“Amalia!” She brightened. “I was just heading back to Aleki. What are you—”
“Interactions of Magic,” I interrupted her. “Is it still here?”
Venasha blinked. “I assume so.”
“Can you check? Quickly?” I all but danced in place. Ruven had said his carriage was on the way; we didn’t have much time.
She gave a sharp nod. “Of course. Wait here.”
“Why,” Zaira asked, biting off each word, “are you haring off after a book? Now?”
“Because if Prince Ruven brings it back to Vaskandar, he might be able to use it to trigger eruptions in all the volcanoes of the Witchwall Mountains, turning the border into a wasteland of ash and fire.”
“Oh.” Zaira’s mouth clicked shut. “Carry on, then.”
Venasha soon hurried back, her face pale. My heart dropped several stories at her expression. “Venasha, please don’t tell me …”
“It would seem Prince Ruven likes erotic poetry.” She shook her head, face grim. “It’s gone.”
Chapter Twenty-Five
I swore.
“Come on.” Zaira spun back toward the exit. “It hasn’t been that long. We can still catch him, and break his smug jaw.”
“Thank you, Venasha.” I turned and started a brisk stride toward the palace gates with Zaira. “He said his carriage was on its way. If he was truly planning on leaving the city, the book could be packed in there, if he took it earlier—and volume one almost certainly is.”
“You distract him, then,” Zaira said. “Keep him away from the coach for as long as you can. I’ll get the book.”
We stepped out into the brilliant sunlight drenching the Plaza of Six Fountains. On the far side of it, a line of coaches waited to receive visitors to the palace. A black carriage, carved in smooth, asymmetric curves, stood among them, like a crow among doves, emblazoned on its side with the crowned tree of Vaskandar.
Prince Ruven was halfway across the plaza, heading for his coach, purpose in his stride and something tucked under his arm.
I didn’t wait to see what Zaira would do. I hurried to intercept him, petticoats rustling. Why did I always run into Ruven when I was laced into some completely impractical gown?
“Prince Ruven!” I called.
He stopped and turned. The smile that spread across his features was taut with malice.
“Lady Amalia,” he greeted me. “Such fortune, to meet you here. I was concerned I might miss my chance to bid you good-bye.”
I’d caught up to him. I realized I had no plan for what to say to keep him distracted, and no idea how much time Zaira would need. “You seem ready enough to leave. Have you been planning this for a while?”
“My departure?” He spread his arms modestly. “I am no self-sacrificing hero, Lady Amalia. I can read the wind well enough to know which way the fire is blowing. I have no desire to be in Ardence when it burns to the ground.”
I stared. His gesture had revealed the object he carried, without any apparent attempt to hide it: Interactions of Magic, Volume Two.
“You stole that book,” I accused.
“This?” He glanced at it with exaggerated surprise, as if seeing it for the first time. “I’d forgotten I was holding it.”
I drew myself up. “That book belongs to the Ducal Library. If you would not demean your royal blood with the shame of thievery, Prince Ruven, prove yourself a gentleman and give it back.”
I held out my hand. He cocked his head, examining me as if I were some curious creature on display in a menagerie. Then he sighed, with exaggerated pathos. “It pains me that you hold me in such low esteem, Lady Amalia. Very well.” To my shock, he held out the book. “If this will repair my standing in your estimation, by all means. Take it.”
I reached for it. My fingers gripped the leather cover, keeping carefully away from his.
And they froze there. I could no more release the book than I could stomp a hole through the plaza flagstones.
Ruven chuckled. “Leather is also skin, my lady. It makes an effective bridge of flesh, does it not?”
The swarming tingle of his magic spread up my hand and past my wrist, numbing my arm to the elbow.
“What,” I asked through my teeth, “do you think this will accomplish?”
“I had hoped we could be allies, Lady Amalia, and perhaps more. But I can see now it is not to be.” He shook his head in apparent regret. “Despite my regard for you, circumstance has made us enemies. And if you are my enemy, why should I not kill you now?”
A line of ants seemed to crawl up every vein in my arm, toward my heart. I still couldn’t pull away from the book.
He respected power; I must not show fear. “Because if you kill me, you start a war.”
Ruven’s smile broadened into pure, brilliant joy. “With this book, we will be ready for a war.”
“It’s the middle of the plaza, in broad daylight. There are a hundred witnesses.”
Ruven shrugged. “None of whom are close enough to stop me, or even see anything amiss. I’m already leaving the Empire. It pleases me if they know I can kill.”
“I could release my fire warlock.” The moment the words left my mouth, I regretted them. He must not wonder where Zaira was.
But he seemed cheerfully unconcerned. “Good! Maybe she’ll burn half the city, and someone will put her down. If Vaskandar cannot have a fire warlock, we certainly don’t want Raverra to have one.”
A heat started from within my arm, as if someone had slid shards of hot metal in through my wrist. I gritted my teeth.
“I can melt your bones, you know, and keep you standing still and quiet the entire time,” Ruven said conversationally. “I can rot you from the inside out, and no one will know we aren’t having a lovely discussion about this book. Or I can simply stop your heart.” He patted my hand where it lay on the book’s cover. “So you see, in the end, for all you bear the great and terrible name of Cornaro, you are after all only one woman. You are no match for me, who bears the mage mark and wields power over everything you are.”
He was done with the conversation. I could hear it in his voice. In another moment, he would kill me.
I should have been terrified. But his words triggered something deep in my mind.
He was wrong. I knew it as surely as I’d known when one of my professors put an incorrect calculation on the wall slate.
“No,” I said. “I am not only one woman.”
Ruven checked whatever fatal word he had been about to utter. He tilted his head in mild curiosity. “Oh?”
I smiled back at him, and it was a killing smile. “I am the Empire.”
I had always wondered what it was that surrounded my mother with such palpable force. What let her sweep into a room full of a hundred people and silence it without saying a word. What made her invulnerable, beyond reach as the Graces themselves, such that her enemies tried to hurt me in desperation because they knew they could not touch her.
Now I felt it rising up in me like lagoon water at high tide. Serenity.
“My footsteps echo with the tread of legions.” I locked his eyes with mine. “My breath is the wind that fills the sails of armadas.”
The prickling heat stopped spreading up my arm. The confident sneer on Ruven’s face faltered.
“The whispers of a thousand spies fill my ears with all your petty plans. And my eyes bear the mage mark of hundreds of Falcons.” I stepped toward him. “You stand within my dominion. Even if you kill me, it doesn’t matter. You can’t outrun my courier lamps. Scores of my miles stand between you and the border, and dozens of my fortresses. I am the Empire, and I will destroy you.”
Ruven took half a step back. Then he checked himself. For a long moment, he was silent, watching, assessing.
Then he laughed. “Oh, very well.”
He released the book. Its full weight dropped into my hand; I barely caught it. My arm was my own again.
“I’ve learned enough from that thing.” He waved
dismissively at the book. “I don’t need it anymore. And I suppose you’re interesting enough to live a while longer.”
He turned toward his carriage. “Look to your borders, O Lady of the Empire,” he called back over his shoulder. “You may soon find your legions and armadas and Falcons are not enough.”
I stared after him. The sense of power that had filled me drained out again, leaving me empty and shaken. I wondered if this was how Zaira felt, when the balefire left her.
Zaira. For all I knew, she was still in the coach. I started toward it, heart leaping halfway up my throat.
But Prince Ruven’s footman had already handed him in. The door with its Vaskandran crest clunked shut. The driver flicked the reins, and the horses began to move.
There was no sign of Zaira as the coach drove away.
I crossed to where it had been, staring stupidly at the empty street. Another coach pulled up to fill the space, letting off a young courtier with her hair piled high in the Loreician style, worked with fruit and flowers.
“Over here,” Zaira called.
I turned and saw her sitting on the rim of one of the six fountains. The Grace of Bounty danced with naked children in bronze behind her, water pouring from jars they carried. The skirts of Zaira’s court dress spread around her. She looked ready for a picnic, not a theft.
I approached, with some anxiety. The hands she braced on the rim of the fountain at her sides were empty.
“Did you get the book?” I asked her.
Zaira shrugged. “Well, I can’t read. So I don’t know.”
Impatience struggled in my breast like a kite trying to break free of its string. I sighed. “Did you get any book?”
“Not any book, no.” Zaira grinned, and pulled aside her skirts, displaying a corner of the leather-bound chest they covered. “To be safe, I grabbed all of them.”
I couldn’t stop myself. I grabbed her bony shoulders in a quick hug. “You’re brilliant.”
“Ugh. What are you, a dog? Get off me.” But she was smiling as she pushed me away. “And I know I’m brilliant. Took you long enough to realize it.”
Back at Ignazio’s town house, we opened the trunk. I lifted out the books one by one onto the dining room table. Marcello, who had joined us on his way back to the garrison after meeting with Lady Terringer, sorted them by apparent owner. Some had library marks on them, or bookplates from a private collection; others might have been purchased honestly. But they all had one thing in common.
“Battle Magic of Ancient Osta … Advancements in Naval Artifice …and here’s Domenic’s book.” I set Interactions of Magic, Volume One aside from the others, to return to him. “These are all books containing war magic. Recipes for death and destruction.”
Zaira whistled. “Good thing I grabbed them all, then, isn’t it?”
Marcello turned a book over, peering at the title. “Castles, Fortifications, and Defensive Wards. Some of these might give him ideas for how to overcome the Empire’s protections.”
“So it’s not just the volcano.” Zaira poked a book as if expecting it to bite her. “Your Vaskandran friend went on a literary shopping spree to study up so he could make war on an Empire full of Falcons.”
“Some of this knowledge is dangerous.” Marcello picked up a copy of Death Magic: Lethal Alchemy and Mortal Artifice. “How much of this does he carry in his memory? Should we …” He swallowed. “Can we in good conscience let him take that memory across the border?”
“You mean assassinate him,” I said flatly.
“I volunteer.” Zaira raised her hand. “If there was ever a face I wanted to light on fire, it’s his.”
It was probably just as well I hadn’t told her he’d as much as admitted to hiring Orthys. “It’s not our job to assassinate people. We can report what happened to the doge and the Council, and if they want to have him killed before he reaches the border, they’ll do it.”
Marcello sighed and sank into a dining room chair. “I can’t see him settling down and causing us no more trouble. Much as I personally dislike the idea, I think the colonel would say this is our chance to make sure he isn’t a problem in the future.”
“I’m not sure my mother would agree.” I eyed the pile of dangerous books. “I don’t doubt we’ll hear more from Ruven. But killing him has consequences, too. His father wouldn’t be pleased. And Ruven is at least a known quantity. I understand him now, I think. If he dies, we have no idea who or what takes his place.”
“Nothing good.” Marcello rubbed his temples. “And Graces forbid the attempt fails, and he escapes, with that mind full of poisonous snakes fixed on vengeance.”
“So you’re going to let him go.” Zaira slouched into a chair, exhausted disgust in the lines of her limbs.
“Of course we are. We’re not murderers,” I said. “Whether the Council of Nine lets him go is another matter.”
“They’re definitely a bunch of murderers.” Zaira brightened. “Maybe they’ll put his head on a pike, as a warning to others. Then I could still set his face on fire.”
“You don’t like him much, do you?”
“Ugh, no.” She shuddered. “Besides, he was a bastard to Aleki.”
“I feel better with him out of the picture, at least.” Marcello started stacking the books neatly. “No more Vaskandran interference. Just home-grown Ardentine treachery.”
“Oh, I’m sure he’s still got plenty of fingers in the Ardentine pie.” I dropped into the chair next to Marcello. “A shame you didn’t find the jess in his coach, Zaira.”
“It wasn’t there. I looked.”
“If he didn’t take it, we need to find out who did, and quickly. But we don’t have much in the way of leads left. Except …” I straightened, remembering. “Lady Savony gave me a list of people who might have information. I still haven’t talked to all of them.”
I fished the folded paper out of my dagger sheath and smoothed it out on the table. Her list of names in elegant, loopy handwriting stared up at me.
There was something familiar about that writing. The curl of the L’s, the way she dotted her I’s with a slash …“Do you still have that letter, Marcello? The one from the Owl?”
Marcello blinked. “I think it might still be in my coat.” He rummaged in his pocket for a moment, then pulled it out. “Sorry, it got a bit crumpled.”
I spread it out on the table next to Savony’s list of names. The similarity was unmistakable.
“Hells,” I said. “This is Savony’s handwriting.”
Chapter Twenty-Six
Of course. Lady Savony had the access to the duke, the resources, and the knowledge of Ardence necessary to have executed this scheme. She had the organizational skills, the intelligence, the purpose, and the drive to be behind it. I’d even seen her talking to Baron Leodra, back at the Ardentine Embassy in Raverra. How she thought this situation would end well for Ardence, I couldn’t imagine—but that just meant there was more to her plan than we knew.
This plot isn’t what you think it is, Leodra had said.
Marcello leaned over the letter. “Grace of Mercy. Are you sure?”
“I can’t be positive.” I scanned the wrinkled pages. “But it certainly looks that way.”
Zaira put her feet up on another chair and lounged with her hands behind her head. “Then tell the duke his loyal bitch is a traitor.”
“Would he believe you?” Marcello asked, frowning.
“Probably not,” I admitted. “Even if we show him the letter, whom will he trust: the woman who’s been his voice and hands all these years or the enemies who want to burn his city? We could have a signed confession from her, and he’d still probably listen to her over us.”
“We can’t just ignore this.” Marcello started to pace.
“Maybe if we could connect her to the missing children.” I worried at a rough spot on my armrest. “Finding them is still the key, both to rescue them and to convince the Ardentine court.”
Zaira shrugged. “So
follow her.”
“Follow Lady Savony?”
“No, the kitchen maid.” Zaira rolled her eyes. “Of course I meant the gray harpy. She knows you’re getting close, right? But you didn’t give away you knew it was her.”
“Only because I didn’t realize it at the time.”
“Yes, because you’re so hopeless at subterfuge you have to take lessons from an illiterate fire warlock. But the point is, when someone’s worried about getting caught, the first thing they do is check all their loose ends.” She walked her fingers on her palm in a parody of frantic running about. “As soon as the duke lets her out of the palace, you can bet your ruddy life she’ll scurry around meeting with all her people, cracking the whip at our funerary friends from last night, and checking on the little lost brats. Buttoning everything down tight.”
Marcello rubbed his chin. “That’s not a bad idea. I’ll get some soldiers to—”
“No,” Zaira interrupted. “Good Graces, not more of your pathetically obvious soldiers. They’d get caught, for sure. I’ll do it.”
“You can’t go out in the city alone.”
“I’ll bring her.” Zaira jerked a thumb at me. “If I have to. But no more. If we start a parade, she’ll notice.”
Marcello shook his head. “That would put the Lady Amalia in danger.”
I straightened. “Lieutenant Verdi, you have many admirable qualities, but your overprotectiveness is not one of them.”
He blinked as if I’d slapped him. “But there are kidnappers after you.”
“And Zaira has proven herself capable of dealing with them.” I wished I could say the same about myself. My cheeks burned, but I pressed on. “I’m not going to stay cooped up in this town house like … like …”
“Like a bird in a mews?” Zaira’s eyes gleamed with a hard light.
“Well, yes. And more to the point, Zaira is the only one with the skills to do this, and if she goes, I have to go with her.”
“I don’t like it.” Marcello’s shoulders drooped. “But you’re right. It has to be done.”
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