When Rasgen entered Tir’s room, she was already nude and waiting. There was an inviting smile on her face and she raised a pale finger and curled it toward him. The Prince however, only quietly shut the door, and neither approached nor stripped.
She almost immediately saw that something was wrong, and got up off the bed, “Oh you want me to do the work? Fitting.” She said, raising her chin to expose the silver locked into place around her neck.
“No… Lodira… I mean, no, Tir.” He said and grabbed her wrists when she was reaching for his belt. She froze.
Her smile ran away from her face, her eyes, heavy lidded and inviting, widened and she started to rapidly blink as she processed this sudden turn of events.
“What’s wrong…? Isn’t this… aren’t I doing what you like? Isn’t this what you want?” She asked, she tried to sound inviting, but fresh from his talk with the twins, he heard the underlying bitterness in her words. ‘How long has that been there, and I just stupidly did not notice?’
“Tir.” He said, ensuring he didn’t use her former name, “I don’t think I should keep doing this.”
She yanked her hands away from him and stepped back to put distance between them. “I’m just clinging to things that can’t be…” He said in his noble timbre, taking a step toward her, she stepped away instead. His hands came out and hers drew back.
“Do you really want to pretend things are as they’ve always been…?” Rasgen asked, and Tir thrust up her jaw, not in arrogance, but when she tilted her head back, he couldn’t not see the silver there.
“Who gives a fuck what I want?” She asked with a vicious bite to her words.
“Tir, I’m… we’ve known each other for most of our lives… of course I care what you want… I love you… I just don’t want to hurt you, and I think, I think doing as we have been, it can’t end well.” Rasgen’s noble voice escaped him, replaced with only the sad words of doubt.
“Now you figure that out? After I’ve been reduced to the Prince’s personal whore for weeks? Now you work that out, after you let everything happen? Now? Now?!” Tir exclaimed and reached for a robe that hung on her wall, she threw it over herself. “Have you done anything so far to make things right?! Have you cut trade with Shog’nai? Have you investigated my… Anton or his children to find out what their interests are and hurt them? Or is Anton still drinking tea in his estate while his children smugly wait for him to die to get what should have been mine?”
Rasgen clenched his jaw. “It’s not that simple, I’m a Prince.” He slapped his hand over his chest, “A Prince, damn it! I have responsibilities! I can’t just cut off trade on a whim! I just got a staff put together after having pushed the old ones out! I have a city to command!” He snapped at her with a sharp tongue and she gave him a long stare.
“You made time to fuck me. You could have made time to help me, Prince.” She said with a scathing expression, “But you’ve done nothing.”
“Things like that take time… I haven’t forgotten my promise… they will pay…” He said with quiet emphasis as he took another step toward her.
Tir tied the blue silk robe around her waist and crossed her arms. “Sure they do. You had Leaman punished almost immediately for what he did to my mistress.”
“That was easy. What do you want me to do, go to war over…” She interrupted his words immediately with a vicious snarling reply.
“Over a whore, that’s what you were going to say, isn’t it? Or were you just going to say, ‘Over a slave’ because that’s what I am now, and what could be dumber than a fight for that? My Lady has probably diverted her entire company of Breakers by now, straight to Hanak’sen. Can you guess what the Prince of that city did to Diana? And yet she’s going herself to make him pay for it.”
Rasgen swallowed that bitter pill, but before it settled in his gut, she railed at him, “If something happened to the Duchessa, if she were captured and tormented, you’d raise the armies of all your nobles to go punish the one to do it.”
“But she’s a noblewoman and…” He silently cursed his reflexive response and lowered the hands that reached for her.
Her bitter face and trembling, wrinkled chin when he spoke, was answer enough for how badly he’d chosen his words. Still, she finished the thought for him. “And I’m the lowest of the low, a suspected killer, an adulterous whore, a fallen noble you get to play pretend with whenever the stress gets to be too much and not worth anything of yourself to do anything for.” Tir spat out the words and tried not to show tears of anger, and she was rapidly failing.
“I offered to buy you, set you up somewhere… Tir… what do you want from me…? I did everything I could…” The Prince replied and came close to her again, he put his hands on her shoulders and tried to draw her closer.
She glared up at him, “Right, you tried to buy me. You’d have set me up in some nice little cabin, we talked about that, the only difference between right now and that offer is the location and a strip of silver around my throat. I’d still just see you when you wanted to get yourself off, and I’d still have no future that wasn’t bitter, only then I’d have no chance for revenge.” She wiped away her angry tears, only for new ones to take their place until she gave up trying to be rid of them.
“You ask what I wanted? I wanted the unreasonable. I wanted you to give up your throne, take some of the funds you were due, and throw all the trappings of power away, then run off with me somewhere. Anywhere. Just so long as it was us.” She put her hands up to his cheeks and held them, his jaw cradled in her palm, “If you’d done that, I could have been happy. I always thought I could rely on you, trust you for anything, everything. I never needed to worry about anything when I was in your arms. But that isn’t what you chose to do, is it, Prince Rasgen? You left me in a powerless state to fend for myself, and this is where I ended up. You really think you’re being kind, coming to me now and telling me this has to stop?”
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As crystal tears ran away from her face to fall on her arms before running away from there and landing on the expensive wooden floor, she looked at him for an answer to the question, and he struggled to think of one.
“You know I couldn’t do that, a man in my position has a lot to lose, a lot to risk… and I couldn’t ever be like you, ignoring duties and responsibilities, just doing whatever I wanted was never an option. You asked the impossible… Tir, you know that.”
She raked her nails down his cheek and pushed him violently away from her. “So I’m irresponsible… I had nothing to lose, nothing to risk… where do you think I am? What do you think I lost?! You say I was irresponsible, but damn it, Rasgen! I was irresponsible with you! You could have said no! You could have just stopped screwing me whenever you wanted. What was I going to do? Force you?” She gave a mocking laugh, “You were fine with the irresponsibility when it got you off, but now I’m the villain here?”
He brought his hands up to touch the red streaks she’d left on his cheek. “Maybe you’re right, Tir. I made mistakes, I did… I did some things I shouldn’t have, and you paid the price. I just wanted you to be happy, for us to be happy…” He turned his gaze away, “But now anything I do, it’s only going to make life harder for you. This will be my last visit like this.”
“The Prince is done with his whore… that’s how it is, woe to the slave who loves their master, they will eat only ashen dreams, and drink only tears.” Tir spat the words of the proverb at his back, and he froze.
He didn’t look back at her when he reached for the door, “If your mistress accepts my proposal… I will ask her to put you somewhere that won’t force you to see me. A posting outside of the city where you can be comfortable. And Tir… you were never just a whore, I never treated you that way… or never meant to.”
He opened the door, exited, and closed it behind him.
“You just did… you idiot… you just did.” Tir whispered alone, and went down on her knees to cry until she couldn’t anymore. When her eyes were empty of anything to shed, she had no idea how much time had passed, and didn’t care. ‘One more to the list.’ She thought to herself, and got back up to her feet to go clean up before she went to see Diana and the Starlings.
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Freyjin looked over the stack of books in her office. There were four full crates, and around her office sat a dozen maids and butlers. Each of them had only one job, look at every single page of the Black Book of Justice and check for any tiny flaw.
The sound of pages turning was the only one in the room, but the blonde elven woman could have sworn she could hear her own pounding heartbeat.
‘There aren’t even close to three thousand copies here…’ Freyjin swore she could almost feel the whip on her back and arched herself reflexively. ‘The copyists have been working around the clock. They had to make enough copies of a single one, then go off of that… what if someone made a mistake? This is my lady’s religious text, what if they have a death penalty for altering it?’ Freyjin felt her fear rising in her stomach.
‘No, stop, stop it.’ She told herself and touched her forehead to wipe away sweat. ‘She’s never been overtly cruel, I’ll just explain that they couldn’t make copies fast enough… great, blame the copyists? Or maybe say she came back too soon… oh no, that’s a fantastic idea, blame the one with the hand that literally sucks out life! That’ll go well!’
Freyjin clenched a fist and sighed with relief when one of the books was found to be correctly made and another was lifted out of the crate by one of the butlers. ‘Just… beg forgiveness. She’ll understand you did your best. I mean, this is the woman who fought for you, stop being such a coward about her all the time. She rushed right to your wounded body after Vargas…’
That reminded her, ‘He’s coming back soon…’ In spite of the memory of the pain of his vicious, savage foot that sent her flying into the wall, she didn’t feel the resentment that she thought she should have. ‘I’ll wait… see who he is… then decide if I want to forget him too or not.’
She took up a book herself and began to check it, hoping to speed the process along, and hoping that by some miracle that there were a lot more coming than this. ‘If there’s not, all I can do is cast myself at her feet and beg forgiveness. Anything else, is likely to go worse.’
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Botisa rode beside Nua when they were finally on their way from Hanak’sen. “A brief but profitable job.” Nua said with satisfaction over her face.
“Did you really only do it for the sake of revenge?” The Ambassador asked with an odd glance her way.
“No, that is just an expression, it’s meant to say what is most important. I am still getting paid, along with the other conditions he initially offered. But if revenge was all he’d offered, yes, I’d have done it anyway.” Nua replied matter-of-factly. “Nobody touches the property of House Aiwenor and gets away with it.”
“I see.” The centaur ambassador replied with an approving note. “Your new possessions don’t seem to understand that, yet. Are you keeping them?”
Nua didn’t need to ask what he meant, she’d kept her face looking like flint as the possessions of Yanmelu were made to climb into the wagons that had held supplies. Her gesture of goodwill in giving them food had not changed their destitute and hopeless expressions.
“I don’t know yet. They’re better off belonging to me than anything else that could happen to them. It did save their lives at least, I’m fairly sure my brother would have killed them if I hadn’t presented the alternative.” Nua replied and scratched her chin. “I will need staff in the estate in Pas’en, perhaps I can have them trained to take care of it for me.”
“That is… generous, I expected you to say you’d simply sell them off.” Botisa replied, folding his hands behind his waist and resting the back of his hands on the part of his body where the horse of him began.
“I’m not completely evil. The children there are very young, and I passed a law prohibiting the separation of the very young from their mothers. Besides, they’re not enemies, I have no reason to seek vengeance on them.” Nua stroked the mane of her dark horse, “Who knows, maybe they’ll be useful to me someday.”
“Speaking of someday, about the venture to my homeland?” Botisa reminded her, inching closer to her horse.
Nua gave a decisive nod at the ambassador. “I haven’t forgotten. We’ll be traveling north for a few days still, when it’s time for us to part ways, I’ll send you back with the aid I promised. I’m sending my second best warrior with you, and for what needs to be done, he is in fact the ‘best’ warrior for the job. If he wants to see his wife before he goes, I’ll send him on my fastest horse to take a day with her, and he’ll rejoin you at the gate of Komestra.”
“Why are you so sure this one man will be so effective?” Botisa asked with doubt.
“Because,” Nua answered, “you don’t need an army, you need the fear of an army. If you wanted to conquer your neighbors, that would be one thing, but you don’t, you just want to be safe from them. One skilled operative can be worth ten thousand men if he knows what he’s doing. And if he’s not? Then I will bring my Breakers to you. We should be in Komestra before long, and that isn’t an impossible distance. We took salt together, you can trust me.” Nua’s answer was filled with confidence and a friendly, inviting smile that lit up her shapely face. Nua reached out with her left hand and put it over his, the false hand beneath fairly pulsed with strength.
It was hard not to believe her, especially because he wanted it to be true.
Botisa’s broad, powerful, tanned human chest puffed out with pride, “Then I look forward to seeing what this warrior does, twice now I’ve seen you venture into danger, once for a mere menial’s sake. I will trust your word, and we will not shame ourselves when he arrives, that much I promise in turn. We will treat him as a brother until he goes back to you, and if he dies, we will honor him as one of our own.”
“I would be grateful for both those things, ambassador.” Nua answered, and turned her attention again to the open horizon that she loved. In the distance it seemed like the earth and sky converged into a point, becoming one like lovers drawn into a passionate kiss. All she wanted in that moment, as her pulse raced and heart fluttered, was to ride toward the place they met, on an undead horse, and never stop.
The mere imagining of it all, kept her spirits up throughout the rest of the day, and the next few beyond it, so much so that even the intermittent sounds of weeping captives she would sometimes hear in her camp, did not disturb her in the least, as her mind was somewhere else entirely.