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Mother wasn’t standing over her.
Instead, she was a few feet back.
And she was offering the flog to Jaronas.
“Take it, boy.”
Her brother looked horrified. “What? Why?”
“Because you are the man of House Cosmin. And you are now of age. It is your job to ensure its good order.”
“But... Ma... No! Not like this.”
Mother looked at him with a kindness she never spared for Teigra. “I know, my son. I know. Much that we do in this life we do not wish to. But if we succeed in our endeavor, then you will join me in the senate. And how can you take on the burden of a thousand houses, if you will not even take on the burden of our own?”
Conflict boiled behind the eyes of the boy she’d saved from bullies countless times in their youth, when they’d teased him for his softness and his fondness for his mummy. The sobbing kid she’d comforted beneath the pink-petaled almond tree the night their life was ripped apart, even as her own grief went untended. Even as the shock and sorrow had bored down into her very bones.
Her skin turned cold in the shade of the stands as she watched the moment unfold. She had never imagined she might lose two family members so quickly. Because to Teigra’s immeasurable sadness, Jaronas took the flog.
He stepped forward, twisting the wicked implement between hesitant fingers.
“Just do it,” she whispered, girding herself for familiar pain.
“Tiggy, I... I...”
“I’m not doing this for her,” she hissed, quiet enough that only the two of them would hear it. “I’m doing this for him. For his vision. For his dreams for what this family could become.”
The blows still didn’t come. Jaronas was weeping.
“Just do it!” she screamed, unable to bear the anticipation any longer.
The first strike across her back tore the air from her lungs. Her thin fabric gave no resistance. Once started, Jaronas didn’t hold back. Mother knew well the proper sound of leather on flesh, and she would tolerate nothing less than full fury.
Teigra gritted her teeth with each crack, resisting the urge to scream, resisting the urge to cry.
She might shed a tear for her past. For the loss of the one thing which had given her joy. For Father—the one man who had loved her more than she’d ever deserved to be loved.
But she wouldn’t shed tears for Mother.
Not one.
Not a single one.
10
AURELIUS
The archon grinned as she stirred the mint mead in her glass cage cup. Each clink of the metal spoon cracked through Aurelius’s head like a sculptor’s hammer. “And how was your night, my little satyr?”
Satyr? A drunken and debauched creature of carnal desire and worldly decadence ...
Aurelius would have snorted and shot back a response, but he could barely form the words to think the retort, let alone speak it. Instead, he slouched on the unconscionably firm couch, clutching at his head and dwelling on her remarkable talent for small evils.
The garden courtyard was filled with glass—trinkets and tableware, vases and cameos. Glasswear was the pride of Mestibes: a craft no other polity had mastered in almost a hundred years. And though beautiful, the cumulative effect was a glinting, white-hot river streaming directly into his eyes.
“If memories of Despota Mathain’s tutelage are correct,” he said, in a voice as rough as horseradish, “a satyr therian is created through the intimate congress of a mortal and the goddess of fertility. Is this your way of telling me that you were secretly shagged by Ardor twenty-one years ago, Mother?”
The archon sipped her spiced liquid. “No. Although I did manage to convince your father to dress as a satyr when I visited Ardora for their famous Black Night Festival. During my brief time as your grandfather’s herald. He was quite a sight, you know, in full horns and hooves.”
