The Unbound Empire

by Melissa Caruso

  “I saw what happened today,” he said. My eyes were well adjusted to the moonlight, and I had no difficulty making out the seriousness of his expression.

  “Ah.” I let out a long breath. “So now you know what Zaira can do.”

  “It will have caused Ruven no small discomfort, to have so many lives of his snuffed out at once,” Kathe said. “If that’s any comfort to you.”

  I rubbed my forehead, as if I could somehow scrub away the memory of screaming. “I’m not certain it is. But thank you.”

  Kathe parted his lips as if he would say something, then closed them and watched me for a moment in silence.

  “What is it?” I asked warily.

  “I also know what happened to Captain Verdi,” he said quietly.

  I couldn’t bear to face his sympathy. I rose abruptly and went to the window, staring out at the chimney smoke rising over city roofs, letting the moonlight slide over my face.

  “I don’t know what to do,” I whispered, my breath misting the glass. “First Marcello, then burning all those people… It’s too much. I have to become numb, or I’ll go mad.”

  Feathers rustled. “I don’t recommend numbness,” Kathe said from behind me. “Some Witch Lords take that path when they can’t handle watching all their friends and family die, one by one, while they live on. Or when they can’t stand feeling life after life snuffed out in their domain, year after year, eventually including almost every person they’ve ever met.”

  “What happens to them?” I asked, tracing an artifice rune in the damp cloud I’d left on the window.

  “They become cruel and distant. Their domains are places of nightmare.” I turned to face him; he still sat in his chair, watching me. “In Let, we consider this a great danger to the domain, and have a tradition to prevent it from happening.”

  “Oh?” Curiosity dragged my thoughts up from the dark places to which they had descended. “What is it?”

  “The Heartguard. You’ve heard me speak of them.”

  “I assumed they were bodyguards.”

  “That, too. But their most important role is to keep me human.” An ironic smile pulled at the corner of his mouth. “And to hold me accountable.”

  “I didn’t think anyone held a Witch Lord accountable,” I said, with a trace of bitterness.

  “That’s precisely why I need them.” Kathe hesitated, a strange uncertainty softening his face. “My Heartguard, ah, made it quite clear to me that they felt I did you wrong at the Conclave. That I should have asked permission before using you as bait.”

  An untidy tangle of feelings rose up in me, twisted together like the roots the Lady of Thorns had used to try to kill me that night. Old anger at Kathe’s betrayal—but also an aching recognition. People make mistakes, Zaira’s voice reminded me. They make a plague-rotten mess of things. All you can do is keep trying not to ruin everything next time.

  “You should have,” I agreed, keeping my tone light to cover my unsettled thoughts. I don’t want to forget how to be a person, I’d told Zaira. Apparently, I wasn’t the only one.

  A possibility occurred to me, and I frowned. “Did you only apologize because they made you?”

  “No. I apologized because they were right.” He shifted restlessly. “I have no natural talent at compassion. But I can get there. Sometimes I need a little help.”

  I collapsed back into my seat. “I’m much the same. Maybe I need a Heartguard.”

  “Maybe you do.”

  I’d asked Marcello to be essentially that for me. To help make certain I always cared, and didn’t grow cold and manipulative. But now the man I had trusted to guard my heart was gone.

  I twisted the skirts of my nightdress in my hands. No. Not gone. No matter what he’d said when Ruven’s poison in his mind drove him to cruelty, I would not give up on him.

  “What do you do, then, if you’ve hurt someone?” I asked.

  “You make it right,” Kathe said softly. “You find a way to make it right.”

  The moonlight gleamed in his eyes. I knew what I had to ask him, but I was afraid that I could already see the answer in his grave, steady gaze.

  “Once someone has been turned into a chimera,” I began, “Is there any way… How would you go about…” I broke off as Kathe closed his eyes.

  “I’m sorry,” he whispered.

  “No.” My fingernails dug furrows in my legs. “No. There has to be some way to undo it. Ruven said he could undo it.”

  “Ruven could,” Kathe agreed heavily. “Because he is a Skinwitch.”

  “Then some other Skinwitch could fix him.”

  “Perhaps?” Kathe spread his hands wearily. “It would be very difficult, because this theoretical Skinwitch wouldn’t know what precisely Ruven did to change him. And it’s irrelevant, because Skinwitches are rare to begin with, and are killed if caught in many domains. I don’t know of any currently alive other than Ruven.”

  “There has to be something I can do,” I insisted desperately. “I can’t just leave him like this. Please, there has to be some way I can save him.”

  Kathe rose and started pacing. “What would you have me do, Amalia? I can’t change how vivomancy works. I can’t become a Skinwitch to restore him. I would help you if I could, but this is beyond my power.” By the bitterness in his voice, it pained him to admit it.

  “What if we kill Ruven?” I asked.

  “That wouldn’t change him back. When a vivomancer makes a chimera, it’s a permanent transformation.”

  “But his mind,” I pressed. “He wouldn’t be under Ruven’s control and influence anymore. Would he return to the person he was?”

  “He might. It depends on what Ruven did to him.” Kathe frowned, thinking. “I don’t make true chimeras, even animal ones. But sometimes I make minor enhancements to animals that don’t harm them—like boosting my crows’ intelligence, or giving horses more endurance. And I’ve also noticed that when I focus my attention on a particular animal, commanding it or guiding it, I influence its behavior, even if that’s not my intent. That influence is much stronger if I’ve altered the animal.” He stopped pacing and shrugged helplessly. “If Ruven changed your friend’s brain, those changes are permanent. If it’s only Ruven’s influence that’s twisting him, there’s a chance that killing Ruven might return him to something like the man you knew.”

  It wasn’t much of a hope, but I seized it. “Then that’s what I’ll do.”

  “I don’t want to lie to you.” Kathe’s shoulders slumped, as if the energy driving him had drained out. “It’s unlikely that Ruven took care not to damage him. Unless you can somehow get Ruven to undo his work, you’ll have to accept that he’s never going to be the same.”

  “Fine. If I can trick Ruven into fixing him, I will. And if not, I’ll save whatever I can of him.” My voice wavered, despite my determination that it wouldn’t. I pressed the heels of my hands into my stinging eyes. “Curse it, I’m not going to cry.”

  “Everyone with a heart cries.” There came a rustle of feathers; I looked up to find Kathe crouching in front of me, his pale brows furrowed. “I may have mentioned I’m not good at compassion. Do you want me to go, or—”

  “No.” I swallowed. “No, I think I want you to hold me.”

  He settled down next to me, then, and his cloak folded around me like a wing. I strangled the exhausted sobs that tried to climb up out of my chest, struggling to think of anything but one orange eye blazing with cruelty, and one green one staring at me with the pleading horror of a drowning man slipping under the water for the last time.

  “I’m guessing you don’t feel like a game,” Kathe said tentatively.

  A laugh burst out of me, then, with all the ragged strength of the tears I’d been suppressing. “You really are bad at this.”

  “Well, they always cheer me up.” But he was laughing, too, his chest shaking silently with it.

  That only made me laugh harder, tears leaking from the corners of my eyes, the knot of grief
loosening in my chest. Kathe’s arm tightened briefly around my shoulders, and I leaned into the warmth of him, feeling him breathing against me. It was so strange, that he did something so common as respire, when he carried the power of an entire kingdom in him. But he was warm, and human, and I could feel the pulse beating in him.

  He smelled of pine trees and snow and a wild hint of lightning, not smoke and ruin and death. I breathed his scent in deep and closed my eyes, and at last none of the horrors of the day appeared in the warm darkness behind my lids.

  When I woke to the clear morning light, hours later, I was curled alone on the divan, Kathe’s feathered cloak draped over me.

  Zaira woke at last a few hours after I did, as I was poring over magical theory texts, making notes on possible methods to use my blood to claim pieces of Ruven’s domain out from under him, as he wanted to do to his neighbors. I was frowning over a passage on directionality in magical flows when a pitiful moan came from her bed.

  I laid down my pen on her writing table and hurried over. She collapsed back into the pillows after a failed attempt to sit up, eyes squeezed shut, cradling her head in both hands.

  “Headache?” I asked, settling into the chair by her bedside.

  “Grace of Mercy, bugger a duck,” Zaira groaned.

  I poured some of the potion I’d had prepared into the waiting small cup and offered it to her. “This will help.”

  “Is it poison?” Zaira gulped it down without waiting for an answer, then made a face. “Ugh! No, poison tastes better than that. What is this disgusting… oh.” She blinked her eyes open and let out a long sigh. “Oh, that’s better.”

  “I thought you might need some of that. How do you feel?”

  “Thirsty as a sailor just arrived in port.” I handed her a cup of water, which I also had ready, and she blinked as she took it. “Damn, you’ve thought of everything.”

  “I am a scholar of the magical sciences.” I watched her carefully. It was like waiting for someone who’d cut themself with an extremely sharp knife to realize how badly they’d been hurt. “What’s the last thing you remember?”

  “What I remember? Wait, we’re in Ardence.” Zaira set the cup down, frowning. “That’s right. Ruven’s army. What happened?”

  “The city is safe,” I said. “You saved it.”

  “I can see that.” She gestured around the room as if the peace of it annoyed her: the bright morning sunlight, the elegant furnishings, the breakfast tray uneaten on the writing table beside my stack of papers. The latter caught her attention. “Hell of Hunger, I’m starving. I must have burned a lot of…” Her voice trailed off. She stared at me, her eyes opening wide into dark pools that gathered more and more shadows.

  “What’s the last thing you remember?” I asked again, softly.

  “The chimeras leaping at us.” It came out as a hoarse whisper. “I lost control, didn’t I?”

  “You protected Ardence,” I said. “You saved sixty thousand people.”

  Zaira’s fingers clenched in the covers. “How many did I kill?”

  “Zaira, listen to me. You never made a choice to kill anyone.” I reached for her hand, half expecting her to snatch it away, but she let me take it. “You did everything you could to spare them. When you were lost to the fire, it was I who made the choice when to stop you. I decided how many people would die. Not you. Don’t burden yourself with their deaths.”

  “That’s a pretty sentiment,” Zaira retorted. “So pretty you can tie it up in a posy and lay it on their graves. I made my choice to kill the moment I let loose my fire. Do you think I don’t know what it does?” She shook her head. “I knew what would happen. The best you can say is we did it together.”

  “Then we did it together,” I said.

  “Just a nice friendly outing with the two of us. Now tell me. How many?”

  I closed my eyes. I could still see the valley burning end to end in a lake of blue flames, and hear the wild, high chorus of distant screams. “I don’t know the exact numbers.”

  Zaira sighed. “Hells take the numbers. I’m no good with them anyway. Show me.”

  I took Zaira up the narrow stairs to the sending spire on the roof of the Serene Envoy’s palace. Wind caught us at once as we stepped out onto the square platform, barely bigger than Zaira’s guest bed, with the gilded spike of the sending spire towering above us. I was glad for the stone railing that ensured the stiff breeze couldn’t stagger us clean off the platform onto the sloping red tile roof below, but wished I’d thought to grab a coat before coming up here. The chill wind cut through to my bones.

  I pushed windblown hair out of my face as Zaira stepped forward and gripped the northward banister, leaning on it with both hands.

  “Graces wept,” she whispered hoarsely.

  A sea of red roofs separated us from the city walls and the brief stretch of rolling green-and-gold farmland beyond. The snow-dusted hills reared up soft with distance around us, and the River Arden wove a shining ribbon through it all, appearing and disappearing in bright glimpses.

  It would have been a beautiful view if it weren’t for the hazy pall of smoke hanging over everything, and the terrible black scar of the valley.

  From up here, there was no missing the sheer scope of the charred, ruined wasteland Zaira’s flames had created. The blasted swath of blackened stubble and gray ash stretched the width of the valley and much of the length of it, endless acres of scorched earth where there had once been fields and farms, taverns and houses. Low skittering clouds of ash blew streaks across the jumbled mess of sticks and cinders; here and there the thin crumbling spike of a blackened cypress trunk or house beam remained jutting up from the rest.

  We were too far away to see the bones, thank the Graces.

  I stepped up beside Zaira and gazed out at what we had done.

  “It’s like the paintings of the Dark Days in the temples. Or the Hell of Death itself.” Zaira’s knuckles flared white on the railing.

  There was no denying it. All the scene needed was demons with whips driving the damned before them. I couldn’t think what to say, so I simply stood there at her side.

  “All my life, I’ve had to worry about people treating me like some kind of demon.” Zaira’s voice wound tight to the point of breaking. “Now it turns out they were right.”

  I remembered what Bree had said: She’s not human.

  “They’re wrong.” I squeezed Zaira’s shoulder and released it. “I know you, Zaira. You’re no less human than I am. Or than my mother, or Kathe, or anyone with power.”

  “Those are terrible examples. Your mother and the Crow Lord are demons, too.” The corner of Zaira’s mouth twitched, ever so slightly. “You’re bad at this, Cornaro.”

  Like Kathe. “Ask Terika, next time you see her, then,” I urged. “She’ll tell you you’re human.”

  “She’s biased.”

  “Well, ask your dog,” I said desperately. “I’m sure they can smell monsters. Right?”

  Zaira laughed. There was an edge to it, but it was real. “Scoundrel would cuddle up to the Demon of Carnage himself for a bit of leftover beef.” She shook her head. “No, let me be a demon. This is worse if I’m human. A human shouldn’t do something like this.”

  I gazed out over the fields of smoking ruin. “I can’t do that,” I said quietly.

  Zaira pulled her eyes from the devastation to look at me. They were deep black wells, bottomless and aching. “Do what?”

  “Let you be a demon.” I gave a helpless shrug. “You’re my friend.”

  For a while, she stared at me in silence. Then her mouth moved in the ghost of a smile. “You have questionable taste in friends.”

  A Witch Lord, a chimera, and a killer of thousands. “I suppose I see what you mean,” I allowed. “But no. I have to disagree. My taste in friends is excellent.”

  Her slim warm hand found mine, and we stared out at the plain of death together.

  Chapter Thirty

  There is one k
ey question we need to answer,” I said, scanning the faces gathered around me in a meeting room at the Serene Envoy’s palace.

  “Where I can get decent beer in this city?” Bree suggested, leaning an elbow on the table.

  “How to prevent energy loss over time in a solar artifice circle?” Domenic countered.

  “Most satisfying place to stab Ruven,” Zaira declared, with finality.

  “Zaira’s closest,” I said grimly.

  Kathe let go a sigh as carefully as if he’d cradled it for half a year. “How do you kill an immortal?”

  Everyone turned to look at him. He seemed to take up an unequal space somehow as he lounged at the table, like his namesake crow strutting in among a flock of sparrows. I’d given him his cloak back before the meeting; every time my eyes fell on its feathery ruff about his shoulders, I couldn’t help but recall its soft, light warmth.

  “Since you mention it,” I said, “yes. That.”

  Silence fell over the room in heavy folds. Domenic’s eyes sat in shadowy pools of exhaustion—I doubted he’d gotten a full night’s sleep in days. Zaira met no one’s gaze, strain showing in the taut lines of her face. Bree had left a certain extra distance between her chair and Zaira’s—out of instinctive awe rather than on purpose, I suspected, but I had no doubt Zaira had noticed. I’d invited Istrella, but she was late—busy with some project at the garrison probably, but I couldn’t help worrying extra significance into the delay even though an accurate sense of the passage of time had never been one of Istrella’s signal virtues.

  Lucia should be here, too, and I knew it. And Marcello, of course. Their absence ached like missing fingers.

  Domenic frowned. “Define immortal.”

  “There are two problems.” I glanced at Kathe, but he’d leaned back in his chair and looked disinclined to talk, so I continued on my own. “First, he’s a Witch Lord, which means that the vast power of life in his domain will allow him to survive almost any injury short of completely destroying his body. Second, he’s a Skinwitch, which means he can heal himself instantly of any harm we manage to inflict.”