It might have been better for him if Nero got that one, too.
Like Lazlo, Thyon Nero was born during the war, but war, like fortune, doesn’t touch all folk with the same hand. He grew up in his father’s castle, far from the sight and smell of suffering, much less the experience of it. On the same day that a gray and nameless infant was plunked on a cart bound for Zemonan Abbey, a golden one was christened Thyon—after the warrior-saint who drove the barbarians out of Zosma—in a lavish ceremony attended by half the court. He was a clever, beautiful child, and though his elder brother would inherit the title and lands, he claimed all else—love, attention, laughter, praise—and he claimed it loudly. If Lazlo was a silent baby, harshly raised by resentful monks, Thyon was a small, charming tyrant who demanded everything and was given even more.
Lazlo slept in a barracks of boys, went to bed hungry, and woke up cold.
Thyon’s boyhood bed was shaped like a war brig, complete with real sails and riggings, and even miniature cannons, so heavy it took the strength of two maids to rock him to sleep. His hair was of such an astonishing color—as the sun in frescoes, where you might stare at it without burning out your eyes—that it was allowed to grow long, though this was not the fashion for boys. It was only cut on his ninth birthday, to be woven into an elaborate neckpiece for his godmother, the queen. She wore it, and—to the dismay of goldsmiths—spawned a fashion for human-hair jewelry, though none of the imitations could compare with the original in brilliance.
Thyon’s nickname, “the golden godson,” was with him from his christening, and perhaps it ordained his path. Names have power, and he was, from infancy, associated with gold. It was fitting, then, that when he entered the university, he made his place in the college of alchemy.
What was alchemy? It was metallurgy wrapped in mysticism. The pursuit of the spiritual by way of the material. The great and noble effort to master the elements in order to achieve purity, perfection, and divinity.
Oh, and gold.
Let’s not forget gold. Kings wanted it. Alchemists promised it—had been promising it for centuries, and if they achieved purity and perfection in anything, it was the purity and perfection of their failure to produce it.
Thyon, thirteen years old and sharp as the point of a viper’s fang, had looked around him at the cryptic rituals and philosophies and seen it all as obfuscation cooked up to excuse that failure. Look how complicated this is, alchemists said, even as they made it so. Everything was outlandish. Initiates were required to swear an oath upon an emerald said to have been pried from the brow of a fallen angel, and when presented with this artifact, Thyon laughed. He refused to swear on it, and flat refused to study the esoteric texts, which he called “the consolation of would-be wizards cursed to live in a world without magic.”
“You, young man, have the soul of a blacksmith,” the master of alchemy told him in a cold rage.
“Better than the soul of a charlatan,” Thyon shot back. “I would sooner swear an oath on an anvil and do honest work than dupe the world with make-believe.”
And so it was that the golden godson swore his oath on a blacksmith’s anvil instead of the angel’s emerald. Anyone else would have been expelled, but he had the queen’s favor, and so the old guard had no choice but to stand aside and let him do his own work in his own way. He cared only for the material side of things: the nature of elements, the essence and mutability of matter. He was ambitious, meticulous, and intuitive. Fire, water, and air yielded up secrets to him. Minerals revealed their hidden properties. And at fifteen, to the deep dismay of the “would-be wizards,” he performed the first transmutation in western history—not gold, alas, but lead into bismuth—and did so, as he said, without recourse to “spirits or spells.” It was a triumph, for which he was rewarded by his godmother with a laboratory of his own. It took over the grand old church at the Great Library, and no expense was spared. The queen dubbed it “the Chrysopoesium”—from chrysopoeia, the transmutation of base metal into gold—and she wore her necklace of his hair when she came to present it to him. They walked arm in arm in matching gold: his on his head, hers on her neck, and soldiers marched behind them, clad in gold surcoats commissioned for the occasion.
Lazlo stood in the crowd that day, awed by the spectacle and by the brilliant golden boy who had always seemed to him like a character from a story—a young hero blessed by fortune, rising to take his place in the world. That was what everyone saw—like an audience at the theater, blithely unaware that backstage the actors were playing out a darker drama.
As Lazlo was to discover.
It was about a year after that—he was sixteen—and he was taking the bypass through the tombwalk one evening when he heard a voice as hard and sharp as ax-fall. He couldn’t make out the words at first and paused, searching for their source.
The tombwalk was a relic of the old palace cemetery, cut off from the rest of the grounds by the construction of the astronomers’ tower. Most of the scholars didn’t even know it was there, but the librarians did, because they used it as a shortcut between the stacks and the reading rooms in the base of the tower. That was what Lazlo was doing, his arms full of manuscripts, when he heard the voice. There was a rhythm to it, and an accompanying punctuation of slaps or blows. Thwop. Thwop.
There was another sound, barely audible. He thought it was an animal, and when he peered around the corner of a mausoleum, he saw an arm rising and falling with the steady, vicious thwop. It wielded a riding crop, and the image was unmistakable, but he still thought it was an animal that was being beaten, because it was low and cringing and its bitten-off whimpers were no human sound.
A burning anger filled him, quick as the strike of a match. He drew in breath to shout.
And held it.
There was a little light, and in the instant it took his voice to gather up a single word, Lazlo perceived the scene in full.
A bowed back. A crouching boy. Glavelight on golden hair. And the Duke of Vaal beating his son like an animal.
“Stop!” Lazlo had almost said. He held in the word like a mouthful of fire.