CHAPTER TWENTY
“WHAT A SOMBER DAY. EVEN the rain cannot stop weeping for James Wilde, it appears.” Lucien Montclair stood at the high, gothic windows of the electoral chamber.
The high curtains and irradiant chandeliers were the length of poppy fields above them and even the grand Corinthian pillars were imperious in their affluence.
Elliott gritted his teeth as Lucien Montclair allowed him to enter the stateroom of electors. “As an art student, I always wondered when you’d want to be welcomed here. You have a fine script. You’d make an excellent elector with the letters, Archway.”
Lucien displayed to Elliott the silver-plated antique fountain pens on the secretaire. One was already inscribed to him. Elliott Taylor Archway.
Elliott fought through waves of thrashing hatred. He dried the water suspended in his eyes. Lucien was mocking the dire situation. However, Elliott tamed his response. “I have no interest to be welcomed here as an elector.”
“A lapse of judgment truly.” Lucien’s eyes pitied him. “You’ve spent excessive time in the company of women. You could accomplish more for the rector than useless systems of astrology.”
“Astronomy,” Elliott corrected. “And I am not in the science field to attract women.”
Lucien didn’t seem convinced, given Elliott’s track record of endless girlfriends, but he changed the subject nonetheless. “Did James send you here to beg after all?” Lucien’s eyes were delighted with malice. “Is he poisoned with terror yet?”
Elliott tightened his fists. “No one is afraid of you. I am here for Kitty Evers. You will never be near her again.”
Elliott stepped further near the sharp-edged fountain pens, prepared to thrust it right into Lucien’s larynx. Lucien’s eyes caught his line of sight and his expression flooded with rage.
“Don’t you dare.” Lucien still could not stand to his full height and he walked with favoritism towards his right side, limping perceptibly, he couldn’t risk another arterial injury. His acrimony was fresh. “Get away from the pens. I never touched her in that way and I never will.”
“Do not touch her at all. Not even a hair on her head.” Elliott refused to move. He was the exact same height and stature as Lucien. Elliott stared him down until Lucien conceded.
“There was nothing illegal that happened,” Lucien stated tartly a moment later. “I never knew her age until after the matter. Why was a high schooler on the college grounds, anyway?”
“You knew she wasn’t a student. You seem to know all the freshmen girls.”
Lucien restrained his eye roll, aggravated that Elliott cared that deeply. “She will never see me again. Is that all you came here for?”
“James will not be selected for the ritual. It’s barbaric.”
Lucien’s lips spread into a small, pleased smile.
“You are here for James Wilde as well then.” He spun the pen through his fingers with a darkening tint to his irises. “Alea iacta est.”
That was yet another recitation quote. Everyone heard it every year from James’s lips in the winter.
Callum Han arrived at that second, his eyes dilated in brief fear of Elliott, checking over the ceremonial area for any sign of the knife-thruster, before his eyes settled with relief. “Archway. I’ve never seen you without James outside of Hexley’s class.”
The third elector arrived. Valeria Vaneras strode through with her scarlet night robes without a flinch of apprehension. She was the head of the upperclassmen women electors, the top of her class in organic chemistry. “Elliott Archway, why did you pester me out of bed?”
Elliott ground his fists into his sides, glaring down at all of them through his lashes. “I need to be made certain you all will keep your word.”
Valeria’s light laughter was like listening to water trickling from a sprite’s mouth. “You woke me out of my warm bed for James Wilde? I said yes last night, didn’t I?”
The Ides of March was what Elliott meant. He couldn’t mention it in front of Lucien, but he needed to know, right in the midst of the tyrant himself, if they would commit to what needed to be executed in regards to tyrannicide. If they were with him, or with Lucien. Sic semper tyrannis.
“I need your word that you won’t elect James Wilde.”
“Have I not always been a woman of my word?” Valeria lifted her perfect brow.
After a sip of an afternoon mezcal, she shut the sensor-constructed doors to the elector’s stateroom for privacy.
Elliott knew she was an invention hobbyist outside of even her chemist ambitions–rudimentary automatic doors, crude motion sensors.
Industrious by nature, she planned to patent and license her work in the near future.
Therefore, she needed her rest now. She tightened her robe around her plump, thick frame. “Anything else, Elliott Archway?”
“That’s everything. Only that James is safe from selection.”
It was Thursday, December 20th, and Elliott had not seen James for the entire day.
It was the first time that winter they spent the weekend apart from each other.
“Then sit down.” Lucien’s voice was as dark as basalt, as if he had been waiting for this moment. Valeria snapped her eyes to him. However, Lucien’s eyes were chaotic with fury. “Open your mouth.”
“Lucien–” Callum interceded, but one sharp glance silenced him.
Lucien remarked acidly, “Archway cares for the man. He hunted the electors down on behalf of the attractive swan, let him plead properly for mercy then.” Lucien revealed a rotted carcass from beneath a glass cloche.
Hefty, fleshy skin peeling on a discolored boar head from the butcher.
Lazy, turgid flies circled the bulky ears.
Similar flies to the ones that surrounded Mr. Newton.
“Everyone vilified me as a swine for the little humor I made to the girl. We’ll both be pigs then, Archway. Eat it.”
Elliott was shocked beyond words.
“Fucking eat it.” Lucien lifted the glass culinary cloche, releasing a fetid, decayed, ripe stench throughout the electoral chamber. Valeria dry-heaved in her mouth at the bloated tongue distended under its wild tusks. “If you devour this clean, he will be safe. I give you my word.”
Elliott’s nostrils curdled under the reek of rancid decomposing eyes.
Valeria thrust open the doors with a swirl of her fingers to air out the room. “Enough. Leave, Elliott.”
Lucien snatched the four-pronged fork and slammed the flat end of it against Elliott’s chest, shoving the exact dinner knife James had stabbed him with into the porcine creature.
The plate braced from the pressure. “If you leave here, we’ll send James Wilde for death.
Truly, what does he mean to you, Archway? You’ve always made me so curious.”
“He’s my best friend.”
Friendship was a foreign concept to a tyrant like Lucien Montclair. He only had subjects, strategists, enemies, and allies, not friends.
He could not comprehend true intimacy in friendships. Affection. Trust. Loyalty.
“Prove your fealty to your best friend. The fox and the swan.” Lucien dragged the putrescent, gristly boar head across the table, its coarse bristles laden with several days’ worth of fermented, degenerating ligaments from its cartilaginous snout, where it’d been shot.
Lucien, no doubt, knew Elliott would try to save James. That he would always try.
Elliott truly was predictable.
“What will the myth of the fox and the swan be in the end?” Lucien mused.
“Swans are violent, territorial, and kill their own, but they are relentlessly loyal and mate for life. Even with fellow male swans. Foxes are playful, smart, curious, affectionate and, most of all, helplessly loyal and mate for life. Even foxes have been found to bond and pair with the same sex. Will you live out the rest of your years in the forest together? Will the hunter make a pelt of him in the end?”
Callum’s strained voice cut in. “Elliott, we already gave you our word. You don’t need to do any of this. Head back to your dorm.” There was a hint of tragedy in his tone, something he wasn’t telling him. Elliott mistook his uneven timbre for lies.
Elliott glared at Lucien, who kept the miasmic air smeared with indecency, refusing to open even a frosted window.
Lucien reminded him heartlessly, “As senior elector, I outnumber a quarter of the electors by my single vote. All it would truly take is a few treasonous votes for bird season to begin–”
Elliott grasped the fork into his hand.
“Elliott.” Callum released his breath. “Don’t. You’re already too late.”
“I will not stand witness for this nonsense.” Valeria traipsed out of the doors without a single retreating glance. Her scarlet robes flashed behind her.
Callum Han attempted to remove the hulky boar head from the hollow plate, but Lucien glowered. Above all, it was clear, Lucien would take his vengeance against James Wilde in one method or another.
After the horror was finished, Callum departed without a word left in him.