Anzu landed on the top deck of the yacht that had ferried Valeria and Leon to the capitol island. The rest of the group got onto the boat the same way that the three of them had left: via a small platform at the back that led to a storage area for the first dinghy and had a staircase leading back up to the deck. The ten knights and their two charges left the dinghies with the yacht’s crew to handle and ascended to meet with Leon and the woman who owned the yacht.
As soon as the group reached the top, Princess Cristina threw off her hood and rushed forward, pulling the woman into a tight hug.
“Sister! You came!” she gasped.
“I’d never leave you here,” Stefania, the First Princess, replied, for, of course, she was the yacht’s owner.
“Your Highness… thank you,” said the second hooded person, who slowly removed her own hood to reveal the same pretty face that Leon had earlier glimpsed. Her features were no longer wracked with worry now that she had found a familiar face to cling to, and her smile was breathtaking in its beauty. It was easy for Leon to see why she had become the King’s favorite.
“Lady Isabelle, it’s good to see you,” Stefania responded, welcoming the King’s concubine onto her ship warmly.
“Where are we going now? To get August?” Cristina asked, her excitement at seeing her sister and at freedom from the Royal harem dying a bit as the sounds of battle continued to find their way to the ship from the eastern side of the island.
“That was the plan,” Stefania said as she glanced at Leon and Valeria.
“Going with Plan B?” Leon asked as he removed his helmet.
“Hu! I know you!” Cristina exclaimed with a gasp of surprise now that she could see his features.
“Your Highnesses,” Leon said with a bow directed more toward Cristina than toward Stefania. The latter had already given him permission not to bow to her, but he could see a few disapproving looks from Cristina and Isabelle’s guard detail at his lack of formality.
“Yes, yes, we can all stroke each other’s egos another time,” Stefania said with a dismissive wave of her hand. “Right now, we have much more important things to take care of, namely that it seems like Dame Minerva and the two Paladins on our side have made a mess of things on their end. I’m not bringing my baby sister to a battlefield.”
Leon nodded in understanding, noting that the yacht had already begun to turn southward. “Get us as close as you can,” he said.
“I can do that, but we’ll be falling back to the secondary rendezvous point,” Stefania replied with a warm smile.
Leon nodded, then looked to Valeria. “Get ready for a fight,” he said.
Valeria nodded and unslung her glaive from her back while Leon summoned his bow from his soul realm.
“Wait, you two aren’t going to go join that battle, are you?” Cristina asked with a panicked expression. Her question was directed more toward Valeria than Leon, but it was the latter who answered the Princess.
“It’s our duty to go join the battle. Your Highness will be safe here in Princess Stefania’s capable hands, and you have ten of the finest knights in the Royal Guard to protect you. There’s little need for the two of us to stick around.”
Cristina frowned and stared at Valeria, silently asking what she was going to do.
“I… I will be fighting alongside Sir Leon,” Valeria said, to Cristina’s immense disappointment.
Before the Princess could protest, Asiya skipped over and added, “Your Highness, we should let these two lovebirds play, I’m sure they’ll be fine…”
“But they’re not playing… they’re going into battle…” Cristina pouted as Asiya pulled her away from Leon, who had averted his gaze to anything but Asiya’s teasing smile, and Valeria, whose face had gone scarlet. With a wink and a nod to Valeria, Asiya and Cristina disappeared below deck, along with Isabelle and the rest of the Royal Guard.
“Ah. Well. Shall we carry on?” Stefania asked, giving Leon and Valeria a knowing a smile.
“Yes… yes, let’s get going,” Leon whispered.
---
At the same time that Leon and Valeria were making their way to the Royal harem, August was sitting in a cell in the dungeon. For the two weeks before his trial, he had languished in his private apartments, with little food and the occasional ‘visit’ from some knights in his brother’s employ. They demanded he write and sign a sworn statement ‘confessing’ his guilt, and whenever he refused, they would get rough.
In the end, August made the statement they wanted, and he was left alone in his apartments. Even if he was locked in a cage, it was a gilded one, with all the amenities a man of his station could ask for. The temperature was regulated, he had access to his bathroom where he could wash and do his business in peace, and all of his furnishings were simple, if of the highest quality.
The cell he was moved to after the trial, however, was dark, cramped, and lacked even the most basic of amenities. There was nowhere for him to wash, his toilet amounted to a bucket in the corner, and his bed was a slab of stone elevated a mere foot off the stone floor. The cell itself was only about five feet square, which meant that August, now a little more than six feet tall after awakening his blood, couldn’t even stand up straight, and barely had enough room to stretch out diagonally on the floor.
Even more uncomfortable were the powerful wards placed upon the cell that were specifically designed for high-level mages. The same reinforcements that existed on the walls of fortresses and within most training rooms to keep them intact were present here, so even August’s earth magic couldn’t help him escape.
The only way in or out of the cell was a three-foot by three-foot hatch in the ceiling. On the other side of that hatch, though, August knew were at least two powerful guards, if not more, let alone the guards that filled the dungeon. It wasn’t a large building since most law-breakers were held in prisons run by the Arbiters, reserving the dungeon on the capitol island for those who had crossed the Royal Family. However, even with its smaller size, the dungeon still had an impressive complement of knights watching over it, even though to August’s knowledge he was the only person imprisoned within.
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But August didn’t mind his current accommodations that much. He was relatively uncomfortable, but he was alive, and he didn’t think he’d be able to say that tomorrow. What really bothered him wasn’t even the fact that Octavius had won; he had never lied when he said that the primary reason he got involved in the struggle for the throne was for Cristina and Isabelle.
He’d lost. Octavius had won. August’s only regret was that now his mother and sister would be without his protection.
As August lay on the stone bed, bereft of even the thinnest blanket and lost in thoughts of his family, he felt the ground start to shake. At first, the fallen Prince paid it no mind, chalking it up to a trick of the mind, or at the very least something that he needn’t concern himself with.
But the shaking didn’t stop. It came in irregular bursts and eventually became too powerful to ignore. There was clearly something going on.
‘Probably just breaking ground for my execution platform,’ August cynically thought.
It wasn’t until he started hearing the screaming and the fighting that he realized what was happening.
He bolted up from the meager bed he’d been resting on and straightened up as much as he could, pressing his ear against the hatch to try and hear anything. He heard some muffled shouting, probably the guards outside of his cell getting ready for whatever was obviously coming, but the details escaped him.
And then came an explosion, loud and strong, ripping through the room above August and sending dust falling down into the cell from the stone ceiling. The hatch vibrated in its frame, knocking August back a bit, and he backed away from it as fast as he could, just in case it was knocked loose and fell into the cell. He was weak from weeks of mistreatment, and he didn’t want to take any chances with an injury.
The sounds of fighting became loud, clearly happening just above him. A few wisps of power leaked in through the hatch, telling him that very powerful mages were battling above. He detected fire, wind, and light magic, giving him a few clues as to who might be up there, but when he strained his senses looking for even the tiniest spark of lightning magic, he came up empty.
That ruled out Leon, but August guessed Brimstone and Roland at least had come for him.
The fallen Prince did his best to keep a straight face, but he couldn’t help but break out into a wide smile. There wasn’t any confirmation of what was happening, and he knew better than to make assumptions.
Fortunately, he didn’t have long to wait, as only about five minutes after the shaking started, the hatch swung open, letting light stream into the cell. It was harsh and bright, but August’s fifth-tier eyes adapted in a second, and he saw above him the Paladin Roland.
“Your Highness!” Roland shouted as he lowered an arm into the cell. Behind him, August could see other figures, but he couldn’t recognize them from behind the veil of tears he failed to suppress.
“You damn idiots!” he cried out as he smilingly reached out for Roland’s outstretched hand.
With ease, the Paladin pulled August out of the cell. The Prince stumbled a bit once he was put back on his own feet, but he quickly righted himself and turned to analyze the situation.
His cell—or, more accurately, his shallow oubliette—had been located on one end of a small guard room, just large enough for a table that could seat five or six people. There had been six people there guarding his cell—at least, that’s what August figured since there were now six corpses on the ground. Within the guard room were another four people, aside from himself and Roland: Minerva, Brimstone, and two knights he couldn’t name but recognized as sixth-tier mages from Trajan’s old retinue.
“Your Highness,” Minerva said as she stepped forward, “this isn’t the time to talk, we need you to come with us if you don’t want to die tomorrow.”
“Got it,” August said, simply going with the flow. He wasn’t a military man by any stretch of the imagination, and he was perfectly comfortable with deferring to someone who had both the experience and knowledge of the situation to get him away from the cell.
“Good. Come with us,” Minerva said, leading the way back out of the only door into the guard room.
Outside, August witnessed a scene of carnage. The guard room opened into a four-sided courtyard that had been lined with eleven other cells just like his on three sides, with the fourth side functioning as a reinforced gateway. Above the courtyard were stark concrete walls forty feet high, and August knew that the opening at the top was heavily warded to keep anyone coming in from above.
The courtyard itself was filled with bodies, at least two dozen from the brief glimpse August got before Roland hurried him along. Much of the courtyard was heavily damaged from the fighting, with rubble everywhere, but the dungeon itself still seemed stable.
Still standing were a handful of other knights that had come with Minerva, Roland, and Brimstone, though the bodies some of them were carrying indicated the fight hadn’t been nearly so one-sided as the one in the guard room.
Minerva led the group past the gates and into the main hall of the dungeon. It was fairly long, with three stories opening into the hall, each with at least a dozen more normal cells—all empty. This made the normal guard detail light, but the bodies scattered around the hall were already far more than double what August would’ve expected. Again, he found several dozen knights still standing in the hall covering the main door whom he assumed followed either Minerva or one of the Paladins, and while they had clearly taken a few casualties, a quick count put them at less than ten. Combined with those from the section he was being kept in, that put the total number of casualties sustained by Minerva’s force at barely a dozen.
On the one hand, it was a testament to the retainers that Trajan had employed that so few casualties were taken, but on the other hand, it was deeply suspicious that more hardened knights hadn’t been watching the dungeon. The guard detail had clearly been staffed up for August’s stay, but it all just seemed too easy…
August’s concerns seemed shared by Minerva as her face wore an expression of intense focus, and she kept the group moving, calling the rest of the knights into formation as they went rather than stopping to give orders. The knights, who were looking more and more like Minerva’s own rather than Roland’s or Brimstone’s, sprang into motion with barely a word from Minerva, opening the door for them and spilling out into the night to link up with even more knights who had been securing the dungeon.
Only outside did August begin to truly understand the scale of what Minerva and his Paladins had launched. More than a hundred knights had come for him, completely overwhelming the prison guards with superior power, experience, and discipline. August didn’t even think it had been ten minutes since he first felt the ground begin to shake, and he was already outside of the dungeon.
“Let’s go!” Minerva shouted, and that was all the gathered knights needed to hear, again impressing August with the speed and precision with which they moved. There was no questioning her order, no signs of laziness, just crisp action. They stormed off southward from the dungeon, staying well off the roads. By sheer necessity, the dungeon had been built a good distance away from the rest of the palace complex in the southwest, so there was little risk of running into anything of note if they stuck to their current course.
However, August’s quiet fears were soon proven prophetic as the large group sped south, sticking as close to the rocky cliffs of the coast as they could. As they moved through the hills and light forest of the island, they found a large contingent of soldiers formed up waiting for them.
Minerva called their group to a halt but didn’t bother trying to conceal herself. Even in the evening darkness, they were unmistakable. Even more, she could see who was leading them: the Earthshaker Paladin was standing in front of the Legion shield wall, grinning at her like a hunter gloating at a hare trapped in his snare.