Hero, Traitor, Daughter

Her handmaiden nodded, and Stephania watched while she and some of the others there drew throwing weapons and darts. A few of the guards with them had short bows taken from the armory. One had a ship’s crossbow, better fired braced on a deck than a balcony. They hesitated.

“Our people are down there,” one of the noblemen said.

Stephania snatched a light bow from his hands. “And they were going to die anyway, fighting combatlords so poorly. At least this way, they give us a chance to win.”

Winning was everything. Maybe one day, these others would understand that. Perhaps it was better if they didn’t. Stephania didn’t want to have to kill them.

For now, she drew the bow as best she could with her swollen belly. Firing down like this, it almost didn’t matter that she could barely pull it back halfway. It certainly didn’t matter that she took no time to aim. With the mass of those struggling there below, it was enough that she would hit something.

More than that, it was enough to serve as a signal.

Arrows rained down. Stephania saw one punch through the meat of a combatlord’s arm, and he roared like a wounded animal before another three slammed into his chest. Knives flashed down to cut and skim, dig and gouge. Darts carried poison that probably had no time to act before the targets were punctured by arrows.

Stephania saw imperial soldiers fall along with the combatlords. High Reeve Scarel looked up at her with accusing eyes as he pawed at a crossbow bolt that had struck him through the stomach. Men continued to fall under the combatlords’ blades, or found gaps in their defenses, only to find their moment of victory cut short by arrow fire.

Stephania didn’t care. Only when the last combatlord fell did she raise a hand for the assault to cease.

“So many…” one of the noblewomen started, and Stephania rounded on her.

“Don’t be so foolish. We have taken Ceres’s support, and we have taken the castle. Nothing else matters.”

“What about Ceres?” one of the guards there asked. “Is she dead?”

Stephania’s eyes narrowed at that question, because it was the one thing about this plan that irritated her.

“Not yet.”

They had to hold the castle until either the invasion was done or the rebels somehow found a way to beat it back. At that point, they might need Ceres as a bargaining chip, or even just a gift so that the Five Stones of Felldust could show their victory. Having her there might even draw in Thanos, letting Stephania have all her revenge at once.

For now, that meant that Ceres couldn’t die, but she could still suffer.

And she would.

CHAPTER FIVE

Ceres was floating above islands of smooth stone and beauty so exquisite she almost wanted to cry. She recognized the work of the Ancient Ones, and instantly she found herself thinking of her mother.

Ceres saw her then, somewhere ahead of her, still robed in a mist. Ceres sprinted after her, and she saw her mother turn, but she still didn’t seem to be gaining on her quickly enough.

There was a gap between them now, and Ceres leapt, holding out her hand. She saw her mother reaching out for her, and just for a moment, Ceres thought that Lycine would catch her. Their fingers brushed, and then Ceres was falling.

She fell into the midst of a battle, figures flailing about her. The dead were there, their deaths apparently not stopping them from fighting. Lord West fought beside Anka, Rexus beside a hundred men Ceres had killed in as many different fights. They were all around Ceres, fighting one another, fighting the world…

The Last Breath was there in front of her, the former combatlord as bleak and terrifying as he had ever been. Ceres found herself jumping over the bladed staff he wielded, reaching out to turn him to stone as she had before.

Nothing happened this time. The Last Breath knocked her sprawling, standing over her in triumph, and now he was Stephania, holding a bottle in place of a staff, the fumes still acrid in Ceres’s nostrils.

Then she woke, and reality wasn’t any better than her dreaming.

Ceres woke to the feel of rough stone. For a moment, she thought that maybe Stephania had left her on the floor of her room, or worse, that she might still be standing over her. Ceres spun, trying to come to her feet and continue the fight, only to realize that there was no room in which to do it.

Ceres had to force herself to breathe slowly, fighting down the panic that threatened to engulf her as she saw stone walls on every side. It was only when she looked up and saw a metal grille above her that she realized she was in a pit, not buried alive.

The pit was barely broad enough to sit in. There was certainly no way that she could lie full length. Ceres reached up, testing the bars of the grille above her, reaching down for the strength to bend or break them.

Nothing happened.

Now, Ceres felt the panic starting to rise. She tried reaching down for the power again, being gentle with it, remembering how her mother had corrected her after Ceres had burnt out her powers trying to take the city.

This felt the same in some ways, and yet different in so many more. Before, it had been as though the channels along which the power flowed had been burned through until they hurt too much to use, leaving Ceres hollowed out.

Now, it felt as though she was simply normal, although that felt like less than nothing compared to what she’d been only a little while ago. There was no doubting what had done this either: Stephania and her poison. Somewhere, somehow, she had found a method to strip Ceres of the powers her Ancient One blood gave her.

Ceres could feel the difference between this and what had happened before. That had been like flash blindness: too much too soon, fading slowly with the right care. This was more like having her eyes pecked out by crows.

She reached up for the bars again anyway, hoping that she was wrong. She strained, putting all the strength she could muster into trying to move them. They didn’t give in the slightest, even when Ceres pulled at them so hard her palms bled against the metal.

She cried out in surprise as someone threw water down into the pit, leaving her soaked and huddled against the stone of the wall. When Stephania stepped into view, standing over the grate, Ceres tried to glare at her in defiance, but right then she was too cold and wet and weak to do much of anything.

“The poison worked then,” Stephania said without preamble. “Well, it should. I paid enough for it.”

Ceres saw her touch her belly then, but Stephania went on before Ceres could ask what she meant.

“How does it feel to have the only thing that made you special taken away?” Stephania asked.

Like having been able to fly, but now barely being able to crawl. But Ceres wasn’t going to give her that satisfaction.

“Haven’t we been here before, Stephania?” she demanded. “You know how it ends. With me escaping and giving you what you deserve.”

Stephania dumped another bucket of water on her then, and Ceres leapt at the bars. She heard Stephania’s laughter as she did it, and that just drove Ceres’s anger. She didn’t care if she had no powers right then. She still had a combatlord’s training, and she still had everything she’d learned from the Forest People. She would strangle Stephania with her bare hands if need be.

“Look at you. Like the animal you are,” Stephania said.

That was enough to slow Ceres a little, if only because she wouldn’t let herself be anything Stephania wanted her to be.

“You should have killed me when you had the chance,” Ceres said.

“I wanted to,” Stephania replied, “but events don’t always give us what we want. Just look at how things have gone with you and Thanos. Or me and Thanos. After all, I’m the one who’s actually married to him, aren’t I?”

Ceres had to put her hands against the stone of the walls to keep herself from leaping at Stephania again.

“I would have cut your throat if I hadn’t heard the war horns,” Stephania said. “And then it occurred to me that it would be an easy thing to take the castle back. So I did.”

Ceres shook her head. She couldn’t believe that.

“I freed the castle.”

She’d done more than that. She’d filled it with rebels. She’d taken the people who were loyal to the Empire and she’d imprisoned them. The others, she’d given chances to, she’d…

“Ah, you’re starting to see it now, aren’t you?” Stephania said. “All those people who were so quick to thank you for their freedom turned back to me just as quickly. I’ll have to watch them.”

“You’ll have to watch more than that,” Ceres snapped back. “You think the rebellion’s fighters will let you sit here playing queen? You think the combatlords will?”

“Ah,” Stephania said, with an exaggerated show of embarrassment that made Ceres dread what was coming next. “I’m afraid I have some bad news about your combatlords. It turns out that the best of fighters still dies when you put an arrow in his heart.”

She said that so casually, so tauntingly, yet if it was even half true it was enough to break Ceres’s heart. She’d fought alongside the combatlords. She’d trained alongside them. They’d been her friends and her allies.

“You just enjoy being cruel,” Ceres said.

To her surprise, she saw Stephania shake her head.

“Let me guess. You think I’m no better than that idiot, Lucious? A man who couldn’t enjoy himself in the slightest unless someone else was screaming? You think I’m like that?”

It seemed like a fairly accurate description from where Ceres was standing. Especially given everything that was likely to happen next.

“Aren’t you?” Ceres demanded. “Oh, I’m sorry, and there I was thinking that you’d put me in a stone pit, waiting to die.”

“Waiting for torture, actually,” Stephania said. “But that’s just you. You deserve everything you get after all you tried to take from me. Thanos was mine.”

Perhaps she really believed that. Perhaps she honestly felt that it was normal to try to murder your rivals in relationships and life.

“And the rest of it?” Ceres said. “Are you going to try to convince me that you’re basically a nice person, Stephania? Because I’m pretty sure that ship sailed the moment you tried to send me to the Isle of Prisoners.”

Perhaps she shouldn’t have made fun of her like that, because Stephania hefted a third bucket of water. She appeared to consider it for a moment, shrugged, and dumped it over Ceres in a wash of freezing cold.

“I’m saying that nice doesn’t come into it, you stupid peasant,” she snapped as Ceres shivered. “We live in a world that will try to take all you have from you without asking. Particularly if you’re a woman. There are always thugs like Lucious. There are always those who want to take and take.”

“So we fight them,” Ceres said. “We set people free! We protect them.”

She heard Stephania laugh at that.

“You actually believe that foolishness works, don’t you?” Stephania said. “You think that people are basically good, and all will be well if you just give them a chance.”

She said it as though it were something to mock, rather than a good philosophy for a life.

“That is not life,” Stephania continued. “Life is a war, fought any way you can find to fight it. You give no one power over you, and you take all the power you can, because that way you have the strength to crush them when they try to betray you.”

“I’m not feeling very crushed,” Ceres retorted. She wasn’t going to let Stephania see how weak she felt in that moment, or how empty. She was going to create the pretense of strength, in the hope that she might find a way for reality to follow.

She saw Stephania shrug.

“You will. Your rebellion is currently fighting a battle with the army of Felldust. It might win, and then I will trade you for a path out of the city with all the wealth I can take. My guess, though, is that Felldust will wash through the city like a wave. I will let them break against the walls of this castle, until they are ready to talk.”

“You think men like that will just talk to you?” Ceres demanded. “They’ll kill you.”

Ceres wasn’t sure why she gave Stephania that much of a warning. The world would be a better place if someone killed her, even if it was the armies of Felldust.

“You think I haven’t thought it through?” Stephania countered. “Felldust is fractious. It cannot afford to have its soldiers sitting, laying siege to a castle it cannot take. They would fight amongst themselves in weeks, if not before. They will have to talk.”

“And you think they’ll play fair with you?” Ceres asked.

Sometimes, she could barely believe the arrogance Stephania showed.

“I am not a fool,” Stephania said. “I have one of my handmaidens preparing to play the part of me for the first meeting, so that if they try to betray us, I have time to flee the city through the tunnels. After that, I will present you, kneeling and in chains, to First Stone Irrien. An offering with which to begin peace negotiations. And who knows? Perhaps First Stone Irrien will find himself… amenable to joining our two nations together. I feel I could do a lot alongside someone like that.”

Ceres shook her head at that thought. She would no more kneel on Stephania’s command than on that of any other noble. “You think I’m going to give you the satisfaction – ”

“I think that I don’t have to wait for you to give anything,” Stephania snapped back. “I can take anything I want from you, including your life. Remember that, in what follows: if it weren’t for this war, I would have shown you mercy, and just killed you.”

It sounded as though Stephania had as strange an idea about mercy as about everything else in the world.

“What happened to you?” Ceres asked her. “What made you into this?”

Stephania smiled at that. “I saw the world as it was. And now, I think, the world will see you as you are. I can’t kill you, so I’ll destroy the symbol you made yourself into. You’re going to fight for me, Ceres. Again and again, without the strength that made people think you were so special. In between, we’ll find ways to make it worse.”

That didn’t sound so different from anything Lucious or the royals had tried to do.

“You’re not going to break me,” Ceres promised her. “I’m not going to collapse and beg just for your entertainment, or your petty revenge, or whatever else you want to call it.”

“You will,” Stephania promised her in return. “You’re going to kneel before the First Stone of Felldust and beg to be his slave. I’ll make sure of it.”

CHAPTER SIX

Felene had stolen plenty of boats in her time, and she was pleased to find this one was one of the better ones. It wasn’t much more than a skiff, but it sailed beautifully, seeming to respond as quick as thought, feeling like an extension of herself.

“It would need more holes in it for that,” Felene said, moving to bail out water that had washed over the side. Even doing that hurt, and as for the times when she had to row because the wind had dropped…

Felene winced just thinking about that.

She tested the wound gingerly, moving her arm in every direction to stretch the muscles of her back. There were some movements where it almost seemed as though she could ignore its presence, but there were others —

“Depths take you!” Felene swore as pain flashed through her, white hot.

The worst part was that every flash of pain brought with it memories of being stabbed. Of looking into Elethe’s eyes while Stephania stabbed her from behind. Every physical pain brought with it the agony of betrayal as well. She’d dared to think…

“What,” Felene demanded. “That you might finally end up happy? That you’d float off with a princess and some lovely girl, and the world would just leave you alone?”

It was stupid thinking. The world didn’t offer the happy endings you got in singers’ tales. Certainly not for a thief like her. No matter what happened, there would always be something else to steal, whether it was a jewel, or a slice of the map, or the heart of some girl who would then turn out to…

“Stop it,” Felene told herself, but that was harder than it looked. Some wounds didn’t just heal over.

Not that her physical one had, yet. She’d stitched it as best she could on the beach, but Felene was starting to worry about the puncture Stephania’s knife had left in her back. She lifted her shirt high enough to douse it with sea water, gritting her teeth against the pain as she washed it clean.

Felene had been wounded before, and this felt like a bad one. She’d seen wounds like this among others, and generally it hadn’t ended well. There had been that climbing guide who had found himself mauled by an ice leopard’s claws when Felene had been trying to steal from one of the dead temples. There had been the slave girl Felene had rescued on a whim after her master had whipped her bloody, only to watch her waste and die. There had been that gambler who had insisted on staying at the table, even after he’d gashed his hand on a broken shard of glass.

The sensible thing to do right now, Felene knew, was to head back the way she had come, seek out a healer, and rest for as long as it took to get back to everything she had been. Of course, by that point, the invasion would probably be over, and everyone involved would be scattered to the wind, but Felene would be all right again, free to go off wherever she wanted.

It shouldn’t make any difference to her how the invasion turned out, after all. She was a thief. There would always be things to steal, and there would always be those who wanted to hunt her down. There would probably even be more in the aftermath of a war, when things tended to get a little less tightly controlled, and there were always gaps for someone cunning enough to slip through.

She could go back to Felldust, rest up, and then find some fresh adventure to set out on. She could go off in search of long-lost islands, or head into the lands where ice closed over everything like a fist. There might be treasure and violence, women and drink. All the things that had tended to mix together so readily in her life to date.

What made her keep the small boat’s tiller pointed toward Delos was simple: it was where Stephania and Elethe would be. Stephania had tricked her about Thanos. She’d used her to get to Felldust, and then she’d tried to kill her. More than that, she’d tried to kill Thanos, even if the rumors around Felldust suggested that he had at least survived through to the rebellion’s capture of the city.

Felene found that she couldn’t let what Stephania had done go. Felene had left plenty of enemies behind her when she sailed on, but she didn’t like to leave unsettled debts. She’d fought a duel in Oakford once over an insult a year before, and once hunted down a locksmith who had tried to cut her out of her share, following him across half the Grasslands.

Stephania was going to die for what she’d done. As for Elethe…

In a lot of ways, that betrayal was worse. Stephania was a snake, and Felene had known it from the moment she set foot on the boat. Elethe had actually dared to make her feel something. For one of the first times in her life, Felene had dared to think beyond the next theft, and had started to dream.

“And what a dream,” Felene said to herself. “Traveling the world, rescuing beautiful princesses and seducing fair maidens. Who do you think you are? Some kind of hero?”

It sounded more like the kind of thing Thanos might have done than something for the likes of her.

“My life would be so much easier if I hadn’t met you, Prince Thanos,” Felene said. She jerked on one of the lines for her boat, setting it skimming in a new direction.

She didn’t mean it though. The main thing her life would have been if she hadn’t met Thanos was shorter. She would have died on the Isle of Prisoners without him, and after that…

He was a man who seemed to have a cause. Who stood for something, even if it had taken Felene to remind him of what that was. He was a man who had been prepared to fight against everything he’d been brought up to be. He’d fought the Empire, even though it would have been easier for him not to do it. He’d been prepared to give his life to save the likes of Stephania, which was truly the kind of thing a hero did.

“I suppose if I had any sense, I’d be falling in love with you,” Felene said as she thought about the prince. He was certainly a better person to fall for than the likes of Elethe. But you didn’t get what you wanted in this life. You certainly didn’t get to choose when it came to love.

It was enough that Thanos was a man to respect, even admire. It was enough that just thinking about the kind of thing he would do made Felene into a better person.

“If not necessarily a more sensible one.”

Felene sighed. There was no point in all this trying to argue with herself. She knew what she was going to do.

She was going to Delos. She would find Thanos if by any stroke of luck he was still alive. She would find Stephania, she would find Elethe, and there would be blood for blood, death for death. Probably, Thanos would have argued for something kinder or more civilized, but there was only so far you could go in emulating people. Even princes.

Now, there was just the question of getting to Delos and getting inside. By the time she got there, Felene had no doubt that it would be a city at war, if it hadn’t fallen outright. Felldust’s fleet would probably be a floating barricade before the city, and it was a long established tactic in times of war to blockade ports.

Not that Felene cared about that kind of thing. She’d occasionally made quite a healthy profit from smuggling her way around blockades. Food, information, people who wanted to get out, it had all been the same.

Still, Felene couldn’t imagine that Felldust’s soldiers would be very welcoming to her if she were stupid enough to just charge for the city. Already, Felene could see fragments of Felldust’s fleet ahead of her, vessels strung out across the water from Felldust to the Empire like jet beads on a necklace. The main fleet had long since sailed, but they were going in clusters now, forming groups of three or four, setting off together as they tried to make the most of the invasion to come.

In a lot of ways, they were probably the sensible ones. Felene had always had more of an affinity for the people who came up after a fight to steal than for the ones risking their lives. They were the ones who understood about looking out for themselves. They were Felene’s people.

An idea came to her then, and Felene steered her skiff in the direction of one of the groups. With her better arm, she pulled out a knife.

“Hoy there!” she called in her best Felldust dialect.

A man appeared over the railings, holding a bow aimed at her. “Think we’ll take all you – ”

He gurgled as Felene threw the blade, cutting him off mid-sentence. He tumbled from the boat, hitting the water with a splash.

“He was one of my best men,” a man’s voice said.

Felene laughed. “I doubt that, or you wouldn’t have made him the one to lean out and see if I was a threat. You the captain here?”

“I am,” he called back.

That was good. Felene didn’t have time to waste negotiating with those who weren’t in a position to do it.

“You all off to Delos?” she demanded.

“Where else would we be going?” the captain called back. “You think we’re out catching fish?”

Felene thought of some of the sharks that had hunted her on the way in to the shore. She thought of the body tumbling among them now. “Might be. There’s bait in the water, and there are some big prizes in these parts.”

“And some bigger ones in Delos,” the voice called back. “You looking to join our convoy?”

Felene made herself shrug as if she couldn’t care either way. “I figure an extra sword is good for you.”

“And an extra fifty is good for you. But it looks as though you can fight. You don’t slow us down, and you eat your own supplies. Fair enough?”

More than fair, since Felene had found her way into Delos. However careful the cordon around the city, Felldust’s fleet wouldn’t look twice at her when she was a part of it.

“Fair enough,” she called back. “Just so long as you don’t slow me down!”

“Eager for gold. I like that.”

They could like what they wanted, so long as they left Felene be. Let them think that she was there for gold. The only thing that mattered was —