The Tethered Mage

by Melissa Caruso

  “Hmm. Everyone pressures the duke.” Savony shook her head. “To stand up to the Empire, or to appease the doge’s wrath. To find their missing children, and to punish whoever took them. To pay for their indulgences. To find someone to blame. To make Ardence what it was when they were young. All his court want the duke to be the great man who solves all of their problems for them.” Her gaze met mine, assessing. “But he is not that man. And so it falls to me.”

  “That seems quite a task for a steward,” I admitted.

  “And that,” she said, “is why I am hoping for help from Raverra, to whom the nobles of Ardence have no choice but to listen. And from the shrewd and wealthy house of Cornaro in particular. Your cousin and I had a plan to save the city, despite Duke Astor. But Ignazio was recalled to Raverra.” By the disapproval in her voice, I guessed she preferred Ignazio as Serene Envoy over Lady Terringer.

  “I hope, after the current difficulties are settled, your efforts with him will not be in vain.”

  A faint smile touched her severe mouth. “I hope so as well. I will do everything I can to restore peace and good relations between our cities, both for the sake of the present and in hope for the future. I ask you to bear in mind that no solution to the current crisis will work if it does not account for the fundamental problems causing unrest in Ardence: financial ruin and poor leadership. I look to Raverra for help in creating a remedy. I hope you will be part of that solution.”

  “I would certainly like to help Ardence thrive again,” I said carefully, wary of stumbling blindly into a hidden agreement lying in her words like a trap.

  She gave me a stiff bow. “Perhaps, then, you may be the one who can save my city, Lady Amalia. If you don’t destroy it first.”

  The next morning, I cleared my schedule and had my oarsman take me to the Mews. I’d related my interactions with Ruven and Savony to my mother as she was on her way out the door to the Imperial Palace, but I was desperate to really talk to someone about Ruven’s connection to the Shadow Gentry, Duke Astor’s reckless rejection of the Serene Envoy, and what might be done to keep the situation from sliding farther down into the Hell of Madness.

  I hurried past the guards at the gates and through the dim, lofty entry hall, pausing when I broke out into the garden and realized I had no idea where to find Marcello. A senior Falcon was giving lessons to a handful of vivomancers nearby, twisting the rosebushes into fanciful and menacing shapes; a pair of Falconers leaned against a tree together, cleaning their pistols and talking. A Falcon in uniform strode briskly past, his Falconer at his side, heading for the docks. By the tool bag he carried slung across his shoulder, emblazoned with the winged horse of Raverra, he was probably an artificer off to see to some project for the Empire.

  “Amalia!” Marcello’s voice rang out cheerfully across the garden.

  I spotted him waving from the doorway to the officers’ quarters, where he stood with a clerk who was making entries in some sort of ledger. Marcello made his excuses to the clerk and headed over to me, the sun gleaming on the dark waves of his hair and catching bright sparks from the golden threads in his uniform.

  “Marcello,” I greeted him. “Are you free this morning? I was hoping to talk to you.”

  “As it happens, I am.” He grinned. “My morning was set aside to discuss a new match for a Falcon whose Falconer is retiring; but the Falcon had a request who seems ideal, so that conversation took all of ten minutes, and I’m unexpectedly free. I was actually just thinking how I wished you were here!”

  “Yes, well, we have a lot to talk about.” I dropped my voice, glancing around anxiously.

  “Right! Like meeting my sister.”

  “Like …” I blinked. Marcello beamed at me. Dire portents died on my tongue. “Of course. Meeting your sister.”

  Marcello led me into a dormitory and up twisting stone tower steps to a landing cluttered with broken oddments: broom handles, pothooks, jewelry boxes, all piled in twin precarious heaps on either side of the door, with barely enough room left to open it.

  “She collects this stuff,” he apologized. “She keeps saying she’s going to use it in her work, but I don’t believe her.”

  Tacked to the door was a note in an elegant, spidery scrawl:

  PLEASE KNOCK

  Or I Cannot Be Held Responsible

  For the Consequences

  Thank You

  Marcello reached for the handle.

  I grabbed his wrist. “Aren’t you going to knock?”

  “Oh, right.” He sighed. “I suppose I’d better, after last time.”

  “Last time?”

  He grimaced and rapped on the door.

  There was no answer. I could faintly hear humming from within, and the occasional clink. Marcello knocked again.

  “This is why I don’t bother,” he explained.

  “Should we try another time?”

  “No, no. She’d love to meet you.” He knocked a third time. “Istrella! It’s me, Marcello!”

  “Busy,” a voice sang through the door.

  “I can come back another time,” I murmured. “Really, it’s no bother.”

  Marcello grinned and held up a finger. “Istrella, Lady Amalia Cornaro is here with me.”

  The door flung open with such force it crashed into one of the piles flanking it and tipped a broken model ship onto the stairs. “Why didn’t you say so? Come in! Mind the chandelier.”

  The first thing I noticed was her glasses: one lens tinted green and the other red, the round frames ringed in artifice runes, large enough to dominate her narrow, pointed face. She couldn’t have been more than thirteen, if a tall and lanky thirteen, full of knees and elbows. Her long, delicate fingers never stopped moving.

  The room she ushered us into was cluttered with half-finished wonders of beads and wire, gears and glass, gleaming with promise and unfulfilled purpose beneath varying layers of dust. A gutted clock spewed its innards across one chair, and a flintlock with rune-carved golden bands around the barrel lay snarled in a tangle of copper wire on another. Workbenches fought with shelves for wall space, covered indiscriminately with parts, books, and projects in progress. The chandelier she’d warned us of hung low enough to force Marcello to duck, dangling crystal in elegant cascades, but lumps of quartz wrapped in beaded wire sat on rune-carved disks in place of candles.

  “Is that chandelier a courier lamp?” My voice rose to a pitch I hadn’t known I could produce as I stared up in wonder.

  “That’s the idea.” She waved at it dreamily. “They have me making courier-lamp pairs all the time, and I thought wouldn’t it be lovely to make an entire linked chandelier set instead? It would be more compact than the receiving rooms you see now … but I got distracted by my vanishing crown and never finished it.”

  I blinked. “Vanishing crown?”

  “Yes! Here, I’ll show you.” She bounced on her toes, then raced to a shelf and pulled down a somewhat squashed circlet of wire and beads, trailing loose ends in a scraggly tail. “Not much has been done with illusion, because it’s so tricky to get it right. But I thought if I anchored the spell with wirework and then draped down a veil woven through with silver threads to carry the energy, and seeded more beads into the veil …”

  “That could work.” I peered at the crown; she held it out, and I turned it in my hands. The wirework was nearly as delicate and complex as that in jesses, but with a feverish, haphazard twist. “But if the person moved around, wouldn’t it disrupt the pattern in the veil?”

  “Well, they’d have to stay still. I was more worried about a power source.”

  “You could use volcanic glass,” I suggested.

  Istrella pushed her spectacles up onto her forehead, bunching her wild hair behind them. Her mage mark glittered gold around her pupils. “Oh! I could stagger pieces of obsidian through the veil, to distribute the energy evenly!” She broke into a dizzying smile, and her fingers started working, as if twisting invisible wire.

  “That’s bril
liant! And I’ve done some research that might help with the design for the sending circle in your chandelier, as well. I’ve been reading Muscati, you know.”

  “You have a Muscati?! Oh, can I borrow it?”

  “Of course!”

  Marcello burst out laughing. We both turned to face him. Warmth crept up my neck.

  “I forgot you were there,” Istrella said.

  “I could see that.” He grinned widely enough to split his face. “Carry on, by all means.”

  “Do you want to sit?” Istrella looked hopelessly around the room. Every chair was covered.

  Marcello waved her concern off and settled down cross-legged on the floor. “It’s all right. I’ll get comfortable. I can tell we’ll be here a while.”

  Half an hour later, he interrupted us as we bent together over the vanishing crown, muttering about how best to weave in the volcanic glass. “You know, that would be incredibly useful to the military, even if you couldn’t move around in it. I’d bet I could get full support for that project from the Empire.”

  My gulp of joy had an odd bitter aftertaste. I hadn’t considered military uses. Did it always have to be war? But Istrella grabbed my hands with open glee. “That’s wonderful! We can make it work, Amalia. I’d love to do this with you!”

  My smile widened until my cheeks hurt. “I can think of no one I’d rather collaborate with.”

  By the time I managed to successfully say good-bye to Istrella, a process no less complicated than helping her disentangle the wires of two devices she’d heaped on each other, the sky out her tower windows was bright with noon sunlight. My stomach grumbled for lunch.

  Istrella stood in her doorway as Marcello and I started down the tower stairs, waving. “Thank you for bringing Amalia by, Marcello!”

  “It was fated.” Marcello laughed. “I had to.”

  “Come again any time, Lady Amalia,” Istrella called as the curving spiral of the steps brought us out of sight. “You and my brother make a good couple.”

  I threw an embarrassed glance over my shoulder at Marcello, on the stairs above me, who waved his hands in frantic disavowal. “I didn’t … Amalia, please believe me. I have no idea how she got that impression!”

  I lifted an eyebrow. “That we make a good couple?”

  “No, that we are a couple. I didn’t—I wouldn’t—”

  We were halfway down the stairs, in a patch of shadow too far below Istrella’s landing and too far above the next window to catch much daylight. It was a between space, perfect for secrets, demanding daring to make it through to the light again.

  I stopped and turned. The shadows brought out the fine, clean angles of his face. Something stirred in my chest. “You wouldn’t?”

  One step above me, Marcello swallowed, feelings moving across his face like storm clouds boiling into shape over the open sea.

  “I’m not another one of those useless fortune hunters.” His voice was a dry whisper.

  “I know you’re not.”

  No one was watching. This moment was between the two of us alone: Marcello and Amalia, not the lieutenant and the Cornaro heir. A heavy pressure hung in the air, like an impending storm. Or some divine word of the Graces, balanced on the cusp of speech.

  I could laugh, and turn to head back down the steps, and nothing would come of it. Marcello wouldn’t say anything. He couldn’t, even if the ache in his eyes meant what I thought it might. The single step between us was an impassable ocean for him. If anyone was going to cross it, it would have to be me.

  Graces preserve me. I couldn’t let this chance pass. It might never come again.

  I reached up and pulled him down onto my step. Only our hands touched, but we were close enough I could feel the warmth of him all up and down my body in the chilly stairwell. His green eyes flickered, and his face bent closer to mine. A wild bird fluttered madly behind my rib cage.

  “Lieutenant Verdi?” a voice called from below.

  I jumped down a stair with a squeak, and Marcello straightened. “Yes?”

  The space between us was normal air again.

  “The colonel wants you,” the voice called. “Report just came in from the Tallows.”

  Marcello let out a long breath. “I’m sorry, my lady,” he murmured.

  The sweetness of the twilight turned bitter on my unkissed lips. “It’s fine.”

  “I’ll be right down,” he called. And he gave me a short bow, closing the door of formality between us. “This could be important. You may want to stay at the Mews, to hear how it goes. I’ll find you after.”

  That could mean anything, or nothing. “All right.”

  So close. Curse it. And what did that I’m sorry mean? Perhaps I’d misread him, and it was relief that shuttered his expression now.

  Words gathered on my tongue, full of prickles and edges and a longing to bridge the one-step gap that separated us. But his eyes slid away from mine, and he started down the stairs alone.

  I looked for Zaira, but she was deep in some card game with Terika in the dining hall, Scoundrel curled at her feet. The glare she shot me across the hall made it quite clear she had no use for my company, so I grabbed a slice of tartgrass quiche and nibbled it in a window alcove in an administrative hall from which I could see the colonel’s office. I tried to work at the puzzle of who might have the means and motivation to kidnap the heirs of Ardence, but my thoughts kept reaching back to that moment on the steps, between the shadow and the light.

  I barely had time to finish my quiche and wonder if I should press my ear to the colonel’s door when Marcello emerged, eyes downcast in apparent thought.

  “Is everything all right?” I asked.

  He rubbed the back of his head. “I suppose. Some new information to digest. Will you walk with me?”

  “Of course.”

  I felt a certain fluttering in my stomach as I fell in beside him. As we proceeded down the hall, I cast glances his way, wondering if he would walk a little closer, or take my hand. Anything to show the moment in Istrella’s stairwell had happened, and that things between us had changed.

  But Marcello’s eyes kept pulling away to things we passed in the Mews hallway—an old suit of armor, the door to a playroom for small children, a scrawled posting requesting the return of a missing wormwood jar to the alchemy lab. I wasn’t sure he even knew he was walking next to someone at all, let alone a woman he’d maybe nearly kissed less than an hour ago.

  I’d swear I hadn’t dreamed it. How could he be so maddeningly oblivious?

  “What did Colonel Vasante talk to you about?” I asked.

  “Mmm,” Marcello replied in the direction of his feet.

  I stepped in front of him, startling him into meeting my eyes. “You’re distracted,” I accused. “What’s bothering you?”

  He sighed. “Come with me to the dining hall. Zaira needs to hear it first.”

  We found Zaira sitting with Terika in the dining hall, their heads together over half-finished bowls of pauldronfish bisque. Scoundrel waited at their feet, his eyes on Zaira’s bowl with intense devotion. We wove our way to them through the thinning late-lunch crowd, passing between a table with half a dozen children throwing bread at each other on one side, and a group of uniformed soldiers struggling to ignore them on the other. As we approached, Terika threw back her head and laughed over something Zaira had told her.

  When we got closer and Zaira saw Marcello’s serious face, however, her wicked grin sobered. “Don’t tell me you have more bad news about Ardence.”

  “So you do care what happens there?” I asked, trying not to make it a challenge.

  Zaira shrugged. “I like Domenic. I don’t want his geography rearranged.”

  Terika giggled, elbowing Zaira in the ribs. Zaira’s return smile was strained.

  “It’s not about Ardence,” Marcello said gravely. “It’s about your indenture contract.”

  Zaira sank deeper into her chair. Her fingertips fell to Scoundrel’s back, as if the touch
of his fur gave her strength. He nosed her hand, though he kept his attention on the bowl.

  Marcello eased himself into a seat opposite her. I followed suit, my spine stiff with tension.

  “We did some investigation into Orthys, after your escapade in the Tallows. And into your contract in particular.” Marcello took a deep breath. “It’s fake.”

  Zaira bared her teeth. “That bastard.”

  “Yes.” Marcello’s voice thickened with anger. “Apparently he makes a practice of this. Forging indenture contracts for children without anyone to protect them, all over the Empire so no one notices he has too many. He smuggles his victims off and sells them in Vaskandar. They’re his return cargo, after he unloads his dream poppies.”

  “Maggots take his eyes.” Zaira brought her fists up onto the table. “I should have killed him when I had the chance.”

  A thought struck me, and I leaned forward. “You realize what this means.”

  “That burning’s too good for him?” Zaira snorted. “Don’t worry. I can make it slow.”

  “Your mother didn’t sell you to him.” I made my voice as gentle as I could. “Your family may not have abandoned you at all.”

  Zaira winced as if I’d struck her.

  “We could find them.” I offered. “Find out what really happened.”

  “No.” Zaira’s voice was so low I thought I’d misheard her.

  “I know it’s been a long time, but we could at least try. They could be alive and looking for you somewhere.”

  Terika tightened her arm around Zaira. “She said no! Can’t you see she doesn’t want to talk about it?”

  Zaira shook her off, scowling. “I can fight my own battles.”

  “We may have to find them,” Marcello said. “Falconer regulations state—”

  “Stuff your Falconer regulations.” Zaira half rose, looking ready to go after Marcello. “If you go poking your beak where it isn’t wanted …”

  Scoundrel whined, nudging her leg urgently. Zaira threw up her arms and dropped back in her seat. “All right, all right! Here it is!” She set her bowl on the floor, and the vigorous sound of his lapping drained some of the rage from her face.