The arrival of the army to Jeameax came with much affair. Parades and minor feasting, as well as courtiers come for the young bishop’s favor much like any noble lady returning after long to her domain. At this day, the paladin’s betrayal was not yet known to the public, so his absence merely caused confusion. Many speculated that he had been dispatched to respond to Vassermark, but there was no good explanation for Lucius’ presence in the city.

Tension drew across Jeameaux. While it was true that the paladin had taken away a large armed force, one must always remember that a trained army is but a small fraction of a population. The men left behind in the city subconsciously felt a duty of protection for all the mothers, wives, sisters, and daughters left behind by those in the field.

Lucius and his army were permitted into the city by the blessing of Jean, but they knew they had not conquered the city. Even a small riot could overwhelm them. Under such threat, unspoken as it was, Lucius instigated a harsh garrison procedure. He busied his men with cleaning and preparing supplies while posting more trusted soldiers as perimeter guards to keep the army from carousing.

When the sun set upon the city, Lucius sat on a balcony overlooking the smaller of the two namesake lakes. Lakelight Temple had a swath of rooms fit for pilgrims, many of which had been given to the army for the night. Even the premier room on the third floor of the wing had barren furnishings. Chairs were of simple wood, and the mattress of the bed was a few layers of rough fabric topped by woolen sheets. The only thing of beauty was an oil painting depicting one of the key miracles of the church, the Restoration Of The King(1).

Lucius was no pilgrim. He did not turn to the art to contemplate the thorny relationship between duty and virtue. While his eyes stared at the waters before him, his brow knitted tight with thought. Foul ideas of bloodshed manifested within his skull. He had already seen what fragmentary cannon shot could do to loose infantry.

He wondered what it could do if a riotous mob did rise up, untrained but violent men pressed shoulder to shoulder within tight streets.

His portents of the future so occupied him that the opening of his chamber door did not even rouse him. The padding of feet drew his attention as his visitor approached, but he expected Aisha to steal in with him. She, along with Lupa, had thought the boarding insufficient and demanded of him enough coin to pay for a proper inn.

The woman who joined him was Aria, now dressed in a cotton robe with a shawl wrapped around her shoulders. “I can join my brother, can’t I?” she asked as she stepped out on the little balcony with him.

“I’m surprised you aren’t trying to claim sanctuary,” he said, gesturing to the chair beside him.

She sat down with a huff. “The bishop approves of your lie, so what would that accomplish?”

“This is the furthest you’ve ever been from home, is it not?”

Aria nodded, her gaze on him rather than the twilight. “I was only supposed to go as far as Rackvidd, but circumstances have pulled me halfway across the world.”

“You’re welcome, but it’s not halfway. You’d have to make it at least to the grand cathedral to be halfway. Unfortunately, your future travels won’t be very picturesque. If Rodrick goes for the grain, we’ll be chasing him through mountains and foothills. I once had to take an army through a mine shaft to outmaneuver my enemies and I can only imagine what I’ll have to do now.”

“And then?” she asked.

“And then what?”

“When you’ve defeated this rebel, what will you do then? Attend the king’s festival? Going to falsely marry a princess?”

Lucius smirked. “Falsely? Everything I’ve accomplished has been my own. What falsehood would there be?”

“You aren’t a Solhart.”

He snorted. “Lineage matters less than you think it does, at least for men. And as for marrying, my first wife will be Aisha. My first child won’t be a bastard. I doubt the princess would want to be a second wife, even if legally speaking we could change the order.”

“Would you tell me about yourself?”

He cocked his head and studied her face. She had something about her expression reminiscent of an artist trying to take to memory all that they saw. “No,” he said. “I don’t think I shall. I am your brother and if you don’t know my history that is a fault of yours.”

“At least tell me why you are so driven to do all this? Money? Love? Revenge?”

Stolen novel; please report.

“None of those,” he said, reclining his head and closing his eyes.

“Fear then?”

If he had laughed at the idea, Aria might have been but a smidgen of trouble going forward. Alas, he took her question seriously and left in her suspicion. “Have you ever spoken to someone who said they could predict the weather? Perhaps someone with an old injury. ‘Rain’s coming, I can feel it in my knee,’ they might say. But, they only know the subtle events that foretell a storm, not quite the when or the how, let alone the why. In some areas, the mountains for example, you might have very predictable patterns, where wet air is pushed up to the heavens and it pours out across the land. Some stretches of Giordana live by the subterranean flow of water which comes in seasons, directly causing later rains. The storms themselves are chaos, however. Influenced by a million million tiny details.”

“Is that what you are? A storm?”

“No. Storms are war. People are the raindrops. Life is even more complicated than the weather. Every life pushing and pulling on the lives around them across layers of power. When a king sneezes, the poor starve, ever heard that saying? If you had ever in your life been truly powerless, you would understand how carelessly some people treat their influence and you would be terrified of it. You would do whatever you had to in order to become the one who sneezes rather than the one who starves.”

She reclined to the opposite side of her chair with a coy smile. “You expect me to believe an unkillable man is afraid?”

He matched her smile. “Do you want to kill me? You’d be doing me a favor, really.”

“Poor taste, when you’re wearing my brother’s face.”

Lucius unbuttoned his linen shirt and bared his breast. He showed her the sigil upon his chest and tapped it. “Right here is my heart. Here and here are the ribs. Why don’t you put a knife right here? I’ll give you mine even.”

She stood up, eyeing him carefully as he held out a small dagger. She took it from him but glanced into the shadows of his room.

“There’s nobody here but us. I won’t even make a sound if you do it right.”

Aria said, “Normally, you would frame somebody for a lesser crime.”

He laughed. “Do you think I’ll actually die from being stabbed? Here. How about I help you? I think you’ve surmised this already, but I have your brother’s face because we got him killed. I’m not saying he didn’t get what he deserved, or that he would have lived a long life without us, but–”

She slid the knife through his heart in a rough stab. Not elegant, it sawed through the boy’s meat and left a gushing trickle down his chest as every convulsion of his heart ripped it asunder on the blade. He let out a cough, sputtering blood through his pierced lung.

He said, “I thought you’d hesitate more than that.”

“Maybe you should be afraid more,” she said, and left him on the balcony to die.

Of course, he didn’t die. I was the one that had to show up to his room in the dead of night and wrench the blade free from his heart. Then, quick as I could before his heart hammered once more, I had to cut the prosthetic off his stump leg as flesh regenerated. Life surged in him valiantly, flushing out old injuries and restoring his flesh to his image. While the one death wasn’t enough to put a foot back on him, we could at least hide the wound in a boot, and another such regeneration could be done as soon as he had properly feasted.

While Lucius was still coughing blood out, he said something most regrettable. “I think I might like her.”

I had to remind him, “She’s your sister.”

~~

Unfortunately for him, Leandro Bauer knew nothing of their bloody tryst. He barely understood how he could have earned the king’s esteem with but a single painting. In fact, he believed he was being set up, that he had somehow gotten discharged wrongly from the military after Rackvidd. The only reason he took the risk, was because he was quite penniless and in need of a patron. The poor fellow wasn’t even able to afford supplies for another artwork and had spent weeks begging food off the temples to get by.

In such extremis, even the prospect of going back to war seemed preferable.

The interlocutor who brought him to the castle was a worm of a merchant, posturing a great relationship between him and Leandro, but he had the curious fortune of meeting a nobleman with such overwhelming intellect that no trickery of tongue could dupe him. The man had faults, but none of them left him vulnerable to platitudes, courtiers, flattery, or deceptions of status and wealth. He cut right through the merchant’s propositions and arrested Leandro forthwith. He snapped the man up and handcuffed him with money.

The nobleman acted decisively, securing from the artist a year-long contract that would take him far away from the capital and keep him well furnished and quite busy. So busy, in fact, that the pay almost wasn’t worth it. Leandro signed his life away to furnish The Eastern Academy of Science with portraits of their key staff. The work would be dreary, but it gave him the resources to hone his craft in a way he could not refuse.

Particularly with the lingering pangs of starvation gnawing at him like a pack of hounds.

Now, allow me to reveal this nobleman, this lightning bolt of mental vigor. A wise reader may have already surmised, by his association with the academy, that he worked on behalf of the Feugard family. Indeed, he was none other than the second son. While his older brother was failing to reproduce Lucius’ success in the Misty Isles, he attacked

He was Austin Feugard, the man who failed to withdraw his support from the bloodiest disaster of Vassermark’s history.

The artist happened to be the man who instructed Leandro Bauer, who you may recall depicted Lucius at his victory in Rackvidd. The Restoration Of The King has been depicted the world over, but none so skillfully as the one available in Lakelight Temple, where they did not even dare display it prominently. Artistic genius took hold of the man and drove him to commit heresy in the eyes of the orthodoxy. He depicted the king weeping over the battlefield, for he had been denied the absolution of death. I found the work to be far more touching than the typical display of rapturous joy at grasping life once more.