The Unbound Empire

by Melissa Caruso

  A tangle of roots reached up from the ground, slithering over him. “You see,” Ruven said, clearly relishing each word, “you are not the only one who has made bargains with the Lady of Spiders, Crow Lord. I know your greatest fear.”

  “No,” I whispered, clutching at the claws around my neck.

  The roots dragged Kathe’s unresisting body toward the lake. I knew in my bones how deep it was, and how dark, and how smothering the weight of water at the lightless bottom.

  “Zaira, can you burn those off him?” I asked desperately.

  “Not without getting your crow friend, too.”

  “If you unleash your balefire,” Marcello said to Zaira, his voice low and uneven, “I’ll shoot Amalia in the gut. My lord can heal her later if he wants her alive.”

  He wouldn’t meet my eyes. My veins filled with ice to match the gray surface of the lake—fear of dying in slow agony, fear for Kathe, and fear that shooting me would utterly destroy whatever remained of the true Marcello.

  “Marcello, we’re your friends,” I urged, searching desperately for some sign of the good man I knew in the taut lines of his shoulders, the tension in his jaw. “Let us pass. Let us help him.”

  “Friends?” He glanced deliberately at Hal’s still, bloody form. “I’ve seen how you use your friends and cast them aside. I have my orders. Don’t test me.”

  The claws of Kathe’s necklace dug into my palm, and my chest hurt as if I were the one with a hole speared through me. Zaira cursed, squeezing her hands into fists until her knuckles showed white.

  The roots broke through the ice and hauled Kathe’s still, bloody form down into the watery darkness.

  “We’ll see if you last as long as your mother did, before you choose to die,” Ruven called gleefully after him.

  The black water scattered silent ripples beneath the shattered ice.

  Chapter Forty-Two

  That’s enough.” A blue spark kindled in Zaira’s eyes. She raised her hands, facing Ruven across the water. “I don’t care if it won’t kill you, you festering blister, I’m setting you on fire.”

  Marcello cocked back the hammer of his pistol. “Please don’t.”

  Deep lines furrowed his face, but his hand remained steady. The round eye of the pistol’s muzzle stared at me, his slit orange eye glaring above it.

  “Fine,” Zaira growled. “I’ll burn you, too. Sorry, Amalia, but it’s that or let him kill us.”

  Despite her callous words, sweat beaded on her brow, and her cheeks tightened up under her eyes. Balefire kindled at her fingertips; the spider bite on her hand was livid in the harsh blue light.

  The moment slowed until the heartbeat throbbing through me became a gradual roar. The crows screaming angrily in the sky barely moved, their wings frozen as they thrashed the air. This was it: the last precious second before Zaira killed Marcello, or Marcello killed me. Either way, a friendship on which my life had pivoted was over.

  No. If there had ever been an Amalia who would have stood by and let it happen, she was gone long ago.

  “No!” I threw myself between the two of them, facing Zaira, my arms spread wide to shield Marcello from her fire. “I won’t let you do it!”

  “Don’t be a sentimental idiot,” Zaira snapped. But moisture shimmered at the corners of her eyes, and her voice trembled at the edge of breaking. “He’s gone, Amalia. It doesn’t make sense to get us both killed trying to save someone who’s already dead.”

  “He’s not dead!” The words scraped my throat raw. “I can’t let you kill him. He’s not gone, Zaira.”

  I could feel Marcello’s presence behind me. He was part of Ruven’s domain, too, and close enough that I could sense the beat of his heart, the quickening of his breath, through my blood still on the stone. I didn’t have to look to know the moment the pistol began to waver in his hand.

  I took a deep, ragged breath. “That’s why I have to do this myself.”

  Before I could think, before I could stop myself, I spun and lunged at Marcello. The dagger I’d used to cut my arm was still in my hand, and all his chimera’s speed was useless with the pure shock widening his eyes. I drove the dagger into his side, throwing the full force of my weight behind it.

  Warm blood spread against my hand. Marcello staggered, choking, staring at me in horror. His pistol discharged with a bone-jarring crack and a puff of smoke, the ball ricocheting harmlessly off rock.

  He collapsed to the ground, his breath wet and labored, clutching at the spreading bloodstain on his side. I fell to my knees beside him, half-blind with tears.

  “Holy Hells, Amalia!” Zaira cried out.

  “I’m sorry,” I whispered. “Marcello, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.”

  “You did it,” he wheezed, shock slurring his words. “You actually stabbed me.”

  “Oh, my. Oh, very nicely done, Lady Amalia.” On the shore, Ruven tucked Kathe’s dagger through his belt and clapped.

  Zaira whirled toward him, teeth bared in a snarl. Ruven laughed and stepped back toward the forest.

  “Much as it pleases me to demonstrate my immortality, Lady Zaira, I must confess that your balefire causes me some discomfort. So I will risk being labeled an ungracious host and leave the entertainment of my guests to others for the moment.”

  The three dead chimeras sprawled on the ground suddenly jerked and twitched, like puppets with jostled strings, and then lurched unsteadily to their feet. Their eyes remained blank and empty, glazed with death, and no breath expanded their sunken ribs. They shambled toward us with the dull gracelessness of broken clockwork.

  It was wrong. The delicate tracery of life to which I was still barely connected shuddered with it, and nausea wrenched my belly strongly enough to distract me even from Marcello dying on the ground in front of me. I braced myself on the earth and felt it cringing under my fingers.

  “There are so many foolish rules and taboos in Vaskandar,” Ruven sighed. “Laid down by the oldest Witch Lords in the name of preserving the cycle of life—but frankly, I think they only want to keep themselves in power. If we can shape wood and bone, why not use the dead as our puppets, after all? It’s the same thing.”

  All around the lake, a tumult shook the snow, and black mounds of earth heaved up from beneath the blanketing white. Bones reached up into the daylight, bones picked bare by time and ones with ragged flesh still hanging off them; bones still cloaked in moldering fur, skulls with decaying eyes still pooled in them. Rotting carcasses trailing startled beetles, and ancient skeletons clean and pure as the snow itself.

  “Hell of Corruption,” Zaira breathed, the flush of rage draining from her face.

  Some of them had been human, with scraps of armor hanging off them, and rusted weapons caught in their rib cages from an ancient battle. But beside them stumbled deer with grinning skulls and spreading sharp antlers, great shaggy bears with stinking holes rotted in their fur, and wolves with wisps of gray pelt clinging to their yellowed skeletons. They followed the three venomous chimeras as they advanced up the causeway toward us, the vanguard of a terrible army.

  “Please enjoy this modest entertainment,” Ruven called, with a mocking bow, and retreated into the woods.

  “Get out of my way, Cornaro,” Zaira said, and she unleashed her fire.

  I slipped my arm beneath Marcello’s shoulders and dragged him back from the blast of heat and light, away from the smoke and stench, almost to the tip of the rocky spit. Ice stretched around us, thin and brittle as the barrier that kept me from screaming, with black water stretching deep and dark below it. Crows circled above, cawing frantically. Marcello’s blood soaked through my shirt.

  I pulled him half into my lap and fumbled with shaking hands in my satchel in a desperate search for something that could help him, some forgotten alchemical salve to stop the bleeding, but all I had was Terika’s vial of reinvigoration potion.

  “Oh Graces, please tell me he’s going to heal you.” I couldn’t stop crying. My dagger had fallen from his
side and was gone, and now there was only the terrible spreading bloodstain on his ruined uniform, and Marcello’s struggling breath, and the blood he coughed up onto my already scarlet hands as I pressed them over the wound. “You’re too valuable to let die. Right? Please let him heal you.”

  Marcello tried to push my hands away. “It’s all right, Amalia,” he said weakly. “Let me go. I’m done being Ruven’s toy.”

  “I can still cure you,” I insisted, furiously blinking away tears. “Somehow. We’ll make you human again, you’ll see.”

  “He took away so much.” Pain twisted Marcello’s face; his scales wrinkled like a lizard’s skin. “And he filled me up with bloodlust and cruelty. But he couldn’t make me stop loving you.”

  I seized his hand, then, claws and all. “I love you, too,” I said desperately, at last. Grace of Mercy, what kind of fool was I, that I always waited until one of us was dying? “Do you hear me? I love you.”

  He nodded, and managed the barest, thinnest echo of his wistful smile. And then his eyes closed.

  “Don’t you dare die,” I whispered, crushing his hand in mine. “Don’t you dare, Marcello.”

  But his heart was still beating. I could feel it, pulsing in time with Ruven’s. A thin trickle of vivomancy threaded through him: not enough to close his wound, but enough to pause the bleeding and keep him alive.

  Ruven wasn’t done with either of us yet.

  Rage swelled in me, so strong I could feel the heat of it scorching my skin. But no. That wasn’t mere anger; anger wouldn’t focus exclusively on my landward side. Nor would it come with a harsh blue glare and a thick pall of black smoke.

  I lifted my head to find a wall of balefire creeping toward me. Zaira stood within the heart of the blaze, arms stretched wide to embrace it. The entire spit was burning, pale flames leaping skyward with hungry exaltation, except for the tip where I knelt with Marcello. Blue fire clawed its way closer over the rocks, a finger’s width at a time, melting the stone beneath it.

  “Zaira,” I called. “You can stop now. They’re gone. You burned them all.”

  She gave no sign that she heard me. The madness of the flames had taken her, and she was lost to it.

  I squeezed my eyes shut against the heat, against the sight of Marcello’s pale face and bloodstained body, against the knowledge that Kathe was fighting to live and trapped in his own worst nightmare hundreds of feet beneath the ice. How in the Nine Hells had this gone so wrong? We were supposed to save the Empire.

  I still had to save the Empire. Somehow. No matter what happened to me, no matter what happened to my friends, that was my duty. It might be tempting to let Zaira’s flames rage unabated, to let them wash over me and absolve me of everything I had done, but that was not an option I possessed.

  I opened my eyes and dragged in a breath. “Revincio,” I said.

  Nothing happened.

  Balefire still raged all along the spit, spreading out onto the surface of the lake, licking hungrily toward the clouds above. The ice retreated before it, a clear space spreading rapidly, freeing a scattered reflection of glowing blue ripples in the black water.

  I cleared my throat of smoke and tears and fear. “Revincio,” I said again, as clearly as possible.

  The balefire edged closer, withering grass and charring sticks to ash, scorching the rock beneath. I dragged Marcello back a few feet, down the slope toward the water’s edge, but we were almost out of land. I might be a decent swimmer, but not good enough to keep an unconscious man afloat with me in icy cold water—and the blazing lake was proof enough, if I’d needed it, that water was no protection.

  “Revincio,” I cried, in a panic now. “Revincio, revincio, revincio!”

  Zaira stood wreathed in a glorious mantle of fire, her head tilted back to the sky. On one upraised wrist, the jess gleamed—but the shape was wrong, blurred and uneven.

  It was melting. Istrella had warned that it might become further damaged after the apocalyptic fire she’d unleashed outside Ardence, and now it was melting altogether. Sweet Grace of Mercy.

  As I watched, it sloughed off her wrist in a dribble of molten gold.

  Lightning-blue flames danced and writhed all around her, consuming everything but Zaira herself, reveling in absolute destruction. All that remained of Ruven’s dead army was ashes. There is nothing we cannot make beautiful, the flames said. There is nothing so dark we cannot turn it into light.

  Graces preserve us all. Without the jess, her flames could rage to the far border of Kazerath, consuming everything in their path. That might even be her intent; it was the one thing that could destroy Ruven.

  But I’d promised to always bring her back.

  I reached into my satchel. My trembling fingers brushed across Marcello’s button before finding the cool, complex weave of wire they sought. The jess.

  I rose, the jess clenched in my hand, and faced the flames.

  Zaira twirled slowly within them, her bare wrists gracefully extended, her hair an aura of fire. Flames fluttered from her arms like wings. She was dancing, exultant, drinking in the destruction with the pure hunger of the flames themselves.

  She was free.

  The jess dangling from my hand suddenly felt as heavy as an iron chain.

  I’d put this on her once, to save Raverra from burning. I couldn’t force it on her again. Not even to save my life.

  I gritted my teeth and slipped the jess over my own wrist, pushing it up my arm to get it out of the way. I didn’t need it. I had taken one bright thing out of the Lady of Spiders’ cottage, and I clasped it to my heart: No matter how far gone she might seem, Zaira could quench her flames on her own.

  I tried not to think about how that had come after she’d killed the people she loved most.

  “Zaira!” I called. “Zaira, listen to me! Your balefire is spreading too far!”

  She turned, slowly, to face me. Her eyes were full of blue fire. It burst from every inch of her skin: the wild, fierce magic of her own soul escaping, leaping with joy and yearning into the light.

  “I know you don’t want to kill me,” I pleaded. “Zaira, you’re my friend. You’re the best friend I have, in fact. We’ve been through so much together.”

  The balefire kept creeping toward me. Even with the additional distance I’d opened, it was less than ten feet away. The cold waters of the lake lapped over Marcello’s limp hand; I had nowhere else to run. If I couldn’t get through to Zaira, Marcello and I were both going to die, and no amount of healing from Ruven could restore our scattered ashes.

  I steeled myself and stepped forward. The heat rolling off the flames sucked all the moisture from my skin, leaving my eyes dry and raw. The fire burned shifting patterns into my vision, and every time I blinked, orange flames danced behind my eyelids, the inverse of what raged before me.

  “I trust you, Zaira,” I said quietly. “And if your fire is part of you, I trust that, too.” I struggled not to cough from the smoke; the fire was close enough now that the bare skin on my face was tightening. Zaira stepped closer with it, trailing a wake of eddying flames, her expression a distant mask within the twisting curtains of fire.

  “I put my life in your hands,” I breathed. “My friend.”

  I reached out a hand toward her, empty, offering. Pain seared my fingertips.

  I closed my eyes and waited to see if I would die.

  Chapter Forty-Three

  A warm hand slid into mine. Slim, confident fingers clasped my palm close against hers.

  There was no pain.

  I opened my eyes and met Zaira’s. They gleamed black and clear, with the fire still rising all around her.

  Around us. The balefire raged all about me, deadly streams of blue-white light shifting and snapping, a myriad of shapes in light created and destroyed every instant. I still felt its heat, but I wasn’t burned.

  “Amalia,” she said, her voice clear and calm. “Stab him in the face for me.”

  All at once, the fire winked out.
>
  Zaira’s eyes closed, and her hand slipped from mine as she collapsed to the ground.

  I stood alone on the rocks, over the unconscious bodies of my friends, with a stretch of smoking ruin making a path to shore. I sucked in a deep breath, coughed on the lingering smoke, then pulled in another. My whole body trembled with the unspent energy of fear and love and grief.

  I didn’t have time for shock. I groped in my satchel and drew out Terika’s reinvigoration potion. My hands trembled so violently I almost couldn’t break the wax seal and work out the cork, but I managed to splash some over Zaira’s parted lips.

  “Come on,” I whispered. “I need you. This has to work.”

  The wind blew a fine grit of ash across her face and teased her dark curls, but she didn’t stir. Crows called overhead with desperate urgency.

  From the shadow of the woods, out onto the cindered shore, stepped Ruven.

  “Lady Amalia Cornaro.” His smile spread wide. No stray trace of blood on his face remained to suggest he’d had both eyes stabbed out not half an hour ago. His black leather coat flowed behind him as he advanced across the stony causeway toward me, his boots crunching on the remains of his creatures. “Just the two of us again, I see. Exactly as I planned.”

  Hells. I had nothing left in me to deal with Ruven right now. Even my dagger was gone, for what little good it would have done, melted to a slick pool of steel by Zaira’s fire. I had driven him off with words alone before, but they had always been words backed by some kind of power: that of the Serene Empire, or of his fellow Witch Lords at the Conclave. Now we were in his domain, and I was out of allies and resources. I had no way to protect myself, let alone my friends.

  When you’re taken off guard, get your opponent talking, my mother’s remembered voice whispered in my mind. It will buy you time to make a plan.

  “What do you want, Ruven?” I asked, my voice rough and broken as the heat-shattered stones beneath my boots.

  He spread his hands wide, pacing nearer. “A fine question, Lady Amalia! It seems to me that I can ask you for anything I desire.”