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YEAR 794 OF THE DIVINE HOUSE OF AGNEPHUS

“Do you think it’s too late to run?”

“The lady’s carriage has departed the estate,” said Laud Ereguil, shutting the door on a messenger. “If you’re going to go, Divinity, you’re going to have to do it out the window.”

“I would make a capable mercenary,” said twenty year-old Bastin Agnephus, two years the Emperor of Argence, and soon to be married.

Imminently, in fact.

Thirty-one years before Remin Grimjaw lifted the first beams of his House in Tresingale, Emperor Bastin Agnephus was getting married.

He stood with a young Duke Ereguil in an upper room of the Temple of Imele Mer, a soaring structure of crystal and stone upon whose high tower rested the light of the stars. The Emperor was splendid enough to rival them in his wedding attire, a blue-black doublet the color of the night sky, studded with pure white diamonds. He had the thick brown hair and blue eyes of the House of Agnephus, and he was a well-made man, elegant and spare, his body trained in the use of sword and bow.

His was not the body of a weak man. He could not abide weakness.

“You think so?” The recently raised Duke of Ereguil laughed. “I hear they’re hiring in Rendeva.”

“I would never go to Rendeva. Backhill peasants.” Bastin leaned against the deep stone window ledge and looked out on the streets below, where flower petals were falling so thickly, he could barely see the crowd. Was that a carriage, at the end of the road ?

“I don’t think you’d get along with the other mercenaries, Divinity.”

He would never have a chance to try. There was no escaping his destiny. Bastin Agnephus, Beloved of Stars. He had been born in their sight and would die in it.

Ordinarily, he would have been attended by a half-dozen of the highest-ranking lords in the land, but Bastin had kicked them all out an hour ago, leaving only Laud to stand this final vigil. Both men were young for their responsibilities, but theirs was a generation of orphans. So many of their fathers had been lost on the battlefields of the Andelin Valley, in yet another failed bid to take it back from Valleth. The former Duke of Ereguil had perished along with a full third of the peerage of the Court of War. It had been all they could do to hold Valleth back at the Brede.

But Bastin’s father had not died honorably on the battlefield. The previous Emperor had died in his bed of a wasting illness, weak to the very end. And before he died, he had bowed one last time to his nobles and betrothed his son to Esmene of Melun, the eldest daughter of that powerful House.

Bastin had been fighting to get out of the betrothal for two years. And Laud Ereguil had supported him all that time, the nearest thing he had to a real friend. It was hard to tell sometimes. Everyone always wanted something, and the divinity of the Emperor intimidated many of them. Maybe other Emperors had believed in their own celestial origin, but Bastin was all too aware of his mortal frailty.

“You are the blessing on the land, my son,” his father had told him, over and over again. “Our lives are the covenant between the stars and the Empire.”

That was the bargain, as Bastin had always understood it. He was born into wealth and splendor, raised and guarded as the most precious treasure in the Empire so that the blessing would endure. In all the world, the Empire of Argence was the only land without magic. There were no Stone Teeth left in the hills, none of the chaotic bursts of wild magic that twisted men into beasts and beasts into men or melded the two together. In Benkki Desa, a man might walk into the forest and find twenty years had passed when he walked out again. In Bhumi, he might carve a wooden totem for his door and wake up the next morning to find it had come to life and was gnawing on his toes. In the Empire, a statue was always a statue. A song was just a song .

But if the lives of the House of Agnephus were the binding covenant for this blessing, it was a very flimsy one. His father had been ill for several years before Duke Melun had won his way into his chambers, where he kept the Emperor closeted for three days, then emerged with a signed betrothal in his hand. The Emperor had died soon after. It had been humiliating, but Bastin had gone before the Court of Nobility to argue that his father was weak and sick, and it ill-served Argence to bind its Emperor against his will.

It had been the first great challenge of his reign, and he had lost.

“That’s her,” he said, clenching his teeth. That was definitely a carriage, moving slowly down the road toward the temple, giving the commonfolk a show. “She will never be an Agnephus.”

“It might be more productive to try to make her one,” Laud replied, pragmatic as always.

“There have been six Melun Empresses.” Bastin knew his history. “Their ashes rest in the Melun crypt at Ereseide.”

He did not doubt Esmene of Melun would follow suit. He had met her three times since their betrothal: once when the engagement was first announced, again at the summer Turning of the Stars, when he had been browbeaten into making an appearance with her, and the last time after he lost his bid to break the engagement and had been forced to go before the Five Courts to formally present his future Empress.

There had been no mistaking the triumph in her eyes.

He saw it again when he stood upon the temple dais and watched her approach, resplendent in a silver gown that suited her cold beauty. In her heeled slippers, she was of a height with her soon-to-be husband, and three years older, though she wore her silver-blonde hair loose in the style of a maiden. She was already wearing a delicate silver crown.

One that he, her sovereign, had not placed on her head.

“Blessings upon this night,” said Duke Dardot Melun, bowing deeply to Bastin and then turning to kiss his daughter’s hand. Bastin had been so distracted, he had barely noticed the true author of his misfortune. He was not required to acknowledge the duke, so he didn’t; his eyes passed right over him, as if he did not exist.

“Greetings to the Divinity Bastin Agnephus, Beloved of Stars, Emperor of Argence, Dulcia, Capricia, and the Four Isles,” said Esmene, sinking into a deep and graceful curtsy .

“Lady Esmene of Melun,” Bastin acknowledged, with only the slightest nod. He was an experienced courtier and could assume a mask of serenity even when he was being shackled to a harpy. The House of Agnephus had suffered many humiliations like this over its long history. There were some that called it the House of Marionettes for the number of weak Emperors it had produced, figureheads protected only by their sacred blood. Divine puppets.

Esmene’s lips curved with satisfaction as they turned to face the Seer together, and in his heart, even as he spoke his marriage oath, Bastin swore another: he would find a way to be free of her.

Thirty-one years later, he was still trying.

From the wide windows of his office in the Imperial Palace, he gazed down into the gardens at the evidence of his failure. In those gardens walked the Empress and his half-Melun daughter, Selenne, who was the same pale platinum beauty as her mother. The birth of Selenne was a victory for the Empress that he could never undo, but though he had tried to hate his child for the crimes of her mother, he had failed there, too. Though Esmene had done her best to keep his daughter from him, Selenne still came to walk in the gardens he had forbidden to anyone else, and he endured the hated presence of the Empress.

Among the begonias a short distance from the two women, a small white animal appeared and vanished again, swift and silent as a ghost.

“Divinity,” prompted one of his secretaries. “The petition?”

“I am minded to grant it,” the Emperor said, turning away from the window. Picking up the letter on his desk, he skimmed it again, feminine writing that used many more words than necessary to obscure its vulgar quid pro quo. “Draft the necessary documents and I’ll sign them.”

“Yes, Divinity.”

The years had not been without victories. Bastin was not the weak man his father had been. Over the decades, he had reminded the Empire that he was sacred in ways they would never forget. He had built his power and influence, augmented by the enormous increase in Imperial resources that came in the aftermath of the Conspiracy. He had tripled his lands and wealth from that incident alone.

And Bastin had learned that even in defeat, there were still ways to snatch a species of victory .

“Send for Master Geheim,” he ordered, prompting an exodus of scribes from the room. Master Lariot Geheim’s visits with the Emperor were not recorded for posterity: another victory. It had taken twenty years of patient work for Bastin to bend the Tower of Scholars to his will, but the record of his reign was now under his control.

Turning back to the window, he watched as the Empress waved farewell to her daughter, sweeping off into the roses with her ladies behind her, fluttering like so many aged, dignified butterflies. Empress Esmene was fifty-five now, and her slender elegance was beginning to show signs of brittleness. It was an aging court. But as long as she died before him, Bastin would count that a victory, and every day of life without her would be sweeter for her absence.

Crown Princess Selenne was another matter. Bastin had been preparing the battleground for her betrothal almost since the day she was born. She would not be bound, as he had been. She was his last chance to set things right. His last opportunity to triumph over the House of Melun and make the House of Agnephus a power in its own right. It would be satisfying, if ironic, if his enemies aided him in this ultimate victory.

“Divinity?” Master Geheim stepped inside and bowed, a lean man who might have been any age from forty to sixty. His black hair and gray eyes conveyed all the warmth of a puddle. Nominally, he was in charge of the Emperor’s Land Office, with its vast network of couriers and messengers, who often carried more unofficial orders. Over the years he had handled a great deal of the Emperor’s clandestine work.

“Master Geheim.” Bastin waved him to a chair and sat down on the other side of his desk. “We have some messengers to dispatch.”