Sun
Chapter One
Sunshine
When the sun rose on the morning of the fifteenth of November, it brought with it the startling- and to some, deeply disturbing- news that Robin Maybury was coming home.
In fact the sun’s whispers were entirely spurious: the treacherous, light-fingered lies of a day where it promises constancy, and fades all-too quickly behind the thunderous face of the cloud. It had actually witnessed Robin’s return to Court a week previously, with blood in his hair and the damp chill of the freezing winter seeping like the first meltwater through his bones.
*
When they found the young man beside the reluctantly trickling fountain, struggling to keep itself from icy stillness, they assumed that he was another unfortunate drunk: a reasonable supposition, given the circumstances. The too-small clothes that stuck clammily to him were drenched with beer of the cheapest variety and his face was pallid with gleaming sweat.
They hauled him roughly into a sitting position, unsympathetic but not oblivious to the risks of coma on such a frosty, biting morning in the East, unshielded as the capital was from the blistering cold sweeping from Russia. It was only then that they realised, the three rather unwilling rescuers, that some of the damp, dark patches crusting the loose, raggedly-knit jumper were blood, and that his oblivion was not simply a result of alcohol.
“He’s alive.” The only female in the group sounded cold, clapping her hands together with a ring muffled by her thick gloves as she bent forward to examine their prize. “Should we-“
“Car’s too far away,” the larger of the two males, silhouetted in the streetlamp murk of the square, replied. The weak attempts of the sun to struggle skywards had so far proved ineffectual and the unconscious boy was only a darker blur against the shallow stone edge of the fountain. “We’d better call an ambulance.” His voice showed faint flares of concern, as if the magnitude of their discovery had begun to dawn upon him.
The last of the finders, a taller, thinner man who had been standing squinting at the pale, wavering face of the youth with something like recognition, was suddenly galvanised into action. In a rush of movement that blew their steaming breath into puffing spirals, he knelt down on the damp, icy flagstones and pulled off his thick, sheepskin-lined jacket.
“Give me a hand, Mal,” he said curtly, and there was a hint of professional urgency in his tone. “June, go and call an ambulance. Tell them Alistair Carmichael says it is urgent.”
She nodded with the easy obedience that came of many years’ acquaintance, and stepped to one side. Pulling her phone out, she dialled a number and began speaking as the still-clad Mal knelt on the other side.
“Not drunk,” he stated thoughtfully as he helped pull the unconscious figure forward, so that they could wrap the huge bulk of the coat around it. The boy was broad shouldered, but the jacket fitted well enough to keep out the insidious fingers of the cold.
The man who had called himself Alistair sat back on his heels, placing two fingers carefully against the chilly skin of the young man’s neck. His greying hair, curling slightly over the back of his neck, gleamed in a sudden, hopeful sunbeam, trickling between two of the high buildings.
“Pulse is steady,” he remarked economically, not bothering to respond to his own companion’s comment. “Which is lucky, considering.”
Mal looked up at him thoughtfully in the slowly lightening grey gloom that pooled in the square. He was not quick of action, but he knew Alistair well enough to know that he was troubled.
“The kid is someone you know,” he said flatly, and the thin-faced man shook his head abruptly.
“Not me. But- I think I know who he might know…”
*
When they contacted Owen Maybury to inform him that his brother was not only alive, but in one of the three hospitals in their home city, his first assumption was that it was a ransom demand. Five complicated and slightly threatening minutes later, he sat down heavily in a chair in his cluttered office, clutching the phone to his ear with trembling fingers.
Twenty minutes after that, the sturdy, blonde-haired mage was hurrying through the sterile, starch-aired corridors of the Healers’ Academy, his hands still shaking slightly as he tried to button the white coat he had been handed by his companion.
“You found him where?” he asked again, still slightly incredulous. Owen had searched the country for his younger brother, and had found no proof that he had absconded, and absolutely no concrete evidence that he had been taken by force. For him to be found in the capital city, barely a kilometre from where he lived, was at the outside of believable.
The man walking, with rather more measured strides, beside him shrugged, his own pristine coat creasing as his thin shoulders rose.
“By the fountain in the Square, the day before yesterday,” he answered, and a faint edge in his voice suggested that he had now answered the question several times. “I did not contact you then, since I was unsure until he regained consciousness that it was in his interests to do so.”
“Alistair.” Owen Maybury snapped the name, his eyebrows dropping sharply into a frown. “You surely didn’t think-“
“It is not my business to speculate,” the doctor retorted, then paused so abruptly that Owen’s shoes squeaked on the linoleum as he too halted. “Your brother is in a-puzzling state, Owen, and there is absolutely no possibility that he came by his injuries accidentally.”
The mage sighed, rubbing a hand through his hair. “I assume he’s told you something,” he said eventually, “If you’re now willing to let me see him.”
The other man shrugged. “Since the first thing that he did when he woke was to ask for you, it seemed unlikely that you had been involved,” he admitted. Owen eyed the doctor suspiciously, noticing the way that his mouth had begun to droop with worry. They had not known each other for long, but he respected the doctor.
“You’re still not satisfied,” Owen said flatly. Alistair Carmichael began walking again, straightening the collar of his white overcoat with clipped movements that wasted no energy.
“He was injured severely, and something is not right,” he said eventually, as Owen caught up. “That is why you are dressed- at my request- as a member of hospital staff, and that is why I have told no-one on my staff his name.”
Owen bit his lip, worrying at it with his teeth. Relief was still coursing through him, providing him with energy as if it was adrenaline, but a heavy, nauseous instinct was telling him that something was desperately wrong.
Something was bothering him about the doctor’s statement, too. Some kind of inaccuracy that nagged as if he had forgotten something incredibly important. Owen felt the frustration wrenching at his brain.
Then he realised, and spun to stop Alistair moving any further, catching the man by the sleeve so forcibly that the doctor jerked away, startled.
“Alistair,” Owen said urgently, his grey eyes wide. “Was it really the first thing he did? Ask for me, I mean?”
The other man’s mouth twisted, and he carefully removed Owen’s fingers from his arm without looking at him. “Of course not,” he said with exasperation, “I thought it might make you feel better to hear it, that was all. You were the second thing he asked for- well, you and Miss Penfold.”
“What was the first?”
Suspicion narrowed Owen’s eyes, and it dawned on the doctor that he was being asked a testing question, one he needed to answer absolutely correctly in order to gain the mage’s confidence. He sighed, and rubbed a hand across the stubbled line of his jaw.
“A cigarette,” he stated flatly.
Despite his worry, Owen Maybury began to grin. Whatever the troubles he had suffered, or the catastrophes he was about to visit upon them, Robin was most definitely still alive.
*
When Robin officially returned to the Court, the sun was shining gleefully over Lincoln as if it had never presided over such a dank, squalid occasion as the eighth of November. In its light the limestone buildings that fringed the two streets that lay between the hospital and the Court glowed, and the water in the fens that surrounded the city glittered with almost festive fervour.
It warmed Robin’s face as he clambered awkwardly out of Owen’s car- his brother had insisted, though the hospital was barely six hundred metres away- and shone glistening on the cobblestones where he steadied his feet and the one institution grey crutch he had been persuaded to carry ‘for insurance’. Robin hated it, and intended to lose it as soon as his solicitous sibling was safely out of sight.
He glanced around, taking in the reassuring familiarity of the Court residents’ carpark, with its moss covered, flaking white lines and black, iron gates that had once irritated Robin and now faintly reassured him. It even smelled the same. The grim-faced doctor, who Owen seemed to know somehow, had looked extremely puzzled when told that the reason for Robin’s definite negative on the Court as his prison was that it hadn’t smelled right. Owen had understood, nodding with so much comprehension that the doctor- Alistair, had Owen called him?- had accepted the answer with resignation.
Robin thought vaguely that Alistair had seemed to place a lot of trust in Owen’s judgement. This fact did not surprise him- with the usual arrogance of those lucky in their family, he assumed that everyone else saw his brother just as he did. Robin trusted Owen without even thinking about it, in the same way that he blinked as a reaction to bright light, or shivered in the cold.
He was shivering then, for that matter. The usual Lincoln wind, biting with the almost-promise of snow as it blew straight across the flat landscape from the sea, caught at the hem of the jacket Owen had brought. Sometimes, Robin thought with absent affection, the weather smelled like salt, and sand, and the edge that came from clean, free space.
Turning back again, he waited almost patiently for Owen to finish methodically setting the many defences that protected his car from damage, drawing the symbols for his complex protection spells. The routine of the delay settled the churning unease in Robin’s stomach, and he felt his muscles relax steadily into past habits.
“It’s a Ford Focus,” he had pointed out, a week before he had walked out of the Court and into- well, he thought, suddenly disturbed again- into what? “Who would even think about stealing it?”
Owen had shrugged. “Someone might think I kept valuable information in there,” he replied simply, no longer irritated by Robin’s mocking degradation of his beloved car. Robin had snorted with laughter, deeply amused by the backwards logic. It had been an often repeated incident, and thinking about it blurred the dark times in between almost comfortingly.
“There,” Owen remarked as Robin blinked. “All done.” He spoke with the satisfaction of a man who was aware that he had performed a fiddly task to the best of his ability. Owen saw his magic that way, Robin mused: as a craft, a making of something.
Robin loved the feel of magic, the tin on the tongue crackle that felt like impending snow and smelled like static, and the rushing joy of the beauty that he saw when the bright flow wriggled its way through the symbols. The overall effect was beautiful too: the combination of the intended result and the veil of illuminated characters that overlay it, when he looked in that slightly unfocused way. It saddened him that so many people would never see the magic that threaded the world. It seemed a waste.
“So, are you ready for the welcome party?”
Owen’s words, spoken over his vague, scattering thoughts, sparked Robin into something resembling attention. His sibling watched the expression of horror stealing gradually across his expression, and snorted. Robin watched him reach out to clap a friendly arm across his shoulders, before pausing abruptly, and dropping his hands back to his sides as he said casually, “No welcome party. I thought it would be a bit cruel.”
Robin smiled crookedly, shifting his palm on the handle of his crutch to stop the skin pinching. “It would be a little inappropriate, too, since you have no idea yet whether there is any cause for celebration.”
He paused, considering whether he should apologise then for the shrouding secrecy and mystery he had insisted upon, then decided against it. Owen would understand soon- and if Robin continued to think about how unpleasant and difficult it must be for his brother, he would succumb and tell him everything too early anyway.
And that could destroy any chance they- or rather she- might have…
He shook the thought off, feeling with irritation that he had once again allowed his confrontation to drift. Damn the transfusion, making this happen, and damn those who had made the transfusion necessary!
“What lie did you spin them, in the end?” he asked with interest, forcing himself to keep his tone cheerful. Owen grinned, good humour still unsullied.
“You were kidnapped for ransom,” he told his brother seriously, though amusement glinted in the blue eyes as he led the way across the carpark. Robin fell behind, negotiating the perilously smooth curves of the cobbles with the help of the hated crutch. He watched Owen hesitate from behind, as if he was considering waiting to help, and then nodded to himself in satisfaction as his brother clearly came to a decision and accelerated once more.
They were an odd pair, the Maybury brothers. Owen, blonde and shaggily fringed, with blue eyes so permanently wide with fascinated interest that he looked very much younger than his actual twenty-seven years: and Robin, the baby, three years less experienced and a wealth richer in cynicism. Brown-haired and broad shouldered, he was shrugged negligently into a leather jacket that Owen would rather have destroyed than wear. Robin counted it as a mark of Owen’s genuine worry concerning his welfare that he had agreed to fetch the beloved garment at all.
“There will be people around,” Owen warned quietly as Robin caught up with him beside the nondescript door, covered in peeling pine-green paint, that led to the residential wing of the Court. “Sure as the Dawning, they’ll find excuses. The rumour mills have been at work since you left, Rob.”
Robin made a face, even as he accepted his brother’s comment. He had known they would have been, and wondered how much of the speculation had been malicious- how much brunt Owen and - she- had taken in his absence. However much they all loved the Court, and the golden city it led, they were all fully aware of its dangerous, sifting surface.
Stay still for a moment, the old adage taught to Royal service trainees said, and you will be sucked under. Keep moving, keep changing direction, and you will find a branch to cling to. The oldest, most wily politicians at the Court always added the final line of the proverb: Trust the branch only until it is no longer in its interests to keep you safe…
“I’m mainly disappointed,” he commented dryly, avoiding the thought that he had not been the only one who had been caused suffering, and leant with relief against the rough, snagging surface of the brick wall of the porch as Owen dug in his pockets for his swipe-card pass. “That you thought it was reasonable to suggest that I am such a pathetic excuse for a Court representative that I would- could- be kidnapped simply for money. You could have done better for me. Intrigue with a lover, perhaps, or-“
He stopped very suddenly, shame suddenly crossing his face, and tugged ineffectually at the robust collar of his jacket.
“I thought it might be tactless,” Owen said shortly. “In the circumstances.” Then he turned from the card reader, looking at Robin’s downcast expression with a softening of his own features, and touched his brother briefly on the shoulder. “Don’t worry,” he reassured. “I knew what you meant. And so would she, as you very well know.”
Robin made a wry face, the split lip that was still healing to faint pink scar tissue wrinkling with the distortion of his mouth. “It’s not really the point,” he retorted, ruefulness tingeing his tone.
Owen merely grunted softly in response, before letting out a cry of satisfaction as the security box finally flashed with a spark of green light, accepting his identity.
“Come on, little brother,” he said as Robin hung back, obscurely resenting that he did not have his own card, and had to enter as a visitor. “They’ve all been worrying about you: they won’t hurt you.”
“That,” Robin muttered, tugging with fidgety nerves on the tiny silver hoop that pierced one of his ears, “Is entirely a matter of opinion.”