The Defiant Heir

by Melissa Caruso

  “I can leave, if my presence is unwanted,” I said. Curiosity and alarm mixed a pulse-quickening elixir in my gut, but no amount of mystery would compel me to stand here and let my adversary insult me to my face.

  “I won’t blame you either way,” Kathe muttered, “but there’s advantage to be had here, if you know how to take it.” Then he raised his voice as he turned to the Lady of Thorns. “If you think a moment, I’m sure several reasons will occur to you why I might bring the Lady Amalia to our meeting. None of them involve you being rude to my guest.”

  “I can indeed think of several motives you might have, and they all come down to either an offer or an insult.” The slim tendrils of briar vines around the Lady of Thorns’ feet began slithering across the ground toward me. “Surely you would never presume to the latter. As for rudeness, if you wish, I can be entirely polite while I eviscerate her.”

  My legs strained with the urge to run, but I held my ground. I had to get some measure of control over this conversation before it became unrecoverable.

  “I’ll grant that we are enemies,” I said, forcing the edge in my voice to be stern rather than afraid. “But you are alone, outside your domain, and one word from me will unleash a fire straight from the Hell of Death itself. I came here for a civil conversation, not a violent conflict. Did you not do the same?” I hoped she would answer; the question was far from rhetorical.

  “You dare threaten me, you powerless worm?” the Lady of Thorns hissed. Her bramble vines reared up like cobras. My heart stumbled in panic, but I held my ground, desperately hoping Kathe would do something and not merely watch with curiosity as I was ripped apart by angry flora.

  Kathe looked back and forth between us with apparent amusement. But when he spoke to the Lady of Thorns, his voice cracked like a whip. “Do you truly think this is the best way to help your daughter?”

  The thorny tendrils froze, a few feet from my boot tips. “What do you mean?”

  Tension crackled in the air between them. Kathe wound it tighter with a slow, wide grin. “Why risk your purpose here in Callamorne? Besides, I could hardly overlook a grievance so significant as an attack on the woman I’m courting—and you know what I have to offer you.”

  Twin circles bright as poison flicked in my direction, then back to him. “If you came here to trade, then do it.”

  “Ah, ah.” Kathe lifted a finger. “I’m not sealing any bargains until the Conclave. You’ll have to wait till then if you want my cooperation. In the meantime, I know you came here to pay a call on the Queen of Callamorne—and I doubt she’ll receive you if you murder her granddaughter.”

  The Lady of Thorns regarded him for a long moment. I watched them both narrowly, searching for any further clue of what understanding might pass between them.

  Finally, she let out a sigh. The briars she’d sent toward me collapsed, withering, with her released breath. “Very well. You’ve made your point. We can finalize our deal at the Conclave.”

  “Oh, good.” Kathe rubbed his hands together.

  “And you, upstart Lochaver.” The Lady of Thorns sneered as she turned toward me. “I’m letting you live now only out of respect for the Crow Lord. If you show such brazen cheek to me again, know that I’ll send you to meet your father.”

  She spun with a swirl of velvet train and stalked off between two twisted black trees. A latticework of branches spread in sudden, groaning growth between them, like the slamming of a door.

  My father. I felt as if I’d swallowed a coal: cold and hard for now, but harboring the potential to burst into flame.

  “We’d best go quickly, before she changes her mind,” Kathe murmured. “I’m not certain I can beat her if it comes to a fight.”

  He offered his elbow as we turned back toward the forest, but I didn’t take it. “You implied you’d sell me to her,” I accused.

  He glanced back over his shoulder, then hurried faster through the crunching brush. When the sound-swallowing pines engulfed us once more in their dripping shade, he said quietly, “You’re Raverran. I trust you understand the principles behind letting someone think you can give them what they want.”

  “Like you’ve been doing with me,” I said pointedly.

  “Well, yes.” He flashed me a smile. “But I’ve already delivered something of value to you.”

  “What, death threats?” I demanded. Graces, he could be infuriating.

  “The best currency of all, of course. Information.” He assumed a pedantic expression, spoiled by the mad yellow rings in his eyes. “Tell me, what did you learn today?”

  “I learned to always ask you where exactly we’re going before letting you take me anywhere!”

  “Quite a valuable lesson.” He nodded. “What else?”

  “That the Lady of Thorns is incredibly rude and disrespectful.”

  “That’s because you’re not mage-marked.” His tone grew heavy with some buried emotion. “I’m afraid there are some among my peers who believe those without magical ability to be beneath those with it. Property, not people. The Lady of Thorns is the worst of the lot.”

  “Lovely woman,” I said through gritted teeth. The path inclined upward toward the road, but my anger drove me up the hill with far less effort than it would usually have taken me. “I also learned that she apparently wants to kill my family.”

  “See?” He spread his hands. “I could have told you that, I suppose, but I feel direct personal experience is the best teacher.”

  “Forgive my reluctance to sign up for practical lessons when the subject is powerful mages trying to murder me,” I said.

  “Anything else?” Kathe asked brightly.

  Yes. Several things. Like what Kathe had said about her daughter, and how it had stopped her cold. Or that she had plans to visit my grandmother, which seemed ominous given her apparent animosity for Lochavers. But we’d broken out of the trees, and Marcello waited as tense as a leashed hound by the coach, surrounded by mounted guards. I only had time for one question, and the coal smoldering in my belly demanded an answer.

  I stopped and faced Kathe. “Did she kill my father?”

  The animation and mischief drained out of his face, leaving his eyes bright and somber. “I don’t know,” he said quietly. “But I suspect she did.”

  A hot flood of emotions threatened to break through me in a boiling wave. I stuffed them down, for now; he might be wrong. And I couldn’t do anything about it at the moment.

  Still, it took me a moment to force my jaw to unlock. “You’re right,” I said. “It was useful information.”

  He bowed, with only a hint of his usual mockery. “Glad I could help. I’m sure I’ll see you again soon, Amalia Cornaro.”

  I nodded, my neck stiff. Then I turned, smoothing my face out into a mask of serenity, and picked my way around mud puddles to the coach.

  Thoughts and feelings about my father and the Lochaver family and the Lady of Thorns rattled around in my head like a handful of pebbles, shaken by the motion of the coach. Nothing had settled when, a few hours later, we first caught sight of Durantain.

  The Callamornish capital spilled from a blocky stone castle at the crest of a hill down to the narrow twist of river valley at its foot, washing partway up the side of the next hill. The gray slate roofs and square construction of the houses gave it a businesslike look from afar, as if every shop and home might at any moment disgorge grim-faced warriors armed with whatever implements came to hand—and there had been times in Callamorne’s history when that wasn’t far from the case. The only signs that the city had changed in the past two hundred years were the tall poles of courier-lamp relay posts scattered about the hill, sending signals away from the spire that now ruined the symmetry of the castle’s towers. Another sending spire jutted up from a large house near the crest of the hill: the Serene Envoy’s palace, where the Empire’s adviser to the queen kept his residence.

  This was my father’s city. He’d grown up here, in that castle on the hill, as a prince. I
had few memories of him, but my time-hazed impression was that he was both more playful and more soothing than my mother, a calm presence full of bubbling good humor. It was hard to connect this rain-drenched place with my warm, faded memories of the man who’d held me on his knee and told me the story of the Dark Days, with gravelly booming voices for the demons, and rich lovely ones for the Nine Graces who taught humanity how to drive them back.

  I could conceive of no reason why a Witch Lord would want to murder him. A Raverran, surely, to get at my mother. Perhaps even some misguided Callamornish patriot seeking to break the treaty that bound their country to the Empire. But a Witch Lord? My father had been the kind parent, the quiet one, full of wry compassion and threatening nobody.

  When we arrived in the open square before the castle gates, a grand public reception awaited us. Ranks of royal guards stood in smart attendance, cuirasses gleaming and muskets on their shoulders. A curious crowd filled the square, children riding on their parents’ shoulders in hopes of a glimpse of the royal family; the people of Callamorne adored the Lochavers, in no small part due to my grandmother’s legendary heroics in conflicts with Vaskandar in her youth.

  My grandmother and cousins came out to greet us. The queen cut a regal figure in her stiff leather doublet with ornamented bright steel scrolling, halfway a cuirass; a fur-trimmed mantle hung from her shoulders. Her long silver hair fell over one shoulder in a thick braid from beneath her simple circlet crown. She looked every inch a warrior, as always, ready to draw the more than ornamental sword at her side and cut down the enemies of her kingdom at any moment despite her advancing years.

  As I descended the coach steps to meet them, Roland gave me a serious nod, doing his best to look suitably princely in a military-cut burgundy velvet doublet with a hundred tiny buttons down the front. Bree, by contrast, seemed poised off-balance, as if she might lunge suddenly into action at any moment—which, knowing Bree, she might. She’d pulled her hair into a messy knot at the back of her head and wore a gorgeous copper-and-russet brocade half-cloak slung off one shoulder, over a simple cream-colored tunic dress with split sleeves and sides, leaving her limbs unencumbered. I suspected she could move in it quite freely.

  “Amalia!” Bree called, and ran to give me a fierce hug. “It’s good to see you.” Roland clasped my shoulder, with more decorum.

  My grandmother swept piercing gray eyes across my companions; they lingered on Zaira, who stretched and yawned as she climbed out of the carriage, her jess catching the light.

  “Welcome home,” she said in a deep voice that rolled out like thunder over the crowd. Cheering greeted this pronouncement, and I felt an odd, guilty pang: Raverra was home. Callamorne, with its straightforward blocky grayness, was a foreign country.

  Under cover of the crowd’s cheering, I murmured to my family, “The Lady of Thorns is in Callamorne and intends to pay you some sort of unspecified visit, Grandmother.”

  The queen’s eyes narrowed. “Come inside, then, and we’ll talk.”

  “… So she’s a short distance from Durantain, and the Crow Lord said she’d come to ‘pay a call,’” I concluded urgently, after telling my family everything from our suspicions that she’d planted a traitor among us to my unexpected meeting with the Lady of Thorns. We stood clustered in the castle courtyard, while grooms bustled to take our horses and those of our escort off to the stables for a well-earned rest.

  My grandmother exchanged glances with Roland. “That’s not as unusual as you might think. Our relationship with Vaskandar is … complicated. Since their personal power makes them virtually invulnerable, when a Witch Lord takes it into their head that they have something to say to us, they often just walk right up over the mountains and say it.”

  “Given that she’s preparing for war, I don’t like it,” Roland said, his brows drawing a line of concern across his forehead. “Vivomancers don’t have many offensive options in stone cities, but she may have brought hidden forces with her.”

  “I’ll increase the guard and arm them with defenses against vivomancy, just in case,” my grandmother said. “And tell them not to let her in if she shows up unannounced.”

  Roland gave Zaira a small smile. “At any rate, I suspect even a Witch Lord would hesitate to start a fight with a fire warlock in residence.”

  Zaira curtsied. “All-powerful murderous mages deterred. Free service with room and board.”

  We barely had time to settle into our guest rooms and bathe before dinner, which was always a grand and disquietingly public affair in the royal court of Callamorne. The whole castle broke bread at the same time in a great, high-arched hall hung with banners and tapestries that fell the full three stories from ceiling to floor.

  Callamorne’s meticulous attention to rank and precedence put me at the royal table with my family. They’d seated Zaira with me; whether because she was my Falcon or out of deference to her ability to destroy entire cities if she became vexed, I couldn’t guess. Marcello and the other Falcons and Falconers had been placed at the high tables that flanked us at right angles, too far away for conversation.

  Roland, as the heir, sat at the queen’s right hand. But my grandmother was deep in discussion of defense planning with the Serene Envoy, which left him and Bree free to converse with Zaira and me.

  “So, how have you been?” Bree asked. “We’ve heard some wild rumors here. That you murdered the Duke of Ardence—”

  “You’ve heard that here?” I exclaimed, dismayed. “I didn’t kill him! I was framed.”

  “—and drove Prince Ruven of Vaskandar out of the Empire with balefire—”

  “I would have loved to,” Zaira grumbled. “But no, she just threatened him.”

  “—and that you’re courting the Crow Lord.” Bree laughed and shook her head.

  I shifted in my chair. “Ah, well, as to that …”

  Bree and Roland both stared at me, eyes gone wide as wine cups.

  “It’s true.” Zaira sighed. “There’s no accounting for taste, but maybe his options were limited in Vaskandar.”

  “You’re joking,” Roland said, shock or disapproval flattening his voice. “You can’t be serious.”

  “Is that going to be a problem here?” I asked, worried. “I didn’t think of the political ramifications in Callamorne. I know there can be a certain, ah, animosity toward mages here.”

  Zaira raised an eyebrow. “Oh, really?”

  “Only among idiots,” Bree grumbled. “But every country has a fair number of those.”

  “It’s why our father had to abdicate as Grandmother’s heir, and never comes to Durantain.” Roland kept his voice low, glancing at the nobles seated at the other high tables. “Everyone accepted Grandfather as king because he was only Grandmother’s consort, but neither our people nor Raverra would be pleased to see a ruling vivomancer on the throne.”

  Bree scowled and stabbed her table knife into the slice of roast on her plate. “If he cared about his family, he wouldn’t let stupid politics keep him at the far end of Callamorne. He’d be here, with us, and if anyone was nasty to him we’d make them choke on it.”

  Roland cleared his throat. “Be that as it may, I think you’ll be all right, Amalia. The people remember that Grandmother’s marriage stopped a war. They’ll understand.”

  “And are your people going to say things to me that make me punch them in the face?” Zaira growled.

  “Oh, no.” Roland waved his hands. “The prejudice in Callamorne is only against vivomancers, because we’ve suffered so much at their hands in war. Everyone loves warlocks.”

  Zaira blinked. “That’s a new one.”

  “The first known storm warlocks ruled Callamorne over a thousand years ago,” I explained. “It was the height of Callamorne’s power, before the rise of the Serene Empire or even the Witch Lords. The Storm Queens of Callamorne ravaged every coastline in Eruvia and were responsible for the fall of ancient Osta.”

  “I don’t think anyone outside Callamorne looks back
on them fondly,” Roland admitted. “But no one should give you trouble. Given what the Witch Lords have waiting for us across the border, everyone feels much better with a fire warlock on our side.”

  “What do they have waiting?” I nudged my glass, as if shifting its angle might magically cause it to be filled with wine rather than the beer they seemed to prefer in Callamorne. “I’ve only seen markers on a map.”

  “Chimeras,” he said darkly. “All manner of creatures twisted to new forms by the Witch Lords’ magic.”

  Bree spread her hands with evident relish. “Picture venomous bears the size of horses. Wolves with rat tails and porcupine quills. Leopards with lizard skin and rows of teeth like a shark. Great clouds of razor-winged moths that suck your blood.”

  “You haven’t seen anything like that!” Roland said.

  “Oh, how would you know?” Bree turned to me. “He hasn’t been to the border. He’s not expendable, like some of us.”

  “Go on, rub it in, that you get to lap up the glory while I’m stuck at court,” Roland said tartly. “But you still haven’t seen all that.”

  “So,” I asked Roland tentatively, “are you saying the chimeras aren’t like that? My reading suggests that what Bree describes is possible for a sufficiently powerful vivomancer, but I’m dubious anyone could create enough of them to fill the ranks of an army.”

  “Not whole armies of them, no,” Roland said. “Individuals and small packs. It doesn’t take many to cause a lot of chaos, especially when they’re backed up by musketeers and pikemen. They break your lines with the chimeras, or get them over the walls of a fortress, and then the human troops come behind to clean up.”

  Bree turned to Zaira and me, assuming a pompous expression. “You’d best listen to Roland. He is the Anointed Heir, and he Knows Things.”

  Here they go. Hopefully they were old enough not to wind up hitting each other this time.

  “Hmph.” Roland crossed his arms. “You’d know things, too, if you didn’t skip strategy meetings to go drinking and carousing in the worst parts of town until all hours of the night.”