VII.
It was the August of 1572, and Marguerite de Valois had just become Marguerite de Navarre. Her marriage to Henry de Navarre was a joyous time for her, even if she had not chosen him by her own whim, and even despite the political unrest that swirled around their happy union. And perhaps she may have been able to continue to ignore all those who so desperately hated her, her husband, and what their marriage symbolized, had a beautiful wedding been the only extraordinary thing to happen to her at that time.
Only a few days later, the streets of Paris, her beloved city, were awash with violence as the Catholic population wantonly slaughtered any and all Huguenot peoples they found. The Saint Bartholomew's Day Massacre had begun. Marguerite was at the time unaware of the hand her fellow royalty had had in orchestrating the events of that terrible night and that it had been born of no small amount of malice towards her new husband Henry, who was seen as a sort of leader of the French Huguenot population. The only thing she did know that night was that an injured Huguenot, pursued by a mob clearly intent on killing him, had stumbled into her room and that she was the only thing standing between him and a wretched and painful death.
The man whom she had taken such pity on that night, whose very life she had saved was Joseph Boniface de La Mole, a young man whose finely shaped mouth showed his bright teeth with a pained smile to Marguerite, even as the prospect of his death was so near at hand. It was not so odd then, for La Mole to fall in love with the queen, the woman who had ensured his survival and shown him such kindness in the midst of all the hatred and chaos that night. And it was not so strange that Marguerite, on her side, also fell in love with him, charming, kind, and lovely as he was. She was not unhappy in her marriage to Henry, this is true, but she did not really love him, a fact Henry himself was aware of, though he never gave voice to it.
Eventually, through Marguerite's connections La Mole was reunited with Anibal de Coconas, a Catholic man whose friendship and trust he had earned shortly before the violence of that most dreadful night had begun. Much like the love affair with Marguerite, La Mole and Coconas's friendship only deepened as time went on, especially embroiled as they were against the sinister political maneuverings that were unfolding against Marguerite and Henry.
It was impossible to find La Mole without Coconas, or Coconas without La Mole and, provided she was away from the palace and too many prying eyes, Marguerite was also always with her lover. Unfortunately the joyous days of all three were not meant to last. In order to protect Marguerite from the subterfuge of her political opponents, La Mole and Coconas both had to be arrested and tried for conspiracy to commit crimes that were not theirs, a sacrifice La Mole was more than happy to make for the woman he loved, and Coconas was willing to make for his closest companion. Coconas had been granted an opportunity to escape the day of the execution, a stroke of good fortune spared his body the mutilation suffered by La Mole during their interrogation and torture. But as he beheld the broken and shattered frame of his dear partner, he could not bring himself to flee to safety and leave La Mole to die a death originally meant for both of them, and instead chose to stay and die with the man he cherished more than anything. Marguerite, for her part, did everything she could to save her lover and his beloved friend, but in the end all she could do was watch and grieve as they were both publicly executed, and the man whom she had so desperately loved was gone forever from her life.
But now, impossibly, he was here before her in this dark cavern beneath those streets that all those hundreds of years ago they had once gamboled about with so little mind paid to everything around them. Here he was, that man whom she had loved so deeply, was calling out to her despite the excruciating effort it must have taken to move under the pressure of her Authority.
"It is you! My dear Marguerite! My sweet love, oh to think that I would be so fortunate as to see you again in another time as this! Truly God does favor me!" Despite the usual air of overblown pomp to his words, none could deny the genuine joy and love in Noire's voice as he spoke.
"Lancer." Madame Fenix commanded her Servant with a single word, the response to which was an immediate redoubling of the Authority's pressure on the hapless Archer. "Sir Mage," her words now directed to Leo, "You would do well to teach your familiar to hold his tongue and not interrupt his betters when they are having a conversation."
Leo struggled to lift his head in order to respond to the aristocratic mage. "Madame, I apologize on behalf of my Servant's interrupting your conversation, but seeing as how it does not terribly concern us I can't say I blame him for perhaps feeling impatient? Regardless I would ask that you manumit myself and my mates from the magical malady Marguerite has mollified us with, Madame." Leo's cheeky and self-satisfied grin was not a terribly good match for Madame Fenix's own look of utter bafflement. "Also, I would appreciate if you would drop all this pretext of 'betters.' I am no one's lackey and, last I checked, we are all mages and Masters in the Holy Grail War here. Does that not make us all equals?"
"Your stance is laughable, Monsieur." Madame Fenix replied, her tone having shifted to one of slightly surprised amusement. "You claim we are all equals, yet you are currently restrained beneath Lancer's Authority. No, that makes it quite clear that you serve someone else and are therefore beneath myself and Madame. Now, silence. Another outburst from you and I promise that my next rebuke will not be so pleasant."
"Pleasant? Nothing about you from the moment you appeared has been pleasant!" Leo, his voice pained and breathless, but still defiant, raised himself off his knees into a sort of squat as he yelled back at Madame Fenix, all of his power and energy being used to raise himself to his feet. "You listen to me now! Whatever the past may have been, I swear the de Franchi serve no one! We are proud mages who-!"
Louise had been so busy watching Leo force his way to his feet, and the Servants were all still so completely under Lancer's power, that none had seen the small gesture that Madame Fenix had made to her Servant. None of them had seen the spear loosed from Lancer's upraised hand or watched it scream through the air. Not until it had firmly planted itself in Leo's torso. There was a dull snap, a sound like a quick low roll of thunder, and a small flash of light that preceded Lancer appearing by her favored weapon. Her hand was already on the long shaft when she materialized before Leo, and she wasted no time driving the weapon through his body, the two supporting points being forced past the bends in their form with a sickening crunch as all three points met the ground behind their unfortunate victim.
Leo's face was contorted in a mixture of confusion and absolute agony as Lancer performed the needlessly brutal maneuver, the impact of the initial throw having been enough to kill any non-Servant target. "I... I have... no regrets. Brother... Zoe. Fin... Finish what we started." Leo was dead, his final breath escaping with his imploring words to his brother.
Rider had been unable to watch everything that had happened, but he had heard the sounds of Leo's death, and that was enough for him to have developed an idea of how things were going to play out.
-"Master."- He called telepathically to Louise. -"Master, you must leave this place now. It is only a matter of time before it is your turn."-
Louise heard her Servant's appeal, but was in too much a state of shock to react in any form. Her own thoughts were screaming at her now, screaming for her to run, desperately screaming to understand why Leo had just died, screaming at how it had all happened so quickly, screaming at the prospect of her own death. Words and thoughts were all overlapping in one loud, incomprehensible mass that all culminated in one single, shouted, all encompassing plea, "WHY!?"
Madame Fenix seemed surprised at Louise's perplexed state. "I beg your pardon, Madame?"
"Why!? Why did you do that?" Louise's initial tone of outrage shifted to confusion as she interrogated Madame Fenix.
"Why?" The older mage looked as though she genuinely did not understand Louise's question. "He dared to speak against someone of a higher station. He dared to refute his position of servitude, despite it being quite clear that he was in service to someone else. Beyond any of that though, I have every reason to kill him. It was already clear, but he stated it quite plainly himself that he is a Master in the Holy Grail War. Have I need of any other reason to kill him than that?"
-'Master, please. You need to run. Flee this place NOW."- If telepathically screaming was possible that was exactly what Rider was doing now, his panicked thoughts all exploding into Louise's mind.
"You had him and his Servants both in your power! You do not need to kill a Master to remove them from the Grail War! You need only defeat their Servant!" Some part of Louise heard Rider's pleas for her escape, but she was too rooted in her disgust with Madame Fenix to follow his admittedly excellent advice.
"But a Master without Servant can still be a potential problem. Whereas a Servant without Master will simply disappear all on their own. Observe, cut off from their Master's magical energy, they will soon be nothing more than motes of dust on the wind." Madame Fenix gestured grandly towards where the two Archers were still rooted to the spot. However, rather than the spectacle of them fading away back to the Throne of Heroes, they were both still merely sitting fixed to the ground as they had been. "Interesting. It seems I underestimated the knave. He was perhaps slightly less mediocre than I had given him credit for. Nevertheless." With a wave of her hand Madame Fenix directed Lancer to continue her gruesome work.
-"I have an idea, Rider."- Louise finally responded to her Servant.
-"What?! No! No ideas! You need to get out of here NOW!"-
As Lancer retrieved her weapon wholly from Leo's body, the corpse falling to the ground with a wet splat, she turned her cold gaze on the Archers, one of whom was a man she had known in life as a close confidant, and the other her lover. "Marguerite, my sweet." Noire without a single trace of fear in his voice looked into the unfeeling eyes of the woman he desperately loved. "Surely you don't mean to turn that weapon on me so suddenly? Have we not only just been reunited? Will you not at least let me hear your beautiful voice? Won't you speak to me?"
Lancer continued her slow advance on Noire, a small smile crossed her lips as she gave a fleeting look to her Master. Madame Fenix's only response to the glance was another wave of her hand. Lancer turned back to Noire. "I am sorry La Mole, my love. I have so little time to grant your request." Her tone was almost a mockery of affection. "But I can promise you this, I will not turn my weapon on you."
A smile of relief lit up Noire's features, his pearly teeth sparkling in the magical light that emanated from Lancer's dress. He then watched as she raised her arm again, and the spear once more became a deadly projectile that impaled his partner. Rouge let out an anguished scream as the multi-pointed weapon pinned him to the ground more thoroughly than the magical force of Lancer's powers had. Noire looked from the mutilated, injured form of his companion, the other Archer still writhing beneath the spear, back into the face of the woman he loved and found that he no longer felt the magical energy pressing down on him. The thing he felt in its place was the sharp impact of Lancer's hand piercing through his chest.
"No, my dear. You I will grant the privilege of dying by my hands." There was another sharp snap and burst of light as Lancer, with Noire in tow, was once again transported to her spear where it was embedded in Rouge's torso. With a singular motion Lancer wrenched the weapon from one, and her hand from the other, then drove both back into their respective victims once more. With a third, and final blow of the same type, the Servant ceased and let both of the Archers fall lifelessly to the ground. There was not, this time, the brilliant conflagration of rebirth that Louise and Rider had seen proceed their deaths before, this time the bodies of both Servants just started to faintly glow before they began dematerializing, their magic phantasmal forms blowing away as gold motes of light. Only a dozen or so seconds later, there was nothing left to indicate that either had ever been there.