Halls of Ivory

Chapter 5 - The Princehood Clause

When the religious order of the White Mantle claimed Kryta for themselves, the kingdom was set to become a footnote in the history of Tyria. The bloodline of Doric, the king of legend that laid the groundwork for all human kingdoms to come, had been extinguished. Or so one thought. A bastard daughter of the last king by the name of Salma, was raised in a temple, far away from the affairs of her family. A chance at a new beginning, created by mere chance in an act of sin. Were it for the laws and judgments made by authorities past alone, Kryta would have been lost forever. So when the heroes that fulfilled the Flameseeker Prophecies, bested Shiro Tagachi and killed the forgotten god Abaddon, returned to Kryta, they enlisted Salma's help to found a new kingdom, to stand against the White Mantle. The White Mantle had since fallen for good, but the time of its reign was a dire reminder of just how fragile and easy to wipe out Doric's line of descent was.

Salma never forgot what could have been lost, had she not begrudgingly accepted her ascent as the queen of a new Kingdom.

The next stop in the Seraph captain's investigation of Evias Halden's kidnapping was a courthouse. Judge Meldan's courthouse was a tall building on Kormir High Road, the southeastern bridge of the city. The back of the building had a full view of the district of Rurikton from up above. It was one of the larger ones up here. It had several upper floors, which among other things, held the homes of the judge and the judicial scribe assigned to the same courthouse. Logan knocked on the door and waited for one of the servants to open. The servant, a young man, was surprised to see him. "Captain Thackeray. What gives us the honor?"

"Is court in session right now?"

"Not right now, you're in luck. His honor is free. But you had better take this chance now. Another family has just been here and given the situation, there will likely be more."

"Yeah, it feels like the city is about to flip upside-down. I just wonder how much it will take for this madness to end." He was led inside, past the small entrance room and into the actual court hall with rows of benches on both sides and the judge's seat on the other end.

The ministers didn't usually handle legal affairs, their role was that of creating laws rather than enforcing them and even their authority was only predicated on the queen agreeing with their conclusions. The actual application of law - the process of deciding legal matters when they were more murky than petty thefts or murders fell upon judges like Meldan. The courts' staffing and process was kept lean to prevent them from being swamped in legal work. The building's position was deliberately chosen so that the judge - whether seated in court or from his bedroom window above - had a clear view of an entire district of the city. To remind him how many lives were at stake with every decision he made.

The servant asked Logan to wait here and vanished behind a door to the side. After a while, the actual judge came in. An aged man dressed in a dark red silken robe. The folds and wrinkles along his cheeks and the corners of his eyes told of a long and stressful life. His hairline had long been receding and what of it was left was - while elaborately treated, already faded. He was clearly trying to appear awake to maintain good form, but the weary eyes betrayed him. Then again, Logan was long overdue for some sleep as well so his exhaustion must have been just as visible. "Good night - or good morning, Captain Thackeray."

"I'm sorry for bothering you at this time of night. But time might be an issue."

"It always is, isn't it?" Logan had known Judge Meldan for a long time. His judgments were harsh, but fair. Other judges tended to rule less on the word of law and more on their personal allegiances. Meldan not so much. He was old and the ideas and conventions he held to were even older. He was known for not being very open to new or foreign ideas, but in the same vein, he was the most diligent, hard-working and neutral judge in the city. The only thing that mattered with him was the exact word of the law. When Logan wanted justice in a more complex legal matter, this was the courthouse he would seek it in.

"I always tell you to keep everyday business short in case that happens." He was also known for being very impatient, always eager to speed up the legal process and he had little tolerance for when people tried to stall it. "For now I seem to have some time on my hands, how can I help you?"

"A couple came to me with a missing person's case. It's the Haldens. They said they had visited your courthouse earlier."

"Yes, and there was another family sometime after them. What of it?"

"Their son went missing right afterward. I wanted to know what they were here for."

The judge sighed. "Give me a minute." He locked the front door of the building, the double doors of the court hall, even the doors to the side. He then went back to the front, ascended the stairs to the judge's seat and sat down. "Normally I wouldn't just give out details like this, but if this is part of a criminal investigation, I will."

"So why did they visit you?"

"Evias' parents were among the first in the city who heard of the queen's death and shortly after finding out about it, came straight to me to ask me to invoke princehood."

"Princehood?"

"A several-century-old contingency law dating all the way back to queen Salma. Prior to reclaiming Kryta from the White Mantle, the lineage of Doric's descendants stood and fell with Salma alone. Salma's ascendancy of the throne was an act of desperation and even she acknowledged that. She chose this path because she had to. The only alternative was for Kryta to forever go without a king. And the line was still on the verge of extinction until Salma married and had children. So after she secured her rule and her bloodline, she sought to make sure that Kryta never faces this threat again. To do so, she came up with the 'princehood' clause."

"So it's a law drafted by the queen herself."

"Not just any queen, the first queen since the kingdom was founded. Which gives it more legitimacy than almost every law we have in place. No matter how massive its impact, it's impossible for a minister or judge to argue with the merit of the law, simply because of who drafted it. Doing so would mean overhauling our whole legal system."

"So what does it do?"

The judge used one of his keys to open a drawer on the side of his desk and pull out a few loose documents and flipped through them. "Now then…here we go. 'In the event that any generation of Queen Salma's descendants fails to secure an heir to the throne, it falls upon the kingdom itself to find its new ruler from within the populace.' Then come several pages relating to priorities within it, but the most relevant parts would be the following."

He scrambled out a note from within the pile. "The priorities most applicable to Kryta's state of affairs - or I assume Divinity's Reach seeing as we no longer have Kryta - are the following: Those eligible for princehood have to be humans of good health. They can be no younger than thirteen years and no older than twenty-one years to ensure that they remain in good health for a decent amount of years even after a several-year period of trial and preparation. They must not have a single currently attending minister in their immediate family. They must not have a single member of the Shining Blade in their immediate family. They must be the only prince or princess in their family. And they not only have to be of noble descent, but must come from families that have been officially recognized as nobility within the royal census for at least one century, the timeframe for exceptions to that last rule expired one century after the law passed."

"So the Haldens wanted you to make their son a prince. Did he qualify? Did he meet all the requirements?"

"Well, yes. But I still don't appreciate getting ambushed with ancient contingency laws that haven't been cited for hundreds of years. Every time a family comes here asking for me to invoke princehood, I have to keep them in the courthouse while I walk to the city archives and back, to check name lists for any nobility in records from one hundred years ago against their current-day equivalents. And that doesn't even mention the followup work. Even after I've invoked the law, I have to go back for each family and check their names for every single year's records, just to ensure that their nobility status didn't face any interruptions in the course of the century. So it takes much more work to verify if I have to revoke their princehood within a month, because it can't be undone after that."

"Are you saying this happened more than once?"

"Indeed."

"How many families are we talking?"

"By this point, three. And mind you, I'm not the only judge in the city. The others may not take their duties seriously, but they still have robes and gavels of their own."

"By the gods, how many families do you think will go for this? We could be dealing with dozens of princes."

"Not necessarily. Elevating a family to nobility wasn't this common until Kryta's population exploded two thirds into Salma's lineage. Only a handful of families qualified when I checked the archives."

"Then that'll be my next stop. Thank you for your help."

"Of course, it is part of a sitting judge's duties to aid the Seraph in matters like this."

The judge put together a list of all the families that had visited him that day and soon returned to his chambers for much-needed sleep. Logan was not so lucky, as he still had work to do and now had an idea what kind of work. The Haldens said that the Shining Blade intercepted them and took their son when they were on the way back from the court.

A potential new king sounded like something important enough to draw their attention, so he now knew why they took Evias. But the Haldens had held out on Logan about 'princehood'. It was a tad slimy to omit a detail like that, but Logan could understand why they did what they did. If someone saw an opportunity to give their child a chance at becoming the new ruler of Kryta, who wouldn't rush to the courthouse and seize it?

The best way to find out who else could have requested princehood was to check who even qualified to do it. Logan's rank allowed him access to the city archives without having to jump through any hoops. And once he had everything spread out on one large table, his original worries proved false. While at first, the list of noble families seemed insurmountable, appearances were deceiving.

Most noble families were not that old for a start. Of those that were, many occupied seats in the ministry. Among the families without ministers, not all of them even had a child that fit the age requirement. Some of the families left after that had members in the Shining Blade. By the end, after eliminating all the families that didn't qualify, only eight were left.

To his dismay however, during his research in the city archives, one of the Seraph came to him telling him about several families that requested his presence in the upper city. And the fear he had on the way there proved true. Five more families, cold and worried sick from having been outside for most of the night, congregated just outside the Seraph Headquarters. Each with the same story as the Haldens. They all had gone to courthouses - presumably to request princehood - and each family was stopped on the way back by Shining Blade who took in their son or daughter for 'questioning'. And of course none of them saw their child again.

Logan had long held a sneaking suspicion of what was going on here, but he was hoping it was much more innocuous and did so even now. He couldn't imagine Anise being so ruthless that she would have children and younglings 'disappeared' just so she could groom a preferred prince of her own to retain control of the city. But he couldn't just let the citizens down like this. As much as he feared what he would find, he had to keep looking into this case.

Eight families had a child that qualified for princehood, six of them had lost theirs which only left two. The Hawthornes and the Meades. The Hawthornes were close friends of the Shining Blade. If Logan's growing suspicion was true and this was Anise singling out one successor and taking out all the others, then the Hawthornes were going to be her choice.

So the family more at risk were the Meades. He had to get to the Meades before the Shining Blade did. And he had to start getting backup on this. So while he talked to the families, he made sure to stop every Seraph leaving the headquarters and order them to help him with this case instead. He instructed one Seraph to keep an eye on the Hawthornes and two to take position in front of each courthouse to keep watch over anyone leaving them. While they did that, he and five more men following him straight to Meade Manor in Rurikton.

By this time, the morning sun had long risen, so they were already awake. Without further ado, he told the soldiers to keep an eye out for anything suspicious - including Shining Blade soldiers marching to the same house. Then he knocked on their front door. Shortly afterward, a servant in matching garb opened the door and from behind him, two people in their early fourties came up to greet Logan. "Captain Thackeray! What a relief to see you at a time like this."

"Hello. Are you busy? I have something urgent to discuss with you."

The man greeting him was dressed in gold-laced robes. The woman had long blond hair, covered her face with an assortment of eyeliner, eyeshadow, powder, rouge and lipstick. She wore a dress with a long skirt that matched his attire in fabric and colour.

"Not at all, things have become very uncertain recently, so we like to keep to ourselves until the situation calms down. My name is Edobar Meade and this is my wife, Kasmeer. Rolan! We have a visitor, do come and greet him appropriately!" A young blond man - barely past his adolescence - and in much more modest attire came down the stairs to the right of the door and shook Logan's hand with his head held low. He wore the usual faire of a multi-layer frilled white shirt and frilled trousers, except that the latter were in a deep shade of purple. "This is our oldest son, Rolan. Now please, do come in."

Logan followed them while their servant closed the door and retreated to the kitchen. The Meades had a living room with several couches arranged around a small table. Logan undid the straps on his chest piece and took it off so he could sit down somewhat comfortably. "Now then, what leads you to our humble home?"

Logan obliged and told them about the distraught couples and their missing children and the ancient law that connected their disappearance. "By Lyssa's grace, this is horrifying."

"Yeah. And I'm pretty sure at this point this is someone taking out the competition. I just hope I'm wrong about who."

Sir Meade wasn't just appalled by the subject matter. "There's got to be more you can do about this. Track down where they took all those children."

To Logan's surprise, the Meades' otherwise very quiet son spoke up. "What if there is a way?" He had been silent for most of Logan's recount, but he had been intently listening. In the course of Logan telling them what had happened, the young man's attitude had shifted from tentatively acting on an obligation to be present, to intently following every step the captain laid out. "They go after everyone who does this princehood thing, right? If we do the same, I could act as bait so you can catch them."

Understandably, this was met with immediate rejection from his parents. "We're not risking your life like this! We don't know what they do to them! You think we can just let you put yourself in danger like that?"

"The captain never said anything about an expiry date on this princehood thing. They don't know if and when I plan to do this, so for all we know, they'll try to go after me either way."

Logan reeled this overeager adventurer back in. "We'll see about that if we're sure of it. For now, the most important thing is that you remain safe while we try to figure out how to go about this."

He got up and went to the front door to talk to his subordinates. "I've filled them in. Notice anything unusual?"

"We have one observer." The Seraph pointed down the street that led from the square to the path up to the inner ring. Someone was peeking from around the corner. When Logan came a little closer, he recognized the armor. "Shining Blade. Unusual, but not unexpected. What else?"

"Just commoners for the most part." The square did look rather ordinary. There were several stands, commoners and nobles perusing the wares at the local market stands and going about their way. When giving his surroundings a thorough look though, Logan noticed something off that the other Seraph hadn't. Far off in a different direction but in a position to see the front door of the Meades' house, stood a suspicious-looking commoner eating an apple. Eating apples wasn't suspicious, but Logan had seen that exact commoner standing in that exact spot, eating what was likely that same apple when he first entered the house.

Even assuming that it wasn't the same apple, it made no sense in terms of convenience for him to walk to the square, around the corner, to the apple stand and then all the way back to that same, very specific spot, unless he was watching the Meades' front door. "I think I just found something worth paying attention to."

Logan decided that he wanted to know who that was and why they were watching this house. To make sure they wouldn't lose Rolan, he ordered two Seraph to enter the building, never leave his side and to not let him leave the house either. He placed extra emphasis on this task: "No matter who comes here and asks to talk to him or for him to follow, do not let this boy leave. He has to stay in here, no matter what happens. Even if there are Shining Blade asking for him, don't hand him over. No matter what they threaten to do, call their bluff. If they complain about it, tell them to take it up with me. Rolan's safety is our top priority right now. Did I make myself clear?"

"Yes, sir."

Then he ordered two more soldiers to prepare for a maneuver that was routine among the Seraph. They stood where they were while Logan left for the square. But once he was out of sight of the man with the apple, he went the long way round to cut him off from behind. When he moved into his soldiers' line of sight, that was their cue.

Without projecting it first, they started marching straight for the unwanted observer, spurring him into a hasty rush in the opposite direction. Which led him right into Logan, allowing him to send the commoner stumbling onto the pavement with a single swoop of his leg. When the poor guy's face was still planted onto the pavement, the captain stepped over him and drew his sword to point it right at him. "Not one wrong move."

The stranger rolled over and held up his hands. "Wait…I'm innocent! I didn't do anything!"

"I'll decide on that." When the other two Seraph reached them, they put the man's hands behind his back and cuffed them. The three guards left at Meade Manor were enough to turn people away and things hadn't escalated nearly enough for Logan to believe the Shining Blade would start a civil war now. Things were too precarious and simultaneously too comfortable for them. He told them where he was going and then took the other two guards and the prisoner with him to an empty guard house in the district. One of the Seraph pulled out the matching key, unlocked the front door and locked it behind them.

The commoner was of course struggling and protesting but it was nothing trained soldiers couldn't handle. They dragged him into a dark interrogation room, forced him to sit against the wall and closed off the only entrance, trapping him inside here with Logan. "Stop this at once, I'm just an ordinary carpenter spending a day outside! This is an abuse of power!" The clothes he was wearing were those of a field worker, complete with having his trouser legs rolled up to avoid them catching dirt.

During their entire trip from the streets of Rurikton until they arrived here, Logan was annoyed. Very annoyed. He had enough of people pretending not to know anything from his earlier talk with Parah in the palace.

Humanity was pushed to a corner to the point where all they had left was this city, peasants and workers were losing their lives and livelihoods in droves, were forced to watch their loved ones get butchered. And in a time like this, when Logan's aid was most needed, he was spending his day playing detective because Anise just had to turn around and invalidate years of trust he placed in her in lieu of becoming a megalomaniac. That, or even worse, for her to show that she had always been one and that Logan had simply failed to pick up on it because his judgment was consistently clouded by Jennah's presence.

He had been up for more than a day straight. He was sick of having to overcome hurdles just because people refused to tell him what he needed to know upfront, he was tired of arguing in circles with the deliberately obtuse. The last thing he wanted was to stand here talking back and forth with some snide street rat. He pointed his sword at the struggling peasant. He restrained himself when he was about to shout at the prisoner and instead spoke to him in a tense, but very reserved tone. "Listen very closely. I have neither the nerves to play games with you for too long, nor the time. So you can either tell me exactly what you were up to back there, or I'll start considering my options."

"What options? I have rights, I demand a trial."

Logan raised his sword and inched closer until the blade was inches away from the peasant's neck and reminded him of a few of the peculiarities of Krytan law. "Unless you can prove that you're a noble as recorded in the annual census, you don't have a right to a trial. Your treatment is entirely up to the judges and the Seraph and judges don't tend to choose to get involved with petty criminals. So unless you want to rot in a prison cell for casing a scene for a burglary, you're going to tell me what you were up to."

"You can't prove I was planning a burglary! Where is this coming from?"

"If that wasn't what you're doing you sure spent a lot of time watching that big house. And you saw the Seraph standing outside, you knew if you were caught standing there for so long, we'd have to infer that that's what you're doing."

"But I didn't do that!"

"Even if not, we can still lock you away for purposefully wasting our time."

"You can't prove I did that on purpose!"

"I don't have to, negligence counts as intent, too."

The last weeks did their damn best at flushing out any good will Logan had. If a few hours or days of tyranny was what it took to prevent decades or centuries of tyranny, then he was no longer hesitant to make that trade. And this realization slowly dawned on Logan's prisoner as his defiant body language turned more and more into that of a caught animal pressing itself against the wall behind it. "You - you wouldn't actually do tha-"

Logan punched him in the face and broke his nose in the process. He grabbed him by the collar. "You just watch me."

He dragged him back to the door and when he was already in the middle of ordering his men to take him to the prison, the peasant gave in. "Wait! I'll talk! I'll talk! I'll tell you want you want to know!" At long last. Logan pulled him back inside the interrogation room and tossed him back onto the bench at the wall. "I work at one of the vineyards in the east. Or I used to. It's among the first ones the Charr get to. The ones you evacuated! Lord Aldryn's estate!"

Aldryn was a name well known to Logan. He was a minister and not the kind he approved. Arrogant and overconfident both in his politics and his skills as a mesmer. His policies were almost always diametrically opposed to whatever Queen Jennah wanted at any given time. Whenever a proposal involved relinquishing control of Krytan law to Lion's Arch or some foreign entity like an order, Aldryn was among the first to argue against it. And he voted against them every time. "So you work for Lord Aldryn. What does he want with the Meades?"

"He's been looking into the exact same thing as you. Princehood clause, right? People going missing? He has servants positioned all over the city!"

"That's a matter for the Seraph to look into."

The peasant spat on Logan's armor. "Like the Seraph will do anything for the people of Kryta." He wanted to punch him again, but he couldn't blame him for thinking that way. There had been more arrests like that first one, and when the Seraph were seen arresting people for defending their livelihoods and their loved ones, public trust in them was sure to wane. The brunt of it was yet to come, and yet there already were atrocities to speak of. Even if the Shining Blade made them do it. The Seraph were no better for going along with it.

Logan's hands were tied. All he could do for now was to save Kryta's next ruler. And for that he had to solve this case. "What is Aldryn planning? Where is he now?"

"You'd just love to know that wouldn't you?" That got Logan to actually punch him a second time after all. And it did its job. "He's tracking two Charr. He thinks they'll lead him straight to where they're keeping the children!"

"Why? Why does he think that?"

"They're swords for hire. They've been for years. The Shining Blade pays them to take out people they don't like!"

"Hiring Charr to harass or kill humans? That's Separatist propaganda. I've seen the posters!"

The peasant started to grin through the trails of blood on his face. "Where do you think the idea for those posters came from?"

"Even the Seraph have little patience for Separatist sympathizers. You will stop spreading their drivel."

"How do you think their propaganda works? They spread rumours of things they know to be true, because they know the throne will deny them. Then, whenever a human discovers the truth, they know that the throne lied. That's one more man for their cause every time it happens."

"Enough, where is Aldryn?"

"The sellswords were setting up camp just west of Beetletun, but they're bound to make their way here again. They're probably marching out as we speak. We have their whole route mapped out and the lord is tailing them."

"If you don't want to spend your life in jail for treason, you will give me every step of that route."

He chose the latter. He gave Logan everything he had. Apparently, the minister had his staff record the entire route. The farmer recreated as much as he could from memory on a spare map of Queensdale, and brought up various specific buildings or other landmarks. Logan knew all of those well and could fill in the blanks from there. He kept the farmer in custody for the time being, but in the event that this craziness found an end, he would be cleared of any charges.