The news of the letter spread. In Chrysopolis it was a thunderbolt, one moment a secret to all and the next moment omnipresent. Demagogues found their way onto intersections and marketpces, and from atop boxes and piled sacks they procimed the proof of the Emperor’s unfitness. In corners and hallways, men of wealth and influence whispered about the implications, about how the letter had come to be revealed at all, about what next move would be the wisest. And in taverns and bars, veterans grimaced and sneered in disgust at the man who had left them to die so long ago.

  Outside of the main city, the news was by necessity much slower to spread. The fastest means of communication were under control of the state and as such disallowed from spreading the news to anyone; but mouths are substantially more difficult to hold shut. Distorted versions of the truth passed from the lips of messengers into the ears of stable-hands and tavern-girls, who in turn told what they had heard to merchants and other travelers, who in turn reyed the tale to vilges and towns far from the main routes. Those early rumors were, of course, given little weight by those in power. Certainly they were listened to, but those who could discern knew that far worse rumors about the Emperor were invented daily. It was only as the days passed, as men of influence and power sent pages to their country estates with the news stored safely in their pockets, that it became clear this was real.

  Nowhere was the news received with more vigor, more strength of feeling, than Eunon itself. Nine years is but the blink of an eye in the memory of a city; even the youths held blurred memories of terror and death. Amongst those in the prime of their life, the scars had yet to fade, the wounds were still red and raw. There were many in the streets of Eunon who called for the Emperor’s blood, though of course the gulf of hundreds of miles and thousands of soldiers between them and the pace made such cries impotent.

  As for the city’s ruler, Exarch Abderus was much more cautious. This was unusual for him; normally he was not prone to such caution or evenhandedness as to disregard a rumor until proof had arrived. Certainly, it disturbed him, but he did nothing. Even a man such as Abderus, Helen supposed, must have occasional bursts of sense.

  Was this Shirrin’s doing? It certainly did not strike Helen as beyond the witch’s means to unearth bckmail such as this, or to fabricate it so convincingly that even noblemen were fooled. This had every indication of being the moment that Helen had been waiting for, and considering how outrageous were the accusations, Helen wondered if her presence would be really necessary at all. Surely, once Abderus was satisfied at the truth, he would bay for Peleus’s blood?

  But that rage which Helen had assumed would arise, never came. As the days passed, as the news of Peleus’s betrayal grew more omnipresent and arrived from ever-more reliable sources, Abderus’s mood only sank into a profound depression. The huge man, normally full of a warrior’s verve, as extroverted as he was foolish, defted, all energy and will subsumed under some mental darkness. He would hardly speak, drink more than was good for him or not at all, refuse his wife’s company and then remain awake from dusk to dawn. Finally, one evening, Helen faced herself: this was no mere stop on the road to bloodlust, and she needed to know what was afflicting her lover.

  She lured Abderus into the bedchamber, attempting to coax him to disrobe and indulge in her company, the better to loosen his tongue and rex his thoughts. He refused without expnation. Once he had made that clear, he began to drift, washing disinterestedly towards the far corner of the room. Helen made her move.

  “What’s happened to you?” she said. “You’re acting like a ghost. Hardly here.”

  Abderus paused, blinking furiously as though waking from a long sleep. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “For one thing, the man I know would have at least put his hands on me, even if he weren’t up for more. I’ve never seen you go so long without smiling. Is it… is it about the news?”

  Abderus flinched like Helen had poured vinegar on a fresh cut. “What else could it be about?”

  Helen rose from the bed. “I can’t believe that Peleus would do something like that. It stretches the bounds of even common monstrosity. I can understand if you’re angry, I am as well and—”

  “Angry?” Abderus turned, his brow deeply furrowed with what almost looked like shame.

  “Peleus betrayed you. Turned his eye from Eunon when it was most needed. Are you not angry?”

  Abderus tugged at his beard. “I… Helen, what have you experienced of war?”

  “Nothing,” she said, momentarily forgetting her invented backstory. “Well, only a little. The army of Iathines was destroyed on the field, caught unawares; so I fled the city as soon as the Sarraniai arrived.”

  “Then you have felt a single droplet in the ceaseless rattling rainstorm that was the siege of Eunon. Two-thirds of a year, it was, and not a day passed where it was not a suffering akin to the depths of Tartarus. I have seen men, women, children, turned upon one another in a single drawn-out frenzy of desperation, fighting to the death over the carcasses of dogs, throwing themselves onto pyres that their loved ones might not starve, and worse, and worse.”

  Abderus’s hands were trembling, though he stood strong. His voice had gone dark, and cold, and shrill like the hiss of beach-sand caught in a strong winter wind. Helen shivered to hear it.

  “And Peleus allowed you to nguish in that state for months when he could have come to your aid. Months, Abderus. Do you feel no rage? Do you not wish that he should see justice?”

  He shook his head wordlessly, compulsively, until the denial seemed less like a statement and more like a fit. Abderus did not know how to speak. Helen closed with him further, reaching out her hand in wordless support. In the back of her mind, pns were rearranging, her entire understanding of her situation spinning in pce, but her consciousness was entirely focused on the moment.

  “Do you…I know what people are saying. Revenge. Revolt. Philgeonia has never been fully satisfied being merely a subordinate.”

  Helen’s fingertips brushed against Abderus’s shoulder. “What are they saying? I know, but I want to hear it from you.”

  “War. They howl for it. They say I should be the Emperor, that I have the strength to seize the throne.” Abderus shuddered, arms wrapping around his substantial stomach. “They all lived through it just as I did; how could they ask for the same thing again?”

  Because they believe the war would not come to them, Helen thought. Because some things are worth suffering for. But of course she could provide excuses and reasons, given that she was, in the end, operating on the same side as they were. Instead of speaking, Helen took the final step forwards and pulled Abderus stiffly into her arms.

  “I do not know what to do…” he moaned, sounding weak and confused as a child. “I am caught, caught between war and betrayal with hounds at every side and nowhere to go!”

  Helen’s eyes were wide, unblinking, her heart chilled with horror. It was without any truth behind the words that she said, “You have me, I am here, I am with you always.”

  Abderus returned the hug, pulling Helen tightly to his chest, letting her head slip into the notch under his chin while he wept for the trap he had found himself in. Helen found herself imagining what he would do if he knew the truth. Would he cast her away, have her thrown into a dungeon never to see him again, or would he merely strangle her to death where she stood? Either option would be something she deserved.

  The rest of the evening was much the same. Abderus wept, fell morosely silent, drank heavily, shared stories of the siege and of the cruelties he witnessed there, and the cycle would begin again. They did not make love, the attitude was not there for that, but when they fell asleep it was tightly entangled in one another.

  The next morning, once Abderus had finished thanking her for all the support she had provided, Helen found herself once more alone with her scribe work and her thoughts. She could hardly pay attention to the former on account of the tter. Her mission, the thing for which she had been handed a new life on a silver ptter, had run into a critical problem.

  One idea which nagged at her throughout the day was that it might be best if she simply gave up. How she would inform Shirrin about this she wasn’t certain, but if anybody could adapt to the shift in circumstances it would be her, no doubt. It was simply never going to happen, there was no way she could convince a man so wounded by war to go to war for the second time in his life, and Shirrin’s grand pn was going to have no choice but to find a way around. But who would Helen be if she turned back at the very first sign of trouble?

  And that was what kept such thoughts of surrender as merely thoughts. She had been made for this, quite literally, and this was merely the first challenge. A princess who could not withstand a simple mismatch of personality was no princess at all. The next morning, Helen awoke with a new center: finding a way to convince Abderus to go to war, traumatized or not.

  Of course, Helen was no maniputor. She knew politics, but her politics had always been more centered around ensuring her own survival amidst the constant cshing of various factions within the bureaucracy than convincing those factions to move along her own designs. The main means she knew of getting others to follow was power, pin and simple, having enough followers and enough institutional inertia to make others do as one pleased. But she was operating from a position of weakness, and Helen knew of only one person who could do such maniputions behind the scenes.

  Which, in the end, gave Helen quite the road map. She simply had to ask herself: what would Shirrin do?

  The first step was to gather information. Helen felt it unnecessary to collect the vast web of informants and hoard of pilfered secrets that Shirrin had, but at the same time it was quite easy for the wife of an Exarch to find a man here and there who was willing to act as a spy in exchange for coin and favors. It was not long at all before Helen had selected a dozen or so loyal men who would walk the city streets listening to the whispers of Eunon’s genius loci.

  Much of what they told her Helen already knew, about the unrest rattling through every stratum of urban life, the tavern arguments and street-corner conversations. But the talk was more than merely disgruntled, and it extended far beyond the civilian sphere. One of Helen’s informants was a quartermaster in the local legion, technically under command of the Emperor but answering to the Exarch as well, and what he told her brought with it a mixture of excitement and terror. There was, he expined, talk of mutiny within the legions. Philgeonia, sharing as it did a border with Sarrania, was the most heavily militarized of the five Exarchates, and by virtue of the amount of warring which went on there, a rge percentage of the comitatenses were Philgeoniai recruits. The local legions had undergone purges of any with Tempr sympathies after the Revolt, but Tempr or not, Philgeoniai were Philgeoniai, and to learn that one’s own homend had been betrayed invoked anger.

  Of course, to even speak against the Emperor was a crime which could be punished with severe beating, and there were too many Macarians filling out the ranks for much open talk. But the quartermaster knew. From shared looks between comrades, from the occasional comment made when no Macarians were in earshot, simmering disloyalty was everywhere.

  “Do you suppose it’s going to go anywhere?” Helen asked. “You say it’s suppressed for now, but such is often the case only as long as luck deems it to be.”

  “I don’t know. But my instinct is that it will do nothing without any direction. I would be much more afraid if a leader showed himself, someone to turn a thousand angry little locusts into a single swarm.”

  Helen pretended to be justly concerned, but in truth her feelings about this matter were more a mix of anticipation and frustration. All the ingredients were in pce for a rebellion: a dissatisfied army, an unpopur Emperor, a beloved Exarch. If only Abderus were willing to take up the rebel mantle, Helen’s work would be done.

  Which meant that he had to be made to take up that mantle unwillingly. The question of how that was to be accomplished was a matter of several more days’ thought. Abderus was the Exarch, his control was absolute and his power endless so long as he was in his domain, so the usual methods of bckmail or browbeating would surely be useless; but Shirrin had never needed such methods, and so neither would Helen. Clearly he needed to be tricked, misled, made to believe that it was to his benefit to go to war.

  Or, perhaps, that it was a necessity. Abderus’s hatred of war, the pain and torment he had suffered during the siege, made it difficult to believe that any amount of personal benefit would drive him onto the battlefield. But desperation, the belief that there was no alternative, could drive a man to do almost anything. That was the final revetion, that was the key. Helen didn’t need to convince her husband of anything other than the truth of his impending death, and let desperation do the rest.

  It was te in the evening when Helen realized her pn. Abderus slept soundly by her side. Struck by inspiration, she snuck out from under the bedsheets, found a mp, and carefully made her way through the darkened halls of the pace, aided by the light of the waxing moon. Her goal was her study, the small area set aside for her bureaucratic bors, and once there she began to sift through her old papyri, squinting in the flickering firelight until her eyes at st fell upon what she had been looking for: the official seal of the Exarchate.

  As Helen observed the outline of the seal from every angle, her hands twitching with muscle memory gained through decades of scribe work, she again thought of what Shirrin would do. With a single letter, most likely faked, Shirrin had brought the idea of rebellion to Eunon. With a single letter, definitely faked, Helen would make sure Chrysopolis saw the real thing.

  SaffronDragon