“Doesn’t it bother you,” Zaira asked abruptly, “making something like that?”
Istrella shrugged. “I grew up wearing one. It makes people feel safer around me, and Marcello leaves me released nearly always anyway. I can see why it would be more annoying for a warlock, though, having your powers sealed all the time. Especially since I hear you don’t want to be a Falcon.”
“Do you want to be a Falcon?” I asked.
Istrella’s eyes crinkled into a smile, the mage mark shining gold around her pupils. “Oh, yes! I get to putter around with artifice projects all day, I have all the books I want, and I have friends who understand me and aren’t afraid of me. It’s lovely.” She started picking through blood-red beads in a tray in her lap. The coach hit a bump, and she clucked her tongue disapprovingly.
Zaira’s brows clumped in frustration. “But you can’t leave the Mews without your brother, and he’s gone half the time—off bringing in new Falcons, or at meetings, or arresting some poor crazy bastard with a touch of artifice who’s carving explosive seals on all the village doors to keep the demons out. How can that not make you angry?”
“I do get angry at Marcello sometimes, when he’s being an ass. He’s my brother, after all.” The twinkle in Istrella’s eyes dissipated to a more contemplative shine. “But back when the colonel used to make us spend half the year with my family, he looked out for me. When Father found one of my devices and tried to ruin it, like he always did, Marcello would tell him that was property of the Empire, and destroying it was a crime. If our older brother raised his hand to me when Marcello wasn’t looking, I could hold up my jess to remind him I was a Falcon now, and he’d have to leave me alone.” She turned her wrist, making the red beads sparkle. “But Halmur tells me it’s unnerving sometimes when he leaves the Mews, and they have to seal his vivomancer powers, and he can’t sense the life around him. And I know you don’t want to be in the Mews at all, except when you’re with Terika. So I suppose it’s different for everybody.”
Zaira jumped a bit at Terika’s name. Then she settled back onto her bench with a sigh. “You’re hopeless.” She turned deliberately to Ignazio. “Where was I? Oh, right, so the shrinekeeper arrives at the beach, still without trousers, and realizes there’s no bridge to Raverra, and takes it into his head he wants to swim there …”
Istrella flipped her bicolored glasses down and picked up a bead. “And now the hard part. Have you ever seen someone try to thread a double helix in a moving carriage, Amalia?”
“I can’t say that I have.” I watched Istrella’s nimble fingers. It was a relief to focus on the familiar intricacies of artifice. We chatted about the techniques she was using, our heads bowed together over her practice jess; occasionally secrecy compelled Istrella to remain apologetically mute on the theory behind some cunning twist of the wire, or why she positioned the beads where she did. Zaira cast glances our way now and then, an odd, wistful expression sliding over her face.
But as I watched Istrella work the golden wire, I remembered why the doge was sending her to Ardence. Those busy fingers could unleash a destructive force nearly as great as Zaira’s balefire. And we had one last chance to keep that force from being turned on a city full of innocents.
I couldn’t sleep that night. My inn room was comfortable enough; they’d given me their finest feather bed, with lavender-scented pillows and tall posts carved with twining vines. But I lay awake staring at a crack in the ceiling until it became as familiar as the curve of the Imperial Canal. My thoughts traced the same path over and over, like the fissure I stared at: I had to find a way to keep Ardence from burning.
With Duke Astor refusing to receive the Serene Envoy, I didn’t have much faith she could persuade him of Raverra’s innocence—no matter that her advice was supposed to be just short of imperial command. To have a chance of thwarting our unseen enemy, we needed to track down the missing children. And unless the Empire managed to capture and interrogate Baron Leodra, our best avenue of information might well be Domenic’s connections to the Shadow Gentry—if I could persuade them to talk to me. And if Domenic’s brother wasn’t one of the guilty parties himself.
I rose, leaving the coverlet in a tangle, and shrugged on a jacket over my nightgown. If I stared at that ceiling any longer, I’d go mad. I needed sky above me.
I made my way down timeworn wooden stairs, through the deep, living silence of a house muffled in sleep. I wandered out through the inn’s weedy courtyard and crossed the kitchen garden, under the bright, uncaring stars, surrounded by the scent of rosemary and basil. A chill breeze bent the grasses in a moon-soaked field beyond the low garden wall.
I sat on the wall, staring out at a distant line of cypress trees, and tried to let the diamond-edged starlight into my mind to cleanse it of troubles.
The cold, hard muzzle of a flintlock pistol pressed into my back.
“Not a sound, or I shoot,” Baron Leodra whispered.
Chapter Seventeen
Every muscle in my body went rigid. My hands flicked toward my dagger, then my flare locket, but I’d left both on my bedside table in the inn.
“Don’t move.” Leodra stepped up to stand beside me, where I could see him. The flintlock muzzle hovered a few inches from my chest now. His once-pristine white hair had straw in it, as if he’d been sleeping in a stable, and rough stubble marred his cheeks.
“Listen,” he said with hoarse urgency. “Just listen.”
I held myself still as the wall I sat on, save for the rapid stutter of my pulse. “I’m listening.”
“I’m not a traitor.” The pistol nudged my side, trembling. “I’m loyal to the Empire.”
I tried to convey the essence of respectful attention while my mind ran through various moves Ciardha had showed me for disarming an attacker of their gun. But I wasn’t Ciardha, and I had little confidence I could manage any of them without getting shot.
A spasm of anger crossed Leodra’s face. “Graces curse it, I should just kill you. It would serve Lissandra right. But there are things the doge must know. For Raverra’s sake.”
I caught his wandering gaze. “Did you kidnap the Ardentine heirs?”
“No!” Leodra grimaced in apparent anguish. “I didn’t know they were going to do that. It was supposed to be a ruse to spark the Empire into action, not a real kidnapping. They pulled me into their scheme and played me for a fool, tricking me into putting my seal to those writs and letters without understanding how they’d be used. How they’d be altered.”
“Who?” My fingers curled against the stone wall, scraping on mortar. “Whom did you give the seal to?”
Leodra’s wild eyes narrowed into craftiness. “I want a guarantee of safety first.”
“That’s a strange thing to ask, when you’re pointing a pistol at me.”
“I know your mother too well.” His lips twisted over bared teeth. “She’ll have my head off by dawn if she catches me, unless I have something she needs. And she needs this. Oh, she needs this.”
The pistol shook so badly now I feared he’d pull the trigger by mistake. “I can’t make promises for my mother,” I said. “But if you give me the information, if you tell me who’s plotting against Ardence and the Empire, I’ll do everything I can to save you.”
“I’m not telling you everything. Not now. You can’t win the game without cards in your hand.” He passed a hand over his brow. “But I’ll tell you enough to show I’m no traitor. As soon as I realized what they were doing, I refused to help them anymore. I’m here, warning you, because I’m loyal to Raverra. You tell your mother and the doge that.”
“Yes.” I wasn’t going to argue with him while he was talking rather than shooting. “Tell me.”
“This plot isn’t what you think it is.” He licked his lips. “If you go to Ardence, you’re in danger, Amalia Cornaro.”
My skin went tight and cold across my scalp. “Me?”
“Yes.” He took a deep breath, his pistol listing off center. “The
y plan to—”
An earsplitting bang echoed through the night, and Leodra staggered. His hand flew to his neck, trying to stop the sudden dark flow of blood. His mouth worked in silence.
I scrambled to my feet, unable to suppress a shriek. Before the crystal shards of fear stabbing through me could spin me toward the sound of the gunshot, Leodra collapsed across the wall.
“Amalia!” It was Marcello, sprinting across the courtyard in his nightshirt, smoking pistol still in hand. “Are you all right?”
Lights moved and flickered in the windows of the inn. A dog barked madly, and voices called out in alarm.
“For love of the Graces, Marcello, he was about to tell me something important!” All my nerves jangled like cracked bells. Blood soaked Leodra’s neck and shoulder. He moved feebly, still sprawled facedown across the wall, but there was no sense or hope in it.
I tore my jacket off and pressed it to his neck, trying to staunch the blood, but it was no good. Grace of Mercy, he was dying in front of me.
Marcello stared, pale and wide-eyed. “He was pointing a pistol at you. I thought he was going to kill you.”
Leodra’s drowning eyes swallowed all my attention as I held my sodden jacket against his awful wound. “Tell me who took the children,” I pleaded.
His blood soaked my hands, cooling rapidly in the night air. He reached a trembling hand up toward me, trying to pull a gasp through his shattered throat. I squeezed his fingers. “Tell me how to find them!”
But the desperate, terrified spark dulled in his eyes. His feeble, frantic movements went still.
I bowed my head. His life’s blood stained my trembling arms.
“What …” Marcello swallowed. “Who was he?”
A shudder ran through me, and I forced myself to turn away. “Baron Leodra. He was dead already, Marcello. The Demon of Death just hadn’t caught up to him yet.”
The half-dozen soldiers escorting us flooded the courtyard, weapons at the ready. Marcello shook himself like a wet dog and took command, ordering some to search the inn grounds to make sure Leodra hadn’t had accomplices. One offered me a handkerchief, with a murmured apology that spoke to its stunning inadequacy. Others removed Leodra’s body.
I didn’t stay to watch. I walked out through the garden gate alone and into the soft, silvery field with its border of sentinel cypress trees and the rolling hills beyond. I wiped at my arms and hands with the handkerchief until not a speck of white remained on it, and then I cast it aside on the ground.
Tears pressed at the back of my eyes, but I refused to shed them. I couldn’t feel sorry for Leodra, not after he’d tried to have me killed. But the man had been a frequent guest in our drawing room. Watching him die had shaken me to the core.
In time, the noise died down. The soldiers went back to bed, the dog stopped barking, and quiet settled over the night. The song of crickets rose to the distant moon. I shivered in the deepening cold, but I couldn’t go back to bed. Leodra’s blood still drenched my eyes, and the words he hadn’t said hung silent between the stars.
Footsteps sounded in the grass behind me. I turned, and there was Marcello, weariness in the line of his shoulders. A glimpse of his chest showed through the plunging neckline of his nightshirt. He’d slung his belt over his shoulder, so his rapier and flintlock hung close at hand.
“Amalia. Are you …” He shook his head. Neither of us was all right, and he knew it. “Do you want to come inside?”
“He was trying to warn me of something.” I rubbed my freezing arms. It was strange to feel my own living flesh through my nightgown and know Leodra had lost this vital animation, when he’d been alive and frightened an hour ago. “He wanted to tell us who kidnapped the children in return for mercy. Now he can’t, and that knowledge is gone.”
I didn’t mean it as an accusation. But Marcello blanched. “Hells. I didn’t know.”
“You couldn’t have.”
He sank down into a crouch, cradling his face in his hands. “And I killed him. Graces forgive me.”
I knelt on the cool grass, trying to catch his eyes, alarm bubbling up in my stomach. “He wasn’t an innocent man, Marcello. I’m only alive because his attempt to murder me failed. You couldn’t have known he wasn’t about to shoot me.”
“I’ve made a horrible mistake.” He lifted his eyes to mine, and the anguish there was bottomless. “And I can’t undo it. I can’t put life back into him.”
It was all true. I couldn’t belittle him by denying it. “I know.”
He closed his eyes and bowed his head, dragging in an uneven breath that bordered on a sob.
I had no words to comfort him. I had no comfort within me to offer. So I leaned slightly toward him until our foreheads barely touched. It was a solid and reassuring warmth: he was alive, too.
“I know,” I whispered again.
Our coach bumped and rumbled through the long, golden countryside. The fields lifted up into rolling hills, with tall, dark cypress trees walking in lines like pilgrims. In the morning, mist lay in the folded valleys between the hills, anointing the land with grace and mystery.
Leodra’s undelivered warning sunk hooked claws into my thoughts, refusing to let go. Every mile passing beneath our wheels brought us closer to Ardence, where an unknown enemy waited. I had no loose end with which to start unraveling this web, and it was far from reassuring that I couldn’t see the spider.
I tried to distract myself by chatting with Istrella about artifice and about places she might like to visit in Ardence. I caught Zaira staring at us once or twice, though she quickly turned her gaze out the window. Once, I saw her smoothing the creases from a charcoal self-portrait of a smiling Terika, which her fellow Falcon must have given her before she left the Mews.
Marcello kept pace with the coach on his mare, coordinating our handful of guards, on higher alert since last night. Occasionally our eyes met through the window glass, and even across half the dusty road I could read the pain and worry in his face.
When we stopped for lunch at a roadside hostelry, I found myself momentarily alone at the table with Marcello as Zaira, Ignazio, and Istrella examined the warding charms the proprietor, a minor artificer, was selling at the bar. I gathered my courage to tell him something I should have days ago.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
His eyes flicked up from the deep-scarred wood of the tabletop. “For what?”
I shrugged uncomfortably. “For what I said about you during the Council session.”
An odd, sad smile passed across his face. “I can’t hold the truth against you. A man like me would be a fool to think he could court the Cornaro heir.”
Words backed up in my throat like flotsam. I had so much I wanted to ask, to map out the territory of might-have-been that stretched between us.
Istrella plopped down next to him, spilling a handful of rune-engraved wooden pendants on the table. “Look! Aren’t these adorable?”
Marcello’s brows lifted. “Only you would think artifice could be adorable, Istrella.”
“Is that a challenge?” She lifted up a pendant whose crude circle scribed a ward against mosquitoes, squinting at it contemplatively. “I could build a wirework kitten around this. Then would it be adorable?”
“Would this wirework kitten, ah, do anything?” Marcello looked worried. “Remember what happened that time when you thought you were just playing with your artifice tools …”
“No one was permanently damaged.” Istrella scooped the charms into her velvet bag. “Besides, I have to amuse myself somehow, since you still haven’t told me about this secret project I’m supposed to make in Ardence.”
Marcello flinched. I gave him my best Really, Marcello? look.
He glanced around at the busy room. “Not here. We’ll arrive at the garrison tomorrow evening; I’ll tell you then, when we have privacy.”
Tomorrow. My gut tightened. I’d longed to return to Ardence since my mother called me back to Raverra from my studies at the u
niversity, but now its approach brought me nothing but dread.
On our third day of travel, we made our way safely down out of the hills toward a green valley, which the River Arden crossed in a gleaming bracelet. Ardence adorned the river like a dowager’s jewel, its red roofs bright in the sun. Greater hills rose on the far side, climbing purple into the distance, until they eventually reared up into the Witchwall Mountains, visible as a faint smear of gray clouds on the far horizon.
When you cut to the heart of it, we were coming to threaten this place with destruction. To crack the red-tile roofs with the blue heat of balefire, and to scorch the verdant valley. When I made out the River Palace in the distance, its gilded domes looming over the city like a hen gathering her chicks around her, a vision flashed before me of it charred and broken, lying empty to the sky, a picked-over carcass. I shivered.
Rather than arriving in Ardence at dusk, we spent our final night of the journey at the imperial garrison, which crowned the last hill looming over Ardence. Garrison was a modest term for the sprawling castle, built to harbor thousands of troops. Its massive walls still bore scars from the endless petty wars that had raged between the city-states of central Eruvia before Raverra united them all under the banner of the Serene Empire. Since Ardence had been a peaceful part of the Empire for two hundred years, the soldiers were stationed there to protect Ardence, rather than menace it.
But that could change overnight. With Istrella’s modifications, the fortress’s cannons would easily be able to reach the city.
I tried not to think about that as I settled into my room and washed the dust of the road off in an artifice-warmed bath. But once I chased images of smoking holes in the city walls from my mind, Leodra’s penultimate words filled the gap: This plot isn’t what you think.
Trying to sleep would be pointless now. I sought out Istrella and the welcome distraction of her endless tinkering, and found Marcello visiting her.
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