The Council themselves showed a stark and chilling reminder of the toll of last night’s attack. Exhaustion hollowed every face, and discreet bandages flashed white beneath cuffs and collars here and there. There was no hiding the claw marks raking Lord Caulin’s face; alchemical salves had closed the wounds, but the angry red lines would still take days to fully heal, and might well leave scars. My mother sat stiffly, paler than usual, but her own wound was hidden beneath the bodice of her gown, and she would allow it no concessions. She gave me a small, fleeting smile as I settled in my seat. I gauged the shadows beneath her eyes and judged with some relief that Ciardha must have succeeded in getting her to sleep for at least a few hours.
The moment came when the doge would have called proceedings to order. A sort of muted hush fell on the hall, as the realization that he would do no such thing fell over the Assembly one at a time.
Finally, Lord Errardi, as the most senior Council member, cleared his throat and called out, “Your attention, please.”
But then he faltered, uncertain where to go from there, grief cutting deep lines into his expression. A thousand silent faces stared at him, waiting.
Into the hush, my mother rose, and strode to the amplification circle. She was never one to let someone else fumble imperial business without picking it up and setting it to rights, with the same instinctive efficiency with which she might straighten my collar or fix my straggling hair.
“Welcome, my friends,” she said, her tone stern but stirring. “I stand before you in grief, for we lost an extraordinary man last night. But we can afford no time for mourning. Lord Ruven has struck at the heart of the Serene Empire, and he has dealt us a grievous blow. We need a new doge now—one who can move with decisive strength and our united will to put down this threat to the Empire.” She swept an arm behind her, where the rest of the Council of Nine remained seated. “I therefore nominate the Marquise of Palova to the office of doge of Raverra.”
The marquise straightened, glaring at my mother; I half expected her to get up and march into the circle to interrupt. But she followed protocol and held her peace, though she looked as if she were chewing old leather.
“The marquise is a hero of the Three Years’ War, the best strategic mind in the Empire, and has the universal respect of our military,” La Contessa continued. “She already holds authority over our armed forces, and electing her as doge will ensure smooth continuity of command in a time of crisis. I urge the Assembly to put the needs of the Empire above politicking and factions, as the marquise herself has always done, and choose her to lead us in this troubled time.”
Enthusiastic applause followed my mother’s speech, and she returned to her seat looking satisfied. She had avoided her usual spot to the left of the imperial throne this time, and sat on the end of the row, next to the marquise; I’d wound up in the corner seat nearest her, and she caught my eye and murmured, “That should do it,” as she settled back in her chair.
I tended to agree. In one neat move, she’d answered the unspoken question of whether she would seek to take the crown, removing herself from consideration, and put forward an exemplary candidate nearly everyone could accept before most of the Assembly would even have begun wrapping their minds around the idea that we were electing a new doge today. She’d made the marquise the default choice, the standard any contenders would have to beat; a task that would prove difficult, given her excellent reputation and the Empire’s position on the brink of war.
The Marquise of Palova, however, was less appreciative of this display of political acumen. She gave her friend a reproving look. “How could you, Lissandra?”
“The best candidates for doge never want it,” my mother said with a wry smile. “I’m sorry, but we must put Raverra first.”
“Hmph. I’ll get you for this.”
More Assembly members came forward to make nominations, one after another. Normally, electing a doge was a complicated process that took at least a week, wherein the Assembly chose electors who in turn chose more electors who selected candidates to put before the Assembly for multiple rounds of voting; but everyone had agreed to streamline the process given the current emergency, and the shrinekeepers took a simple show of hands to determine whether a certain minimum portion of the Assembly considered a nominee a viable candidate before hurriedly preparing a ballot box for them. There were some five or six nominations that received enough support, including Scipio da Morante and Lord Caulin. The former received particularly heartfelt applause, led by the powerful da Morante family, especially on invoking his brother’s name; I tensed, worried not only for the fate of the Empire, but for Marcello.
But La Contessa seemed unperturbed. “Look at their faces. They’re cheering for Niro, not Scipio. None of them have enough support to beat you,” she said to the Marquise of Palova, giving her a sympathetic pat on the hand. “You’re stuck with this, I’m afraid.”
The marquise grinned wolfishly. “We’ll see about that.”
“You wouldn’t.” My mother’s voice dropped half an octave.
“Damned right I would.”
And the marquise rose and walked to the amplification circle.
“Surely she’s not going to…” I whispered. But then the marquise began speaking, her bold voice booming throughout the Assembly Hall.
“My peers of the Assembly, I am honored beyond words that my good friend Lissandra Cornaro put me forth as a candidate. But I must disagree with her that I am the best candidate. There is only one possible choice in this election.” She spread her arms. “When disaster struck last night, my friends, I am not ashamed to admit that we were shaken. In one swift move, our enemy knocked out two of the supporting pillars of the Empire. I stood staring in the face of the Demon of Death and was sure, for a moment, I would watch the Serene City fall.”
The room hushed at her words, staring enraptured at the marquise’s lined face and her regal crown of braids. She spoke with the power of a woman who knew how to inspire armies, and the amplification circle set her voice resonating in the bones of every person in that hall. I glanced at my mother and saw her clutching the arms of her chair, her face deliberately impassive, her jaw tight.
“But you and I are here in this room, right now, because one woman did not hesitate,” the marquise continued, her voice ringing with passion. “We are here because one woman stepped forward and continued the work she has done for decades, from beside the throne. She saw what needed to be done, my friends, and she did it. La Contessa Lissandra Cornaro is already acting as our doge. Let us elect her to continue the work she has always done, and grant her the honor she has so selflessly offered me.” The marquise managed to keep all irony out of her voice, but my mother’s eyebrow jumped. “I trust you, lords and ladies of the Assembly, to vote her into the office she has so thoroughly earned.”
The marquise bowed and returned to her seat. Under cover of the thunderous applause that shook the hall, she turned to my mother and broke out into a wide, gleeful grin.
“Take that, Lissandra,” she crowed.
“You’re ruining everything I’ve worked for,” La Contessa hissed.
“A wise woman once said that the best candidates for doge never want it,” the marquise said piously.
“I’m more effective working from the shadows, and you know it.”
“This is what you get for starting a fight with the best strategic mind in the Empire.” The twinkle of mischief dimmed in the marquise’s eyes, then, and her tone grew serious. “Besides, Raverra needs you now. I meant everything I said.”
There were no further nominations, so the shrinekeepers began setting up the ballot urns. I wasn’t certain how to feel as they set a card with my mother’s name beside the last one; I couldn’t help a surge of pride, but that plain silver urn threatened to upend my world.
I filed into line to vote with the rest of the Assembly, and accepted my handful of colored balls: from red for one’s most preferred candidate through black for one’s leas
t preferred, they let the Assembly rank candidates in order to avoid the need for further rounds of voting. A young acolyte set up a wooden sign reminding us of the order of the colors. I was far from the only one fingering my ballots and staring at the names beside the urns, struggling to decide on an order.
My mother wouldn’t see how I voted. If I were completely honest with myself, I tended to agree with the marquise that in the long term, my mother would make a better doge. But if she won, I had little doubt that it would impact our happiness for the rest of our lives. Being on the Council of Nine was bad enough, but at least now our family still could claim some measure of privacy, walling off some tiny piece of our lives that belonged to ourselves and not to the Empire; if she became doge, we surrendered that hard-won reserve forevermore.
My turn to vote came all too soon. I hesitated over the marquise’s urn, then dropped in my red ball, a dutiful daughter. But my conscience forced me to give my white ball, for my second-choice candidate, to my mother. Lord Caulin got my black ball, since the thought of a man with so few firm principles leading the Serene Empire genuinely alarmed me, and Scipio da Morante the gray one for second-least favored. The remaining handful of candidates I ranked as best I could in the middle. And then I was done, my votes cast; my future was out of my hands.
No rule prevented me from leaving now and going to visit Marcello. The vote and the subsequent tally could take hours yet; I had time to relieve the worry gnawing my gut. I wanted to lay eyes on him in daylight, without a night of murder and catastrophe pressing at all our nerves. To find that I had overreacted last night, imagining things in my exhaustion, and that he was still entirely himself.
But I had promised Zaira not to visit him without her or Ciardha along. And if my fears weren’t baseless after all, seeing him alone could be foolish indeed. So I watched the elite of the Serene City file up in an orderly fashion and drop balls in urns to decide the future of the Empire—and of my family.
The election of a doge was crucial enough that the shrinekeepers traditionally counted the votes in public. Once the voting was over, nearly everyone in the Assembly stayed to watch as acolytes gradually emptied the ballot urns, sorting the balls by color into groups of tall glass jars, one cluster per candidate. The whole Assembly stared, with tense and waiting quiet, as slowly, slowly, the jars began to fill. One tiny ball at a time, they began to sketch out a vision of the next era of imperial history in growing columns of color.
My mother sat stiffly in her seat, watching the tally with a grim expression. The Marquise of Palova kept casting glances at her and chuckling.
And she had reason. While the marquise, my mother, and Scipio da Morante were all doing well, my mother’s jar of red first-choice ballots was filling rapidly, outstripping all the others. A murmur grew and swelled in the hall; the count continued, but it was clear enough how this election would go. Some of the dignitaries seated around me started offering me congratulations, as if this were something I’d wanted.
I’d never wanted this. Nor had my mother. We’d had Cornaro doges enough; it was a complication and a burden we had no desire to take into our lives. But in this, the Assembly had final and ultimate power, and the Assembly’s choice was clear.
It was so like my mother that one of the very few times in my life I’d seen her lose, it was by winning.
The marquise made some teasing comment, and my mother turned to her with iron in her eyes and a voice of steel.
“Fine. You insist that I rule this empire, over my objections. Then, by the Grace of Majesty, I will rule.”
The marquise smiled. “I ask for nothing less, Your Serenity.”
As the shrinekeepers declared the official results, the world seemed strangely distant and muffled, as if I were sinking further and further away from the reality I knew. I might as well have watched the proceedings from underwater, with a silent roaring weight in my ears.
My mother accepted her fate graciously enough, thanking the Assembly for their trust and pledging to dedicate her life, as she always had, to the service of the Serene Empire. The sense that this must surely all be a strange dream intensified as the shrinekeepers brought out the ducal crown, which Niro da Morante had worn only for state occasions, for the swift, no-fuss emergency coronation my mother had insisted on before she knew it would be her own head bending to accept the crown. The shrinekeepers invoked the blessings of the Nine Graces, and my mother swore an oath, and the head shrinekeeper of the Temple of Majesty placed the gold-wrought crown upon my mother’s auburn hair, and it was done.
My mother was the doge. It was impossible, but there she stood before the Assembly, her face stony and determined.
“There will be time to celebrate, and time to mourn,” she said. “For now, you elected me to do a job, and there is work to be done. Will the Council of Nine please attend me in the Map Room.”
It was over at last. I started toward the exit, shaking my head to clear it of its surreal haze; I was finally free to see Marcello, and that meant ascertaining where he was and then collecting either Zaira or Ciardha.
“Amalia, where are you going?” It was my mother’s voice, pitched sharp and low.
I looked up to find her standing by me at the edge of the Assembly floor, her face regal and remote save for her eyes, which gazed on me with something far too much like pity.
“I… I was going to inquire into a certain matter.” I barely stopped myself from saying Mamma, here in front of the Assembly. “Your Serenity.” The words tasted strange in my mouth; it was like taking a sip of a drink expecting chocolate and finding it to be wine.
“I called the Council of Nine to the Map Room,” my mother said.
I stared at her blankly. Of course she had; I’d heard her. What did that have to do with me? My mother was the one on the Council of Nine.
Except that she was the doge now. And she couldn’t be both.
Oh, Hells. Panic flooded in like black lagoon water into a leaky boat.
“Yes.” My mother’s voice softened. “That means you.”
Chapter Twenty
Someone had scrubbed the bloodstains from the beautiful map of Eruvia inlaid in the Map Room floor. No sign of last night’s violence marred the room’s stately gravity as I crossed the threshold, stepping onto the turquoise blue of the Summer Ocean. The incident had been swallowed by the thick layers of history folded invisibly into the shadows, hanging like smoke in the air.
The table was set up for a private Council meeting, with ten chairs drawn up around it. I’d mostly been here for larger strategy sessions, when the Council pulled in outsiders like military leaders, key imperial officials, and the occasional heir in training. More often the doge and Council met alone, behind closed doors, their business swathed in secrecy.
Ten chairs, for the ten most powerful people in the Serene Empire. And one of them was mine.
I paced slowly across the golden-brown coast of Osta, with its elegant temples and ancient walled cities rendered in alabaster and mother-of-pearl. I’d never truly thought this day would come—not until some unimaginably distant future, when my mother retired or passed away. It seemed likely as not that I’d die first, given all the trouble I’d gotten into. The Cornaro Council seat was a doom that had hung over my head since childhood: When you take your place on the Council of Nine, you won’t be able to blurt out any foolish thing that leaps into your head, Amalia. You won’t have time to read books all day when you’re on the Council. As one of the Council of Nine, you’ll have to get used to making sacrifices. My only consolation had been that this grim future remained several decades away.
Now it was here. Once I sat at that table, my freedom was over.
My mother watched me from the head of the table, her eyes grave. I pulled out a chair and sat down.
Lord Caulin cleared his throat, giving my mother a meaningful look. “Your Serenity, is it truly appropriate for your daughter to join us in this meeting?”
My mother lifted an eyebrow. “
Lady Amalia was confirmed as my successor in the Cornaro seat when you were still struggling to grow a beard, Lord Caulin.”
“Of course.” Caulin’s smile barely stretched his scars; no humor touched his eyes. “But at that time, the Lady Amalia was not yet a Falconer. It’s already a violation of the law for her to retain her seat on the Assembly after putting a jess on a fire warlock; for a Falconer to ascend to a seat on the Council is an even grosser breach of the rules laid down to separate magical and political power. Surely, we cannot blithely accept such a disruption to the balance that has maintained the serenity of the Empire for three hundred years without at least giving the matter some serious consideration.”
“Excuse me, Lord Caulin,” I said sharply, fighting to keep the heat from rising to my cheeks. I knew one thing for certain: I couldn’t let this turn into an argument between my mother and Lord Caulin while I sat here being talked over like a child. “It seems far more disruptive to tamper with the equally hallowed process by which the Empire selects its highest council. Having four inherited and five elected seats has protected us from civil war more than once. Are you challenging the process by which not only myself, but several others here ascended to our seats? Do you question our legitimacy?”
“I should hope not,” old Lord Errardi scoffed, drawing himself up. “Rather bold for someone who’s only been in his own seat a few months, Lord Caulin.”
Scipio, his eyes still red from what must have been a sleepless and grief-stricken night, frowned at Caulin. The da Morante seat was the oldest inherited spot on the Council. “We already had this discussion, when Lady Amalia first became a Falconer. We cannot set the precedent that a Council member or confirmed heir can be stripped of their seat by a magical accident, such as the one that melted the knot of the Lady Zaira’s jess and made it impossible to remove.”
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