Conquest of Avalon

What happened here?

The beach had been aflame last he saw it, but this was something else entirely. Perhaps only one in five of the tents and cabins that had once stood here remained, all of them stained by faintly pulsing scorch marks. Of the Fox King’s quarters at the top of the hill, there was no trace at all.

The fighting must have spread south. Put that way, it didn’t seem so surprising, but this was still a level of devastation far beyond what Fernan could have imagined. The people here wouldn’t have even seen the duel; why would they take up arms like this?

A palpable malaise hung in the air, mixing with the salt of the sea and lingering scent of smoke underpinning everything even now.

“There, now you’ve seen it. Plenty of space with those Malin wastrels thinned out.” Guy Valvert towered above from his horse, loose flowing clothing flapping in the wind. “Now would you please attend to my cousin? She is to stand trial for parricide, you know. Not the sort of thing you want to procrastinate about.”

“I thought you said I would just be following instructions.” Fernan kept his eyes level, taking in the full surroundings.

Shelter was limited, but the early summer heat had already arrived, tinging the air with the slightest shimmering orange glow. Thicker insulation wouldn’t be necessary until winter, especially for the hardier mountain villagers used to brisk spring wind and rain.

But there were so many desperate people behind him, willing to endure even the hated geckos in their midst for a chance at something better. Could this fire-blighted collection of ramshackle dwellings clinging to the port really suffice?

“Well, we certainly wouldn’t have some skulking mountain peasant organizing the defense. You’re simply a vessel, a backwater sage of a barbarous spirit, through whom we can assert Annette’s innocence in accordance with the proper legal proceedings.”

“I’m blushing.”

“Don’t be oversensitive. I’m merely speaking the truth.” Valvert clicked his tongue. “Delivery remains important. Imagine yourself as a player in a troupe. Your performance must move the judges enough to convince them of Annette’s innocence. My eloquent words shall do much to sway them, but circumstances demand that they pass through your mouth. You would do well to honor the occasion with the preparation it demands.”

“An actor.” Fernan sighed. Brilliant. “Well, I’m not studying your script until I can be sure my people are taken care of. This is a decent starting point, but what about food? Drinking water? Far more people used to live here; I need to be sure there won’t be any conflict about inhabiting their space. And—”

“Agh!” Valvert slapped his palm to his face. “Do you really expect me to be familiar with all of that tedious drudgery? People lived here before; presumably those were solved issues for them. Annette’s the one with the head for logistics.”

It took a great deal of willpower to avoid incinerating him on the spot. “Lord Valvert, could you please turn your head around?”

He tilted his back in what had to be an eyeroll, but rotated to face the gathering of people that had followed from the mountains.

Travel and hopelessness had left them weary trudging through the city, their glows dimmer every day. Some had melted away as the procession had passed through the center of town, but most seemed to have stayed.

Now, though, they were staring at the water excitedly; some were dumbfounded, while others eagerly leapt to meet the waves.

“Generations of them lived and died in the same village where they were born,” Guy noted. “Less than a week’s ride from the water and still they have never glimpsed it. What is your point, Fernan?”

“My point is that you promised them safe shelter here. You, Lord Valvert, not your cousin who’s currently imprisoned. I’m not helping you until I’m sure they have more than seawater to drink tonight.” Gourds and skins had been filled at the last mountain stream, but that only lasted so long, and was already likely to be running low.

There were still people here they could ask, but that might be misinterpreted as a threat. The last thing they needed to do was take from people who had clearly already lost so much.

He groaned. “I’m sure there’s a well to the north. The Gold Road plays host to supply caravans by the hundreds, and their horses need to drink more than they’d be able to carry easily, even when the streams run dry..”

Fernan stared at him silently, his eyes blazing brighter.

“...I suppose I’ll send someone to go find it, then.” He picked up his reins with a tremor in his hand. “As for food, there ought to be enough rats around to last the night. In the morning, I can arrange something once I speak to Annette. She’ll know what to do.”

“What did you just say?”

“Rations!” he hurriedly corrected. “I said rations, from the trip. I know there wasn’t much left, but it ought to last the next twelve hours. Satisfied?”

“For the moment.” It wasn’t worth arguing any further about this. Clearly Guy Valvert was not the man to ensure these people were taken care of, even if he intended to honor their deal for longer than it took to defend his cousin. And that itself was hardly a given. “Find that well, and I’ll visit the castle.”

Valvert took off on his horse, riding south through the gate into the city, dented and scorched but still standing strong.

Now I have to hope Lady Annette can do better from the inside of a prison cell.

After so long on the road, surrounded by people looking to him for direction, walking back through the city on his own felt refreshing, even as worries nibbled at him with every step.

“I don’t understand what was wrong with the rat suggestion. My siblings would have been happy to help catch them if they’re too fast for humans, or too hard for their weak eyes to find.”

Well, mostly on his own.

“Rats aren’t very good food for humans. They taste foul, and carry diseases on them really easily, to the point that it’s a last resort at best. Especially city rats, here. Soleil only knows what pox they might have carried here from one of those ships.”

“Isn’t this a desperate situation though?”

Fernan exhaled with a hint of amusement. “Sort of. If it were a choice between feeding people rats and letting them starve, the correct decision would be obvious. But Guy Valvert promised food and shelter. Telling us to find rats to eat breaks the spirit of the agreement. It’s an insult, especially when I know he can do so much better.”

“Oh. I guess that makes sense. That guy might not have known about that, then. He’ll be so embarrassed when he finds out!”

“If only…” Fernan scratched the back of her head. “Right now, he still needs me enough to fall in line, but the moment the trial is over, that ends. I need to work something else out, and fast.”

The gecko’s head tilted to the side. “If he needs you right now, and he knew he was insulting you, why would he say that?”

“Habit,” Fernan guessed. “He’s not used to depending on someone like me and he doesn’t know how to deal with it, so he’s falling back on his normal behavior.” Camille Leclaire had done the same when she’d been alive, though to a far, far lesser extent. “The more I see, the more I think people will take any excuse to just keep acting the way they normally do, whether or not it’s in their best interest.”

I only narrowly avoided doing it myself.

Even after learning of Jerome’s monstrous actions, that temptation had been there: follow the path laid out before him, take the opportunity to return to his life after everything that had happened, with the people he loved in the town he knew…

It would have been so easy to ignore what all of it had been built on. Jerome had managed it for decades and still thought himself a good person.

“Gézarde can be like that, too. It was hard enough convincing him to let me take even this many geckos with me. If he’d had his way, even I wouldn’t be here.”

Fernan nodded slowly, continuing to walk. The winding path up from the city to the castle was a long one, and with night on the cusp of falling there was no time to waste.

Even in the distance, the guard at the gates to the castle glowed brighter than a normal person would.

“Fernan?” they called out. “Is that you?”

“What gave it away?” He flared the flames in his eyes as Mara scurried up to them. Once he was close enough, he recognized one of the sages from the Sun Temple, though not one he’d ever needed to interact with too closely. “Yves, right?”

The sage nodded. “Sage of Phoenicia, and now Keeper of the Gate.”

“Quite a title,” Fernan congratulated, not understanding what it entailed. “Though I’d expect you to be at the temple.”

“Lord Lumière has a lot of us working in the castle now. He needs people he can trust.”

And what is he doing there?

Guy Valvert had made some effort to fill Fernan on the situation in Guerron, but between the man’s demeanor and his inability to get to the point, Fernan could hardly say his understanding was comprehensive.

“Is it alright if I come in?” He glanced down at Mara. “If we come in?”

Yves smiled. “Lord Lumière is at the Temple with Magnifico right now, but I’m sure he wouldn’t mind.”

“He’s feeling better, then?”

“Not all the way back to where he was, but a few weeks bedrest did wonders…” His glow pulsed, as if a thought were coming to him. “Say, what brings you back, anyway? Lord Lumière said that your village was being accosted. Did you save it?”

I doomed it. “...I did the right thing.”

“Hmm.” Yves raised his eyebrows and nodded slightly. “Well, we’re glad to have you back, in any case. Little Aubaine has missed you dearly.” He stepped to the side, inviting Fernan to pass the threshold of the gate.

“I hope he’s not getting into too much trouble,” Fernan said with a hint of a smile as he stepped forward, feeling the shade of the entryway cool him. “And how is Adrian?” He’d been clinging to life when Fernan had left, but...

Yves sucked in air through his teeth. “The healer soothed his passing with opium. At the end, at least, he felt no pain.”

Fernan nodded somberly, not sure how to respond.

“The Fox-King’s got a lot to pay for, and pay he will. Rabid cur, attacking us like that.”

He threatened Magnifico for arming Lumière with that horrific weapon, and Adrian intervened. But in the end, what was the difference?

It was hard to imagine feeling such love for someone that it would provoke anyone to act like that, with all of the destruction left in its wake. What had happened was horrific, but the Fox-King had only made it worse. He was so old, too. He’d been six years of age during the Foxtrap, according to Florette, which would make him twenty-three now. Old enough to know better, no matter how gruesome that image of Camille, lying there as the life drained out of her before being kicked into the water.

How had it come to this?

“It was a horrible day.” Fernan had no interest in lying, but Yves wasn’t looking for nuance here.

The other flame sage nodded back, a drip of warmth sliding down his cheek. “Feel free to look around the castle. It’s really impressive when you’re seeing it for the first time. Just be careful you don’t wander into the wrong place; the prisoners are being kept in the eastern tower.”

“Thank you.” For multiple reasons.

It seemed a strange choice to keep people guarded in a tower who were accused of pushing someone out of one, but perhaps the dungeons were full or something.

Yves hadn’t technically forbidden him from going there, although the justification felt tenuous. It had sounded more like a warning than a prohibition, though, and it wasn’t as if he planned to help anyone escape. Seeing Annette seemed to be easy enough for Guy, anyway, so there probably wasn’t anything legal stopping Fernan from doing it. Hopefully.

This was too important to wait for Valvert.

It would be impossible to ensure his people’s needs would be met without talking to Annette Debray herself, let alone to defend her.

East meant inland, so Fernan simply followed the winding corridors as far back from the front entrance as he could until he found a staircase leading up.

That led to a fantastic view of the sunset, but no signs of anyone being held captive. The whole thing seemed rather too decadent for dungeons anyway; however ostentatiously this castle had been built, there was no way the jail would match it.

At least the view of speckled people glowing in a tower shape out of the east window showed where he did need to go. It gave him enough direction to find the stairs up to it after a few more minutes of wandering.

All the way through, the castle seemed strangely empty. The few people milling about had vaguely familiar auras, as if Fernan had seen them in passing at the Sun Temple. The fact that none of them remarked on Mara or his eyes was another good sign of that, though only some of them had the brilliant aura of sages.

But then where was everyone else? It seemed unlikely that the glowing dots he’d seen in the other tower represented all of them.

Who lives in the castle, anyway? The Duke was dead, his heir imprisoned. Courtiers, I think? That would be other aristocrats like Guy or Camille, but for a building this enormous, surely there ought to have been more.

Either they left, or someone got rid of them. Neither possibility was particularly comforting.

Fernan knew he was on the right path as he climbed, as the groups of people grew far denser and more frequent, mostly groups of five to ten non-sages carrying pikes, with one sage in their midst unarmed.

Some of them Fernan recognized, and paused for a brief exchange of pleasantries, but none of them stopped him, nor even seemed to think it strange that he was there.

That is, none of them cared until he reached the door to the chamber on the top floor. The way it was positioned in the hallway, it looked like the room took up the entire floor, with a woman he didn’t recognize standing at the entrance, her aura bright and red as only a sage’s could be.

When she glimpsed him, light flared out in recognition. “Hey, you’re that guy who was pretending to be my cousin, aren’t you?”

Fernan blinked. “I beg your pardon?”

The woman clapped her hands together, the sound echoing off the stone. “When I got here for the tournament, the guards said they’d already let my cousin ‘Fernan’ in through the gates weeks ago, a spirit-touched sage with flames in his eyes. Then I get here and no one knows anything about ‘Fernan Bougitte’, but all the other light sages mention a boy named Fernan, again with flaming green eyes, who Lord Lumière had taking care of his kid.”

How am I still paying for that lie?

He tapped Mara three times, a signal for her to hang back and observe, and to be ready for danger. “It was a misunderstanding. An accident.” On my part, anyway. Florette hadn’t really given him any choice in the matter.

“Of course! Happens all the time. Just this morning I accidentally said I was the Great Binder to get into Avalon. We all had a big laugh about it!”

“I’m sorry. Really. It was… brief. The ‘Fernan’ you learned about from the other sages is exactly who I am. No lies.”

Her fists clenched tightly. “How dare you impugn the name of the hallowed family Bougitte for your petty deceptions! Two hundred years we have served the great flame spirit Flammare, Guardian of the Gold, Champion of the Hearth, presumptive heir to Soleil as Arbiter of the Light. Your vile misdeeds have torn asunder the very fabric of society. A curse upon you, that darkness may ever follow in your wake, until it drags you down to Khali’s world of eternal emptiness.”

I hope you’re having fun being a pirate, Florette, because when you get back, I’m going to kill you. “Please, please, Lady Bougitte, I meant you no wrong. I would be happy—eager—to remedy any harm that my deceptions have caused you, and—”

She burst out laughing. “Your fucking face! Man, Aurelian said you were a good egg, but wow!” She interrupted herself with another fit of laughter. “And your eyes do get bigger when you’re angry! It’s really cool to look at, by the way. Super impressive, even when you’re cowering over something stupid.”

His eyes narrowed, their brightness intensifying. “So is there a problem?”

She shook her head with a snort. “Man, I couldn’t care less about you dropping my name to get past some guards that would have let you by anyway. Only thing that pissed me off when I got here was that Aurelian had beaten me to killing Camille Leclaire.” She shrugged. “I guess the bitch had to go, but he could have at least waited long enough to let me see it.”

Prick. Who would torment someone like that? “Well, it’s a pleasure to meet you, Lady Bougitte.”

“Laura.”

“Laura, then. If you don’t mind, I’ve just had a very long day, and—”

“Sure, yeah, whatever. Oh! We should totally duel! Wouldn’t that be amazing? I’ve already fought all the other sages at the Temple, but you’re new. I heard you managed to get the hang of Aurelian’s flying trick. That, I have to see. And your gecko familiar? So cool!”

“Hello!” Mara called out, apparently thinking the need for caution was past.

I’ll have to talk with her about that.

Laura's glow brightened. “You talk too? Ok, we definitely have to spar. You and your familiar versus me and mine. They haven’t rebuilt the platform yet, but we could still do it on the beach. If things get really heated, we could even make some glass. I love doing that.”

“Isn’t glass that glowing stuff that they put on the side of the temple?”

“Yeah! You make it by heating up sand a lot. I’ll show you down at the beach some time. You’re in too, right, Fernan?”

Fernan clutched strands of hair as he tried to think of a polite way to decline.

“Of course he’s in! That sounds so cool! Who wouldn’t want to see it?”

Thanks, Mara.

“Laura, I’m honored by your request.” He took a deep breath, trying not to scream. “But for the moment, could I please speak to the prisoner you’re guarding?”

“Eh?” She tilted her head back. “She’s awfully popular for a murderer, but I guess it’s fine. Just don’t rough ‘em up. Aurelian gets really pissy about it, and I’ll end up being the one to get in trouble.”

“Of course not! Why would I do that?”

Laura tilted her head in what Fernan was pretty sure was a wink. “Who knows why people do the things they do?” She fidgeted with a key until it fit into the keyhole to open the lock. “Try to make it quick.”

It’s amazing you’re trusted to guard anyone at all.

A loud wheezing sound greeted Fernan as he entered the room, closing the door behind him.

Duchess Annette Debray was pacing back and forth across the room, a wad of papers in her hand as she mumbled to herself.

And behind her...

In a massive armchair, doubled over coughing under a mop of dimly glowing red hair, was the Fox-King, Lucien Renart.