The Defiant Heir

by Melissa Caruso

  I swallowed. Maybe she’d wear a different dress tomorrow.

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  The last few Witch Lords made less extravagant statements with their entrances. They carried such a weight of power with them that they needed no eye-catching fancies to impress their fellows. These were the surviving original Witch Lords from the earliest days of Vaskandar: the Elk Lord, with a crown of great branching antlers and a regal bearing; the Lady of Eagles, who gave me a small nod of recognition as she entered, fierce and overwhelming as I remembered in her winglike mantle; and at last the Yew Lord, thin and sharp as a knife-cut in the flesh of time, with deep, sunken eyes I could believe had seen the dawning of the world itself.

  Ruven spoke words of welcome to us all, but they sounded muffled beneath the sheer force of magic in the air. Then he offered his guests rest and refreshment and clapped his hands; servants cringed up to each group of guests, terror in their faces, to show us to our rooms.

  Kathe’s guide urged him in a different direction than ours did. He raised his brows at me. “It would seem guests are lodged in a different wing than Witch Lords. Will you be all right?”

  It only made sense. The best guest rooms would all go to the Witch Lords themselves. But still, my nerves prickled; I half expected our room to be a dungeon.

  “We’ll be fine,” I assured him. “You don’t need to protect me, remember?”

  “I should hope not.” Amusement sparkled in his eyes. “If anything, Lady Zaira could protect me.”

  “If I felt like it,” Zaira said.

  Our guide led us down ominously familiar corridors, then up the stairs past the second floor where Ruven had locked us on our ill-fated previous visit. He conducted us to the third floor, which we hadn’t seen last time, and down a hallway covered in some climbing vine with dark, triangular leaves and bloodred berries. I hoped the lattice on the outside of the castle reached this high, in case we had to escape.

  Zaira’s eyes darted down each side corridor and lingered on every doorway. “He’ll have moved Terika out of that big bedroom, with all these guests,” she muttered, dropping far enough behind the servant to be out of hearing range. “We’ll have to find her again tonight.”

  I had been so overwhelmed wondering how I could possibly conduct diplomacy with the bizarre visions I’d just seen arriving at the castle that I’d almost forgotten our other critical mission. “She’s probably with the other captured Falcons now. We can go looking for them after everyone goes to bed.”

  Zaira’s expression went grim. “If these demons even sleep.”

  There were no chimeras at our door this time, nor were we locked in. I supposed even Ruven wouldn’t quite dare mistreat the guest of another Witch Lord. So we had no need to creep along the side of the castle, which was just as well, given that our windows were higher up. Still, it felt strange to simply open our door and step out into the dim corridor. The enshrouding vines and flickering oil lamps gave it a starkly shadowed, ominous appearance.

  “No luminaries,” I murmured. “No courier lamps. No wards.”

  “They can probably see in the dark, they can send birds to carry their messages, and no one in their right mind would attack a Witch Lord,” Zaira replied. “I doubt they miss the conveniences of the Empire.”

  “You attacked a Witch Lord,” I pointed out.

  “And given that I don’t remember it, I’m fairly sure I wasn’t in my right mind at the time.” Zaira glanced up and down the corridor. “I’m betting he’ll have the Falcons in one of the towers, to keep them out of sight. Come on. And don’t skulk—we’re invited guests, and no one said we couldn’t walk around the castle at night.”

  “I’m not skulking,” I said.

  “But you were about to.”

  Whether Witch Lords slept or not, the dim corridors of the third floor were empty. The Witch Lords would have no reason to come up here, after all, and the other mortal guests were in bed. We found mostly bedrooms presumably occupied by fellow guests of Witch Lords, as well as a solarium overlooking the valley that must have a spectacular view during the day; now its windows showed only black emptiness. A covered easel tucked in a corner of the solarium reminded me of the redheaded boy we’d glimpsed on our last visit, and I wondered if he’d been allowed to keep his room on the second floor with so many important guests in the castle.

  We discovered five different stairways ascending to the cluster of towers that crowned the castle. One and only one of them bore an artifice lock freshly carved into the door.

  “It’s got to be this one,” Zaira said, stopping in front of it. “Can you open it?”

  I examined the circle. “This isn’t a standard door seal,” I realized. “Usually they open to a physical key or a password. But the runes for this one dictate that it will open to ‘the blood of the master.’” Another case of Ruven mixing imperial artifice with Vaskandran vivomancy. Now that I’d seen the Truce Stone basin, I wondered if perhaps he’d gotten the idea before he’d come to Raverra and Ardence on his journey of literary larceny, and if Interactions of Magic hadn’t been his primary goal there from the start.

  “So do we have to cut Ruven and splash his blood on the door?” Zaira sounded entirely ready to pull out her knife and go find him.

  “That might tip our hand a bit early.” I frowned at the door. There was no definition for the term master in the artifice diagram, which made no sense. It was as if the enchantment expected the door to already know who the master was.

  Of course, if it was made from a tree grown in Kazerath, it would know its master. Sprinkling Ruven’s blood on the door wouldn’t unlock it, even if we could somehow get some; the door wouldn’t recognize us.

  Or would it?

  I closed my eyes. If I drove out all the distractions—the pulse of my own anxious heart, Zaira’s breathing, the overpowering hum of magic emanating from the seventeen Witch Lords gathered in one place—I could faintly pick out the tracery of vines on the ceiling, a dim presence in my spatial sense of the corridor around me. I knew, somehow, that a spider had built its web in the corner where wall met ceiling, waiting for some lost fly to wander into its grasp. My awareness of the life in the corridor didn’t extend far—barely beyond arm’s reach—but it included, ever so weakly, the dead wood of the door before me.

  This sense of mine wasn’t magic, any more than it was magic when any normal person touched a luminary and felt the warmth of the crystal, or caught the scent of strange herbs in their wine and identified a potion hidden there. It was like the connection I could dimly sense between Zaira and me, created and anchored by the jess I’d placed upon her. The magic was there already. But because I was connected to it, I could feel it.

  The Lady of Eagles’ rivers had fed this tree. Her life had become a part of its life, and the door remembered.

  I laid my palm on the door. The wood felt warm and welcoming to my touch. It knew me.

  I pushed it open, revealing a dim stairway spiraling up into darkness.

  “How did you do that?” Zaira demanded.

  “It worked because I’m descended from the Lady of Eagles.” I stared at my own spread fingers. “No wonder the Witch Lords want this,” I whispered. No seal in Vaskandar would keep me out. Much of the country would recognize me on a deep magical level as the blood of its master.

  “Do you think Ruven realizes you can walk through all his wards?” Zaira asked warily.

  “I don’t know. He might, if he’s given thought to it. We should be careful.”

  No lamps lit the winding stone stairs, and only occasional windows let in the thin starlight. As we climbed, the darkness around us felt full, not empty, as if all manner of things might be hiding in it. And I supposed something was: this was Ruven’s domain now, and his power flowed through every part of it.

  The Wolf Lord had known when we crept around his castle. Ruven might be too new to his role to recognize our steps falling out of place, among all the other lives moving about all the land in
Kazerath, especially with the power of all seventeen Witch Lords gathered below us, unstable and dangerous as the fires within Mount Whitecrown itself. But then again, he might not.

  The low murmur of subdued voices came from above, too muffled to make out words. Zaira froze ahead of me on the steps. I barely made out that her shadowy outline had stopped before running into her.

  She started moving again, silent as falling snow. My huffing from all the climbing sounded impossibly loud by comparison. I did my best to quiet my breathing and followed.

  Lamplight trickled down the stairwell; soon it became apparent that it leaked from under a door at the top. A woman’s deep, mature voice came from within.

  “I’m not sure we can risk drawing their attention. Some of them make him look like the Grace of Mercy, if you believe the rumors.”

  “That’s Namira,” Zaira whispered. “I’m going in.”

  I loosened one of my artifice rings and nodded.

  Zaira flung open the door on a wide, round room that took up the entire level of the tower. Oil lamps and candles lit a simple living area, with chairs around the hearth and a large dining table; a couple of cots were crammed in against the far wall, and open stairs led up to another floor.

  The cots stood empty, the blankets neatly made. Half a dozen people sat around the table, leaning conspiratorially together, the flickering lights throwing their faces into shadow: old and young, male and female, some of them all too familiar. When the door flew open, they recoiled in surprise; a few sprang to their feet.

  Terika was among them. She froze, gripping the table, her eyes wide. The missing artificer Namira sat beside her, expression rapidly changing from shock and alarm to a broad grin. The other four I didn’t immediately recognize, though at least one or two of them looked familiar from around the Mews.

  We’d found the missing Falcons.

  “Don’t be alarmed,” I said quickly, to the ones I didn’t know well. “We’re here to help you.”

  “We don’t need help,” Terika said, her voice raspy with emotion. Her gaze locked on Zaira as if no one else were in the room.

  “Of course not,” said a thin young man with perfectly groomed brown ringlets and tired eyes. His voice dripped sarcasm. “We’re so very happy here.”

  Namira stood and offered me a bow. “Lady Amalia, Zaira, I can’t tell you how glad I am to see you.”

  “Terika,” Zaira said urgently. “Your grandmother is all right. They made her the potion, and she’s fine.”

  Terika closed her eyes and swallowed. “Thank the Graces. Thank you for telling me. And now, please …” she trailed off, shaking her head.

  Zaira’s voice took on an edge. “What’s wrong? You don’t look good.”

  She was right. Terika’s face was pale as paper, and she looked as if she might faint.

  “Everything is lovely. We’re all fine.” Terika drew in a shuddery breath, and a spark came into her eyes. “You shouldn’t have c … co …” She swallowed the word she couldn’t say and tried again, her knuckles white on the table. “You shouldn’t have … combs.”

  Zaira blinked at her. “Of course I came.” She stepped forward. “It almost killed me to leave you last time, Terika. We’re getting you out of here.”

  Terika shook her head violently. All the others murmured, “No, we’re fine, we like it here.”

  Terika forced words out past a fixed smile, sweat beading on her brow. “You’re in d … daisies, Zaira. Right now. Do you understand me? You’re in daisies, and you need leaves. Now. Everything is so, so wonderful.”

  The Nine Hells lay in her eyes. My skin crawled with unease, as if I’d gone to the Lady of Spiders’ tailor. Something wasn’t right. The other Falcons exchanged frowns and confused glances, seeming unsettled as well.

  Zaira stepped forward. “We’re in danger. Right. Don’t worry; we’re invited guests. That viper already knows we’re here, and he can’t do anything about it. I’m going to get you out of this cursed place.” She reached toward Terika’s hair, tenderly.

  Terika let out a wail and threw herself into Zaira’s arms.

  But then Zaira staggered back, a hand clapped to the side of her neck, mouth gaping.

  A bloody knife gleamed in Terika’s hand.

  “You shouldn’t have come back, Zaira,” Terika said, tears spilling from her eyes. “Now I have to kill you.”

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  The room erupted into consternation. Some of the Falcons scrambled back out of the way; Namira lunged to try to grab Terika’s arm, but Terika dodged, her eyes still fixed on Zaira.

  “Terika, what are you doing?” Namira cried.

  I steadied Zaira by the elbow. “Are you all right?”

  Zaira just stared, one hand half extended, the other pressed to her neck. I’d never seen her struck so utterly silent. A few drops of red stained her fingers, but the cut didn’t seem serious.

  But then, it couldn’t be; Zaira’s enchanted corset stays and hairpins stopped the sudden, forceful impacts of musket balls or dagger strikes. A tiny nick, however, wouldn’t set off the shield, which had to let through the thousand gentle touches of daily life.

  My stomach dropped. Terika was an alchemist. If she were going to kill someone, she’d use poison.

  “Zaira!” Terika cried, anguish in her voice. And she lunged at her again, knife flashing.

  Zaira didn’t even try to step out of the way. Terika’s knife came down for her heart, but this time she’d moved fast enough to trigger the shield; the air an inch from Zaira’s chest rippled and chimed, and the bloodstained blade rebounded.

  I threw myself between them, even as Namira grappled with Terika for the knife. The tired-eyed young man leaped in to help her, and they twisted it from Terika’s grip.

  “Don’t touch the blade!” I warned them. “It could be poisoned!”

  The young man threw the knife away from himself across the room, as if it were a stingroach. It clanged off the stone wall.

  In the distraction, Terika wriggled free of them and threw herself at Zaira again, knocking her down. Zaira stared at her in shock from the floor, lifting empty hands between them, as Terika pulled something from her pocket.

  I dove and grabbed her wrist before she could shove a tiny glass vial into Zaira’s face.

  “Careful, Amalia!” Terika cried. “That vial’s totally harmless!”

  Namira swore and started prying Terika’s fingers off the vial with both hands, while I kept mine clamped around her wrist. Terika made a grab at Zaira’s knife with her other hand, but Zaira scrambled away across the floor, still staring in wordless shock.

  Then the other Falcons all jumped in and helped hold Terika down. She struggled against them, her honey-brown curls shaking.

  I dropped to my knees beside Zaira. “Are you all right?” I asked.

  She held up trembling fingers before her eyes, staring at the blood on them. Some kind of darker substance smeared through the red.

  “I feel … strange,” she said, her voice higher than usual. “Demons have mercy. Didn’t see that coming.”

  Terika went still. “She needs an—” The word stuck in her throat, but her face was pale and desperate. “Quick, she needs a dose of … It’s … Hells take it!”

  “Check the knife,” I called. An old woman with a crown of white braids retrieved the knife and sniffed it gingerly, holding it up to the light.

  Zaira slumped against the stone wall behind her, drifting slowly over to the side. “Whoo. Seeing some strange stuff now.”

  I steadied her, taking her weight as she went nearly slack against me. Fear tasted coppery in the back of my throat. “Terika,” I said urgently, “do you have access to alchemical supplies and equipment here?”

  “Yes,” she said from where they still held her pinned to the floor. “We make things for Ruven, because we love working for him so much. Hurry!”

  “Do you make things for yourselves as well? Do you have anything in stock?”


  “Why, yes!” she shouted it more loudly than was remotely necessary. “I’m so glad you asked! I keep a stock of assorted useful potions and antidotes in my pillowcase upstairs. For no particular reason!”

  A young boy dashed up the stairs and came rushing back down a moment later with an entire pillow. Zaira had started shivering in my arms, and her eyes roved wildly as if they were tracking things only she could see.

  “Revincio,” I muttered, because the last thing we needed was a hallucinating fire warlock burning down the castle.

  The white-haired woman tore through the pillowcase, pulling out one vial after another until she came to one holding a bright blue liquid. “Ferroli’s Tincture of Purity?” she snapped to Terika.

  “Of course not,” Terika said eagerly. “Why would I ever make Ferroli’s Tincture? It’s not as if I was expecting anyone here to be poisoned!”

  “Right.” The woman hurried over to Zaira, squeezed open her jaw, and dumped the vial into her mouth, over Zaira’s incoherent protests.

  Zaira spluttered, but the old woman clapped a hand over her mouth to make sure she couldn’t spit out the tincture, with grim practicality. In a moment, a sizzling sound came from the cut on her neck, and there was a smell of fresh lemons. Terika let out a sigh of relief.

  The old alchemist nodded decisively, shaking scraggly white tendrils free of her braid crown. “That should do it. Powerful stuff, Ferroli’s Tincture.”

  Sure enough, Zaira shook her head and clambered to her feet, her eyes sharp again.

  “Ruven ordered you to do this, didn’t he?” she said to Terika. Rage filled her voice as she dusted herself off. “Hells take his rancid soul.”

  “Sorry,” Terika panted, smiling apologetically up from where three Falcons held her pinned to the floor. “It’s really good to see you, though.”

  Zaira nodded, swallowing. “Good to see you, too.”

  After a few attempts, we found that if we sat Terika on the far side of the room, with no weapons or dangerous objects to hand, and put the rest of us between her and Zaira, she could consider the situation impossible enough that she wasn’t forced to attempt to kill Zaira anymore. She waved forlornly at Zaira, who stuck out her tongue in return, and then they degenerated into making bizarre faces at each other across the room. I murmured the release word, once I was sure Zaira was back in full possession of her faculties.