He knew then that unless he escaped, he would die here. He would die, and Lucious would become king. What happened after that would be a thing out of nightmares. He had to find a way to stop it.
Surely even Queen Athena could see how bad things would be. He just had to make her understand.
“What do you think will happen when Lucious is king?” Thanos asked. “What do you think he will do?”
He saw Athena smile. “I think he will do as his mother suggests. Lucious has never had much time for the… dreary details of his role. In fact, I should probably thank you, Thanos. Claudius was too stubborn. He didn’t listen to me when he should have done. Lucious will be more malleable.”
“If you believe that,” Thanos said, “you’re as insane as he is. You’ve seen what Lucious did to his father. Do you think being his mother will keep you safe?”
“Power is the only safety there is,” Queen Athena replied. “And you won’t be around to see it, whatever happens. When the gallows is done, you will die, Thanos. Goodbye.”
She turned to go, and as she did, all Thanos could think of was Lucious. Lucious being crowned. Lucious as he’d been in the village Thanos had saved. Lucious as he must have been when he killed their father.
I will get free, Thanos promised himself. I will escape, and I will kill Lucious.
CHAPTER TWO
Ceres came out from the Stade borne on the shoulders of the crowd, into the sunlight, and her heart soared. She looked out at the aftermath of the battle, and as she did, a wash of emotions fought for attention within her.
There was the joy of victory, of course. She heard the crowd shouting its victory as it poured from the Stade, the rebels of Haylon alongside the combatlords, the remnants of Lord West’s forces, and the people of the city.
There was relief, that her desperate attempt to save the combatlords from Lucious’s last Killing had succeeded, and that it was finally over.
There were bigger reliefs, too. Ceres scanned the crowd until she found her brother and her father, standing together arm in arm with a group of the rebels. She wanted to run to them then and make sure that they were all right, yet the crowd was determined to carry her halfway through the city. She had to make do with the fact that they appeared to be uninjured, walking together and cheering along with the others. Amazing that they could still cheer. So many of these people had been willing to die to stop the crushing tyranny of the Empire. So many had.
That brought the final emotion: sadness. Sadness that all of this had been needed, and that so many had to die on both sides. She could see the bodies in the streets where there had been clashes between the rebels and the soldiers. Most wore the red of the Empire, but that didn’t make it better. Many were just ordinary people, conscripted against their will, or men who joined because it was better than a life of poverty and subjugation. And now they lay dead, staring at the sky with eyes that would never see anything again.
Ceres could feel the warmth of the blood on her skin, already drying in the heat of the sun. How many men had she killed today? Somewhere in the endless battle, she’d lost count. There had been only the need to keep going, keep fighting, because stopping meant dying. She’d been caught up in the smooth flow of the battle, carried along by the energy of it, with her own energy pulsing inside her.
“All of them,” Ceres said.
She’d killed all of them, even if she hadn’t done it with her own hands. She’d been the one to convince the people of the stands not to accept the Empire’s idea of peace. She’d been the one to convince Lord West’s men to assault the city. She looked around at the dead, determined to remember them, and what their victory had cost.
Even the city showed scars of violence: broken doorways, the remains of barricades. Yet there were also signs of joy spreading, too: people were coming out into the streets, joining up with the crowd that flowed down the streets in a sea of humanity.
It was hard to hear much over the yelling of the crowd, but distantly, Ceres thought she could hear the sounds of combat continuing. Part of her wanted to charge forward and deal with it herself, but more of her wanted to put a stop to it before it all spiraled out of control. The truth was that in that moment, she was too exhausted for it. It felt as though she’d been fighting forever. If the crowd hadn’t been carrying her, Ceres suspected that she might have collapsed.
When they eventually did put her down in the main square, Ceres went looking for her brother and her father. She pushed her way toward them, and reached them only because the people there seemed to step aside in respect to let her through.
Ceres hugged them both.
They said nothing. Their silence, the feel of their hug, said it all. They had all survived, somehow, as a family. And the absence of her dead brothers was felt deeply.
Ceres wished that she could stay like that forever. Just stay safe with her brother and her father, and let this whole revolution run its own way. Yet even as she stood there with two of the people she cared about most in the world, she became aware of something else.
People were staring at her.
Ceres supposed that wasn’t so strange after everything that had happened. She’d been the one at the heart of the fighting, and right now, between the blood, the dirt, and the exhaustion, she probably looked like some monster out of legend. Yet that wasn’t the way people seemed to be staring.
No, they were staring as if they were waiting to be told what to do next.
Ceres saw figures pushing their way through the crowd. She recognized one as Akila, the wiry, muscled man who had been at the head of the last wave of rebels. More wore the colors of Lord West’s men. There was at least one combatlord there, a large man holding a pair of fighting pickaxes, who seemed to be ignoring several wounds as he stood there.
“Ceres,” Akila said, “the remaining imperial soldiers have either retreated to the castle or have started to look for ways to leave the city. My men have followed those they can, but they don’t know this city well enough, and… well, there is a danger that people might take it the wrong way.”
Ceres understood. If Akila’s men hunted through Delos for fleeing soldiers, there was a danger that they would be seen as invaders. Even if they weren’t, they might be ambushed, split up, and picked off.
Yet it seemed strange that so many people should be looking to her for answers. She cast around, looking for help, because there had to be someone there better qualified to take charge than she was. Ceres didn’t want to assume that she could take charge just because her bloodline gave her a link to Delos’s Ancient Ones’ past.
“Who is in charge of the rebellion now?” Ceres called out. “Did any of the leaders survive?”
Around her, she saw people spreading their hands, shaking their heads. They didn’t know. Of course they didn’t. They wouldn’t have seen any more than Ceres had. Ceres knew the part that mattered: Anka was gone, killed by Lucious’s executioners. Probably, most of the other leaders were dead too. That or hiding.
“What about Lord West’s cousin, Nyel?” Ceres asked.
“Lord Nyel did not accompany us in the assault,” one of Lord West’s former men said.
“No,” Ceres said, “I guess he wouldn’t have.”
Maybe it was a good thing he wasn’t there. The rebels and the people of Delos would have been wary enough of a noble like Lord West, given all that he represented, and he had been a brave and honorable man. His cousin hadn’t been half the man he had been.
She didn’t ask if the combatlords had a leader. That wasn’t the kind of men they were. Ceres had come to know each of them in the training pits for the Stade, and she knew that while any one of them was worth a dozen or more normal men, they couldn’t lead something like this.
She found herself looking to Akila. It was obvious that he was a leader, and his men clearly followed his example, yet he seemed to be looking for her to give the orders here.
Ceres felt her father’s hand on her shoulder.
“You’re wondering why they should listen to you,” he guessed, and it was far too close to the mark.
“They shouldn’t follow me just because I happen to have Ancient One blood,” Ceres replied softly. “Who am I, really? How can I hope to lead them?”
She saw her father smile at that.
“They don’t want to follow you just because of who your ancestors are. They’d follow Lucious if that were the case.”
Her father spat into the dirt as if to emphasize what he thought of that.
Sartes nodded.
“Father’s right, Ceres,” he said. “They follow you because of everything you’ve done. Because of who you are.”
She thought about that.
“You can draw them together,” her father added. “You have to do it now.”
Ceres knew they were right, but it was still hard to stand in the midst of so many people and know that they were waiting for her to make a decision. What happened if she didn’t, though? What happened if she forced one of the others to lead?
Ceres could guess the answer to that. She could feel the energy of the crowd, held in check for now, but there nonetheless, like smoldering embers ready to burst into wildfire. Without direction, it would mean looting in the city, more death, more destruction, and maybe even defeat as the factions there found themselves at odds.
No, she couldn’t allow that, even if she still wasn’t sure she could do it.
“Brothers and sisters!” she called out, and to her surprise, the crowd around her fell silent.
Now the attention on her felt total, even compared to what had gone before.
“We’ve won a great victory, all of us! All of you! You faced the Empire, and you snatched victory from the jaws of death!”
The crowd cheered, and Ceres looked around, giving that a moment to sink in.
“But it’s not enough,” she continued. “Yes, we could all go home now, and we would have achieved a lot. We might even be safe for a while. Eventually, though, the Empire and its rulers would come for us, or for our children. It would go back to what it was, or worse. We need to finish this, once and for all!”
“And how do we do that?” a voice called out from the crowd.
“We take the castle,” Ceres replied. “We take Delos. And we make it ours. We capture the royals, and we stop their cruelty. Akila, you came here by sea?”
“We did,” the rebel leader said.
“Then go to the harbor with your men and make sure we have control of it. I don’t want imperials escaping to fetch an army against us, or a fleet sneaking up on us.”
She saw Akila nod.
“We’ll do it,” he assured her.
The second part of this was harder.
“Everyone else, come with me to the castle.”
She pointed to where the fortification stood over the city.
“For too long, it has stood as a symbol of the power they have over you. Today, we take it.”
She looked around at the crowd, trying to gauge their reaction.
“If you don’t have a weapon, get one. If you’re too injured, or you don’t want to do this, there is no shame in staying, but if you come, you’ll be able to say that you were there the day Delos got its freedom!”
She paused.
“People of Delos!” she cried, her voice booming. “Are you with me!?”
The crowd’s answering roar was enough to deafen her.
CHAPTER THREE
Stephania clung to the rail of their boat, her knuckles as white as the spray coming off the ocean. She was not enjoying the ocean journey. Only the thought of the vengeance it might lead to made it palatable at all.
She was one of the high nobles of the Empire. When she’d undertaken long journeys before, it had been in the staterooms of great galleys, or cushioned carriages in the midst of well-guarded convoys, not sharing space on a boat that seemed far too tiny against the vast expanse of the ocean.
It wasn’t just her comfort that made it difficult, though. Stephania prided herself on being tougher than people thought. She wasn’t going to complain just because this leaky tub rolled with every wave, or because of a seemingly endless diet of fish and salt meat. She wasn’t even going to complain about the stink of it. Under normal circumstances, Stephania would have plastered her face with her best fake smile and gotten on with it.
Her pregnancy made that harder. Stephania imagined that she could feel the child growing within her now. Thanos’s child. Her perfect weapon against him. Hers. It was something that almost hadn’t seemed real when she first heard it. Now, with the pregnancy exacerbating every hint of sickness and making the food taste even worse than usual, it all seemed far too real.
Stephania watched Felene working toward the front of the boat, along with Stephania’s handmaiden, Elethe. The two made such a contrast to one another. The sailor, thief, and whatever else she was in her rough breeches and tunic, hair braided down her back. The handmaiden with her silks covered by a cloak, shorter hair framing softly dark features with an elegance to them the other woman couldn’t hope for.
Felene seemed to be having a high old time of it, singing a sea shanty of such inventive vulgarity that Stephania was sure the other woman was doing it deliberately to bait her. Either that, or it was Felene’s idea of courtship. She’d seen some of the looks the thief had given her handmaiden.
And her, but at least they were better than the looks of suspicion. Those had been rare enough at the start, but they had been growing more frequent, and Stephania could guess why. The message she’d sent to lure in Thanos had said that she’d taken Lucious’s potion. At the time, it had seemed like the best way to hurt him, but now, it meant that she had to hide the signs of a pregnancy that seemed determined now to make itself known. Even if there weren’t the near constant sickness to consider, Stephania was sure that she could feel herself swelling up like a whale, her dresses growing tighter by the day.
She couldn’t hide it forever, which meant that she was probably going to have to kill Thanos’s pet sailor at some point. Perhaps she could do it now, just walk up to the other woman and shove her over the bow rail of the boat. Or she could offer a water skin. Even given the hurry she’d left in, Stephania still had enough poisons on hand to deal with a legion of potential enemies.
She could even have her handmaiden do it. Elethe was good with knives, after all, although, given that she’d been the sailor’s captive when Stephania had found them at the docks, maybe not quite good enough.
That uncertainty was enough to make Stephania pause. This wasn’t the kind of thing that she could afford to get wrong. There would be one chance to get this right. So far from other resources, failure wouldn’t mean a quiet retreat. It might mean her death.
In any case, they were still too far from land. Stephania couldn’t steer the boat, and while her handmaiden would probably be a useful guide in the lands of Felldust, she probably couldn’t get them across the ocean to it. They needed the skills of the sailor, both to find land safely again and to get them to the right piece of land. There were things Stephania needed to find, and she couldn’t do it if she couldn’t even get to the land that had been the Empire’s ally for generations now.
Stephania walked over to the others, and for a moment she considered pushing Felene anyway, simply because she seemed surprisingly loyal to Thanos. It wasn’t a trait Stephania expected in a self-confessed thief, and it meant that bribery probably wasn’t an option. Which only left more violent means.
Still, as Felene turned toward her, Stephania forced a smile.
“How much further do we have to go?” she asked.
Felene lifted her hands like a merchant balancing scales. “A day or two, maybe. It depends on the winds. Resenting my company already, princess?”
“Well,” Stephania said, “you are foul-mouthed, condescending, high-handed, and almost gleeful about the fact that you are a criminal.”
“And those are just the start of my good points,” Felene
said with a laugh. “Still, I’ll get you to Felldust easy enough. Have you thought about what you’re going to do then? Friends at court, maybe, to help find this sorcerer of yours? Do you know where to find him?”
“Where the falling sun meets the skulls of the stone dead,” Stephania said, recalling the directions Old Hara the witch had given her. Stephania had paid for those directions with the life of one of her other handmaidens. They hardly seemed like enough.
“It’s always this kind of thing,” Felene said with a sigh. “Trust me, I’ve stolen some pretty impressive things in my time, and it’s never just straightforward directions. Never a street name and someone telling you to take the third door on the left. Sorcerers, witches, they’re the worst. I’m surprised a noble lady like you wants to mess with anything like that.”
That was because the sailor knew nothing about Stephania, really. Not the things she’d spent her time learning so that she would be more than just one more face in the background of royal occasions. Certainly not the lengths she was prepared to go to when it came to revenge.
“I will do whatever it takes,” Stephania said. “The question is if I can rely on you.”
Felene flashed her a smile. “So long as you mostly ask me to do things that include drinking, fighting, and occasional stealing.” Her expression turned more serious. “I owe Thanos, and I gave him my word I’d see you safe. I keep my word.”
Without that part, she might have been perfect for Stephania’s plans. Oh, if only she’d been as open to bribery as the rest of her sort. Or even seduction. Stephania would have given her Elethe as easily as she’d given the old witch Hara her last handmaiden.
“What about when we get to Felldust?” Felene asked. “How do we go about finding this ‘place where the sun meets the stone dead’?”