3rd Week of June, 1460
Mangup’s sunrises were colder than Suyren’s.
It surprised Apostolos. Suyren lay farther north, but Mangup stood high upon its stony plateau, exposed to every wandering breath of the mountains. The wind came knifing through the pale dawn, slipping beneath thin wooden shutters, scouring warmth as much from skin as from the white rock that dominated Apostolos’s life now.
He suspected that was why so little grew upon this barren height. The place seemed made more for endurance than life; it unsettled him.
Then again, unsettling was something he had grown used to in recent weeks. First as defeat, then as captivity, and now as the humiliating knowledge that he was being kept like a bird in a room with a view.
Apostolos dipped the cloth into the warm water he had asked to be drawn up from the castle kitchens and pressed it against his face. He spread the soap lather over his jaw and throat, softening the stubble along his chin and neck. The burgundy in it caught his eye and sent a small pang through him, memory tugging at him even as pain twined itself together with the thought.
“Are you ready?” asked the voice behind him, a low, rasping screech dragged through an old throat.
“Yes,” Apostolos answered.
The barber-surgeon began to trace the curve of his neck with practiced strokes. Apostolos held himself still, forcing each breath to remain slow. It was absurd, the amount of will required simply to sit in a chair and let another man touch steel to his throat.
He had been marked as one of the leaders of the rebellion. The barber-surgeon might have lost a son in the fighting, or a brother, and be eager for some form of revenge. There was no love lost for traitors.
Apostolos supposed he should count himself fortunate. He had a small room to himself, and from its narrow window he could see the sprawling city below, the clustered roofs and steep lanes clinging to the mountain as the valleys opened beyond them, where the horizon was beginning to burn, a stark orange line widening into the day.
Yet the room was foreign. This was no room of his, no castle he could walk through.
He was not even allowed to shave himself, as a razor could be considered a weapon, so little was his true agency. Apostolos sat with his head tilted back and trusted that a man who might hate him would not choose this morning to end him.
“All done,” the barber-surgeon grunted, wiping the blade across his stained apron before lowering it into the cloudy water, to join with the needles, hooks, and other implements of the trade, clinking softly against the basin.
“Excuse me,” Apostolos ventured as the man began packing them away. “You do not need to come anymore if you do not want to. I can shave my own beard.”
“Not up to me whether you can or not,” the man said, buckling his leather roll of tools shut. “Not up to you either.”
He turned for the door with no other preamble, moving like a man eager to be rid of the room and the prisoner inside it.
“Could I be allowed to leave earlier today than yesterday?” Apostolos tried again.
The barber stopped in the doorway and looked back at him with an ugly stare. “How the hell should I know?” he ground out. “If it were up to me, you wouldn’t see the light of day ever again. Talk to the Prince if you want it that badly. Maybe he’ll throw you in the dungeon for your insolence.”
A ghastly smile tugged across his face, brown and gap-toothed. Then he heaved the door closed behind him.
Apostolos remained seated, alone again in a room meant to cage him, to cage his thoughts. It would not have been so cruel if they had not begun to thread across dangerous lines.
Apostolos had been lying in bed when he heard the call, watching the sun climb past its zenith and begin its slow trail toward the far side of the sky, where the walls of his little room would soon cut it from view. He had nothing else to mark the hours by except light, footsteps, and the changing moods of the wind.
After hours, three rough knocks broke against the wooden door.
“Time for your walk,” the guard called, his voice muffled by the worn planks.
Apostolos hated how eagerly he pushed himself off the bed.
The eagerness was the humiliating part. He was being led about like a dog taken out once a day so it would not foul the place where its masters slept.
The door groaned open, and Apostolos stepped into the corridor, crossing the threshold from his cage into foreign territory.
Mangup’s corridors bent in unfamiliar directions, its stones carried different smells, and even the light seemed to fall through its narrow windows at wrong angles. He walked with his back straight and his chin lifted, enduring the suspicious stares that followed him from every side. Scullery maids paused with baskets in their arms. Pages slowed mid-errand. Court officials watched him from beneath lowered brows.
All different shapes of the same expression. Suspicion, maybe disgust, or simply curiosity, though always with the quiet satisfaction of seeing a rebel’s son reduced to nothing.
Apostolos felt their judgment pressing against his skin and made himself walk as though none of it touched him. It was one of the few forms of resistance left to him, so he cherished it, in a small, bitter way. Hatred meant he still mattered enough to offend them.
“Where to today?” asked one of the two guards assigned to him, a lean man with beady eyes and a ragged spray of grey hair that refused to lie flat. There was a trace of mockery in the question, the same old joke repeated each day to remind Apostolos how little the answer truly mattered.
“The Drop,” Apostolos replied.
The guard snorted, but led the way all the same.
They passed out into the courtyard, where the wind struck colder than it should have beneath the high summer sun. Apostolos drew in a deeper breath despite himself. The open air tasted of dust, and the faint mineral sharpness of the plateau rock. Miles better than the stale warmth of his room.
Across the yard, the Royal Guard was conducting their morning training. They were meant to be the best and brightest warriors in the Principality, the men chosen to stand nearest the Prince and carry the prestige of his person into battle. Apostolos knew what such a post meant to common-born men. To be raised into the Royal Guard was to be told that strength, loyalty, and skill had lifted you above your station, that you were worthy of defending the ruler himself. It was the kind of honor that could turn a farmer’s son into someone other men stepped aside for.
If that was still true, then the Principality was in dire straits.
The men training in the hard-packed sand stumbled through their forms, blades wavering, feet dragging, shoulders rising and falling as they fought for breath, as sweat ran down faces. They had the loose-limbed awkwardness of lads who had not yet learned the measure of their own reach.
Apostolos noticed that they were almost all barely more than boys.
Even the guards escorting him slowed to watch.
“These new recruits are a disgrace,” muttered the stockier of the pair, a quiet one who rarely troubled himself to speak. His eyes remained fixed on the training yard, his mouth set in a hard line. “If this is what our strength amounts to now…” He shook his head.
“Fresh prey,” said the wild-haired guard, with a grin that showed too many teeth. “It will be fun to break them.”
Apostolos could not tell whether he meant to train them or torment them. Perhaps the distinction was thinner than it ought to be.
New recruits, then, an enormous number of them too. Apostolos let his gaze move across the yard, counting roughly, noting the gaps where older men should have stood to correct the young ones by example. Had the Royal Guard been gutted so badly during the rebellion?
A small, shameful pleasure stirred in him at the thought, and he did not know whether to strangle it or nurture it.
Then he saw the man standing ahead of the cohort, watching the drills with the stillness of someone who did not need to shout to be obeyed. Bald-faced, broad-shouldered, and unmistakable even at a distance.
Apostolos stopped.
“Is that the Doux?” he asked, surprise slipping into his voice before he could hide it.
“He likes to take a firm hand in the breaking-in of new recruits,” answered the dour guard, a small smile cutting briefly through his usual severity. “I can tell you personally that he is a hard taskmaster.”
There was something almost fond in the way he said it, the kind of respect beaten into a man by years of exhaustion, discipline, and grudging admiration. Apostolos glanced at the guard from the corner of his eye, noting his clean-shaven scalp and thick frame, bulked by prodigious muscles.
“More like a slave driver,” the rugged man said. “All those neat little moves won’t help them in a real battle. They’re little more than a snack the way they are now, and a little bit of sweat won’t change that. The Doux is a fool to think otherwise.”
“Ah, because petty ambushes and banditry are the finest schools of war, Cosmas?” The dour guard turned fully toward the wilder one, his mouth twisting with disgust. “Not everyone can be as deceitful and shameless so as to steal from the defenseless, unlike you.”
“You grow so uppity every time I mention the Doux, Yannis.” Cosmas rolled his eyes, plainly delighted by the reaction. “If you love him so much, why don’t you ask for his hand?”
His smile was sharp and canine beneath the wild grey of his hair.
Yannis seethed, eyes glowering from beneath those bushy brows. “I will never understand why a dog like you was let into the Royal Guard.”
“Because the Doux, for all his many flaws,” Cosmas said, lingering over the word with obvious pleasure, “recognizes skill above all else. Even blood and pedigree.”
He snaked an arm around Yannis’s shoulders in a mockery of companionship, leaning close as though they were old friends sharing some private jest.
“That is why a dirty little peasant like me can stand shoulder to shoulder with a nobleborn son like you,” Cosmas went on, voice dropping into something nastier. “Because unlike you, I’m not a failure.”
Yannis shoved him off violently. “Get your hands off me, mutt.”
Cosmas stepped back neatly from the blow, both hands raised in exaggerated surrender, not even close to losing his balance. The ease of the movement told Apostolos more than the man’s words had. Whatever else Cosmas was, he was dangerous.
“All right, all right, pretty boy,” Cosmas said, laughing under his breath as he turned to walk ahead. “Come on. We need to get our dear hostage to his favorite place.”
Yannis thundered after him, each step landing hard against the stone as though he wished the corridor beneath him were Cosmas’s skull.
Apostolos followed in their wake, filing away the exchange, even as his eyes drifted back toward the training yard despite himself.
The Doux was still there, implacable amid the dust and strain, barking corrections at boys who could barely keep their sword arms steady. The second most powerful man in the Principality somehow still found time to personally train raw recruits. More than that, he seemed to consider it important enough to do himself, standing beneath the sun while lesser officers hovered nearby, too tense to interrupt. Apostolos could not decide whether that spoke to discipline, desperation, or both.
All of a sudden, the Doux turned to meet his gaze squarely, as if some instinct had told him he was being watched.
Apostolos looked away almost immediately and kept walking, trying to keep his face carefully still.
…
The Drop was a section of the keep’s walls where the patrols thinned more than they did elsewhere, though not from negligence. It hugged the western side of the fortress, where the stone dropped away into a sheer cliff so steep that any thought of escape became laughable the moment one looked down. The wall there did not need as many men. The mountain itself stood guard.
Apostolos had used the brief forays they allowed him before supper to learn what he could of the castle, nothing meaningful, of course - they were not fools enough to let him near anything truly important or dangerous - but to understand the turns of the corridors, the gardens scattered about and, more importantly, for somewhere he could stand and feel, for a little while, like himself.
He could not deny that some childish part of him had hoped to stumble upon a hidden passage or forgotten postern gate, some convenient crack in the mountain through which freedom might be reached. In the weeks since, he had come to understand how ludicrous that hope truly was.
Mangup was not merely a keep. It was a fortress city crouched upon a massive plateau. Every servant, guard, and courtier knew who Apostolos was and why he was there, and his bronze-red hair made him instantly recognizable.
Even if he somehow slipped past the patrols of the keep and reached the outer yards, even if the gate guards were mostly fresh recruits now and might be fooled, he would still have to cross a city where he had already been paraded before half the population. He would have to duck through alleys for close to a mile, penniless and unarmed, hoping no fishmonger, child, washerwoman, or idle soldier thought to shout his name, all the while praying that no one checked his room too soon and found him missing.
And after that miracle, he would reach a second gate, watched by more guards who knew his face. If, by some absurd mercy, he passed even them, he would still be alone on the road, without coin, food, horse, allies, or any clear place to go.
The simple act of imagining escape left him despondent.
That was why his bodyguards were so relaxed. They did not need chains when the whole mountain served the same purpose.
As they reached the faded staircase on the far side of the keep fortifications, Apostolos felt his mood lift despite himself.
The steps were worn smooth in the middle, the stone stained darker where rainwater gathered in the cracks. It led toward a lonely stretch of wall where the wind always seemed stronger.
The Drop was famous, and not for the right reasons. People threw themselves from the height and tumbled into the emptiness below, casting their souls back down to hell, because heaven would be barred to them forever for that final sin, at least that was what Apostolos had heard from servants whispering of it with a strange mix of horror and fascination.
Perhaps that was why the guards never followed him too closely when he neared the place. They lingered farther back, unhurried. Maybe they wished Apostolos would throw himself over the edge.
Whatever the case, he was happy for the solitude - and for the view.
The land fell away in a vast sweep of rock, forest, and distant haze. In the distance, mountains rolled away toward the horizon in layered shades of blue and grey. Here, alone with the view and the wind, he could almost forget everything.
Only he was not alone today.
Someone sat cross-legged on the edge, hands resting open at either side, broad back straight and strangely relaxed. A long dark braid ran down most of its length, shifting faintly with each push of wind. It was a man judging by the hum under his breath - a low, grave tune that seemed more fitted to a monastery than a cliffside. Two guards that mirrored his own hovered farther away, looking utterly untroubled by the sight, as if finding a man seated at the edge of death were a perfectly ordinary inconvenience.
Apostolos slowed and considered turning away, but the choice was taken from him before he reached it.
“Come,” the man said, without turning his head. His voice was low and roughened by a deep accent. “There is room for two.” It was Crimean.
Apostolos hesitated only a moment longer before approaching. “Apologies for the disturbance.”
“Not at all,” the man said calmly. “I am just appreciating the view.”
“With your eyes closed?” Apostolos asked, skepticism slipping through as he rounded the man and saw that the stranger’s eyes shut, his face turned toward the mountains, chest rising slowly as he breathed in the high air. It seemed an utterly bizarre sight.
“That is because I am not looking outwards, but inwards,” the man answered, each word placed with care, as if the Greek had to be lifted and set down one piece at a time. He had the body of a warrior, scarred and corded with hard muscle, his skin darkened by years beneath harsher suns than his. It seemed utterly at odds with his esoteric words, as though a blade had decided to pretend it was the bible.
“This place helps,” he continued. “It is quiet in the right way.” One eye opened, dark and assessing, and settled briefly on Apostolos. “Though I’ve noticed it occupied as of late.”
Only then did Apostolos notice the man’s right leg.
It was gone below the knee, the stump bound neatly beneath his garments. Somehow it did not seem to disturb his balance in the slightest. He sat on the parapet as though the cliff were a bench in a garden, not one step away from plunging into the rocks below.
“You are awfully close to the ledge, friend,” Apostolos said, uneasy. “The winds are very strong here. I would appreciate it if you stepped back a little. The Drop is not known for its kindness.”
“That is the point,” the man said, closing his eye again and turning his face back toward the open air. His expression settled into something still and hard, almost carved from the same pale stone beneath them. “Clarity is best reached from high up, and often it is not kind when you reach it.”
The words struck him more deeply than Apostolos expected, and he did not know how to answer.
He looked from the man to the yawning emptiness beyond the wall, where the mountain dropped sharply. There was something unpleasantly apt about the stranger’s words.
“So this has been your place to...” Apostolos trailed off, struggling to find the right word.
“Meditate,” the man supplied. This time his eyes opened fully, and he turned his face toward Apostolos. “It helps to center myself from time to time.”
Apostolos lowered himself onto the parapet a careful distance away, leaning one arm against the stone while keeping his weight turned safely inward.
“I can understand it,” Apostolos said at last. “All one’s worries must seem rather inconsequential before the grand vastness of the hills.”
The man gave a small hum, though whether in agreement or amusement Apostolos could not tell. “We are specks,” he said. “And our worries are never bigger than us.”
“You are quite learned,” Apostolos said, unable to keep the surprise from his voice. “Your appearance would not suggest it.”
He regretted the words as soon as they left his mouth.
“Because I am foreign?” the man asked. There was no anger in his voice, only the faintest hint of something close to a smile.
“Because you are a warrior,” Apostolos corrected quickly.
The man grew quiet at that. His eyes drifted down toward the place where his right leg ended in folded cloth, and for the first time, the stillness around him seemed less like serenity and more like restraint.
“My service as a warrior is over,” bitterness roughened the edges of his words. He gestured once to the missing limb, a small motion without drama. “So I am trying to find other ways to fulfill my duty.”
“And what is your duty now?” Apostolos asked, curious.
The man only smiled and turned back toward the scenery, as if the question had passed by him on the wind. “Why are you here?” he asked instead.
Apostolos stared at him. “You haven’t heard?”
“They tell me little,” the man said simply.
That was an understatement if ever there was one. Apostolos studied him for a moment, weighing how much he should say.
“I am under house arrest,” he settled on.
The man quirked an eyebrow, plainly unimpressed by the thinness of the answer. Apostolos met the look with one of his own, and a lopsided smile. If you are going to keep your secrets, I will keep mine.
The one-legged man rumbled out a slow laugh. It was low and brief, but it was the first true sign of open emotion Apostolos had seen from him.
“You are a weapon, then,” the man said. “Sheathed and kept ready for when they want to use you.”
The mirth had not fully left him, but something darker moved beneath it. Anger, perhaps, or recognition. Apostolos understood then that this man was in the exact same situation as him, though perhaps under different circumstances.
“I suppose that is true,” Apostolos’s gaze fell to the Nomikos crest embroidered subtly between the outer and inner seams of his tunic, close enough to his heart that he could feel it when he moved. Choosing his own clothing was one of the few allowances they had granted him, and having his House hidden there, worn before every guard and servant without any of them noticing, had become his own small rebellion. It was a childish defiance, perhaps, but it was still his.
“It hurts,” he admitted, the words coming more softly than he intended. “Knowing I am only here to be used against my own kin.”
He turned his eyes toward the horizon, pretending to follow the far blue line of the mountains so the man would not see his tears. It was a useless effort.
“What you are here for depends on you,” the man said, and Apostolos was grateful he did not call him out on his show of emotion. “If that is your purpose, it is because you chose it.”
The words sounded like wisdom he had repeated to himself until they became a rope he could hold.
“How can you believe that?” Apostolos demanded, flaring with outrage. “We are bound in chains as surely as any other prisoner, even if we do not wear them. Stuck here and able to do nothing at all.”
“You are stuck because you think you are stuck,” the man replied, unfazed. “Rage. Shout. Curdle your face like a child denied his sweets. The world does not care for your small struggle, only you.”
He rose from his seated position in one smooth motion, so fluidly that Apostolos almost forgot the missing leg until the man reached down beside the parapet. There, half-hidden against the stone, lay two wooden crutches Apostolos had failed to notice before. They were polished dark from use, the grips wrapped in worn leather, the lower ends capped with iron that so scratched it had to have scraped against the ground hundreds, no, thousands of times.
“So only you can do something about it,” the man finished.
He set the crutches beneath his arms and turned toward the stairs. His movement was steady and economical, lacking even the faintest trace of self-pity. Apostolos couldn't help but admire it.
“Wait,” Apostolos said before he could stop himself.
The man paused and looked back over his shoulder.
“What is your name?” Apostolos asked. Who was this mysterious stranger?
“Mustafa,” he said simply, offering no title.
Then he descended the faded staircase, leaving Apostolos alone at the Drop.
For a long while, Apostolos did not move. He turned back toward the view, toward the great sweep of valley and forest and distant mountain ridges disappearing into orange. The sun had lowered enough to coat gold along the cliffs, catching on the pale backs of birds circling below. Somewhere beyond those hills lay Suyren and the broken remnants of a life he had once assumed would last forever.
The wind rose, cold and painful, but Apostolos did not close his eyes, trying to will clarity to come with the gust. More tears followed the first, slipping down over the crest hidden at his heart.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
“He was so arrogant, was he not?” Arete complained, her soft caramel locks catching the traces of sunrays where they poured through the high windows, each curl glinting warmly despite the ugliness in her voice. “Did you see the way he walked?”
“He had his back straight,” Kalliroe agreed, her venomous tone sitting strangely beneath the prim little bun pinned tightly to her scalp, the same brown shade as her sister’s hair. “As if he were some champion being crowned in the streets, and not the son of a failed traitor being paraded before the city.” Her lips curled. “Truly, the Nomikos spawn have no shame.”
“Ugh, it reminds me of that fool Remus, always ogling us with his lecherous eyes.” Arete’s face twisted in disgust, as if even the memory had left something sour on her tongue. “To think his cousin could be worse. Unfathomable.”
“You know,” Kalliroe whispered, leaning closer, ready to feed another scrap into Mangup’s endless rumour mill, “I think I saw him at the Drop the other day. Perhaps one day he will gain the courage to jump.”
There was a bright, eager note in her voice that made Anastasia’s stomach tighten.
Cruelness could be found everywhere, even in bright-eyed, innocent young girls.
Anastasia had met the boy on occasion, and while she would not pretend to know him, he had always been polite. Quiet, perhaps, but kind of heart by her judgment, and her intuition rarely failed her in such matters.
She had never enjoyed gossip, despite how much of her life it had taken over. Rumour was the blood of a court, and it was her job to keep the pulse.
People could find endless reasons to be callous when they believed consequences would never reach them, and nothing bound the shallow together quite so efficiently as a common enemy.
Now the boy paid for the sins of his father through no fault of his own. Most in Mangup seemed content to forget that little inconvenience whenever hatred made the story cleaner.
Anastasia could understand the impulse. Painting the world in black and white was easier than admitting how many shades of grey lay between guilt and innocence, duty and cruelty, justice and revenge.
Understanding did not make her like it.
Hesperia, who had looked only a breath away from joining the accusation with her usual relish for tattle, changed her entire demeanor the moment she caught the hard stare Anastasia fixed upon her. The transformation was almost admirable in its speed. Her chin lifted, and a severe frown settled over her face as though moral outrage had been her natural position all along.
“Have you no shame?” She cut in, tone sharp and offended enough that Anastaia almost believed her. “Wishing someone dead, truly? What would God say if He saw how black your hearts are?” She let the rebuke hang just long enough for the twins to pale. “Do you think any decent man will want you if he learns how hateful you are, or how eager you seem to spread rumours about something already several weeks past?”
The girls looked as startled as newborn fawns caught in mischief. They bowed in unison, their skin turning a sickly pallor.
“We’re sorry, Lady Hesperia,” they said together, looking sheepish, though Hesperia merely harrumphed.
Unlike usual, Anastasia could not even smile at their antics.
They had beaten back the rebellion. The Genoese had been stalled. Philemon was in the dirt at long last, and Panagiotis had returned home safe. She ought to have been relieved, yet her unease had only grown since Panagiotis’s return.
Olympia, her longtime advisor, did not miss it. She never did. While Hesperia continued scolding the twins with an admirable amount of theatrical fury, Olympia stepped nearer and slipped a steadying hand onto Anastasia’s forearm.
“What is the matter?” she asked softly, taking advantage of the distraction.
Anastasia wanted to brush the question aside, but Olympia knew her too well for that, damn the woman’s cunning.
“I need you to gather every secret you have on the high court,” Anastasia murmured, drawing her arm back. “Every piece of dirt, every private arrangement that has been moving through the castle recently.”
She knew she had let too much tension show. Hesperia noticed from the corner of her eye, though to her credit, she kept the twins occupied without missing a beat.
Olympia’s expression tightened, the fine stress lines at the corners of her eyes deepening. She was the chief reason Anastasia remained so well informed, having woven a quiet web of contacts through Mangup so deftly that few things of consequence went unnoticed for long.
“Why?” Olympia asked. “What is happening?”
Anastasia only shook her head.
Olympia tensed further at that. That Anastasia could not tell her…
Movement across the corridor drew the group into stillness. Cloth whispered of the scuffed stone, followed by the measured cadence of several feet approaching from the opposite side of the passage.
A moment later, a similar entourage emerged into view, on a straight collision course with hers.
Her ladies put on their battle faces and angled themselves toward the garden, mirroring the approaching group ahead of them. No word needed to pass between either side. Everyone present understood what was about to happen.
They entered the garden through two parallel archways, and met in the centre of their chosen battlefield among the roses. The scent of the garden perfumed the space pleasantly. Anastasia felt it was deeply out of place for what was to unfold.
“Lady Anastasia, what a pleasant surprise to see you here.”
Princess Euphrosyne wore her yellow-gold hair in twin braids today, each one arcing over a shoulder and tracing the line of her chest with studied care. Striking emerald eyes searched Anastasia’s faded browns.
“Princess, likewise,” Anastasia said, offering the bare minimum bow courtesy required. Her entourage followed a beat behind her. “I see you have braided your hair.”
Euphrosyne usually wore it loose, letting it fall in a soft, wavy cascade down her back. To anyone outside the high court, the change might have seemed nothing more than vanity. Among women like them, such choices were rarely meaningless.
“John likes it better like this,” the princess said, almost shyly, in that soft maidenly tone she used to convince half the men in the castle that innocence was her natural condition. “So I decided to oblige him.”
“Curious. You never seemed to care for what he wanted before,” Anastasia hummed almost idly, making sure the words landed exactly where she meant them to. Euphrosyne’s smile died for a fraction of a heartbeat before blooming again.
“John and I have never been closer than we are now,” she said, sweetness returning in full force. “Our love has never run deeper. Can you say the same for yours?”
She drifted toward a nearby rose bush and let her fingers pass over the blossoms, inspecting them as though choosing the finest jewel from a tray. Anastasia, in contrast, joined her hands before her, posture severe and face carefully composed.
“Unlike yours, my marriage does not fluctuate with the seasons.”
It was the kind of cut that would ordinarily have ended the encounter. Anastasia was in no mood to trade barbs with the princess, not today.
“It is stale, you mean,” Euphrosyne answered, entirely unaffected. And Anastasia began to grow suspicious. The princess was not normally this even-keeled. Something had her in a joyous mood.
“One does wonder how your relationship with the Prince improved so suddenly,” Anastasia probed. “Given your… rocky beginning.”
It was known to everyone worth knowing that John had married Euphrosyne to steady the Principality’s finances. She was not even of proper nobility, merely the daughter of a wealthy Trapezondian merchant who had brought a substantial dowry and a useful political and commercial connection to the only other Byzantine remnant. For years, the Prince had barely paid her any heed.
“Ah, that?” Euphrosyne plucked a flower from the bush at last. “He was so distraught during that dastardly business with the rebellion. I had to… help him get back on his feet.”
She allowed a sensual lilt to enter the words, and her gaggle of ladies chuckled behind her, light and eager and utterly obedient.
“I can only think of one way you could have done so,” Anastasia replied, fighting not to let disgust show. “Through conversation, it most certainly was not. You have never had the temperament to hold one for long.”
“It worked, did it not?” the princess asked, unashamed. “He is so much stronger now. More virile," she drawled out the words, "ready to take charge of the Principality once more.”
Her manicured nails began stripping the thorns from the rose’s stem, breaking each sharp little barb neatly at the base with patient, delicate violence.
“He has spoken of taking a firmer hand with the state, and with his vassals,” Euphrosyne continued. “His position is stronger than ever now.”
She stepped closer than was proper, close enough that Anastasia could smell the warm perfume on her breath.
“Being married to such a powerful man allows his wife certain benefits, did you know?” she spoke with a dainty, playful tone. “Such as removing prickly, annoying thorns from her side. People who think they know too much.”
Euphrosyne placed the thornless rose against Anastasia’s dress, just above her heart, and smoothed it there with a gentle touch.
A striking azure coated its delicate petals, the same colour as Anastasia’s dress.
“I think it suits you,” she said, appraising the effect. “Be sure to care for it. You would not want it to wilt as your own flower has.”
With that final little cruelty, she turned in a graceful twirl and swept away. Her posse followed, laughing behind their hands as though they had witnessed something terrifyingly clever.
Hesperia looked thunderous. The twins had gone pale and frightened. Olympia looked worried, though she hid it better than most women would have managed.
Anastasia only felt her determination settle into something hard and cold.
“Gather whatever information you have on the Princess,” she commanded, eyes fixed on the path Euphrosyne had taken. “Not gossip. Actionable proof of her crimes.”
Her Ladies straightened as if someone had pulled them up by strings. It was rare that Anastasia ordered such a strike, and rarer still that someone escaped unscathed.
Anatasia's hand closed around the rose, crushing it just enough for its ruined softness to stain her glove.
“It is time to tear this weed out by the roots.”
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Author Notes: Something I've been thinking about lately is all the facets of Fallen Eagle. Is it truly a Kingdom-Builder, or a Historical Drama? Character relationships and conflicts are at the center of it, certainly. But so are economic policies, social manipulation, philosophical dilemmas, military strategy and a dozen other things if we were to get nitpicky about it.
It is pretty funny to think about sometimes because Fallen Eagle really started as just a shot in the dark after reading what I felt were unrealistic kingdom-builders that fell into the same old tropes. Not saying I avoided them but that was the plan. Just a cold, analytical protagonist that was dropped into an untenable situation and told to survive. Characters were secondary, what mattered was having cunning strategems and historical K-B. Funny how that turned out.
My first forays into proper character work were Christos and Orestis's original archs, and at the time I was just thinking 'it's hard to convey the passage of weeks while the recruits are training if I just do a few paragraphs of exposée, and pretty boring and dry besides, I'll just add some random stuff in between', and it just kind of grew from there.
Now we are in a phase that is similar to that first arc. It is very heavily Kingdom-Building, and a few random stuff are happening in between. I could just write about how the policies are done and the end result of how I picture them, but I try to strike a balance between all these different things. The good part (I would hope) is that readers don't get too overwhelmed or bored with just any one thing, as things constantly change. The bad part is the difficulty of having to juggle everything and make something coherent out of that mess.
That got me wondering what are you guys' favorite parts of Fallen Eagle? Is it the battles? The Characters? The Intrigue? The Kingdom Building? Let me know, and just drop your thoughts down below. It helps to get some perspective on what you guys are feeling, and what you'd like to see more of.