Dorius traced his hands over the folds of his waist wrap, tucking an edge that stood out to his roaming fingers behind another. The motion inadvertently loosened the wrapping, and the crisp shape was lost as layers began to spill. He tried to save it while Cote, his primary body servant, had his back still turned, but it was useless and the folds of his outer robe followed. He wanted to stamp his foot, shake his fists like a child, and instead he drew a shuddering breath that instead of calming him only served to his own ear to betray every nerve he felt.

  The unwinding fabric seemed an apt metaphor for his mind, and his fumbling hands his desperate bid for control over it. Every time he finally turned his thoughts from the conspiracy the last few days had begun to unearth, a new thread came to mind unbidden, and his thoughts spiraled again as he ran through memories of maps and tables, words and actions, connected and disparate in relation alike, over and over again in his mind.

  Cote turned, and he did not fully stifle the twitch of a frown at the sight of his master undoing his hard work. He handed the boxes of jewelry he was preparing to Lee’to, and shook the wrappings free to restart the outer layers.

  “It was coming loose,” explained Dorius meekly, but the servant gave no reply as he worked. Firm hands refolded and shaped the fabric around Dorius’ torso. The flat of his hand, placed firmly to Dorius’ gut, held things in place, while Lee’to wrapped the waist belt again.

  In some ways, he was thankful for the stiff, thick fabric and layers, they served to hold him steady when he was certain his knees would be shaking without them. He raised a hand unconsciously, tempted to run them through his hair in a bid to do something, anything with them, then restrained himself.

  “My rings,” he instructed. Lee’to held the carved wooden box Cote had prepared with his favorites.

  He quickly found the first, his mother’s signet ring, and placed it on the smallest finger on his right hand. A noise outside the door drew his attention before he could work through the rest, and he unconsciously began to turn the ring on his knuckle as he looked over his shoulder at the door.

  “...I’m just suggesting a few men, in roles they can’t fuck up, carrying plates or something. Just to get some men close,” came Bastian’s voice as he opened the door, then stepped out of the way to let Val in after him. She dipped her horns through the doorway, and remained slightly hunched even within the room.

  The serving tray seemed absurdly tiny against her bulk, yet she brought it to Dorius’ side and placed within his reach the cup of tea it held. With a mildness that contrasted so extraordinarily with her size and disposition around anyone except their present company, she responded gently to Bastian, “How will you hide their weapons?”

  “They can wear a dagger under their clothes, probably not much else we can do,” replied Bastian, sitting without any hesitation on Dorius’ bed behind him.

  Val gave a noncommittal hum in response, and leaned against a wall across from Bastian and out of the way, slipping down it to sit on the floor and cracked her neck from side to side.

  Dorius spun his signet ring on his finger, staring at the cup of tea, then asked, “You are hoping to place some Company men among the servants?”

  Bastian threw up his hands, “If you are going to insist on Val and Til not being there, what else can we do?”

  “Sylus would perceive it as a continued threat. I should seem weak, un-threatening, incompetent,” he replied. The justification was sound in his head, yet logic was of little comfort when his heart beat so loudly in his chest and his stomach twisted in fear.

  He was terrified of being alone with Sylus, with the exhausting effort of meeting his quips and snarks, with the contemptuous eyes of his women hiding their true intentions behind sleeves and fans.

  “Watcher damn what Sylus thinks! You are weak, on your own,” retorted Bastian.

  “I agree,” added Val, and in a burst of openness which usually meant she was truly worried about something, “Perception is a luxury we may not be able to afford here.”

  Their concern was almost enough to shake his resolve. But he knew this strategy was the correct one.

  Dorius had learnt years ago that he was quicker than everyone else. He instinctively knew, partially by natural gift, partially with Elias’ tutoring, to separate fact and assumption clearly, weigh risk and reward impartially. He knew when he did not have enough information to act, and he knew clearly when he did and a decision was to be made. And, as Elias had noted was the most crucial ingredient, he knew when gut and instinct could be trusted and when rationality was required. He could see the path forward, like a silver thread in a forest of haze. And, he had learnt that others could not.

  Bastian, and Val, were emotional creatures. Bastian was quick to abandon reason when a temper flared, and to blindness where his soft spots were. Val was decisive only when driven by animal instinct and clear purpose, and hesitant in every other moment. It was not to say that either of them were dim-witted, both were sharp and capable retainers, although Val lacked the education Bastian had gotten in his teens. Partially, it was he who handicapped their ability to anticipate him. He knew he sat on information he was not sure was useful yet, or that he felt was too sensitive to share. What he saw clearly, they were missing the clues to reveal rather than any actual shortcoming in abilities.

  He did not necessarily feel there was anything wrong with this. Val carried the weapons, she did not look down on him for not knowing how to use them. Bastian understood people, places, risks, he did not bemoan that they did not contribute to the scouting. Dorius, in turn, collected information and made decisions.

  Still, it did not prevent him hoping they would give him the confidence in his decisions, especially when he was barely able to muster it for himself. If he had time to explain, he knew they would see the same, but the thread of facts and observations, the history of previous interactions with Sylus that informed his assessment of risk and gut instinct, was too many to fully give voice to. And so he reached out for his second ring, his own signet, and placed it on his right index finger.

  “I have made up my mind.” If only the words could steady his treasonous fear. It was infinitely easier when Bastian imperceptibly smoothed out any hardships, or Val just through her presence changed the way he was treated in a room.

  “I trust you,” replied Val. He knew she meant the words as support but they felt like the shackles of responsibility. Like his robes, in some ways he was thankful for it, it forced him to hold together when he may not have been able to on his own. He turned back to the rings one by one and placed the rest on his fingers, always the same order. Cote was done with adjusting his robes, and had moved onto preparing his earrings and bracelets.

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  “How’s that cut from Til?” asked Bastian to Val behind him.

  “Fine,” came Val’s curt response.

  Undeterred Bastian continued, “Never seen anyone actually match you before. Must’ve been pretty odd?”

  There was silence for a few moments, then quietly, “I have become aware of how much my own strength is a crutch.”

  “You still outmatched him?”

  “I would not have in real combat. It was only when it became a contest of muscle that I forced a tie, even then who knows if we had continued.”

  “Ho?”

  Dorius adjusted the final bangle at his wrist while Cote finished his work on his collar. “Let us get this over with,” he announced, “Val you will escort me at least.”

  The short moments that passed as Val steadily rose and crossed the room to get her axe felt like an age, Dorius was nervous he would break into a sweat before even facing his cousins. With the barest of gestures, Val gestured for him to lead the way.

  —

  The smallest of the three formal dining rooms was empty of his immediate family when Dorius arrived. Instead the serving staff in white and gold were patiently waiting, appetizers and drinks arranged for the upcoming company. The sight of viridian green among the colors was enough to force Dorius to gulp back a mouthful of anxiety. It was suitable he was first and would force no one to greet him or listen to his name being announced by the servers. The goal was not to outplay Sylus, his position was too weak to force a direct confrontation. He would weather the insults, give just enough snark to maintain a facade of ineptitude, and continue to play the game he had started only years ago with his family.

  A servant passed him a goblet of red wine, and when he sipped it it was mixed with fruit juice. Bastian or Hart had succeeded in getting Company men or his own servants somewhere within the Ivory then. The flush of strength it gave him was unexpected and very welcome.

  He rose as the first guests entered, a selection of the women from Sylus’ companions. The women were all noble family lines, they wore no gold in deference to the Pentarchy but Dorius’ spied sigils on broaches, rings and necklaces. No Fae creatures like his own dragon, as had become the sole right of the Pentarchy, but instead organic and geometric shapes alike that romanticised a past when the noble blood had truly meant breeding pure enough to grant its descendants old magic. Most were geometric patterns, the shapes evoking the bloodlines' old mastery of earth, fire, air or water. One had a striking zig-zag pattern, indicating the storm bloodlines that could control both air and water, and with mastery of both, summon lightning from the air. Politics must have been a significantly more frightful time when single individuals with exceptionally pure blood were the equivalent of congealed tempests. The status of the nobles would have made sense then, these days they did little but ride the coat-tails of their predecessors.

  The women sat about the head of the table, leaving a seat where Sylus would later sit. And after the politest of greetings with Dorius, resumed gossip amongst themselves. As he observed them, he saw the hints of their power dynamics in who was spoken over, laughed at, or dismissed by the pair that seemed to lead the group.

  Sylus’ arrangement with these women was likely built on the sham impression one would eventually marry him. Bloodlines passed through the maternal line, men when married were absorbed into the women’s family, their dowry, the trades or connections they bought with them. While these women of status likely flocked to him, in the hope one would win his affections enough to absorb him into their families, his own ambition meant he would never marry while his older sister still supported his cause. It was likely he cultivated a belief among them that he could be swayed by true love from this path, or some other equal nonsense.

  Women had an unusual freedom of choice in noble families, as the only way of continuing bloodlines there was a natural power there but it came with the grave burden of bearing children, an interest not all women had. Depending on their own ambition, they might seek power themselves, like Synthias did leading the Carmine branch. Others chose to place their support with a brother or male cousin, opening the door to the only pathway sons had to power within their family as Virconas did with Sylus, and the Pentarch before had done with the support of his older sister. Both of these pathways required breeding heirs - for their own inheritance or their supported male family member’s benefit. Some yet, would eschew these systems - a choice easier made when one had many sisters - and break for their independence like Dorius’ own mother had. He knew he and his father had not been a part of her plans, and yet they had happened, and she had died bringing him into the world, leaving them in the precarious position they held in her absence. Dorius was yet technically the blood of a Pentarch, but any children he fathered would be their mother’s. As such, he offered the Pentarchy no clear pathway for dynasty, and he was unable to directly make any claim for the throne himself.

  It did not mean that men had no love for their children or their own families, many found great satisfaction in supporting their families, or forging alliances with nobler bloodlines to ensure their own children had clear and strong inheritances. For others, the pressure of finding an alliance to a promising family and to develop themselves to make a suitable match was a crushing burden. Some were too way-ward for even that, and so for noble families who had the means such that children only brought opportunity, the father at least had no contest or rights to any child they left behind without subsuming their own identity to the child’s family in return.

  For Dorius, it offered a freedom in his own choices of partner that was unparalleled. His family would not care where he went, and if anything would be relieved of the burden of his relation to them.

  Not that dynasty building was a high priority for him, the only reason he was even thinking over the topic was as an exploration of the women and Sylus' motivations for their relations. His focus had been solely on reclaiming what his mother was due, and had been neglected in her passing and beyond the means for his father to access without her. As he had re-entered his mother’s world though, he had found only petty political squabbles fueled by the greed of those born lucky to the right mother and still thinking they deserved more. The petty desire to tear them down from the inside had started as a childish reaction to his disgust at what he found, but he definitely spent longer than he should turning the idea about in his head to examine it.

  He had been raised one foot in the Company, one foot in the Merchant Guild his mother had forged at Southold, and only Elias to hold his hand to teach him what her world had looked like at first. Pay is his world had been earnt in labor, fairly distributed by the accountants at Trade Unions who understood the market forces of skill, demand, risk and reward and regulated accordingly. In the peace since the unrest, the common man had organized and bettered himself to earn a lifestyle rich in prosperity and abundance unheard of since the stability of the Monarchy.

  It was the noble class that lived in the past. They desperately held onto the remnants of a prestige and wealth their powerful ancestors had rightfully earned, and likely labored for with great acts of magic, thinking they too had rights to it. They married and conducted themselves with the rules of old bloodlines that were no longer relevant when the magic, despite their careful maintenance of maternal lines, had dried to a husk. It was particularly bitter for Dorius, who was looked down upon and disregarded by his own mother’s family for lacking the ability to pass on blood which granted nothing but the ashes and faint memories of the past.

  And yet, he had still not quite decided what to make of the news his family's bloodlines traced back to the Dragoness when she had once been mortal. Of all the things he had learnt in the past few days, this secret he would hold tight until he knew how to use it. His trust in Val to guard him and his affairs was absolute, she knew she kept them even from Bastian, and he felt no small amount of guilt in his role in the rift it caused his friends.

  Deep in his thought, Dorius had lost track of the gossip of the women, swirling his wine in his goblet as he stared at the arrangements of appetizers in front of him. He didn’t even notice the servants changing places in a manner that signaled his cousin's arrival. He started when the announcement finally came, and as Sylus entered the room raised his eyes hesitantly, hands tucked within his robes to hide the constant spinning of his mother’s signet ring on his knuckle.

  “Cousin,” was all he gave in greeting.