A Blade of a Boy, A Weapon of a Woman

A prince and a price. A sorceress and her schemes.

Queen Aella Ectorius had a newborn baby, a ritual knife, and two decades’ worth of barely banked hostility.  

Her royal child had been born in the early hours of the morning, expelled from her womb in an explosion of screams and spite. She came into the world much the same way Aella intended to leave it: angrily, bloodily, and loudly. 

The squalling, red-faced child did, by all accounts, have her mother’s disposition. 

Queen Aella had been trying to calm her for hours, the babe cradled in the crook of one arm, ritual dagger clenched in her spare hand, hidden from the midwife’s beady gaze only by the sprawl of soiled sheets. Her eyes remained fixed unwaveringly on the open balcony doors. 

The midwife’s disapproval was made clear. “Unheard of,” she muttered. “Nursing the babe yourself. There’s a wet nurse, you know.” 

“My precious royal teats will survive, I’m sure,” said Aella. “Now leave. All of you.” 

Weighty glances were shared between the servants and the midwife. “The babe…” began the midwife. 

“Stays with me.” Aella’s refusal to part from the child remained steadfast. She would not let her out of sight. She couldn’t. He was coming. She knew it with a certainty that bordered on religiosity. Some things were certain, intractable, undeniable. Things like the sun rising, the tides turning. Things like the king’s b*****d son doing something monstrous. 

The midwife sighed. Shrugged. 

Aella let out a breath as the door fell shut behind the congregation of busybody servants. Void of people, the room suddenly felt colder, plunged into sub-zero frigidity. The November night seemed to take on a breathless sort of anticipation. A light breeze stirred the pellucid drapes of the Ectorius winter home. The hem of them whispered against the floor tiles, phantasmal. The winter home wasn’t like the palace in Kadav, wasn’t bustling with life, with lies, with lickspittles. The winter home was a place of nihility, a purgatory where Aella could be locked away and willed into nonexistence. It was a carapace, a cage, a coffin. 

The bed beneath her was still wet and bloody, grimed with her own gore. Aella briefly wondered if she should recall the servants to make the bed fresh, considered the pointlessness of such a thing, and laughed--an abrupt enough sound that it ripped into her scream-shredded throat anew. 

For seven months she had tossed the bone die daily. The past two days they’d both landed dark side up. 

Imminent death.

She would die here. In indignity. In obscurity. But her baby would not. 

As the child nursed, Aella took the string of bone from her pocket. Her connection to death magic was weak thanks to so many years in the Tavelan court, where she had been unable to practise her craft. Her potential suffocated, smothered by the years in which she’d acquiesced to her husband’s insistence on mundanity and magic-less-ness. 

Still, she felt it. Magic lived in her, regardless of the years of disuse. It lived in the world, too. Waiting. Spark to ember. Ember to conflagration. Elemental magic was a combustible entity, explosive and wildly unpredictable. Carnivorous, too: a consumer of living things. Death magic was different. A detritivore. A cannibal. Death magic didn’t have the abundance of life to draw on that other magic did. It fed on dead things and dead things alone. There was no natural wind to help buffer it; no fire to feed it. Death magic starved. 

And when it fed, it devoured. 

She snapped off two pieces of bone from the string--one from the living, one from the dead--and tucked them into the babe’s blanket. She could only pray that there was enough magic in the bone, and enough magic in herself, to do what needed to be done. 

With her preparations almost complete, Queen Aella reclined on the bed, fixed her eyes back on the balcony, and waited for him to come. 

The B*****d Prince Casimir arrived the way he always did: silently, unobtrusively. Aella saw his gaunt silhouette as he lithely hauled himself over the railing and onto the balcony. He lingered in the doorway for a moment, his figure faintly silvered by the moonlight, his contours sharp in the shadows. He looked first at Queen Aella, then at the babe. 

Prince Casimir, though barely sixteen, already had a reputation for cruelty. He was a blade of a boy, religiously buffed against the whetstone of his father’s malice until he’d come out sharp enough to cut. He had a look about him, a certain starkness to his face, that gave him an almost perpetual expression of hunger. Aella could only stare for a moment. She was a blade too, she supposed--a disused one, rusty and brittle with neglect, more liable to shatter than slice. 

Casimir looked back starkly. 

Time and again, she had tried to warn her husband of his b*****d son’s true nature, but the king had waved her off with a sneer and an unsubtle reminder of her place. Her place. Beneath him, both physically and metaphorically. Less than. Diminished. Panting beneath him in discomfort at night as he rutted against her, his jowls wobbling, teeth gritted and stained. Her eyes fixed on his bare neck above her. Unprotected. Exposed. 

Her sister’s voice in her head: How do you hold onto power? 

Could she cut it from the king’s neck and bleed it out of him? Could you tap power like a cask of wine? Could you drink it from someone else’s veins? The consideration was enough to fuel her dreams, enough to keep her staring at his jugular, night after night, with canines bared. 

“Casimir,” she said softly, trying for a smile. “Have you come to see your sister?” 

The B*****d Prince was quiet for a long moment. “Half-sister.” 

The smile died. “But still your sister.” 

Casimir wasn’t looking at the queen. He was looking at the babe with that hungry expression, his gimlet eyes glinting in the half-dark, almost luminescent in their famishment. Queen Aella knew, as did Casimir, that the child in her arms was the only thing between him and the throne. As it stood currently, the succession was confused. Typically a son would inherit the throne, but Casimir was a b*****d, making him unfit for kingship. The babe in Aella’s arms was true born, but a girl, making her almost equally undesirable. 

“You understand,” Casimir said quietly. “You understand how this must end.” 

Queen Aella clasped the babe close to her breast. Her eyes darted to the door.

“The other women are gone,” said the B*****d Prince. “No one will hear you.” 

Aella almost smiled. A critical miscalculation: that she would scream. That she would beg. 

“The guards?” 

“Dead.” He straightened his cloak. It was bloodless, like the rest of him. Eerily pristine. Aella did not believe Casimir to be a good enough fighter to kill six guards alone and emerge unscathed, which meant he’d brought people with him--people who were loyal to him and not the king. Like father like son, the king had made a critical miscalculation too. Casimir had acquired power of his own.

“My husband--”

“Will never know. People die all the time. Even queens. Especially queens.” Casimir’s green eyes shone, as reflective and hard as glass. He unsheathed the dagger at his hip. 

“The wounds,” said Aella desperately. “The dead guards. They’ll know this was no accident.” 

Casimir cocked his head and waved a hand to indicate the open balcony doors. “River.” 

A pause, then: “Dead bodies don’t stay sunk. Not forever.” 

He looked at her sharply. Her manner had changed in an eerie instant. Her voice, too; the desperation had sloughed away, leaving the words sharp-edged and certain.  

His eyes took her in with a sharpshooter’s precision. For the first time, he seemed to truly see her. Aella had a very practised courtly disposition, all sweetness and subservience. A witch’s basic nature, predatory in the extreme, hidden beneath a shell of civility and practised docility. Usually, the shell was all anyone saw. Her magic--that feral, ferocious creature--remained locked in the confines of its cage. And if sometimes a passing courtier caught her gaze and felt an echo of that old animal fear, of prey sensing predator, bone-deep and tremulous, then Aella’s spun-sugar smile convinced them it was a fluke, a coincidence. 

But now Casimir was looking into her eyes, unobstructed, unveiled, and he saw what was there. Predator. Panther. Pollutant. 

“Something happens inside them post-death,” Aella continued. “Their innards putrefy. They bloat. They come back to the surface.” 

"How do you know this?" 

"Experience." Aella let him reckon with the truth of it. The evidence was in her voice, in the cold clarity of her eyes. She’d made this mistake herself. She’d dumped a body herself. Let him wonder when, why, who. Let him fear. Aella could see him trying to reconcile the two disparate parts of her: quelled queen and murderous menace. 

She smiled at him, big and wide. A caricature of herself, of who she pretended to be. 

He smiled back, amused, a little off-kilter. “I heard,” he said slowly, “that there’s an awful case of the plague in this area. The bodies have to be burned almost immediately to stop the spread.” 

Aella tried not to let her satisfaction show. A burning. It was what she’d banked on. “Burning?” She made sure to blanch.  

“Don’t witches always burn in the end?” 

It was almost funny. 

Casimir dropped his gaze. “You may name her first if you like.”

It wasn’t a kindness, this offer. Aella knew that. It used to be a favourite childhood game of Casimir’s to offer one of the other children a toy, urge them to name it, to love it, only to then break it in front of them. It was never a kind breakage, either. Aella had seen the aftermaths. Obliteration. Carnage. Wooden soldiers decapitated, de-limbed, defiled. 

Aella wasn’t afraid of Casimir as a general rule. What she feared was the pinpoint accuracy of his cruelty. It wasn’t a vague sort of meanness. His attacks were honed with a specificity that spoke of an instinctive ability to ferret out the most effective way to hurt someone. 

And this--to name a child she would never know, never see, never grow with--hurt more than she cared to acknowledge. 

“Avice,” said the queen. “Avice Valeria Ectorius.” 

“Avice.” Casimir chuckled softly. “‘Refuge in battle’. Very funny, Queen Aella. Did you hope she would be the peaceful sort? A bastion of good?”

Aella ground her teeth together. She realised, in a moment of hard-won clarity, that what she felt for Casimir made theirs the most simple relationship she’d ever had in her life. What she felt for him was fortifying and uncomplicated: a simple, seething hatred, pure and cleansing as fire, untainted by love or nostalgia or regret. “I hoped only that she would be better than you.”  

Casimir’s hand tightened on the dagger’s hilt. His eyes flashed. His hatred was pure too. “I’m afraid that very soon she will be nothing at all.” 

He prowled toward her soundlessly, dagger in hand. He moved like a Sidonian w***e, all long-limbed, languid elegance and soft-footed sensuality. 

Except a Sidonian w***e, Aella was sure, would deliver a much more pleasant sort of death.  

She clasped the babe close to her chest and kept her eyes wide open. She expected no mercy here. People weren’t people to Casimir. They meant as little and as much to him as the toy wooden soldiers of his youth. They were to be played with, for a while. And then, when that grew wearisome, when the breaking of them could provide more amusement than the building, he’d dismantle and discard them. 

Casimir had an almost vacuous expression as he brought the knife down into Aella’s gut. The act was surgical in its certainty, the pain immediate and startling, but it lacked the true potency of her fear. Fear for the child. Fear for herself. She let the words roll over in her head, a demand, an invocation. The magic will work. The magic will work. 

Casimir’s face came into slow focus above her: a thin, fine nose; delicate bones; deep-set, depthless eyes. He looked so breakable, fragile as blown glass. An angelic-looking boy. A danger to no one, surely. 

Blood continued to leak from Aella’s gut in a steady stream. She pressed a hand to her stomach under the guise of trying to clot the bleeding. Her body felt oddly light all of a sudden. She was bird-boned, her pulse fumbling and stumbling like a newborn colt. She could feel magic there, somewhere in her hollow bones, clawing at her edges with blood-stained talons. Magic pressing out; pain pressing in. She was pressurised like the inside of a volcano. 

Death magic devours. It would devour her. A final sacrifice. A life for a life. Her for the babe. 

Perfect. 

Once she deemed her finger adequately bloody, she brought her hand covertly to the babe’s head, the downy, dark cap of her hair velvet-soft beneath blood-slicked fingers. 

Without looking, she drew the symbol. 

Part of the not-looking was to avoid drawing Casimir’s attention. A larger part of the not-looking was a personal denial of the act. It held the same pseudo-blamelessness as looking away from a street beggar. It’s not your responsibility if you’re not looking. It didn’t work. Aella felt no cessation of guilt. She knew who the runic bloodmagic would call. She knew who would come. Someone both better and worse than Casimir.  

She hoped the babe was not better off dead.      

Casimir raised the knife again. Aella kept her eyes on his. Reptilian green. Snakes eyes. She scrabbled briefly for her ritual knife. She sank it deep, deep, into Casimir’s arm. Casimir’s blood was not required for the magic Aella intended to save her babe. This was no act of necessity. It was a final defiance. A serrated-edged f**k you. There was a satisfying reverberation as the blade hit bone. 

“Go on then,” she rasped. “Have it done with, you coward. Finish it, B*****d.” 

It was objectively an insane way to use one of her last breaths on earth. But Aella Ectorius had no magic left to spare in her own defence, no family left to call on, no guards left to protect her, and no gods left to listen. She’d done all she could. She had her ritual knife, a fatal gut wound, and spite. 

Casimir finally--finally--flinched. “F*****g witch,” he said. Then he brought the knife to her throat and cut. It wasn’t quite deep enough to be quick. The world blackened at the edges as the pain set in. 

The babe began to cry then. Loudly. Furiously. “Shut up,” Casimir said. Aella heard a repugnant, wet squelching sound. The babe’s cries went quiet. Blood warmed Aella’s chest and neck: her babe’s bloody baptism. 

It will be enough, she thought weakly. The magic will be enough. 

Her breaths were getting harder to take, one after another getting stuck somewhere in the gaping maw of her throat, bloody and thick. Her vision grew dark. She could feel that same pressure from earlier: magic pushing out, pain pushing in. The magnitude of it crippled her, and still, she held fast. The magic had to be absolute at the point of death. She had to be effulgent with it, irradiated, magic in the shape of a woman. 

 She could feel the call of the Beyond. The magic reached its apex, and for a brief moment, she was entirely other, immortal and immortalised. Before she let it take her, Aella sent out a final prayer. Let Avice be safe, let her be strong. She thought of cruel Casimir. And let her stay hidden.