The Defiant Heir

by Melissa Caruso

  “So charming.” Terika sighed. “That’s what I like about you.”

  She slipped an arm around Zaira’s shoulders. Zaira gave her an alarmed glance, then relaxed against her. Lienne turned her face to the window to hide a smile.

  The coach should have felt like a rolling target, with four people in it on the Vaskandran assassin’s list, but we’d taken enough precautions that I wasn’t worried. Zaira was back to wearing her artifice-worked corset stays and hairpins, which protected her from musket balls and blades alike; unfortunately, they required her innate magic as fuel for the powerful shield, and none of the rest of us could use such protections. Marcello rode outside the carriage with our escort of a full two dozen soldiers, training a wary eye on every fold in the land, line of trees, or farmhouse. No band of attackers large enough to threaten us could possibly escape his scrutiny, in the unlikely event they could penetrate this far into the Serene Empire at all.

  No, it wasn’t fear that weighed on me as we traveled northwest toward Callamorne. It was the heavier, duller burden of expectations.

  If I couldn’t figure out what to do with Ruven’s circle on Mount Whitecrown—if it was even the volcano enchantment at all—thousands of people could die. If Vaskandar invaded and the doge called Zaira to the border, thousands of people would die. And there was the old guilt I always felt when visiting Callamorne, wound queasily through it all—that an entire nation trusted in me to secure and uphold their place within the Empire, including my own family, and I only visited once a year and rarely thought of them.

  They must have hoped for more when they gave up their prince to marry my mother and swore allegiance to Raverra. And this time, I had to give them more, so they would know the Empire would uphold its half of the bargain my birth had sealed.

  I wished I could just sneak off with my cousins again, and perform no more complicated diplomacy than talking to Roland about Callamornish history to distract him while Bree stole apples from the castle orchard. But I had stepped up to take my place in my mother’s shadow, and there was no stepping down now.

  Istrella rode in the coach with us, tinkering away on some experimental modifications to her brother’s powder horn, which I’d insisted she empty and clean first. The last thing we needed was to make exciting new discoveries about the interaction of artifice and gunpowder while locked in a moving carriage with a fire warlock. I couldn’t help but notice that Terika and Zaira seemed physically closer than they had before their kiss—small touches and glances passed near constantly between them, and no sliver of space divided them on the carriage bench.

  When we stopped at a roadside inn on our fourth and last night before crossing into Callamorne, I took advantage of a moment alone with Zaira at our table in the inn’s crowded, candlelit dining room to lean in and murmur the obvious question.

  “So, are you two finally courting now?”

  Zaira glared at me, then flicked her eyes to the stairway leading up to our rooms on the second floor. Terika and the others hadn’t come down to dinner yet, though we expected them to join us shortly; I only had a few minutes to get in as much teasing as I dared.

  She picked up her cup, realized the server hadn’t filled it yet, scowled into its emptiness, and set it down again. “It’s none of your pox-rotted business, but let’s just say Terika is the only person I’ve met who’s more stubborn than I am. You can tell she grew up on a goat farm—the spiky-headed bastards must have given her lessons.”

  “That’s a yes.” I leaned back in my chair in satisfaction. “And good for Terika. You’re allowed to be happy, you know.”

  “I don’t know what she’s thinking.” Zaira shook her head. “She’s sweet as a summer peach, and I’ve got a fair bucket of blood on my hands. Besides, what future does she think we have together?”

  “Well, if I get my Falcon reform act passed—”

  Zaira snorted.

  “All right,” I sighed, “forget my act. Purely theoretically, if you could have any life you wanted with her, what would it be?”

  “Do I look like some moon-besotted idiot who sits around dreaming about a charming country cottage and a bunch of babies to you?” Zaira flicked her cup with a fingernail.

  “I have no idea. Which is why I asked.” I shrugged. “If I could pick my own fate, I’d like an extensive library, a circle of good companions, and … and someone to share it with.” Marcello’s smile and warm green eyes filled my imagination; by the gleam in Zaira’s eyes, she knew it. “What about you?”

  “That’s a dangerous question.”

  “Dangerous? How so?”

  Zaira’s eyes narrowed. “If you waste time thinking about everything you want and can’t have, it’ll eat you up from the inside, like you swallowed a cup of bloodworms. If you can’t reach out and take it, brooding about how much you want it only makes you wretched.”

  “That’s a rather grim philosophy.”

  “Growing up in the Tallows, you have to focus on staying alive moment to moment. You don’t think about the future, beyond making sure you have one at all.”

  I traced a curving scar on the tabletop, where someone had carved their initial. “I never dreamed much about my future either, to be honest, for the opposite reason. Mine’s already been laid out for me. I can’t choose what I’m going to be or do.” Even in that dream of a well-stocked library and Marcello at my side, I had to vaguely imagine my mother still scheming away in the background, filling her seat on the Council of Nine. Once she retired, any last vestiges of freedom I possessed would vanish into the depths of the Imperial Palace.

  Zaira grunted. “Maybe you’re the one who should run away.”

  A server finally arrived with a wine pitcher to fill our cups; I welcomed the reprieve from needing to find an answer. An old, sullen anger had stirred half awake at Zaira’s words, left over from the last time I’d seriously considered running from my fate: when I opened my mother’s letter that called me home from the University of Ardence, just when I’d finally found a place to be myself and not the Cornaro Heir.

  I raised my glass to drown the bitter memory.

  “Took you long enough,” Zaira grumbled at the cringing server, and reached for her own cup.

  As the wine tilted toward my lips, a spark flared on my hand. A sharp prick of heat pierced my finger, and the wire-bound crystal on a certain ring glowed gold.

  Alchemy. Someone was trying to poison us. Fear lanced through me, jagged and white as lightning.

  I slammed the cup down, splashing red across the table. “Zaira, don’t drink it! It’s poisoned!”

  Zaira froze, her cup halfway to her lips.

  The server lifted her bowed head, her face emerging from curtains of blond hair. Cold, deadly resolve burned in a face I’d seen before: the Vaskandran assassin who’d attacked Istrella.

  I barely had time to recognize her before she drove the knife she’d held hidden under her tray into Zaira’s side.

  I let out a shriek of panic and despair, but the air in front of Zaira rippled as if someone had dropped a stone into a still pond. The assassin’s knife rebounded from Zaira’s rune-scribed corset stays.

  All this during the time it took me to leap to my feet—I was moving too slowly, and the assassin was too fast, and the desperate energy flooding my body made me clumsy. But I lunged at the assassin anyway, the impact jarring my hip and shoulder with bruising force, and I knocked her away from Zaira before she could strike again.

  The assassin immediately recovered her balance, slipping out of my reach. She moved with deadly grace, efficient and lethal as a striking heron. Alarm spiked up from my lungs; I knew my limits, and I wasn’t good enough to stop her.

  Zaira cursed and drew her dagger. The assassin cast her tray aside; it hit the floor with a room-silencing crash, shards of pottery skittering everywhere. All over the tavern, heads turned, voices exclaimed, and chairs scooted back in alarm.

  Hells. The tray had hidden a pistol. The assassin leveled its gleami
ng barrel at Zaira. Time seemed to slow down, all the light in the room focusing on that fateful cylinder of polished wood and metal.

  But then the assassin narrowed her eyes, seemed to think better of chancing Zaira’s shields again, and swung the muzzle around to point at me.

  It stared at me like the cold eye of the Demon of Death. The hammer clicked back.

  “Ex—” I caught the release word halfway out of my mouth, clamping my lips on my own panicked cry. Frightened faces pressed back behind the assassin; a mother thrust a crying child behind her.

  Too many people. I couldn’t do it.

  An earsplitting crack filled the dining room, followed by a sharp-smelling haze of gunsmoke.

  Chapter Ten

  I flinched, but no pain came.

  The assassin stumbled backward, blood blossoming on her side. She discharged her pistol in my general direction, her eyes glazing, and the crowd screamed at the second sharp bang; an oil lamp on the wall behind me shattered. It took me a long instant of frozen terror to realize the second shot had missed, and the first one hadn’t been hers at all.

  Marcello thundered down the stairs, his pistol smoking, Lienne at his heels with her rapier drawn. My heart leaped at the sight of them, even as I pressed back into the table as if I could somehow merge with it, one hand on my flare locket. Grace of Mercy, that had been close.

  “Please clear the room,” Marcello called, his voice full of calm authority. The inn patrons scrambled to oblige, some still swearing or crying. The innkeeper hustled to help them out to the garden, murmuring soothing words and apologies. I had to admire his ability to gently tease order from the chaos.

  The assassin knelt on the floor, one arm clamped to her bleeding side. Her other held a dagger, but the point wove and dipped. Lienne strode over and flipped it out of her hand with the tip of her rapier, then lifted the edge to the assassin’s neck. Marcello reloaded his pistol, scanning the room for any sign of further danger with infinitely reassuring competence.

  Zaira let out a shaky sigh. “I should have seen that coming. Damn it, I’ve gotten soft.”

  “Any questions for this vermin, Lady Amalia?” Lienne asked.

  That’s right. I was in charge here. I didn’t have the luxury of sinking into a chair and downing half a bottle of wine while other people took care of things, no matter how much I wanted to.

  My pulse still sang in my veins, keen and nearly painful. I stepped forward; my knees trembled, but the assassin was too busy coughing up blood on the gleaming wooden floor for me to worry whether she noticed.

  “What is the Lady of Thorns planning?” I demanded. “Why is she murdering Falcons?”

  The assassin’s lips, pale and bloodstained, moved. “Can’t believe I missed,” she whispered. A cough racked her, and more blood hit the floor. She sucked in a wet, ragged breath. “But it doesn’t matter, Amalia Lochaver Cornaro. You’re already rushing toward your own death.”

  “Answer the lady’s questions,” Lienne snapped.

  But the assassin couldn’t have answered if she wanted to. She swayed and collapsed, blood still flowing from her side, her breath gurgling in her throat.

  Marcello swore. “I know her.”

  I nodded. “She was the one who came after Istrella, back at Lady Aurica’s party.”

  “No. I know her from years ago.” Marcello bit his lip and turned away, his shoulders hunching.

  “Should we …” I trailed off. I couldn’t bring myself to look at the assassin; she might have tried to kill me, but her blood was red as any human’s, and her struggles to breathe tore at my sympathies. We all needed air, and we all knew pain.

  “She’s not going to talk, and she’s not going to survive,” Lienne said grimly. “Captain?”

  “Yes,” Marcello said.

  I turned away from Lienne’s quick, brutal mercy.

  While our escort removed the body, I found the innkeeper, apologized with a handful of ducats, and told him to treat the rest of the inn guests to the best wine in his cellar and let me pay for their rooms. The man’s eyes lit with reflected gold—it was probably more than his inn normally earned in a month—and he hurried about taking care of his guests with renewed vigor.

  One more innkeeper who will speak well of the Cornaro family to anyone who passes this road. I wouldn’t have thought of it, last year, but it was all part of my mother’s training. Generosity bred goodwill; generosity and goodwill meant people brought you information; and information was the elixir that powered politics in the Serene Empire.

  And besides, I did feel bad about ruining dinner for everyone.

  I returned to the dining room to find the body gone, Terika examining the poisoned wine cups with Zaira and Lienne, and Marcello slumped by himself at a table in a corner. I headed straight for Marcello, but Terika waved me over before I could get there.

  “There’s Black Malice in this wine,” she said, her tone serious. “You and Zaira would have been dead within the hour if you’d drunk it.”

  It was oddly reassuring to find ourselves attacked with such mundane weapons as guns and poison. I’d far rather that than vivomancy.

  “I’ll have to thank my mother again for this ring.” I ran my thumb over the stone, which was now cool to the touch.

  “Black Malice takes a mage-marked alchemist to create,” Terika said. “I’m not sure Vaskandar has any alchemists strong enough; their mage-marked tend to be vivomancers. So there may be another child out there who the Falcons didn’t find in time, forced to make poisons for someone unscrupulous enough to sell them to Vaskandar.”

  Anger compressed her brows, and determination hardened the round, freckled face I usually saw lit up with laughter. She must be remembering her own childhood, when her father had sold her to an assassin’s guild that had forced her to mix poisons for them—possibly including the Demon’s Tears that still ran in my veins.

  “We’ll find them,” Lienne promised, putting an arm across Terika’s shoulders. “We rescued you, and we’ll rescue this one, as well.”

  Marcello lurched to his feet, fists clenched at his sides. “I know who it is.”

  We all turned to stare at him. “Who the alchemist is?” I asked.

  “Yes. Grace of Mercy protect him.” Marcello ran a hand through his hair, as if he could push memories away. “The boy.”

  Lienne clicked her tongue. “Ah. I heard about that.”

  “What?” I asked.

  Marcello started pacing. “Four years ago, when I was a new Falconer, I stumbled across a mage-marked boy whose family had been hiding him. Emmand, his name was. He was ten years old, an only child of minor gentry; his parents told everyone their son was sickly, and kept him shut up in their house.” He shook his head. “I was off duty, and since he seemed perfectly safe, I saw no reason to rush him straight to the Mews. But when I came back to check on him the next day, his parents were dead, and Emmand was gone.”

  “How do you know this was him?” Terika swished the poisoned wine in Zaira’s cup. “It could have been anyone.”

  “I recognized her.” Marcello jerked his chin toward the bloodstain on the floor. “I took the village militia with me and followed their trail. We caught up to the kidnappers, but there were a dozen of them, and we only had six. That woman was one of them. I’ll never forget her face—she was the first person who ever shot me.” He absently rubbed his thigh.

  Lienne let out a surprised snort. I took a half step toward him, lifting my hand instinctively before I let it drop. “I never knew you’d been shot.”

  “I healed well enough.” Marcello’s voice grew taut and raw, like brittle leather stretched too far. “But I was too hurt to follow. I took a last shot at the kidnappers as they dragged the boy off, but he thought I was shooting at him and started screaming.” He swallowed. “That was the last I heard of him—screaming that I was trying to kill him as they led him away. I never knew if he lived or died.”

  I crossed to him and squeezed his shoulder, my heart
aching in sympathy. “You did everything you could to save him.”

  “Well, if they were capturing them years ago, they’ve moved on to killing now.” Terika’s voice was oddly cheerful as she poured the poisoned wine out the window. “Black Malice is invariably lethal. The Lady of Thorns didn’t intend for you to survive.”

  When we finally headed up to our rooms, I drew Zaira aside on the stairs to murmur an apology.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I should have released you as soon as I saw you were in danger.”

  Zaira’s brow contracted. She glanced at the handful of people who’d timidly reentered the dining room, then up at Terika, who’d preceded us to the landing.

  “No. It was too crowded in here.” She shook her head. “I would have burned that bitch, faster than you can blink. And like as not, half the unlucky bastards standing around her. You did the right thing.”

  “I did?”

  “Don’t let it go to your head.”

  “I want to learn to get this right,” I said. “To release you immediately when you want your balefire, before you even have to ask. Like Jerith and Balos.”

  Zaira’s eyes narrowed. The dim light in the cramped stairwell made them black as obsidian. “When I want it? Or when you think I need it?”

  “When you want it,” I said firmly. “It’s your fire.”

  “You’re not going to sit on your hands and have the vapors for half an hour first, like you used to?”

  “That was different.” Shame heated my cheeks. “I was afraid.”

  Zaira snorted. “You’re still afraid.”

  “Of course I am!” I said defensively. “Anyone in their right mind would be scared of a fire warlock.”

  Zaira’s face closed like a slammed door.

  “Of balefire,” I corrected myself quickly. “I meant your balefire. Not you personally.”

  “I know what you meant,” she said.

  And she turned and followed Terika up the steps.

  The next morning, I couldn’t tell whether Zaira was ignoring me more than usual. My own guilt over my words on the stairs made it hard to meet her eyes; between that and the stiff, cheery awkwardness of my exchanges with Marcello as we prepared to resume our journey, I was ready to hide my nose in a book as soon as I got into the coach.