Chapter XXVIII #3
“I’m from everywhere and nowhere. And if you think this is the worst position I’ve found myself in because of the postulant, you’re sorely mistaken. I don’t expect it’ll be the last time I run afoul of the Invers on her behalf, either.”
“Stop prattling and fight, Nikolau,” Fia snapped, because a murmur of gossip was spreading through the courtiers.
It wasn’t only the noise that was a concern anymore, not with Gaius puffing like a bellows.
The nobles considered it an established fact that Fia and their Priest were bonded to each other, and Fia needed them to continue to believe so.
She could not have Nikolau sow seeds of doubt as to how things stood between her and the Priest.
But Nikolau had fallen silent again. Fia could have told Lucian that meant trouble—even a life of privation and danger in a strange land had done little to damage Nikolau’s Vesperin gregariousness.
When his focus grew intent and fierce, as it had done now, no good could come for the object of his attention.
The last time Fia had seen him overcome by such a mood, Nikolau killed two pressers with his own hands.
Using a flagrum, the very scourge with which they humiliated and punished deserters, he’d beaten the pair so badly they died of their wounds and were little more than raw meat by the end.
Not an hour later, he’d been back in the nearest of his hidden camps, laughing with deserters’ families and bouncing one of their children on his knee.
So it did not surprise Fia at all when one of Lucian’s feints failed spectacularly—the spymaster darted forward, and rather than move entirely away, Nikolau shifted to one side, seizing hold of Lucian’s arm.
The spymaster’s own recoiling momentum carried him toward Nikolau, so that he ended with one wrist and dagger pinned behind him, Nikolau’s own knife at his throat.
Bright as Raea herself, the Vesperin laughed, a low and mirthful sound, and then pressed a kiss to the side of Lucian’s sweating face.
Nikolau had been like this when the pressers died—feral in his anger, half-mad with it, a creature of unruly and gloriously inhumane impulses.
Fia knew she should be repulsed by such behavior—that it was antithetical to the substance and beliefs of the daughters of light—but she never found it anything less than compelling.
Violence drew her like a moth to flame, and she watched with parted lips as Lucian was forced to wrench himself free, his wrist snapping audibly in the process, while Nikolau’s dagger raked a shallow, bleeding wound along the side of his throat.
Lucian stumbled away, and when he looked up, Fia could see murder in his eyes. He made not for Nikolau, but for the Priest, who remained focused on Gaius, the two of them still circling the audience hall.
“Your left, Priest,” Nikolau called, and unhesitatingly lunged at Gaius, despite the guard being nearly twice his weight.
The sudden force of Nikolau’s impact, coming from an unexpected angle, caught Gaius off balance, and the two of them toppled over into the crowd.
A crush of bodies hid them from Fia’s view, and a shocked clamor rose up, but her gaze was trained on the Priest. Lucian had come at him furiously, but Nikolau’s warning served its purpose, and the two of them were locked together, striving for the upper hand.
At some point in the confusion, the Priest had lost his dagger, but Lucian still held his.
The spymaster’s face was crimson with the strain of trying to overpower the Priest, sweat standing out on his forehead as he attempted to embed his dagger in his rival’s throat.
With a sudden jolt, the Priest twisted to one side, and Lucian let out a strangled gasp as his broken wrist gave way.
The dagger was in the Priest’s hand now, and he did not hesitate.
With a practiced movement born of undertaking dozens of sacrifices, he drove the knife into the side of Lucian’s throat and wrenched forward, a prodigious fountain of blood anointing him and heralding the spymaster’s end.
Lucian crumpled to the floor and the Priest stepped over his body, striding toward the place where Nikolau and Gaius had fallen into the crowd.
Nikolau had taken full advantage of Gaius’s moment of weakness.
Though both their daggers were nowhere to be seen, he had the guard captain pinned, forcing him onto the ground face down rather than upward.
One of Nikolau’s knees held Gaius to the floor, while his arm around the guard captain’s neck slowly throttled him.
But when Nikolau sensed the attention of the crowd shifting as the space around him opened a little more and all eyes were drawn to the Vesperin and the guard captain, he lost patience.
Seizing Gaius by the hair, he drove the guard’s face into the unrelenting stone floor again and again, a furious snarl twisting his mouth.
By the time Nikolau finished, there was no longer anything recognizable about Gaius from the neck up.
The floor was streaked scarlet and pink, with blood and spackles of bone and brain matter.
Despite their vaunted ruthlessness, several of the Invers were pale and sick, being ushered from the room by those nearest to them.
For her part, all Fia felt when she surveyed the ruined remains of Gaius and Lucian was a wash of contentment and gratitude.
Nikolau was just who she needed to serve as a safeguard for Justus, and the Priest, who’d already reached out a hand to help Nikolau to his feet, was the only person she’d ever place on Honoria’s Inver throne.
Nikolau took the Priest’s offered hand and scrambled upright, breathing hard but already grinning again.
“All right, then?” Nikolau asked.
“Hm,” the Priest said, and tilted his head slightly in the direction of Lucian, lying in a pool of blood.
“Oh, well done,” Nikolau said, transparently impressed. He’d always worn his heart on his sleeve, and Fia could see it in him already—he liked the Priest in spite of himself.
A few more words passed between them, so low they could not be overheard, and Nikolau strode swiftly away, retrieving the Priest’s cane from the dais and returning it to him. Waiting for the Priest to lead, Nikolau followed him up the dais steps and hung back as the Priest moved to Fia’s side.
Slipping Justus from the sling, Fia set him into the Priest’s arms.
“This is your king,” the Priest said, in a voice that brooked no argument.
Drenched with the blood of his rival, scarred by Honoria’s perpetual war, and cloaked with the austere self-possession that was uniquely his own, the Priest made a formidable figure.
An Inver fit for legends—the only person capable of reconciling the rabble before him to an infant sovereign and, in future, the bloodless succession Fia craved.
“You will kneel before him now. I claim the throne only on his behalf—I will be Priest, and regent, and hold Honoria in trust for my kin. My adjutor, Nikolau, will become an Inver, and captain of my guard. We will forge new ties with Raea’s house and strengthen Honoria with a unity like none this country has known for two hundred years.
If anyone objects to my claim, let them do it now, with the edge of a blade. ”
As one, the court knelt. As one, they broke into a full-throated roar of assent. And Fia, watching the crowd as she stood between the father of her faraway golden daughter and the father she’d chosen for a nation, felt a new truth strike her like a blow.
Somehow, in assenting to foster and nurture Justus Inver, she’d become a mother to Honoria itself. The headiness of that knowledge felt like floating, even as the weight of responsibility hung like a millstone around her neck.