The Unbound Empire

by Melissa Caruso

My mother lifted an eyebrow and waited. Which meant she felt that I was fully capable of arriving at an answer on my own.

  It had been rather a long day, and I was no longer feeling particularly clever. But I rubbed my temples and did my best. “People lie when they have something to hide, or when they want to trick someone else into unwise action.”

  “And what might our dear Lord Caulin have to hide?” La Contessa asked, her eyes gleaming sharply in the fading light of the luminaries.

  “Half a Hell full of secrets.” I waved a hand as if to swat away a buzzing cloud of them. “He’s got to wade through them to get out his door in the morning. But I can’t think why he’d want to cover up Ruven’s plans—unless he’s somehow complicit in them.”

  “If he is, that’s a very grave matter indeed. I don’t consider it likely, but neither would I rule it out—unlikely things happen every day. And your second option? Who would he want to trick into unwise action?”

  I stared into the evening darkness gathered in my mother’s eyes. She waited, sure and cynical as death itself.

  “Me,” I whispered. “Because my Falcon reform act is gaining ground.”

  La Contessa nodded slowly. “Step carefully, Amalia. This could be a trap set just for you.”

  “So your uncle’s dead.” Zaira took a long swallow from the water flask set out for us, then scowled at it as if annoyed it wasn’t wine. “Good riddance to the bastard.”

  I’d stolen a moment during a break in our morning training session with Jerith and Balos at the Mews to tell her my concerns about Caulin, and about Ignazio’s warning and death, to which she’d reacted with this succinct eulogy.

  I couldn’t quite bring myself to speak in Ignazio’s defense. “Yes, well, regardless of what you think of him, you may want to take his warning to heart. You’re likely to be one of Ruven’s targets. Please be careful.”

  “Oh, you know me. I’m a model of caution and restraint.” She tossed the metal flask onto the heap of our winter coats, discarded on a bench against the training yard wall for being too warm to wear in proximity to balefire. The winter air cut through my light brocade jacket now that we were resting, and I hugged my arms against the chill. “As for Lord Dubious, your mamma’s right to give him the dirty eye. That story that Ruven is hiring alchemists from the Tallows is a pile of rat dung.”

  “I don’t doubt it, but what makes you think so?” I asked. “You know the Tallows better than any of us.” Zaira had grown up in the Serene City’s poorest district, which was populated mostly by honest dockworkers and laborers; but those criminals who stayed beneath the Council’s notice—or made themselves useful enough to earn a blind eye—had their enclaves there as well.

  “For one thing, you can’t make Ruven’s potion without the mage mark, so no two-penny Tallows alchemist could mix it up.” Zaira wiped her mouth on her sleeve. “For another, there aren’t that many mages in the Tallows—even a weak alchemist would do well enough selling pimple cream and impotence cures to gullible rich folk that they could afford to live somewhere nicer. I know the handful who do gray-market jobs out of the Tallows, and none of them would take a job from Vaskandar.”

  I tugged on a loose lock of hair, thinking. “Then why did Caulin say that? Is he trying to trick us, or did someone trick him?”

  Zaira shrugged. “I dunno, but if that worm is trying to pin something on Tallows mages, I’ll be damned if I let him get away with it. Come with me later, and I’ll ask around and see if any of my old contacts know anything.”

  Balos strode over to us across the training yard, from where he’d been talking to Jerith in the warded instructor’s corner. The thin sunlight picked fleeting gleams from the gold trim on his Falconer’s uniform, and his deep brown eyes considered us thoughtfully.

  “Are you ready to continue?” he asked.

  “If you’re still mad enough to want to do this in the middle of the Mews, sure,” Zaira said. Her tone was light, but muscles in her face tightened. No one spoke of the reason Jerith and Balos had made the time to prioritize training us during their brief stay in the Mews between border deployments, or of how soon Zaira and I might have to use what we were learning. But it was hard to forget.

  “We have faith in your control,” Balos said.

  “Oh, I don’t know, I think loosing balefire inside a populated castle is mad by definition.” Jerith strolled over to us, grinning. “But we’re only making tiny sparks today. What could possibly go wrong?”

  Zaira groaned. “Why did you have to go and say that?”

  “What fun is a boring, predictable life?” The mage mark gleamed silver in Jerith’s eyes. “Now give us a tame little fire, the size of your thumb, and let’s see how long you can keep it that way.”

  “Exsolvo,” I muttered. Even after months of practice, my heart still kicked up when I said it, as if a lion had wandered into the courtyard.

  Zaira held out a hand, palm up. A slim, pale flame licked from her fingertips.

  It stretched no taller than a candle flame, but its presence was far less gentle. It tugged and twisted in the air as if it yearned to be free, and its eerie blue light cut at my eyes. Zaira stared at it like an old enemy with whom she’d forged an uneasy truce.

  “You’re fighting it,” Jerith observed, as the slip of fire writhed on Zaira’s fingers in thwarted hunger.

  “Would you rather I let it go?” Zaira snapped. “The Mews might look nicer with a gaping blackened hole in the middle of it.”

  Zaira’s eyes stayed on the wisp of balefire, and despite its hungry snapping at the air, it still hadn’t spread or grown. A surge of pride in what she’d accomplished warmed me; with balefire, it was easier to burn down a building than to light a candle. But Jerith’s glittering eyes hadn’t left her face.

  “You don’t need to be afraid of it,” he said softly.

  The flame in Zaira’s hand jumped to twice its previous height. “I’m not afraid.”

  “Mmm. I can see that.” Jerith lifted a pale brow. “No bigger than your thumb, remember.”

  “You’re distracting me on purpose, you rat,” Zaira complained. But she gritted her teeth, and the flame shrank again. Sweat stood out on her temples, despite the chill air.

  “So long as you’re afraid, you’ll never have true control,” Jerith said.

  “I’m controlling it just fine. See?” She thrust her hand toward him, suddenly, and grinned as Jerith jumped back. I sucked in a breath, but the slim blue flame clung low and tight to her fingertips.

  Jerith’s eyes narrowed. “Balos.”

  “I don’t think this is a good idea,” Balos warned, his deep voice dubious.

  “Balos.”

  “All right.” Balos shook his head. “Exsolvo.”

  I glanced at Balos in alarm. He held my gaze and mouthed, Be ready.

  That was far from reassuring.

  Zaira eyed Jerith warily. The balefire still licked up from her fingertips, cruel and hungry, endlessly testing the chain of Zaira’s will.

  Jerith gave her a broad, sharp-edged smile. “Your control is a lot better, I’ll give you that. But you’re not fooling anyone, Zaira. Not even yourself.”

  Zaira’s hair stirred in a sudden breeze that teased her curly locks forward into her face and tugged her skirts against the back of her legs. Where I stood a few feet away, I could barely feel it. But the bitter blue flame in her hand bent toward Jerith, its top streaming eagerly in the wind.

  “What are you doing?” Zaira stepped away from him, pushing her hair out of her eyes with her free hand. The wind at her back grew stronger, making a low hissing moan. Jerith’s own spiky blond hair bent before it. “Are you an idiot?”

  “Sometimes,” Balos murmured.

  “If you’re not afraid, control it.” Jerith’s voice went hard and flat as a knife blade. He stood unflinchingly as his wind stretched Zaira’s flame toward him, streaming with eager fluttering fingers that scrabbled at the air, seeking life to consume.

  “Y
ou’re mad as a sack of ferrets!”

  “No bigger than your thumb, Zaira,” Jerith said calmly.

  Her flames blew a banner long as my forearm, reaching mere inches from Jerith’s narrow chest. I stirred uneasily.

  “Don’t seal her, Lady Amalia,” Jerith barked at me. “She has to do this herself.”

  “Pox rot your smug wretched face!” Zaira snarled, and closed her hand into a fist.

  The fire winked out at once. The air grew chill again. Jerith’s wind swirled around Zaira, whipping her hair into a tangle, and settled with a skittering of dust along the flagstones.

  Zaira’s shoulders heaved, her breath quick with effort. She leveled a glare at Jerith that made me wonder his jacket didn’t start smoking after all.

  Jerith let loose a faint huff of relief or disappointment. “Why did you quench the fire, instead of controlling it?”

  “Go kiss a stingroach,” Zaira retorted, and stalked off to pick up the water flask again.

  Chapter Three

  Marcello moved in front of Zaira and me through the dusk-painted, twisting streets of the Tallows, scanning the early-evening crowds warily for any sign of danger among the workers slouching wearily home and the sailors bound merrily for the taverns. Zaira had insisted that no other guards accompany us for fear that the sight of too many soldiers would keep anyone from talking to her, and Marcello took his duty seriously.

  This district was too poor for luminaries. Its crumbling façades showed patches of brick through the plaster, and trash bobbed against the walls of the canals. A lamplighter moved across a narrow bridge not far ahead of us, brightening the world one flickering flame at a time. An intoxicating scent of mushrooms cooking in wine teased us from a window above, and a woman’s contented humming drifted down with it. Zaira’s dog Scoundrel sniffed excitedly at our heels, his tail wagging with a fury of recognition at the smells of his old neighborhood.

  As for Zaira herself, perhaps it was the way the gray wash of dusk and the ruddy lamplight mingled on her features, but for a fleeting moment, she looked lost.

  “Everything’s the same, but it’s different,” she muttered as we walked. “I haven’t been gone half a year, and Pip Gallo’s dead and the Six Jays is closed, and the best baker in town’s gotten married and moved to Palova.”

  “It’s always strange, coming home after an absence,” I said, thinking of my own return from my year in Ardence.

  Zaira lifted an eyebrow. “Who said anything about home? Come on. There’s a place up ahead that always has information.”

  We crossed a bridge over a crooked canal slender enough that I doubted the sun ever reached the green water below. On the far side, we had to pause a moment as an old man struggled to right an overturned handcart that nearly blocked the street; Marcello hastened to help him. Zaira crouched down and scratched Scoundrel’s rump, but he was too busy sniffing a crumpled bit of oil-stained broadsheet that had probably once wrapped fish to care. A crow eyed the same wrapper from a rooftop; I wondered with an odd pang if it were Kathe’s. I might not be able to trust him farther than I could throw him, but I could use his cleverness right now.

  “I lived there for a few months,” Zaira said in a low voice, jerking her chin across the crooked street.

  For a moment I thought she meant a butcher’s shop, but then I noticed the spire of a temple rising behind it. I squinted at the green-streaked figure atop it. “The local Temple of Mercy? They took you in?”

  Zaira nodded, her eyes dark and shuttered as she rubbed Scoundrel’s ears. “After the old woman died. They were nice enough to make your teeth hurt, but they met my eyes way too much, so I had to leave. Then I got to be an expert on floors.”

  “Floors?” Heat flooded my cheeks. “Oh! You mean sleeping on them.”

  The look she gave me could have stripped the paint off a wall. “No, I meant licking them, like Scoundrel here. Graces grant me patience, you’re dense as year-old cream.”

  “Sorry.” I remembered the tangle of frayed blankets we’d found in a dark corner of an abandoned laundry, the place Zaira had been living when I’d unwittingly helped capture her for the Falcons. “So you never really had a home.”

  “Not after the old woman died.” Her tone was flat and hard, denying any sympathy. “When you have to keep moving, you don’t get attached to places. Or things, or people. Scoundrel was all right, because he could come with me.”

  “If we can pass this Falcon reform law, you’d be free to live anywhere you wanted,” I said softly. “It wouldn’t matter if someone noticed your mage mark. You could make a home for yourself at last.”

  “What makes you think I want one?” Zaira straightened and stretched. “That’s Terika. Always talking about getting some little cottage in the mountains, or a town house in the city, and how many cats will I let her have, and do I think luminaries or oil lamps give a more comfortable light, and what do I think about spring green in the bedroom. It’s enough to make a person vomit.”

  Marcello had righted the cart and seen the old man on his way with a cheerful wave. Zaira sighed. “Come on. We’re almost there. It’s that tavern up ahead—the Laughing Siren.” She gave me an assessing glance. “Just keep your valuables close, and don’t start any fights you don’t want to finish.”

  The smoke hazing the air of the Laughing Siren tavern bore a heavy scent of sweet herbs, and the lamps and fireplace burned an alchemical oil that made their flames flicker through shades of blue, green, and purple. The cool, shifting light gave the place the appearance of being underwater. An Ostan boy with a cello played dreamy music that wove through the smoke, enhancing the impression. The place was crowded, but the noise remained strangely muted, with patrons huddled in private groups holding murmured conversations I couldn’t quite make out even as Zaira led us on a weaving course around tables toward the bar.

  A closer glance at the round tables told me why: someone had carefully carved runes into their edges, and cut diagrams into the tops. A muffling enchantment to dampen sound, so no one could overhear you. Clever.

  More than a few people shot glances our way or even stared openly. I was used to drawing attention as the Cornaro heir, but their eyes slid past me to latch onto Zaira. She ignored them, but her jaw tightened, and Scoundrel pressed close against her legs, his tail tucked.

  “Do they know you here?” I whispered.

  Zaira grunted. “I used to be in here a lot, but they didn’t know I was a fire warlock. Now they do.” Her tone was careless, but she wouldn’t meet my eyes any more than she would those of the patrons watching her, shades of blue and purple drifting across their carefully neutral faces.

  I understood anyway. The Tallows had never been her home, not really, but it was all she’d had. And now everyone she’d known realized she’d always been a stranger here. Even if my law passed, she couldn’t go back.

  The stinging in my eyes as we approached the bar might have been from more than the smoke. But Zaira showed no hesitation as she leaned on the rune-edged wooden counter and caught the attention of the proprietor, a tiny old woman with a face wrinkled like well-used leather.

  “Hey, Rosa.”

  “Zaira!” the old woman greeted her, in a surprisingly strong voice. “Good to see you, dear, it’s been ages. And you’ve brought friends!” Her sharp black eyes took in Marcello’s uniform and lingered on my face. “Showing them the old neighborhood? Or did you come all this way from the Mews for a drink?”

  “I’m here for the house special,” Zaira said.

  Rosa laughed. “Information, eh? It’s not the cheapest drink in the Tallows. Can you pay for it?”

  “Miss Moneybags here wipes her arse with gold foil,” Zaira assured her.

  I hoped the blue light hid the burning of my cheeks. “I imagine we could arrange payment as needed, yes.”

  The old woman assessed me narrowly. “I imagine you could. All right then, what do you want to know, Zaira dear?”

  Zaira dropped her voice so low I coul
d barely hear it over the deep liquid strains of the cello. “Heard of any alchemists taking jobs that might have come from Vaskandar?”

  “Vaskandar!” Rosa’s nostrils flared, and she looked as if she might spit if it weren’t her own bar she’d be expectorating upon. “I’d throw anyone dealing with them out of the Laughing Siren. I fought those demons in the Three Years’ War, you know.”

  I shifted uncomfortably, wondering if she’d heard about my courtship with Kathe.

  Zaira grunted. “I figured as much, but I had to ask. Next question: heard about anyone talking to the Empire in the past day or two?”

  Rosa shifted uneasily, giving me a sideways glance. “There are people who pass news to Raverran intelligence from time to time, but I don’t give out those names. If this is some test from La Contessa—”

  “It’s not a test,” I assured her hastily. “We’re only interested in contact that wasn’t through the regular channels. Unusual activity.”

  “Well…” Rosa drummed her fingers on the bar, frowning. “I suppose given who you are, I can tell you. All right.” She dropped her voice until I could barely hear her. “I heard about a gray-market mage crew taking a job that was supposed to be from someone very high up.”

  “A job, huh?” Zaira kept her tone casual. I tried not to show my own surprise. “Any details?”

  “I don’t know who or what,” Rosa said, glancing at me again. “You probably know more than I do. But if it helps you narrow it down, I know when and where. Some patrician lady’s charity ball.”

  “Lady Aurica’s annual dinner dance for the Temple of Bounty?” I asked at once. Her chef’s reputation made the event quite popular among the Serene City’s rich and powerful, and ensured a crowd at the buffet. It would be a perfect opportunity for Ruven to spread his poison. “Good Graces, that’s tomorrow.”

  “That sounds right,” Rosa agreed. “Sorry I don’t have more for you, but that’s all I know.”

  “No, that’s very helpful. Thank you.” I slipped the woman a couple of ducats, which seemed to be far more than she’d expected, given how wide her eyes went and how quickly the gold disappeared.