8. Defiance
Defiance
“This isn’t a request.” The tall, silver-haired praecurus stood motionless outside the gate.
His dark purple uniform cape rippled feebly in a damp wind, as did the ends of his iron-straight hair. No other part of him moved. A pearlescent mist coated the grounds, rendering much of the landscaping invisible, yet somehow making the tall black tower before them look even more imposing.
It had taken them too long to get here.
Valor La Fey stood just behind his commander, along with the rest of the Praecuri called out on this errand. He had requested to be among them. He’d practically demanded it. In the end, they’d allowed it, although he knew they did not like how it might look, his being there.
It took them four days to obtain permission.
Three days longer than it should have.
Valor had wanted to be able to tell his cousin they had made it the very next day. As it was, he confessed to some worry about her. Forsooth promised he would keep an eye on her after the events that nearly got her killed, but even Forsooth could not hide his concern over her reaction to events.
Caelum Bones.
Of all the people for his cousin to become involved with, she had to rut with and apparently marry into the vilest of the royal families in all of Magique.
Malefic Bones had a bad reputation even within that foul lineage, and his son, Caelum, seemed destined to follow upon his father’s dark footsteps, and not only because he was Malefic’s only child.
Valor had crossed paths with both of the Bones males, of course, and to say he hadn’t been impressed would be putting it mildly.
Being a La Fey meant being in the same social circles as the other royal families.
That meant weddings and cotillions, coming of age parties and funerals, birthdays and holiday parties.
Valor had seen Caelum at a number of such occasions, and he’d more than once noted the arrogant prick’s absolute disdain for all manner of witches.
He wished now he’d made more of an effort with Leda.
She shouldn’t have been permitted to go to a place like Malcroix Bones totally blind.
If he’d been a better cousin, he would have made an effort to introduce Leda into that society properly.
He could have shared their family’s oral history, described the histories of the different families, including their modern day reputations, and their relationships to the various branches of magic.
He could have warned her about the Bones clan in particular, and assured her their vile reputation had been well-earned.
She might not have believed him, of course.
He may not know his cousin well, but she’d demonstrated a strong will on more than one occasion, and she might have charged forward with Bones anyway.
But at least she would have been warned.
She would have walked into Malcroix Bones armed with relevant knowledge against a liar and actual murderer like Caelum Bones.
Moreover, she might have met decent representatives among the older families, mages with honor, with reputations that didn’t cause people to speak in whispers whenever their names arose.
She might have avoided Alaric Greythorne in that way, as well, which likely would have solved the problem of Caelum before it started.
Valor had no doubt it had been Greythorne who introduced her to Bones in the first place, as the two of them were childhood friends.
Of course, he knew most in his family bloodline were having a different reaction to the pairing, including his own mother.
Even though Leda was half La Fey, most were horrified that a Bones would sully themselves with a half-human, much less the royal heir. Valor, maybe because he was a praecurus and had spent actual time among humans, didn’t care about that.
To him, her human blood was the least of it, although he admitted to some disappointment it hadn’t protected her from being pursued by that animal in the first place.
Of all things that might have been considered a redeeming quality in the prick, why did he have to be less of a raging blood-bigot than his father?
While Valor would very much like to throttle Caelum Bones for whatever he’d done to seduce his young cousin, it was Malefic’s reaction that worried him significantly more.
Malefic would kill her.
He would kill her horribly, and possibly publicly.
The thought made his heart hurt, mostly because he knew it to be true.
Malefic would never permit this sham of a marriage to go forward, whatever his political ambitions. He would make a message out of the insult, and not only to his son.
He folded his arms, breathing a cloud of cold air from his lungs.
He knew he wasn’t the only one who worried about what Malefic would do next.
The King, the Ethnarch, all of them had gone back and forth on how hard they wanted to go after Malefic in this.
They’d argued over punishments, what they intended to demand, how much resistance they expected, and whether they could risk imprisoning him again, given what happened the last time.
Valor had watched a large part of those debates with disbelief.
Still, it hadn’t been difficult to read between the lines, nor to understand what drove all of their hesitation and indecision.
The King was leaning towards reconciliation.
He talked of retribution and duty, pounded his fist on his famous Moon Table, made grandiose speeches about the need for “alignment,” but King Roland II was leaning towards offering concessions to Malefic to bring everything back into normal order.
Valor didn’t know if it was fear, simple blood loyalty, or a far more cynical calculation, but the King had blinked. It was obvious enough and dramatic enough that even taking this simple step had required a near five days of negotiation.
During long, rambling, meetings about how to address the “Malefic problem,” Roland talked of blood, of kin, of “misunderstanding,” of the overreach involved in going after a beloved wizard for “disciplining” his son, and inadvertently causing a rift with his wife and tearing a family apart.
King Roland seemed to have decided that everything that happened the first time Malefic was arrested was an “overreaction.”
In this, of course, King Roland was brushing over all the missing young wizards and witches, the obvious evidence of illegal Resurrection rituals, the attack on Academy Square, the fight between the Praecuri and Dark Cathedral, not to mention years of talk and speeches and ongoing efforts to indoctrinate his fellow royals into establishing a system where all of humanity was enslaved and Malefic ruled as some kind of pharaoh.
King Roland dismissed all of that by claiming there was no evidence Malefic had any role in such things, nor that Dark Cathedral even existed, which meant he could not use those “suppositions” to condemn one of their oldest and most respected lineages.
The reasons for the deliberate self-delusion were obvious.
Gold still spoke louder than most wanted to admit.
Deference to royal blood, even when it fought to burn down the edifice that gave it power, spoke louder than anyone wanted to say aloud, as well.
Even now, the King hid behind not his own Royal Guard, but the Praecuri, a body already seen as tainted due to its frequent contact with the human world.
They would be handy scapegoats if anything went wrong out here.
Valor’s eyes tilted up towards the sky as they continued to wait.
The snow had stopped falling sometime in the night, but the drifts had all frozen, leaving their boots to break through the crust into the deep powder below. Valor watched one of his comrades stamp a black boot to get the packed ice off the deep tread, but only a few chunks fell.
The silver-haired mage in front of Valor didn’t look away from the iron front gate. At the continued silence, he finally scowled at the sorcerer on the other side of those bars.
Molokai Saladin, leader of the Praecuri, wasn’t a wizard to be trifled with.
Even apart from his title, he wasn’t just any praecurus.
He’d led their sect for over thirty years, and had the scars and the thousand-yard stare to prove it. While all who obeyed him called him by his given name, and he had few adornments to his rank apart from the purple cape, his official title was “Praetorian.”
The rest of them wore all black.
“I have a writ from the Magus Imperius,” the Praetorian said coldly.
“Endorsed and signed by the King, sealed with the King’s mark.
” A sneer touched his lips. “Will the fugitive, Malefic Bones, really deny the authority of the King he professes so vehemently to love? Even for something as toothless as a discussion of what occurred?”
The Praecuri standing around Valor shifted their feet in silent approval.
Most of them might have been willing to throw Caelum Bones to the wolves, but they weren’t so cavalier about all the young mages and wizards who disappeared only to come back changed.
Many had family among the Resurrected. Many had known those witches and mages personally.
Many had warm feelings about their parents, or their aunts and uncles, or knew them from school, or perhaps from one of the massive temples of Magical England.
They had other reasons to be angry, as well.
Valor wasn’t the only member of the Praecuri who knew they were being used.
A few folded thick arms over their chests, or toyed with the handles of concealed weapons. Valor might have thought their agitation to be nerves under different circumstances, or impatience, but he strongly suspected what he was witnessing was closer to suppressed rage.
He thought this mostly because his own fury barely remained in check.
A large part of him would like nothing more than to unsheathe his sword and run through this smirking, simpering little monkey Malefic had sent out here to dance with them.
How dare this traitorous murderer deny them entry? How dare he continue to act like the high lord and favored royal successor? After what he’d done?