The Unbound Empire

by Melissa Caruso

  “Of course not, my lord.” Hal bowed from his saddle. “Only making conversation.”

  “Well, why don’t you go up ahead and make conversation with Verin, or perhaps the Lady Zaira,” Kathe suggested firmly.

  Hal slapped Glass on the back. “We’re being dismissed, my friend.”

  “But we were only getting started,” Glass sighed. They obediently moved around to the other side of the carriage, however, and Hal rode forward to catch up with Verin.

  “Forgive them,” Kathe said. “It’s been years since I’ve courted anyone, and they’re excited.”

  “You seem very close to your Heartguard.” I couldn’t quite keep a trace of envy from my voice. I’d had precious little easy camaraderie in my life, and now that I was on the Council, it would become even rarer. Though I hoped that perhaps Lucia could become something very like a Heartguard, with time.

  “Of course we’re close.” Kathe turned his wrist up, showing blue veins through his pale golden skin. “This domain is my blood and bone. Like everyone else in Let, they’re a part of me.”

  Zaira gave him a deeply dubious look. “You Witch Lords are creepy,” she declared, and turned away from us to start chatting with Glass. In a moment they were laughing together, as if they’d always been friends.

  Kathe watched them with an odd, bittersweet expression. “See, the problem I run into is that I already feel a closeness with everyone in my domain, but it’s a rather lopsided closeness.”

  “They look up to you,” I said.

  “They don’t just look up to me. I am their lord.” He dropped his voice so Glass wouldn’t hear the weariness in it. “I sustain them, I protect them, and I could kill them with a thought. No matter how I treat them, or they treat me, it can never be an equal relationship.” He grimaced. “And I’m terrible at making friends in the normal way, as you may have noticed, so it’s rather difficult to get close to anyone outside my domain.”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I like you all right.”

  He lifted an amused eyebrow. “I’m not certain you know how to make friends in the normal way, either.”

  “Fair point.”

  “Maybe that’s why I get along better with you than I do with anyone else outside Let.” He tapped his chin, thinking. “Except possibly the Fox Lord. He’s a friend, too, I think.”

  An unexpected stab of sympathy slipped between my ribs. I knew what it was like to never be entirely certain whether your friends were really your friends, or just people who were being nice because they wanted something from you. “I can see why you’ve found it difficult to find people to court.”

  He laughed. “Am I that bad, then?”

  I thought about protesting that that wasn’t what I meant, but I smiled instead. “No worse than I am.”

  “We haven’t played a game with just the two of us in a while,” he said, reaching out across the moving air between us, then letting his hand fall again as a swaying of the sleigh opened more distance. “Not since I visited you in Raverra.”

  My cheeks warmed as I remembered our kisses in the mask shop. “That was a nice visit.”

  “When we’re not on a desperate mission, we’ll have to pick up where we left off.” He grinned. “But in the meantime, perhaps we can play a game we’ve been postponing.”

  “We’ve been postponing a game?”

  “Yes. A dreadfully serious one called Does It Make Any Sense at All That We’re Courting?’ We can take turns bringing up the obvious problems with a potential marriage alliance, and you get a point for each one you solve.”

  Something lurched in my chest, an anxious bird half-afraid of flight. But I kept my expression smooth and lifted an eyebrow. “Is the prize a marriage proposal?”

  “Oh, no.” Kathe put his hand to his chest. “I’d come up with a much better game for that.”

  “In Raverra, such details are usually negotiated in writing, with wine and advisers present, but all right.” My insides buzzed like a nest of bees. I’d always half assumed that our courtship was a joke—one Kathe was playing on me, or on his fellow Witch Lords, or perhaps on the Serene Empire. It was easy enough to play along when every kiss was part of the game. He would tire of it at some point, and move on when the gambit had outlasted its usefulness. I could surprise my grandchildren someday by telling them, Did you know I once courted a Witch Lord?

  He’d told me he was courting me in earnest. Perhaps I should have believed him. He was just so present in the now, seizing it with both hands and squeezing everything he could get from it, that it was hard to imagine a future with him—unlike Marcello, whose every look seemed to carry promises of family and home.

  But Kathe was right. Our courtship might be a game, but it was one with rules and stakes and, one way or another, an ending.

  “I’ll go first,” I said, striving to keep my tone light to match his. “We govern two different countries hundreds of miles apart, and neither of us can be away from our duties at home for long.”

  Kathe nodded, as if he’d been expecting this. “Since Let is certainly not going to become part of the Empire, we’d have to content ourselves with frequent visits, I suppose,” he said. “I can enhance horses to make the trip go quite quickly. If we spent a week per month in each other’s domains, we’d only be apart half the year.”

  “That could get lonely,” I said softly.

  Kathe shrugged. “No lonelier than we are now.”

  I thought of all the nights my father struggled to stay awake until my mother came home from the Imperial Palace, then finally gave up and put us both to bed, murmuring, We’ll see your mother in the morning. “I suppose we wouldn’t spend much time together regardless.”

  “Just as well. I’m told I’m best in small doses.” Kathe’s eyes crinkled at the corners. “Do I get a point?”

  “It’s a workable solution, I think, if not a perfect one. Your turn.”

  “Heirs.” He raised his pale brows. “I believe we both need them, and have rather different requirements in terms of magical ability.”

  My face heated. It was an entirely logical question, but I couldn’t help thinking about how those heirs would be conceived. “We’d have to hope for one with the mage mark and one without, to make our lives easier,” I said. “If we weren’t so lucky, well, I suppose we’d have to, ah, keep trying.”

  The Graces weren’t hearing my silent prayers, because Zaira whipped around from her conversation with Glass. “That’d be such a trial,” she leered. “All that trying and trying.”

  Kathe flashed her a grin. “I find that solution entirely acceptable. A point for you. Your turn, Lady Amalia.”

  I wished I could grab up a handful of the nice cold snow around us and rub it on my face. I cleared my throat, waited for Zaira to go back to chatting with Glass, and then pointed out in a low voice, “You’re immortal, and I’m not. I’ll grow old and die at the usual rate.”

  The glee slid off Kathe’s face, leaving it somber. He glanced at his Heartguard, one by one, and then turned his gaze back to me. “That’s something I’ll have to come to terms with, one way or another. There are those among the Witch Lords who train themselves to think of all the rest of humanity as passing shadows, not worth getting to know because they’re doomed to an early death.” He shrugged. “I think that’s dreadfully arrogant. We do get killed off, after all. Not letting yourself care for someone who won’t live past a hundred is ridiculous when odds are decent you won’t live to see three hundred yourself.”

  “How practical of you! Well, if it doesn’t bother you, it doesn’t bother me.” The idea of him remaining untouched by time as it passed was oddly comforting, in fact. Kathe was a force of nature, like my mother or Ciardha; it seemed more wrong that they would age than that Kathe wouldn’t. “Your turn.”

  “Saying it wouldn’t bother me might be an exaggeration, but it certainly shouldn’t affect our decisions. Let’s see.” Kathe studied his hands, folded in front of him on the saddle. “You cu
t to the quick with that one, so perhaps I shouldn’t hold back, either.”

  My belly tightened. “I know what you’re going to say.”

  “I imagine you do.” He met my eyes, the yellow rings of his mage mark piercing and relentless. “Captain Verdi.”

  Hells. This was supposed to be a game, and not one called Wring the Blood from Amalia’s Heart. “You know I put my duty to the Empire first,” I said stiffly. “I wouldn’t allow other romantic entanglements to disrupt a marriage alliance.”

  Kathe sighed. “To be clear, for all I’ve enjoyed poking at the good captain, it doesn’t bother me that you care about him. And I would consider a marriage that allowed other lovers. But—”

  “But it’s not what I want,” I interrupted, the words bursting out of me from the sheer force of anguish I’d invested in the question over the past months. “I remember what it was like for my parents. When you’re married to an empire, there are only so many other relationships you can maintain. I’m barely going to have time for one husband; I’d never want either of you to become an afterthought. And—” I took a breath and mustered half a smile. “I’m an only child. I never did learn to share. I admire those who can, but I don’t want to.”

  Kathe’s expression changed several times, settling on something unreadable, his yellow-ringed eyes gleaming. “That’s just as well,” he said. “I don’t like sharing, either. But that wasn’t what I meant.”

  “Oh?” I might as well simply keep on blushing, if I was going to spend half this conversation embarrassed.

  “I fear,” Kathe said, with the care of a man stepping out onto a bridge one strong wind gust short of collapsing, “you may, ah, overestimate my confidence that we can restore Captain Verdi to himself.”

  My hands clenched inside my fur mittens, cold fingertips curling against my palms.

  “I have to find a way. If I can’t, it doesn’t matter. He’s gone.” The words cut me on the way out, like coughing up swords.

  “I profoundly hope, for your sake, that is not the case.” Kathe edged closer to the sleigh and reached out again, his hand lighting on my hair like a bird for one brief moment. “But if it is, well, suffice to say I’ve learned there are problems that come with carrying around someone’s ghost.” His voice roughened, and I knew he must be thinking of Jathan.

  “In Raverra, we look toward the future,” I said. “We strive not to let the ghosts of the past haunt us.” It was easy to say, a sentiment my mother would approve. It was more difficult to banish my last memory of Marcello’s two green eyes, pleading with me not to leave him alone in a room decorated with scenes of torture while he fought to keep some shred of himself alive. “But sometimes…” I swallowed. “Sometimes it’s hard.”

  “I may know someone who failed to do that, once,” Kathe said. “Who carried his grief and guilt around with him and honed it into a weapon.”

  I couldn’t look away from his eyes. “And does he regret it?” I asked.

  Kathe tipped his head, seeming to ponder this. “He doesn’t regret getting vengeance. That part was extremely satisfying.”

  “I see.”

  “But he regrets losing track of other things that mattered along the way.” He reached out across the air scented with snow and horses for my hand. I took off my mitten and laced my fingers through his, feeling the familiar hum of magic beneath his skin.

  “I’ll remember that,” I said.

  “This is probably it, isn’t it?” The firelight traced patterns of orange light and shadow on the side of Zaira’s face. “One way or another.”

  She regarded me with an odd, pensive frown from her seat on a sawn-off log in the huntsman’s shelter where we huddled before a fieldstone fireplace. Kathe had offered to let us rest here while he made a side trip up a hill too steep and rocky for the sleigh to collect my elixir from the alchemist who had brewed it. I had been more than happy to stay behind; my head was still pounding, and I was glad to be out of the sleigh for a while. I certainly hadn’t recovered enough to climb up what looked like a small mountain in the dark. Glass and Verin had gone with him, and they’d left a grumbling Hal to look after the horses outside.

  “Us or Ruven, you mean?” I asked. It had, in fact, occurred to me that if our trap for him failed, matters would likely go poorly for us.

  “No. I mean the last time we do this sort of thing.” Zaira waved at the cold night beyond the three-sided stone shelter, where snow stretched white and dreaming beneath the black spears of tree trunks. I shivered at the sight, drawing my own stump seat closer to the fire. “You and me, off doing mad things by ourselves that nobody else has the guts to do.”

  I felt an inexplicable piercing loss at the idea. “Maybe not. This sort of thing will still need to get done.”

  Zaira snorted. “Not by one of the Council, it won’t. You’ll be locked up in the Imperial Palace all day, frowning over maps and papers and ordering people killed.”

  “That’s not…” I let my protest die, sighed, and finished, “inaccurate.”

  “And I’ll be, well, not here. And not in your palace, either.”

  I raised an eyebrow. “Where will you be?”

  Zaira let out a gusty breath. “Terika wants to get married. She won’t say it in as many words, because she doesn’t want to scare me off, but it’s pretty damned obvious.”

  “Would that be so bad?” I asked, trying very hard to sound neutral, and not at all as if I were wondering whether they’d let me buy them a nice little town house in the city as a wedding gift.

  “I dunno.” Zaira picked up a stick from a basket beside the fireplace and began poking the fire; the flames flared up, reflected in her eyes. “I don’t understand how she can still like me. I’m like a dog that keeps biting her hand and chewing up her boots and pissing on her floor, but she keeps feeding me anyway. And I’ve been a stray for so long.”

  “Well, my understanding is that usually you get married if you find someone you want to spend the rest of your life with.” Or to seal a political alliance, but never mind that. “Do you want to spend the rest of your life with Terika?”

  “I used to think the rest of my life would be about five years.”

  “And now?”

  She laughed. “At the rate we’re going? Two days. So I suppose it’s not much of a commitment.” She tossed her burning stick entirely into the fire. “I should probably ask her, I guess.”

  A noise escaped me that I could only have described as a squeal, though I attempted to smother it with a cough. Zaira scowled at me.

  Then her eyes slid past me to the dark woods beyond the shelter, and she frowned. “Is that what I think it is?”

  She didn’t seem alarmed, and we should theoretically be quite safe in Kathe’s domain. But it was still one of those questions that set the pulse to pounding in anticipation of the worst possible answer, much like What’s that in your hair?

  When I followed her gaze, however, the shape teased by the farthest edge of the ruddy firelight was neither a massive slavering chimera nor some fresh dangling human corpse—both entirely real possibilities, this close to the Kazerath border—but a tall rough stone carved with timeworn swirls and slashes.

  “A boundary stone.” I rose and approached it, trying to make out the lines of its ancient patterns. It stood on the far side of the road from the huntsman’s shelter, some fifty feet from our fire. “I knew we were close to the border, but I didn’t realize we were this close.”

  “Maybe you should stand back farther, then,” Zaira suggested. But she followed at my shoulder, fingers flexing.

  “So long as we stay on this side of the stone, we should be safe. Remember how it acted like a wall when those chimeras were after us?” We were close enough now that I could pick out the symbols clearly in the flickering firelight. “This is definitely a Kazerath stone. I recognize the patterns.”

  I traced a jagged line, feeling the rough rock slide beneath my fingertip. And something more, too—magic tingled beneath m
y touch. The stone didn’t warm in recognition like the ones marking Atruin had, but I still felt a certain resonance vibrating in my fingers. It knew me, and recognized my great-grandmother’s blood.

  Halfway down the monolith, which stood taller than my head, several patterns converged in a divot carved into the stone. The niche was no bigger than a child’s fist, and the bottom of it bore stains that looked black in the reddish light.

  “That must be where he bloods it, to mark the boundary of his claim.” I reached for my dagger.

  Zaira seized my wrist. “What in the Hells are you doing? Did that poison rot your brain?”

  “We need to lure Ruven north if we want to trap him,” I said. “It’ll take him time to get here. He’s still down at the border, and the last thing we want is him personally supporting his controlled army as it invades the Empire. If we can get him moving toward us now, we can spring our trap much sooner, and have a chance of killing him before those poor controlled people from Greymarch reach Ardence.”

  “Don’t get me wrong, I like the idea of spitting in his wine. But last time you got that strange look on your face and started poking one of these rocks, we wound up getting arrested by a bunch of angry deer.”

  I sighed. “Maybe I should wait for Kathe to get back.”

  I let Zaira tug me back to the fireside, and we settled on the stumps again. Hal stuck his broad bearded face into the shelter to check on us, then stepped in to warm his hands at the fire.

  “Don’t worry, I’ll be leaving you alone again soon,” he said cheerfully. “Those poor horses have been in harness for too long, even with Lord Kathe taking good care of them; I’ve got them out of it, but I want to give them a thorough brushing.” He hesitated a moment, then turned to face me, mischief in his eyes. “I only have one question for you first, my lady, while my lord is away.”

  “Oh?” I asked warily. Zaira looked back and forth between us, grinning, clearly expecting something good.

  “Do you love him?”

  “Well.” I seized up a stick and became very busy poking the fire. “That’s a complicated question.”