Iris found her clothing and the purple robe smeared with blood and utterly savaged during what passed for fighting in the little massacre. However, a quick darting of her eyes around the room from where the door was closed behind her, she found her little leather bag and along with the ruins of the pine box and broken red fragments of the bottles that held all her doses of Silphium Tea. ‘I’ll replace it later.’ She made a mental note and flung open the bag, everything there was to wear was designed to mock the concept of modesty.

She took up a red and white set of muslin fabric and began to wrap herself in it, stopping only to take up the purple robe and clean her thighs before tossing it into the corner. Iris did her best to control her breathing, the rising and falling of her breasts was slowed at last when she finally had the wrap crossed enough times over her chest to finally conceal it properly. The white wrap around her waist she secured with a tight little knot and let the little dangling tresses hang free.

“Alright… you’re going to properly meet the Mother of Terror… you’re going to meet the most brutal warlady that Jabaria has ever introduced and you’ve been caught in both an assassination plot and screwing her son… in the same hour. Think, Iris, think. What do you say from here?” She asked, and struggled to come up with something.

She looked around the room, where bodies were in pieces scattered about, the brutal orcs and their love of blunt weapons and axes was on fierce display. Gottfried’s sword had clearly taken a nasty toll, a man lay in half, legs dangling in one place, but he had died while still reaching for them. ‘Did he think he was going to reattach them?’ His face was slack, and entrails hung from the severed torso, torn out as he’d dragged himself toward the lost legs.

Gottfried’s sword lay against the wall, smeared with the proof of his actions and blood running toward the pommel.

She stepped over the smashed brains of a fallen assassin, and as if to confirm the truth for herself, she picked up the remnants of the pine box and counted out the contents. “...Three, four, five, six…’ One was missing. She looked around the room again, the bloody painting that it had become was a natural camouflage for the little tool of her trade, “Don’t be stupid, it doesn’t matter now.” She rolled her gray eyes at herself, and then went to the double door to open them and return clothed to the room.

She approached the royal pair, the room was empty other than they and the remaining corpse. Her pulse raced hard enough that she could feel it throbbing in her veins, and went down to her knees a few feet away from the Princess.

Eniera’s voice was strangely calm, she waved a hand out in a gesture toward Iris and commanded, “Tell me what happened. From the very beginning… from the time you met my son, Iris.”

Iris’ breath caught when her name was used, and glanced to the Princess’ left hand where Gottfried sat.

“Look at me, not at him.” Eniera rebuked her with a sharp tone, “I am not asking only as his mother, but as the Princess and the mother of the future Emperor. It’s my responsibility to know everything.”

Iris bowed her head, the floor was cool beneath her knees and the surface of her feet, she sat back on her heels, and began to tell her story.

Their first meeting.

Their first hours together.

Eniera interrupted when Iris brought up the plot in the arena. “If you lie to me, there is no favor you can do that will let me forgive it. I have it on good authority that the name of the one to report that information is Lyrica Tyren. She’s set to receive quite a reward for that, if you try to take it from her-”

“That is my owner, Mistress. But the information is as she reported, I am the one who overheard it.” Iris replied, swallowing her fear at royal rebuke, she felt the blue eyes like ice filling her veins.

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The Princess went quiet, and taking that as permission, Iris continued.

Their subsequent rendezvous.

Becoming ‘cohorts’.

Everything up until the moment of the plot, her ‘client’.

“Who was this ‘client’?” Eniera hissed.

“I don’t really get any ‘names’ My Lady. But this is him.” Iris removed a hand from her thigh and pointed to the corpse.

Eniera moved then, rising from her seat, she kicked the corpse over onto its back.

“Do you know him, mother?” Gottfried asked when he saw her crouch down over his bloody and shredded face.

“I think so. It’s hard to tell, given his face.” Eniera picked at a few pieces of glass and pulled them out. “I’ll have it removed, then have an artist try to remake it, we’ll find him soon enough.”

She stood up and removed a cloth from her pocket to wipe her hand of the blood, then tossed the white silk aside like trash.

“I… he wanted me to use a paralytic on G- on the Prince. To slip it into his wine.” Iris caught herself and shivered while the wave of raw and terror inducing fury overtook the cruel faced Princess.

“Mother…” Gottfried put his hand on Eniera’s shoulder, and the woman calmed her quiet wrath.

“Why you?” Eniera asked, her narrow eyes focused on Iris like she was some unfamiliar bug or how a merchant looked at a suspicious customer.

“I can’t speak for the dead but…” Iris said with a weary, hoarse voice and put a hand over her chest, “He made a great deal out of me being from Abacleon. He talked about how your son, and you… were responsible for the death of his brother, he insisted I sh-” Iris paused and cleared her throat, she looked up at Gottfried, not his mother, “should hate him for the way my life is now, for the womb he would have rotted for his amusements and for… just everything. He told me-” Iris looked down at the floor, away from the face of her lover, the look of guilt on his face, his closed eyes, his inability to meet her cloudy, pained eyes, it was too much.

Eniera was seemingly unmoved, “Told you what?” The demand had an edge to it.

“That you were behind the war, that you Princess Eniera Jabara, were behind my city’s betrayal and that this was my only chance to take some kind of revenge on you all. He thought…” She looked over at the corpse and spat on it, the glob of spit striking his face, “that I would be an easy tool to use.”

“Preposterous.” Gottfried quipped.

“Well now I know who he is.” Eniera said decisively, “Only a handful of people knew about that.” She relaxed at last, “That has to be Peel. His brother ‘was’ on my council, and on your uncle’s council.”

“It’s true…?” Gottfried asked, and looked at his mother with dismay and shock.

“Of course it is. Not quite the way he probably thought of it. But it is.” Eniera admitted and pointed down at the former noblewoman. “Her city was infected with foreign elements, elements whose interest carried their eyes elsewhere. Their nobles, such as her family, would have been more important and powerful as nobles in our neighbor’s northeast than in our southwest. Trade, mining, crafts… I took note of the change, and just… accelerated the process.”

Iris was caught in the steel blue eyes of the warlady. “A few bribes and phony promises of aid, and a governor I knew I couldn’t trust, then all I had to do was wait.” Eniera admitted, then flipped her hand palm up and closed it into an iron fist. “Then I had them all. A rebellion I could end in a month, instead of a war that would take years of fighting to resolve and give us a country we couldn’t easily hold if we won.”

“That is why we died…” Iris asked, she put her hand over her belly and looked at the small closed fist.

“Yes, Iris. Yes.” Eniera remarked and glanced at the stunned face of her son.

Gottfried’s mouth hung partially open as he tried and failed to disguise his dismay at his mother’s ruthless entrapment.

“Don’t look so shocked, when you’re the Emperor, you will always have to weigh the many against the few. If you feel tricked, my son, blame yourself for being tricked. That is on you.” The Princess said with icy calm, and then dropped her hand down and gave a closer look at Iris.

“Which now brings us to the present… finish your story.” Eniera commanded, and again, Iris obeyed.

Iris explained it all in detail, from why she said nothing to Lyrica, to finding Gottfried still suffering the effects of the opium laced honey cakes and the impromptu ambush.

“And why… Why do all this? Why would a whore from Abacleon, a slave with nothing who insists she wants nothing and did not even get a reward for her first action… do any of this for a man and his family she has every reason to hate?” Eniera finally demanded.

Only then did Iris level her eyes up at the Mistress of Life and Death in the Jabarian Empire, and she spoke with all the courage she could muster.

“Because I love him.”