Marked

by S. Andrew Swann

  “What are you talking about?”

  “The power you have as a Prince is at its height in the area favored by your blood, your family line. That demesne expands the longer Princes of that bloodline inhabit it, stabilizing it. The Emperor’s line here is a century deep. Should you and he produce an heir, almost certainly a Prince in his own right, he would wield such power in this demesne, and yours.”

  “Apparently mine isn’t much in comparison—”

  “And that of your family line.”

  “I don’t believe I’m listening to this.”

  “If you’ve been as isolated as you say you’ve been, you will need to make alliances.”

  “You’re talking about a lot more than an alliance.”

  “And you’re facing a lot worse once any rival takes an interest in you.”

  I was about to snap something angry at him, but something about his tone stopped me. He sounded concerned, as if he was actually interested in my welfare. I was probably reading too much into it; Ivan had plenty of reasons of his own to push me into the arms of the Emperor. I suspected there would be significant rewards for someone who did successful Imperial matchmaking. Probably enough to offset the indignation of the Comte Juliet.

  Something about the way he spoke, though, made me think that wasn’t his only concern. Possibly not even his primary one.

  It didn’t help that he was right. The Shadows came from somewhere. And I had Dr. Lefevre’s testimony that my Mark bore some kinship with the Shadows’. That, along with my John Doe’s warning to me before he died . . .

  Could the Shadows be from that hypothetical rival that Ivan just suggested?

  What I had heard from Dr. Lefevre, Ivan, and the Emperor all described something that amounted to a biological aristocracy—power passed from parent to child like pan-dimensional European royalty. Jacob might be the history buff, but I knew enough to know that such royal families weren’t the kind that held cozy reunions.

  If somewhere out there was another Empire formed by Princes with a Mark related to mine, and my relation made me as powerful in that demesne as they were, would they see me as a long-lost cousin, niece, or sister? Or would they see me as a threat?

  Wealcan has fallen! They’ll come for you! The Shadows are coming!

  Something burned in my chest, and my eyes became suddenly blurry.

  “Are you all right?” Ivan asked.

  “I’m fine!” I snapped at him. Because of this train of thought, I was losing my family, the one I’d never had, all over again. Of course, I wasn’t all right. I was suddenly irrationally pissed at Ivan for not seeing all the implications the way I saw them. It was unfair, but I was in no mood for fairness.

  He had the good sense not to continue the conversation as we returned to my cabin. We went on in silence until we reached my door, where he turned to me and said, “I apologize if this has upset you. I know it is not the Emperor’s intent.”

  Good lord, he sounds as if he’s trying to hook me up with his old college roommate.

  “He has left you a token of good faith,” Ivan told me. “I hope you will consider it.”

  And now he sounds like some Mafia thug. “Nice car ma’am. Shame if anything happened to it.”

  He opened the door to my cabin, and I was relieved to see that the explosion of clothing Greta laid out before dinner had returned to wherever it had come from.

  A silhouette stood out against the windows, looking over a nighttime cloudscape illuminated by a full moon that hung fat over the horizon. He turned around, and I felt something catch in my throat.

  I managed to croak, “Jacob?” as the door shut behind me.

  THIRTY-TWO

  HE LOOKED AT me and smiled. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen you in a dress before.”

  I might have blushed. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen you in a tux before.”

  He turned to look back out the window, at the clouds rolling slowly under the night sky. “I don’t think I really let everything sink in until now.”

  I walked up next to him. “Really? You were on the same road trip with me?”

  He reached out and took my hand and gave it a squeeze. Then he let it go. I found myself reaching to take his hand back, but something about his manner stopped me.

  “I know,” he said. “I guess I didn’t realize what it meant.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  He chuckled and shook his head. “Was it two or three days ago? This Walking business is worse than jet lag.”

  “Was what two or three days ago?”

  “When I barged into your apartment, with the extra gun.”

  I opened my mouth, then I closed it. In the face of everything that had been happening, it had been easy to forget the life I had. The life I’d half-seriously thought of abandoning. Now that it looked like I might have abandoned it, it felt as if a massive hole had been torn out of myself. It might have been dysfunctional and defined by a self-imposed loneliness, but unlike the anachronistic dress or the Imperial sitting room, it had been mine.

  And what had I been thinking, dragging Jacob into this? Pulling him out of his life. “I’m sorry.”

  “I think I’m over the whole planted evidence thing, Dana.”

  “No, I’m sorry for dragging you away from home. I should have thought about what I was doing—”

  “I seem to remember making that decision.”

  “Like you, or Whedon, had any idea what you were getting into.” I dropped myself into the settee in a very unladylike fashion. I didn’t much care. “Especially her.”

  “Don’t beat yourself up over that. Did you know what was happening?”

  “No, but I should have made sure neither of you were injured after that fiasco at the morgue.”

  He walked around and sat next to me. He sat stiffly, as if the tux was uncomfortable, and stared off toward the door to the cabin. “What’s going on here, Dana?”

  “Going on where?”

  He sighed.

  “What?”

  “They took us on board at gunpoint, and now we’re having dinner with the Emperor?” He turned and looked at me. “Ivan wasn’t kidding about all that Prince stuff.”

  “Apparently not.”

  “So you’re really some sort of royalty?”

  I shook my head. “I’m not sure what it means. But my Mark seems to be impressive.”

  “As impressive as our local Napoleon.”

  “Well, I don’t know about—”

  “Dana, people did talk at my end of the table. And I know some French.”

  “You know some . . .”

  “High school and some college, hearing so much of it at once helped it come back.”

  “What did you hear?”

  “That the Emperor should choose his consorts from within the Empire.”

  I felt my face burn. “That’s not what I’m here for.”

  “That’s why they brought you here. I think if you were a guy, you’d get a much different treatment.”

  “Crap.”

  “I’m pretty sure that’s why I’m here.”

  “What?”

  “To encourage your favor. Remind you that they have me as a hostage.”

  I didn’t have a response for that. Deep down, I felt as if I should have known what I had been getting him into. I didn’t know if fate was punishing me for failing to be open about my Mark long before now, or if I was being punished for finally breaking down and revealing it at all. If Jacob was going to be a hostage to my good behavior, it meant that he’d be trapped here as long as I was.

  “No,” I said quietly. “We have to get out of here.”

  “What about the Mark? What they know about where you came from?”

  I wiped my hands on my skirts and avoided looking at him. “I’ve lear
ned enough. There are others like me, and other worlds where people have this Mark. They don’t know much more about John Doe than we do, other than he was related to me . . . and the Shadows.”

  “The Shadows?”

  I gave Jacob a short version of my examination at the hands of Dr. Lefevre. As I spoke, I became aware of my naked shoulders. I had removed the wrap I’d worn to the dinner. I twisted it in my hands as I became aware of it, but I resisted the ingrained impulse to hide the Mark again.

  Jacob didn’t seem to notice the gesture, which made me more comfortable with it. I finished my story, untangled my hands from the fabric, and smoothed it across my lap.

  “That’s . . .” he paused. “I don’t know what that is. It doesn’t sound good.”

  “No, it doesn’t.”

  “But if there wasn’t any doubt that the Shadows were after John Doe and Ivan, followed them—”

  “I don’t think they were after John Doe.”

  “You just said his Mark was tied to the Shadows, and they showed up right after—”

  “They were after me.”

  “What?”

  “John Doe, whoever he was, passed through the Empire. Instead of paying at least token respect to the guys in control here, and probably being able to move on after dealing with the bureaucracy, he tried to fight his way out from the White Guard. Then, when they had him imprisoned with their magic handcuffs, he actually did manage to escape, killing a couple of people along the way. Why?”

  “Outstanding warrant?”

  “When he escaped, he wasn’t trying to be evasive and escape pursuit. He was a Prince; he should have been able to evade Ivan in the Chaos, the way I was able to evade the Shadows. He didn’t. He traveled the multi-universal equivalent of a straight line.”

  “To you.”

  “To me.”

  Jacob muttered under his breath. “Wonderful.”

  “He was trying to warn me.”

  “As if you’d know what he was talking about. He probably led those Shadows right toward you.”

  “Or he knew they were coming.”

  “Dana, this guy might be related to you, and he might have had this all-powerful Mark of yours, but it doesn’t mean he was the sharpest knife in the drawer.”

  I sighed.

  “Why would they be after you?”

  “Wealcan has fallen. They’ll come for you. The shadows are coming,” I quoted.

  “What?”

  “Why is Emperor Napoleon the Umpteenth interested in me? Why would anyone be interested in me? This damn Mark. And it ties me to a bloodline somewhere, the same one that gave us John Doe and the Shadows. If the Empire here is typical, it ties me to a family, a dynasty, somewhere.”

  “Wealcan?”

  “I think it’s a name.” I turned to look at him. “If we’re talking about the fall of some ruling house somewhere, especially somewhere where they still speak Old English, they might not like having extra family members about. I’m not the history buff here, but I’ve seen Richard III.”

  “I see what you’re saying.”

  “Am I wrong?”

  “No. Given the implausibility of the situation we’re already in, what you’re saying is all too reasonable. An aristocracy based on a Mark might be even more paranoid about rogue heirs.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Lines of succession in a normal situation are completely a social construct. Sure, who fathered whom is high on people’s mind, but crowns have gone to bastards, cousins, and rabble off the street when enough aristocrats could be convinced to give lip service to legitimacy. Some unknown heir wasn’t a threat unless they got support from someone . . . the Mark changes that.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “It has inherent power. It isn’t given by a priesthood or a clique of powerful landowners. It can’t be denied, or forged, and no one can pretend it doesn’t exist. If there’s some power struggle in a place that bases its ruling class on this Mark, you’d be a potential rival just by existing.”

  That wasn’t even taking into account what Ivan had said. If someone of my “bloodline” had formed an island of stability in the Chaos out there, my Mark would be at home there as much as it was where I had settled. It wasn’t just individuals that founded these demesnes. In fact, logically that would be the exception rather than the rule. If the affinity for a “stable” collection of worlds was passed down like the Mark, it would make sense that families of Princes would eventually settle down and, like here, form some sort of dynasty.

  So I wasn’t so much a general threat to other Princes, just the ones from my own family.

  My hands balled into fists in my lap, and I realized I was shaking.

  “Dana?”

  “I’m okay.” The words came out strained, and my voice sounded anything but okay. I had seen John Doe die in front of me, and ever since I’d been tearing the scab off my past, inflaming the wound of my lost birth family until I’d felt that pain as acutely as I did the loss of my adoptive one. I had known, intuitively, that the attacks by the Shadows were connected to me, to where I had come from, to my family. Somehow, though, I had managed to avoid realizing that it meant that my long-lost family might not want to hear from me; that it meant my real family was actively hostile.

  Out there, I had brothers, or uncles, or cousins, and they wanted to kill me.

  I tried to blink the burning from my eyes. I’d been obsessing about my birth family, and I hadn’t been thinking about my real family. The one that actually cared for me.

  “Dana?”

  “She’s dead, Jacob.” I sucked in a breath. “She died, and I never told her about . . .” The tears hit like a baseball bat in my gut. The guilt, the loss, the loneliness, all slammed into the wall I’d been using to hold back the grief. My words dissolved into an inarticulate sob, and I buried my face in the wrap I’d used to hide my Mark.

  I had nothing left. I had no family, no friends, and what life I had, I’d abandoned in this fruitless search for a family that wanted me dead. I had allowed my mother to die without telling her the most significant part of my life, and I’d poisoned my memories of my father with my narcissistic adolescent guilt—as if his death was all about me, how I was special, and how I had failed him.

  I felt Jacob place his arm around my shoulder and it made me sob more. The one friend I had, the one person I’d trusted enough for me to bare my secrets to voluntarily, I’d taken him away from his life, his world, to a place he was hostage to my good behavior.

  “Fuck.” I spat half coherently into my hands.

  “I’m here,” Jacob whispered.

  As my wracking sobs subsided, I said, “You shouldn’t be.”

  “We’re partners.”

  My sides ached from crying, and my hands were a slick mess of tears and the makeup Greta had put on me. I raised my head slightly and sniffed. “This is far beyond your job description.”

  “You’re my friend, too.”

  I looked at the mess in my hands and winced. I took deep breaths, half afraid that the sobbing jag would return, but I seemed to have gotten it out of my system. All I felt at the moment was a deep ache. I stood up, out from under his arm. His fingers brushed my naked shoulder, and I shuddered slightly.

  I wish I wasn’t so screwed up right now.

  “I need to clean up.” I walked over to the lavatory and found a basin where I could wash the smeared makeup from my hands and face.

  As I washed, Jacob asked, “What do we do now?”

  “Wait until this airship docks somewhere, then I can Walk both of us home.”

  “What about your car?”

  “I don’t think that’s all that important anymore.”

  “I don’t believe I just heard you say that.”

  Me neither. I felt a twinge at the loss of my Charger
, but it was insignificant even aside from the residual ache from my breakdown. “I can get another car.” I found a towel to dry my face and hands. I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror and saw someone strange staring back. From the neckline down I was still some dainty French aristocrat fresh from the ball. Above that, though, I was some feral wild woman with tribal markings, untamed hair, and bloodshot eyes that looked crazed as much as grieved.

  I shuddered when I realized I was looking into the adult face of the damaged child my parents had adopted.

  “What about the Emperor?” Jacob asked.

  I turned away from the mirror. “What about him?”

  “If you’re a target of a power struggle somewhere, you could use an ally.”

  “You can’t be suggesting what I think you’re suggesting.”

  “You’re telling me you haven’t thought about it yourself?”

  “No. I haven’t.” Of course, because of Jacob, I was thinking about it now. It certainly made some sense. If there were people out there Walking around Chaos looking for me, I would be better off surrounded by an army that knew what that involved.

  But I wasn’t a sixteenth century princess to be bartered around to form some sort of national alliance—even if that alliance was with myself. I might have been pushing my limits lately, but spreading my legs for someone as if I was paying protection money?

  “No,” I said. “Just no.”

  Jacob shrugged. “I thought as much, but you’ll need to come up with some idea what to do if he doesn’t take that as an answer.”

  “I know. It all just keeps getting more comp—” I gasped as I felt something brush my Mark.

  Jacob sprang to his feet. “Dana, what’s wrong?”

  “You’re kidding me,” I whispered, almost afraid to breathe. It felt as if dozens of rotting fingers were hovering over the boundaries of my Mark, reaching for me. . . .

  He ran to me and grabbed my shoulders. I shuddered when I felt him touch my skin, and this time there was no pleasure in it at all. “What is it?”

  I looked in his face and couldn’t believe the words, even as I spoke them, “The Shadows. I feel them coming.”