Palatine First (The Aurelian Archives)

by Courtney Grace Powers

  “My, but they look marvelous!” Lucius loudly exclaimed as the duke and Abigail stepped into the light to thunderous applause. He, along with all the other guests, had pushed back his chair to stand as he clapped, hailing the High Duke and Duchess, both dressed in a deep, almost-black green. Reece rose after a moment’s pause with a strange heat rushing in his ears: adrenaline. As he clapped halfheartedly, his eyes started a circuitous sweep of the ballroom, looking for a hint of out-of-placeness to warn him of danger.

  The duke gave a brief welcome, then descended the stairs with Abigail and started for the elevated table on the other end of the room, greeting guests along the way.

  “You know, Reece, I’m quite surprised you’re not sitting with them tonight,” Lucius mused. “But I suppose it must be exhausting, being in the spotlight so. Especially since Liem disappeared. Big shoes to fill, isn’t that what they say?”

  Reece made a noncommittal noise, staring fixedly at his parents as they shook hands and nodded respectfully here and there. As they passed by a few tables to their right, he dropped his fork and spent a moment doubled over by his feet, waiting for them to move on. When he resurfaced, Scarlet was watching him, tapping her lips with a finger.

  Every course of the meal dragged. The cranberry custard salad tasted like weeds in Reece’s mouth, the warm sourdough bread like a sponge. He put away a considerable amount of food nonetheless, just to have something to do with his fidgeting hands.

  Halfway through the third course (stuffed cream chicken that tasted like rubber), golden hoops were lowered from the ceiling bearing girls in white leotards who twisted around the hoops as if they had no bones to bend. Reece watched only the duke, who seemed quietly focused on his plate and unaware of the daring acrobatics being performed overhead. Even when one of the performers dangled upside-down by a single foot, he paid her only a glance.

  His chin on his fist, Reece frowned. Respect had sneaked up on him before he’d realized what was happening. The duke knew tonight was the night he was to be assassinated. For whatever numptified reason, he was willing to let it happen, and this was how he faced it. The man was either brave or out of his bleeding mind.

  There was a slight pressure on Reece’s arm; he glanced at Nivy, whose brow was furrowed in question. Seeing how Scarlet and Lucius were engaged in a heated argument over which candidate should be elected to represent the southern district of some county or another, Reece asked, “What is it?”

  Nivy pointed at the duke, pointed at him, and spread her hands “why”, or maybe, “what”.

  A suddenly tired smile pulled at Reece’s mouth. “What happened, you mean? Between the duke and me?”

  Nivy nodded patiently, her blue eyes on the duke.

  “We had a fall out a few years ago. He wanted to send me across Epimetheus, to a planet called Leto, to study politics.”

  Scarlet stopped midsentence to turn and stare at Reece, leaving Lucius gazing at the back of her head with a sleepy smile. “Leto? I never knew that. That—”

  “Is halfway across the Epimetheus,” Reece finished for her. “I know.”

  Scarlet pursed her lips. “I was going to say that would have been a great opportunity. Leto has needed political intervention for decades now, it’s on the brink of uncivilization.”

  Reece wondered wryly how that factored into The Kreft’s plan for Epimetheus.

  “Great opportunity for you, maybe, but I was studying to be captain, remember? My life was at The Owl. I would’ve disappeared from everyone’s lives; they all would have gone on without me. That’s how I saw it. That the duke just wanted me out of the way.”

  Reece shuddered as if the old memories he drudged up brought a chill with them. He clenched his eyes shut and remembered. Sitting at the clawed feet of a chair, playing with a wooden replica of Aurelia as his father read Legends from the Voice of Space aloud. Two or three years later, the duke taking him to The Guild House, telling him how one day, when he and Liem governed Honora, he would be in charge of managing Emathia. A few years further on, Reece begging to be allowed to study aviation at The Aurelian Academy, not Interplanetary Politics. That’s when the chasm between them had started to grow, when the duke had stormed out of Reece’s bedroom and left him standing there, alone…

  He’d met Hayden and Gideon not a year later. For the longest time, the duke had pretended this didn’t concern him. The chasm stretched. Reece got older, saw the duke less and less. Imagined more and more how he must resent him for choosing becoming a captain over becoming Liem’s second-in-command.

  Then there was that fateful day in late winter. Reece could remember just how it felt, standing in the doorway of the duke’s office at Emathia, staring at his father’s back as he poured over notes on his desk.

  “I’ve decided to send you to Leto,” the duke had rumbled without turning, jotting something down with an eagle-feather quill. “You’ll finish out the rest of your schooling there.”

  It had taken Reece a whole minute to stop staring and demand why.

  “Experience. Practice. The planet is in need of strong political faces. If you assert yourself properly, I expect you’ll return to Honora in a few years time ready to take a stand in The Guild House.”

  “But I’m not…The Guild House…” Reece had tripped to his father’s desk and planted his hands to support himself. “I’m studying to be captain! These last six years, that’s all I’ve worked for! For what, if you’re going to send me to Leto now?”

  “You will be Liem’s right hand. You will manage the estate and do as you are told.”

  “But classes—”

  “An end must be put to your juvenile fancy with flying. It’s time to grow up, Reece.”

  “Six years!” Reece had yelled. “Six years, and you never once told me this was the plan. Liem doesn’t need me! He’s going to be the bleeding duke, he could care less what I do with myself!”

  “This is hardly about you or Liem. It is about duty, about obligation.” Frowning, the duke had bent over his desk, checked a schedule projected on his flat datascope screen, and added with finality, “You leave tomorrow at noon.”

  Reece flinchingly remembered kicking the leg of the desk as he shouted, “It’s the middle of the school year! I have friends here! Hayden…Gideon!”

  “As I said, it’s time to grow up. Your friendship with those beneath your station has been encouraged for too long.”

  “Encouraged? Mother won’t even let me bring them in the front door! And you, you haven’t cared a scrap about who I spend my time with, you’ve never even asked, you never ask anything! You haven’t been here—you haven’t cared!”

  The knuckles gripping the duke’s quill had gone white. “A man in my position can’t often afford to expend himself upon caring. You’ll want to start packing.”

  Reece often wondered when this memory came back to haunt him if he and the duke might’ve recovered from their fight if he hadn’t had a total lapse in judgment and shouted at the duke, “I hate you!”

  The duke’s response, given calmly, without looking up from his work, had been, “Then perhaps it is fortunate I cannot afford to care.”

  That had been two years ago. Reece had left Emathia on his bim, gone to Atlas, and stayed with Mordecai and Gideon at the workshop for the rest of the school year. When he returned to Emathia months later, the duke said nothing about Leto, their fight, or their parting words—which had made Reece that much angrier. As if the duke could just pretend he hadn’t meant to ship Reece out of his and everyone else’s lives! Well, if that’s what he wanted, Reece decided he would give it to him until he acknowledged he’d been wrong.

  Only the duke never came to set things right, and after the first seven or eight months of waiting, Reece knew he’d gone too far to ever turn back. And the regret he felt was never enough to drive him back to Emathia when he knew the duke would be home. They both knew the chasm could never be closed again.

  Reece swiftly ducked his head as the duke gazed
briefly in his direction. “We fought. I waited for him to apologize, but he never did, and by the time a year had gone by, I knew I never could either.”

  “That’s a little petty, Reece,” Scarlet said sagely.

  “And you’re a little nosy,” he snapped. “Seems we all have our little faults.”

  “Come now, Reece old boy,” Lucius chuckled good-naturedly. “Scarlet does have a point! It’s time to bury the hatchet! Why, I used to resent you, if you can believe it—thought you had everything. Well, now I see how miserable you are, I can’t find it in me to resent you in the least!” He half choked on his drink and sat up straighter, looking over their heads. “I say, I think that’s Hogarth Boyle over there, I simply must say hello. Please excuse me.”

  As Reece, Nivy, and Scarlet watched him walk a little crookedly to a neighboring table, Reece said, “Wow. I’m really warming up to him.”

  Nivy laughed silently into her hand, but Scarlet scowled reproachfully.

  “Be nice. He means well, and he’s right. The duke’s your father, Reece…you only get so much time to enjoy him.” Her look added, I would know.

  “Enjoy him,” Reece repeated dryly, watching the duke as he scanned the dessert menu on a wide datascope a servant was holding before him. “It’s hard to enjoy someone from a distance.”

  Lucius returned, bubbling with gossip fresh from the mouth of Hogarth. They all selected their desserts, except for Reece, who despite never having felt emptier, couldn’t make himself eat one more bite. Nivy still picked one for him, clearly with the intention of eating it herself.

  “Orpha, I don’t think I’ve heard you say one word,” Lucius said thickly, through a mouth of cheese and red fudge.

  Reece very unsmoothly intercepted the attempt at conversation. “She has to save her voice for the theatre.” He lifted up off his seat slightly as a waiter blocked his view of the duke. What was he going to do if someone pulled a gun? He couldn’t outrun a bullet.

  He was just considering moving closer to the duke’s table when Lucius gave a dramatic gasp and exclaimed in a hoarse sort of whisper, “Stars above, is that a Vee?”

  Reece spun so quickly, his back cracked twice. He, Scarlet, and Nivy followed Lucius’s startled stare to its target and saw a thin, sallow figure observing the ballroom from one of the box seats in a balcony above. Its bald head and dark eyes were visible even from this distance.

  “They are a work of modern man, aren’t they?” Lucius said in awe. “Here to keep a special eye on things, no doubt.”

  No doubt.

  Face grave, Nivy started digging in her handbag; Reece caught her wrist before she could draw her gun.

  “Not—yet,” he said through his teeth, wary of Scarlet, who at the moment was staring at the Vee with cold, stiff composure. A few other tables had noticed the Vee, but the general consensus seemed to be in agreement with Lucius’s thought that the Vee was here for everyone’s protection.

  Reece had subtly gestured for Nivy to join him in trying to get closer to the duke and was starting to stand when a hand appeared on his shoulder and shoved him back into his chair. Out of the corner of his eye, he glimpsed a servant’s dark green sleeve, but it seemed strangely matched to the hand attached, a hand both callused and dirty. He about had a seizure when he twisted his head and found his mysterious waiter was Gideon.

  Gid was dressed in the servants’ livery right down to the napkin draped neatly over his forearm, but his jacket was tight in the shoulders, and his sleeves showed too much wrist. It said something that it was seeing him dressed like this that had Reece gaping like a fish out of water, not the fact that one of his cheeks was turning the royal purple of a bruise and his bottom lip bore a fresh red cut.

  “Splendid timing!” Lucius declared, very pink in the face. He held up his empty goblet. “I was just about to go get another! Good help here tonight, what?”

  Gideon shot Lucius a look of the deepest contempt before kneeling beside Reece’s chair.

  “What the bleeding bogrosh are you doing here?” Reece hissed, not dumb to the fact that Scarlet was staring at the both of them with puzzled interest. She knew Gideon well enough to know that his hobbies didn’t exactly include volunteering for servant duty.

  “We’ve got a situation,” Gideon mumbled.

  Nivy leaned forward to hear better, her second helping of dessert pushed aside. Lucius also leaned forward, and in full view of all, dragged Reece’s mostly full drink towards himself and knocked it back.

  “What kind of situation?”

  Hesitating, Gideon opened his mouth, but it was Lucius who spoke. Or, more accurately, sprayed his drink (which was actually Reece’s) everywhere.

  “Bleeding bogrosh!” he exclaimed in a slur. “There’s s-something in my drink!”

  As his tablemates stared, Lucius used his fork to dig in the dregs of his glass and fish out a small red trinket. He pinched it between his thumb and forefinger and went cross-eyed holding it before his nose and mumbling, “It’s some sort of pin...dropped by a servant, I suppose…hic…I shall most a-assuredly be having a word with—”

  Feeling as if someone large had just trodden on his lungs, Reece snatched the red lion head pin out of Lucius’s hand and held it up to the light. It was Mr. Rice’s pin. The one he always, always wore, had worn as long as Reece had known him…it had been his wife’s…

  He instinctively glanced upward and froze as if caught in a spotlight. The lone Vee remained seated in his lofty box, staring down at Reece with that sinister emotionlessness. As anger seared Reece’s insides and turned his look of shock into a glare of hate, the Vee’s lips parted in a smile.

  “That’s what I’m tryin’ to tell you,” Gideon said, his voice low beneath the babble of busyness all around them. “Eldritch is onto you. He’s got a hold’a Mr. Rice and Sophie and is likely gonna—”

  Reece tried to stand only to find himself being slammed roughly into his seat again.

  “That’s what we’re here for.” Gideon sounded half irritated, half amused. “Eldritch is gonna try to distract you from doin’ what you came to do. You keep your mind where it’s been and let us deal with the rest.”

  Then tonight was the night, if Eldritch wanted to distract him. Well, the plan was working. Reece felt as though a seam down the middle of his chest was being pulled from either side, ripped painfully in two.

  “Reece, what’s going on?” Scarlet leaned around Gideon. She was having another rare wringing-of-the-hands moment, looking anxious behind her mask.

  Nivy had her own questions. Forgetting or maybe not caring any longer about their charade, she gestured at Gideon, pointing at him and then at the empty spot beside him, wondering—

  “Who is we?” Reece asked aloud for her.

  “Aitch, me. Er…Po.”

  Reece choked as if he’d gotten a lungful of bad air. Now wasn’t really the time to lecture Gideon on getting Po involved, but he felt like a parent who’d just found out their child had been sneaked into a raucous party.

  “You’d better go, we’re drawing looks,” he told Gideon as he glanced around and met a few too many curious eyes.

  Peevishly straightening his napkin, Gideon nodded and turned to go. Then Reece was struck by a sudden inspiration.

  “Waiter? Excuse me, Waiter?” he said a little loudly, in a voice he hoped was sufficiently pompous.

  Gideon paused and turned very slowly, giving Reece a look that promised physical harm should he ever call him that again.

  “Would you see these are put in my carriage? I hadn’t realized I’d brought them in.” Reaching into his jacket, Reece pulled out the netted bag of burstpowder marbles, first making sure to tip a few loose in his pocket. “Do take care, won’t you? They’re my uncle’s.”

  Gideon bowed deeply, hiding his dark smirk, and accepted the marbles smoothly. They disappeared into his jacket as he crossed to one of the corridor mouths attached to the ballroom, where Reece could see Po daubing Hayden’s bleeding nose with a
handkerchief as they waited in matching green uniforms.

  Po just had time to wave and smile before she was sucked out of sight by an impatient Gideon yanking on her hand.

  “You know,” Lucius mused dazedly, “I don’t think that man is really a waiter at all!”

  XXI

  Gid Makes a Promise

  Hayden had decided. Of all the things in the galaxy he could hate, the thing he knew for certain he hated the most was feeling helpless. Knowing that Sophie and Father had been taken by The Veritas, knowing how powerless he was on his own to do anything for them…that’s what he hated.

  He, Gideon, and Po made it to Emathia in record time. Po hadn’t been exaggerating about the modifications she had made to The Tutor Taxi, or about how rough a ride it would be. They’d been rattled so badly putting down on Emathia’s back meadow, Hayden had bitten down on his sleeve to keep his teeth from chipping together, and Gideon had had a case of emergency medical supplies fall on him.

  Somehow, in all the hubbub of servants rushing in and out of the side gate with candlesticks and fresh flowers and replacement strings for the cellist, Gideon, Po, and Hayden managed to slide in unnoticed, just another cluster of servants on their way to work, thanks to the uniforms Gideon had appropriated from The Owl’s Masquerade Committee. They had a brief scare when an alarm started peeling shrilly, but then a red-haired servant hurrying in the opposite direction impatiently waved them on, shouting for the alarm to be shut off.

  “I thought we had that fixed! Someone get Watkins! Get Watkins!”

  They entered the mansion through the back door Reece was in the habit of using whenever he brought Hayden and Gideon home, followed a line of servants pushing dessert trolleys to the ballroom, and then ducked into a dark sitting room to catch their breath. Then Gideon left to warn Reece.

  Hayden’s feeling of uselessness was climaxing.

  “What now?” he asked when Gideon rejoined him and Po. Gideon hauled them through the sitting room and out into the corridor intersecting it, which was dark and marked off-limits by a thick velvet rope that he stepped over without a second glance.