In Human Skin

by Akemi Homura-san

In January, a.t.b. 2010, Empress Marianne vi Britannia, Knight of Two and His Majesty's favoured consort, was assassinated at her residence in the Imperial Villa at Aries. But for Justine and Juliette vi Britannia, her daughters, this proves to be a blessing in disguise... Surrounded by old foes and sheltered by new and unexpected allies, their tale heralds the dawn of a new era.

34. Zombie

Imperial Capital of Pendragon, February, a.t.b. 2015

Bismarck had been in His Majesty's service for a long time by now—several decades, in fact, to the point where he could honestly say he'd spent more of his life as Charles zi Britannia's shield than not. He'd been an unmoored mercenary before, having grown up knowing nothing else practically from the day he'd been born, in his native homeland of Samoa, which had been disputed territory between Areas Seven and Nine; his first love had been a gun, and his first friend a corpse. The noble squabbling—for in those days, during the Emblem of Blood, several viceroys had taken it upon themselves to attempt to depose their rivals so long as there was no authority upon the Chimeric Throne to punish them for it—that had turned his home into little more than a breeding ground for disposable cannon fodder, villages full of orphans turned into camps and proving grounds for who could be more ruthless, more monstrous, more obedient. And in that regard, he'd excelled, believing in nothing, valuing nothing, drifting through life and sowing death in his wake. Even in those days, he'd been a more than proficient soldier with both gun and knife, and so when Prince Claudius, a man who'd been the favourite to win the throne in bygone days but now survived as little more than a historical footnote, had asked the then-viceroy of Area Seven for a selection of his very finest troops as a show of support—which was almost certain to be richly rewarded—Bismarck had easily been one of them.

Those had been the circumstances under which he first saw the Homeland—it had been a battlefield like no other, and the very worst of the fighting occurred in Pendragon itself. But that hadn't mattered very much to him, who had been taught to believe in nothing he couldn't hold in his hands. Grand promises and high-minded ideals were things he'd never encountered, and they'd immediately struck him as a very frilly noble affectation, to the point where he'd begun actively looking down upon those lowborn retinues he and his fellow killers fought against, the ones who actually believed in shit like 'honour' and 'loyalty', who held to some misguided standard of 'righteousness.' Where he came from, those were the kinds of things spoken by a dead man walking; he'd learned to trust in his own skills, the gun in his hands, and the medics who did their best to patch him up—so he'd smirked and derided the so-called 'true believers' as he and his fellows slaughtered them like animals in the middle of a ruined, crumbling city, a hellscape if ever there was one.

And of course, he'd been there when Prince Claudius, in a move he gloated over as a master-stroke, flooded one such princeling's compound with chlorine gas, while the rest of them stood guard to kill any who attempted to leave, ready to storm the fortifications and clean out what remained.

On that day, he'd seen the power of belief, had felt it wrapping its bony grip and molten flesh about his throat. He'd stared it in its blazing eye as conviction gave men and women both, of common blood but true devotion, the ability to defy Death Itself its due. He'd watched as honour and righteousness took up a very mortal woman as their instrument, and turned her into a murderous revenant, to stand tall and mete out their bloody vengeance.

Princess Agrippina had been more skeleton than woman at that moment, with half her face sluiced away to reveal bloody bone, her physical beauty marred almost beyond recognition by chemical burns, and yet nonetheless magnetic even in her final act of vengeance, bringing with her an almost gravitational pull that allowed a legion of the dead to spit back at them from the heart of Hel itself…

And with those ruined hands, she wrought ruin upon her own father in turn.

The Triumph of the Hel-Queen, they'd called it, the horror he'd witnessed that day—and yet, it had taught Bismarck then, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that his scoffing and derision were nothing more than ignorance and hubris. He'd been a child, back then—not even of majority by Britannian standards—but he believed now as he'd had an inkling of on that day, that bearing witness to such an event was what changed on a fundamental level the manner in which he saw the world, and all those who existed within it.

It was on that day that he'd met the then-Prince Charles, and his "dead" brother Vespasian, who had placed themselves into Prince Claudius's care (though 'bondage' would have been perhaps more politically accurate); wishing to learn more about this strange power that he'd dismissed until he witnessed how it had allowed men to stave off their own mortality in service to their mistress, he'd taken a gamble on them and sworn himself to the prince, and to his ideals. He'd been almost a decade younger than the prince, but he'd still been taken on, as Charles's vassal and his bodyguard, and he'd let himself be guided by his loyalty and by his sense of honour ever since. Now, the boy he'd been had been lost to time, and the man he was, other men knew only as 'Bismarck Waldstein,' the Knight of One and Grand Master of the Order of the Round Table; and he had gotten here, he maintained, by following the very same path of single-minded, resolute, and steadfast conviction that had allowed common people, whose only claim to fame was their service, to transcend their mortality twice over, and become figures of myth.

No one who remained now remembered the would-be Emperor Claudius for his own sake, while his daughter, Princess Agrippina, had all but become a Satanic figure within the context of the muddled mess of what passed for aristocratic Britannia's spiritual and cultural consciousness. For all that his power base had seemed at the time substantial, and his victory assured, nowadays he was remembered only in the context of her story. There was a lesson to be learned in that, Bismarck thought; he'd been mulling over it ever since the day itself, really, and privately, in his heart of hearts, he knew that the day he understood it in full would be his last.

All of this was to say that in the course of his service to his liege lord, His Imperial Majesty and Ser Bismarck had long since managed to work out a system by which he could give his reports—he would find his way to His Majesty's private chambers, nearest to the Thought Elevator, and kneel before him, as he did now, with his white cloak spreading like the feathers of a bird all around him. Then, with one eye open, and his branded one bolted shut, he made eye contact with His Majesty, to allow him to establish the necessary link to use his Geass upon his willing servant. And so it was that he looked up at the man he towered over in the day-to-day mundanities of his existence, with His Majesty spreading his cape like the wings of some great and terrible pagan god of myth, his eyes glowing scarlet with the twin brands of Geass. And he asked, did His Majesty, as he always did, no matter how fervently Bismarck protested that there was truly no need for such consideration, "Are you prepared?"

"As always, your majesty," Ser Bismarck replied with a small smile. "I am at your service…"

The Holy Britannian Emperor's graven face softened slightly at that affirmation, as it always did; it was a way, Bismarck knew, of His Majesty demonstrating how he appreciated the loyalty that the Knight of One gave freely, as was the deep breath Emperor Charles took as he braced himself to delve into the mind of his most loyal servant—which would be, to him, ever an open book.

Bismarck, in turn, braced himself as well, mastering the impulse to clamp his mind down, to keep it as difficult as possible for anyone to get anything out of it. This was His Majesty, and he kept nothing from the man he served. His Majesty had never done so, as far as he was aware, but even if he wanted to modify Bismarck's memories or alter who he was, that was something that Bismarck would be fine with. He was His Majesty's shield, after all, and what good was a shield upon which a knight could not emboss their coat of arms if they so chose? And so he prepared himself for the familiar piercing sensation that came with any dive deeper than skimming surface-level recent memories, with the feeling of invasion and violation—His Majesty possessed a heavy hand, of which it could be said that there was no one who was more aware than the man himself, and this aspect of his nature translated into his Geass, and so it was not a gentle process to have His Majesty in his mind, for all that it was routine.

Or at least, it was routine, until now.

Instead of the feeling of having a long, thin needle driven into his brain past the back of his eye, the only sensation that Bismarck was aware of was His Majesty crying out in pain…!

"GRAAAAH…!"

"Your majesty!" Bismarck yelled as he swept to his feet, dashing around the man to catch him with a muted oof of effort as His Majesty's legs buckled out from under him, leaving all one hundred plus kilos of man and cloth to fall directly into the Knight of One's grasp in a flutter of fabric.

Thinking quickly—and knowing that there were no servants who could be called, not this deep into the Imperial Palace, and none who could be trusted with this besides—Bismarck slowly, gently guided His Majesty onto his back on the floor beneath them; and once the Emperor was laid supine, Bismarck reached up and unfastened his gold-trimmed white cloak, folding it up swiftly and putting it beneath his liege lord's head as best he could.

Now that he was on the floor, Bismarck could examine him more clearly—he was unconscious, of course, given how he'd dead-weighted as he fell, but more than that, the Knight of One was struck by how ashen his face had turned, as though a further ten years of youth and vitality had been sapped out of him all at once, or as if he'd been wasting away under a life-sapping delirium for weeks. His broad forehead was clammy with sweat and cold, his skin almost translucent, and from the corners of his eyes, there were twin streams of deep red blood.

There was no one in the Imperial Palace who could help him with the situation he was in—and was that not just the sharpest of ironies, that despite Lady Marianne serving for so many distinguished years as His Majesty's sword, crushing all those who stood against them with a level of fervour and martial prowess that outstripped even Bismarck himself, annihilating all of their enemies so very thoroughly that the ground was salted, both proverbially and literally, where they'd been buried, the very nature of Britannia itself was such that, even in spite of this being His Majesty's seat of power, new foes had emerged, as if by means of spontaneous generation, and thus made this perhaps the most dangerous place in the civilised world for an event like this to come to pass?—and so instead of looking towards the door by which he'd gained entry not too long ago, the Knight of One looked instead towards the open Thought Elevator, through which the geometries of the world of the living began, gradually, to fuse into the World of C, the boundaries growing progressively more fuzzy as the two dimensions began to bleed into one another. Through there, he could gain entry to any other Thought Elevator in the world, though not without significant complication; but that was well enough, because the only one he cared about right then was very firmly inside their territory.

Making a snap decision in that moment, then, Bismarck, who was loath to leave His Majesty alone, not to mention potentially vulnerable, lowered himself to grab hold of his liege lord, and lift him as best he could into his arms. He'd done dead-lifting on a weight somewhere on the order of three and a half times His Majesty's weight before, of course, with his record being four hundred twenty-five kilos, but carrying a person was at once much easier and much more difficult than dead-lifting. Easier, because a person was not often as heavy as a dead-lift weight, but more difficult because the lift had to not only be sustained, but also mindful of the fact that you were carrying another living being, and not merely some lumps of metal at the ends of a bar fashioned for the sole purpose of being heavy.

Yet, he did it without a moment's hesitation for His Majesty, though he could only manage doing so over-the-shoulder, for the sake of not dropping him. It wasn't the most dignified of propositions, to carry the Holy Britannian Emperor like he was no more than a common soldier carrying an injured comrade across hostile territory, but it worked well enough for him to be able to make his way both to and through the corridor of the Thought Elevator, into the balcony-esque platform that was meant to be Ground Zero for the Ragnarök Connection in the near future.

The World of C was a dimension of cognition; it was shaped and formed based on the associations one drew based upon the topics of their environment, from something as simplistic as "what one wanted or expected to see," and growing only more esoteric from there. This meant that, in order to establish a clear and unambiguous connection to another place in the World of C, all Bismarck really needed was enough in the way of strength of will and clarity of intent—of which he had both in spades. The nebulous pink clouds that defined this sort of metaverse, this realm that had been the foundation for at least a few of the various versions of an afterlife dreamt up by humanity and human cultures, parted, or perhaps more properly, had never been there in the first place; no sooner had he definitively crossed the threshold into the World of C, past the hazy territory where the boundary both was and was not, than was he aware that he was not at all alone on the platform.

"L-Lady Marianne!" Bismarck called out, with an emotion for which 'relief' was too small a word.

And indeed, the other occupant of the platform was none other than his old friend and rival, the true Knight of Two, for however well Michele filled the role in her absence—Marianne 'the Flash' had been the one to define what the role even was, following his extensive reformation of the Knights of the Round; she had been, in a very real sense, his second-in-command, a true peer instead of a subordinate in the way that Michele was, and it really wasn't the same without her, regardless of whether she was still filling the same role in a much less official capacity nowadays. She turned towards him as he called out, her long black coat and her raven hair fluttering in the phantasmal grasp of the spectral wind—and at the sight of him, and of his burden, her violet eyes went wide in alarm.

At once, she was alongside him, reaching out her arms and beckoning him to give over her husband into her care—a request to which he was beyond glad to accede, of course—and as Bismarck eased His Majesty off of his back and into her arms, he couldn't help but notice (now that he had the cognitive space to think of things other than His Majesty's immediate well-being) that her arms didn't even sag under the weight he was imparting upon her, with Marianne seeming to experience no difficulty carrying him beyond the inherent awkwardness of bearing such a large man aloft 'bridal style,' so to speak. Her fingers clenched into his body almost possessively, before she paused to assess his condition—this round of prosthetics was much less skeletal in appearance than previous iterations, dull, segmented, matte black metal and ceramic plates making up the articulation of every knuckle and joint he could see; they were transparently artificial, a sustained reminder of what she'd become and how she'd survived V.V.'s act of treachery, but more than that, Marianne seemed to take a particular sort of pride in her robotic limbs and the mechanical strength they granted her. It was ironic, really—for all that they were alike in their fervent devotion to the cause, and to His Majesty, he was certain that most would say he was much more of an automaton, really, than Marianne ever was; and yet he remained wholly flesh, while she clad her resolve almost literally in iron.

"Bismarck," she said in her flat, grinding, computerised monotone. "What happened?"

Even that question came out sounding like a statement more than anything that could be interpreted as even remotely interrogative; but he'd known Marianne as a comrade-in-arms first and foremost, any sort of attraction he might have felt towards her over the years aside, and so unlike His Majesty, the voice didn't bother him even slightly. The Marianne he'd known in the past was a hard, deadly woman, sharp as flint and at least twice as lethal, despite the image she'd cultivated as a hero of the soldiery—and so he couldn't really say that her new voice didn't fit the truth of who she was more closely than her original voice did, however pleasant to the ears it may have been. He slipped into parade rest—more a reflex than anything of significance, really—and said, "His Majesty attempted to use his Geass on me, but he was unsuccessful. He collapsed with a pained cry, and though I managed to catch him before he hit the floor, he was unconscious by the time I got to him all the same. The blood-weeping began shortly thereafter. I judged it unwise for me to seek aid for His Majesty in the palace, and so I decided to lift and carry him into the World of C in hopes of encountering you, or failing that, to reach the Thought Elevator in the Order's headquarters, and seek aid once we got there."

"…A prudent decision," Marianne judged after a moment of consideration. "I believe I may have some idea of what has caused this. Come with me. The gate to Terminal Dogma is not far from here."

Bismarck nodded slowly in silent assent, and when Marianne turned from him, her husband in hand as she led the way, he waited for the space of a single respectful beat before following after her. And surely enough, the gate they were seeking wasn't far at all—at least to the extent that a profoundly mundane and quintessentially mortal concept such as 'distance' meant anything at all in this place, this half-world which abided between this life and the next—so that before long, they emerged from out of the Thought Elevator, and into the cool, quiet, quasi-monastic air of what Marianne had made of Terminal Dogma, the innermost sanctum of the Geass Directorate. Awaiting them were a squadron of Marianne's personal guard, made up in its entirety of her most die-hard devotees from her chapter of the Order of the Round Table (every knight of which being entitled to maintain their own retinue of sworn swords and armigers), clad as they were in a uniform formation of midnight-blue body armour that rendered them faceless and all but indistinguishable from one another at first glance.

Marianne's chapter of the Order had borne the cognomen 'Relentless,' and not for the first time, he entertained the thought that there could perhaps be no moniker more fitting for those whose loyalty to their liege lady, Marianne the Flash, was both absolute and utterly beyond reproach.

"Your majesty," greeted the one who, by the insignia on his pauldron, seemed to be in charge of this squadron. Bismarck could not place the voice, not immediately, the helmets that rendered Marianne's guard faceless also bearing speech apparati that stripped as much individuality from their voices as was possible, to the point where their diction was the same uniform grinding warble. The one who had spoken, then, took a step forth, their combat rifle held at parade rest as they gave their very best salute. V.V. had preferred his personal guard to appear as servants, and so most of them had been attired in little more than a plainclothes uniform before being made to wait upon him; Marianne's own was as evocative a depiction of how times had changed as Bismarck himself could imagine was possible. "Prince Vespasian remains incapacitated, but Doctor Jest is insisting his condition is stable for the moment. He bade us to announce that he's now ready to receive His Majesty. We'll escort you."

"Very well," Marianne assented with a nod, for all that her mechanised voice remained every bit as flat and devoid of affect as ever.

Then the armoured commander—decurion, Bismarck noted, assuming he managed to read the rank insignia correctly—turned from Marianne, and instead regarded him in a manner that Bismarck couldn't help but interpret as sterile and businesslike. Then again, he reflected, it wasn't as if Marianne's men had ever lacked for discipline… "Lord Waldstein, we've contacted a secondary contingent to escort you to your accommodations for the time being—"

"I will accompany His Majesty hence," Bismarck rejected smoothly. Respect for Marianne he might have, and his belief in her abilities made his bolted-shut eye ache, but he would not allow for any manner of qualifier to make him derelict in his duties—he would remain alongside His Majesty, guarding his body, until such time as he awoke and saw fit to banish Bismarck to see to other tasks.

He was, after all, the Knight of One.

And no one else.

"We would be honoured if you could join us, Lord Waldstein," Marianne replied, her own directive implicit, but no less unmistakable for the fact that it was spoken between words.

The decurion who had come to receive Marianne and serve as her escort took the hint very swiftly indeed, nodding, saluting, and bowing before retreating to take their position up alongside their fellows as they shifted their collective formation. Thus, when Marianne tilted her head in their direction in the course of making another directive known, Ser Bismarck found that he had no qualms about falling in beside his erstwhile colleague, as her own escort fell into step around them.

"'Your majesty,' then?" Bismarck inquired with the ghost of a smirk upon his face—which was, in fact, the closest he ever got to teasing. Fraught though the situation was, it would do them no good to have their nerves fray for lack of even the slightest degree of levity.

"In their eyes, I am the only one worthy of the title," she answered soberly, though perhaps that was merely the effect of the monotone of her new voice. "I am, after all, Charles's one true wife. At least as far as they know…"

"As far as His Majesty would attest, as well," Bismarck replied, in the process pushing back gently against the veiled subtext in what his old friend had just said.

"History teaches us all too well of what becomes of so-called 'true wives' who fail to bear proper heirs," Marianne said, and were she capable of inflection, Bismarck couldn't help but think she would have sounded rueful right then. "I will not pretend to what I have not earned."

Bismarck bit back a grimace. The continued non-existence of the son Marianne would have named 'Lelouch' was an old wound between His Majesty and the former Knight of Two, and while he understood it no more than His Majesty did, Bismarck knew how inappropriate it would have been for him to speak on the Holy Britannian Emperor's behalf in the course of a marital conflict. It was not his place, after all, and he'd seen the woman before him cut down and mercilessly slaughter too many would-be aspirants who had reached above their station for him not to be exceptionally wary about overstepping his bounds—especially in Marianne's presence, no less.

The trek from the Thought Elevator through the labyrinthine corridors of Terminal Dogma that led to the infirmary-cum-workshop-cum-abattoir of Doctor Jest was a mercifully brief one, and so they did not need to abide in silence for long enough for it to become awkward, before they came at long last upon the domain of the strange blond German man who had almost single-handedly rebuilt Marianne; the man was himself much subdued from his normal manic chattering as he directed some of Marianne's guards to come forth from the sides of the room and carry His Majesty the rest of the way to the bed Doctor Jest had taken the time to prepare, and this left Bismarck and Marianne standing alone at the threshold, with the exception of her unit of unflinchingly loyal bodyguards.

It was at this point that Bismarck thought to ask what was perhaps the most obvious question at the moment; namely, "What became of V.V., then? I would be given to assume that that was why you were in the World of C already when I came looking for you…"

"You would be correct in that assumption," Marianne replied evenly. "V.V.'s Code flickered again. We lost another batch of his contractors. Whatever it is that the fool found in that pyramid, it seems to work by targeting the freshest contractors and working its way up. And given that his contract with Charles is the first Vespasian ever struck, I deduced that it was likely that something had befallen my lord husband as well…"

"Have there been attempts to establish fresh rotations of contractors?" Bismarck asked, even as he began to feel his own heavy brow furrowing above his eyes, both the open and the sealed, the branded. "Distasteful though his penchant for creating dozens of young contractors at a time, whensoever his whim demands it of him, was and yet remains, it should at the very least delay the progress of this strange and terrible affliction, staving it off until such a time as we can discern its nature and neutralise it…"

"We tried that the moment the pattern became apparent," Marianne replied with a rueful half-smirk that didn't make it past her lips. "But it seems the contagion, whatever it is, has stripped V.V. of his ability to form new contracts."

"Then the situation truly has become dire…" Bismarck remarked gravely.

An unhappy silence settled between the two friends for a few protracted, awkward moments; then, Marianne let out an alarming death-rattle that Bismarck realised a moment later to be her attempt at a sigh, and said, "I thought it foolishness and paranoia. I have been putting it off as a result. No more, however; on the morrow, we will descend into Anabaseios, you and I, and we will seek her aid."

Bismarck felt the urge to shudder almost entirely overwhelm his iron command of his own body, and it was perhaps a note on the state of things that he did not begrudge himself even so much as the impulse. The thing that lurked down there, in the depths of Anabaseios, the creature that radiated an aura of perpetual autumn so profound that any plant matter in her vicinity shrivelled and browned to it within moments, was the absolute last resort for any of them—something that wasn't quite an immortal, but not quite a bearer of the brand of Geass, either, capable of perpetual regeneration and wholly indestructible by any arts they here possessed without so much as a whisper of Code about her… The unholy melding of flesh and bone and wood as she (for indeed, it was and did claim the title of 'woman') was pumped full of experimental compounds, all of them deadly, all of them reviled the world over, for the sake of trying to slow her regeneration to a crawl… It was the only method by which they could even hope to contain her, and yet…

There was something wrong about the woman at the core of Anabaseios, Bismarck knew. What it was they were sensing in truth, neither he nor his co-conspirators had even the foggiest clue—a reminder, one might say, of how deep the waters they were treading in truly were, and how ignorant they were of all that which lurked in those antediluvian depths—but it was undeniably malevolent, and in their heart of hearts, even V.V. knew beyond the shadow of a doubt that in some primordial way, the creature was purely, ontologically (to an extent, almost elementally) evil.

And yet, though he might try, he could not deny that the situation well and truly called for it.

Thus did Bismarck Waldstein save the breath that might otherwise have been expended in fruitless protest, and instead, he nodded solemnly. "I am, as ever, at your service, old friend."

Marianne nodded silently, and as there was nothing more between them that needed to be said just then, the Right and the Left Hand of the Emperor, the two deadliest knights of the Empire, stood their silent vigil, guarding the helpless body of the man to whom they were, the both of them, and each of them in their own ways, absolutely devoted.

—

He remembered Ayame's panic, when she'd come to get him; and it was a deep and abiding shame that even now that they were living far from the main estate, in his family's Pendragon townhouse, they had to conceal the truth of them behind the veil of 'master and servant.' With the abject fear on her face, Gino, too, had immediately thought the worst—his family had made no secret of their disapproval of his 'Eleven concubine,' as they called her with a sneer—and so he'd stormed out, his shoulders squared, prepared as he always attempted to be to fight for the woman he loved with passion and fervour, and demanded to know of his guests, "What is the meaning of this…?!"

There were two women whose presence in his foyer stopped him short; the first was very clearly of Britannian stock, for there was certainly no other lineage who could achieve such a vibrant shade of red in their hair without the surefire application of dyes, with piercing sapphire eyes and a strong, lean frame that was dressed like a bravo—and yet, on closer inspection, weren't her eyes a little too almond-shaped for one whose striking hair was resolutely Britannian? Wasn't the structure of her face, of her beauty, reminiscent in the subtlest but most undeniable of ways of the woman whom he was currently attempting to shield with his body?

And then his eyes drifted over to the other one, over an elegant courtly hairstyle that was the same hue as was displayed on portraits of His Majesty as a young man, a heart-shaped, delicate, finely-featured face, and a pair of amethyst eyes that were so familiar, and yet entirely alien to his experience…

He didn't even get to the gown before his mind realised who this was who stood before him. For all that he'd never met his visitor personally, he would never mistake her elder sister anywhere…

"It's lovely to make your acquaintance as well, Gino, Heir Weinberg," the young woman spoke, her affect granting her an impression of age beyond what he knew must have been the truth. "My sister spoke quite highly of you. Might we sit down? We certainly have aught to discuss, you and I."

"Wait, you're…" he proclaimed before he could properly get a handle on himself. He shook his head, as if to deny the evidence of his senses—of course, he'd just been chosen to command the force that was being put together from what remained of the reserves that hadn't been sent to fight in the European Theatre, so it was clear why she might be seeking him out, but at his place of residence? Something wasn't quite lining up here. "No, you can't possibly be Princess Justine's sister, can you…?"

Something changed about the way that the young woman who seemed to Gino to have been all but confirmed to be Her Royal Highness Juliette vi Britannia, Sixth Princess of the Realm, held herself in that moment, and it provoked a similar sense of foreboding to the heady aura of menace that Princess Justine could exude on a whim—and yet, here it was different, more unsettling, in a manner he couldn't quite put his finger on all that well. But when she spoke at last, he imagined that this is what it might feel like to be a butterfly pinned to a display board: "Yahtzee."

"—no! Gino! Gino!" came a high, somewhat nasally voice that, even while mired in the midst of his catnap-induced somnolence, Gino Weinberg would know anywhere. In fact, he imagined that it would be a far greater cause for concern if, by some quirk of misfortune, he wasn't able to recognise his oldest friend, Lady Anya of the House of Alstreim, at a glance, so to speak. The young woman's bubblegum-pink eyes glared at him in exasperation, set above a mouth that was fixing him with an impatient scowl that, due to Anya seemingly being a late bloomer, if not just eternally petite, resembled nothing so much as a pout in practise. "Oh, thank fuck you're awake…! C'mon, get on your feet! We have places to be! I'm not going to bother staying on as your adjutant if all that means is that your lazy, lackadaisical ass is forcing me to do all the work for you!"

It took a few moments longer for Gino to blearily blink sleep out of his eyes, and to take his initial stock of his surroundings. He was in one of the townhouse's several drawing rooms, having fallen asleep, apparently, upon one of the more comfortable chaise lounges on the premises. Thankfully, he'd thought to dress for the day before courting such an awkward mishap, so really, all that he had to deal with right now was the allure of the brown leather beneath his back, cradling his head, and the incensed pip-squeak who'd been his constant companion seemingly since either of them could walk. Her equally bubblegum-pink hair was secured on the sides of her head in huge poofy twin-tails that made her look like some kind of cartoon representation of a mouse, her blandly pretty, cute, china-doll facial features scrunched up into a rictus of hostility and open enmity, and her fists propped up against her bony, nonexistent hips as she loomed over him, his copy of the book that had put him to sleep against his will held in one of them.

"What're you on about this time, Anya…?" asked Gino, even as he took in her apparel in a search for contextual clues to better facilitate reconstructing his memory of exactly what he was meant to be doing today, instead of laying back in one of the decent chaise lounges for welcomed guests and reading—he strained a bit to see the title, but he caught it, thankfully—a copy of Moby Dick, it seemed. It was a strange choice for him, given that he actually wasn't all that big on reading as a hobby, as it happened; but then, an argument could be made to say that his choice of Moby Dick was more or less a direct result of the dismal state of his knowledge with regards to classical literature. A cursory examination didn't really tell him all that much, however—as they were now officially under examination to join the ranks of the Knights of the Round, they were allowed to wear the uniforms, which both of them did when on official business. When they proved themselves, they would be allowed to don the cloaks that went with the white uniforms of the Order of the Round Table, and they would then be expected to build out their ranks of men-at-arms so as to lay down the foundations for their individual chapters of armigers and squires, but for now, the fact that his childhood friend was garbed in the white-and-gold suit of the chivalric order into which they were being inducted (she'd very firmly rejected the merest suggestion of a skirt in favour of trousers, citing that she'd had quite enough in the way of 'needlessly gendered attire' back during their academy days) told Gino almost nothing of note—only that they were expected somewhere on official business, which really could have meant any number of different things, especially given the amount of scrutiny the two of them were under nowadays.

"We're expected at court, you absolute dunderhead," Anya explained in a tone that very clearly conveyed an extreme level of exasperation. "I suppose it's a small mercy that you're already dressed, even if you do insist on maintaining that ridiculous hairstyle…"

"Hey, hey, lay off the hair!" Gino protested, sitting up on the chaise lounge almost at once. "Chicks dig the braid."

"Yes, well, 'Chicks' isn't here right now, and I really don't need to know what you think passes for a pet name," Anya snapped right back, scowling and crossing her arms over her boyish chest, still holding the copy of Moby Dick in her hand. "And besides that, if we tarry any longer, we're going to wind up being tardy, Gino. 'Fashionably late' is for socialites and debutantes, not for prospective Knights of the Round."

Suddenly, Gino imagined the one-eyed disapproving stare of the Knight of One, and that was more than enough to banish any lingering dregs of sleep—it lit a fire under his ass, to boot. He stood tall at once, eager to dispel the recurring whispers of Juliette vi Britannia from where they lurked in the recesses of his mind, and gave a sharp nod. He brushed off the front and back of the white-and-gold tailcoat in an attempt to smooth out any fresh wrinkles in his uniform, and then he double-checked that the forearm-length black gloves that rounded out the outfit were in place; at last, he looked to Anya, and asked, "Do we have to get the car?"

"I brought one with me on my way here," Anya replied, shaking her head. "It's waiting outside as we speak. Oscar's going to be driving us."

Gino winced at the mention of which of Anya's valets would be driving them. "Well, at least we'll be getting to the Palace quickly…though whether or not we make it in one piece remains to be seen…"

"Quit your bitching, Gino," Anya sighed, closing the book at last and casting it upon the abandoned chaise lounge behind him. Part of him winced at the rosette's indelicate treatment of the book, but that was less out of any true love for books or for book-keeping, and more of a symptom of having received more than his fair share of lectures on the subject of the proper treatment of hardcovers in his youth. "Oscar hasn't crashed a car since he first learned to drive."

"There's a first time for everything," Gino maintained.

"Gino!"

"Fine! Fine!" Gino exclaimed, throwing his hands up in the universal gesture of surrender. "I'll get into a car with your most psychotic valet if it means we'll get there on time, alright?"

"Thank you," Anya sighed, looking him over and brushing him off once more, before she turned on her heel and walked towards the entryway of the Weinberg townhouse. Gino, dutifully, then followed in her wake, out of the door and down the steps—being sure to close it behind him—to see, sure enough, that an automobile sat there, awaiting their arrival, a limousine with the wings of its logo proudly proclaiming it to have come off of an Aston Martin production line. The brand lacked the prestige of Jaguar or Rolls Royce, being roughly on par with Bentley as a car used by middling nobility instead of upper nobility and royalty, but it was certainly the sort of vehicle that neither Anya nor Gino would receive undue scrutiny for arriving in—Gino knew he lacked the head for such considerations, but as he was not yet a Knight of the Round in full, not yet fully beyond political reproach in the Imperial Court, he had to make an effort, at least, to keep such things in mind, for the sake of those he loved if not himself.

It was these sobering thoughts that occupied the young heir to the House of Weinberg as he settled into the back-seat of the limousine, right beside Anya, before the uniformed valet, the slender, lithe Oscar, with his sandy-blond hair hidden beneath his peaked black cap, closed the door after him, and went around to sit himself into the driver's seat. He waited just long enough for them to settle in before he peeled away from the sidewalk, and tore a blazing, roaring path through the Noble District of Pendragon to the Imperial Palace, where the pair of unlikely longtime friends and future colleagues, barring the unforeseeable, were expected to be in attendance.

As expected, they were far from late; Anya mocked his quaking legs when they got out of the car to make their way into the Imperial Palace via the special entrance they were now entitled to the use of, but it didn't take them long to work their way through the wing of the palace reserved for the use of the Knights of the Round and into the main audience hall, where the Chimeric Throne sat upon a raised dais, a platform from which the master of nearly a third of the world could look out upon the writhing nest of vipers that, in all their vicious malice, made up the beating heart of his absolute dominion.

Only, Gino couldn't help but notice that another far less impressive figure sat upon that throne now.

Already, the courtiers were all in attendance, with Gino and Anya being among the last to arrive. It was a dull roar inside the audience chamber, like the buzzing of a beehive—as a general rule, the Imperial Court waited for His Majesty, and absolutely never the other way around—and Gino did his best to pay no mind to the whirlwind of gossip and rumours that were certain to tear through Pendragon in short order.

It wasn't as if Gino could blame them, though—he imagined he was just about as shocked as any of the other peers and courtiers, to enter into the audience chamber and see that not only was the great stone throne already occupied, but by none other than the Crown Prince, to boot!

His Imperial Highness Odysseus eu Britannia, First Prince of the Realm and the Empire's (current) Heir Apparent, was legendary for the fact that he wholly lacked notoriety. Much more than the apple only having fallen far from the tree, if not for the fact that he very clearly took after the Emperor in the colour of his hair and the graven cast of his face, many would have said (and honestly still did say) that the fruit was born of a different tree entirely! But where the hard, stony angles of his face made Charles zi Britannia seem a statue of antiquity given life and breath, those same features made Odysseus seem plain and mild, which wound up being an accurate predictor of his temperament. The Crown Prince was known for the mediocrity of his existence, as well as his indecision; Anya had remarked recently that if this were the days before the Emblem of Blood, and the passing of the edict of His Majesty that had brought that horrible time to a swift and decisive end, then Odysseus eu Britannia was the sort of claimant that other claimants would have long since chewed up and spat out, and while Gino had conceded and felt uncomfortable doing so then, now that he was gazing directly upon the First Prince's carefully coiffed light brown hair, his well-groomed beard, his slate-grey eyes and the fine grey suit that was draped about his tall, broad-shouldered frame, any sort of hesitation he might have had was gone—he agreed, wholeheartedly.

The way the Crown Prince was sat upon the throne made it seem like it dwarfed him, and the effect being so different from how the throne always seemed to be struggling to contain the sheer magnificence of His Majesty's presence, despite the fact that father and son were so alike in build and stature, was so starkly apparent that if Gino thought so, he was certain that even the lowliest of servants in the unseen periphery of the throne room thought much the same, to say nothing of the cunning, conniving assemblage who'd been trained to spot things like this almost since before some of them could even speak. And to make matters all that much worse, it seemed that the man himself noticed as much; his brow was furrowed, and his lips were set into a frown, expressions that would have looked thunderous on His Majesty, but seemed only boyish and petulant upon his firstborn. He'd heard for most of his life about how much people expected for the Second Princess to wholly outstrip the First Prince, and frankly, if this was what those people had been seeing in the ineffectual Crown Prince for so many years now, Gino found he couldn't fault their logic.

As if merely thinking about the Devil brought her to the fore, movement to the side of the dais took hold of Gino's gaze, arresting his attention; and sure enough, there stood and moved Her Excellency the Prime Minister Princess Friederike, to whom Prince Odysseus's grey eyes were darting every few seconds, as if he was seeking some manner of reassurance from his younger sister. And in contrast to the First Prince, who was bland and muted from his features to his slightly slouching posture to the colour and the make of his clothes, to the point where he even made his épaulettes look boring, Princess Friederike was blazing in her radiant brilliance; her neckline was low, cresting only the very top of her full breasts, which were supported by a gold-brocaded bodice that seemed to Gino's admittedly only semi-trained eye to be boned in its structure, and her slender skirt was a cascade of immaculate white silk, flecked throughout with gold, and parted to the side in a manner that left a single long, ivory leg rather scandalously visible. Around her otherwise bare shoulders, to which her unbound hair cascaded in a flood of fine, wavy pale gold, a mantle settled, decorated quite heavily with pure white feathers—though at this distance (or indeed at any distance) Gino couldn't tell whether they were dove feathers, goose feathers, or swan feathers—and despite the unbound state of her golden hair, those same feathers were still carefully placed among the wavy locks. Her sleeves were long, their forms fitting very closely to her arms, ending just past her wrists, and her hands were bare to display her elegant fingers (a trait Gino, strangely enough—he didn't think he spent all that much time looking at women's hands, though perhaps the fact that she'd reached one out to him after laying him out made more of an impression than he'd given the event credit for—recognised she shared with her younger sister, Princess Justine) and their finely-manicured nails. There was a lot of symbolism on display with her, that much was clear, and Gino was prepared to parse precisely none of it; yet, here she was, bold as brass, with the Crown Prince none-too-subtly taking his cues from her, and not the other way around.

"Well now," said Anya from right beside him, sounding almost amazed. "It looks like someone's out for blood…"

"…How do you figure?" asked Gino, leaning down in an attempt at discretion. This had never been his strong suit, and because he was the son of a ducal family that had strong blood ties with one of the most prominent lineages in the Empire in the form of the House of Ashford, and was good at fighting besides, it had been allowed to let slide; the House of Alstreim, on the other hand, were marquesses, and while they were high enough in rank for it not to have raised eyebrows for Gino and Anya to have been playmates, the disparity in status was sufficient for Anya to not have been allowed such a luxury, no matter how well she might have done in combat training.

"Friends, Britannians, countrymen," began the Second Princess suddenly, striding forth at some sort of directive that Gino had clearly missed, and thus cutting off any chance of Anya answering his question. "Many of you have surely noticed the…conspicuous absence of some of our most estimable personages, in the form of both His Majesty and the indefatigable, stalwart Ser Bismarck Waldstein, the Knight of One. We beg, however, that you allow us to assuage your worries; at this very moment, good peers, His Imperial Majesty and Ser Bismarck are merely attending to a dire and confidential matter of state. So critical is this matter, in fact, that it demands the whole of their undivided attention; and so, until their safe return, which we shall await in all piety and faithful loyalty to crown and country both, the duties of temporary regency fall to our esteemed Crown Prince, His Imperial Highness Odysseus eu Britannia, First Prince of the Realm, who is now, by the grace of His Majesty, ordained as the Lord Regent of the Holy Britannian Empire!"

There was a brief pause among the peerage, barely more than a heartbeat, but by the time it ended, with a single courtier's clapping signalling that the whole of the crowd of nobles was meant to break out into enthusiastic applause, which they did in short order, it felt as though it had lasted the span of a lifetime. Gino let out a tense breath along with it, but that didn't alleviate the sense that a razor-sharp blade was now held at the back of his neck, waiting to draw the life out of him with a single errant swipe.

"Now, we do appreciate how sudden this shift is; thus should we like to provide further assurances to you, the peers, who are the beating heart of this great empire," Princess Friederike continued smoothly, once the applause had died down enough so that she didn't have to shout to be heard over it. "And in the interest of that noblest of ends, I have offered to my dear elder brother, the Lord Regent, all the aid and the assistance that it is within my power as prime minister to grant his nascent interim rule. But, regrettably, if I am to aid my dear brother to the fullest extent of my power, I must dispense with many other duties, and in so doing, I must sacrifice one of the several offices I now hold."

That got their undivided attention—the promise of power to be gained was like blood in the water, as far as these people were concerned. It was almost comical, how swiftly and how readily they all perked up at the mention of it.

"And so, with the authorisation of His Imperial Highness the Lord Regent, I hereby shed the title of Minister of the Interior, and its attendant bureaus," declared the Prime Minister, folding her hands across her abdomen, and favouring the assemblage with a small, charming smile. "In my place, I name my dear sister, Her Royal Highness Marrybell mel Britannia, Fifth Princess of the Realm, as my successor, and appoint her to serve in this esteemed office to dispense all concomitant duties for the good of this empire, our homeland, and of His Majesty."

There was another brief moment of absolute silence—astonishment, perhaps, or even dismay, which laced itself into too many of the onlookers for Gino to feasibly count them all—but it was a short-lived sensation, and its passing was heralded by a returned smattering of applause, especially when two women, both the princess who had been named and her Knight of Honour, stepped forth from the crowd. He would freely admit that he was nowhere near the most politically-minded young scion he knew and with whom he interacted on a daily basis, but even Gino had heard of Empress Flora mel Britannia, renowned as the most gregarious and kindest of His Majesty's consorts; and thus, by extension, had he heard of her daughter, who was not only openly involved with her own younger half-sister in the form of Princess Euphemia, but with her childhood friend and knight, Dame Oldrin, Heiress Zevon, the daughter and only living child of one of his soon-to-be colleagues, the Knight of Six, Olivia Zevon—though that much exposure likely had more to do with the fact that the status of 'the princess and her knight' as a recurring romantic archetype, as far as Britannian culture was concerned, compounded with the lurid nature of two would-be rival claimants to the throne being openly romantically involved to create one of the most gossiped-about units among the whole of the aristocracy, than any true association Gino might have had with any one of them.

"Well, they certainly look the part, we have to give them that much," Anya remarked, and Gino did not by any means disagree; Princess Marrybell was as gorgeous as she was stately, her gown striking quite a clear resemblance to her elder sister's daring number, save for the obvious lack of both the leg slit and the mantle, as well as the resulting breast window—though the dress's colour scheme, scarlet and crimson with gold trim, rendered it very nearly as striking—while Dame Oldrin looked every bit as much the subject of a bodice-ripper as rumour would have painted her, with her black riding boots, her charcoal grey breeches, and her buttoned black tailcoat very clearly not denoting military dress, even as her aiguillette, épaulettes, and the winged sword pin of a Britannian Knight of Honour upon her lapel all remained clear indicators of the status she held, being the personal bodyguard of a member of the Imperial Family. Even their hair was done to contrast each other—the princess's set in a modest bun, fletched with the chest-plumage of a robin, and her knight's bound in a high tail with a length of crimson ribbon.

But that consideration hadn't been the only thing that Anya speaking up had prompted him to think about, and even as he nodded his assent to his best friend, while the pair won free of the press of ambitious courtiers for the princess to accept for herself the honour of her position, Gino found his mind circling back to the point of their conversation just prior to the announcement. "Anya."

"Speaking," Anya snarked at him.

"How do you figure that Her Excellency is 'out for blood'?" Gino asked for a second time, brushing past the rosette's sardonic affect for once instead of engaging with it.

"What, besides the fact that she's chosen to wear something that at this point is associated with who is openly her favourite little sister, our classmate, might I remind you, who's currently either knee-deep in the brush or six feet under?" Anya rejoined quietly.

"What do you mean…?" he asked, his tone a little warier this time. It seemed that there were layers to the context that he was missing, which filled him with a not entirely unfamiliar sensation of trepidation.

"…Right, right, I keep forgetting that you don't have friends who drag you out to the opera every so often," Anya sighed with a heavy roll of her shoulders. "That feathered mantle that goes into long sleeves? Princess Justine's opera gowns usually featured that, in black instead of white. That Princess Friederike is wearing a feathered mantle, then, is about as obvious and combative a show of support as you can get. As to the rest…well, 'beauty is a blade.'"

It took a moment for Gino to register the use of the aphorism—it wasn't an especially common one nowadays, during this age of relative peace—but once he did, he nodded, taking in the Prime Minister's garments with new eyes, as she all but guided the uncomfortable-looking Lord Regent through the ceremony of swearing their little sister into her new office, Dame Oldrin standing vigil just to her side. Taken in that light, Gino could certainly see what Anya was getting at: he could easily imagine, were this the Emblem of Blood, that Princess Friederike attiring herself in the way she currently was would be tantamount to bearing the regalia of war.

The ceremony, brief as it was, came to a mercifully swift conclusion, and as Princess Marrybell rose from her lowered position, turning in a flutter of livid red to regard the rest of the court, once again was the gesture greeted with a round of polite, performative applause. Her Knight of Honour came to stand behind her once again, stepping to her royal lover's left shoulder, a knight's position, the side of the shield-hand that symbolically guarded her blind spot from her adversaries, and the new Minister of the Interior abided in silence until the applause died down. It was, as far as Gino knew, customary for a new official, once deputised and sworn in at a session of court, to make some manner of brief address—a flurry of half-meant pleasantries that was a formality at best—but at once, he got the creeping feeling of the razor again, and with it came the instinctive understanding that what was to come would be nothing of the sort.

"Thank you, thank you, my friends and peers," greeted Princess Marrybell, her voice crisp and clear as she spoke, the result of years upon years of elocution lessons and vocal training. "It is surely an honour, to be entrusted with such a responsibility as this office I now bear, under which our indefatigable Prime Minister has laboured for many a year, dispatching her duties with an enviable efficiency. I can only hope that I should fill the role half so well as she.

"It is, as well, an enduring sorrow that certain persons of note must, for the sake of dispatching their matters of state, be absent from this moment. It is a terrible thing for the Imperial Family to stand divided, to be apart and alone from one another. Such isolation, one may be given to recall, as gave rise to the Reign of Ruin and the Emblem of Blood, in which the sacred bond of kin was broken; and for that trespass, that transgression of common country and consanguinity, it was the realm which bled," said the princess, and it was undeniably impressive how well she made her voice project throughout the whole of the audience hall, which could hardly be described as anything but 'cavernous'. Gino probably had twice her lung strength, he wagered (though he'd hardly bet against Dame Oldrin, who had probably held his level of proficiency since she was half his age—the perks of being groomed for knighthood since childhood by a Knight of the Round, he supposed), and yet he didn't think he'd have been able to make himself heard over such a large expanse nearly so well as she did, and surely not with so little in the way of visible effort. "With the aid of His Majesty's wisdom, we have staunched the bleeding, and we have bandaged the wound, aye; and yet, it would be a mistake to believe that an injury so grievous as had nearly toppled our beloved homeland could ever be healed so swiftly, and certainly without ample complication. Most ruinous of all is the skilled blade which is turned upon itself. We devour that we might replenish the blood we have lost, but we must remain vigilant, lest the wicked wound turn to rot and fester.

"Would that I had words of assurance to grant you, my countrymen, my fellow Britannians, at this, the moment of my inauguration," the Fifth Princess continued, and Gino looked around just to be sure that he wasn't crazy after all, and that this was turning out to be every bit as ominous as his gut feelings warned him it was going to be. And indeed, as he looked around the chamber at all those who were gathered within it, he witnessed that there was an uneasy question that began to be reflected more and more in the eyes of the elegantly-dressed courtiers: Where, exactly, is this speech going…? "But it seems as though it would be in remarkably poor form for me to begin my time in office with falsehood, when already there is so much deceit that eats away at the foundation of our empire, when there remain parts of our land that bleed the land itself, when such bloodletting can be ill-afforded, lest we bear the appearance of weakness in the eyes of the world. Ill-news is an ill-guest, as is known; and yet still, it must needs be heard.

"The pressures of our elder sister's many concurrent offices were beyond her, as it is and shall be beyond any of us, His Majesty included," said the newly-ordained Minister of the Interior, her slender form shifting to fold both of her bare hands at the small of her back. Her delicate chin tilted up just enough, and the resulting effect was as immediate as it was profound. "No other could do as she has done without all of us falling into the spiral of ruin, and certainly not for half so long. And yet, in the midst of this, this rot, this remnant of bygone strife, has shown itself once again. Only with steadfast vigilance and the most decisive of action may this corruption be excised, like a boil being lanced, a festering sore being drained. Lest it be the absolute end of us, my friends, we must cut it out like a cancer, and abide none other to take its place, no matter how familiar a face such an end might wear.

"And so it is with a heavy heart that I must begin my service to crown and country in this way, with the announcement of the formation of the Chivalric Order of Glinda," declared Princess Marrybell; and in the very next moment, as a collective stir rose up from among the audience, the court awash in wild gossip and speculation that was almost certainly defamatory, Dame Oldrin stepped forth, so that she was now level with her charge and lover. "This decision is not made lightly, nor from whole cloth; for indeed, I shall say also that the first duty of the Glinda Knights, effective immediately, is the thorough investigation of the affairs of the Marquess of Greater Virginia and Chief General of the Imperial Army, Reginald Hargreeves."

If there was a stir before, then Gino felt like it wouldn't be inaccurate to say that it was building into a clamour. Not that he could blame them—Princess Juliette had confided in him about her worries that her sister was being sabotaged, that the effort to reinforce her was being worked against, that there were those at court who wanted her dead and buried, and given that Gino's corps showed no sign of proper arming, or even proper staffing, and certainly not in time for them to ship out anytime close to the deadline, the young nobleman who would be the Knight of Three found it increasingly more difficult to argue that the anxieties of the Sixth Princess were in any way unfounded…

But for Field Marshal Hargreeves to be in any way responsible…!

Suddenly and simultaneously, so much and so little made sense.

"It has come to our attention, from an extremely reliable source, that Field Marshal Hargreeves has begun to reach beyond his station, and conspires with forces which seek to ruin our glorious empire, whose machinations shall only see us dragged back into the very same writhing pit of discord and inevitable self-destruction from the brink of which only His Majesty's ascension and capable rule managed to pull us, and with us, the whole of the realm, back." And at this, Princess Marrybell gestured to her knight, who now still stood tall and dutiful beside her. "With the Grand Master of the Order of Glinda, my Knight of Honour and dearest friend, Dame Oldrin, Heiress of the House of Zevon, taking primary charge of this inquiry, my countrymen, you may all rest assured that we shall most certainly get to the bottom of this ghastly affair; and at the end of this, if His Excellency the Chief General, Marquess Hargreeves, is truly found to be guilty of conspiring to undermine Britannia itself—to, whether by design or by incident of greed and naked ambition, present us all the more clearly to the likes of Europia United, those upjumped heirs of Robespierre and Napoleon, and the Chinese Federation as nothing more than a cake to be carved, that our rivals the world over might cut away for themselves each a pound of our flesh as a nation, as an empire, then his punishment shall be meted out to the fullest and most appropriate extent of the law.

"Either way, justice shall be done," Princess Marrybell concluded, severe as the grave. "This much, at least, I promise to you all."

With that, she curtseyed to the court, the gesture heralding a much more genuine—certainly more layered—round of applause; the ovation was threaded through with feelings of apprehension and fear, yes, but also with intrigue.

Gino didn't know what that note in particular might mean; he had only the vague suggestion in the back of his mind that it wasn't anything good.

He stood there, dumbstruck and trying in vain to parse the discordant mixture of layered emotions that began to mire all the highborn of the crowd even as he stood at its periphery, a complicated mélange of sentiments that made the air around him feel thick enough to swim in, when he registered someone tapping him on the shoulder very firmly.

Startled, and somewhat ashamed that he'd gotten so immersed in this thing that he'd let someone sneak up on him—Anya only picked up on it after he reacted, so at least he wasn't alone in his dereliction of duty, cold comfort though that may have been—Gino whirled around to regard…

…Oh…!

"Hello, cousin. I daresay it's far past time we were properly acquainted…"

—

Anya Alstreim had been prepared for a lot of things to happen today. One didn't make it very far in the circles in which the circumstances of her birth and lineage dictated that she run without cultivating, at some point, a healthy expectation of the unexpected; even now, as she'd just borne witness to firsthand, there were quite enough ways in which affairs of the Imperial Court could turn topsy-turvy for it to be quite prudent for her to preemptively brace herself for some new upset each and every time she set foot on the grounds of the Imperial Palace. Today had already proven weirder than most, of course, but it was still well within expected parameters given the environment, if only just so; running into the woman she was now staring at with wide eyes, however, on top of granting her (or perhaps afflicting her with) an increasingly acute sense of empathy for all manner of cornered prey animals, was very far outside of the boundaries of what she was prepared to deal with today.

Anya knew who Carmilla, Duchess Ashford—or rather, she supposed it was properly Her Royal Highness Princess-Consort Carmilla vi Britannia now—was, of course; the same 'friends' who regularly dragged her out to the opera were responsible for that. She was a regular at the Pendragon Opera House whenever she was in town, usually with her then-fiancée, Princess Justine, on her arm, and the gaggle of debutantes with whom Anya was basically required to associate (she actually did like most of them well enough, they just didn't really have all that much in common to have much in the way of meaningful conversations about) fawned over the woman with increasing frequency. It hadn't taken her very long to gather the knowledge that, among the circles of young highborn women in Pendragon, then-Duchess Carmilla was considered to be quite the heart-throb, and she'd be lying if she said she didn't see the appeal; but while Princess Justine was polite enough, as she knew from the academy days, the two had long since made the gist of their dynamic abundantly clear with how they comported themselves in public, and really, as far as Anya was concerned, any woman capable of topping Justine vi Britannia on what appeared to be a regular basis was one hundred and one percent not someone to fuck with.

There was no way that Carmilla vi Britannia was anything but twenty kilometres of bad news, and the fact that she'd approached them, with a smile that didn't even reach her cheeks, let alone her eyes, plastered upon her (admittedly gorgeous) face meant that they were knee-deep in the shit, so to speak.

"Hello, cousin," she began cordially, her rippling alto smooth and even, its affect almost relentlessly polite—which, even if Anya didn't personally know how fucking terrifying the woman's pillow princess of a wife was, would have had alarm bells vibrating their way out of her skull with how hard they were ringing. "I daresay it's far past time we were properly acquainted."

"You're Aunt Irina's granddaughter, aren't you?" Gino, eternal knucklehead that he was, replied, seeming for all the world as if he were somehow blissfully unaware of exactly how thin the ice they were treading right now must be, probationary Knights of the Round or no. "Carmilla, right?"

The woman's thin, painted-crimson lips twitched up into a sardonic, mocking half-smile (it wasn't quite a smirk), her brow, which was neither fine nor strong, though it was a deeper shade than the lustrous golden hair that fell unbound in a single voluminous wave to her shoulders, cocking itself halfway towards her hairline. Her posture, which until now had been fairly neutral, shifted, such that she propped a single white-gloved hand upon her flaring, strong hip, slightly displacing the tails of her black coat in the process and drawing attention to the way her similarly black breeches framed the obvious and potent musculature of her thighs. She was amused, for certain, but it was by no means an encouraging sight; the way her piercing diamond eyes glittered gave off too much of an impression of a ballet recital conducted at the very far edge of what one might consider 'sanity' for that. "That I am. Though I have reason to suspect that we have a great deal more in common, you and I, than some simple matter of shared ancestry."

"Oh? How so?" Gino asked, his sky-blue eyes flicking across her shoulders and registering the fact that the shoulders of her tailcoat were adorned with golden épaulettes with an increasingly furrowed brow.

It was at this moment that Anya realised, with a sense of dawning horror, that Gino and his cousin had never been at court together at the same time, and given how good her best friend was at being almost dangerously out of the loop with happenings among the peerage, there was a good chance that he somehow didn't know that…

"Well, my wife, for one," the princess-consort stated bluntly, slightly cocking her head. "The three of you were classmates, after all."

"Princess Justine," Anya supplied before Gino could ask another inane question.

Gino's eyes shot wide at that, while his cousin merely chuckled, shaking her head. "Quite so. But I hardly think the Imperial Palace is an appropriate place to have a friendly chat, as it were. Would the two of you be so kind as to join me for luncheon? I have a car that should be waiting to take us to Belial Palace. We can discuss freely there, without having to worry about unfriendly ears."

"We'd be honoured," Anya cut in, heading off Gino and fixing him with a meaningful look. To his credit, he seemed content to take her lead in this—which, of course, he generally was—and after a beat, he was nodding along with her. "Just let me make sure my valet knows…"

"But of course," said the blonde, her free hand raising in some manner of coded beckoning gesture. "Juliette and Kallen will be heading out to go on a date after court, and Euphy's here to support Marrybell and Oldrin, so thankfully, I daresay we ought to have the run of the place."

"That sounds good," Gino replied, taking his cue flawlessly, even though he likely had no idea why, exactly, he was being pushed in this direction. Oh, he might have some suspicions here and there, but Anya knew her friend well enough to know when he was just taking her word for it.

Princess-Consort Carmilla's painted lips lengthened from that half-smile into a full smirk, and she turned on her heel with a precision that a career infantryman would find difficult to replicate, waving them onward. "Come along, then."

The phrase had all the weight of a command and all the gravitas of a threat, and Anya found herself following the blonde before she'd fully registered why she was doing so. Of course, she would have done so anyways—probationary Knights of the Round or not, if Princess Justine had shown them anything at all, it was that that position did not constitute impunity, not by any means, so it mattered that it was clearly a bad idea to antagonise the person Anya was certain was one of the most dangerous women in the empire, who seemed by all accounts to have the backing of the one true most dangerous woman in the empire—but it was, admittedly, a little unsettling all the same, how easily and unhesitatingly Anya followed that order. Her saving grace, if indeed there was one to be found here, was that Gino had stepped forth alongside her, so she didn't have to face this situation, which promised to be difficult, alone.

The third Princess vi Britannia led them through the thinly-disguised press of bodies with a deft sort of confidence that had courtiers parting before them without her even needing to say a word, and Anya did not fail to notice how the blonde winked at a few of them as she passed, nor how their eyes widened near to the point of bulging out of their skulls as their faces went ashen-grey. She filed that away quietly, the way Princess Carmilla's smirk turned vicious in a split second before moving on, the terror with which those to whom she winked responded to it, and before long, she noticed that another person fell into lock-step with them as they worked their way out of the crowd.

He was shorter than the princess-consort, the man who joined them, and his crimson hair hung near his shoulders, chin-length and unbound. The strength of his brow complemented the sapphire colour of his almond-shaped eyes, and his features were a mix between high cheekbones and flat planes and sharp angles that made his highborn Britannian lineage quite clear (though the hair colour admittedly did do most of the heavy lifting when it came to 'highborn'), even as the traces of something distinctly other added a touch of what some might call 'the exotic' to his appearance.

He was a pretty man, really—almost extraordinarily so—and the way the black suit he wore fit onto his slender, lean frame certainly did his appearance a great many favours. But more interesting to Anya, in particular, was how he moved as if he belonged alongside them, eyes forward and focused, the briefcase in his hand granting him the air of a solicitor. Who was this man?

"Heiress Alstreim and Heir Weinberg will be joining us for luncheon," said Princess Carmilla, her sudden speech startling Anya slightly. "Please inform her valet, and then join us at the car."

"I took the liberty of doing so when you summoned me, your highness," the man replied with a tone that was best described as 'deferential,' and a perfunctory nod.

"Wonderful. Exceptional foresight," said the blonde, nodding in turn. Then, without missing a step, figuratively or literally, she said, "Cousin, Heiress Alstreim, this is my capable retainer, Naoto, Lord Stadtfeld. He'll be joining us on the way back, if that's alright."

Anya didn't buy for a moment that that was any more than a pleasantry, that if either of them really objected to the man's presence, it would be heeded; and it wasn't even all that nefarious, either—a retainer was considered a peer or courtier's second pair of eyes, ears, and hands, and because they were, as a result of that, essentially treated as if they and their liege were for all intents and purposes the same person, their presence wasn't really considered any sort of breach of privacy—but she still couldn't shake the feeling of being corralled, or perhaps even cornered. But she had been raised as a Britannian heiress, and so none of these thoughts showed themselves upon her face; instead, she nodded. "Of course. Well met."

"Hey, nice to meet ya," Gino chimed in, a touch awkwardly.

"A pleasure," Lord Stadtfeld replied with another perfunctory nod, his tone making it clear that he wasn't particularly interested in going all that far beyond pleasantries. Which, to be fair, was about what Anya might have expected—he was the retainer to royalty, after all. That had to be an awful lot of work, so she couldn't really blame him for being maybe a bit terse.

The sun was out and high over Pendragon, and the winter chill had already begun to give way to an early spring, so when they stepped out of the huge redwood doors to the Imperial Palace, it was not so cool as to require extra layers, and not so warm that it was uncomfortable in their current garb. A breeze carried the smell of brine in from the bay at the other end of the city, and it fluttered through all of their coats, their tails lifting in the gust. Clouds there were, perhaps, but not nearly enough to be considered even remotely overcast—rather, it was just enough to distinguish the city from the shrinking desert to the north. All in all, it was a flawless day; and yet, as they descended down the steps after Princess Carmilla to a sleek-looking black Rolls-Royce limousine at street-level that awaited them, the door open, and the driver dressed in full uniform, with the peaked cap, goggles, gloves, and all, she couldn't help feeling the dread begin to gnaw at her, while Gino didn't seem to be feeling much more than mild unease.

That was fine. She felt more than enough discomfort for the both of them.

"Thank you, Taliesin," Princess Carmilla shot off briskly as she stepped into the backseat of the car, the motion smooth and practised. Lord Stadtfeld stood aside to let the two of them in, and Gino brushed past Anya on his longer legs to get in before her; then she stepped into the cabin of the vehicle, followed in short order by the retainer, behind whom the driver closed the door.

Shortly thereafter, they were gliding off through the streets of Pendragon.

"…So," Gino began after a few seconds of portentous silence. "How's married life treating you?"

Anya fought the urge to plant her face into the palm of her hand. She won that fight, but only just.

"I wouldn't know," Princess Carmilla replied airily. "What time my wife and I did have together in the wake of our wedding was mostly overshadowed by her preparations for being shipped off to war."

Even Gino had the presence of mind to wince at that blunder.

But then, it did give her something of an opening, so there was that. Taking advantage of that, she leaned in, and asked the princess-consort, "How are you holding up, your highness?"

The smile that Princess Carmilla gave her then was quite a bit more genuine, though it still didn't manage to reach her eyes. "About as well as can be expected, under the circumstances. I have absolute faith in her, of course—I've known my Justine since we were children—but that only makes it so much easier to bear, I'm afraid."

"I can imagine…" Anya muttered in response.

Something flashed in the princess-consort's eyes, some strange mixture of mirth and fury, and her smirk returned, sharper than ever. Anya didn't know whether to be reassured or further on her guard—this much, it seemed, was completely candid. "With all due respect, Heiress Alstreim, I sincerely doubt that."

Whatever Anya might have said next was irrelevant; the words shrivelled and died in her throat, to the point where she only narrowly managed to avoid choking upon them.

"Your highness," Lord Stadtfeld spoke up, his tone almost…chiding?

Princess Carmilla sighed, leaning against the door on her side of the cabin, propping her elbow up against the sill, and then resting her cheek upon her closed, gloved fist. "My apologies, Heiress Alstreim. I do appreciate the sentiment, of course, but as you have clearly seen, my nerves are nonetheless more than a little frayed right now, especially on that particular subject. It is always difficult when my wife is apart from me; even more so when the circumstances of the situation render long-distance communication such a complicated endeavour…"

With one blunder each under their belts, neither Gino nor Anya were particularly keen on trying to salvage the conversation. It was for propriety's sake, and for propriety's sake alone, that Anya managed to force out from between her lips the pleasantry, "It's no trouble, your highness."

The silence that pursued them throughout the rest of the ride down to Saint Darwin Street, and thus on to Belial Palace, was tense, and it was more than a little awkward; but given that both of them, on some level, understood the tenuous nature of their position, that was immensely preferable to either of them once again taking the risk of sticking their proverbial foot in their mouth. Neither of them were willing to test the blonde royal's patience any further than they already had.

Belial Palace was almost Italian in its architecture, Anya couldn't help but notice, as they came out from the man-made forest that concealed the compound and its driveway from the view of the street itself; she'd seen its like in pictures of summer homes owned by doges of Venice and by members of the House of Medici, one of the old noble families from before the Age of Napoleon. Its belvedere towers boasted what looked like a commanding view of the surrounding grounds, and the pale grey stone of its walls in the view of the bright sunlight only added to the grandeur of its edifice. She'd admittedly halfway expected that the place Princess Justine called 'home' would be some towering, forbidding citadel of dark stone, with gargoyles and stone carvings of ancient and unspeakable horrors performing terrible and awe-inspiring tableaus, the citadel's many spires piercing the sky like so many spears arranged into a palisade—a striking fortress, a Gothic castle that might host an evil sorceress or a slumbering dragon or a wicked queen in some children's tale. It would have seemed very much her style—and Anya maintained that it still seemed as though it would have been much more her style than the unexpectedly innocuous (relatively speaking) architecture of the true Belial Palace ultimately proved to be.

At least the fountain in the centre of the courtyard fit what Anya knew of the woman—she'd had to study quite a lot of art and art history in her younger years, so that she wouldn't embarrass her lineage with her lack of culture if she chose any path in life apart from the military, where such lapses were largely seen as much more permissible (if only because soldiers, particularly highborn soldiers, were seen in large part as living exemplars of Britannian culture in and of themselves); thus, she recognised at a glance the scene that had been taken from watercolour and rendered into sculpture for the sake of the waterworks here…

Anya's observation and speculation came to an abrupt end as the automobile slowed to a halt, with the driver exiting the vehicle and circling around to open the rear doors for the limousine's four occupants. Doing her best not to look directly at the two passengers who really held all the power here—that being, of course, Princess Carmilla and her retainer—she all but scrambled out of the vehicle once the door had been opened for them, coming face-to-face with a pretty Japanese…Eleven woman in a maid outfit, who stood at the front step atop a small flight of steps that led to the porch, before the open double-doors of the building, with her hands folded at the base of her abdomen, watching them with the air of a raptor sizing up her unsuspecting prey far below.

"You doing alright?" Gino asked, leaning down and lowering his voice so that only the two of them could hear what he said.

"I'll be fine," she half-huffed, half-sighed, her attention diverted to him for the moment. "Just…be careful, alright?"

"I'll do my best," Gino replied seriously, without a single hint of mirth about him.

"Welcome to Belial Palace, my home here in Pendragon," declared Princess Carmilla, breezing past them with her retainer in tow, even as her driver climbed back into the limousine and drove it off. As if she hadn't even noticed their hesitation and trepidation, she swiftly began to ascend the stone steps to the front doors of the palace. "Both of you, enter freely, and of your own will. This is Shinozaki Sayoko, Head Maid and my body servant. Our majordomo, Taliesin, who is my wife's body servant, will be around shortly; he's just gone to park the car."

The maidservant, once she had been named, curtseyed gracefully, but the mannerly gesture didn't make her brown eyes any less falconine, or her stare any less disturbingly piercing; and Anya couldn't help but notice how she drew just that much closer to her liege lady as the blonde princess drew near, stopping right beside her. Her first thought, an uncharitable one, was of a mistress—it would hardly have been the first time—but immediately she dismissed it as a fanciful notion. No, by all the methods she'd had drilled into her head since the days of her earliest childhood memories for assessing such sights, the proximity was protective, with a strangely maternal bend to it, to boot. The posture she assumed, perhaps even by habit, was an overt threat: bring her harm, and I shall rain it tenfold upon you.

Thankfully, Anya's civilities had not wholly abandoned her, even in a situation this potentially dangerous; she swept an arm across her own lower abdomen and bowed to the proper angle of deference before the proper courtesies sprang from her lips. "We are honoured to be guests in your home, your highness."

There was that flash again in the princess-consort's diamond-blue eyes, and she nodded slightly as she smirked sharply. "So you are. Come along, then. It's rude to linger at thresholds."

As surreptitiously as she could manage, Anya lightly elbowed Gino in the side, not hard enough to hurt, but just hard enough that she felt the flesh against her own under the layers of cloth that made up their garments, reassuring herself that yes, he was still here by her side, and she wasn't here to face this alone.

Bracing herself, she did as she had been bidden, ascending the steps with Gino right at her side, and stepping past the lady of the house and her chief maidservant as they passed at last into the grand foyer of Belial Palace proper.

The interior of the rounded foyer was a grand and foreboding bit of architecture, with slabs of black and white marble in a chequerboard formation upon the floor, mortared together with what looked like pure gold, and not gilded grout like Anya's own childhood home, light fixtures upon the walls that looked like gas lamps in the older style of things, illuminating striking paintings set up upon the otherwise soothing green walls; the paintings themselves, however, were far from comforting. The Garden of Earthly Delights took up the preponderance of one such wall, positioned adjacent to the twisted humanity of the European Francis Bacon's work, and opposite Blake's Great Red Dragon paintings on the opposite wall, which were themselves adjacent to illustrations from Blake's Jerusalem on one side, and some of the paintings of Florian the Lost Artist on the other—the same Edmund Florian who had captured scenes from the Emblem of Blood in a manner that made them align strangely well with all of the other paintings on display, which seemed to share a unifying thread in that they were equal parts lurid and esoteric in nature. And wherever Anya looked, no matter how she looked at it, in not one of the unsettling pieces of art on display was there a single depiction of uncomplicated beauty to be found.

"You'll have to forgive the décor, I'm afraid," said Princess Carmilla, as she stepped past the two of them, staring rather gormlessly about the room at the art on display here, and pivoted to face the pair in the exact centre of the room, her hip jutted out confidently and arms akimbo. "In order to better manage my moods, I've taken up a bit of redecoration, you see,in anticipation of my wife's safe and victorious return, and she does so love these rather vivid pieces. She considers them to be quite…stimulating. Though, to tell you the truth, her enthusiasm for them, I suspect, has begun to rub off on me as well. The stairways here in the foyer lead up to the second floor, of course, though I'm afraid the main stairwell is a bit further into the building. I'll be hosting you in my parlour, however, and that's up a bit, so I ask that you stay close. Some of the staff here can be rather…skittish around strangers, you understand. I would hate for there to be some manner of incident."

Receiving the message very clearly—which was echoed by how the head maid circled around them to position herself at the edge of the room, but otherwise within her employer's blind spot, to her left, in the manner of a Knight of Honour—Anya nodded furiously, which Gino echoed, and then when the lady of the house mounted the stairs, with their polished ebony bannisters and black ash balusters, and began to ascend them, both of the probationary Knights of the Round rushed (within the boundaries of decorum, of course) to follow in her wake, rising to the second floor right behind her, with the head maid bringing up the rearguard.

The second floor was similar in its finery, and here too did marble provide flooring, with the walls here painted blue rather than green, but no less soothing a shade for it, and otherwise adorned richly with a great many paintings, few of them portraits of anyone Anya recognised. Here, she saw Millais's Ophelia, and there she glimpsed Dicksee's La Belle Damme Sans Merci, and yet further down was the nude figure of The Martyr of the Solway alongside Waterhouse's Boreas—all of them women, many of them suggestive in their content, though not all of them, and each representing a sort of ethereal, there-but-shouldn't-be beauty that surpassed the natural and the mundane and exposed an awesome dread at the roots of the sublime. She could grasp the underlying thread here, too—this was a very different artistic sensibility that was on display on this floor, more pre-Raphaelite than anything else, abandoning the viscerally esoteric for a depiction of desire that was powerful to the point of the obsessive, no matter how remote the subject may have seemed; and in that aspiration, that seeking and having, there was a definite underlying note of the profane.

If she had to guess, this was a gallery that Princess Carmilla had assembled herself, as a tribute to how she saw her new wife. That, or it was inspired by her, in which case… Yeah, Anya wasn't going to get anywhere near that. Nothing good could come out of psychoanalysing a woman who referred to Justine vi Britannia in such possessive terms—that much, Anya knew for certain.

They traversed that level without incident, ascending another flight of stairs before coming at last to the double-doors Princess Carmilla stopped at, pushing them open and ushering Gino and Anya out of the corridor and into the parlour, with its grey walls and deep blue carpeting and dark wood furniture, its large bookshelves full of titles that had clearly all been read at least once, with large windows on one wall to let a flood of natural light illuminate the interior, and a number of weapon displays upon the opposite wall.

It was almost on rote instinct that Anya sat herself down upon one of the two settees that had been arranged around the low table, taking the one closest to the door, as was customary for guests; after a beat, Gino sat alongside her, and Princess Carmilla circled around the low table to plop herself down upon the opposite settee with a soft sigh, arranging herself upon her seat into a semi-reclined posture that, in Anya's mind, practically oozed braggadocio. "Ah. Home at last…"

"I'll say," Gino opined, seeking once again to break the ice. "These are some nice accommodations you got here, cousin."

"The perks of a royal bride, you might say," Princess Carmilla replied airily, and though her smirk had been incredibly menacing every other time Anya had seen it, putting her very much on edge, this time, the expression communicated nothing more clearly than an overwhelming sense of gregarious sanguinity. "But then, I, myself, wouldn't exactly consider a Saint George's Square address to be particularly humble, either, dear cousin."

"It has its upsides, I won't deny that," Gino replied, leaning back in the settee himself and crossing his legs, spreading his arms across the back of the furniture. "But I have my doubts that you brought us all the way here just to flex. So, what can I do for you?"

Princess Carmilla's eyes went a bit wide at that, and she nodded, with an impressed-sounding hum. "That's very direct of you, Gino—may I call you Gino?"

"Everyone does," he replied with a shrug.

"Very well, then," she nodded. "But I won't say I don't appreciate a little directness here and there. I'd say that this has a lot less to do with what you can do for me than it does with what I can do for you. Or, I suppose, your paramour, as the case may be. As a show of good faith, if nothing else. Nishimura Ayame, I believe her name was…?"

The name shot a rod of steel through Gino's spine, and Anya couldn't blame him. From what he'd confided in her, it seemed that this was the second time in as many months that this closely-guarded secret of his had been sussed out—though, Anya had her suspicions about the commonality of the source between the two allied parties who had heretofore exposed their knowledge. "Is that a threat?"

Princess Carmilla, for her part, looked supremely unperturbed. "Hardly. If I had to choose one thing I've learned from my wife, whether it was a lesson she meant to impart or not, it's that it's very rarely a good idea to antagonise someone with whom you intend to work in any appreciable capacity. And personally, Gino, you and your friend Anya are worth far more to me as willing allies than as bitter enemies, or even as reluctant puppets. And if, for whatever reason, you don't believe me, my man will be here with proof in…oh, three, two, one…"

The doors to the parlour opened again, admitting two people—and it was at this point, and not at any point before (much to Anya's chagrin), that she realised that the woman who had been introduced to them as 'Shinozaki Sayoko' had all but vanished into thin air on the way here.

The first was the pretty-looking solicitor-cum-retainer they'd lost before (not that Anya had noticed that surreptitious departure, either) in the form of Lord Stadtfeld, holding under his arm what looked to be some kind of folio, which was thick with what Anya's work-weary eye recognised as paperwork.

The second was a decently tall woman—around one hundred eighty centimetres or so, to Anya's naked eye—and quite remarkably pale, but not to an alarming extent, with knee-high laced brown boots and black trousers, a dark red waistcoat over a white blouse with a ruffled jabot, pinned in place with a turquoise brooch, bevelled in immaculate silver. Her hands were shod in black gloves—which seemed to be a running theme with people who bore some direct relation to Princess Justine, the aversion to baring their hands—and her bone-white hair was bound with a black ribbon in a style reminiscent of the ways in which Princess Euphemia would wear her hair to sessions of court; yet, the deathly chill of her corpse-blue eyes were the end of any further comparisons that otherwise might have been drawn between the two women, and though she was, on paper, quite startlingly beautiful, that beauty melted away, somewhat, in the face of how little Anya could read from her face or from the easy languor of her posture.

"Ah, Mireya! How lovely of you to join us," Princess Carmilla called forth with a warmth that was as startling as the half-lidded eyes of the woman it was addressed to. "Come, sit. I didn't forget to tell you that I'd be entertaining Heir Weinberg and Heiress Alstreim for luncheon here, did I?"

"You did not forget," the woman, Mireya, replied smoothly, her voice bizarrely difficult to place beyond the fact that it sounded pleasantly feminine. "And I would be glad to, thank you."

"Wonderful," the blonde effused, her smirk broadening to a fond smile, which did interesting things to her already staggering beauty. And then, as the newcomer circled around to take a position on the settee next to Princess Carmilla, she spoke again. "Naoto, please, sit down and join us. Gino, Heiress Alstreim, I would like you both to meet Mireya—she's the one who instructed both Suzaku and my wife in the arts of combat, and is a valued member of this household besides."

"My first students," Mireya confirmed casually. "And thus far, my very finest. I mean no offence, of course."

"There was none taken," dismissed Princess Carmilla. "I daresay that both Suzaku and my wife are on a level rather above that of a mere 'rare talent,' after all…"

And if that wasn't just the most absolutely terrifying thing that Anya had heard all week. She, Gino, and everyone else who had been at Ad Victoriam had witnessed well not only the monstrous levels of sheer martial prowess that Princess Justine and Kururugi Suzaku possessed, but also how well they imparted that same prowess onto their force-mates…and this woman was their combat instructor?!

Frankly, Anya felt as though it would have been much less scary to think that both Kururugi and the Fourth Princess had come out of the womb handling a sword like demons from Hell, if only because, at the very least, that didn't come with the implication that there was someone better than them that she might one day have to worry about facing on the field of battle.

While Anya was having her little internal freak-out at the prospect that the woman sitting across the table from her could even exist in the first place, however, Lord Stadtfeld had come to sit in the armchair directly adjacent to his employer—on her right-hand side, as was proper—and set the folio down upon the low table's surface, opening it to what was apparently the relevant bit of bureaucracy. "In short, my lord, these papers declare that an Eleven woman by the name of Nishimura Ayame has been deemed eligible for 'special considerations or otherwise extenuating circumstances,' and thus has been registered at the bureau in Area Eleven as an Honorary Britannian, with all the rights and privileges that entails, according to how that status is defined in Area Eleven. I've included, of course, the relevant literature to that end, but if I may offer any meaningful reassurances at all, Area Eleven's Honorary Britannian system is the best there is. My own mother is a beneficiary, and it's…allowed my family to be together again, in truth if not on paper. So if my word is worth anything to you, and I understand if it isn't, then believe me when I say that this is not in any way a bad thing, for you or for your paramour."

"The peers, of course, will still look at you strangely," Princess Carmilla added airily. "But it will be the oddity of a nobleman cavorting with his scullery maid, and not 'rutting with an animal,' so to speak. In short, it narrows down the amount of avenues your family has to pursue punitive action effectively against you through her by quite the considerable margin. And because our houses, that of Weinberg and Ashford, are in fact allied by way of my grandmother, my royal wedding, as well as the general 'rising star' status of the Ashford Foundation, and the House of Ashford along with it, provides an incentive to toe the line, as it were, instead of resorting to sabotage.

"I have effectively put her under my aegis, which is the long and short of it," the blonde concluded, gesturing absently with a gloved hand as she spoke. "But unfortunately for all of us, cousin, that aegis is by no means impermeable. Your house's willingness to cross mine strictly to save face by disciplining you is tied directly to the prestige enjoyed by my own house, and the one I share with my wife. Which means that it is in your best interest to act in my best interest.

"Fortunately, however, the inverse is also true," she said, almost as an afterthought, an addendum of the spoken word. "It is in my best interest, on multiple fronts, to act in your best interests as well. So, as our interests seem to be, as I've said, in complete and total alignment, I thought it would be a good idea to iron things out, you, your friend, and I, with regards to where we stand in relation to one another. Quid pro quo, as it were—an arrangement of mutual benefit."

Gino was silent for a long moment, his expression so graven as to be almost entirely inscrutable; yet Anya could see the muscle twitching at the bend of his jaw, a tic that would be invisible unless one knew just what they were looking for—which, of course, she did. Gino knew painfully well that his royal cousin had him by the balls, so to speak, and had elected not to squeeze seemingly out of some diluted form of altruism that was in truth simply enlightened self-interest. He knew she had him dead to rights—that it would be just about the easiest thing in the world for her to orchestrate a scandal that would have him and his prospects to join the Knights of the Round falling alongside Field Marshal Hargreeves—and yet, instead, she had come to him, and offered him an olive branch.

"Why are you doing this?" Anya found herself asking before she could think better of it, as Gino reached out to take the folio from the table, and flip through its pages to ascertain the veracity of its stated contents. "What you know could and would be the ruin of us, if spun correctly in court—especially given certain recent events."

"That I could," Princess Carmilla admitted casually, crossing her legs over each other as she shifted, and suddenly she'd reclaimed an echo of that menace that she had worn like a second skin throughout the duration of the car ride, all the way up to the third-floor parlour in which they now sat, itself. "But that would be rather monumentally wasteful of me, don't you think? And besides, Gino, my wife spoke rather highly of you, indeed. She tells me everything, you see—holds no secrets from me—and so I have heard of how well you conducted yourself as her classmate. I don't care about your scores, but that she would vouch for you? That means something. So you might consider this offer motivated by gratitude as well as by sheer force of practicality. There are, and were indeed, plenty of individuals who would have been only too eager to make life difficult for my wife; and so I wanted to thank you, my dear cousin, for going out of your way not to be one of them."

Just then, a knock on the door interrupted their conference, followed shortly thereafter by the doors opening to admit a strangely familiar-looking man, tall and slender, with long black hair tied at the small of his back, a pair of pince-nez perched before his startling scarlet eyes (of which only one was clearly visible as Anya looked at him) but otherwise dressed in such a way that he could only have been the majordomo, as well as the absent Princess Justine's body servant (which answered the question of where she'd seen him before—in the driver's uniform, taking care of the Rolls-Royce). It was strange for someone in such a high position in the household to be pushing a trolley stacked with cloche-covered dishes, delivering by himself what looked to be their midday meal, but she supposed it made a certain amount of sense for one of the royal households to keep the number of servants who could have been alone with food that was about to be served to an absolute minimum, if perhaps a bit old-fashioned.

The trolley rumbled to a halt, and deftly the majordomo set about the serving-vehicle, putting a few large platters on the low table and providing a stack of plates with an assortment of gleaming silverware of various sizes, alongside a number of crystal glasses which he filled with water from a silver carafe that he then placed upon that table. Then, with a jovial, showmanlike flourish, he removed the cloches one after another. "As this late February day has given way to an early spring, I thought it only appropriate to follow suit. Lamb shanks, braised in a red wine sauce; asparagus and spinach, sautéed liberally with lemon and garlic, respectively; mushroom risotto; and freshly-made bread and pesto, here for any who desire it."

"It sounds wonderful, Taliesin, thank you," Princess Carmilla complimented genuinely, prompting the majordomo to step away and bow at the waist with a smile that seemed on its face far too genuine to be anywhere near as menacing as it felt to witness.

"Of course, your highness," the man replied. "Please, enjoy."

With that, he departed, taking the trolley in tow; Princess Carmilla reached forth to grab a plate for herself from the top of the stack, as well as a fork and a knife, and put that all to the side slightly to take the larger utensils in hand, selecting from the large platters in sequence. "Come now, don't be shy. Take a plate for yourselves, and I'll pass the serving silver around so that we can all get fed. I didn't promise to provide luncheon idly, after all."

Uncharacteristically hesitant, Gino set aside the folio for now and complied with the directive he'd just been given, getting himself a plate and silver and passing a set to Anya as well, before he received the serving utensils from Lord Stadtfeld as they began to pass counter-clockwise to the five of them who were therein gathered. Anya wasted no time once she'd filled her own plate—it turned out that feeling as if she was balancing at a knife's edge for the better part of an hour did wonders for the appetite—and she bit back the urge to moan aloud at how good the meal tasted in her mouth, perking up what slumbering remnants of her hunger had remained dormant from her extremely light breakfast and causing her to tear into it all with a ravenous vengeance, her appetite kept mannerly only by sheer force of habit.

"You claim to be doing this as an act of good faith," said Gino, midway through the meal. "And yet, I can't help but notice that it still lands Ayame squarely within your power."

"Appropriate collateral guarantees accountability," the blonde replied without missing a beat. "And a deal without collateral, dear cousin, is called a 'gentleman's agreement' because only the gentry are naïve enough to agree to one. As it stands, we each have the other's lover within our power—albeit indirectly so in your case—and quite frankly, Gino, that's a better deal than you have any right to hope for."

She had a point there, and one look told Anya that Gino knew it as well as she did.

The blond sighed heavily, lowering his still-laden plate, and asked, "…What are your terms?"

From Gino Weinberg, that was as good as an agreement—and from the look on Princess Carmilla's face, she knew it as well as Anya did.

—

Marianne vi Britannia detested being underground.

This had been true ever since she'd been a child—since before she'd been herself in truth. The cool, dank, mouldering darkness that permeated such spaces deep beneath the earth, even when the technologies of man laboured to make them habitable, sent phantasmal hunger-pangs racing through her stomach, made her blood chill in her veins, and echoes of ancient, half-forgotten fear sent her pulse pounding in her ears. It was a constant reminder of the weakness of her past, of how she'd spent so much of her adult life trying in vain to outrun the labyrinthine caverns that ensnared her mind and soul once again each and every time she closed her eyes to rest. To be underground was to be surrounded by the unending echoes of her nightmares, where she was once again the bastard daughter of some arrogant politician, seeking shelter from the winter cold amongst the ancient dead whose restless eternal slumber lay beneath the full breadth of what had been, back then, the wealthiest city in the world; to be underground was to be mute and dying, to be haunted by the lingering spectre of a mother who had resented her for everything that Marianne's illegitimate birth had robbed from her, to be so thirsty and dehydrated that every breath she took, every gulp of air that raced its way down her scraped-raw throat, was like swallowing hot coals. She had been more akin to the dead she'd sought shelter among that day than the living who jealously claimed her, only to spurn and starve her.

And though C.C.'s miraculous arrival had taken her body away from the depths of the Parisian necropolis that was its subterranean Catacombs, there was a certainty within her that her soul still lingered there, damned to wander eternally amongst the lost and the forgotten, the forsaken detritus of centuries.

C.C. hadn't understood her, not truly; how could she, when the immortal verdette had come in time to love the shackles in which she bound herself, with which she kept herself apart from humanity? Neither had the man to whom she owed so much, who had taken her in and fed her, trained her, groomed her to be the vanguard to his own ambitions, from which she, too, also stood to benefit. Reuben Ashford was both then and now many things, a good man being chief among them—or at least, as good as a life spent among the ruling class of Britannia could reasonably allow any man to be—but his patronage was little more than painting over the cracks in her being, the hollowness in her spirit, the pit of cold isolation that had replaced her heart, if indeed she had ever had any right to lay claim to one.

Of all the people she had encountered in her life, only one had ever truly understood her—a man who, despite being decades her senior, was every bit as rooted in his haunted past as she was, caught in the moment he watched his parents murdered in front of him, with only his frail brother, who hadn't ultimately been all that long for humanity in the end, for comfort or security, stranded and isolated within the single bloodiest interregnum in all the history of Britannia, if not all the nations of the Old World. Charles was in all regards her anchor to humanity, the one person who had kept her time and again from succumbing to the sweet siren song of the dead halls to which her soul was tethered, kept her as she was rather than merely a dead woman walking, just as she was for him; they depended upon one another, their fates and lives twined together into a single combined thread. Neither was complete, neither could live, without the other, and this was in many ways the foundation of the deep and abiding love they had for one another.

And now he lay, feverish and caught in a potentially mortal delirium, watched over by her colleague and the doctor who had given her her body back, restored and augmented to be better than ever it had been; for the first time, where her husband had gone, she could not follow.

She wondered, at first, if this was what he had felt before he'd discovered that she had taken shelter, however temporary, in the body and mind of her body double, Boleyn; she'd quickly done away with such considerations, however, because her mind had immediately turned from that to her disdain for Vespasian, which began in short order to compound rapidly (the audacity of that insect, the sheer, unmitigated gall,to claim that any degree of the bonds of fraternity that once bound him and Charles together remained intact, that he had been so willing to inflict this agony, this rending of the spirit, upon his own brother), and given the fact that the deficient worm not only remained, unfortunately, quite essential to the ultimate success of their grand, heretical endeavour—the forging of the Sword of Akasha, to sunder their shackles and set them free—but was now also key to understanding what fate had befallen the love of her life, she had decided that it was counterproductive, to say the least, to allow her antipathy to grow to the point where she might see fit to throw away everything they had worked towards together for the sake of making a petty point.

Instead, she'd sought out a more constructive outlet for her excruciating impotence, which was how she came to be where she was, her metal feet treading upon the cold stone she could no longer feel, with all manners of cables and tubes running along the walls like the arteries of an antediluvian beast, a creature of myth that existed utterly beyond the furthest extent of mortal comprehension.

Marianne hated being underground; she had hated it when she was a girl as she did now. But she'd long since learned that there was a value to hatred that few other sensations or convictions could match; she had learned how galvanising hatred could truly be, how steeping herself in its seething depths for sunless days and weeks and months and years on end could crystallise her conviction, reaffirm her dedication, and steel her resolve until it was every bit as iron-clad as the artificial heart that even now lay still and whirring softly within her chest. It was why she had volunteered to sequester herself within her sanctum in Terminal Dogma as she recuperated, and had her body rebuilt around her. She fed upon her own hatred—upon her own pain and anguish and the bone-deep fear that had haunted her, had dogged her every step, for as long as she could remember—until it became every bit as essential to her survival as food or water had been, back when she had been fully formed of flesh and bone.

Anabaseios was not the domain of man, not any longer; not even the most brazen of heretics, as all those who laboured alongside them to see their deicidal dream to realisation surely were, would dare claim any form of dominion over a place this dark and deep into the earth, where the descent bore witness to the laws of nature bending to some malign will the further an interloper went. Steel and concrete gave way to carved stone as the darkness deepened, engraved walls with characters that seemed to flicker and distort in her periphery, as if what she witnessed with the evidence of her senses was not the truth of their nature, but instead the nearest approximation her mind could form that would keep her merely on the brink of madness and not immersed in its infinite, twisted fullness; and she proceeded deeper still, unaccompanied (Charles had yet to wake, and Marianne had commanded that Bismarck stand vigil, so that at least one of them was by his bedside at all times), to where dead stone gave way to living, porous and pulsing, and the beginnings of an entire symbiotic ecosystem made its home.

It would grow thicker still as she descended, the humidity innate to the pressure of venturing so far beneath the surface thinning out to a tell-tale crispness of texture, and the living stone began to play host to any number of mutated mockeries of the life that abided in the world above. Pale, eyeless things that had never seen sunlight and never known warmth, malignant flowers that bloomed with vividly unnatural, sickeningly luminous hues, and even near-flawless facsimiles of trees and shrubs that kept the floors coated in an unending carpet of crunching, desiccated leaves—new foliage sprouting, flourishing in growth until it reached its fullest extent, and then shrivelling and falling away in cycles that spanned no more than perhaps a few seconds apiece, if that, even as their boughs hung heavy with hardy fruit.

The illuminated darkness of Anabaseios was that of an eternal autumn, the chill that of a November evening, and the air such that it brought to mind images of harvest festivals and pagan ritual.

And as near as they could tell, the source of such was the being she was descending to meet.

She brushed past the withering forests even as they grew thick, strode beneath the shifting shadows of trees arranged in rows, like an orchard, and stepped deftly around thick vines wound torturously about a multitude of heaping piles of winter squash and other autumnal vegetables. Phantom breezes came in gusts past her in gentle, but insistent headwinds, that would have chilled her to the bone if she did not currently have one foot firmly planted within the truth of her origin, of the chill of the grave and the rambling depths of the nameless, forsaken dead; and still, Marianne ventured on—until she came at last upon the horror that lay at the very heart of it all.

'Subject Zero', as previous research teams had very creatively dubbed her, was, as her name might have suggested, the origin of all of this; but her imprisonment here was not their doing. Indeed, the means to fashion the likeness of the method of her captivity was utterly beyond their ken, and what little they were able to glean from what had become of the oldest immortal they had yet discovered had, at several points in the past, sent their knowledge galloping ahead of what it had previously been.

The immortal had been in human shape, once, though it was doubtful that she had ever been truly a member of the human race. What they had been able to glean from carbon-dating had placed the date of the formation of her prison at around six figures into the past, beyond the recorded history of mankind, or even of the primacy of Homo sapiens sapiens; and yet, here there was a face in the likeness of humanity, and she could see there the evidence of some limb, a torso, breasts, even…

And yet, the lion's share of it resembled nothing more closely than wood.

The means of the immortal's wretched imprisonment—who, it should be noted, bore the brand of Geass on no part of her body that they could find, and indeed bore no evidence of her immortality deriving its function from what they knew of the workings of a Code—were beyond the capabilities of the Geass Directorate, for they had not discovered, and would likely never discover, the method by which one might come to trap another sapient being within the unending process of the transmutation of flesh to the bark and wood and foliage of a tree; but nonetheless, here she was, and all evidence pointed to this tortured, twisted domain of everlasting autumn springing anew from the commanding mass of her arboreal form.

"My children whispered to me of your coming, quickling," spoke the everlasting creature, from the face that retained a likeness of flesh even as the bark encroached upon her further, the black sclera and the concentric rings of the emerald irises of her eyes flicking this way and that as Marianne approached. "They sang songs of the clank-clank of iron feet, the crunching of leaves, the scattering of fear and pain, hunger in the cold, unloving dark… You bring the halls of stone with you where you step, and the dead cry out their bereavement of the sister, daughter, wife they had robbed from them…"

The immortal did not speak, per se, though indeed her lips moved and sound came forth; her voice was of yawing boughs, creaking, ancient trees, the knife-chill wind juggling deadened leaves upon currents of caprice and inhuman glee, and the sounds formed, the shapes her lips shifted into, were of no language that they could discover ever having passed the lips of mankind, to the point where their minds refused to hear the words that were spoken, such as they were; instead, directly into their skulls was the seeming rasp of her voice projected, the words aligning with whichever language was the subject's mother tongue.

It was somewhat sobering for Marianne, that to her, the creature spoke in French.

"I come seeking answers, Olyvianna," Marianne said, undeterred; indeed, the immortal seemed to enjoy nothing more than getting under the skin of those who amused her—a trend Marianne had noticed herself, coming off of years of acquaintance with C.C.—and her words seemed deliberately chosen from a place of careless malice and meaningless sadism. But Marianne had always been resilient to her taunts, for they told her nothing she did not already know, nothing she did not hold as the elemental foundations of her identity; the immortal would tire of her game shortly, and Marianne hoped that she could learn what she had come here to seek once that had run its course.

"You come bearing questions," the creature corrected, ever the pedant. "And you will devise your own answers to them in time, quickling. Answers that sound pleasant to your ears, they will be, and in their face the truth is meaningless. The rock rolls down the hill, and we must imagine the labourer happy. When has your kind ever done otherwise, to speak of answers…? When have you, quickling, dead-thing?"

The creature's taunting mattered little. Marianne would have what she sought.

If not, she would make the descent once again tomorrow, and the day after if need be.

After all, there was nothing Marianne would not do for the sake of the man she loved.

She asked instead, "What is the thing that hunts my husband?"

At that, the immortal creature paused.

And then, she grinned.

---

Author's Note: My apologies for being so late, guys. Had trouble with Document Manager all weekend as I tried to post this chapter, and the problem only went away when I broke out Microsoft Edge (yes, I know) on the advice of a forum post. I generally use Firefox, but if that's going to be an ongoing problem, I suppose I'll have to change browsers when it comes time to post. Anyways, hope you all enjoy, and I'll see you all again on the eighth of March for Chapter 35.