Knight, Heir, Prince

CHAPTER FIVE

Thanos saw the guards awaiting him on the long run into the city gates, as he and Stephania returned home. He raised his chin and kept on riding. He had expected this. And he wouldn’t run from it.

Stephania obviously saw them too. Thanos saw her stiffen in the saddle, going from relaxed to prim and formal in an instant. It was as though a mask had slid down in front of her features, and Thanos found himself reaching out automatically to slide a hand over hers as she held the reins.

The guards crossed their halberds to bar the way as they approached, and Thanos drew his horse to a halt. He kept it between Stephania and the guards, just in case Lucious had somehow bribed men to attack him. He saw an officer step out from the knot of guards and salute.

“Prince Thanos, welcome back to Delos. My men and I have been instructed to escort you to see the king.”

“And if my husband does not wish to travel with you?” Stephania asked, in a tone that could have commanded the whole Empire.

“Forgive me, my lady,” the officer said, “but the king has given us clear orders.”

Thanos raised a hand before Stephania could argue.

“I understand,” he said. “I’ll go with you.”

The guards led the way, and to their credit, they managed to make it look like the escort they claimed it was. They led the way through Delos, and Thanos noted that the route they picked was one through the most beautiful parts of the city, sticking to the tree-lined avenues that held noble houses, avoiding the worst parts even when they formed a more direct route. Perhaps they were simply trying to stick to the safer areas. Perhaps, though, they thought that nobles like Thanos and Stephania wouldn’t want to see the misery elsewhere.

Soon, the walls of the castle towered above. The guards led the way through its gates, and grooms took their horses. The walk through the castle felt more confined, with so many guards surrounding them in the narrow spaces of the castle corridors. Stephania took Thanos’s hand, and he squeezed it gently in reassurance.

When they reached the royal apartments, members of the royal bodyguard blocked the way at the door.

“The king wishes to speak to Prince Thanos alone,” one said.

“I am his wife,” Stephania said in a tone so cold Thanos suspected most people would have stepped aside instantly.

It didn’t seem to affect the royal bodyguard at all. “Nevertheless.”

“It will be all right,” Thanos said.

When he stepped inside, the king was waiting for him. King Claudius stood, leaning on a sword whose hilt formed the tentacles of a twisting kraken. It came almost to the level of his chest, and Thanos had no doubt that the edge would be razor sharp. Thanos heard the click of the door shutting behind him.

“Lucious told me what you did,” the king said.

“I’m sure he came running straight to you,” Thanos replied. “Did he also tell you what he was doing at the time?”

“He was doing what he was commanded to,” the king snapped, “in order to deal with the rebellion. Yet you went out and attacked him. You killed his men. He says you defeated him through trickery, and would have killed him too if Stephania hadn’t intervened.”

“How does butchering villagers stop the rebellion?” Thanos countered.

“You’re more interested in peasants than in your own actions,” King Claudius said. He lifted the sword he held as though weighing it. “It is treason to attack the king’s son.”

“I am the king’s son,” Thanos reminded him. “You didn’t execute Lucious when he tried to have me killed.”

“Your birth is the only reason you are still alive,” King Claudius replied. “You are my son, but so is Lucious. You do not get to threaten him.”

Anger rose up in Thanos then. “I don’t get anything that I can see. Not even the acknowledgment of who I am.”

There were statues in one corner of the room, depicting famous ancestors of the royal line. They were out of the way, almost hidden away, as if the king didn’t want to be reminded of them. Even so, Thanos pointed to them.

“Lucious can look at those and claim authority going back to the days when the Empire first rose,” he said. “He can claim the rights of all those who gained the throne when the Ancient Ones left Delos. What do I have? Vague rumors about my birth? Half-remembered images of parents that I’m not even sure are real?”

King Claudius strode to the spot in his rooms where his great chair sat. He sat upon it, cradling the sword he held across his knees.

“You have an honored place at court,” he said.

“An honored place at court?” Thanos replied. “I have a place as a spare prince no one wants. Lucious might have tried to have me killed on Haylon, but you were the one who sent me there.”

“Rebellion must be crushed, wherever it is found,” the king countered. Thanos saw him run his thumb along the edge of the sword he held. “You had to learn that.”

“Oh, I’ve learned,” Thanos said, moving across to stand in front of his father. “I’ve learned that you would rather be rid of me than acknowledge me. I am your eldest son. By the laws of the kingdom, I ought to be your heir. The eldest son has been the heir since the first days of Delos.”

“The eldest surviving son,” the king said quietly. “You think you would have lived if people knew?”

“Don’t pretend you were protecting me,” Thanos replied. “You were protecting yourself.”

“Better than spending my time fighting on behalf of people who don’t even deserve it,” the king said. “Do you know how it looks when you go around protecting peasants who should know their place?”

“It looks as though someone cares about them!” Thanos shouted. He couldn’t keep from raising his voice then, because it seemed like the only way to get through to his father. Maybe if he could make him understand, then the Empire might finally change for the better. “It looks as though their rulers aren’t enemies out to kill them, but people to be respected. It looks as though their lives mean something to us, rather than just being something for us to throw aside while we have glittering parties!”

The king was silent for a long time after that. Thanos could see the fury in his eyes. That was fine. It matched the anger Thanos felt almost perfectly.

“Kneel,” King Claudius said at last.

Thanos hesitated, only for a second, but it was apparently enough.

“Kneel!” the king bellowed. “Or do you wish me to have you made to? I am still the king here!”

Thanos knelt on the hard stone of the floor before the king’s chair. He saw the king raise the sword he held with difficulty, as though it had been a long time since he’d done it.

Thanos’s thoughts went to the sword at his own side. He had no doubt that if it came to a battle between him and the king, he would be the winner. He was younger, stronger, and had trained with the best the Stade had to offer. But that would mean killing his father. More than that, it really would be treason.

“I have learned many things in my life,” the king said, and the sword was still poised there. “When I was your age, I was like you. I was young, I was strong. I fought, and I fought well. I killed men in battle, and in duels in the Stade. I tried to fight for everything I believed to be right.”

“What happened to you?” Thanos asked.

The king’s lip curled into a sneer. “I learned better. I learned that if you give them a chance, people do not come together to lift you up. Instead, they try to tear you down. I have tried showing compassion, and the truth is that it is nothing more than foolishness. If a man stands against you, then you destroy him, because if you do not, he will destroy you.”

“Or you make him your friend,” Thanos said, “and he helps you to make things better.”

“Friends?” King Claudius raised his sword another inch. “Powerful men have no friends. They have allies, servants, and hangers-on, but do not think for a moment that they will not turn on you. A sensible man keeps them in their place, or he watches them rise up against him.”

“The people deserve better than that,” Thanos insisted.

“You think people get what they deserve?” King Claudius bellowed. “They get what they take! You’re talking as if you think the people are our equals. They aren’t. We are raised from birth to rule them. We are more educated, stronger, better in every way. You want to put pig farmers in castles beside you, when I want to show them that they belong in their sty. Lucious understands.”

“Lucious only understands cruelty,” Thanos said.

“And cruelty is what it takes to rule!”

Thanos saw the king swing the sword then. Perhaps he could have ducked. Perhaps he could even have made a move for his own blade. Instead, he knelt there and watched as the sword swept down toward his throat, tracking the arc of the steel in the sunlight.

It stopped short of cutting his throat, but not by much. Thanos felt the sting as the edge touched his flesh, but he didn’t react, no matter how much he wanted to.

“You didn’t flinch,” King Claudius said. “You barely even blinked. Lucious would have. Would probably have begged for his life. That is his weakness. But Lucious has the strength to do what is needed to hold our rule in place. That is why he is my heir. Until you can carve this weakness from your heart, I will not acknowledge you. I will not call you mine. And if you attack my acknowledged son again, I will have your head for it. Do you understand?”

Thanos stood. He’d had enough of kneeling to this man. “I understand, Father. I understand you perfectly.”

He turned and walked for the doors, not waiting for permission to do it. What could his father do? It would look weak to call him back. Thanos stepped out, and Stephania was waiting for him. She looked as though she’d maintained her image of composure for the benefit of the bodyguards there, but the moment Thanos came out, she hurried forward to him.

“Are you all right?” Stephania asked, raising a hand to his cheek. It dropped lower, and Thanos saw it come away with blood on it. “Thanos, you’re bleeding!”

“It’s only a scratch,” Thanos assured her. “I probably have worse from the fight earlier.”

“What happened in there?” she demanded.

Thanos forced a smile, but it came out tighter than he intended. “His majesty chose to remind me that prince or not, I am not worth as much to him as Lucious.”

Stephania put her hands on his shoulders. “I told you, Thanos. It was the wrong thing to do. You can’t put yourself at risk like that. You have to promise me that you will trust me, and never do anything so foolish again. Promise me.”

He nodded.

“For you, my love, I promise.”

He meant it, too. Going and fighting Lucious in the open like that wasn’t the right strategy, because it didn’t achieve enough. Lucious wasn’t the problem. The whole Empire was the problem. He’d briefly thought that he might be able to persuade the king to change things, but the truth was that his father didn’t want things to change.

No, the only thing to do now was to find ways to help the rebellion. Not just the rebels on Haylon, but all of them. Alone, Thanos couldn’t accomplish much, but together, they might just bring down the Empire.

CHAPTER SIX

Everywhere Ceres looked on the Isle Beyond the Mist, she saw things that made her stop and stare at their strange beauty. Hawks with rainbow-colored feathers spun as they hunted things below, but were in turn hunted by a winged serpent that eventually settled on a spire of white marble.

She walked over the emerald grass of the island, and it seemed as if she knew exactly where she had to go. She’d seen herself in her vision, there atop the hill in the distance, where rainbow-colored towers stuck up like the spines of some great beast.

Flowers grew from the low rises on the way, and Ceres reached down to touch them. When her fingers brushed them, though, their petals were of paper-thin stone. Had someone carved them that fine, or were they somehow living rock? Just the fact that she could imagine that possibility told her how strange this place was.

Ceres kept walking, heading for the spot where she knew, where she hoped, her mother would be waiting.

She reached the lower slopes of the hill and started to climb. Around her, the island was full of life. Bees buzzed in the low grass. A creature like a deer, but with crystal tines where its antlers should have been, looked at Ceres for a long time before springing away.

Yet she saw no people there, despite the buildings that dotted the landscape around her. The ones closest to Ceres had a pristine, empty feel, like a room that had been stepped out from only moments before. Ceres kept going, up toward the top of the hill, to the spot where the towers formed a circle around a broad area of grass, letting her look out between them over the whole of the rest of the island.

Yet she didn’t look that way. Instead, Ceres found herself staring at the center of the circle, where a single figure stood in a robe of pure white. Unlike her vision, the figure wasn’t fuzzy or out of focus. She was there, as clear and real as Ceres was. Ceres stepped forward, almost to within touching distance. There was only one person it could be.

“Mother?”

“Ceres.”

The robed figure threw herself forward at the same instant Ceres did, and they met in a crushing hug that seemed to express all the things Ceres didn’t know how to say: how much she’d been looking forward to this moment, how much love there was there, how incredible it was to meet this woman she’d only met in a vision.

“I knew you would come,” the woman, her mother, said as they stepped back, “but even knowing it is different from actually seeing you.”

She pulled back the hood of her robe then, and it seemed almost impossible that this woman could be her mother. Her sister, perhaps, because she shared the same hair, the same features. It was almost like looking into a mirror for Ceres. Yet she seemed too young to be Ceres’s mother.

“I don’t understand,” Ceres said. “You are my mother?”

“I am.” She reached out to hug Ceres again. “I know it must seem strange, but it’s true. My kind can live a long time. I am Lycine.”

A name. Ceres finally had a name for her mother. Somehow, that meant more than all the rest of it put together. Just that was enough to make the journey worth it. She wanted to stand there and just stare at her mother forever. Even so, she had questions. So many that they spilled out in a rush.

“What is this place?” she asked. “Why are you here alone? Wait, what do you mean ‘your kind’?”

Lycine smiled and sat down on the grass. Ceres joined her, and as she sat, she realized that it wasn’t just grass. She could see fragments of stone beneath it, arranged in mosaic form, but long since covered over by the meadow around them.

“There’s no easy way to answer all of your questions,” Lycine said. “Especially not when I have so many questions of my own, about you, about your life. About everything, Ceres. But I’ll try. Shall we do this the old way? A question for a question?”

Ceres didn’t know what to say to that, but it seemed her mother wasn’t done yet.

“Do they still tell the stories of the Ancient Ones, out in the world?”

“Yes,” Ceres said. She’d always paid more attention to the stories of combatlords and their exploits in the Stade, but she knew some of what they said about the Ancient Ones: the ones who had come before humanity, who sometimes looked the same and sometimes looked like so much more. Who’d built so much and then lost it. “Wait, are you saying that you’re – ”

“One of the Ancient Ones, yes,” Lycine replied. “This was one of our places, before… well, there are some things that it is still best not to talk about. Besides, I’m owed an answer. So tell me what your life has been like. I couldn’t be there, but I spent so long trying to imagine what it would be like for you.”

Ceres did her best, even though she didn’t know where to start. She told Lycine about growing up around her father’s forge, about her brothers. She told her about the rebellion, and about the Stade. She even managed to tell her about Rexus and Thanos, though those words came out choking and fractured.

“Oh, darling,” her mother said, laying a hand over hers. “I wish I could have spared you some of that pain. I wish I could have been there for you.”

“Why couldn’t you?” Ceres asked. “Have you been here all this time?”

“I have,” Lycine said. “This used to be one of the places of my people, in the old days. The others left it behind. Even I did, for a time, but these past years it has been a kind of sanctuary. And a place to wait, of course.”

“To wait?” Ceres asked. “You mean for me?”

She saw her mother nod.

“People talk about seeing destiny as if it were a gift,” Lycine said, “but there is a kind of prison to it, too. Understand what must happen, and you lose the choices that come with not knowing, no matter how much you might wish…” Her mother shook her head, and Ceres could see the sadness there. “This isn’t the time for regret. I have my daughter here, and there is only so much time for you to learn what you came for.”

She smiled and took Ceres’s hand.

“Walk with me.”

Ceres felt like days had passed while she and her mother walked the magical isle. It was breathtaking, this vista, being here with her mother. It all felt like a dream.

As they walked, they spoke mostly of the power. Her mother tried to explain it to her, and Ceres tried to understand. The strangest thing happened: as her mother spoke, Ceres felt as if her words were actually imbuing her with the power.

Even now, as they walked, Ceres felt it rising up inside her, roiling like smoke as her mother touched her shoulder. She needed to learn to control it, she’d come here to learn to control it, but compared to meeting her mother, it didn’t seem important.

“Our blood has given you power,” Lycine said. “The islanders tried to help unlock it, didn’t they?”

Ceres thought of Eoin, and of all the strange exercises he’d had her doing. “Yes.”

“For people not of our blood, they understand the world well,” her mother said. “But there are things even they can’t show you. Have you made anything stone yet? It’s one of my talents, so I would guess it will be one of yours.”

“Made things stone?” Ceres asked. She didn’t understand. “So far, I’ve moved things. I’ve been faster and stronger. And – ”

She didn’t want to finish that. She didn’t want her mother to think badly of her.

“And your power has killed things that have tried to harm you?” Lycine said.

Ceres nodded.

“Do not be ashamed of that, daughter. I have only seen a little of you, but I know what you are destined to be. You are a fine person. All that I could hope. As for making things stone…”

They stopped in a meadow of purple and yellow flowers and Ceres watched her mother pluck a small flower from the meadow, with delicate, silken petals. Through the contact with her mother, she felt the way the power flickered within her, feeling familiar but much more directed, crafted, shaped.

Stone spread across the flower like frost over a window, but it wasn’t just on the surface. A second after it had begun, it was over, and her mother held one of the stone flowers Ceres had seen lower on the island.

“Did you feel it?” Lycine asked.

Ceres nodded. “But how did you do it?”

“Feel again.” She plucked another flower, and this time it was impossibly slow as she turned it to something with marble petals and a granite stem. Ceres tried to track the movement of the power within her, and it was as though her own moved in response, trying to copy it.

“Good,” Lycine said. “Your blood knows. Now you try.”

She passed a flower to Ceres. Ceres reached down, concentrating as she tried to grasp the power within her and push it into the form she’d felt her mother’s take.

The flower exploded.

“Well,” Lycine said with a laugh, “that was unexpected.”

It was so different from the way the mother she’d grown up with would have reacted. She’d beaten Ceres for the least failure. Lycine just passed her another flower.

“Relax,” she said. “You already know how it should feel. Take that feeling. Imagine it. Make it real.”

Ceres tried to do it, thinking about what she’d felt when her mother had transformed her flower. She took the feeling and filled it with power the way her father might have filled a mold at the forge with iron.

“Open your eyes, Ceres,” Lycine said.

Ceres hadn’t even realized that she’d closed them until her mother said the words. She forced herself to look, even though right then she was afraid to. Once she’d looked, she stared, because she could barely believe it. She held a single, perfectly formed, petrified bloom, transformed into something like basalt by her power.

“I did that?” Ceres asked. Even with everything else she could do, it still seemed nearly impossible.

“You did,” her mother said, and Ceres could hear the pride there. “Now we just need to get you to do it without your eyes closed.”

That took longer, and a lot more flowers. Yet Ceres found herself enjoying the practice. More than that, every time her mother smiled at her efforts, Ceres felt a burst of love expanding through her. Even as the minutes spilled into hours, she kept going.

“Yes,” her mother said at last, “that’s perfect.”

It was more than that; it was easy. Easy to reach out and pull power from inside her. Easy to channel it. Easy to leave behind a perfectly preserved stone flower. It was only as the rush of doing it faded that Ceres realized just how tired she was.

“It’s all right,” her mother said, taking her hand. “Your power takes energy and effort. Even the strongest of us could only do so much at once.” She smiled. “But your power knows what it is for now. It will rise up when someone threatens you, or when you summon it to you. It will do more, too.”

Ceres sensed a flicker of power from her mother, and she could see the full potential of her power. She saw the stone buildings and gardens in a new light, as things that had been built with that power, crafted in ways no human could understand. She felt full, somehow. Complete.