Chapter 5. Before Luca
BEFORE: LUCA
“Again, Matius.”
The Philosopher Vitrasian stood at the top of the steps that led down into her study, watching me scrawl the last of the sequence on the smooth surface of the parchment. The pain in my wrist had crept up to my elbow in the hours since I’d first started.
I dropped the stylus to stretch the cramp in my palm. “I’ve completed it sixteen times. I know the axiom.”
“Again,” she repeated.
I looked up, ready to argue, but Vitrasian’s attention had already left me.
Her eyes were cast up to the bronze-and-silver orbs suspended in the air overhead as they slowly rotated in the breeze coming through the windows.
The shining metal spheres were erected in an apparatus that replicated the orbits of the six planets.
I watched as she reached up, touching one and gently nudging it through the air to make the entire solar system spin.
She’d had me working the sequence to triangulate the orbits’ arcs for the last month. The equation was one she’d solved years ago, but each day that I came to the theater, she had me work it again from scratch.
“I think my time would be better spent on the archives. Or the trials you’re running on the new infusion from the Citadel’s physicians.”
She turned the small scroll she was holding over in her hands, rolling it between her palms. “I thought you were here to learn, Matius. In fact, from what I remember, you begged for this noviceship.”
“I did, but—”
“So, that is what you will do. You will learn.”
Her gaze held a finality that I knew not to challenge. Angering Rhea Vitrasian would only end with me cataloging the hundreds of scrolls in her study or cleaning the equipment for her experiments in the catacombs for the next month. This noviceship was a place I wanted to be.
It had taken almost an entire year to convince Vitrasian to agree to the noviceship, which was triple the time it took to persuade my uncle.
I’d had to show up at the theater before dawn for an entire month before the Philosopher would even begin to discuss it, and there were times when I regretted my persistence.
Vitrasian was unrelenting in her instruction, with standards that felt impossible to reach.
On top of requiring me to master and memorize countless mathematical equations and scientific theories, she had also begun to teach me the first language—the language of the gods.
Only those who held the highest seats in the temples could read it, and that alone had me up late studying every night.
The first time I saw Rhea Vitrasian, she’d been giving a talk to a group of Magistrates at the Sophanes River on hydro propulsion and water purification.
I was a child, no more than six or seven years old, but I’d marveled at her use of technical terms and concepts that felt more like magic to me than they did ideas.
The next time I saw her was after my uncle took me in.
After years of trying to produce a child with multiple women who went on to carry children for other men, he’d been forced to face the fact that he wasn’t capable of fathering an heir.
As fate would have it, he had a nearly orphaned nephew who carried his blood living right across the river.
My uncle was a Magistrate, and his sole purpose in taking me in and giving me a life outside the Lower City was that I would fulfill the duties of an heir—to carry on the family name, maintain its honor, and build upon its power.
For most noble boys in the Citadel District, that meant a career that began as a legionnaire.
I was attending my first-ever tribunal as a spectator when Vitrasian was called to give an account of Isara’s inefficient trade routes that had stifled the Citadel’s profits.
I watched in awe as she countered the arguments of the Magistrates and defied their resistance to her recommendations.
The Philosopher didn’t mince words, and I had never seen anyone speak to the Magistrates that way.
The next day, I asked my uncle if my place as a novice could be with the Philosopher.
He’d laughed, and then he’d refused, enlisting me in the legion like the other Magistrates’ sons.
Kastor’s plan for me was a military career that would bring me glory and fame.
It was months before I could convince him that serving as both a novice to Vitrasian and a legionnaire would strengthen my place in the Forum when I took his seat.
The only reason he’d finally agreed was to ensure that even if I failed to make a name for myself as a soldier, I’d have connections elsewhere.
Now I was tenuously juggling the hours of my day between the two, all while trying to learn the rules and constructs of the Forum.
Vitrasian came down the steps of the theater, hands clasped at her back.
The violet stola draped over her white chiton trailed down the stone behind her bare feet, the gold brooches at her shoulders bearing the mark of the Citadel.
Beyond that, she bore little resemblance to the other women of the district.
Her hair wasn’t adorned with jewels, and she didn’t have a single possession that was made with godsblood, nor did she use it in any of her studies.
She didn’t even wear a talisman to signify which god or goddess she worshipped.
And I wasn’t the only one who’d noticed.
She was the city’s most accomplished Philosopher in the last six generations, with discoveries and breakthroughs that spanned biology, the cosmos, mathematics, and medicine.
She was even gifted in the arts, having written multiple plays and literary works that were celebrated as cultural pillars.
But the way she stood on the edge of society was a point of contention among Magistrates, and the longer I served as her novice, the more I realized that she was anything but favored.
The Citadel considered her a necessary evil, merely tolerating her in exchange for the advancements she made for the city.
She wasn’t nearly as afraid of them as she should be, and that concerned me.
I slid the parchment to the side and took a new one from the stack, starting the sequence again.
“You know, I can tell when you’re worrying about something, Luca.” She grinned, using my given name in an attempt to force me to relax. She thought I was too rigid. Too serious. She pressed the tip of her finger to the place between her eyebrows. “You get a crease just here.”
“You don’t worry enough,” I murmured.
I didn’t call her by her given name out of respect, though she allowed me to use it.
The lines of our relationship had blurred over the years that I’d served as her novice, and there were times when she felt much more like a mother to me than a mentor.
It was a feeling I tried to keep in check when we were working.
“Are you nervous?” One of her eyebrows lifted.
“About what?”
Now she was smiling. “Your public introduction at the feast tonight.”
I didn’t give her the satisfaction of an answer, my attention focused on retracing the numbers on the parchment. They’d nearly lost their meaning to me now, becoming just a blur of ink.
“Your uncle will want to make a show of you. I hope you’re ready.”
“Not much to show, I’m afraid.”
Vitrasian clicked her tongue disapprovingly. “You’re too modest, Luca.”
I gave her a knowing look. From what I’d heard, the Magistrates tended to use the feasts as an opportunity to display their sons and daughters like goods in the market.
Marriages were arranged adhering to schemes that had been in play as far back as the Old War, sometimes even planned from birth.
The other heirs had spent their entire lives grooming themselves for the Forum, but my mother had been disowned after taking vows with a lowborn trader who ruined her, so I hadn’t been reared like the children of the Citadel District.
While they spent their young years being taught the ethics of government and economics by tutors and advisors, I was laying bricks with calloused hands in the Lower City.
I was just a sick woman’s son who’d been adopted by a desperate, dying man.
You didn’t have to see the blood on my uncle’s handkerchief to know that his days were numbered.
The death growing in Kastor’s eyes was looming.
The physicians predicted he had mere months to live, and as a faction leader who’d slowly been losing his majority to Casperia in the Forum, he’d finally been forced to unveil me at tonight’s feast.
“It’s important you make a good impression,” she said. “And whatever you do, don’t disrespect the gods in front of them. That’s the quickest way to make enemies in the Forum.”
I stifled a laugh.
“It’s not a joke,” she said, words sharp.
I glanced at the room around us. Her theater was one of the only places that was wiped clean of any evidence of the gods. “It is. You don’t revere the gods any more than I do.”
“You don’t have to worship them to understand that they are an important part of playing this game.”
My jaw clenched. I didn’t like it when she referred to the happenings of the Citadel as a game. I heard enough of that from Kastor.
“That’s what it is.” She countered my unspoken rebuke.
“When you talk like that, you sound like one of them.” As soon as I said it, I could feel my body tense. I was edging the line of insulting her—something I never did.
“You were dedicated at the temple, weren’t you?”
My eyes flicked up, my fingers tightening on the stylus. “I didn’t tell you about my mother so that you could use her in a debate against me.”
Rhea watched me for a long moment, and I could almost feel the change in the atmosphere of the theater. Her mind was like that solar system drifting through the air—always spinning. It was the reason she was brilliant, but it also meant she could always see more than I wanted her to.
“There is only one insect that can invade the great fortress of a beehive. Do you know what it is?” she asked.
I set down the stylus, attempting not to appear irritated. “No.”
“It’s a beetle. A parasitic beetle.”
She walked to the shelf behind her desk, surveying the jars there until she found what she was looking for. When she had it in hand, she walked back in my direction and set it on the parchment before me.
I picked it up, studying the creature inside. “How?”
“They mimic the scent of the female bees, which attracts the males. When the males come to gather pollen off the vegetation, the young beetles attach themselves to those males, who unwittingly fly back to the hive with them in tow. There, the beetles gorge themselves on pollen and nectar and eggs. They grow and get stronger, surviving off the spoils of the bees’ opulent kingdom.
And once winter has passed, the adult beetle emerges as both a child of that place and an enemy. ”
The illustration made me uncomfortable. I wasn’t sure I wanted to understand it.
“I don’t worship the gods the way others do, because I know well enough not to trust them. Magic, favor, miracles—they are like sand that slips through the fingers. But science—” Her chin lifted. “It does not change. It does not shift with the wind. Science is truth.”
She had a heavy look about her now, her face just a bit paler than it was a moment before.
“Tonight, you will write the first line of your story in the Citadel. You may not have grown up with the advantages of the other Magistrates, but a clean slate—a lack of history—is more valuable than all of that. Don’t discount their hunger for new blood.
” She walked back to her desk, where she’d been sketching the geometry of a collection of seashells.
“They can’t resist it. You may be of Matius’ lineage, but you represent something the Magistrates rarely see—possibility.
It’s been generations since a seat in the Forum turned over to someone who isn’t one of them. ”
I looked up, not able to hide my own pride at her words. I didn’t want to be one of them, and Vitrasian seemed to be the only person who understood that.
“And it’s not just any seat, Luca. Your uncle is a faction leader. With that place comes power, and there isn’t a soul in the Forum who isn’t wondering what you’ll make of it.”
Vitrasian held the small scroll out before her, an empty expression cast over her face.
I watched as she tipped it toward the candle.
It took me a moment to realize what she was doing.
The flame caught the parchment slowly, growing as it consumed the end of the scroll.
She stared at it, unblinking, before she dropped it into the bronze bowl on her desk.
Smoke trailed up into the air as it burned in a tangle of fire that died down a few seconds later.
I hadn’t paid much attention to it before, but it looked like a message.
Her eyes flicked up but I dropped my gaze before she could catch me watching. And I wasn’t even sure why. There was something strange about the way she’d almost nervously fidgeted with the scroll, and I’d never seen her burn one. But Vitrasian was full of secrets. I’d learned that much by now.
From the corner of my eye, I could see her return to her sketches, and I focused on the sequence, working the sums methodically until it was finished. But before I’d even lifted the tip of the stylus from the parchment, the Philosopher was already speaking.
“Again, Matius.”