by Terah Edun
“Apologies, Mother,” Ciardis said stiffly. “Do go on.”
She wasn’t yet willing to trust Lillian Weathervane. For that to happen, her mother would need to be made whole again, under her own mental faculties and awareness, because make no mistake, until she was—regardless of whether or not she feigned calculation or emotional manipulation—she wasn’t the Lillian Weathervane that Ciardis Weathervane knew and loved.
She was a sham, a shadow, no better than the simulacrum that the Emperor of Algardis had set upon her with a bit of dark magic and Sebastian’s blood to make it work.
Whether or not he could control or even influence the new Lillian had yet to be proved, but Ciardis suspected that if he had been able to, her mother wouldn’t be flipping back and forth between two personalities with no rhyme or reason.
Lillian cleared her throat and clapped her hands together sharply. “I have a proposal for the Emperor and the prince heir. One that I believe we will all agree is the best possible way to go forward.”
“Does it involve us killing a god for him in his stead?” Sebastian asked in disgust.
Lillian gave the prince heir a pointed look, but she didn’t reprimand him. Whether that was because protocol dictated that she couldn’t or Lillian just didn’t think it was appropriate to do so, Ciardis couldn’t tell.
Maradian said while stroking his forehead, “Well, we might as well hear this plan, dear. Tell us, go on.”
His tone is lazy and patronizing, Ciardis thought. Just like the man himself.
Just looking him was enough for Ciardis to itch for something sharp in her hands. Seeing her mother standing side by side with him, sometimes proud, sometimes clinging, was enough to make her turn away and be done with the entire scenario.
But when the Emperor of Algardis looked down at her mother with a patronizing smile on his face, and Lillian Weathervane looked back up at him with a simper on hers, Ciardis Weathervane couldn’t turn away.
She couldn’t abandon the person who had given her life, not once but twice, when she had taken her on as a companion trainee under the guise of being Lady Serena, to this vain, manipulative power-addicted maniac. Not today. Not any day.
Even if Lillian was willing to compromise her own sense of self and abandon Ciardis’s brother and all he stood for in his short life in the process.
She had to be set free. And for now, that meant sitting through these rituals of listening and planning and preparing. Ciardis couldn’t see any other way to defeat the Emperor of Algardis than to beat him at his own game, which he had mastered over more than four decades of court life and strife.
Lillian, meanwhile, blushed and said with a sweet dip of her head, “I think it’s time that this alliance between Algardis and Weathervane is truly formalized. A power play the world has yet to see. One that even the dragons will hesitate at.”
Maradian didn’t really look too impressed at Lillian’s statement.
Nevertheless, he spoke. “Well, yes. We’ve already agreed on the wedding. In fact, I did tell these two lovebirds that it would be in their best interests to move along with it after all that business with Kifar is done.”
“Excellent,” said Lillian, beaming. “There’s no time like the present, then!”
Sebastian cleared his throat uncomfortably. “Is this before or after we deal with the bluttgott?”
His voice was filled with sarcasm, but everyone else took the question quite seriously.
Maradian looked at Lillian. Lillian looked back up at Maradian.
Together, they turned and announced to the group, one quite solemnly and the other almost bubbling over with joy, “Before!”
Ciardis resisted the extreme urge to roll her eyes as her court training kicked in. No matter how ridiculous this situation was, if the request was coming from an Emperor with as much power as Maradian and without the moral compunctions not to use said powers to his advantage, she would take his words as a command unless stated otherwise.
Still, she wasn’t stupid.
“Mother, as much as I am reluctant to disagree with you—” Ciardis delicately began, as she thought, Listen, you’re out of your mind right now. “—but I must institute a formal protest,” she continued. “We need to be focused on this coming battle which will take our attentions night-and-day.”
Lillian looked ready to protest and Ciardis happened to add, “Besides mother the wedding will only happen once and you want it to be perfect don’t you?”
She was appealing to Lillian’s vanity and hoped the emotional personality wouldn’t see through her attempt.
“Well yes, that is true,” Lillian said. “It’s a once-in-a-lifetime event.”
“If you’re lucky,” Thanar interjected ominously.
Ciardis didn’t touch that statement with a ten-foot pole.
“And we need to be as prepared as we can,” Ciardis said.
“But that is also precisely my point!” said Lillian with an eager clap of her hands.
Ciardis’s heart sank.
Lillian continued on. “The wedding is more than an event, it’ll help you in your preparations for the battle against the god. The ceremony will not only gain us vital allies within the nobility—Who doesn’t like a grand party, after all?—but it also should strength the ties between you and your betrothed.”
Ciardis opened and closed her mouth, flummoxed. She wasn’t sure if Lillian was lying through her teeth or if she really believed all the nonsense that had just spewed forth from her mouth.
“I think Lillian is right,” the Emperor said in a low tone.
Ciardis stiffened and looked over at him. He couldn’t possibly think a wedding would in any way help them win against the god of destruction. So what was this snake of a man up to?
The Emperor’s words flashed back at her: Always be one step ahead of your enemies. It’s the only way to play. Lillian’s words sparkled in her mind like a warning: I’ve never known a better player of the game of empires.
This isn’t about the bluttgott, she realized. It’s about the game. The game he wants me to learn. To be a good princess heir…and a better opponent...
As much as it infuriated her to realize, this was still all about him. He was bored or twisted or some combination of the two, and he wanted to play. So he tossed her a challenge and wanted to see how she’d deal with it.
Or, rather, how they would deal with it, Ciardis thought as she looked over at Sebastian and Thanar. Stalwart partners by her side.
All right, Ciardis thought as she connected with Thanar and Sebastian to explain her understanding of the situation, what do we do?
We play his game, Thanar responded coolly.
And we win, the prince heir continued, a warm wave of determination riding his words.
Ciardis swallowed harshly and squared her shoulders.
Hollowly, even though this should have been one of the most joyous occasions of her life, she asked her mother, the captive Weathervane, and Sebastian’s ‘father’, the maniacal ruler of a once-great empire, “Where and when?”
The smile on Maradian’s face told her he already had the perfect answer in mind.
Her skin crawled as she bared her teeth and tried to mimic his nonchalant attitude to her entrance to the game of empires.
23
Ciardis had to wonder if this would ever end. The toying, the games, the manipulation. Formally, it had just begun; but she had already endured what seemed like a lifetime of Maradian’s games. Even though at the time, she hadn’t known she was playing by his rules and in his realm of influence. Now she would be forced to compete, and any misstep could truly mean not only her last, but that of everyone else she cared about—a list that was growing shorter by the day. Maradian was tightening his screws in her body with increasing intensity, and he didn’t seem to care if she broke under the pressure. Only that his plans continued on without interruption; and that, of course, he got to laugh about it along the way.
She felt her will being temp
ered. Her mind being pressed to the brink. She wondered if she could truly win in a game of Maradian’s own making. A game he seemed perpetually destined to win, if previous victories were any sort of proof of what it was like to go against him.
He’d even managed to outwit a dragon, though Ciardis wasn’t even certain Raisa had known she was playing his game.
Did she know? Did Bastian? Ciardis wondered.
One was dead to the world, and the other might as well have been.
As she thought about the dragon, she looked over at her comatose form and frowned.
She had to know, Ciardis thought. The dragons would have sent no fool to represent their interests a thousand miles of ocean away.
But that begged the question of how. How did Maradian outwit, outmaneuver, and outfox even the most sanguine of challengers? And what’s more…how did he expect her, common girl from a small village, to outwit him at his own game?
Turning back to the Emperor and eyeing him nervously, Ciardis took in his satisfied smile.
Well, at least he’s happy to have me on board, Ciardis thought bitterly. As some sort of protégé, I guess.
No, said Thanar. I’d be careful of how you think of that man. He has projects. Toys. The word protégé indicates a sense of pride in one’s pupils’ accomplishments. The only sense of pride he had or will have in you is when he thinks you’re close to surpassing him and he strikes you down.
Ciardis thought back at the daemoni prince ruefully, Sounds like that’ll be my lucky day.
Was it my father’s? Sebastian asked her bluntly.
Ciardis jumped and outwardly said, “Sebastian, I didn’t mean—”
She stopped suddenly when she realized she was speaking aloud.
Sebastian, however, didn’t have such a misstep.
He continued, Take this seriously, Ciardis. Because he is.
She swallowed harshly. There was no doubt in her mind who the prince heir meant; Sebastian was staring staggers into Maradian’s chest. It was impolite, just a teensy bit short of rude. Of course, Maradian could have him arrested and imprisoned for daring to glance crossly at his imperial form, but he didn’t.
It seemed to amuse the Emperor to have his blood nephew so twisted in knots.
He takes joy in others’ displeasure, Ciardis noted blithely—mostly to herself.
No, interjected Thanar once more. Maradian takes pleasure in others’ pain. There’s a difference.
She didn’t bother retorting. Because he was right. She just needed to internalize that simple outlook, and the ability to be blunt about another person’s utter vileness. Thanar didn’t hesitate to call a spade a spade, or to register the evil in a person at first glance. It was in her very nature to give people the benefit of the doubt. To try to put someone at ease by seeing their faults as mistakes rather than as evidence of who they were. She had done it with the young satyr Thomas when she and her family had just returned to court.
He had been a nature demi-god with the ability to manipulate all manner of flora and fauna. He had used his natural magic to influence the thoughts of humans and kith to his own whims.
Her jaw tightened. Much like a certain emperor before her, Thomas had been a vile creature that she hadn’t acknowledged for what he was until it was far too late. By the time she had accepted what Thanar had known from the moment he met the satyr, Inga had been severely hurt and mentally compromised. They had ended up saving her, but it had forced her retirement back to the frozen fields of her homeland, to rest and to recuperate. Ciardis hoped that sojourn had been a blessing for the frost giantess at least.
It certainly couldn’t have been more nerve-wracking than the weeks she’d been by Ciardis’s side. Being mentally hijacked by a mad satyr had been one of the more interesting events to happen to Inga then, but it certainly hadn’t been the most dangerous.
“Shilling for your thoughts?” the Emperor said, interjecting into her private space with a gentle smile.
Ciardis forced herself to keep still, to not step back and keep backing away until her back was against the far wall like she wanted to.
It wasn’t that she was afraid.
Though I should be, she thought grimly.
It was that he triggered every sense of self-preservation she had. That wasn’t fear. It was the wariness of prey caught in a predator’s eyesight…and not knowing how to escape the trap they knew was coming to pass. She had felt uncomfortable around the Emperor before, but Ciardis had put that feeling down to the difference in their social power and privilege. The man, after all, was the leader of one of the biggest empires she knew of. But now that she had gotten to know the Emperor of Algardis more closely, Ciardis could tell that it wasn’t just the trappings of privilege that he carried around him like a second vestment. It was precisely because of the man within the clothes, the jewels, and the airs that she felt so wholly unprepared.
To top it off, he apparently wanted to be friends now. As much as a man like Maradian Athanos Algardis could have friends. But it wasn’t really so much friendship as cultivation of someone who he now recognized as beneficial to him. She knew that. From the moment she had come to court, he had actively ignored her presence while keeping tabs on her, as she was sure he did everyone who came into his palace, with a strict offhand dossier. It was only when she began to show promise, powerful promise, that he had even elected to acknowledge her in a face-to-face court session.
Though that had been after she had unceremoniously dropped—or fallen, depending on how you looked at it—into his palace audience chamber like a rat coming out of a sewage pipe one fateful day. She’d been filthy on more than one occasion of meeting him. She’d been desperate in precisely all of them.
And she didn’t like that, because she knew that he did.
It was a power play from the very beginning. Precisely because of who he was, Maradian would always be the one coming in with an advantage, be it magically, physically, or socially. Adding to that the fact that his magic was, dare she say it, dark magic—the kind that put you in company with a shadow mage…well, she had to say she wasn’t particularly pleased to be the latest toy for the man.
The only thing that she had over him, if you could call it that, was the knowledge that he was on a deadline. More specifically, Maradian had messed up once in her presence, when he had said he ‘wasn’t ready yet’ when she had revealed that a messenger was on its way to tell his dire enemies about his illegal Kasten ship.
How illegal it was, she didn’t know. In fact, until today Ciardis hadn’t realized just how much power the dragons wielded over an empire that had been supposedly free of their ministrations for centuries now.
Goes to show that things are not always as they seem on the surface, she thought ruefully. Especially inter-court politics.
Of course, Maradian had the messenger in his grasp now, but the frustrated outburst proved that he was not infallible. In fact…he was vulnerable. She just had to pick apart his layers until she could ascertain how to use his vulnerabilities, physically and magically, against him while keeping the empire safe in the process. Because she had no doubt in her mind that Vana’s warning that ‘kill the Emperor, kill the land’ had at least some basis in factual reality.
She had seen the proof of it in Sebastian’s connection to the land and the Land Wight—a spiritual entity that manifested its presence when called, and which could be described as the Empire of Algardis’s soul.
Or its keeper, she thought privately.
But the Land Wight wasn’t here now, and the Emperor was. Ciardis had the sneaking suspicion that his desperate grasp of Sebastian’s power as a child hadn’t been so desperate after all. It had been carefully planned, even cultivated, over time so that Maradian had had a secondary source of power and a full connection with the land without using his own gifts in the process. Which begged the question—how? Why? Why use another’s gift from the same bloodline instead of his own?
It was a mystery decades in the making, an
d one that Ciardis was firmly convinced that she had to solve. Because whatever it was that Maradian was doing, it was more important to him, or more worthwhile to him, than the wealth and power that he had gained as the ruler of an entire empire. So she pondered it. Now that she knew he was some sort of mage capable of mental deviation—she didn’t want to call it persuasion, because it wasn’t that, not really—she feared him capable of even worse actions than stealing a mage’s gift in pursuit of his own initiatives. He didn’t just want power anymore. She knew he would use whatever he had at his disposal to get it.
She figured his mental magic wasn’t exactly a pure deviation of their thoughts, because of the way his victims were acting. Unlike the satyr’s powers, which had been complex, if simple in their effectiveness. Thomas had triggered Inga’s natural base instincts and pushed them to the breaking point. The anger that had rested inside her, buried within a pit by honed experience, reason, and intelligence, had been broken out and given free rein. Instead of being ruled by her logic, she became ruled by a single emotion.
That had been the danger of the satyr’s psychic manipulation.
Because if you pushed someone’s emotions to the breaking point and confused their minds, then you could change the very foundation of who they were.
She worried that Maradian had access to eerily similar magic as well.
24
Maradian’s powers, though she couldn’t put a finger on exactly what type of mental mage he was, were different.
He didn’t project his own emotions on top of another’s or influence theirs. Instead, he created schisms and planted needed ideas. And for some like Raisa, he even buried entire mental landscapes so that they were comatose.
Though to be honest, Ciardis thought as she looked around, Raisa could have been just as easily drugged by an attendant healer in Maradian’s pay.
