“I can melt your bones, you know, and keep you standing still and quiet the entire time,” Ruven said conversationally. “I can rot you from the inside out, and no one will know we aren’t having a lovely discussion about this book. Or I can simply stop your heart.” He patted my hand where it lay on the book’s cover. “So you see, in the end, for all you bear the great and terrible name of Cornaro, you are after all only one woman. You are no match for me, who bears the mage mark and wields power over everything you are.”

He was done with the conversation. I could hear it in his voice. In another moment, he would kill me.

I should have been terrified. But his words triggered something deep in my mind.

He was wrong. I knew it as surely as I’d known when one of my professors put an incorrect calculation on the wall slate.

“No,” I said. “I am not only one woman.”

Ruven checked whatever fatal word he had been about to utter. He tilted his head in mild curiosity. “Oh?”

I smiled back at him, and it was a killing smile. “I am the Empire.”

I had always wondered what it was that surrounded my mother with such palpable force. What let her sweep into a room full of a hundred people and silence it without saying a word. What made her invulnerable, beyond reach as the Graces themselves, such that her enemies tried to hurt me in desperation because they knew they could not touch her.

Now I felt it rising up in me like lagoon water at high tide. Serenity.

“My footsteps echo with the tread of legions.” I locked his eyes with mine. “My breath is the wind that fills the sails of armadas.”

The prickling heat stopped spreading up my arm. The confident sneer on Ruven’s face faltered.

“The whispers of a thousand spies fill my ears with all your petty plans. And my eyes bear the mage mark of hundreds of Falcons.” I stepped toward him. “You stand within my dominion. Even if you kill me, it doesn’t matter. You can’t outrun my courier lamps. Scores of my miles stand between you and the border, and dozens of my fortresses. I am the Empire, and I will destroy you.”

Ruven took half a step back. Then he checked himself. For a long moment, he was silent, watching, assessing.

Then he laughed. “Oh, very well.”

He released the book. Its full weight dropped into my hand; I barely caught it. My arm was my own again.

“I’ve learned enough from that thing.” He waved dismissively at the book. “I don’t need it anymore. And I suppose you’re interesting enough to live a while longer.”