The birth of Gramis Gana Solidor was an occasion of some importance: his brother Ceraano, sole heir of House Solidor, had been sickly since birth, and every month his doctors were surprised to hear that he yet lived. Over the Emperor's head hung a specter of a house fallen, an ignoble end for generations of might. Certain noble lords whose families held power in the Senate began to smile when they spoke of the future. Gramis's birth took the smiles from their faces. House Solidor would endure.
By the time Gramis was seven, four attempts on his life had been thwarted by luck and skilled guards. With his every breath he learned that the very men who smiled at him at parties would kill him if they could. He never forgot it.
The dearest friend of his boyhood was Zerides Bunansa, second son of a third son who had never been ambitious. House Bunansa was far larger in number than House Solidor, being without such strong motivation as the Imperium for younger sons to fight their brothers. Zerides' father and brother were investigated thoroughly and found as safe as cautious parents could hope. The friendship of the two children was not nearly as safe: they spent most of their times sneaking into and out of places they were not supposed to be.
The Judge, a man in his middle years called Dorian, of House Zargabaath, who had been assigned to guard young Gramis soon discovered that it was pointless even to try keeping him in his bed after dark. Trying only drove him to be stealthier and harder to watch. Instead, he verified the loyalty of the night guard a thousand times and worried. When nothing happened, he almost convinced himself that nothing ever would.
When Gramis was fourteen, his brother came of age, and the hopeful lords at last had to accept that Ceraano, for all that he still looked like a stiff wind would blow him away, was tougher than he appeared, and it would take more than nature could provide to remove him. The assassins started coming, along with more subtle attempts to encourage him to overstep his authority. In that they failed; Ceraano was not one to defy his father's rule, even in seeming. He was not confident enough for that.
Even without confidence, he was a good strategist, and the constant border scuffles failed to do better than illness and ill-will had done. With his military success came a measure of pride; Ceraano began to carry himself like the crown prince he was.
Still, Gramis knew that his brother would not make a good emperor. For years he had been exposed little to the society of his future subjects, and many lessons Gramis had been taught in childhood Ceraano had never learned. He was sixteen, and only now was he coming to know the lords of Archadia. Knowing him for a threat, they dissembled before him more than before the child of five Gramis had been when he had met them. Ceraano had never discovered whom to trust how far. Gramis knew more about his brother's friends than he did himself, and what he knew was far from encouraging.
It would be a divided Archadia that Ceraano would rule, an Archadia torn between the Senate and the Emperor's favorites. Gramis was fifteen when he vowed not to allow such a thing to be. The Empire was his soul and his world. He would protect it.
He came of age the next year, a thin boy whose face was still a mass of unexpected angles. Amid fanfare and intrigue, Gramis Solidor became a man.
Ceraano did not seem even to notice that the brother of whom he had always been fond was old enough to threaten his tenuous position. If he did, he ignored it. He was too quick to befriend and too slow to think ill of a friend; Gramis had been a bright spot on his bedridden youth, next only to the books he loved best of all, and the love for the boy was easily transferred to the man.
The one effect of Gramis's majority on his brother, as far as anyone could tell, was that he was expected to be betrothed as soon as possible. Accordingly, he spent the winter involved in negotiating his engagement to Khalia Margrace, a cousin of the Rozarrian Emperor. The alliance was viewed by its architects as a hopeful sign, a token of friendly feeling. Still, Khalia was not a princess, the Archadian court noted. The offer was good, but not foolishly so: it would not give Archadia a foothold in the Rozarrian imperial succession.
Many at court, Senators and Judges both, supported closer ties with Rozarria, but as many did not. Naturally, they gravitated to Gramis, who gave them every hope that he was sympathetic to the need for Archadia to be visibly stronger than its great rival. In fact, he had no opinion on the subject, but, seeing that it could gain or lose him his first core of supporters, he swiftly acquired one. Archadia was her own strength; she needed no other.
If Ceraano was blind to the rising faction, his hangers-on were not: Gramis continued dodging assassins and refusing to impinge on his father's Imperial power. He knew that he would not succeed: if nothing else, Teren Bocinger, Ceraano's chief hanger-on, would expose his treachery as soon as he said or did anything incriminating. He neatly avoided all the traps laid so carefully before his feet and took a certain pleasure in catching the plotters in their own plots. He convinced his father to raise his old ally and bodyguard Dorian Zargabaath to the rank of Judge Magister when a position fell vacant by his efforts. It was such a pity that Judge Magister Orieth Bocinger had approached Judge Zargabaath for help in a plot against the Emperor, but it just went to show that faithful service should be rewarded.
Ceraano did have some skill in improving the Empire: he put into effect modifications to the roads based on descriptions of Galtean Era transportation which he had read. He also began entangling some of the problems of the intricate justice system, working with a diligence and attention to detail even his enemies admired. Gramis wished a thousand times that he had been the elder brother and Ceraano the younger. They might have been the first Solidor brothers in generations to refrain from the power struggles that had dwindled their house. Ceraano had been born to be a scholar and administrator, as Gramis had been born to be a leader and politician. What allies they could have been, if Fate or Fortune had been kinder!
But Ceraano was older, and no wishes could change that. Gramis left his dreams for sleeping and set out to do what he had to do for the good of the realm.
Teren Bocinger was becoming restless. He was a handsome, charming man whose clever tongue had won the Crown Prince's friendship, but his ambition did not stop at being advisor to an emperor. His mother was the older sister of the Emperor, and from her Teren had inherited a very Solidor will to power and lack of scruple. He wanted to rule. It meant nothing to him that he would be very bad at it, even worse than Ceraano. He just wanted it. This could not be allowed.
Gramis made himself act friendlier toward his cousin, pretending that his dislike was softening. In fact, he despised Teren more than ever. The man had neither convictions nor scruples, a hedonistic egotist of the worst variety. Ceraano had been a true and generous friend to him, and he was ready to betray that trust for advancement elsewhere.
Of course, so was Gramis.
He hated himself for what he was about to do. All his life he had believed in keeping faith with those who kept faith with him, and now he was preparing to go against that belief to destroy the brother he loved. But more than family Gramis loved Archadia. He would do this, and worse, to keep her strong.
He held out the hand of friendship to Teren, who grasped at it greedily. In private, Gramis confided in him, saying that as much as he thought he deserved the throne, he cared too much for Ceraano to take action against him. He told Teren this, he said, because he thought Teren could understand, being Ceraano's dearest friend, and half a Solidor as well. It was a great pity that Teren was not in Ceraano's place, he said, because Gramis could have trusted him to use the Imperium wisely. Unhappily, it seemed that they all took after their mothers more than their fathers.
Such flattery was ridiculous, but though it made Gramis nearly ill to say it, Teren was eager to think himself more imperial than he was. With a few tokens of esteem from Gramis, he convinced himself that Ceraano needed to be put out of the way to clear a path for Teren's own bid for power.
Gramis's one consolation for what he had wrought was that Ceraano died in his sleep, without pain.
Evidence had of course been faked to incriminate an old Senator who had opposed Teren's ascendancy over the imperial family. Unfortunately for Teren, he had relied on Gramis's connections among the Judges to conceal the inconsistencies in the evidence. Instead, they pulled the shoddy lie to pieces. Once found, the assassin was more than willing to name his employer in exchange for clemency, and Teren, Duke of Mirmeleh, was executed for treason.
Gramis wept openly at his brother's funeral. "Entite's tears," many said, but he truly missed his brother, who had trusted him and whom he had betrayed. He would mourn his death for as long as he lived.
Although he mourned in private, in public there was work to do. He was twenty years old and sole heir to the Archadian Empire. He had much to do to gain power while his father was yet strong enough to have no fear of a coup. He would never challenge his father for power, but many would wish him to. He wanted to be strong enough to refuse them, and to do that, there were many things to be done.
For one thing, he had to marry. The customary five-year betrothal period over, Ceraano was to have married Khalia Margrace in the spring. With his death the contract would ordinarily have passed to Gramis. But he had his supporters to think of, who had joined him and stayed with him on the conviction that he would remain distant from Rozarria, and he kept his promises.
By good luck or good planning, those same supporters had persuaded the Emperor that marrying his only son to a Rozarrian would be unpopular with the people, who wanted their rulers to be all Archadian. Therefore Gramis watched his father seal the letter that contained his most polite regrets along with an excellent counter-offer: if Rozarria and House Margrace would swallow the insult, he was willing that Asseline Fidelia Solidor, his only daughter, should marry Al-Malik Margrace, brother of the scorned Khalia.
The offer was made under gentle pressure from Asseline and accepted under equal but less gentle pressure from Al-Malik. Gramis gave his sister a rich present of jewelry in thanks, to which she responded with an equal gift of a fine ceremonial sword, in token of her own gratitude. The melancholy of her company for the next five years was a small price to pay for all that he gained thereby.
As a reward for the support of his allies, Gramis requested and received a betrothal to the daughter of an Archadian noble house.