The Unbound Empire

by Melissa Caruso

  “Don’t I owe her the truth?” Never mind that I wasn’t at all certain I could fix him; I couldn’t think of that, not now, when I hadn’t even tried. “It’s my fault this happened to Marcello in the first place.”

  “It’s not your fault,” Bree said sharply. “It’s that demon Ruven’s fault.”

  That was the same thing I’d tried to tell myself a hundred times, without success, about Roland. I caught her eyes. “But I made choices that caused it to happen,” I said. “I bear at least some of the responsibility.”

  Bree frowned. She’d caught the double layers of what I’d said, and she searched my face as if more might be written there. “What are you going to do about it, then?”

  “I don’t know yet.” My hand tightened on my wineglass. “I have plans and ideas for how to save the Empire, and how to fight Ruven, but none of my research into the magical sciences has ever touched on a method to restore a chimera to their original form.” The unsteady surge of emotion that had been trying to force its way up like bile from my stomach rose again, and I swallowed it down with a gulp of wine. “Graces’ piss, this is sour,” I complained.

  Zaira let out a mock gasp. “Such language!”

  The proprietress, having heard, turned from chatting with a pair of Bree’s soldiers to glare at me. “Well, pardon me, princess! I’m not exactly serving royalty here, you know.”

  Bree and I blinked at her, and the soldiers exchanged incredulous grins, but the proprietress stalked off to the other end of the bar. Zaira bit the edge of her hand to try to hold back her laughter.

  “Should we tell her?” Bree asked, a mischievous smile tweaking the corner of her mouth.

  “No.” Zaira waved a hand. “It’s funnier if she doesn’t know. A princess, the doge’s daughter, and a fire warlock walked into a tavern… Holy Hells, we’re a bad joke.”

  “But in all seriousness, I’ve never heard you swear like that,” Bree said, clasping my shoulder. “You’re upset. Have some more awful wine.”

  “I need to be able to think clearly.” I pushed my glass away. “And I need to find an answer, Bree. I’m going to have to keep making these kinds of choices—weighing lives against each other. We all will.”

  Marcello had faced similar decisions, as a military officer. But somehow he had retained his mercy and compassion. I wished I had him here, to ask him how he’d done it.

  If he could even remember. If Ruven hadn’t truly killed the good man he’d been.

  “I might not have to after all.” Bree grimaced. “Word’s gotten out that I’m a vivomancer.”

  Zaira slapped her shoulder sympathetically. “Not everyone can be a warlock. They’ll get over their disappointment eventually.”

  “You’re still the heir to the throne of Callamorne,” I said firmly. “You can’t get out of it that easily.”

  “I suppose not,” Bree sighed. “But the nobles are having trouble deciding whether their love for the Lochaver family outweighs their distrust of vivomancers. It’s not so comfortable at court for me right now. That’s why Grandmother let me go out and ride patrols in the hills.”

  A thought occurred to me. I squinted suspiciously at Bree. “Does the queen know you’re here?”

  “Ah, well, as to that.” Bree took another swallow of wine. “She probably does by now.”

  “Bree!”

  “Oh, hush. So long as I manage not to die here, she’ll forgive me.” Bree flashed me a grin.

  I exchanged glances with Zaira. She shook her head and muttered, “That’s another one I have to keep alive. Bugger an ox.”

  “Anyway,” Bree said, lifting her glass to me, “I know what you need, Amalia. You need clarity of purpose.”

  I frowned. “Clarity of purpose?”

  “Grandmother says it’s necessary in battle, to achieve victory. But to have clarity, you can’t dwell on what you’ve lost and where you’ve failed.” She poked a finger at me. “You must focus on what you still have to protect, and what you need to do. If you know that, you’ll know when you need to make a sacrifice, and when you must fight to the death rather than give something up.”

  “Well, I still have plenty to protect.” I laid my bandaged arms on the counter, staring at the spots of blood that had begun to seep through. “As for what I need to do…” There was so much. See my Falcon law through. Defeat Ruven. Save Marcello. Make sure my mother was all right, and protect the Serene Empire. “I have to figure out a way to fix everything.”

  “You don’t have to fix everything.” Bree shook her head.

  “Wrong. It’s her actual job.” Zaira cuffed my shoulder. “You fix everything that needs fixing, I break everything that needs breaking.”

  “That’s very nice,” Bree said, laughing, “but a bit ambitious. You’re not one of the Graces, you know, Amalia.”

  “No.” I pushed on the bar with both hands and levered myself to my feet. “I’m a Cornaro.”

  A tinkling crash sounded at the far end of the bar. The proprietress stared at me, her mouth hanging open, the glass she’d dropped shattered at her feet.

  That afternoon Ruven’s army came marching down the river valley at last, spreading wide beyond the road in a dark mass. Domenic and Zaira and I stood once more at the parapet, on a section of undamaged wall some distance from the fallen gate, watching the invading army flow closer like some deadly flood. The fog had burned off, and the winter sun picked out gleams of metal from cuirasses and pikes and muskets. Even from this distance, I could spot chimeras moving among them, irregularities in the weave of humanity.

  Domenic handed me his spyglass, shaking his head. I trained it on the chimeras, and found dozens of them, mostly along the flanks of the army: armored weasels big as wolves, nightmarish lizards the size of horses with foaming mouths, bulls with faces like bird skulls full of dagger-length teeth. A few small units of human chimeras marched in the army, too, mixed in with the pikemen and musketeers. I scanned those groups closely, but didn’t see Marcello among them.

  I passed the spyglass to Zaira, feeling queasy. She took a look and immediately swore. “Half of them aren’t even soldiers.”

  “What, the chimeras?” I asked. “I didn’t think there were nearly that many.”

  “No. The people. Half of them look like I’d expect soldiers to look, trained and disciplined and ready for this. But the other half…” She swept the ranks of the army with the spyglass, her mouth tight. “Some of them are probably grandparents. Grace of Mercy, this one’s got to be Istrella’s age. And even I know that one’s holding his musket wrong.”

  “We knew Ruven was conscripting everyone able-bodied into the army.” I couldn’t help thinking of the old Vaskandran innkeeper who’d been taking care of babies while their nursing mothers cut firewood, after their village had been emptied to swell Ruven’s forces. “They can do that in Vaskandar, with vivomancers to ensure there’s still enough food.”

  “They’re scared.” Zaira handed the spyglass back to Domenic, shadows of what she’d seen lingering in her eyes. “Damn that smiling bastard to the Hell of Carnage. Those poor sods have got no business being here, and they know it, but he’s forcing them against us anyway.”

  I tried not to think about how it would feel to be taken from my family and forced to go to war in a strange country, marching beside inhuman monsters against an empire armed with powerful magic. If we didn’t kill these people, these desperate and unwilling conscripts, they would murder or enslave the tens of thousands of equally innocent civilians in the city we stood to protect.

  I suspected that afforded Zaira only moderate consolation. She hugged her arms as if against the cold as she stared out over the valley—but cold didn’t usually affect her.

  Vultures circled above the army, patient and waiting. The gates of the Hell of Death were already open. There had to be some way to keep this from turning into a slaughter, surely, to make them turn back and return home to Vaskandar as so many of them clearly wanted to do.

  Then
a circle of light flared on the grass beneath the feet of one section of the vanguard, and perhaps twenty of Ruven’s soldiers dropped to the ground. Another circle flashed farther down their front line, with the same effect. Distant cries of fear reached our ears, thin and faint on the wind, before the breeze shifted and carried them away.

  “The first of the trap circles,” I breathed.

  “What happened to the people who stepped in them?” Zaira asked warily.

  I shook my head, feeling no sense of victory, but rather a sick dropping despair. “That type of circle delivers a shock that stops the heart.”

  Zaira let out a soft curse. “How many more are there?”

  “Only a handful. You have to bury great chunks of obsidian beneath the entire ring, so they’re difficult to make.” When they’d told me the plans, I’d wished we had more. But that was easy enough to wish for when enemy soldiers were faceless numbers rather than frightened people forced from their homes.

  Any hopes I might have had that Ruven’s army would turn around at the first sign of resistance faded. His lines closed ranks and kept marching, more pristine farmland and fields of winter-brown stubble disappearing beneath the advancing ocean of boots.

  “They should be coming in range of the garrison’s artifice cannons soon,” Domenic muttered.

  At my side, Zaira tensed, gripping the stone-capped edge of the parapet over which we watched. She stared at the blocky fortress standing on its hill, then at the army advancing across the valley.

  “Everything that happens here is Ruven’s fault,” I murmured to her. “He’s the one doing this. Not us.”

  “Istrella made those cannons,” Zaira said, her voice low and troubled.

  Grace of Mercy. She was right. Istrella would be watching as her creations finally unleashed their destructive power, with no one to comfort her as she came face-to-face at last with the death she could cause. And Marcello was out there somewhere. If one of her cannons killed him…

  But no. He was too valuable as a hostage. Ruven surely wouldn’t put him in danger—and besides, Istrella could sense his location well enough at that range to keep them from firing on him.

  My hand slipped into the satchel slung over my shoulder, where I carried extra elixir, writing materials, and a few other key supplies. I dug in the bottom, among the grit left over from stuffing half-eaten pastries and alchemical powders in there over the months since I’d last let Rica clean it out, until my fingertips brushed a small nub of cool metal.

  I gripped the button Marcello had given me before my unexpected trip to Vaskandar, the familiar ridges and grooves pressing into my skin. Worrying about him would accomplish nothing. I had to believe he would survive this day.

  On the battlements of the Raverran fortress, a red light flashed. A hot streak arced through the air, sizzling a mile or more across the valley before descending into the front ranks of the army below. Beside me, Zaira sucked in a breath.

  The shot exploded on impact into a great ball of fire, loosing a cloud of black smoke and throwing the lines into a panicked chaos visible even from this distance. A rumbling boom echoed down the valley, the sound broken and repeated by the hills.

  “And so it begins,” Domenic said sadly.

  After a moment, another red flash came from the fortress, and then another. Two more fireballs erupted in the Vaskandran front lines, wreaking utter devastation. The front half of the army compressed, bristling, like a living creature recoiling from an attack.

  Domenic lifted the spyglass to his eye. Whatever he saw made him flinch, but he didn’t look away. “They’re trying to flee,” he reported.

  “That would be good,” Zaira said hopefully.

  I shook my head. The sick, empty feeling in my gut knew better. “Ruven will never let them.”

  Sure enough, the ripple that had run through the army stilled, with an eerie suddenness that should not have been possible for a mass of thousands of panicked people. And their forward march began again, into the cannon fire, splitting neatly around the smoking craters full of corpses each shot left in the ground.

  Domenic swore and lowered the spyglass at last. “Those are his own people. He must know they’re all going to die. Even if he takes Ardence, when the imperial forces and the Falcons arrive, they’ll be wiped out. He’s forcing thousands of his own subjects to go terrified to their deaths, and for what?”

  “So he can piss on your city to make it his, like a dog marking a tree,” Zaira said roughly.

  “He sacrifices a few thousand to gain tens of thousands.” I shook my head. “If you don’t care about human lives except as the coin of power, it’s a sensible strategy.”

  “No it isn’t,” Zaira said, her voice gone hard. “Because he’s not gaining anything. I’m here, and I’m going to stop him.”

  My stomach dropped. “Now?”

  “I’m sure as Hells not waiting for my birthday. Those cannons aren’t slowing them down. That army would be knocking on the gates within the hour, if you still had gates to knock on.”

  Domenic’s hand stole over and squeezed hers, briefly. “I have always admired your courage, Lady Zaira. How close do you need to get?”

  Zaira shrugged. “The fire starts from me and spreads from there, so long as it has lives to eat. I don’t think you want balefire too close to your city, though, so I’m going to go out there and meet them.”

  “Do you want me to send some of my ducal guard with you?” he asked.

  “No,” Zaira said. “They’d just get in my way.” She turned to me, her dark eyes unreadable. “You don’t have to come, you know. You can seal me from up here.”

  “Of course I’m coming with you,” I said. “I’m not making you do this alone.”

  She closed her eyes a moment, then opened them again. “Thank you.”

  “And I’ll ask Bree’s cavalry to stand ready to get you out if anything goes wrong,” Domenic said. “They should be mobile enough to stay out of your way, but to respond quickly if you face any unexpected threats.”

  “Good thinking,” I approved.

  “All right.” Zaira took in a long, ragged breath. “Let’s do this.”

  A cold wind from the north whipped Zaira’s dark curls behind her. I turned up the collar of my coat around my face as we climbed the grassy mound in some farmer’s field where Bree and her cavalry had dropped us off. My boots turned in the soft, fog-dampened earth beneath the broken stubble left over from the fall harvest. The sun hung over the hills to the west, throwing their long slopes into shadow and picking out every bump and wrinkle in the valley floor with soft golden light. The River Arden shone bright as a luminary, winding a broad path of liquid mirror down the long throat of the valley.

  We crested the low rise in silence, save for my own huffing breath. Before us spread the valley in all its beauty, and the advancing stain of the army that choked it. I could make out the bristle of pikes and muskets and the pale flecks of faces. Istrella’s cannons had ceased their bombardment, their magical reservoirs temporarily dry, and the distant rumble of thousands of footsteps beat at our ears.

  There were so many of them. It was madness, for the two of us to stand here alone in the empty stretch of fields before the city. Bree’s riders waited a safe distance behind us; it was hard not to lift my arm and give them the signal right now to come and get us, before the soldiers could come within shooting range, since clearly we’d made a terrible mistake.

  At my side, Zaira shuddered. “Bugger it all. I don’t want to do this.”

  She was staring at the approaching army with white-rimmed eyes. She reached out sideways, fingers clutching with blind need at the air; it took me a stunned moment to realize what she was looking for and give her my hand.

  “I know,” I said quietly, as she crushed my fingers.

  “I shouldn’t have looked through that spyglass,” she groaned. “I shouldn’t have looked at their faces.”

  The enemy troops marched closer, the ground trembling benea
th our feet with their coming. I tried not to think about how much longer we had before they came into musket range. “Maybe not,” I said, keeping my eyes fixed on her face, striving to give her all of my attention as the vultures circled overhead. “But maybe it has to hurt. You wouldn’t want this to be easy.”

  “I can’t do it.” She tore her gaze away from the advancing army to face me, her dark eyes stretched wide with panic, the wind dragging strands of hair across her face. “Curse it, Amalia, if I slaughter all these people—hundreds of them, thousands of them, with babies and dogs and parents and homes waiting for them—I become a demon. That’s not a line you can cross and go back home again like nothing happened.”

  “I know.” I took her other hand, too, and squeezed both of them. “Believe me, I know.”

  My eyes stung. The wind, I told myself, surely the wind, because I couldn’t be fool enough to be at the verge of tears here, now, over what I’d done months ago, when I decided that military strategy and the safety of innocents were more important than my cousin’s life. Or over what Marcello had said in the grip of the cruelty Ruven had planted in him. But I didn’t look away, even as the encroaching tide of Ruven’s army grew in the periphery of my vision.

  Zaira’s eyes narrowed with recognition. “Maybe you do.”

  “If…” I took a breath, forcing myself to commit to the words I was afraid to speak. “If you don’t want to do this, you don’t have to. We can call Bree to take us back to the city.”

  “How in the Hells would I tell Domenic I decided to leave him to fend for himself?” Zaira shook her head fiercely. “There are countless brats in that city who didn’t do anything wrong, and some half-decent adults, too. I know what Ruven will do if we don’t stop him.” She turned, as if fighting a powerful force, to face the army again. “Ardence needs me to be a demon now. So I’d better pack for my trip to the Nine Hells.”

  “I’ll be right there with you,” I said quietly.

  “Damned right, you will.” She’d gone the shade of old vellum, and her hands were clammy in mine. “I’m going to have to lose myself further into the fire than I’ve ever gone before. I’m counting on you to bring me back.”