by Morgan Rice
Lucious smiled at that. “Have you seen the way the commoners react in the Stade?” he asked. He understood this part, even if the others did not.
He saw Stephania sniff. “I try not to watch them, cousin.”
“But you will have heard them. They call the names of their favorites. They bay for blood. And when their favorites fall, what then?” He looked around, half expecting someone to have an answer for him. To his disappointment, no one did. Perhaps Stephania wasn’t bright enough to see it. Lucious didn’t mind that.
“They call the names of the new winners,” Lucious explained. “They love them just as much as they loved the last ones. Oh, they call for this girl now, but when she lies bleeding on the sand, they will bay for her death as quickly as for anyone else. We just have to stack the odds a little more against her.”
The king looked thoughtful at that. “What did you have in mind?”
“If we get this wrong,” the queen said, “they will just love her more.”
Finally, Lucious could feel some of his anger being replaced by something else: satisfaction. He looked over to the doors to the throne room, where one of his attendants was standing waiting. A snap of his fingers was all it took to send the man running, but then, all Lucious’s servants quickly learned that angering him was anything but wise.
“I have a remedy for that,” Lucious said, gesturing toward the door.
The shackled man who walked in was easily more than seven feet tall, with ebony black skin and muscles that bulged above the short kilt he wore. Tattoos covered his flesh; the slaver who had sold the combatlord had told Lucious that each one represented a foe he had slain in single combat, both within the Empire and in the lands far to the south where he had been found.
Even so, for Lucious, the most intimidating part of it all wasn’t the size of the man or his strength. It was the look in his eyes. There was something there that simply didn’t seem to understand things like compassion or mercy, pain or fear. That could happily have torn them all limb from limb without feeling a thing. There were scars on the warrior’s torso where blades had struck him. Lucious couldn’t imagine that expression changing even then.
Lucious enjoyed watching the reactions of the others there as they saw the fighter, chained like some wild beast and stalking through them. Some of the women made small sounds of fear, while the men stepped back hurriedly out of his path, seeming to sense instinctively just how dangerous this man was. Fear seemed to push emptiness ahead of him, and Lucious basked in the effect his combatlord had. He watched Stephania take a scurrying step back out of the way, and Lucious smiled.
“They call him the Last Breath,” Lucious said. “He has never lost a bout, and never let a foe live. Say hello,” he grinned, “to Ceres’s next—and final—opponent.”
CHAPTER SIX
Ceres woke to darkness, the room lit only by moonlight filtering in through the shutters, and by a single flickering candle. She struggled toward consciousness, remembering. She remembered the beast’s claws ripping at her, and just the memory seemed to be enough to summon the pain to her. It flared in her back as she half turned to her side, hot and sudden enough to make her cry out. The pain was all-consuming.
“Oh,” a voice said, “does it hurt?”
A figure stepped into view. Ceres couldn’t make out the details at first, but slowly, they swam into place. Stephania stood there over her bed, as pale as the shafts of moonlight that surrounded her, forming a perfect picture of the innocent noble, there to visit the sick and injured. Ceres had no doubt that it was deliberate.
“Don’t worry,” Stephania said. To Ceres, the words still seemed to come from too far away, fighting their way through fog. “The healers here gave you something to help you sleep while they stitched you back together. They seemed quite impressed you’re still alive, and they wanted to take away your pain.”
Ceres saw her hold up a small bottle. It was a dull green against the paleness of Stephania’s hand, stoppered with a cork and glistening around the rim. Ceres saw the noble girl smile, and that smile felt as though it was made of sharp edges.
“I am not impressed that you have managed to live,” Stephania said. “That wasn’t the idea at all.”
Ceres tried to reach out for her. In theory, this should have been the moment to escape. If she had been stronger, she could have burst past Stephania and made for the door. If she could have found a way to fight past the cloudiness that felt as though it was filling her head to the breaking point, she might have been able to grab Stephania and force her to help in escaping.
Yet it seemed as if her body was only obeying her sluggishly, responding long after she wanted it to. It was all Ceres could do to sit up with the covers wrapped around her, and even that brought with it a fresh wave of agony.
She saw Stephania run a finger down the bottle she held. “Oh, don’t worry, Ceres. There’s a reason you’re feeling so helpless. The healers asked me to make sure you got your dose of their drug, so I did. Some of it, anyway. Enough to keep you docile. Not enough to actually take away your pain.”
“What did I do to make you hate me this much?” Ceres asked, although she already knew the answer. She’d been close to Thanos, and he’d rejected Stephania. “Does having Thanos for your husband really matter to you this much?”
“You’re slurring your words, Ceres,” Stephania said, with another of those smiles without any warmth behind it that Ceres could see. “And I don’t hate you. Hate would imply that you were in some way worthy of being my enemy. Tell me, do you know anything about poison?”
Just the mention of it was enough to make Ceres’s heart speed up, anxiety blossoming in her chest.
“Poison is such an elegant weapon,” Stephania said, as though Ceres weren’t even there. “Far more so than knives or spears. You think you are so strong because you get to play with swords with all the real combatlords? Yet I could have poisoned you while you slept, so easily. I could have added something to your sleeping draught. I could simply have given you too much of it, so that you never woke up.”
“People would have known,” Ceres managed.
Stephania shrugged. “Would they have cared? In any case, it would have been an accident. Poor Stephania, trying to help, but not really knowing what she was doing, gave our newest combatlord too much medicine.”
She put a hand to her mouth in mock surprise. It was such a perfect mime of shocked remorse, even down to the tear that seemed to glisten at the corner of her eye. When she spoke again, she sounded different to Ceres. Her voice was thick with regret and disbelief. There was even a small catch there, as if she were struggling to hold back the urge to sob.
“Oh no. What have I done? I didn’t mean to. I thought… I thought I did everything exactly the way they told me to!”
She laughed then, and in that moment, Ceres saw her for what she was. She could see through the act that Stephania so carefully maintained all the time. How did no one notice? Ceres wondered. How could they not see what lay behind the beautiful smiles and the delicate laughter?
“They all think I’m stupid, you know,” Stephania said. She stood straighter now, looking a lot more dangerous to Ceres than she had. “I take great care to ensure that they think I’m stupid. Oh, don’t look so worried, I’m not going to poison you.”
“Why not?” Ceres asked. She knew there had to be a reason.
She saw Stephania’s expression harden in the candlelight, a frown creasing the otherwise smooth skin of her brow.
“Because that would be too easy,” Stephania said. “After the way you and Thanos humiliated me, I would rather see you suffer. You both deserve it.”
“There’s nothing else you can do to me,” Ceres said, although in that moment, it didn’t feel like it. Stephania could have walked over to the bed and hurt her a hundred different ways, and Ceres knew she would have been powerless to stop it. Ceres knew the noble would have no idea how to fight, but she could have bested Ceres easily right then.
“Of course there is,” Stephania said. “There are weapons in the world even better than poison. The right words, for instance. Let’s see now. Which of these will hurt most? Your beloved Rexus is dead, of course. Let’s start with that.”
Ceres tried not to let any of the shock she felt show on her face. She tried not to let the grief rise up enough that the noble girl could see it. Yet she knew from the look of satisfaction on Stephania’s face that there must have been some flicker.
“He died fighting for you,” Stephania said. “I thought you would want to know that part. It does make it so much more… romantic.”
“You’re lying,” Ceres insisted, but somewhere inside she knew that Stephania wouldn’t be. She would only say something like this if it was a truth Ceres could check, something that would hurt and go on hurting as she found out the reality of it.
“I don’t need to lie. Not when the truth is so much better,” Stephania said. “Thanos is dead too. He died in the fighting for Haylon, right there on the beaches.”
A fresh wave of grief hit Ceres, sweeping over her and threatening to wash away all sense of herself. She’d fought with Thanos before he’d left, about the death of her brother, and about what he was planning to do, fighting the rebellion. She had never thought they could be the last words she would say to him. She’d left a message with Cosmas specifically so that they wouldn’t be.
“There’s one more,” Stephania said. “Your younger brother? Sartes? He has been taken for the army. I made sure that the draft takers didn’t overlook him just because he was the brother of Thanos’s weapon keeper.”
Ceres did try to lunge at her this time, the anger that filled her fueling her leap for the noble girl. As weak as she was, though, there was no chance of success. She felt her legs tangling in the bed sheets, sending her tumbling to the floor, looking up at Stephania.
“How long do you think your brother will last in the army?” Stephania asked. Ceres saw her expression turn into something like a mockery of pity. “The poor boy. They are so cruel to the conscripts. They’re all practically traitors, after all.”
“Why?” Ceres managed.
Stephania spread her hands. “You took Thanos from me, and that was everything I had planned for my future. Now, I’m going to take everything from you.”
“I’ll kill you,” Ceres promised.
Stephania laughed. “You won’t have a chance. This”—she reached down to touch Ceres’s back, and Ceres had to bite her lip to keep from screaming—“is nothing. That little fight in the Stade was nothing. The worst fights imaginable will be there waiting for you, again and again, until you die.”
“You think people won’t notice?” Ceres said. “You think they won’t guess what you’re doing? You threw me in there because you thought they’d rise up. What will they do if they think you’re cheating them?”
She saw Stephania shake her head.
“People see what they want to see. With you, it seems as though they want to see their princess combatlord, the girl who can fight as well as any man. They’ll believe it, and they’ll love you, right up to the point where you’re turned into a laughing stock out on the sands. They’ll watch you torn to shreds, but before that, they’ll cheer for it to happen.”
Ceres could only watch as Stephania started for the door. The noble girl stopped, turning back toward her, and for a moment, she looked as sweet and innocent as ever.
“Oh, I almost forgot. I tried to give you your medicine, but I didn’t think you’d knock it from my hand before I could give you enough.”
She took out the vial she’d had before, and Ceres watched it tumble to the ground as she dropped it. It shattered, the pieces spinning across the floor of Ceres’s room in splinters that would make it both painful and dangerous for her to try to find her way back into her bed. Ceres had no doubt that Stephania intended it that way.
She saw the noble girl reach out for the candle that lit the room, and briefly, in the instant before she snuffed it out, Stephania’s sweet smile faded again, to be replaced by something cruel.
“I will be there to dance at your funeral, Ceres. I promise you that.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
“I still say that we should gut him and throw his body out for the other Empire soldiers to find.”
“That’s because you’re an idiot, Nico. Even if they noticed one more body among the rest, who’s to say they’d care? And then we’d have the trouble of bringing him down somewhere they’d see him. No. We should ransom him.”
Thanos sat in the cave where the rebels had holed up for the moment, listening to them argue about his fate. His hands were tied in front of him, but at least they’d done their best to patch and bandage his wounds, leaving him in front of a small fire so he wouldn’t freeze while they decided whether to kill him in cold blood or not.
The rebels sat at other fires, huddling around them, discussing what they could do to keep the island from falling to the Empire. They spoke quietly, so that Thanos couldn’t overhear the details, but he already knew the gist of it: they were losing, and losing badly. They were in the caves because there was nowhere else for them to go.
After a while, the one who was obviously their leader came and sat down opposite Thanos, crossing his legs on the hard stone of the cave floor. He pushed across a hunk of bread that Thanos devoured hungrily. He wasn’t sure how long it had been since he’d last eaten.
“I am Akila,” the other man said. “I command this rebellion.”
“Thanos.”
“Just Thanos?”
Thanos could hear the curiosity there, and the impatience. He wondered if the other man had guessed who he was. Either way, the truth seemed like the best option right then.
“Prince Thanos,” he admitted.
Akila sat there opposite him for several seconds, and Thanos found himself wondering if he was going to die then. It had been close enough when the rebels had thought he was just some noble without a name. Now that they knew he was one of the royal family, close to the king who had oppressed them so much, it seemed impossible that they would do anything else.
“A prince,” Akila said. He looked around at the others, and Thanos saw the flash of a smile there. “Hey, lads, we’ve got ourselves a prince here.”
“We should definitely ransom him then!” one of the rebels called out. “He’d be worth a fortune!”
“We should definitely kill him,” another snapped back. “Think about all his kind have done to us!”
“All right, that’s enough,” Akila said. “Concentrate on the fight ahead. It’s going to be a long night.”
Thanos heard a faint sigh from the other man as the men went back to their fires.
“It’s not going well, then?” Thanos said. “You said before that your side was losing.”
Akila gave him a sharp look. “I should know when to keep my mouth shut. Maybe so should you.”
“You’re wondering whether to kill me anyway,” Thanos pointed out. “I figure that I don’t have a lot to lose.”
Thanos waited. This wasn’t the kind of man he could push into giving him answers. There was something tough about Akila. Unyielding and straightforward. Thanos guessed that he would have liked him if they’d met under better circumstances.
“All right,” Akila said. “Yes, we’re losing. You Imperials have more men than we do, and you don’t care about the damage you do. The city is under siege from land and from water, so that no one can get away. We’ll fight from the hills, but when you can just resupply by water, there’s not a lot we can do. Draco may be a butcher, but he’s a clever one.”
Thanos nodded. “He is.”
“And of course, you were probably there when he planned all of it,” Akila said.
Now Thanos understood. “Is that what you’re hoping? That I know all of their plans?” He shook his head. “I wasn’t there when they made them. I didn’t want to be here, and I only came because they escorted me onto the ship under guard.
Maybe if I had been there, I would have heard the part where they planned to stab me in the back.”
He thought of Ceres then, about the way he’d been forced to leave her behind. That hurt more than the rest of it put together. If someone in a position of power was going to try to have him killed, he wondered, what would they do to her?
“You have enemies,” Akila agreed. Thanos saw him clench and unclench one hand, as if the long battle for the city had started to make it cramp. “They’re even the same as my enemies. I don’t know if that makes you my friend, though.”
Thanos looked around pointedly at the rest of the cave. At the shockingly low numbers of soldiers left there. “Right now, it looks as though you could do with all the friends you can get.”
“You’re still a noble. You still have your position because of the blood of ordinary folk,” Akila said. He sighed again. “It looks as though if I kill you, I’m doing what Draco and his masters want, but you’ve as good as told me that if I ransom you, I get nothing for you. I have a fight to win, and no time to keep prisoners around if they don’t know anything. So, what am I supposed to do with you, Prince Thanos?”
Thanos got the impression that he was serious. That he actually wanted a better solution. Thanos thought quickly.
“I think your best choice is to let me go,” he said.
Akila laughed at that. “Nice try. If that’s the best you have, hold still. I’ll try to make this as painless as possible.”
Thanos saw his hand go to one of his swords.
“I’m serious,” Thanos said. “I can’t help you win the battle for the island if I’m here.”
He could see Akila’s disbelief, and the certainty that it had to be a trap. Thanos went on quickly, knowing that his best hope of surviving the next few minutes lay in convincing this man that he wanted to help the rebellion.
“You said yourself that one of the big problems is that the Empire has its fleet supporting the assault,” Thanos said. “I know that they left supplies on the ships because they were so eager to get on with the attack. So we take the ships.”