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Her blood chilled as a familiar voice echoed through the stadium.
“Teigra! Get down from there this instant!”
8
AURELIUS
Dawn hit Aurelius like sizzling skewers to the face, rousing him from the bliss of strong arms and honeyed eyes.
If he could’ve remembered the name of the servant shaking him awake, he would have told him to fuck right off. As it was, he just grunted a feeble objection, his hand flopping to the floor.
Without even opening his eyes, he knew the hangover would be bad. His mouth had the texture of sun-cured leather, with the ghost of a thousand grapes rotting over his tongue. His head pounded like merry dancers, smacking their feet here, clapping their hands there, spinning and spinning and—
He caught himself before his stomach turned, forcing down the bile and settling back into the lavender-scented mattress. As he drifted off, he thought of the funeral: of the face that had transfixed him all night. Of that moment when every single hair had stood on end. Of that instant where it felt like he might never—
Another shake wrenched him from the precipice of pleasure. “Fner?” he grunted, opening one crusty eye, and staring at the cowering figure.
“My humblest apologies, despota, but you wished to be woken at dawn?”
“Why in Vatic’s cock would I have said that?” he said with a cough.
“You... you said you had an appointment? With the archon?”
Aurelius groaned in recollection, dragging his naked body from the bed with the weight of recollection. As he stumbled to the window, blinking through the fiery glare, his attention was drawn to the marble tablet on proud display nearby.
He had kept it there for six years, but this morning, it seemed particularly conspicuous. It was written in Voresoma, the language of the educated halls of Mestibes, and apparently in some of the more noble circles beyond, including Rinath in vulgar form, but certainly not in the markets or the hippodrome of Mestibes, or in the northern lands either, where Dynosian—the common language of the whole nation—was far more common.
The carefully chiseled script read:
Her Most Serene Majesty, Sabina IV, Archon of Mestibes, does on this day declare the removal of her eldest son, Aurelius, from prominence and succession of House Savair...
He ran his fingers over its creamy white face, listing the litany of his crimes. Perversion. Corruption of moral integrity. Bestial behavior.
Despite it all, Aurelius couldn’t bring himself to hate her—not truly. She had sacrificed him on the bonfire of civic outrage to preserve her own position. Just like she always had. And in a twisted sort of way, he could respect that.
It was just like she had done with the Libercropolis, the city’s crumbling crown, a year before he was born. Famously, she had risen to archon just before her nineteenth birthday, near the end of the Third Dynosian War—following the battle-death of Grandfather Harophonies, and when Mestibes was all but bankrupt. The other polities were already supporting them with blood and were in no mood to lend gold on top of it. Instead, the new archon had taken the unorthodox step of wooing an eccentric Ondocis noble, Satrap Antonio Meuccia of Farsea Island, a known collector of rare curios. She offered to sell him the whole Libercropolis, the literal and cultural pinnacle of the city—almost a thousand years of history and antiques, old religious text, and snippets of myth found nowhere else in Dynosia.
He accepted, of course. It was the ultimate prize for the ultimate collector. And when the war was won, and the time came to collect, the archon advised that he could take the marble any time he liked. For that was all their contract had stipulated—the building, with no explicit reference to its contents.
Aurelius gave a little smirk.
The senate had been appalled. Such trickery had no place in a civilized city like Mestibes—which was exactly the reason the Satrap hadn’t checked the contract as closely as he might have done if it had been proposed by his own countrywomen. No one thought a Mestibian archon was capable of such deception.
The relationship between the senate and the new archon had never recovered. They considered her then, as they did now, as a moralless heathen who would do and say anything to get what she wanted.
And the archon hadn’t cared. Why should she? She’d secured her position—winning favor with the regular people, who ultimately cared less about upholding high-minded religious ideals than having bread on their tables and a future for their children.
Yes, thought Aurelius, looking over the noble city he was soon to rejoin.
She does what it takes to survive.
And she will do so again today.
“What?” he snapped, to the sound of a gently clearing throat.
“What would you like to do about him?”
Aurelius turned to see a great lump on the other side of his bed. One thick arm and one hairy leg were hanging from the blanket. A pillow concealed his identity and muffled the worst of the snores.
