“Mother I realize we’ve not had long together but-” Gottfried was stopped from his protest when Iris squeezed her hand around his waist.

“My Lady…” Iris inclined her head in deference. “I love your son… I didn’t know how much until… until…” Her eyes fluttered as she recalled the precious words he passed to her when she entered his room, and found that she couldn’t say them, her heart still ached with the power she felt thrumming through her when he said he didn’t care what she was, they were hers now. Iris would not give them up. So she finished her sentence saying only, “Before this. I know everything I am and where I stand in this empire.”

She swallowed the sense of danger that rose up at defying the will of the bloody Princess, ”Taking ‘gifts’ from you… I loathe the very idea. Forgive my impertinence, but I still have my pride. Maybe I earned my freedom today, and I can accept that. But… charity from my destroyers?” Iris shook her head, “I helped your son the first time because he was kind to me, and what they were doing did not sit well with me. But I won’t just be ‘handed’ things like a beggar in the street.”

“Iris!” Gottfried gasped, but she did not shake her cloudy gray eyes away from the watery deep blue of his mother.

“Do you think I’m doing all that out of kindness?” Eniera asked in a rhetorical way. “Not in the least. I’m not offering gifts to my son’s lover. I’m grateful beyond words for what you’ve done for him… you showed more courage naked and unarmed than some men in full armor with a sword in their hands. You used your weapons better than most I’ve ever seen. And I am arming you to protect yourself and to protect my son. More than that…”

Eniera leveled her imperious hand with her palm upturned out toward Iris, her fingers folded into a fist save for one that was focused squarely between the eyes of Iris, “You’re mine now. You’re wasted out there. You belong in my house, a cunning woman who makes my son happy, can be trusted, and has courage?” She shook her head, bouncing her short golden hair around behind her.

“I’m not giving you a choice.” Eniera stated flatly.

“Then what…?” Iris stopped when she saw Eniera’s eyes go to Gottfried.

“Mother, you’re not thinking what I think you’re thinking, are you?” Gottfried felt his stomach roiling.

“Oh yes. Iris will enter my household as a royal private courtesan to you. What will she become from there? I can’t even guess.” Eniera said and folded her hands in front of her chest.

Iris felt adrift, “May I… may I sit? This is a lot to take in?” She asked, and Gottfried guided her partway to a stool while her hand went up to touch her forehead.

She sat on the chair and looked down, dressed as she was, recalling how she lived up until that very day. There was no real question in her mind, ‘This is an improvement…’

“So… I’m a woman in his harem, or…?” Iris asked, trying to wrap her head around what she was hearing.

“The harem would be populated entirely by ‘you’ for now, but that is true as far as it goes. However there is no ‘or’. There is no other option, and this is the finest reward I can possibly offer you as things are.” Eniera pointed out.

Gottfried chose the path of argument, he held out his hand as if offering it to his mother to take it, to draw him close to the distant woman at the peak of the empire down from her high place and into the embrace of her son. “Mother, she saved my life, she loves me and I… do you think I could hunt anywhere in the empire and find someone as fit… as… brave as…”

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

His sentimental words did not move the Princess’ heart of flint.

“No. And if this were a better world, a fair world, a world out of the stories I used to read to you when you were a child then this would be the turning point. You’d declare her your wife, and I would relent and bless your marriage and you would live happily ever after. Is that how you imagine things, Gottfried?” Eniera asked with a slow denial in the shake of her head and a voice of pity.

“Well…” He started but then slowly closed his mouth when the shaking of his mother’s head stopped.

“Do you know why those stories always ended the same way?” Eniera asked him and fixed his gaze with hers.

She didn’t wait for him to reply.

“Because,” she raised a finger, “those ‘happily ever afters’ that children fell asleep to, within a few weeks to years those Kingdoms would fall to full blown rebellions. You can’t just throw an unknown onto the throne and into the halls of power at the top without upsetting the whole structure. Right now you are a marriage prize who helps keep our neighbors… optimistic. If you marry, do I need to explain what that means?” Eniera looked at them both with a raised brow that said, ‘I’d better not have to.’

“She’s right.” Iris agreed. “I’d be a stone tossed around in a house of glass. In a ‘harem’, nobody will care. In a position to be on the throne… it becomes unpredictable?”

Gottfried’s hand lowered away from his mother and the mailed fist came around to hold on to Iris like he was afraid she would drift away.

Whatever he planned to utter, his mother killed it with praise.

“You’re quite a find. I won’t run out of fingers if I tried to count on one hand the number of people who would die for my son. That sets you high in my eyes, but as a woman born from a city of treason, that makes you worse than a lowborn. You will not have an easy time. My most loyal will think the worst of you as they will not know this story, my least loyal will make you a target. You will be beset on all sides, and even my help is not divine. But you heard what I said a little while ago, even if my son missed it. Didn’t you, child?” Eniera rose from her seat at last and approached the pair.

Eniera stretched out her hands across the divide between them both and placed them on Iris’ fine, soft cheeks.

“Iris, what is she talking about?” Gottfried asked, his fingers tensed around his lover’s waist, and though he held and spoke to Iris, his eyes, hawk-like and protective, looked down beneath his helmet at his mother.

“She said…” Iris began, and whether by her own volition or the surprisingly gentle guidance of the Hammer of the Empire, turned her face up toward Gottfried.

“Go on, say it. There is so very much to be done, and we can’t wait forever. I have to pay off your former owner, acquire your mother, send out my Arrows to round up everybody connected to the corpses here, return to the capital to speak with my brother, prepare for actions against the elves, and on top of that I have to have proper quarters and training arranged for my newest weapon… you.” Eniera’s voice began to rise as she listed off the things she had to do, and it sounded serious at first.

But, but, thanks to his long affiliation with his mother, the godsheir knew there was laughter held behind those lips.

“She said, ‘This is the finest reward I can possibly offer you as things are’.” Iris repeated the phrase with the special emphasis at the end included.

“Meaning… things can change?” Gottfried guessed.

“No.” Eniera replied with a steely stare.

Before he could even become crestfallen, Iris finished the woman’s thought.

“Meaning we make them change. We force things to change.” Iris did not only say it, she pronounced it.

The light sprang into being in Gottfried’s eyes as he understood.

“If you want more, I’m not giving you a damn thing. If you want what you want, and badly enough, you have to take it. That is how you make an empire. That is how you make a life.” The silken voice of the Mother of Terror washed over them with the full force of a royal born and bred, and yet an almost proud smirk came with her grim and cynical advice when Princess Eniera added with finality.

“If you want to change things, you’d best be prepared to behave… badly.”

“If that’s what it takes…” Gottfried said, clenching a mailed fist, and clutching his lover close as his armor would permit.

When Eniera stepped away, took up her sheathed sword from off the bar, she could only feel a sense of profound, and unexpected pride. Goosebumps rose on her cynical body, ‘My son… is becoming his own man now. I can’t wait to see what sort that is.’

Iris turned her storm gray eyes from her lover, to his mother, and finished his thought as if it were her own. “Then that’s what I’ll do.”

Slowly the growing smell of blood and death filled the room like a freshly filled battlefield, and it bothered none of them even a little.

-END-