The Marquise of Palova marched to the speaking circle next. Many in the audience sat up straighter; she was the Council member responsible for the military, a retired general, and a hero of the Three Years’ War. Her opinion would hold great sway with many.
She swept the Assembly with her gaze, planted her fists on her hips, and began speaking in a voice strong enough it didn’t need amplification to fill the vast hall.
“Lord Caulin is right about one thing,” she said. “We face a serious threat now from Vaskandar. And one of our key advantages in this battle is that we have alchemists, artificers, and warlocks, while they, for the most part, don’t.”
I edged forward on my seat. I thought I saw where this was going, and hope quickened my breath.
“Do you know why I say ‘for the most part’?” the marquise demanded. “The potential for alchemy is uncommon in Vaskandran bloodlines, and artificers are almost unheard of there. Do you know where they get their artificers from?” Scattered mutters met her question, but she cut her arm across the air like a sword stroke to silence them. “From the Empire. Mage-marked who flee to Vaskandar not because they think it’s a better place to live, but because at least in Vaskandar they can be free. We try our damnedest to make the Mews a place anyone would love to live, lords and ladies of the Assembly, but you could open the gates straight to the garden of the Graces and people still wouldn’t thank you for shoving them through by force. I sure as Hells wouldn’t. I have too much to do here on earth.”
A few people laughed. The marquise’s eyes flashed as she gazed out over the hall. “If we force them into the Mews when they don’t want to go, they have nowhere else to run but to Vaskandar. We are handing weapons to our enemies. And if we drag them to the Mews unwilling, we are not only putting the hilts in our enemies’ hands, we’re cradling the blades to our bosoms.” She shook her head. “We learned this in the Three Years’ War. I can’t tell you the details, because they’re secrets of the state. But there were suborned Falcons who acted against us in the war, and mage-marked from the Serene Empire who were recruited by the Witch Lords to fight on the other side. And even in peacetime, every year there are rogue mages who hide their mark and then wind up losing control, committing crimes, causing havoc—all because they didn’t want to go to the Mews, so they don’t have a jess. None of that would have happened—battles lost, people killed, lives ruined—if we had passed a law like this one. Let the damned mages stay home, if they want to so badly that they’ll turn down a life of luxury. If I somehow find myself running short of Falcons, at least with this law the mage-marked won’t be in hiding, and I’ll know where to go looking to recruit more of them.”
She stalked back to her chair and dropped into it. The room burst into applause. I wanted to run up and hug her.
Then the applause died down. The doge swept the remaining Council members with his gaze. “Would any other members of the Council speak?” he asked.
I tried to catch my mother’s eyes. Please. I’m your daughter. They’ll listen to you. Say something.
But she looked at the doge, not me, and gave a tiny shake of her head.
The weight of that small motion crushed the breath from me. All she needed to do was stand up and say a few words to show she supported me. This moment was too important for her political games—important for the mage-marked, for the Empire, and for me.
But then her eyes flicked to mine, fierce and proud. And they crinkled in a smile.
A tendril of hope unfurled in my heart. Perhaps she thought I didn’t need her help, and kept her silence because I’d done well enough on my own.
All eyes turned, then, to Niro da Morante. It was his turn to speak, if he wished. The ambient whispering and rustling in the hall settled to a breathless quiet; a single cough cut through the air, loud as a cannon.
The doge swept his gaze across the Assembly. His eyes flicked briefly to me, then away again, so quickly I almost thought I’d imagined it.
“I have nothing to say on this matter at this time,” he announced. “The debate is closed.”
A wave of murmuring conversation broke over the hall, and I had to grip the edges of my chair to guard against a flush of giddy dizziness. It had been too much to hope that the doge might speak in favor of my law, but he hadn’t come out against it, at least—whether because I’d shaken his convictions or because he didn’t want a record of his stance inked in the pages of history until he’d seen it succeed or fail. Either way, I’d take it.
Two acolytes of the Grace of Majesty brought out the great gilded urn used in Assembly legislative votes, placing it in front of the imperial seal graven in the floor. Another pair brought out the blue velvet bags holding the ballot balls, and the head shrinekeeper of the Temple of Majesty stood by, overseeing the proceedings. Soon, Assembly members lined up to each take two marble-sized wooden balls from an acolyte—one black, and one white—and drop one of them down the urn’s small round mouth.
The first ballots dropped with a resounding clatter, but the sound became softer as the urn filled. My palms grew damp as I waited my turn in line. I had to wipe them on my skirts before taking my ballots from the hand of the solemn-eyed girl holding them out to me. I separated them, then stared at the wooden orb in my hand a long time, to make absolutely certain that it was white and I didn’t wind up voting against my own law through some trick of light or fleeting madness.
At last, I dropped it through the dark round opening. It hit the other balls below with a final-sounding clink. Another acolyte took the ball I hadn’t used and dropped it without looking into a black velvet bag, to be saved in case of a close or contested vote.
Then there was nothing to do but sit in my chair and stare at the long line of grave, purposeful Assembly members, telling myself that I wasn’t going to try to see how they were voting, finding my eyes drawn to their hands as they dropped in their ballots anyway. Clink. Another vote, for or against. Clink. One small wooden ball closer to deciding the fate of the Falcons, and perhaps the Empire. Clink. I didn’t want to think of how I would face Zaira and Terika and, Graces help me, poor Venasha and Foss if the act failed. It was easy enough for me to say we could try again; they were the ones who had to keep living a life without choices in the meantime.
Finally, an ancient woman leaning on a cane cast the last ballot. The acolytes hauled the urn off to count the results under the auspices of the shrinekeeper, without interference. Representatives from the temples of Wisdom, Luck, and Victory would also be there, to make certain no corruption of the vote occurred, and the Council of Nine would verify the results.
I wanted a drink. A nice, sweet dessert wine, perhaps, to relax with. Or something stronger.
Often the crowd dispersed after a vote in the Assembly, content to let the shrinekeepers count the ballots and find out whether we had a new law in the morning. But this time, very few left. The clamor of conversation was no quiet rustle; people argued with each other, gesturing passionately. I glanced to my mother and saw her chatting with the Marquise of Palova, both of them seeming entirely relaxed. Lord Caulin’s chair was empty; he was up and about, circulating and talking. After perhaps a quarter of an hour, the Council filed out of the room to join the shrinekeepers and verify the vote.
It felt as if they were gone for a thousand years. When they filed back in, I searched their faces for any hint of the results, but they remained carefully neutral, still and impassive.
My mother wasn’t meeting my eyes. That couldn’t be good. My heart seemed to descend into my stomach, which squirmed with the effort to digest it.
It was too late to persuade anyone else, too late to make another speech. Zaira’s fate, and Aleki’s and Terika’s and all the rest, were decided. If I had failed them, it was already done.
The doge lifted a hand, and the room fell silent. I braided my fingers together in my lap.
Niro da Morante stepped forward, his stern face unreadable, to announce the results.
Chapter Twel
ve
The doge moved to the center of the imperial seal and stood facing the Assembly. He cleared his throat; the sound boomed off the walls. Most of the room stared at him, but a disquieting proportion of them watched me. Waiting to see my reaction. I struggled to school my face into a mask, but my anxiety must have shown clear as a printed page.
“The results have been tallied,” the doge said, his voice heavy with the gravity of history. “The Falcon Reserve Act is passed into law.”
A wave of wild cheering broke over the room. I blinked for a moment, certain I had misheard.
And then suddenly I was on my feet, people were pounding my back, and the most undignified squealing sounds were issuing from my mouth. A portly woman I didn’t know hugged me. A narrow-faced man scowled at me, and a faint chorus of boos came from somewhere in the gallery. The old woman with the grandson in the Falcons was crying. And across the room, my mother narrowed her eyes in satisfaction, as if this had all transpired exactly as she had planned.
The cloud of euphoria around me was so great that even Lord Caulin couldn’t pierce it, when he came and shook my hand in congratulations, a regretful sort of smile on his lips, his eyes dead and cold.
“This isn’t over,” he said softly, in a voice pitched to cut under the noise of the crowd.
“Of course not.” I grinned at him. “It’s only beginning.”
“If the Empire falls,” he warned, “it will be your fault.”
“Come now, Lord Caulin. Neither you nor I will allow that to happen,” I said.
He regarded me for a long moment—assessing an enemy, or an ally, or an uncomfortable mix of both.
“No,” he agreed at last. “We won’t.”
All I wanted was to get out of the Imperial Palace and row across the lagoon to the Mews, to spread the word to my friends. But it seemed half the Assembly wanted to talk to me, and I could hardly brush them off when they had helped me pass this law. So I smiled and shook hands and accepted congratulations and offered thanks, with someone else always waiting to fill the gap as soon as I finished a conversation. It took me well over an hour just to work my way across the hall to the doors. They would have heard the news at the Mews by now, but it didn’t matter; I’d tell them again myself, just for the joy of seeing their faces.
When I finally emerged under the marble portico that ran the length of the palace courtyard, I still floated on a cloud of giddy relief and the euphoria of victory. The thin winter sunlight beyond the row of delicate columns seemed brighter, and the chill air bracing rather than draining. I turned from the stream of dignitaries leaving the Assembly hall and prepared to cross the sea of white marble that sheathed the palace courtyard.
A strange whooping sound was my only warning before something slammed into me. Panic flashed through me—but this was a hug, not a grappling attack. And I knew the honey-brown curls tickling my nose. I wasn’t being assassinated; it was just Terika.
Or rather, not just Terika. Over her shoulder more familiar faces greeted me: Marcello, smiling broadly despite the sling binding his arm against his chest; Istrella, bouncing up and down at his side, her bicolored artifice glasses pushed up to hold back her hair; and Zaira, grinning and shaking her head.
“What are you doing here?” I asked wonderingly, when Terika released me.
“Taking you out for drinks to celebrate, of course!” Terika said, grabbing my hand. “And then we can head back to the Mews and join the party. But we wanted to get to you first.”
“They’re preparing something for you at the Mews and need us to buy time,” Istrella said happily. Terika elbowed her in the ribs.
I stared back and forth between them. “But wait, you’re out without your Falconers—oh!”
“Some crazy lady passed a law to get rid of that stupid rule,” Zaira said. “About damned time, too. I take back at least four or five of the mean things I’ve said about you.” She slapped my shoulder, hard enough to make my eyes smart, which from her was better than Terika’s hug. “Anyway, never fear, your one-winged father goose there insisted we bring half the army with us.”
Marcello shrugged his good shoulder. “Just to get us here safely. Once you’re with Amalia so she can release you, you’re worth half an army by yourself.”
“Ha! Half an army? You’re undervaluing me.” Zaira, to my great surprise, linked her arm through mine. “Come on, Amalia. Let’s find the best bottle of wine in the city. Your treat.”
I rather doubted the best bottle of wine in Raverra was to be found at the modest establishment at which we eventually settled ourselves, with its warm, wood-paneled interior and a fireplace flanked by a pair of inexplicable brass roosters. However, it was quiet enough for conversation, and the servers seemed content to bring us a perfectly decent dry white wine and crostini and allow us our privacy. We toasted the future and watched the sun set over the small fountain plaza outside, the luminaries waking at dusk to rescue the faces of the buildings from the black shadows attempting to swallow them.
“So, are any of you going to leave the Mews and join the reserve?” I asked, tipping my glass respectfully toward Terika and Zaira.
“Not me,” Istrella said at once, idly tracing runes on the table with her finger. “I love my tower. It’ll be nice to be able to take any old guard and go looking for artifice supplies in the city without having to wait for Marcello to be available, though.”
Zaira leaned an elbow on the table. “I’m staying until we take care of Ruven. I’ve got unfinished business with his face.”
“Does it involve balefire?” I asked, pretending surprise.
“Why, yes, it does! However did you guess?” Her grin faded to a thoughtful frown. “After the war, Hells yes, I’ll join the reserve. If they let me.”
“They’ll have to,” I said.
Zaira lifted a skeptical eyebrow. “Oh, they’ll try to stop me, one way or another. I guarantee it.”
“But we won’t let them,” I replied firmly. “Where will you go?” I tried to ask the question casually, as if of course I didn’t mind if one of my few friends in the world decided to move to the opposite end of the Empire.
Zaira and Terika exchanged glances. “Well,” Terika said, “I want to travel, but this grump here is skeptical.”
“I’m tired of people trying to kill me all the time.” Zaira scowled.
“People don’t normally try to kill travelers,” Terika protested, exasperated. “You’ve just had bad luck.”
“Right, the bad luck of being born a fire warlock.”
“You could finally have a home, if you wanted,” I pointed out. “You won’t have to run or hide anymore.”
Zaira snorted. “Yes, I’m sure the world will leave me alone just because of some piece of paper.”
“It’s true.” Terika sighed dramatically, her eyes twinkling with humor. “The Empire is far from the only thing Zaira has been running from.”
“Like what?” Zaira mock-scowled at her. “You? I can’t run far enough to hide from you. You’re like a plague; you’d always find me.”
“How romantic.” Terika kissed her and patted her cheek. “But no, you’re running from something even more terrifying than me.” She dropped her voice to a spooky register. “Yourself.”
Everyone laughed, but I couldn’t help privately feeling that Terika was, as usual, onto something.
“And you, Terika?” I asked, when the laughter quieted down. “Will you join the reserve?”
She hesitated, casting a glance at Zaira. “Well, I don’t plan to live in the Mews, since I’d like to have my own place, especially if I had someone to share it with me.” Zaira took a long swallow of wine. “But I also don’t mind continuing to make potions for the Serene Empire, and I’d love to not have to worry about finding a means to support myself. I’m hoping to make some kind of deal where I can work in the Mews but live in the city, and visit my grandmother often.”
Marcello nodded. “I’m certain we can. Most of the work the Empire ne
eds done doesn’t require the mage doing it to be an active-duty soldier. Colonel Vasante likes this act because it gives a lot of control and flexibility back to the Mews, allowing Falcons and Falconers to work out solutions with their superior officers rather than having to jump over legal hurdles all the time.”
“That’s good.” Terika sounded relieved. “I think you’ll get more people to stay, that way.”
“I confess, I’m nervous about how many Falcons will choose to leave active duty.” Marcello rubbed the back of his neck, wincing. “I’ve worked for my entire adult life to try to make the Mews a good place for the mage-marked. If half of them leave, I’ll know I’ve failed.”
“Graces grant me patience. It’s not about you.” Zaira poked a finger at him. “If half of them leave, it’s because they want to see what else is out there. When they find out what a festering cesspool the world is, never fear, plenty of them will come back. You raised them from tiny brats to be spoiled lapdogs, and they’ll miss the Mews the first winter they have to survive without artifice heating, or when they get the flux because no one’s alchemically purifying their water.”
“You say the most uplifting things,” I murmured.
“You’re right,” Marcello said quietly. “That it’s not about me, that is, not about the world being a cesspool. I’m tired of lying awake at nights thinking how to make people happy who don’t want to be there. It’ll be nice to teach Falcons who came to the Mews by choice.”
“It may be a while yet before you see much real change,” Terika said, her round face going serious. “Most of us are planning to stay on active duty through the war. Even setting aside that it’s not nice to turn your back on people who are counting on you to protect them, no one wants to try to build a new life in the middle of an invasion. And the last war took three years, so…” She shrugged.
“Let’s hope this one is shorter.” Marcello gave a strained sort of smile. The falseness of it alarmed me; I took a closer look and realized his whole face was stiff with tension, his lips pale.
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