The Unbound Empire

by Melissa Caruso

  Ruven reached out with casual ease and tapped two fingers to the back of Marcello’s neck.

  “No!” I cried in anguish, but the lingering effects of Ruven’s magic still hoarsened my voice. Applause from the ballroom drowned me out as the musicians finished a dance.

  Marcello froze in midmotion, his muscles locked, fear straining his face.

  “There,” Ruven sighed softly. “Now, my lady, we can negotiate.”

  He wrapped his hand around Marcello’s throat. As his fingers settled like pale spider legs around Marcello’s rigid neck, something tore loose in my chest; a fear like nothing I’d ever felt for myself lit every nerve in my body with wild, furious energy.

  I stomped on the foot of the chimera who held me, then slammed my head back into its chin. I might as well have attacked a statue. I twisted my arms against its grip, but its talons only tightened on me. It emitted a rattling, annoyed hiss.

  Ruven hauled Marcello over in front of me; the trees shrugged together to close off all lines of sight and muffle the sound of music and laughter from Lady Hortensia’s palace. He had sealed us into a private box of nightmares, with the city full of revelers all around us, and neither Marcello nor I could make enough noise to let anyone know we needed help. Only the slim sickle moon above could look down on this terrible moment.

  “Let’s see, how shall we begin?” Ruven eyed Marcello appraisingly. A trickle of blood ran down from beneath his fingers where they gripped Marcello’s throat. “This one thinks himself a fighter; perhaps I’d best prevent him from attempting anything foolish.”

  Marcello stared at me, pleading a message with his eyes, since he couldn’t move anything else. I knew what he wanted: Run, get out of here, get away from him somehow, don’t worry about me. But even if I’d been able to break free of the chimera who held me, I’d seen the lightning speed with which they moved; I had no chance of getting away. Until something happened to interrupt or distract them, we were Ruven’s.

  I had to stop panicking and reacting, force back the fear shivering like sleet in every nerve, and think of a plan. Somehow.

  But then Ruven seized Marcello’s shoulder with his free hand, and his fingers pierced through green velvet and the muscle beneath it as if steel claws tipped them. Marcello flinched as blood seeped into his lace cravat.

  All coherent thought scattered from my mind in a fresh wave of rage. “Leave him alone!”

  An audible snap sounded from Marcello’s collarbone, and he went pale as paper.

  “That’s his sword arm, yes?” Ruven glanced at the rapier that lay on the ground, then at the sheath on Marcello’s left hip. “Good, good. Some ribs next, I think, to warm up.”

  Crack. Crack. Marcello jerked against the magic that held him still, his eyes squeezed shut, teeth clenched against the cry he couldn’t utter.

  “What do you want?” Desperation shredded the words on their way out of my mouth. “Stop hurting him, and tell me what you want!”

  Ruven pulled bloody fingers from Marcello’s shoulder and shook one at me, grinning. “Now, you don’t expect me to believe you’ve broken so easily, do you? No, no, you are tougher than that, Lady Amalia. I know we’ll have to do far greater damage to this plaything of yours before you are truly ready to serve my will.” He sighed. “This may take a while, I fear.”

  Despair unfolded black sails in my chest. He would unmake Marcello in front of me, one agonizing piece at a time. He was enjoying this, relishing my anguish; anything I did to try to make him stop would only make it worse.

  All because I wouldn’t take his offer. First Roland had died because I deemed his life a worthy sacrifice to protect the Empire; now Marcello paid the price for another of my choices. The red staining Marcello’s shoulder blurred into his pain-lined face as tears flooded my eyes.

  “I’ll make you regret this, Ruven,” I warned through my teeth.

  “My lady, I never regret anything.”

  Then a sudden rushing darkness fell from the sky, screaming, and fluttered over my head.

  The chimera released me, reeling, its claws raised to shield its face. It hissed in alarm as a black, feathery shape stabbed again and again at its eyes, cawing raucously.

  The crow I’d seen napping on Lady Hortensia’s roof. Kathe had been watching over me. Hope gave an uneven leap in my heart; my arms were free at last.

  I closed my eyes at once and flipped open my flare locket.

  Blinding light blazed red through my eyelids. The eight-eyed chimera shrieked in agony; Ruven cried out as well, cursing the Crow Lord, and branches thrashed. I started running before the glare faded, opening my lids to a slit in time to grab Marcello’s hand as he staggered free from Ruven’s grip; the Witch Lord had thrown up his arms to block the light.

  Marcello let out a strangled groan of pain, but ran with me. We shoved our way through cypress trees that clutched blindly at us, then sprinted between trellises twined by withered brown vines and bushes cloaked with the rattling husks of leaves, toward the blazing wall of light and music that was the ballroom.

  I scrabbled at the door and hurled it open hard enough to shatter one of the glass panels, bursting through into the brilliant light and warmth of the crowded party.

  A hundred masked faces turned to stare at us. The music screeched and wailed to a confused halt.

  Marcello slumped to his knees by my side, blood from his shoulder spattering the floor.

  Chapter Eight

  I held Marcello’s hand in both of mine as my oarsman rowed us through the canals glowing with festival lights toward the Mews, and I didn’t care who saw. We had propped him up with silk pillows as best we could, but blood still dripped from his shoulder, staining his golden waistcoat and soaking his cravat. His face gleamed with sweat, and his jaw clenched against the pain.

  “Please let me try to stop the bleeding.” I pitched my voice low, to carry beneath the laughter and music that drifted over our heads. The next boat over was full of demon masks; it all blended into the dreamlike horror of the evening.

  “Don’t touch it,” Marcello said through his teeth. “I can feel the bone shards grating whenever I take a breath. Let them set it at the Mews, or it’ll never heal right.”

  Worry for Marcello clenched my belly into a tight lump. Ruven could have done anything to him—melted his insides to jelly, twisted his bones in knots. He could be slowly dying without even knowing it, right now. But I nodded stiff assent.

  And Marcello wasn’t the only matter for concern. “Ruven can’t have come all the way here just to make me that offer,” I said, both to distract Marcello from his pain and because it was true.

  “Did you tell someone he’s here?” Marcello’s hand tightened urgently on mine.

  “I sent word to my mother. They’re combing the city for him even now. But I’m sure he wasn’t just out for a night of dancing in all the long hours before he revealed himself. Graces only know whether we can figure out what else he’s done in time to undo it.”

  Marcello’s green eyes clouded with misery. “I don’t know how we can fight him, Amalia. He walked into the Serene City, the heart of the Empire, and did whatever he wanted. If we sent an army after him, they couldn’t kill him. He’s immortal. What can we do to him?”

  “Bah. He’s nothing more than a magical theory problem for me to solve.” I flexed my jaw. “And when I do, Zaira can roast him till his bones turn to glass.”

  Marcello managed a weak laugh. “Well, then, he’d better start running. I’ve never seen a magical theory problem escape you.”

  “That’s right.” I squeezed his hand. “So you rest, and let me handle it.”

  He forced a smile and squeezed back. But rest eluded him all the way back to the Mews, where he dripped a trail of blood up to the gates.

  The soldiers stationed there rushed to meet us with a flurry of consternation, and soon we had Marcello settled on a bench in the great entry hall as someone went for a physician. Masked revelers spilled in from the Mews p
arty to see what was happening, glittering like bright birds in their finery, Zaira and Terika among them.

  “Holy Hells, what happened to him?” Zaira asked, pushing her mask up onto her forehead.

  “Ruven happened,” I told her, keeping my voice low.

  Zaira’s breath hissed through her teeth. “I leave, and the party gets interesting, huh?”

  “I need to get on the courier lamps,” I said, clasping her shoulder. My knees trembled beneath my gown with a saw-edge combination of relief, exhaustion, and worry, but I had to stay collected; there was too much to do. “Can you do me a favor? Can you make sure Marcello is all right, and that Istrella…” I swallowed. “Well, that she at least doesn’t hear some stupid rumor and get more upset than she needs to about this?”

  Zaira exchanged glances with Terika, who nodded. “That’s not a favor, idiot,” she said. “That’s just common sense. Go do what you need to do.”

  “Thank you,” I said with feeling. There were enough people clustered around Marcello now that I couldn’t see him; it made it easier to turn away and head off alone toward the courier lamp tower. But it was a cold and lonely walk through the courtyard garden, with fears lurking in every shadow.

  An hour later, I found they had taken Marcello to his room. Zaira met me at the door, still in her golden gown, her mask gone and her hair half down from its pins. I could hear Istrella chattering away inside.

  “They’ve got him bandaged up and gave him about fourteen different potions,” Zaira told me, yawning. “Terika says he’ll be fine, the physicians say he’ll be fine, Marcello says he is fine—but I’m pretty sure he doesn’t know his own name anymore, so I wouldn’t put much trust in that.”

  My shoulders eased as if stones had fallen off them. “Oh, good. I was worried that Ruven had… Well, you know the things he does.”

  “Ugh.” Zaira made a face. “No, none of that, so far as the physician could tell. He’s all right. You can kiss him good night and go to sleep.”

  “I’m not going to do that,” I protested.

  “Well, I am. Going to go to sleep, that is.” She stretched. “You might want to see if you can get Istrella to do the same. She’s talking his ear off in there, and I think it’s keeping him awake.”

  Sure enough, I found Istrella sitting in a chair by Marcello’s bedside, describing an idea she’d had for a luminary that drew on lunar power rather than solar. Marcello lay staring blearily at her from his bed, his brow furrowed in a desperate but doomed attempt to focus on her words. Perhaps it was for the best that he was too drugged to hear the strain under her enthusiasm.

  I heard it all too clearly; the roughness in her voice raked me with guilt. Ruven had hurt Marcello to get at me. It was my regard that had put him in danger, and it was on my behalf that he lay there with finger-shaped holes in his shoulder and several broken bones. Istrella would be well within her rights to blame me for what had happened to him.

  Graces knew I blamed myself.

  “I’m here now, Istrella, if you want to go to bed,” I greeted her gently.

  She turned, her eyes wide even without her artifice glasses accentuating them, her hair forming an unruly cloud around her face. I realized she was in her nightdress; she must have gone to bed already when we returned to the Mews.

  “They gave him a potion to help him sleep,” she said seriously, “but it doesn’t seem to be working.”

  “Maybe he needs quiet,” I suggested.

  “Ah.” She considered that, and then nodded. “You’re probably right. I’m not good at silence unless I’m working, and I have a strict rule not to work on projects after midnight ever since the explosion.”

  I blinked. “Perhaps you should go to bed, then.”

  “Yes, I think so.” She got up, and then wrapped me in a fierce and sudden hug, driving the wind from me. “Take care of him, Amalia.”

  “I will,” I promised, and swallowed a painful knot in my throat. Better than I did tonight, I added silently.

  When she’d left, I settled down by him at last, taking the weight off my aching feet. The copious skirts of my ball gown rustled around me.

  “’Malia,” Marcello slurred, the sense glazing from his eyes as the pale gray light of dawn kissed the sky through his window.

  “Do you want me to go?” I asked him softly. “So you can sleep?”

  “No,” he mumbled. “Stay, please.”

  So I sat by his bed and held his limp, warm hand, rubbing my thumb gently across the back of it, until my chin dropped on my chest and only the boning of my corset held me upright.

  “Amalia, wake up. It’s past time for your elixir.”

  I jerked awake. Aches from sleeping in a corset flooded in as I blinked back the bright morning light. My head swam dizzily, and for a moment I couldn’t pull my eyes away from Marcello, who still slept, his brows slightly furrowed. His hand had slipped from mine while I dozed. Somehow, in my worry, I had failed to notice last night that his shoulders and chest were naked under the bandages; now the sun dripped gold across his smooth bronze skin.

  But that voice—my mind was fuzzy from sleep and from the first gentle warning symptoms of being late with my elixir. It couldn’t be.

  I turned to find my mother sitting beside me in all her glory: La Contessa Lissandra Cornaro, still in the imposing burgundy silk gown she’d worn when she set out for her own Night of Masks festivities last night, her auburn hair pinned up with gold and jewels. She looked as out of place in Marcello’s simple, spare bedroom as a ruby brooch on a piece of scrap linen. Her piercing dark eyes sat in pools of exhaustion, and she offered me an elixir bottle with the air of one sharing a stiff drink after a long, difficult day.

  I blinked, but this strange vision didn’t dissipate. I took the bottle and downed a couple of anise-flavored swallows, then set it on Marcello’s bedside table beside the burned-out oil lamp.

  “I do have a bottle with me,” I said. I might have made some mistakes last night, but that wasn’t one of them; I’d had enough brushes with death not to trifle with the potion that kept me alive. “I didn’t stay out overnight without a plan. I just—”

  My mother leaned forward and pulled me into a tight hug. “I’m glad you’re all right,” she whispered.

  I pressed my stinging eyes against her silk-encased shoulder. “Mamma, Ruven hurt him to get to me.” My voice wobbled as if I were a child again, confessing in tears that I’d spilled chocolate on my favorite book. “He could have killed him if Kathe’s crow hadn’t shown up, all because of me. Now he’s broken and bleeding, just because I care about him. I don’t—” The words hitched in my throat, and I had to struggle against some heavy, terrible, nameless thing in my chest to force out more of them. “I can’t make this better,” I whispered.

  My mother held me out at arm’s length, then, gazing at me fiercely. “I know,” she said, with a conviction in her voice deep enough to shake me. “Believe me, Amalia, I know.”

  I stared back at her for a moment, amazed at the pain showing clear and bright in her eyes. But then the lingering scent of anise teased my senses, and I realized with a start that she meant me. All those years ago, when I’d been poisoned, and the other times I’d been threatened or kidnapped or people tried to kill me as a child, all in an attempt to get at my mother. I’d never thought before of what she must have felt; she’d treated it as simply the way things were, and lectured me on safety even as she arranged the executions of the people responsible, and it had never occurred to me that every single time had hurt her more than I could imagine.

  “What do I do?” I asked her helplessly. “How can I have friends, if I know people will target them?”

  La Contessa squeezed my shoulders and stared into my eyes. “You must teach them what happens when they hurt the people you love,” she said, in a voice that would set the Demon of Nightmares to trembling.

  I nodded, and dragged a sleeve across my eyes. “I’ll try.” I took a deep breath, and took a moment to attempt
to arrange my gown. “Did they ever find Ruven?”

  “My sources tell me he’s left the city and seems to be returning north.” She leaned back in her chair, rubbing her temples. “He did what he came here to do, and now he’s going home.”

  “What he came here to do?” I asked sharply. Even Ruven wouldn’t travel all the way to Raverra simply to torment an adversary.

  “So I must assume.” My mother rose and began pacing, her skirts sweeping the floor. “He sprinkled his poison about, for certain. We’ve found two parties he attended where we detected alchemy in the food; we’re attempting to track down all the guests to quarantine them, but it’s a logistical nightmare, and it’s frankly going to be impossible to catch everyone. And we’ve pulled two bodies out of the canal, one of them a soldier. We’re working to identify them.” She sighed. “It’s been a busy night.”

  “And we can’t know what more there may be to his plans.” I rubbed my temples, pressing at a headache building there.

  “I assure you, we’re expending considerable resources to find out.” She paused. “Speaking of which. The doge wishes to talk to you at the Imperial Palace, once you’ve had a chance to get cleaned up.”

  I glanced down at my bedraggled ball gown. Marcello’s blood spattered the ocean-blue silk in places. My insides clenched, and I couldn’t help a quick look at his sleeping face to reassure myself he was all right.

  “I’d like to wait for Marcello to wake up,” I said, my voice dwindling to something small and uncertain. “He asked me to stay.”

  La Contessa raised one elegant brow, and with it all the objections I knew too well. I was courting someone else; I couldn’t keep the doge waiting for a mere captain of the Falconers; it was nothing but silly sentimentality, with Marcello drugged into a sleep too deep to know I was here.

  “So long as he doesn’t sleep into the afternoon,” she sighed. And she came and planted a light kiss on the top of my head. “The serenity of the Empire is in danger, and you are a Cornaro. You have work to do.”