Consume My Heart Away

Atia stooped, setting her lantern to the side, and twisted open the amianthus-lined box from Chrysos’ stomach.

This, and other treasures that could not be explained away by the monster’s unique physiology, Petrus had ordered stored in a series of Nephilic-built rooms under the palace, which only he and a choice few of his servants had access to. She had no reason to be here, in particular, but for the moment there was no danger in wandering down here as she ruminated. Today, the palace was almost completely cleared out; everyone besides a skeleton-crew of guards, servants, and clerks was at the hippodrome, for the races in her father’s honor.

She sighed as she lifted the lid. Her father, and his honor. That was the crux of the issue, why she had taken advantage of the quiet in the palace today to think, at the expense of missing the first few races of the morning. Watching races in the Hippodrome of Aureliopolis, from the emperor’s box, was the sort of novel experience she never would have skipped out on, even partially, when she was just a monster-hunter. Now, however, enough had changed about her circumstances that she needed to step back and consider what she was now.

She held up the Crown of Aurelian, looked Saint Alexios in the eye. The rub of this was, she hadn’t changed, from within; she was not becoming a different person, only putting on a different hat. She didn’t even strictly need to do that much; if she ran off into the mountains now, made sure no one from this city could find her, she could keep killing monsters for the rest of her life. But the places and the roles of the people she loved had changed, and if she wanted to stay connected to them, she had to change the whole way she interacted with the world. She’d done so already, and it was already affecting her way of thinking.

She twisted the crown slightly in her hands, let her gaze get lost in the shimmer of Saint Irene’s dress. Her father had come into this palace from the life of a monster-hunter, himself, but that transition had been eased by his time in the palace guard. If her father got his way and shared power with Alexios, that would catapult her to the rank of princess, and if her cousin did what he intended, she would be the left the sole living, acknowledged heir to the throne.

A woman in a position like that was saddled with responsibilities and expectations Atia was in no way prepared for. She had no grasp of courtly protocol, no practice in intrigue. She had been her father’s second in leading a band of monster-hunters, and maybe those skills could be applied to leading soldiers in battle, but militaries were inherently more idealistic things than loose affiliations of adventurers, and tended to hold the specific roles of each sex as a strong ideal. Princes led armies, but the closest princesses came to war was generally diplomacy, ending or preventing wars at the negotiating table. That was something she was completely unpracticed in. Even if she could be excused from using her body for negotiation– marrying for diplomatic advantage– she would still need to project a seemly image with it, for the sake of her dynasty’s reputation.

That meant her relationship with Lucius had to be either cut off, relegated to a secret affair– with nothing in it for either of them but pleasure of the flesh– or else they had to get serious about the matter and marry. Was he ready to be an emperor’s son-in-law?

Probably more ready than she was to be an emperor’s daughter.

She put the crown back as she had found it, and made her way back up to the palace. The treasures recovered from Chrysos’ stomach were stored behind a hidden door in the underground Nephilic ruins, near where a passage led down from behind a shelf in Petrus’ study. From that dusty office, she stepped out into an arcade on one of the several palace courtyards.

That step was accompanied by a clink like moving in armor, though she wore only her sword-belt over a loose chiton and leather sandals.

That Thulean shieldmaiden from the palace guard, the one she met on her first day here, came walking along the arcade, one arm wrapped around both her axe and something roughly a cubit long in a brown bag. She wore a mail shirt, heavy lamellar guards up the whole length of her arms, and a small nasal helm from which her long red hair hung out in a wide braid, though those pale blue eyes of her were shadowed.

“Oh. Atia, was it?”

“That’s me. I think I heard Princess Thekla say your name, in passing… Sigrid, right?”

“That’s right. Are you not going to the races, today?”

“I… merely wanted to take care of something, first. I’ll be heading over now, I think.”

“That’s good. Let me escort you; I think my lady will want your company, at the hippodrome.”

Although Atia had heard this woman speak only twice– once in the throne room, and again at a distance, just before her charge had chastised her for speaking out of turn– something bothered her about the way she spoke now.

Her accent, Atia realized. All of the barbarian guards in the palace had learned the Aponephilic tongue only after coming south to join, and even the most articulate of them had a thick accent. This woman’s voice was the same as before, except her rolling, singsongy accent was completely gone; she sounded as though she had grown up a stone’s throw from the palace.

“Perhaps it is better if I go alone. I should find my father, first.”

“Nonsense, these streets are no place for a lady to wander by herself. The princess and your father will both be in the imperial box.”

The woman stepped forward, her free arm outstretched as to grab Atia by the shoulder. Atia reached into the mental tunnel her cousin had helped her form, to connect to her father’s thoughts, but found that she could get nothing in or out of her own head. Something yellow-orange glowed from beneath the sack the barbarian carried. The midmorning light, shining under an archway, caught the guard’s eyes.

Not pale blue. Flat, cold gray.