The Unbound Empire

by Melissa Caruso

  “You can ask,” I agreed coldly.

  Ruven chuckled. “Spoken like a queen sitting on her throne. But my lady, forgive me, you are no queen here. You cannot dictate terms to me. You have only one choice left to make.” He came closer, every step shattering charred bone. “You can leave here as my vassal, bound to my service by the potion you so detest. Or you can leave here as my willing partner, to stretch the bounds of what magic can accomplish together, forging new realms of scholarship and dominion.”

  “And why should I make such a choice?” I had to stall him to give the reinvigoration potion time to work, or in case some other desperate chance presented itself. “For that matter, what makes you think I’d stay loyal to you if I said I’d join you?” Keep talking.

  “You know why.” Ruven snapped his fingers; behind me, Marcello groaned weakly with pain. “Accept my offer, and Captain Verdi becomes human again—and remains so only for so long as you serve me well. Reject it, and he stays a chimera for the rest of his life, which is likely to be a rather short one. I have no reason to keep him alive if he gives me no sway over you.”

  “What about Zaira?” I asked. “And Kathe?”

  Ruven sighed. “Alas, they are both too dangerous to live. Much as I like the idea of a fire warlock under my command, I have no illusions that she would prove anything but trouble. As for the Crow Lord, he will lie under this lake until he dies. Given what I learned of his greatest fear from the Lady of Spiders, it won’t be long.” He stopped at last, only a few paces from me. His violet-ringed eyes narrowed with satisfaction. “No, Lady Amalia, your position is too weak to negotiate. You may purchase one mercy from me, and only one.”

  I knew how I must look to him: tears streaking my face, barely standing. My coat stained with blood, my tangled hair blowing loose in the wind.

  But if he thought that tears and pain made a person weak, he understood nothing of what it was to be human.

  “Duly noted,” I said, like a tomb door grinding shut, stone on stone.

  “You have already lost.” Ruven didn’t bother to hide how he savored the words. “You only have to decide whether to save your friend, or to damn him.”

  I closed my eyes to shut out Ruven’s face. I had promised myself not to abandon Marcello again, not after I’d walked out of the room while he begged me to stay, leaving him to his fate. And yet I might well have killed him. My mother had advised me to draw hard lines I would not cross. Where could I draw such a line, if not at the abandonment of a friend to death, or to life as a monster?

  I’d told Kathe I’d die before bending the knee to Ruven. But there were so many fates worse than death.

  “You are out of time, Lady Amalia,” Ruven said. I opened my eyes to find him holding out a hand to me, an eager glint in his violet-ringed gaze. “You have spurned my hand before, no matter how many times I have offered it in good faith. Take it now, and accept my dominion at last.”

  I stared at his offered hand, lean and elegant and well-manicured. He extended it farther, insistent.

  “Take it,” he repeated, his voice gaining an edge of urgency.

  This mattered to him. For all he pretended indifference to what I chose, he desperately wanted me to say yes.

  Of course he grew up twisted by fear, the Lady of Spiders had said. He was afraid, surrounded by enemies; he craved the power in my blood, and the power of the Empire that I could wield, to make him safe.

  After all he’d done to me and those I loved, the arrogant bastard was begging me to save him.

  I crossed the few steps between us, forcing myself to come within his reach. Ash stirred up at my every step. Ruven held his hand ready, smile spreading, already triumphant.

  “I’m going to regret this,” I murmured.

  “You may,” he said. “But I doubt that I will.”

  “We’ll see.”

  I swallowed to stop the bile that tried to rise at the back of my throat and forced myself to reach out and clasp his offered hand.

  Ruven’s fingers tightened over mine, as if he were afraid I might change my mind and try to pull them back. Immediately, his magic began crawling up my arm, a pins-and-needles numbing pain that made my stomach turn.

  I met his gloating eyes and smiled. “In Callamorne, they shake hands to seal a deal.”

  I jerked my hand sharply down, then up. The jess I’d pushed up my arm slid down to my wrist, and then over his.

  “Revincio,” I whispered.

  The ache of magic in my arm cut off immediately. Ruven’s eyes widened, and he sucked in a sharp breath through his teeth.

  I didn’t dare give him a chance to recover from his shock. I snatched Kathe’s dagger from Ruven’s belt and started stabbing everything I could reach, blind panic erasing all of Ciardha’s training.

  Kathe’s knife was sharp as starlight, and blood slicked my hands as it found Ruven’s stomach, then his chest, then opened a deep slash in his cheek. There you go, Zaira. I stabbed him in the face for you.

  Ruven staggered back, lifting his arms to ward me off, the jess gleaming bright on his wrist. But when I lunged at his neck with the wild hope of severing it, his hands shot out and clamped on my throat.

  “You vile common filth,” he snarled. “You dare!”

  I struggled to breathe, my pulse pounding against his grip, and kept stabbing at him. Ruven bared his teeth and squeezed harder. “I would have spared you!” he hissed. “I could have used you! But now you give me no choice but to kill you.”

  It was no good. Sparks swarmed at the edges of my vision, and Kathe’s knife grated on a rib and twisted from my loosened grasp. Even without Ruven’s magic, it simply took too much to kill him. My lungs heaved, but Ruven’s fingers dug into my throat like steel.

  “Hey, leave some for me,” Zaira rasped from the ground behind me.

  Twin lines of blue fire arced around me, scribing a circle on the ground, and crossed through Ruven like scissor blades closing.

  He burst into flame. A scream rose from his throat, of pure agonized terror, as balefire roared up from his coat, his boots, his flesh. He released my throat and I fell to my knees, gasping, surrounded by a circle of fire.

  Ruven tugged frantically at the jess on his wrist with fingers withering to bone in furious, moon-pale flames. He pulled his belt knife from a sheath of flames and sawed desperately at his own arm with it, but the blade’s edges had already blurred and melted. Fire devoured his shining golden hair, caressed the flesh from his fine-boned face, clothed him in a robe of glory such as the Demon of Death would tremble to wear.

  He was a charred ruin of a man, still standing in the heart of a pillar of flame that shouted his destruction to the heavens. The trees on the shore thrashed in his agony, raining down pine needles upon the snow as he sucked the life from them to stay alive. But he couldn’t heal himself, and piece by piece the balefire was gnawing him to ashes.

  He staggered at me. He reached out, whether to plead for his life or to attack; the jess dangled golden from his wrist. Blistering heat rolled off him, and the violet rings of his mage mark still blazed somehow in eyes that were nearly gone.

  Zaira stepped up beside me, into my circle of fire. Her eyes held a cold, pure clarity, breathtaking as the geometric perfection of the rose-window center of Aelie’s web. But there was nothing distant or divine about the raw, human pain and triumph on her face.

  She lifted one hand palm-out toward Ruven, and the flames devouring him roared up higher still. And she reached out the other hand, without looking, to me.

  I took it and heaved myself to my feet. We stood there, side by side, holding hands, as Ruven at last crumpled to ash and scattered across the rocks on the wind.

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Zaira lowered her hand, and the flames flickered out. A winter chill descended immediately, stinging my parched skin. She swayed on her feet, and I caught her under the elbow.

  “Is it wrong of me to want to piss on his ashes?” she murmured, her eyes sagging shut
despite all her attempts to keep them open.

  “Maybe later,” I said. “Rest now.”

  She nodded, and slid down my side to lean against a rock, its sides blackened and slicked by fire.

  I sucked in a shuddering breath. This wasn’t over. “I have to see if I can help Marcello and—”

  A series of sharp cracks escalated to a shattering noise as if all the wineglasses in the Imperial Palace had been dropped at once. The ice coating the lake exploded in a shower of shards like falling snow, and a great tangle of roots rose up out of the churning water.

  Kathe rode them, braced on the twisting branches, hunched over as he coughed up bloody lake water. The crows that had been circling and crying in the air above swooped down at once to greet him, settling around him protectively.

  I ran to the water’s edge. He was alive, at least, thank the Graces. “Kathe! Are you all right?” I called, but as I did, I dropped to my knees beside Marcello.

  His face was pale, his eyes closed, and he was barely breathing. Hells have mercy, if I’d killed him despite everything, I would never forgive myself.

  Kathe straightened, dripping, his ripped tunic plastered to his chest. The roots braided a bridge in front of his feet; as he walked toward the shore, a murder of crows carried his cloak to him, draping its feathered warmth over his shoulders. He hardly looked in better shape than Marcello, with blue lips and washed-out bloodstains, but his mage mark shone fierce as ever from his shadowed eyes.

  “How is Captain Verdi?” he asked, in a voice ragged around the edges.

  “I don’t know.” I bit my lip so fiercely I tasted blood. I’d never learned anything about treating wounds; I didn’t have the faintest idea what to do to help him. It was always easier to break things than to fix them.

  Kathe splashed through the last few feet to shore. He stumbled as he set foot on land, but caught himself, and crouched down beside me in a rustle of feathers. Icy cold poured off him, and his skin looked waxy and pale.

  “Are you sure you’re all right?” I asked him in alarm, and then realized he’d never answered my question in the first place.

  Kathe closed his eyes and laid two fingers to the pulse in Marcello’s neck. “I’ll be fine,” he said. “I just… It wasn’t good.”

  I slipped an arm around his cold, wet back, under his cloak, and steadied him. He shivered, so minutely I wouldn’t have noticed if I hadn’t been touching him.

  After a moment, he rocked back on his heels and let out a breath. “The good news is that Ruven appears to have permanently altered Captain Verdi’s ability to withstand grievous injuries and heal quickly, so he may survive.” He met my eyes. “The bad news is that he does appear to have made far more extensive alterations than you can see on the surface, and they’re permanent, too. I’m sorry, Amalia.”

  And we had killed the only man who could restore him to what and whom he had been. I covered my eyes with a hand for a moment, trying not to think, trying to stop terrible possibilities from unfolding in my mind.

  “Let’s make sure he lives, first,” I said. “We’ll figure out the rest later.”

  When we arrived at the closest village across the Let border, they had mulled wine, fresh clothes, soft beds, and a physician waiting, courtesy of Glass and Verin. They must have told the residents to leave us alone; the struggle not to ask questions or express concern was plain on the villagers’ faces as they welcomed us into the largest house in town, which they’d quickly emptied for their lord and his guests, and made themselves scarce.

  The physician took immediate charge of Marcello, shaking her head at the state of him. Zaira and Kathe were in hardly better shape. Zaira didn’t even make it inside before collapsing as the temporary energy from Terika’s reinvigoration potion abandoned her. As for Kathe, Witch Lords might be hard to kill, but being impaled, poisoned, and drowned was still quite a lot to recover from. His lips still had a blue tinge, and his face was pale and exhausted. I hesitated, torn between making certain Kathe and Zaira were well and following after the physician to anxiously await news of Marcello’s prospects.

  “Will you be all right?” I asked Kathe, as Verin and Glass saw Zaira safely bundled into a warm bed to sleep and regain her strength.

  “I must admit I’ve been better.” He winced and put a hand to his chest. From what I could see through the tear in his tunic, while his wound had stopped bleeding, it was far from healed. “I think I need to fall into bed like Zaira.” His voice dropped to a subdued murmur. “But first I have to tell Verin and Glass about Hal.”

  I laid a hand on his still-damp arm; his whole body was tense as a drawn bow. “They know,” I said.

  “I know they do. But I still have to tell them.” He squeezed my shoulder with an icy hand, his gaze solemn. “Go watch over your captain. Verin and Glass will take good care of me.”

  A burst of anguish for all of them surged raggedly through me, and I planted a hurried near-miss kiss on his sharp cheekbone before whirling and running after Marcello.

  The physician had taken him to an upstairs bedroom to treat him. I paced and waited outside its plain wooden door, worrying my ragged lace cuffs to shreds. Kathe’s voice rose and fell below, incomprehensibly quiet, punctuated occasionally by Verin’s and Glass’s higher tones. At last, the physician opened the door, a somber frown further creasing her age-lined face.

  “How is he?” I asked, tucking my hands behind my back so I wouldn’t seize her to shake news out of her.

  “He’ll live,” she said, sounding dubious.

  I let out a long breath and leaned against the yellow-painted wall of the upstairs hallway where I’d been pacing.

  “Only because he isn’t human, though,” the physician said. “The bleeding stopped on its own, and the wound was already starting to heal. I’ve never seen anything like it. He’s already awake.”

  Instead of lifting at the news, my heart seemed to slip from my chest and slither to the floor. “He is? Did he say anything?”

  “He asked for you.” The physician gave me an odd, wary look. “You can talk to him if you want.”

  “I do,” I said, despite her look of skepticism. I could only pray to the Graces that it was because he looked like a monster, and not because he spoke like one.

  The physician moved aside and waved me in.

  I stepped into what must have been a child’s room, painted by hand with a lovely field of bright flowers on the walls, and puffy clouds drifting across a deep blue ceiling. Carved wooden animals had been hurriedly pushed into a corner to make room for a guest, and some child had piled blocks on top of a chest rather than putting them properly away. The sun had set while I waited, and beeswax candles graced the bedside table and almost every other available surface, bathing the room in golden light and the scent of honey.

  Marcello lay propped in bed, his face so pale his scales stood out darkly. He stared at me from beneath lids drooping with exhaustion, but both his green eye and the orange one focused on me with sharp intensity.

  I approached him like I would a wild animal, hardly daring to breathe. Whatever he saw in my face, it made his tighten with pain.

  “I’m sorry,” I whispered. There was no chair, so I sat down on the edge of the narrow bed, atop a bright patchwork quilt.

  “For which? Stabbing me, or saving my life?” He grimaced, and his voice softened. “I’m sorry, too.”

  “How do you feel?” I asked, watching every tiny shift in his face, every flicker in his eyes, searching to sift out what was the man I knew and what might be something else Ruven had put there.

  He pushed his hair back from his face, weariness dragging at his arm. “You mean who am I? I would very much like to know.”

  I reached out to where his hand lay on the quilt and took it gently in mine, avoiding his claws as best I could. Their hard, curving tips still lightly pricked my skin. “You’re Marcello Verdi. A captain of the Falconers and my dear friend.” I tried to say it with inarguable confidence, as if I had
no doubt whatsoever it was true.

  His lids squeezed shut, and relief washed through me at the reprieve from his unsettling inhuman eye, followed by a stab of guilt. This was his face, now, and it still belonged to a person I loved. That wasn’t Ruven glaring at me from the slit pupil, or some wild animal; it was Marcello.

  “That’s who I want to be,” he said, his voice subdued. “But I keep having these flashes of anger, Amalia, sometimes for no reason at all. I wanted to hurt the physician, when she was in here, and I barely stopped myself.”

  I squeezed his hand, my chest aching. “But you did stop yourself.”

  His eyes opened again, his brows lifting. “I did,” he said, sounding surprised. “I wouldn’t have, before Ruven died.”

  “Maybe the alchemists can try to come up with a potion to help you, when you get back to the Mews.”

  Marcello shifted uncomfortably on his pillows. “If the Mews will take me back.”

  “Why wouldn’t they?” I asked.

  He stared at me incredulously. “Amalia, I’m a chimera. How can I ask people to trust me to command them? How can I teach children? How can I…” He broke off, and covered his face with both hands. “Grace of Mercy. How can I face Istrella?”

  “She’s your sister. She loves you.”

  “My father always did say I’d come to a bad end.” The muffled laughter escaping through his fingers had an unhealthy edge to it. “Even he will have to be impressed by how far I exceeded his expectations.”

  “It’s not the end.” I touched the backs of his hands, gently, and he slid them down off his face. “So you’ve changed. I’ve changed, too.”

  His lips tightened. “Not like I have.”

  “No,” I agreed. “But Hells, I’ve killed my cousin and stabbed my friend, not to mention helping slaughter several thousand people. If you’re a monster, I’m a worse one.” It was a bitter admission, but I forced a smile. “This world will keep trying to make us harder, and more broken. But if we know who we want to be, we can keep striving to become that person.” Like Kathe, with his Heartguard. “I was worried, before you woke up, whether you would be yourself, or whether Ruven had truly killed the man you were and twisted you into something terrible.”