Chapter 45

“They say the procession of Gaecrux mages has already crossed the tributaries of the Elga River.”

The warning came in a whisper from a middle-aged palace administrator, one hand raised discreetly before his mouth. True to years of bureaucratic conditioning, the man scarcely moved his lips.

“Hmm.” Lucien’s response was dry and wholly dismissive.

At the same moment, an attendant draped a heavy midnight-blue cloak over his shoulders and fastened it at the collarbone with a gleaming fibula. In place of his customary Carlot stag-horn crest, the circular brooch displayed the royal coat of arms of Izeland: three swords entwined beneath a golden crown.

“Furthermore,” the administrator continued, lowering his voice to a conspiratorial hiss, “the Tower Master appears to be leading them personally.”

Lucien’s brow tightened by the barest degree. “My father must be utterly displeased. Inform the court that I shall arrive shortly.”

As he slid his rings into their proper places along his slender fingers, the administrator bowed and withdrew. The attendants finished dressing him, securing a white scabbard chased with gold at his hip before settling a massive livery collar across his chest, its heavy chain strung with brilliant blue jewels. Lucien despised such suffocating pageantry, but court politics occasionally demanded spectacle. Fortunately, his towering height, broad shoulders, and razor-sharp features allowed him to wear the opulent regalia without resembling a decorated fool.

That was precisely why the frail King dragged him out as the royal centerpiece for every major diplomatic occasion. The thought drew an inward sneer from him.

Lucien smoothed the velvet cuffs of his sleeves before the full-length mirror, then paused to calculate the time.

Could I make a quick detour to the office? The old man can wait.

It was not that he had any urgent administrative business. Rather, his thoughts had strayed to the man currently sitting in his study, most likely wearing an expression of supreme vacancy.

In truth, Kosha was not an idiot. His face was simply built to suggest otherwise. If he kept his mouth shut and stared blankly into the distance, an unsuspecting passerby might mistake him for a brooding scholar lost in profound contemplation. A brief conversation, however, would demolish that illusion entirely. In Lucien’s estimation, the mage’s mind was an immense, empty pasture inhabited by nothing more substantial than a flock of frolicking geese.

And yet…

Mrs. Christie, his mother’s longtime tailor from Carlot, possessed an undeniable genius for fabric and form. Lucien therefore knew that he looked devastatingly immaculate today. He rarely cared for peacocking, but this was a rare opportunity.

Doesn’t that little mage harbor some secret obsession with anything shiny or iridescent?

He remembered catching the boy staring in mute fascination at sunlight refracting through an ordinary glass bowl.

“Your Highness, the Office of the Royal Household is requesting…” An attendant stood urgently in the doorway, bowing low.

Lucien clicked his tongue. Any further delay would provoke an uproar. Even so, the thought of the mage revived an idea he had been considering for several days.

“Prepare a gray robe for me,” he told Mrs. Christie as she smoothed the final wrinkle from the hem of his cloak.

The needle-featured woman glanced up in horror. “Gray, Your Highness? That is hardly a color suited to your complexion.”

“It is not for me.”

Lucien waved the objection aside.

“He is roughly my height, perhaps a little shorter. Give it a deep hood. Any muted color will do, provided it does not attract unwanted attention. He is quite thin, so avoid heavy wool. Also, fasten a stud to the tip of the hood so the winter wind cannot blow it back.”

Mrs. Christie had spent a lifetime witnessing the peculiar whims of the nobility. She absorbed the bizarrely specific order without so much as blinking. “You truly do demand the strangest things, my lord. I shall begin at once.”

“Make it quickly.”

Lucien tapped her shoulder with easy affection, then swept out of the dressing room, leaving a heavy, intoxicating trail of musk and leather behind him.

The royal court was dissolving into chaos. The abrupt influx of Ostrabache security forces, combined with the frantic reassignment of the escort knights, had swollen the King’s entourage to a suffocating size.

The Cavalry Captain fell into step beside Lucien and lowered his voice. “Rumor has it the Tower Master is coming in person.”

Apparently, the entire castle was vibrating with the same apocalyptic dread. Feigning mild surprise, Lucien offered a perfectly polished and utterly empty smile. “Is that so? How unusual.”

“Should we double the security detail?”

“Unnecessary. Maintain standard protocols. I shall station my personal guard inside the throne room.”

Mage, mage, mage.

The word hissed through the corridors like a plague wind.

A deep horn sounded from Ostrabache’s southern gates, announcing the delegation’s arrival. Lucien’s pleasant mask hardened into marble, and he lengthened his stride.

When he reached the throne room, the massive oak doors swung open in absolute silence. This was partly out of respect for his authority as de facto regent and partly because the frail, deteriorating King nearly leaped from his skin at any sudden noise.

The King sat slumped upon the throne. His personal mage, who had shadowed him for decades, was conspicuously absent, evidently unwilling to face the approaching delegation.

Lucien crossed the vast marble floor, mounted the dais, and lowered himself gracefully to one knee.

“Lucien,” the King rasped, extending a trembling hand.

Once a titan of a man, the sovereign had withered into a frail, stooped husk. Though not yet seventy, he looked ancient. Stark white hair clung thinly to a scalp mapped with liver spots, and his decline had accelerated with terrifying speed over the past several years.

“Your Majesty.”

“Why are you so late?”

The King’s tone was petulant and clinging, more befitting a neglected lover than a father. It was an open secret that the King projected the ghost of Lucien’s mother onto him, his mind eroding further with each passing day.

Lucien, naturally, felt nothing for the man’s pathetic decline. “I apologize, Father. Shall I set aside time for a private luncheon tomorrow to make amends?”

He was a master of such performances. He spun lies from silk, feigned devotion, and bewitched the desperate with precisely what they wished to hear.

“Never mind luncheon. Just… drink tea with me later. Five times, at least.” The King’s gnarled fingers dug into Lucien’s smooth, flawless skin. “But only if those damned mages leave my castle! That mad Tower Master… she never ages. She never dies! She feeds on the living inside that wretched swamp, and now she has come to suck the last breath from my lungs! What am I to do, Lucien?”

Another seizure had wracked the King’s body only days earlier, one more symptom of the unknown, creeping rot that the entire court was quietly waiting for him to succumb to. All three of his “trusted” heirs were merely counting the hours until he stopped breathing.

“I am here, Your Majesty.”

Lucien smiled, radiant with the brilliant, predatory vitality the King had lost forever.

“All will be well.”

***

The Gaecrux delegation entered the hall less than half an hour later.

The mages resided in the Gaiker Wetlands, a territory technically situated within Izeland’s borders, yet they conducted themselves as a sovereign and untouchable state. Tension drew taut across the throne room until the air itself seemed thick enough to choke on.

At the end of the Mythic Age, the human kingdoms had launched a brutal campaign to exterminate every nonhuman and magically gifted race.

To the humans, it had been a preemptive strike against an untamable power.

To their victims, it had been nothing more than a one-sided slaughter.

A cornered mage, however, was a terrifying thing.

The massacre ignited a war that raged for twenty years and ended only when the surviving mages retreated into the poisonous swamps of Gaecrux, where they raised a monolithic tower at its center, sharp and sheer as a blade. The swamp formed an impenetrable moat against anyone who lacked mana. Within it, rumor promised a paradise of unimaginable beauty. Beyond its borders, the mages presented a single, terrifying front.

“The entourage of the Gaecrux Tower Master has arrived!” the herald bellowed.

The King flinched violently.

Lucien suppressed his irritation and kept his gaze fixed upon the grand doors.

Thirty-one mages marched into the hall in a flawless two-by-two formation. Despite their rumored obsession with wearing pure white inside the Tower, they dressed from head to toe in blinding, blood-red robes whenever they ventured beyond the wetlands. Some claimed the color served as a protest against the ancient massacres. Others joked that the recluses simply possessed appalling taste.

Lucien could not have cared less.

Red is far too loud.

His mind wandered back to the office.

Gray would suit my mage much better. Perhaps a rich, earthy brown to complement his curls. Or green? No. A green matching those eyes would be far too vivid. The shade would need to be muted…

His musings ended when the procession came to a halt.

Thirty-one mages could reduce Ostrabache Fortress to ash, and every knight in the room knew it.

“It has been a long time, King of Humans,” announced the woman at the head of the procession, casting back her crimson hood.

A cascade of shimmering silver hair, cut unusually short for an Izeland woman, framed a face untouched by time. She had looked precisely the same when the King was still a boy. Her fathomless, ink-dark eyes passed over the trembling monarch and settled upon Lucien. Raw, undiluted disgust flared within them, though her voice remained deceptively cheerful.

“And it has been quite some time for you as well, Fifth Child. Have you been well?”

Lucien moved smoothly in front of the hyperventilating King and inclined his head, his voice flowing like warm honey laced with poison.

“Welcome to Ostrabache, Tower Master of Gaecrux.”

***