Aurelia enjoyed the moment. I am a dangerous renegade.
‘She could-’
‘She’s unarmed,’ Lepitern snapped over Opetreia’s attempt. ‘You are dismissed, General. I am perfectly capable of defending myself if need be.’
Aurelia could see that wasn’t true, but then she had no intention of hurting the Duke. She wasn’t even sure she’d know how. She had only fought in one battle, with a longbow from atop a wall, and the only time she’d clashed hand to hand with anyone, it had been a scrappy wrestle with her brother Anthrom when he’d tried to smother Cassandra.
She watched the general bristle before he turned and strode out.
Aurelia stepped toward the Duke and the nurse. She was a slight woman, but clearly strong enough to deal with Lepitern in his state.
‘How is he?’ she asked.
‘It’s rude to talk about people as if they aren’t present, when they are,’ said Lepitern.
‘It’s bad,’ said the nurse, ‘but he should make a full recovery. There’s no reason to worry. But he needs more bedrest than he’s getting.’ She flashed a glare at the Duke.
‘You can leave too,’ he said by way of thanks. ‘Stay close, but outside the tent please. I need to talk to my guest.’
Guest, thought Aurelia. Could just be a figure of speech, but that was better than prisoner. Far better. The nurse scuttled out, eyes downcast.
‘That’s better.’ Lepitern reclined a little, but winced as he did.
‘What happened?’
He flashed her a murderous scowl. ‘You happened.’
‘You’re not pinning this on me, are you?’
He licked his lip, relishing the chance to explain. ‘I was hit by an explosion during an air-raid by your airship. Shrapnel and debris pierced my shoulder and went right through, and a large spike was embedded in my stomach. I’m also heavily burned.’ Aurelia had an uncomfortable flash memory of Periphy dead at the top of the palace docking tower, mortally injured in the explosion that had destroyed that same airship. He hadn’t made it, but the Duke had.
‘I was defending my city from an invader. I am sorry you were hurt, Lepitern, but if it was the deciding factor in your army retreating then I would do it again in a heartbeat.’
He ignored her remark. ‘I’m glad the blasted thing was destroyed. I watched it go down in flames.’ Was he just not going to mention the huge Celestial that had shot it from the sky with a bolt of lightning? ‘If we were meant to fly, we’d have aerium-sacs like the Overlords.’
Maybe she could draw him out. She reminded herself this was her opportunity. She’d intended to get to him in Argentor somehow, but she had her audience now, and she needed to petition for the use his army.
‘I didn’t take you for a believer?’ she said. She crossed the space to a small writing desk and picked up a quill absently. She looked at the divan. Does he just take all his furniture with him on campaign?
‘What, in Medology?’ He scoffed. ‘No, I’m not, but I was raised that way.’ He winced a little and shifted his weight. Evidently, no position was comfortable. ‘Everyone my age was. You only have to go back forty or so years to my father’s time, when I was a child, to find the world a very different place, my lady. Medologers believe that Celestials movements in the heavens mark omens here on land. They believe common Medusi are our ancestors, benevolent ghosts watching over us. Some believed that becoming thralled was a blessing. Their teachings have been around for centuries, but in Argentor maybe more so than your Theris, that superstitious belief was still pervasive when I was growing up.
‘The Order may have been around for centuries before that, but it was about that time when they made themselves known. That’s when they starting working their way into the fabric of our political system.’ He sighed. ‘Some part of me wishes we could go back to those old days, my lady Nectris.’ He trailed off staring wistfully at the floor.
So that was the title he was going to use, was it? He was a careful man, always aware of a political statement, always one to follow the rules of decorum and proper names. But he was ditching ‘Empress’ despite its truth, in favour of her House name and ‘my lady’. She thought she’d rather ‘Princess’ like Verismuss used to use so scathingly.
‘The Empire was a simpler time,’ he mused. ‘All the nobles of the court answered to one Emperor, your father, and his father before him. We warred still, but it was on the Eastern reaches, or together against the slavers in the West. The Empire was a grand ideal.’
‘What went wrong?’ she asked, coaxing.
‘Greed, mostly,’ he said, surprising her with a little honesty. ‘The greed of powerful men like Stauros Isingr, and opportunistic ones like my father. But the real culprit was the Order; the original Cephea fed the power-hungry nobles with everything they wanted to hear.’ The Order would promise this incredible inside information in exchange for a child of the noble family. The child would be thralled, and then returned to spy on the family, and feed them lies. ‘They orchestrated assassinations, jealous murders, spreading false information designed to feed the nobles egos. Eventually it resulted in the fracture of the court, hostages and murders, and appeasement, and then war.’
He didn’t sound ill, he sounded strong and hearty. Maybe he really will mend, she thought, but then she caught sight of the angry red and yellow stains on his dressings.
‘Where is Crescen?’ she said. It wasn’t as abrupt as it seemed, he had spoken of Cepheans.
‘I told you once before what I would do with Crescen,’ he said. ‘I would not have him making me a hypocrite any longer.’ She worried that he’d had his own son killed, that she had sorely miscalculated the man. ‘I banished him. It’s possible he wanders nearby, but it’s more likely he will return to the bosom of the Medousa.’ Aurelia thought of that emaciated skeletal grey creature, and shuddered.
‘I am down to just one son now. Faibryn is my youngest, probably never thought he’d see the throne, but with Crescen exiled and Laigus presumed dead in your city, he has been thrust into the light.’
All the gloss and ceremony of their previous conversations was gone. He was disarmingly honest, a tired man who no longer cared to maintain the façade.
‘You are far more open than when we last met,’ Aurelia remarked.
The Duke smiled then winced again as his gut pained him. ‘I have little to hide that you haven’t already taken from me. And you, you are simpler also. Your ambitions, your focus is open to me. Before, we sparred almost. You had so many concerns, so many schemes, now you have but one. You thought you had power then, you know you don’t now.’
‘I was trying to arrange a political marriage, in the best interests of my city, in the middle of a siege. Forgive me if a had a little more to juggle at the time.’
‘And yet you spurned my proposal. Where did that get you?’
Thinking back to when she’d had two suitors arrive in one day, Aurelia said, ‘Whichever of you I chose, the Order would have still crashed that final battle and destroyed everyone.’ She sighed. ‘The difference is that had I chosen you then, you might have been in the palace with me, only to be captured or killed. Or thralled.’
‘Or my army would have made the difference, and we could have repelled the Order together.’ Bitterly he said, ‘But instead you gutted us, rendering a potential ally useless.’
Aurelia could see his emotion, even understand it. But they could not cling to the past. She thought of her sister’s impressive new skill to see the future.
‘You look back,’ she said. ‘You regret the choices you made. You lament those I made. But I say this. We can do nothing about the past. We have no way to know if we would have prevailed had we played a different hand. Why not look forward instead. We could do something about the future. There is an army of Medusi behind us in Theris, led by a powerful sorceress masquerading as a Goddess. She might as well be one. She is real, I have seen her, I have felt her power. And I guarantee she will not stop with just Theris.’
She fell silent. She hadn’t meant to lay it out quite so starkly. She’d intended to come at it in a more roundabout fashion, but he was being so open, it must have influenced her. Coupled with his aggravating self-pity, it had swayed her into saying too much.
‘You still want to marry me?’ said Lepitern eventually, like he’d just grasped a mathematical theorem.
‘If that’s what it takes.’
‘Takes for what? No, let me guess.’ He forestalled her, holding up a shaky palm, and shifting himself so that he could look at her directly. ‘You have escaped your city possibly just days before it is completely subjugated by the Order of the Medousa. You have travelled incognito in my army, followed me, when you could have gone anywhere else, begun a new life.’ Aurelia thought of the same suggestion Chrysaora had made, that she had already discarded. ‘Yet you are here, with hope brimming in your young eyes, and nothing to offer. You still carry yourself as if you hold some power, but you have none. You have placed all your hopes on me.’ He paused for a long moment, so long that Aurelia thought he might have lapsed into sleep. She glanced at him, hopeful.
‘You want my army,’ he finished.
‘We could be allies still,’ said Aurelia, approaching him. ‘Against an even greater threat.’
‘No, be quiet. You have overstepped, Aurelia.’ His mouth set in a firm line, before he crushed her hopes. ‘I will not be marrying you, I will not be marrying anyone. I’m an old man. You can forget all your notions of achieving some kind of political alliance through marriage. And you can forget this idea of using my army. Are you insane? I will not allow it.’ His voice was rising. ‘I retreated in order to save my people from that swarm of Medusi, and any retaliation from the Order, and you want me to turn around and fight them. You would destroy my people, Aurelia. Battling the Medousa, battling magic without any of your own is a fool’s errand. I saw what you face. I saw the swarms that took your city.
‘You didn’t evacuate when you should have done, you didn’t keep your word as their leader, their Empress. And now your city is lost, your people are thralled, and you want to take mine and do the same thing. No, never.
‘I retreated to save my people,’ he said again. ‘I keep my promises. I banished my own son when it was clear the Order had taken over. Ask yourself, what have you done?’ His last words dissolved into coughing, but they hit home.
Aurelia stood transfixed, almost unable to hold back tears. She managed but it was an effort. There was open candour, and then there was wide-open-wreck-your-dreams-candour. His honest opinion rocked her. She hadn’t realised just how fragile her hope was; to have it crushed like that was almost too much. She hadn’t intended for any of those things to happen.
But in the end, she knew that the Medousa would come for Argentor as well, and that she would be proved right, unless they stood together against her.
The little mote of hope was injured, but it wasn’t dead.
‘I’ve had enough, my lady Nectris. I’m in too much pain to continue this. I need my nurse. We can continue our conversation at a later date.’ His formality had returned, and Aurelia made sure hers did too.
‘May I suggest my companion. She is a Healer. She can help. She may be more qualified than your nurse.’
‘I know about your companion. She is a thrall. You may have put your revulsion for them aside, but in Argentor we adhere to the old ways, before the Order made thralling acceptable.’
‘As did Theris until it was taken from me.’
‘You let one into your inner circle.’
‘As did you, Lepitern. You are no better than me.’
Lepitern didn’t want to open up a new front while he was hurting, and instead of answering, called for his nurse.
She ducked inside the tent just a few moments later, followed by Opetreia.
‘We are moving again, my Lord,’ he said.
At a wave of the hand from Lepitern, Opetreia manoeuvred Aurelia from the tent.
She let herself be guided, helped up onto the horse again and returned to the march. They crossed the makeshift bridge with little fuss and struck further into the forests between them and Argentor.
She had hoped to get to the city before the conversation with the Duke, find some angle. She had failed to get the army, but realistically had she thought she would achieve that much of a concession on her first attempt? It wasn't a total disaster, he had consented to a further conversation.
It was still two more days before they sighted Argentor in the distance and another until they reached it. She noticed the air get warmer as they travelled further north. The great mountain Cartracia had long since receded to the east. Aurelia did not get the chance to speak to the Duke again while they travelled, instead spending her time with Chrysaora and occasionally with the logistics officer, the Marchioli woman, whose first name she learned was Lucinda. There was never a guardsman far away, but she was able to mostly forget her problems for a few days and fall into the rhythm of the march. No one threw vegetables while Lucinda Marchioli was present. She was one of the only women in the entire army, relegated to logistics work instead of fighting, which she said she had been told was ‘man’s work’ and not fit for a lady. She was the only one in the entire army who deemed to talk to Aurelia at all.
As the trees began to thin, the hill they had climbed flattened out.
‘Follow me,’ said Lucinda.
Aurelia shrugged, she had little choice. They left the army behind to begin its long descent down a dusty dirt road. Aurelia could see a checkpoint further along. Lucinda’s chestnut gelding led Aurelia’s white-specked black mare through a stand of vibrant green trees and then onto a flat rocky outcrop that must have dropped some hundred feet before them. The horses came to a stop at the edge, braying.
Aurelia could hardly believe the majesty of the view laid out before her. It was like something from a story book, or one of Ennius’ wonderful legends.
Lucinda gestured. ‘Allow me to introduce, Argentor.’
The city of Argentor stretched out into the valley ahead, nestled between the forests that climbed the hills around it. It didn’t so much start, as seem to grow out of the vegetation; there was no great wall to keep out invaders as there was around Theris. This meant that the city sprawled in myriad directions; sometimes following the small river that ran the centre of the valley, sometimes jutting out around all the small tributaries.
‘Pretty isn’t she?’ said Lucinda.
Aurelia just nodded, still a little overwhelmed by the vista. Argentor was far more glorious and striking than Theris.
The buildings were speckled with beautiful minareted towers, buttressed courtyards with statues and plinths, and outdoor baths. Most had areas on the roofs to sit and relax, terraces and balconies crawling with creepers and vines. Towards the centre she could see what she imagined was the Duke’s official residence, and near to it a large building with a huge domed roof, that she guessed was the Citadel of the Premiers. She could see a myriad of Watcher shrines too, with their little fluttering red streamers. Whatever Lepitern said, people still venerated Medusi here. Beyond the reaches of the buildings, the hills were formed steps of lush green paddy fields, one atop the next, atop the next, each hemmed in by a dammed edge. She could see farmers wading on the flooded land, and strange hump-backed scarecrows in the centre of each field.
She’d known much about Argentor through her lessons with Ennius, but seeing it in all its splendour was so very different to studying its exports and tariffs.
‘I never realised Argentor was so beautiful,’ she breathed. ‘I have never left Theris.’
‘Theris has its charms,’ said Lucinda. ‘But it is more urban and built up than Argentor. That’s what comes of walled cities, and moats. What you gain in defence, maybe you sacrifice in beauty, and nature.’
Aurelia turned to look at the only female officer in the Argentori army. ‘Thank you, Lucinda.’
‘I wanted you to have an appreciation for the
beauty of our city, before-’ but then stopped herself.
‘Before what?’
‘Before you become a prisoner in a palace from which you can never leave.’
*
Aurelia was installed in a large suite of rooms near the top floor of the vast complex of interconnected terraces, courtyards, roof gardens and bedrooms that made up the municipal compound. She barely had time to open the teak door before a middle-aged woman with severely drawn back grey hair barged in beside her and started reading her rights.
‘Welcome to Argentor,’ she said, in as unwelcoming a tone as she could probably manage, like she was reading from a script she knew well. ‘You are a political prisoner of the principality of Argentor,’ she began.
‘Wait a moment,’ said Aurelia, not entirely sure what she had done to offend the woman. Then remembered the whole city hated her. ‘Who are you?’
The woman looked affronted to be stopped mid-flow, scowled and then said slowly, ‘I am the Major-domo of Argentor. My name is Terietta. I speak for the Duke, make his arrangements, and run these buildings in his absence. Clear?’
‘Yes.’
‘Now, you are a political prisoner of the principality of Argentor,’ she muttered. ‘As such you have free rein of the civic buildings and palace, but you will be monitored and guarded at all times. You are not free to leave. This is both the Duke’s home, and also the site of the court of Argentor. There is a constant stream of people coming in and out. Courtiers, Premiers, farmers, Medologers, merchants, all the damn socialites.’
What did free rein really mean? Aurelia was not one to be locked up, and intended to discover the bounds of her incarceration immediately.
‘How do you keep it secure?’ said Aurelia, trying to appeal to the woman’s self-importance.
‘With difficulty. But you’d be surprised, there is very little need.’
‘How would you stop me walking out?’
‘Every guard in the complex is aware of your presence and has been ordered to watch you like mother hens. You won’t be able do anything without my knowledge.’
Embrace of the Medusi (The Overlords Trilogy Book 2) Page 11