Assassin's Gambit: The Hearts and Thrones Series Read Free Page B

empire apart.
    As she walked to the emperor’s quarters, escorted by two Legaciatti, she glanced at the wall hangings and carved ceilings, relaxing her mind to see the magic anchored in them. Usually, magic dissipated quickly. A mage pulled a bit of magic from the Rift and used it to accomplish some purpose; then it drizzled away. But some mages—Warders—had the ability to anchor magic in the physical world. They could make it last. Anchored magics were invisible to most eyes, but Vitala could see them.
    A blue glow infused the wall hangings; they’d been warded against parasites. The faint red line across a doorway she passed was an enemy ward, set to sound an alarm if someone crossed it with the intent to harm. Each ward possessed a tiny contact point—literally, a hole in the Rift—through which the magic was anchored and made to persist. Vitala could see those contact points. And she could break them, sending their magic harmlessly back to the Rift.
    Where were all the heat-glows? Since entering the palace, she hadn’t seen a single one. They tended to be eyesores, but how did the imperial staff heat the palace without them? Perhaps the glows were hidden from view, inside the walls or behind the hangings.
    Her escort slowed. Just ahead, four Legaciatti guarded a set of double doors. She’d reached the emperor’s quarters.
    “Vitala Salonius?” The door guard directed the question to her escort.
    “This is Miss Salonius,” one of her guards confirmed.
    “The emperor is ready for her.” They opened the double doors, and Vitala relaxed her mind to scan the threshold for wards.
    There weren’t any.
    How could that be? Bayard had assured her they used enemy wards in the palace. She’d seen one already, across a different door. Was it possible they’d developed a ward she couldn’t see? Would she trigger it if she stepped across the threshold?
    One of the door guards raised an eyebrow at her. “Miss Salonius?”
    “Sorry,” she stammered. “I’m nervous.”
    He winked. “Don’t be. He’s not like his father.”
    Vitala’s nerves sang as she stepped through the doorway, but nothing happened. There truly was no ward there. Why?
    She was in a sitting room similar to the one at the entrance to her suite, but larger. She scanned the floor for wards and saw none. Then she lifted her eyes to a table at the far end of the room, where a man sat before a Caturanga board. Emperor Lucien.
    She’d spent so many years studying this man and plotting to kill him that she felt a perverse and unwelcome intimacy with him. Having only a rough description of what he looked like, she’d constructed a mental image, which she saw was accurate in the broad strokes but wrong in all the details. He was taller than she’d expected, his build slim and muscular. As he struggled upright from his chair and slipped a crutch under one arm, she could not help taking in the most obvious fact about him, that he was missing the lower half of his left leg. She’d known he was an amputee, but it was different seeing it in person. She swallowed uncomfortably.
    He wore a wooden leg of simple design, a straight post of polished mahogany banded in gold. He limped on it, supporting himself with a matching crutch. As he moved toward her, smiling broadly, she forced her attention away from his leg. He wore a fine syrtos of blue silk, over which glittered a jeweled loros, the mark of his rank. Like most Kjallans, he had a hawk nose. Coupled with the clean, masculine lines of his face, it gave him a commanding appearance despite his youth. His black hair, slightly mussed, dipped over his forehead—he needed a haircut—and his eyes, so dark they were almost black, regarded her with intensity and intelligence.
    He didn’t look like the sort of man who would enslave half her people and starve the rest with outrageous demands for tribute. He didn’t look like the man who’d massacred her people at Stenhus. But one couldn’t judge a man by his