Hal snorted. “Nothing complicated about it. I’ve got a dog back home, and he loves everyone. Me, I love my friends, and my brother and his little girls, and my lord. As for Lord Kathe, he’d never admit it, but he loves all of Let, every little piece of it.” He chuckled. “My heart’s not that big. I can’t love more people at once than I can count on my fingers. So I won’t judge you if you say no.”
I poked the fire so vigorously my stick snapped. “I… you see, that’s…”
“Define love,” Zaira said dramatically, and then howled with laughter when I glared at her.
“Let me make this easier for you,” Hal rumbled. “Do you like him?”
“Yes, definitely,” I replied immediately.
He nodded, seeming pleased. “Would you take a musket ball for him?”
“Well, that would be a foolish thing to do, because a musket ball could kill me and would barely bother him,” I reasoned.
“Ugh. That’s not an answer.” Hal shook his head. “You’re like he is; I’d get a straight answer out of a cat sooner. Fine. Would you wrestle a bear chimera for him?”
“I don’t…” I paused. “I think you and I define love differently.”
Hal sighed. “I give up. By your definition, then. Do you love him?”
“You’re not going to get her to tell you,” Zaira said. “She’s so stiff she can’t even admit she loves her mother.”
“I’ll ask you, then,” Hal said, his bushy brows set in a determined line. “You seem to know her pretty well. Does she love Lord Kathe?”
My entire face burned. Zaira grinned from ear to ear. “Weeeeeeeeeeeelll,” she began, drawing the word out to some seven or eight syllables.
I sprang to my feet. “Kathe will be back soon, won’t he? Didn’t you want to brush those horses?”
Hal guffawed, holding his belly. Then he slapped my back hard enough to rock me onto my toes, exchanged a knowing look with Zaira, and laughed some more. “You’re redder than a ripe apple! Hah! All right, I have my answer.” He collected himself as best he could and bowed. “I’ll go take care of those horses, then, my lady.”
He left the shelter, whistling.
I could have lit another fire with the heat from my face. “What was that all about?” I demanded of Zaira, whose grin hadn’t faded.
She shook her head. “If you don’t know, I’m sure as Hells not going to explain it to you.”
Before I could frame a response, a gleam of light from the dark woods caught my attention, near the boundary stone. A round, glassy flash, like the eye of a predator. But instead of a pair of eyes, there was only one.
My lungs filled with sudden frost. Marcello.
Chapter Thirty-Eight
I stared into the darkness, struggling to pull a familiar human outline from the black shadows beyond the firelight. The glowing eye blinked once, but didn’t move.
Slowly, with exquisite care, as if I were trying not to startle a wild animal, I took three steps to the edge of the shelter and down onto the trampled snow.
Zaira’s hand fell on my shoulder. “I see him,” she whispered. “Do we try to take him?”
I paused, fear and longing and anguish driving urgently through my veins. It was all Nine Hells in one question. “I don’t know,” I whispered. “I don’t know if we can. Or what we’d do if we captured him.”
“Nothing I could do to catch him would be pretty,” Zaira said. “You could stall him until Mr. Decorates With Bones gets back.”
“Ruven has near absolute power on that side of the border, and Kathe has it here. Unless one of us steps across, there’s not much we can do to each other.” I took a shaky breath. “So I’m going to talk to him.”
Zaira sighed a “this is a terrible idea” sort of sigh. “Fine. I’ll hang back a few steps and chaperone. Don’t do anything to make me have to light him on fire.”
My steps crunched in the snow, each one taking me farther from the warm firelight and closer to the blazing eye waiting in the forest. With each step, the glare of the fire faded, and I could make out more of him. His familiar silhouette, shoulders canted as he rested one hand on the boundary stone. His uniform buttons, gleaming with reflected firelight. The dark waves of his hair. The swath of silver scales trailing down his cheek.
Exhaustion or sorrow hollowed his face, and stubble softened the clean lines of his chin. He watched me approach, unmoving, both eyes bright in the firelight.
I stopped too close to him, well within lunging range, my breath misting between us. My heart pounded hard enough to set the bedraggled lace at my collar to trembling.
“Amalia.” He swallowed, as if my name hurt his throat. “I’m glad you’re alive.”
All the things I might say crowded in my mind. I could try to reach the real Marcello, to help bolster him against Ruven’s influence. I could get him talking, to stall until Kathe returned, in the hopes of capturing him. I could attempt to get information about Ruven from him. Or I could tell him all the things I should have said long ago, when I thought I would have forever to get around to saying them.
“What am I going to do with you, Marcello?” I whispered.
“My lord Ruven’s offer still stands.” His voice remained soft and weary, as if I’d caught him just before going to bed. “He felt your touch on his boundary stone, and assumes you were signaling that you wanted to talk. I’m here to ask if you’ve made your choice.”
“You hate him,” I said, staring into the hard-edged shadows of his one green eye.
“Yes,” he said quietly. “More than you could ever know.”
“That’s not like you. You never hated anyone.”
“I do now.”
I closed my eyes so that I could see the face I knew, warm and honest and stubborn. But that Marcello was never coming back, not even if we cured him somehow. There had been an innocence in him that was shattered now, as surely as mine had been when I had killed Roland.
“People change,” I murmured. “People have to change. They’re only different, not gone.”
“I need your answer, Amalia.”
I opened my eyes again. Marcello was waiting, resigned, for the no he was certain he was getting. But my mother had trained me never to reject an offer on instinct alone. Think through all the implications and all the possibilities, she’d told me. Your instincts may be correct, but they are far from your only adviser.
We had other, better ways of driving Ruven out of the Empire. I could live with poison in my veins, as I had for half my life. But Ruven was the only one who could make Marcello human again.
I had already sacrificed someone I loved for the Empire once. But that didn’t mean that I always had to make that same choice, over and over. I didn’t have to become that person, cold and ruthless, drowning the ashes of my heart for the sake of Raverra.
“What do you want, Marcello?” It was the question I hadn’t been able to ask Roland.
Marcello let out a puff of breath, a white cloud drifting across his face and dissipating into the winter air. “Are you asking the man I was, or this thing I’ve become?”
“You aren’t a thing,” I said sharply. “And I’m asking you. Take that as you will.”
“I don’t know.” He pushed a hand through his hair in frustration. “I want what Ruven wants—but I also want to kill him. I’m horrified at what I’ve done and proud of it. I want you to be happy, and I want you to suffer.” An unstable edge came into his voice. He raised his hand before him, unsheathing the curving claws whose marks I still bore on my arms; I flinched. “I want to stay like this forever,” he whispered, staring at them with apparent fascination. “To be strong and fast and better than human. But I also want to rip these claws out of my fingers, and rip this eye out of my head.”
I reached out without thinking, heedless of his claws, grabbing his hand before it could move toward his face. “Please don’t hurt yourself.”
“The old me would rather cut off my own hands than hurt you again.” He slid
his fingers through mine, his touch heartbreakingly gentle, linking us across the border. “But it doesn’t matter what I would choose. I’m only going to do what Ruven wants, anyway.” He met my eyes; both of his, green and orange, held the same hopeless intensity. “I always trusted you to make the decisions, Amalia. I can tell you that Ruven wants you to say yes, because he’s afraid. But I can’t tell you what I want, because I don’t know what’s me, and what’s him, and what’s some animal instinct he gave me to make me better at killing.” Marcello shook his head, as if throwing off invisible insects that plagued him. “My task is to ask for your decision. Whatever it is, I trust you to make the right one.”
I should have known. There was no way out of this; just like with Roland, I would have to make the choice myself. But this time, instead of a simple trade of one life for thousands, it was giving power to my enemy in return for… what? I would have to be a much greater fool than I already was to believe for a minute that Ruven would give up his hold over Marcello. Even if he turned him human again, it would be a change he could reverse at any time. He would keep Marcello close and torment him whenever Ruven felt he needed to keep me in line.
I unlaced my fingers from Marcello’s, tenderly, carefully. The warmth of his touch lingered on my winter-chilled skin.
“I have a return message for you to take to Ruven,” I said.
Something flickered across Marcello’s face—disappointment? Recognition? It was gone too quickly for me to guess. But he nodded. “That’s why I’m here.”
“Tell him I said thank you.”
Marcello’s brows lowered. “Thank you? For what?”
I drew my dagger. “For teaching me how to conquer him.”
“Amalia, what in the Hells are you doing?” Zaira called from behind me.
I pricked a finger, cutting deeper than was probably necessary in my wild surge of determination, and shoved it into the niche in the boundary stone.
“Have you lost your mind?” Zaira’s footsteps crunched rapidly in the snow.
“Stop!” Marcello cried, panic in his voice.
I squeezed my finger, and three drops of blood pattered rapidly to the rough stone.
Every tree on the Kazerath side of the border began thrashing, as if a fierce wind swept through them. Birds cried angrily, their calls rising in the night air.
“You dare!” Marcello hissed, lunging half across the border to grab my wrist. His face twisted in furious contempt; there was nothing of himself in his expression.
A branch stabbed down from beside and above me, sharpened to a spear, and pierced through his shoulder.
“Marcello!” I cried.
He staggered backward, releasing me, blood spreading a darker crimson across his ragged Falconer uniform. His hand went to his shoulder; his eyes met mine, full of betrayed shock.
I whirled around, but there was no sign of Kathe returning; only Hal, running around the shelter with a sword in one hand and a currycomb in the other to see what was the matter. The tree had detected an invading chimera and acted on its own.
I spun back to face Marcello, but he had already fled. His footsteps receded with unnatural speed into the darkness, and only a trail of blood drops remained on the cold white snow.
“Is there some reason you didn’t ask the Lady of Horrible Crawly Things to meet you someplace closer?” Zaira asked Kathe as our sleigh whizzed along the forest road through Let the next morning, his Heartguard riding around us.
“No, I just like making things as complicated as possible,” Kathe said, so easily that for a moment I wasn’t sure whether he was kidding.
Zaira laughed, however. “All right, what’s the reason?”
A smile teased Kathe’s lips. It was good, by the Graces, to see someone I cared about smiling. It eased the knots that had settled into my shoulders since last night.
“I know a secret,” he said.
“And naturally, you’re going to tell us, because nothing brightens a gloomy winter day quite like ruining a nice fresh secret,” Zaira said.
“Naturally. Especially because this is Ruven’s secret.” Kathe’s grin spread wider. “I know the location of one of his blooding stones.”
I made an appreciative noise, but Zaira’s eyes stayed half-lidded. “I’m sure that’s a big coup you can brag about when you’re sitting around the Witch Lord coffee house, but how is that different than the rock Amalia bled on last night?”
“Boundary stones mark the limits of your claim.” Kathe cupped his hands. “Like the walls of a bowl that keep the water from spilling uselessly across the table. You can’t use them to make a new claim, only to define one.”
Zaira frowned. “So if bleeding on the rock didn’t do anything, why were the trees so angry?”
“It was a declaration of intent,” I said.
“A declaration of war, more like it.” Kathe shook his head. “We don’t touch each other’s boundary stones. To tamper with one is to brazenly announce your plans to seize territory from your neighbor’s domain. It’s a challenge Ruven can’t ignore.” He gave me an approving look. “Which was the entire point, of course.”
“So it was a slap in the face,” Zaira said.
“Yes,” I agreed. “To get his attention.”
“But the blooding stone is a different matter.” Kathe rubbed his hands. “The blooding stones disperse your blood into the rivers and spread your claim through the land. A threat to one of those Ruven will have to deal with personally. Since we need to lure him into the center of the ring of Truce Stones to activate them against him, we need something with the urgency of a rival claim threatening one of his blooding stones to draw him into our trap.”
“And then he comes rushing in to defend his blooding stone and attacks Amalia?” Zaira’s voice dripped skepticism. “That doesn’t leave her in a good place, does it? Again.”
“Actually, we have the opposite problem.” I forced the words out. “I’m not sure we can count on him attacking me. Not in a way that would trigger the Truce Stones. He’s as likely to try to paralyze me, or knock me unconscious. He wants me alive.”
“I’ll do it,” Zaira offered. “He doesn’t want me alive.”
I shook my head. “You can’t. Remember, if you put your blood on the Truce Stones, you can’t attack him, either. We need your balefire to overcome his healing.”
“I fear Witch Lords tend to be reluctant to attack one another,” Kathe said, frowning. “Plus, if he sees me at all, he’ll assume it’s a trap.”
“I hate to say it, but we need to recruit a volunteer.” A queasiness in my belly knew that if Marcello were here and himself, he would have spoken up by now, and I would try halfheartedly to dissuade him but would know that he was perfect. Graces curse me, I was too willing to make these sacrifices. “The problem is that Ruven is as likely as not to do something horrible to them, like bend their bones in knots or simply stop their heart. The harm he does may well be permanent.”
“I’ll do it,” Hal said, kneeing his horse closer to the sleigh.
Glass shot him an annoyed look and sighed. “Beat me to it, but I suppose that’s just as well. I’m not really the self-sacrificing type.”
“You know I don’t want you to,” Kathe said to Hal, his frown deepening.
Verin lifted an eyebrow. “My lord. With due respect, you dare say that in front of the Lady Amalia? After you set her up to take exactly the same risk without her knowledge or permission?”
I stopped myself before I could utter a demurral. On reflection, he deserved that.
Kathe grimaced. “I’m sorry, Amalia. I didn’t want you to get hurt, either. I just…” He trailed off.
“You decided it was worth an injury to destroy your enemy,” Verin supplied. “And in this case I agree, and am adding my voice to Hal’s and volunteering. Which, my duty as your Heartguard obliges me to point out, you did not give the Lady Amalia a chance to do.”
“Sometimes I suspect you enjoy your duty as my Heartguard a bit
much, Verin,” Kathe said.
I smiled at her. “Someone has to keep him in line.”
She nodded gravely. “Even so.”
“Now, that’s not fair, coming after a piece of my glory, Verin.” Hal wagged a finger at her. “I called it first. Besides, you have a wife and son waiting for you at home.”
“All right, Hal,” Kathe agreed reluctantly. “You can be our bait. Try to get him to hurt you but not kill you.”
“Ha! You hear that, Verin?” Hal smacked his own chest smugly. “I’m more disposable than you!”
“A true honor,” Glass said dryly. “Don’t let it go to your head.”
“You’re not disposable, Hal,” Kathe protested. “None of you are. Don’t make me change my mind about this.”
“So,” I asked, “this place where we’re meeting the Lady of Spiders is near Ruven’s blooding stone?”
Kathe nodded. “The blooding stone is just across the border, by a pool at the headwaters of one of Kazerath’s streams. If we can get the Truce Stones, we’ll want to set up the trap immediately, before Ruven hears of the meeting and suspects what we’re up to.”
An alarming thought occurred to me. “If we’re in his domain, can we truly hide the Truce Stones from him? Won’t he sense them?”
Kathe shook his head. “They’re not alive, and they’re not part of his domain. He’d have to see them with his own eyes, the same as you or I.”
“Do you truly think we can convince the Lady of Spiders to let us use them?” I asked.
“If not, we’ll find out soon,” Kathe said.
A silence fell, then, as our thoughts turned to the challenges ahead of us. Kathe kept watching Hal, a frown marring his brow.
When we stopped to water the horses in a crystal clear stream, Kathe abruptly jumped down from the sleigh and strode off into the trees, his boots crunching through the snow. Verin and Glass exchanged meaningful looks; Hal was whistling cheerfully as he tended to the horses, and seemed not to notice.
Glass and Verin put their heads together beside the sleigh, barely within my hearing. “Is this yours or mine?” Glass muttered.
The Unbound Empire Page 39