Shoes on marble pulled his attention, and Arthur turned to see Circe Leos step up beside him.

“We should talk.” She said in a tone tense with suppressed emotion.

“Should we?” He asked blithely. “In that case, should I prepare for you to try to subdue me with your fists again?”

“You are being needlessly caustic.” She huffed.

“You tried to break my skull with a sword!” He shot back.

“Ser! Open your eyes!” She exclaimed while stepping forward and into his personal space to glare up at him. “Do you have any idea what manner of situation you’ve walked into?” Circe demanded with a narrowing of her jade eyes. “Do you even understand how dire things are for House Leos? Do you understand how close our enemies are to the proverbial gates?”

Arthur glared at her in response, and she continued without cessation.

“It is only luck, Ser; luck, my talents for battle, and an inordinately strong-willed father that have kept me from the marriage bed of one of those vipers seeking to prey upon our weakness!” She said angrily. “A weakness they created, mind you!”

“And that explains your assault on me, how?” He asked stubbornly.

“Because you may be a very big issue for me, Ser!”

“I am failing to see how I could be an issue for you, Lady Leos.” Arthur said flatly.

“You could be an issue, Ser, because you seemingly belong to no one and fight for nothing.” Circe said in a fiery tone. “You are a mercenary. You sell yourself to the highest bidder, and do whatever they ask of you. You have no home among us, you have no roots, you have nothing that motivates you to persevere—even when everything goes against you.”

Arthur narrowed his eyes at her presumption, but Circe wasn’t done.

“I have seen mercenaries before, Ser! I have seen them make promises of aid and service to my father, only to renege when our enemies band together to intimidate them with force and send them running, or when that fails; offer them a fee so extortionately large, we cannot pay a matching one.” Her expression tightened while she spoke, and Arthur vaguely sensed more than just anger; he sensed a clear pattern of feeling betrayed.

“Not simply out of honor do we not pay,” she continued fiercely, “which is a factor! But because we simply cannot afford to engage in that manner of escalating bidding war with regularity, and still provide the quality of care our people deserve.” Her words were firmly resolved when she said that. “Every mercenary we retained would be a dent to our coffers, which while they are immense, are not endless.”

“And you divert much of those funds toward development of Pallikári.” Arthur surmised from her earlier words. “Which impacts their quality of life.”

Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

“Exactly.” Circe said firmly. “We cannot even consider not investing actively in those that rely on us to invest in them, for their futures. We have a duty to our people we cannot set aside!”

Arthur finally gave up on his clothing and turned fully to face the heiress, whom he quietly noted had already attained the signs of rapid healing on her cut lip. If his rough assumptions were correct, the superficial wound would likely be gone in less than eight hours.

“If your family is destroyed, Lady Leos, their lives will fall to ruin regardless.” He pointed out with unveiled skepticism.

“Yes.” She agreed without missing a beat. “But that does not mean they should suffer for our weakness. If we are no longer here, then their future deprivation will stain the honor of those who claim our lands after the fact—but House Leos is the owner and defender of these lands here and now.” Her words held a passionate conviction that Arthur couldn’t help but be intrigued by while she spoke.

So he listened despite the rage still burning within him, and barely noticed it cooling.

“These people look to us for safety, and we can no more betray that than we could not call ourselves Graecians! It is the duty of the strong to protect the weak, and it is the duty of a Noble to ensure the prosperity of their charges.”

Circe’s green stare was fierce when she finished, and her cheeks were flushed.

She was passionate, if nothing else. Passionate, and dogged to a fault perhaps.

“Noblesse oblige.” Arthur said with a raised eyebrow. “Some would call that a naive, idealistic, or even antiquated outlook.”

“Look around you, Ser.” Circe said fiercely. “Our whole civilization is built on naivete, idealism, and antiquated notions. The colonists that first landed on Hellas made the choice to build a society that reflected Greece-on-Terra in antiquity, and did so with the knowledge it was both optimistic and patently absurd in the cosmic era! We are well aware of how unlikely our current prosperity was for this age of bipedal war machines and interstellar warships!”

Well, someone had to say it he supposed.

“And your attempt to brain me with a practice blade?” He asked more curiously than angrily. Much of his ire had abated following her impassioned explanations of her motivations, and though he still harbored some solid embers of fury, they were largely smothered by his growing curiosity in the tall, powerful woman before him.

She was interesting.

He wondered idly how much of that was her, and how much was their resonance.

“The point of that exercise was not to hurt you.” She objected immediately and stubbornly. “Anything short of decapitation could be addressed by our medical teams, anyway, thanks to the geneticists’ legacy. No, Ser, the point of that was to test your preparedness.” She continued as if that made perfect sense.

“My preparedness?” He asked skeptically. “For assassins in maid costumes?”

She blushed more brightly at his query, but did not appear deterred.

“No!” She insisted. “For assassination in general! There have been no less than forty-seven attempts on my life in the last five years alone!”

Arthur’s eyebrows rose at that, and her words finally gave him pause.

Forty-Seven? That was… a lot. Even on Albion, where assassination was very much a ritual part of each generation’s struggle for the title of Heir; there had been some measure of reasonable restraint with the amount of attempts. Arthur himself, he remembered, had only had to endure thirty in the last decade of his push to become his father’s heir.

For there to have been so many attempts on Circe’s life… He might have underestimated how badly House Leos’ enemies wanted it off the board entirely.