“Yes, brother. Welcome.” Lavinia’s raven hair cascades down her snow-white shoulders. Her pale, naked body gleams like moonlight. She stands centimeters from me. “Father’s alone tonight. Only Alberich guards him. He’ll admit you to the bedchamber. Enact the ritual of succession. Win tomorrow and I’ll serve you as sister, wife, whatever you desire . . .”
Her hand reaches up to my face, and her heart flutters. Wake up! Nadia’s memory saves me again. I grab Lavinia’s wrist too fast for her to react.
“Edmon!” I see something underneath her long, courtesan fingernails, something writhing beneath the cuticles. I throw her to the bed. She stares back defiantly and wraps the bedsheet around herself. “Damn you,” she whispers. “Only a scratch and the nanites enter your bloodstream.”
Nanites?
“Microscopic robots. I spent a fortune purchasing them from an off-world trader. They would not kill but weaken, make you slow. You destroy everyone’s plans!”
She meant for me to lose against Phaestion tomorrow.
“Father’s still vulnerable. Listen to me. Alberich awaits. Patricide is forbidden for daughters. If you don’t do it, he’ll keep himself alive for decades using healing tanks. This is our chance.” She stands, and I throw up my hands to ward her off. She sighs with disappointment and puts on her clothes. “I wouldn’t have really harmed you.”
Liar.
“We’re both trapped. Unless—” A thought interrupts her. “I can use the same distraction to lower the Wusong tower defenses. Alberich has reduced the guard in preparation for my sending you to Father’s chambers. Fat Beremon Ruska plans to defect this night. If you wish to go, rather than rule by my side, they’ll get you off Tao by day’s end. We can both have what we want. You needn’t fight and you needn’t rule; just leave me to it. Do we have an agreement?”
If I run from the Combat, the punishment is death or the Citadel. If I leave Tao, I can never return.
“You can disappear, just like Edric’s first son,” she says.
What?
“Help me. Kill Edric so that I may be sole heir to House Leontes.”
Edric’s first son? I grab her and hold her down as she attempts to scratch me with her deadly fingernails. I’m reminded of Edric, holding my mother down as he beat her.
“Is this all you are?” she screams. “A mindless savage?”
I look her in the eye. I slowly breathe the words first son.
“You may be eldest son now, but not always. When I became majordomo of House Wusong-Leontes, I delved into the records, the history of his rise, and found the aberration. Census birth lists show the first of his line. Edvaard was to be burned in the Pavaka. Birth defects.”
I release her from my grasp, shocked by the revelation.
“There’s no mention of the mother, but I tell you the boy didn’t die by fire. Ledgers show no record of incineration. The child simply disappeared.”
Edric killed the child by his own hand? Monster. Lavinia is right—I must confront him. For my mother, for Nadia, for all the atrocities he has committed.
“I ask again, do we have an agreement?”
I drop silently from the ventilation shaft to the hallway floor. Just like the Citadel, I think. Normally these corridors are guarded and I’d be unable to travel this route. Now that Lavinia has deactivated the security system and Alberich has lowered the guard, I have a few moments.
The lens of a camglobe swivels as it floats down the hallway. I wait just outside its scope. I snag the pearlescent ball as it floats by and crush it like an egg. The guards won’t notice the missing feed for a few minutes. Over the past few months, I’ve used the Mentor program to study and learn security’s movements. They’ll not pass this part of the palace for another two point five minutes. It’s more than I need.
I open the large double bronze doors inlaid with the great sea apes of House Wusong. Alberich awaits me at a security checkpoint. “You’ve come.”
To slay the monster or be slain myself.
I jam my fingers into his neck faster than he can react. He slumps into the guard station chair and stares up, unable to speak. I want him alive and able to witness everything.
I approach my father’s bed, hand on the pommel of my sword as a partition-screen rises.
“Alberich?” The withered voice cracks. My father rises in the pillows like a corpse from a billowing tomb. I draw siren steel from ivory. “Edmon.” The old man coughs. “I’ve been waiting, my son.”
He knew I was coming? Of course he did . . .
“I knew Lavinia would send you.”
I leap through the air. Twenty meters from the doorway to the edge of his pallet. An impossible jump, but I’m in an impossible mood. Siren song hums as my blade casts light on Edric’s throat. “Why hesitate?” he growls. An ember of strength still burns within his pale eyes. “I murdered your mother, strangled your lover, drowned her and your unborn child. Complete the rite of patricide. Defeat that Julii tomorrow and take the world. Rebuild it!”
I’ve no intention of giving him what he wants . . . yet. So I shake my head.
“I’ve failed.” His voice breaks with despair. “My children, my planet, I’ve failed them all. Everything I’ve done for them . . .” The old man cries reptile tears. “Listen, my son,” he implores. “I was an orphan, alone in the arcologies with only one way out—strength. I had to survive; it was the only way. I had a wife, a child. You were not the first. You had a brother. The birth went hard, and the breach could not be sealed. Freya’s eyes grew cold.” His voice wavers. “He was deformed. His head massive, wine-stain marks covered the side of his paralyzed, little body. I hated him. Why would the ancestors curse me so?”
It is too much. I want to silence him, end his rationalizing. I don’t want him to be human to me. I want him to be a monster, that monolith I saw the day of Edgaard’s christening, the one who denounced me, who struck my mother in front of the entire world. But I may never have another chance to understand him, so I stay my hand.
Tell me it was a kindness that you killed him, monster.
“The whole world lit up when my boy laughed. He was mine.” His cold eyes somehow burn with regret.
He gives the love I never had to a deformity long gone?
“I hid him from the Census. If I lost the Combat, he’d be found and killed, but there was no other way to overcome my station. I took the chance and won. My ascension, however, meant casting off my old life. Edvaard could never be the heir to a new Pantheon house. He couldn’t do what you must. Yet I couldn’t bring myself to kill him, either. I secretly sent him off-world and infiltrated the Electors’ Hall of Records to eliminate his birth from the genealogical history.”