“We have someone in the Vaskandran ambassador’s household.” My mother shook her head. “So far, he’s learned nothing of Prince Ruven’s true purpose in Raverra. But he did discover that Ruven stopped in Ardence on his way here, shortly before the tax trouble began. Apparently he spent some time there, gaining influence with the local nobility, and there is now an entire faction in the Ardentine court pushing for closer relations with Vaskandar.”

“That borders on treason,” the marquise of Palova observed.

The doge steepled his fingers. “Many things Ardence does these days border on treason.”

So this princeling had been stirring up trouble in my second-favorite city. All right, then. Maybe I wanted to know what he was up to after all.

“Fine,” I said. “I’ll go and talk to him. When is this little soiree?”

“Afternoon tea. A Vaskandran tradition.” My mother passed me the invitation. “Next Tuesday.”

“I was going to train with Zaira at the Mews that afternoon.”

“Zaira?” Baron Leodra asked sharply.

“My Falcon,” I said, without thinking.

Baron Leodra scowled his disapproval. “The Empire’s Falcon.”

“Regardless,” the doge cut that line of conversation short, “she can wait.”

Lovely. Now I had to cancel my training, disappoint Marcello, and confirm everything Zaira thought about me, all for the privilege of awkward flirting with a mad tyrant’s son.

My mother looked pleased as a cat licking cream off its whiskers.

Prince Ruven did not appear, at first glance, to be mad.

I had never met a Witch Lord’s son before, but Vaskandar’s rulers had a certain reputation. The Witch Lords had begun as a handful of powerful and universally feared mages in the far north, long before the birth of the Empire. Every thirty or forty years they’d engulfed a new domain in bloody conquest, raising a new Witch Lord to rule over it, until they ran up against the Witchwall Mountains over a hundred years ago.

They’d tried to take Loreice twice, where the mountains gentled to hills on its northern border. The first time, it had still been an independent country, and the king of Loreice had begged Raverra for aid; his country wound up safe, but a client state of the Serene Empire. The second invasion launched the Three Years’ War, fifty years ago. The Witch Lords had left a scarlet-edged impression on my grandparents’ generation with their ruthless cruelty in that war, and even the Vaskandran diplomats and merchants I’d met spoke of them in hushed tones, making the old peasant sign to ward against demons.

I’d heard them called mad often enough that I’d steeled myself for tea with a lunatic.