The Tethered Mage

by Melissa Caruso

  “No magic is absolute, as you saw when Zaira’s fires fused her jess shut. They’re supposed to be indestructible—I’ve never heard of jesses being so much as scratched before.” Marcello shook his head. “We can’t take the chance someone could find a way to remove or circumvent them. Not with a fire warlock.”

  I twirled the mangled leaf stem between my sap-sticky fingers. All that remained was a ragged spray of veins. “It still seems wrong, to keep her against her will.”

  “Maybe. Maybe it’s the lesser evil to keep the Falcons protected here, and not the good I wish it was.” He surged restlessly to his feet and began to pace. “You’ve hit on the core of every argument I have with the colonel. I believe the primary duty of the Falconers is to protect and care for the mage-marked. Or at least, that’s how I want it to be. But nothing I do, no amount of compassion I can bring to my work here, changes the fact that this is a military corps. These are soldiers.” A shriek of laughter rose up from elsewhere in the garden, and he winced. “Even the children.”

  “And they have no choice.” That was the part that bothered me, like a splinter under my fingernail. “From the moment they’re born.”

  “The mage-marked don’t have much chance to make choices, even if the Falconers never find them.”

  Some heavy knowledge burdened his voice. I’d heard tales of all manner of tragedies happening to mages: murdered by superstitious folk, forced to use their powers in unsavory ways, or cast out in fear by their own families. Those without the mage mark could at least hide their abilities; and some did quite well in the open, starting magic shops or finding wealthy patrons. But the weaker magic of those without the mage mark was far less of a temptation or a threat. Perhaps one in a hundred people could manipulate magical energy at all; but without the mage mark, their capacity was limited and they lacked precise control. There was only so much they could do.

  The mage-marked were a hundred times again more rare, and could channel far more power, handling it as easily as breathing, thanks to the additional magical dexterity and perception that came with the telltale ring in their eyes. They were human beings, people who loved and dreamed and feared the same as I did, with families and lives of their own. But their power was also a priceless resource, and some saw only that. I could only imagine the sort of awful stories Marcello had seen unfold in his years as a Falconer.

  “Marcello.” I hesitated, rolling the question around in my mind to find a way to put it. “Have you ever unleashed your Falcon to … to do harm?”

  “No,” he said quietly. “My Falcon is an artificer; she just makes things. So, no. I haven’t had to face that. But after five years in the Falconers, I’ve seen what magic can do. I gave the order to release a vivomancer, who bespelled a lion to kill three brigands in Osta. That was … messy. And I ordered a storm warlock to sink a pirate ship with all hands on deck.” He shook his head. “Magic doesn’t kill cleanly.”

  I crumpled the mangled leaf. “I suppose it’s no different from when the Council of Nine passes a judgment of death. I should get used to the idea.”

  “Maybe not. Maybe you should never get used to it.” He smiled sheepishly, as if I’d caught him doing something foolish. “The colonel thinks I’m soft. She says I’ll have to toughen up if I want to take over the Falcons someday.”

  “And is that what you want?” I tried to picture him commanding the Empire’s most important military unit. I sat in on military councils a couple times a month, out of my mother’s hope I’d learn something; they were full of hard-eyed old men and women, jaded and cold. Marcello had too much warmth and expression in his clean, young face.

  But he nodded, with firm resolve. “Yes. There’s no better place from which to champion the Falcons than the top. I’m already second in command of the Mews itself—which sounds like a more important job than it is; I’m mostly in charge of training, since the Mews has never seen combat. But I could do more if I were the colonel.” He smiled, and something moved in my chest at the pain in it. “Besides, for as long as I can remember my father and brother always insisted I’d be a disappointment. I can think of no better way to prove them wrong.”

  “Really? Your own family?” The idea seemed foreign and threatening. “I disappoint my mother all the time, but because she expects more of me than I deliver, not less.”

  He sank back down onto his lion head. Some old, bitter ache ghosted his eyes. “My brother is the golden child, the heir, born of the first, beloved wife, who died too young. My little sister and I are the unwanted afterthoughts born of the inconvenient second wife who ran off to join the theater and left us behind.”

  “That’s cruel. To abandon her children like that.”

  Marcello shrugged. “I don’t blame her. Much. My father can be a hard man to live with. There’s a reason I became a Falconer at fourteen. Well, more than one, but getting out of his house was part of it.”

  I stared at him. A wistful gravity had drawn his brows down and sobered the lines of his face. Some quality about him had been nagging in the back of my mind since we met, like a piece of a song I’d forgotten. Something I never saw in my mother’s world of carefully chosen words and courtly glamour. I recognized it at last: vulnerability.

  For a moment, I couldn’t think of any words that weren’t stupid, and busied myself fiddling with a loose thread on my jacket.

  “Marcello,” I asked at last, “what will we do about Zaira?”

  He let out a long breath. “We try again tomorrow. It’s the only thing we can do.”

  La Contessa pulled me aside in the foyer of our palace, less than a minute after I’d stepped out of my boat on returning home from the Mews.

  “It didn’t go well, did it?” she said after one glance at my face.

  “She’s not happy with me, Mamma.”

  “I want to hear everything. But right now I have a few of the Council here, to discuss intelligence updates. Wait for me in the library; I’m sure you can amuse yourself there.”

  “An intelligence meeting?” I frowned. It wasn’t the usual day, which meant something had happened to trigger one. “Does it have to do with my Falcon?”

  “Perhaps. I hope not. Now, go to the library, and I’ll join you there afterward.”

  “Yes, Mamma.”

  She slipped back into the drawing room from which she’d emerged, as if swept once more into the center of intrigue by a powerful current. I turned dutifully toward the library, though after my ill-fated meeting with Zaira and my mother’s ominous pronouncement, I was more in a state of mind to brood than to read.

  My mother’s voice floated after me, through the drawing room door: “Back to the matter of Ardence.”

  I froze in midstep, as if she’d said my name. Ardence again. And a matter she hoped wouldn’t involve my Falcon.

  It couldn’t be good for the city I’d called home for a year to draw such interest from the Council of Nine, whose attention was rarely healthy even when there was no chance of fire-warlock involvement. But before I could hear more, Anzo, one of our older servants, breezed through with a wine tray, casting me a sideways glance as I hesitated in the foyer. I had no legitimate reason to linger; if I was still here when he emerged from the drawing room, he’d shoo me gently but firmly off.

  There was a listening post in the library, though. I hurried on my way.

  The leather-and-old-pages smell of the library drained the tension out of my shoulders, and my favorite fainting couch beckoned me to sprawl with a good book and order a glass of sweet dessert wine and some biscuits. But instead of succumbing to the pull of my usual shelves of history, science, and magical theory, I made straight for a certain narrow bookcase in the wall the library shared with the drawing room. I hooked my fingers behind a carved vine in the decorative molding and eased open the secret door, careful not to yank too vigorously and spill the books as I’d done once as a child.

  The narrow room between the walls held nothing more than a bench with a red velvet cushion,
barely wide enough for my hips, and an artifice circle drawn on the wall. The runes and pattern of concentric circles amplified sound coming into the listening post, and reduced it going out.

  I settled myself in and shut the door, plunging myself into darkness. The doge’s voice immediately surrounded me.

  “—new duke has gone too far. Fractious nobles daydreaming about Ardentine independence is one thing, but if Duke Astor Bergandon himself has levied a tax on Raverran merchants, that’s in direct violation of the Serene Accords. I will not countenance such a brazen challenge to the agreement that forms the foundation of the Empire.”

  I gripped the edge of my bench. That didn’t sound good. What was the duke of Ardence thinking? Raverra gave its vassal states almost complete liberty to govern themselves; but the Serene Accords, the pact that defined the fundamental relationship between Raverra and the tributary cities and countries of the Empire, were inviolate.

  “This only proves what I’ve been saying. We allow city-states like Ardence far too much license.” That was a new voice, a nasal male tenor: Baron Leodra, who fancied himself my mother’s rival. “The Serene City should take direct command, to put a stop to such nonsense before it can occur.”

  “Duke Astor has been granted no more license than his father, or all his Bergandon ancestors before him, who abided by the Serene Accords peacefully for two hundred years.” La Contessa’s tone dismissed Leodra’s suggestion. “The issue isn’t that Ardence rules itself. It’s that this particular duke is an ass.”

  “And yet the Serene Envoy to Ardence, your own cousin, requested weeks ago we empower him to overrule Duke Astor.” Leodra’s voice rose in pitch and volume. “I say we take it a step further and remove the duke of Ardence from power entirely.”

  “Do you want all our tributary states to rebel?” my mother asked acidly. “Because that’s what will happen if you forcibly remove a sovereign ruler for so little reason. I worked too hard to bring the entire nation of Callamorne into the Empire to lose it over a minor disagreement with a single city. And as for my cousin …” Silk rustled. “Ignazio had a fine rapport with the old duke, and has maintained warm relations with Ardence as Serene Envoy for ten years. However, it seems this new duke is too brash to respond well to Ignazio’s subtle guidance, and fails to understand how severely he has provoked the Serene City. We need a heavier hand at the tiller until Astor Bergandon settles down.”

  “You would remove your own cousin from such a coveted post?” The doge’s dry surprise mirrored my own shock. Ignazio—Uncle Ignazio, as I called him—had hosted me during my year in Ardence, and was the one who brewed my elixir. He’d indulged me with gifts of alchemy and history books, and hours of intelligent conversation. I couldn’t imagine he’d be happy to lose his position as the imperial power behind the ducal throne of Ardence.

  “Call him home to give him some other honorable title.” I could hear the shrug in my mother’s voice. “Make him the Chancellor of the Exchequer. He’s quite good with numbers.”

  “We must respond to Ardence’s treason with decisive punishment, not a new nursemaid,” Baron Leodra objected. “Besides, we already have a Chancellor of the Exchequer. I appointed her last spring.”

  “And she’s a dull creature, without flair or imagination, who makes mistakes.” The clink of a glass. “She can be removed.”

  “Very well.” The doge’s voice cut across Baron Leodra’s indrawn breath. “We can discuss Ignazio’s replacement as Serene Envoy at tonight’s general meeting of the Council. Do we have any other new information pertinent to the Ardentine situation?”

  “One more thing.” La Contessa’s voice dropped, and her tone went grim. “Something that could cause us far more trouble than breaking the Serene Accords, if we don’t counter it soon.”

  I strained to listen.

  Light fell across me, illuminating the artifice circle on the wall, and the voices went silent. I whirled to find Ciardha standing in the open door, one eyebrow raised in elegant disapproval.

  Chapter Five

  I can explain!” I sprang to my feet, banging my head on the low ceiling of the listening post. “I was just—”

  Ciardha lifted a finger to her lips. “A Cornaro does not need to explain, Lady. But your mother would be disappointed.”

  Shame scalded my neck. “I shouldn’t have eavesdropped.”

  “No, Lady. Eavesdropping is a fine tradition of the Raverran elite. You shouldn’t have gotten caught.” She stepped aside and gestured me out of the secret room. “You need to be more aware of your surroundings, Lady. For your own safety.”

  “Ah.” My voice came out thick with embarrassment. “I’ll work on that.”

  “Still, La Contessa will be pleased you are taking an interest in politics at last.” Ciardha’s cocked head suggested a silent question mark.

  I sank into a chair by the library fireplace. “I’m not so much interested in politics as worried about Ardence.”

  Ciardha nodded. “You have friends there.”

  “Yes. All my friends from the university.” I laced my fingers and squeezed them together. “My old study partner, Venasha, has a baby. She and her family are at risk from this foolishness.”

  Venasha had a theory that new surroundings sparked the mind, so I’d spent hours poring over books with her in all manner of unlikely places: an amulet shop, a boat moored in the River Arden, the university roof. We’d found lacy undergarments up there once, and Venasha had somehow become convinced they belonged to her philosophy professor; I hadn’t been able to look the professor in the eye since.

  “Plus Domenic is the duke’s cousin,” I added, “so he may take some of the blame. And Uncle Ignazio, of course.” My shoulders hunched under the memory of my mother casually proposing to strip him of his office. “The doge as much as told me he intends to use my Falcon to threaten anyone who goes against the Serene Empire. So it’s not political. It’s personal.”

  Ciardha smiled faintly. “All politics are personal, Lady.”

  “I don’t like the idea of being used against my friends.”

  “Then, Lady, I have one piece of advice.” Ciardha caught my eyes with her dark ones. “Don’t let them use you.”

  “The Grace of Wisdom must hate me, to stick me with such a bunch of idiots.” Zaira faced Marcello and me, arms crossed, in a bare-walled classroom. A half circle of wooden chairs embraced a low, broad stage at one end of the room. Marcello and I had taken seats with one empty chair between us, but Zaira remained standing.

  “If you will deign to talk to us nonetheless,” Marcello said wearily, “we can finish the interview regulations require us to conduct with new Falcons, and move on to the training for which Lady Amalia has come to the Mews. I only have an hour before I need to take a boat to the mainland to investigate an accusation of cattle cursing.”

  Zaira snorted. “Good to know I rank below cows for you.”

  Oh dear. I supposed I shouldn’t be surprised we were off to a bad start, but he’d stumbled straight into that one.

  Marcello looked as if he might argue, but sighed and let it pass. “So. Zaira, welcome to the Falcons. Our first priority after assuring your safety is taking care of your family. Is there anyone who might be worried about you?”

  “You asked me this before.” Her face was a locked gate, hard and blank.

  “And you didn’t answer. So I’m asking again.”

  Zaira’s shoulders moved in the barest shrug. “I don’t have family.”

  She said the word as if it were a particularly filthy social disease with which she disavowed all connection.

  Marcello’s voice softened. “Even family whom you don’t care for, or whom you think don’t care for you?”

  “No one.” Zaira clipped the words off with utter finality.

  “Friends?” Marcello pressed. “Business associates? It’s important for us to know about your connections. Not only do we want to do right by you but we want to make sure Raverra’s enemies can’t
use them against you.”

  Zaira made a show of peering at Marcello’s face. “Your black eye is fading. If you keep asking me the same question over and over, I can refresh it for you.”

  Marcello winced. “All right. How about enemies?”

  “Orthys,” she said immediately. “May the Demon of Corruption rot his poxy bowels.”

  “His men who attacked you said something about an indenture contract,” I remembered.

  “The old bilge rat claims he has a piece of paper that means my mother sold me to him, and I have to work for him.” She showed her teeth. “But I don’t have a mother. And I can’t read. And paper burns.”

  “Ah.” I digested this compelling legal argument. “Well, I’m glad he didn’t get his hands on you.”

  Zaira shot me a contemptuous glare. “Don’t fool yourself into thinking you saved me from anything. A jess is worse than any damned indenture contract.”

  Marcello passed a hand across his eyes. But he didn’t rise to her bait. “So you were serving out this indenture contract to Orthys, and you ran away?”

  “He never had me in the first place. I was free as the seagulls who crap on the Imperial Palace until you jailers found me.” She spat on the floor. Marcello winced at the practiced smack of it striking the polished boards. I looked away. “I never heard of this contract until five or six years ago. My dear mother didn’t stick around after I was born to tell me about it. Orthys comes through town every few months, so I have to dodge his scum when his ship is in port.”

  “He’s a smuggler?” I guessed.

  “I’m sure he’s a fine, upstanding, tax-paying citizen of the Empire like everyone else around here who tries to drag a girl off against her will.”

  Marcello ignored that. “So who raised you, if you have no family and didn’t grow up working for Orthys?”

  Zaira flung herself down in a chair at last, as far from us as possible, with an attitude of exhaustion. “No one. It doesn’t matter. Grace of Mercy’s tits, can we skip my life story? Once there was a girl named Zaira, who lived just fine in the Tallows until some stuck-up morons shut her up in the Mews and bored her to death. The end.”