“Keep going,” the new emperor said in a quiet tone.
Choosing his words carefully, Lord Cletus continued. “In order to win many of your battles, you outsmarted your opponents without them even being aware of it. I think that experience will do nothing but help us here. We’re outmatched, my liege, but not outsmarted.”
Sebastian chuckled. “We can only hope.”
The kith leader spoke up. “To use the ancient ley lines, the ones that were forgotten and even buried after the years of misery endured under the wars, we have to complete this task.”
“We have to unlock them,” Ciardis added softly.
The kith leader gave her an approving nod.
“What will we need now?” Sebastian asked.
“Well,” the scholar said brightly, “we have the individual components, the people who will act as the key bearers to unlock the power. We just have to make sure to unlock the centuries of backlogged magic at the most opportune time.”
“I’d say right when the hordes are on our doorstep will do,” Sebastian said in a hardened voice.
“And while the hordes are being destroyed by the magic unlocked,” Thanar said with a dark gleam in his eye, “we shall take on their mistress.”
There was shocked silence in the room, and then Ciardis spoke up. “Simultaneously?”
Thanar turned to her with eager eyes. “What better way to catch a god off her guard? Hit her on two fronts.”
Sebastian licked his lips and said speculatively, “It does make tactical sense.”
Ciardis snorted. “Yeah, and what happens when all our forces are stretched thin and everyone’s in different parts of the empire and we can’t sustain all of the attacks at once?”
Everyone looked at her at that moment—many with approval in their eyes.
“What?” exclaimed Ciardis with her hands on her hips. “I listen. Sometimes.”
A general titter of amusement went throughout the room, and then a soldier spoke up. “Lady Companion Weathervane is right. Spread our forces too thin and we’ll break like a brittle piece of crystal—too divided by fractures to withstand a solid attack.”
“So we don’t stay divided, then,” Thanar speculated with an interested gleam in his eye. “We unleash the ley line powers and we regroup immediately.”
“How?” the Emperor of Algardis asked in a forthright manner. “This ley line plan calls for us to escort the dead loyalists to far different corners of the land for this to work. We’re luring the hordes to nexus points of pent-up power, but we still need to be at the origin points of the network to set off the chain of events.”
Sebastian paused and stared pointedly at the scholar as he added, “Am I not correct?”
“Oh yes, yes, very correct, my liege,” the scholar quickly squeaked.
Ciardis snorted. She got the feeling that the man, and many others, in the face of overwhelming power would have said anything to please the addressor.
It would have been the best thing to do in the face of Maradian, she thought quietly. Please the emperor now and figure just what you’d agree to do when the problem became an actual problem later.
The kith leader spoke up in a speculative voice. “If I may interject—I believe I may have an idea of what the daemoni prince is referring to.”
Ciardis looked back and forth between Thanar and the foxlike kith with interest.
“By all means,” Sebastian said.
“There are ways to transport oneself between one place and the next simultaneously,” the kith leader said in a serious voice.
Eager to contribute, Ciardis said, “You mean by using the regular portals?”
He nodded. “Precisely.”
“But those only take you in and out at specific points,” the scholar countered. “If the ley line point of origination is five miles away, then the activator and the loyalist will have to ride hard on those miles to get there.”
The kith leader looked a little embarrassed at this point. Well, as embarrassed as a creature with a fur-covered fox snout could look, anyway.
“That is not precisely accurate,” the leader responded.
Ciardis remembered something then from a long time ago. The first time she had truly run into the prince heir of Algardis. It was just a hunch, but she had the feeling it was an accurate one.
“The Aether realm?” she said in a softly questioning voice.
“The Aether realm,” the kith leader confirmed. “It is the realm between this mundane world and the realm of the gods. It will allow you to travel swiftly from one point to the next.”
“Yes, that is true, but if I remember correctly, that isn’t the only thing it does,” said Sebastian with a suspicious gleam in his eye. “Times pass differently while ensconced in that realm.”
The kith contingent side-eyed each other silently, as if all were waiting on one person to have the temerity to speak up.
It was finally the daemoni prince who spoke with a bit of laughter in his voice. “What my furry, winged, and scaled friends don’t want to admit is that it is an obstruction only humans face.”
“Oh really?” said Ciardis with interest, her eyes lighting up. She knew what that meant. Everyone did. Instantaneous travel.
The kith leader nodded. “We have used it…moderately to transport our peoples from place to place without any perceptive delay in the case of extreme danger.”
There were mutters from all sides from the human contingent in the room. Disgruntled to learn for the first time that they had been kept out of the loop on a particularly useful magical ability.
That, or, Ciardis thought wryly, they don’t like that the kith were able to use said particularly useful magical ability to outsmart them and their death squads.
For a moment she was uncomfortable thinking of the rumors she had heard. Rumors of lawless nobles roving the countryside like it was their own private playground. Torturing any kith they found. Selling the captured kith off as “favors” to friends and servants to others.
The whole idea made her shudder in disgust. Disgust and fear.
But fear was a powerful motive, and Ciardis Weathervane promised herself that she would do something about these roving death squads come coronation. She would be in a place of power and have the support of her husband behind her to enforce change. Right now, she was just a lady companion with a fine temper.
Which got her into a whole lot of trouble and not much else.
Still as she looked around at the nobles with piqued eyes, she decided that she didn’t really care if they hated her after she started her new cause. It wasn’t worth keeping their favor knowing that behind the smiles was a person fully culpable of the degradation of entire groups and communities…solely because of heritage, solely because of what they’d heard about them.
With an uncharacteristically approving tone, Thanar said in her mind, It would be nice if more humans thought as you do.
Face set in hard lines, Ciardis thought back, If they had, perhaps so many kith wouldn’t have died the way they did in the mines of the North.
Perhaps not, he replied, and that was the end of that. She thought that while this wasn’t the time or place for that conversation, one day it would be. Out loud. In person. With the entire of her empire at her feet. She didn’t want a reckoning, but one was coming; she just hoped it was peaceful.
7
As she tried to smooth over her face to keep the dire thoughts from reflecting in her interactions, Ciardis looked around the room. Her eyes landed on the kith leader. He was silent, face closed in with wariness. She didn’t blame him. Ciardis already noticed the mutters of discontent growing around the room. Even in the small conclave that had overcome so many conflicts to come together, inborn prejudices reared their ugly heads.
One woman shouted out, “My Emperor, I, for one, am not ready to work with a group of creatures so willing to harbor secrets from their allies.”
And here we thought this particular discussion was over, Thanar th
ought at her in disgust.
Ciardis’s mouth pursed into a line of displeasure. I guess that reckoning will be today, then.
What reckoning? Thanar demanded in her head. But she didn’t answer. It was a private supposition, and not for him anyway. Not now. Maybe not ever. Oh, she would be there, but she knew that she could handle anything they could have thrown at her. Sebastian as well. If whomever she faced in the reckoning turned against Thanar simply because of who he was or what heritage he came from, she wouldn’t be held responsible for the damage she would do. So she elected to keep him out of those thoughts and the ideas bubbling around them. For now.
As Ciardis listened to the woman and replayed her words in her mind, though, she immediately deciphered the coded context behind each shout. It wasn’t necessarily what she said; it was how she said it. Her emphasis on the word “creatures” was vile. Something that hinted at both her disdain for non-humans in general and gave a feeling that they in a sense were worse than refuse underneath her feet.
“Never discount a woman’s ability to be as evil as men,” Ciardis muttered under her breath. “We’re just as capable of good as we are of evil.”
But she didn’t say it loudly enough for anyone else to hear. To no one’s surprise, the woman who had spoken up was none other than Lady Danforth. Powerful in name and in magical heritage. Her estates bordered the kith habitations in the Ameles Forest and were whispered to be one of the primary reasons for the rumors about death squads hunting down kith in the empire.
The kith leader bristled. Not at Ciardis’s words, but at Lady Danforth’s.
“I believe you know precisely why your allies kept such a secret,” the kith leader snarled with almost visible rage in his previously wary gaze. “It’s to keep our people safe from the hands of yours.”
“How dare you!” shouted Lady Danforth. “That is a specious accusation.”
Before her fellow nobles and humans could rise to her cause, a large, thick baton rammed down onto a table and shocked silence ensued.
Ciardis saw the sergeant who had done so clear his throat noisily and nod to the Emperor of Algardis in deference. The nobles settled down. The kith quieted.
They couldn’t say something without knowing how Sebastian would stand on the subject, and he looked ready to speak.
Ciardis, for her part, didn’t care what Sebastian had to say personally. She had her own mind on the subject, but she also realized the political importance of being seen as in step with the emperor’s wishes. As both his future wife and as a partner in the seeleverbindung. So she held her silence. Barely. There were many intricacies to living at court and ruling it. They had already been wary of her after she manifested powers beyond a normal Weathervane’s purview in the face of Maradian. After she had followed that up with the explosion caused at the current emperor’s coronation …well, if she was kith, Ciardis would have said they stunk with the tiniest whiff of fear.
However she wasn’t kith and she was no fool either. They might fear her, but they were terrified of the goddess returning before they were prepared to destroy her. No matter the cost. And Ciardis wasn’t scared of them either. As of now, politically the Lady outranked her and half a dozen others…easily. If this were an out-and-out battle, that wouldn’t have mattered; Ciardis would have slammed her with lightning and kept on moving. But this was a court of appeals, in a sense.
The Emperor of Algardis, no matter the prior circumstances, would always be the final arbitrator. Mage power or political power notwithstanding and fortunately for Sebastian—he had plenty of both. What’s more, Ciardis knew that how Sebastian set the tone for this kith revelation would be taken as more than just a simple pronouncement on his feelings on this specific matter. It would be seen as a proclamation heralding how he intended to deal with the kith for the foreseeable future. It mattered. His words. His actions. His thoughts. And Ciardis had the suspicion that no matter what he said, the nobles would have something to fuss over. But at least in this sense they would now be guided, how the emperor chose to respond was how the rest of the courtiers would react. Publicly. She and he as a ruling couple couldn’t do anything about personal preconceptions behind closed doors. They just needed these people to do their assigned jobs in the face of the blutgott’s wrath, nothing more, nothing less.
So, understandably, the room stood tense as Sebastian prepared to voice his opinion.
He stood tall as he looked directly at Lady Danforth and said, “We are not here to discuss long-held discords but to come together in the most resolute way to get our actions done.”
His tone was firm, the hardness in his eyes brooked no argument.
Which was fine, as Lady Danforth gave none.
She backed down immediately with an impeccable bow in the emperor’s direction.
The kith leader spoke with carefully chosen words. “We only wanted to protect our people, the only way we knew how, without spilling blood into the land.”
Ciardis heard the hesitance as each word was voiced. She assumed that he was not convinced that the emperor’s small speech was a declaration of support rather than just a bid to keep the peace in a tiny room, which to be fair was a reasonable assumption. He didn’t know Sebastian like she did. But it would take time to assuage those doubts. Time they didn’t have. They needed the kiths’ help and they needed it now.
My, how the tables have turned, Ciardis thought as she surveyed the room. Even the nobles who had been tittering amongst themselves before were quiet as they strained to hear. The merchants present were white as sheets. They had no bone to pick in this fight, as their bottom line would be grossly affected either way, though she preferred to think that they wanted peace between the communities if only so their goods could pass unmolested through checkpoints throughout the land.
Sebastian took his time to contemplate his words. As he waited, the kith leader decided to add in a hesitant voice, “So you can see why we tried to keep this particular ability confidential.”
“Yes,” Sebastian said in a voice that was clipped. “Now we need your expertise in our quest to reach the ley lines quickly.”
The kith leader nodded. “We will need something in return.”
Before his last words had left his mouth, outraged shouts had enveloped the room.
Sebastian held up a sharp and silencing hand. “Name it.”
The kith leader took a deep breath and Ciardis could tell that whatever he was going to request was momentous.
In the next moment the kith leader continued as he said, “Acknowledge that the emperor crafted these crimes against full members of his society and his people. Acknowledge the crimes against the kith as an official imperial proclamation. Name the enslavement in the North as what it was—a war crime—and we will support your bid and your ascendancy to rule.”
You could have heard a shilling drop in the room in that moment. To demand a proclamation from a sitting emperor was unheard of. The imperial family didn’t negotiate with petitioners, they administered.
But these are strange times, Ciardis acknowledged in her head.
What the empire ‘knew’ as a warfront had been no such thing. Ciardis knew now that they weren’t at war with anything. Not yet, anyway. Instead, the imperial presence on the boundary was both a preventative measure and an evasive one. They hunted and tracked down the escaped mine workers, the kith slaves who they had imprisoned from the territories just cross the Algardis borders, and forced them to work in the mines of Sarvinia. Mines that were under the control of the Algardis emperor as his people searched for a fabled device which, according to General Barnaren, was ‘the only thing that can send the blutgott back to the hell where it belongs.’
As she flashbacked on the memories of her conversation with the general and Thanar, Ciardis was beset with unease. If they didn’t get the kith help now, they were doomed. She knew it. Sebastian knew it.
The question was—would he acknowledge what the empire had done in the name of progress to see th
is happen?
After the Initiate Wars, the empire realized they couldn’t continue to mine the great northern mines without kith help. The air and land were too toxic for human miners. But the kith contingents refused to serve any longer in the dark and dangerous underground caverns. They refused to continue looking for the precious gifts the humans sought. And the humans couldn’t force them. At least not the kith who lived in Algardis, because those who had signed the contract with the land in blood were now protected by its treaty.
Now to see descendants of those same kith forced into the mines, negotiating for better treatment…well, it was nerve-wracking. Especially in the face of the head of the empire.
Formally, Sebastian said, “It is done.”
And so it was.
Sighs of relief erupted around the room, but the only thing the kith leader said was, “His Imperial Majesty is most gracious.”
Sebastian made a noncommittal sound, then asked, “Do I need to know anything else?”
“No. Now can we please proceed to more important matters?” said Thanar, interrupting with an impatient flap of his wings before the kith leader could speak.
Ciardis was surprised—she was pretty sure that was the first time she’d heard the word please come out of Thanar’s mouth. It was unusual.
The leader puffed his tail…then nodded. In acceptance that he had won or denial of the importance of greater concerns, it could have been both, it could have been either. But the tenseness in the room certainly picked up on the duplicity of such a simple tactic.
Ciardis heard a voice plead before they could “move on,” as Thanar so eloquently suggested: “Hang on a minute, then. It’s all well and good to know this is possible, but how is it done?”
He was quickly the focus of about half a dozen irate kith glares as the leader said in clipped tones, “We prefer to not divulge that ability in mixed circles, but we will send individuals with each representative to allow them to make the transportation quickly.”
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