“I don’t understand,” I said softly. “Why don’t you want to know?”
“Because,” Zaira said through her teeth, “there is no possible happy ending to your little fairy tale.”
“But you could have been stolen from them, or lost, or—”
“Get your head out of your buttocks,” she snapped. “The Tallows is full of parentless brats, picking pockets or begging or eating other people’s trash to survive. None of us are lost princesses of Celantis.” She shook her head as if she couldn’t believe our naiveté. “Do you really think I’d feel better knowing my parents died of plague, or abandoned me at the Temple of Mercy because they couldn’t feed me, or drowned in a storm?”
I felt a gulf between us as wide as the sea. I’d want to know. But family and home were foreign words to Zaira, with different meanings than the ones I knew.
“I’m sorry.” I didn’t know what else to say.
Zaira pushed her chair back with a resounding scrape and rose to her feet. “You don’t know what sorry means.” She said it without rancor, as a statement of fact.
Scoundrel danced around her ankles, hoping for play. Zaira sighed. “All right, all right, boy. Let’s go to the gardens and get you a stick.” The three of us watched her go, Scoundrel capering at her heels.
“You shouldn’t push her,” Terika said quietly.
I met her gaze. She was a pretty, plump girl, with honey-colored curls, freckles, and a mild Callamornish accent. I’d seen Zaira smile more at Terika than at the rest of the world rolled up together, but now her face was serious.
“You’re right,” I sighed. “Zaira doesn’t like being pushed.”
“It’s not just that. Let her past stay dead.”
Hearing those ominous words in Terika’s sweet voice sent cold spider feet running up my spine. “What do you mean?”
Terika cocked her head at me, eyes grave. “All those years she lived in the Tallows, suffering and scraping to stay alive … I don’t know what she went through, but I know it wasn’t good.” She tapped the edge of her empty bowl. “But at any time, she could have come here and immediately had all the food she could eat, a warm, soft bed, and anything else she could dream of. She knew it, but she stayed where she was.”
I’d never thought of that. Marcello shook his head. “Why? That’s what I don’t understand. Why would she choose that life over the Mews?”
Terika’s Falconer waved to her across the hall, beaming like an indulgent aunt. Terika waved back, her jess gleaming on her wrist.
“I’m mostly happy here,” she said, her voice soft and thoughtful. “Though I wish I could go home and see my grandmother more often. It’s a long way to Callamorne, and Lienne, my Falconer, doesn’t travel well. I don’t like to drag her there more than a couple of times a year, even though she says she doesn’t mind. Zaira could be happy here, too. But imagine living all your life knowing you had a fire inside you that could kill thousands of people. Imagine knowing the castle that waited for you, with those soft beds and that warm food, was bait put out for you by people who wanted that fire, to use against their enemies.”
“It’s not—” Marcello began.
“It is,” Terika interrupted him firmly. “I’m sorry, Lieutenant, but it is.”
Marcello’s lips tightened. He bowed his head. I wished I had words to comfort him that wouldn’t have been lies.
“So here she is,” Terika sighed. “A Falcon after all, comfortable and safe at last in the Mews. And all those sacrifices she made all those years—all the times she went to bed hungry or cold or did who knows what else, knowing there was a castle waiting for her—they were for nothing.” She shrugged. “Of course she doesn’t want to dig it all up again.”
I stared at my hands, folded on the table. They were smooth and soft, bearing no calluses of hard work, unscarred save for the old mark of the assassin’s dagger. I supposed if Zaira didn’t want me to know what had unfolded in her life before the day I looped a golden bracelet over her wrist, well, I could afford her that privacy.
Lienne approached, two steaming mugs in hand. Terika gave us a knowing smile. “She tries so hard,” she murmured. Then she rose to her feet, grinning. “Chocolate! Lienne, you’re a wonder.”
“Made like we do in Loreice, with milk and honey,” Lienne said cheerfully. “Sorry, Lady Amalia, Lieutenant, but I only got enough for the two of us.”
“That’s all right.” I stood, feeling as if I’d left some piece of myself on the chair behind me. “I was about to head home anyway.”
Marcello rose as well. “I’ll escort you to your boat.”
This time, it was both of us who walked in distracted silence, not meeting each other’s eyes. The Mews was Marcello’s home, and the Falcons his family; I could only imagine what must be going through his mind after Terika’s words.
As we passed through the gloomy grand hall, with its marble colonnades and dramatic paintings of Falconer history, we met Colonel Vasante coming in. She bore a sheaf of papers and an expression of relentless purpose. When she saw Marcello, she veered over to him, without slowing her brisk stride.
“Verdi!” she called. “We have orders from the doge.”
Marcello stopped, his shoulders tensing. “What kind of orders?”
“Deployment orders. We’re moving Falcons to the Vaskandran border.” The colonel’s lips thinned with distaste. “And to Ardence.”
The colonel gave me an assessing glance when I followed Marcello into the same small side room she’d pulled him into before, but she didn’t stop me—whether because I was my mother’s daughter or because she wanted me to hear the orders too, I couldn’t guess. No ornament graced the room’s white-plastered walls, and its only furniture included a scattering of wooden chairs and a stained oak table. It was the sort of place guards might wait while on reserve gate duty.
Colonel Vasante closed the door, then slapped her papers down on the table. “Nothing drastic, Lieutenant; you can stop bracing like I’m going to punch you. A Falcon or two to each of the major border forts, as a precaution, and a couple more to move into the garrison outside Ardence. The full details are in there.”
Marcello spread the papers out and started skimming over them. I caught Vasante’s eyes. “Why Ardence?”
She snorted. “Why do you think? Duke Astor Bergandon is refusing to see the Serene Envoy. That’s a slap in the face the Empire can’t ignore. If they keep defying imperial authority, the doge wants to end this war before it starts. We don’t have time to humor Ardence’s tantrums when Vaskandar is knocking at our border, my lady.”
I gripped the edge of the table as if the floor might buck me off, and leaned in over the papers next to Marcello. I knew too well which Falcon could end a war most quickly. “Who’s on the list?”
“Not you. I don’t give you orders.” The colonel’s clipped voice severed a line of tension in my back. I sighed with relief. At least things hadn’t gotten so bad the doge was ready to use balefire.
But Marcello’s palm struck the table, startling me with a loud bang.
“Istrella’s on this list.” His voice strained as if it stretched over rough stones.
I glanced at the page, alarmed.
Sure enough, the second name was Istrella Verdi.
Chapter Thirteen
Colonel Vasante barely glanced down at Istrella’s name.
“Yes. Relax, Verdi. You’ll be back here soon. I told him I needed you.” The colonel pulled another set of papers out from under the deployment orders. “The doge wants her to pay a brief visit to Ardence to build a few of these. When she’s done, you can both come home.”
Marcello sighed with relief. But I stared down at the schematics Vasante had revealed, tracing the lines of wire that coiled around metal rings, the connections for a vast power supply, and the clever focal lenses.
“This is meant to enhance a cannon.” My words fell on the table, cold and heavy as lead. “To make it many times more destructive. You want her
to build weapons.”
Marcello’s eyes widened. He rounded on the colonel. “You can’t have her creating tools to kill people. She’s just a child!”
“She’s a soldier.” Vasante’s tone brooked no argument. “And she’s one of maybe a dozen artificers in the Falcons with the necessary skill and power. The others are all either getting sent to the Vaskandran border to make more of them there, too old or infirm to travel, or even younger than your sister. Would you rather I sent her to the Witchwall Mountains?”
Marcello snatched up the list and took a closer look, the paper bending from the force of his grip. “It’s not just my sister. You’re sending Halmur to the border—he’s barely older than Istrella. Combat could break out there at any moment!”
“He’s a powerful vivomancer,” Vasante snapped. “We need a way to counteract the Witch Lords if they take the field.”
Marcello stood stiff as a pike. “I object, Colonel. Sending adult Falcons into potential war is one thing. But we can’t countenance sending children.”
Vasante narrowed her eyes. “This is an order from the doge of Raverra and the Council of Nine.” Her voice could have cut steel. “You don’t have to like it. But you do have to obey it.”
Marcello stood trembling, his fists clenched. The colonel’s face softened, just a little, but her tone didn’t. “You and I don’t get to decide. We get our orders and we follow them. Is that clear?”
Marcello threw the list down on the table. But he said nothing. I caught myself from reaching out to him; anything I did now would make things worse.
Vasante frowned. “I said, is that clear, Lieutenant Verdi?”
“Yes, Colonel.” He grated it out between his teeth.
“Good. Now go make preparations for moving those Falcons. You have three days to get them ready.”
Marcello saluted, moving like rusty clockwork. Then he turned and strode from the room without another word.
I followed him into the great, dusky hall with its dramatic paintings, my bones aching with sympathy. He went straight to a marble column and punched it, then bent over his hand in pain.
“Ow. Damnation, why did I do that?”
“Because you’re upset,” I said gently.
He leaned his forehead against the column and closed his eyes. “I should have stood up to her. I should have said no.”
“You wouldn’t have changed anything.”
“I could at least have tried harder to convince her.” He turned to face me, pain drawing deep lines in his face. “I don’t want Istrella to have to create something that kills people.”
“Then we’ll make sure it doesn’t kill people,” I said. “If the conflict with Ardence is resolved peacefully, she won’t have to build it.”
No spark of hope kindled in his expression. “I don’t have that kind of influence, Amalia. Maybe you do, but I’m just a soldier. If they declare a war, I fight it. I have no power to make peace.”
“Then I’ll make it for you.” The urge to protect him flared up in me, brighter than the luminaries kindling in the hall. “We’ll make it together.”
I reached out to squeeze his shoulder, in a reassuring sort of way, as a friend might. But I accidentally touched his hair, and then somehow my fingers slid up around the back of his neck, tangling in the black waves.
His eyes widened in surprise. “Amalia,” he breathed.
Marcello’s arms went around me, tentatively, as if I might be a creature of sea and fire that could dissolve into wrath or laughter at his touch. He didn’t hold me so much as frame the idea of me between his arms.
“I don’t want you to think—” he began earnestly.
“Then I won’t,” I promised. For now, I didn’t need a future for us, no moment beyond this sliver of dusk, with the luminaries waking on the walls around us like evening stars.
I buried my face in his shoulder and just held him. He was warm and solid and real, his pulse pounding in his throat by my temple, his arms settling more comfortably around me with the inevitability of a spring rain.
It was glorious. I wanted to stand there forever, just like that, and forget about Ardence and Zaira and Vaskandar and weapons of war made by the hands of children. But every second we stayed like this was another second begging for discovery.
“Is this …” Marcello began awkwardly. “Are we …”
I laid a finger on his lips and, with the slow reluctance of the sun rising from the sea, stepped back out of his embrace.
“Don’t say anything,” I whispered. “If you talk about a dream, it isn’t real.”
Laughter echoed down a corridor, and approaching footsteps. It was a full minute before the handful of chattering Falcons and Falconers passed through the hall, but Marcello and I still stood there in silence, a few feet apart, staring at each other.
The next morning found me uncommonly distracted as I sat in the back row of the thousand-seat Assembly Hall in the Imperial Palace, ignoring an intricate and impassioned argument over proposed new restrictions on the Loreician silk trade. The afternoon recess came as a relief from the bright, sharp-edged shards of memory and worry sifting through my mind.
I joined my mother for wine and cheese on a balcony overlooking the busy main courtyard of the Imperial Palace. Members of the Assembly swarmed and bunched on the travertine flagstones below, continuing their agitated discussions or making covert deals, while a thin stream of visitors, petitioners, functionaries, and servants passed in and out through the palace gates, carefully checked by the guards. Massive marble winged horses reared at each corner of the courtyard, and statues of the Nine Graces looked benevolently down from the roof above.
My mother watched the flows of people analytically as she nibbled cheeses and crostini. I didn’t expect her to say much; today was a judgment day for the Council of Nine. Her mind would be full of prisons and executions, deciding the fates of traitors and spies, none of which she was much inclined to talk about with her daughter.
But after about fifteen minutes of silence, her eyes snapped to me. “I have news that may interest you.”
“Oh?” I stopped an olive halfway to my mouth. News she learned on a judgment day seemed unlikely to be of an uplifting nature.
“That smuggler with whom your Falcon had an unfortunate history. Orthys.” La Contessa took a sip of wine. “I’ve had people investigating him.”
“Lieutenant Verdi told me he was trading children to Vaskandar for dream poppies.”
“Not just any children.” My mother’s face went hard as an executioner’s ax. “Ones with magical potential.”
I lowered my olive back to my plate. “So it was no accident he went after Zaira.”
She nodded. “Mostly he’s been targeting those with powers too weak for the mage mark. But our investigations have turned up at least one or two incidents where he got to a mage-marked child before the Falconers did, and sold them to Vaskandar.”
A terrible thought struck me. “Could he have been the one who took the Ardentine children? The nobles’ heirs?”
“It’s not impossible. He did pass through Ardence around the right time. If he was involved, he had best start praying to the Grace of Mercy.” My mother finished her wine with one neat swallow, then rose. “But it will not save him. We take kidnapping of mages very seriously. I’ve started a full-blown search for him. We’ll have him in the palace dungeons for questioning soon.”
It was almost enough to make me feel sympathy for the man. “I’ll tell Zaira when I see her. I’m stopping at the Mews this afternoon.”
La Contessa paused. “Ah, yes, the Mews. One more thing.”
“Yes?”
She leveled a cool, appraising gaze at me. “I hear you are much in the company of Lieutenant Verdi. Is there anything between you two?”
I nearly choked on the wine I’d been sipping. “There’s nothing,” I managed. “We’re friends, that’s all, Mamma. I respect him. Nothing of a … a romantic nature.”
“Good.�
� She sank back into her chair, her voice softening to a terrifying gentleness. “Because there can’t be, Amalia. Ever. You know that, don’t you?”
I knew. I knew from four years of my mother telling me none of the would-be suitors who crowded me at court were good enough for the Cornaro heir. I knew from hearing the measured calculation with which the Council of Nine spoke of cementing political alliances through marriage in the drawing room downstairs. I knew it from the moment I was born to a father who had given up being a prince, the younger son of the queen of Callamorne, to come to Raverra and marry my mother so his country could become part of the Empire without losing face. But it had always been a remote thing, a sheathed dagger to protect me from foolish dandies and poor choices. Now the blade was out and up against my throat, and the edge burned.
I had to nod and say Yes, Mamma, like I always did. That was what came next.
But anger rose up in my chest, a great bubble of frustration at all the rules and duties that circumscribed my days. It pushed different words out of my mouth.
“Grace of Love, if I can’t so much as make a friend without you dropping the ax on any thoughts of courtship, you’d best not be expecting any grandchildren.”
My mother reached across the table as if she might take my hand. Her wedding ring gleamed on her finger: a sapphire for Raverra and a smaller diamond for Callamorne, bound together with delicately wrought gold. “Whom you spend time with, whom you dance with, whom you stand an inch closer to in a public square—all of these things are watched, and noted, and like as not printed in rumor sheets. Even your perceived interest in this man could ruin a political gambit based on the idea you are unattached and eligible. Unless you can tell me what advantage a match would bring our family or the Serene Empire, you can show no undue attention to any person. Do you understand?”
“So I’m not to even think of courting anyone?” I couldn’t keep the bitterness from my voice. “You don’t need to control every tiny thing I do, Mamma. You can’t rule what I feel.”
The Tethered Mage Page 18