“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.”