Conquest of Avalon

Guy I: The Blameless Victim

“Imagine, me, imprisoned by mountainfolk!” The very notion was appalling, the concept alarming, and the reality more dreadful yet. I was the one who warned Annette of the treachery endemic to the lesser peoples, she the one who gambled our House’s future on a man she’d hardly met.

And yet it wasn’t Annette who’d spent four years chained in this cell, suffering the torment and cruelty of captivity—well, metaphorically chained; for all that he was free to move about his quarters, they would be small for a guest of only middling importance, let alone the rightful Lord of Guerron.

They’d even built that damned gecko statue right in the courtyard of the Château that Léonce Debray had built up from nothing, as if to taunt Guy specifically. He’d even seen children laughing and snickering as they pointed up at his chambers, reading aloud the epigraph.

No man shall rule Guerron alone —Fernan Montaigne.

Guy had no doubt at all that Montaigne had been the bronze rider briefly erected atop the gecko before its removal that very night, his vainglorious treachery immortalized for all to see.

Perhaps someone stole it. That’s a nice thought.

“How could it possibly have come to this?” Guy demanded, pacing the length of his chambers for perhaps the thousandth such time in what felt like as many years.

“It likely had something to do with antagonizing the entire city whilst losing control over large swathes of your cousin’s government,” answered Valentine, his beloved wife, who’d seen him dangling helplessly in Montaigne’s clutches and ordered her crossbows fired on them both. “If I’d been made aware of the precarity of the position you’d placed us in, I would have handled Montaigne entirely differently.”

It was good that she was still alive, but it also felt appropriate that she’d been shot.

“I never had any problems with him until you tried to tar him as the source of all those troubles with your sister. The poor boy didn’t have a treacherous bone in his body! You turned my compliant servant into my greatest enemy, and for what? Laura? The dead don’t care about the injuries you inflict on the living in their name.”

Valentine tensed, pulling her hand towards the injury that had taken her so long to recover from. Curse those treacherous peasant healers. She’d have been up and about years ago if the rebel doctors had actually wanted her to recover. Guy’s first instinct would be to assume incompetence, but Doctor Sézanne had on occasion attended on those in the castle, and thus his aptitude was surely sufficient if he actually desired success.

Instead he’s still bitter about me pulling his invitation to the masquerade ball so we could fit Sire Raoul. The low-born swine should have been honored to even be invited conditionally!

Valentine looked angry too. “Montaigne made my sister out to be a treacherous wretch like Leclaire, all so his pathetic hermit of a spirit could steal Soleil’s seat. Was I supposed to let him get away with it? If you hadn’t allowed your thrice-damned uncle to make a mockery of the Lord’s justice to relieve his gambling debts, Montaigne would be exiled or dead, and out of our hair.”

“I had no idea!” Guy insisted, implicitly conceding the point. If I’d known that someone of the blood Valvert could be such a selfish, useless oaf, I’d never have invited him with me from Dorseille. But then, despite their differences, Annette had respected family and loyalty enough to appoint him in her stead—failing to honor his own family would be spiting the very grace that had been shown to him.

“If true, that’s quite a stellar display of leadership on your part.” Valentine sighed. Guy hadn’t been waiting with particularly bated breath as she recovered, for it seemed only fitting to give her life the same consideration she’d given his. But now that she was well enough that the peasants were letting him visit her, he’d be a fool to look past the opportunity to wield their combined abilities and resources against the problem plaguing them both. Valentine seemed to realize it too. “But assigning blame will get us nowhere. Call it a confluence of bad decisions, each alone insufficient, but all of them taken together...”

“I suppose I can accept that,” Guy agreed, since the choices made by those around him—Uncle Augustin, Valentine, Montaigne, and all the rest—had certainly ruined everything. And I was the one who brought them all together. No sensible choice but to blame himself for that much, however innocent he might be of stoking the chaos that followed.

Uncle Fouchand ended up with the same problem, drawing in the treacherous like Leclaire, the shortsighted like my cousin, and the simpleminded like the Fox-King. Even Aurelian had been overambitious, for all that his words and deeds had remained loyal and capable. And as foolish as it was, Fouchand had always favored the children, and what Aurelian had done had spat upon that legacy.

Guy, of course, had labored tirelessly for the Duke and without complaint, but he doubted he’d have ever been included in the council if not for his mother, and the guilt Fouchand felt over her death. He knew how to honor his family, even if his granddaughter doesn’t. “The question, then, is how to set things right.”

Valentine raised an eyebrow. “Is that not obvious? As soon as I recover my strength, I’ll bring the wrath of Tauroneo down upon their heads. We obliterate all opposition, thoroughly enough that no one for a thousand years will think to repeat the insult.” She’d never looked more beautiful than that moment, even lying sickly in her bed. Her blue eyes radiated the intent of vengeance, auburn hair radiating out onto the pillow like a crown of fire.

And yet...

“I’m not sure that’s wise.”

In the gambler’s dens, they called it ‘toppling’, letting the anger over one loss goad you into misplaying the next hand. From there, another loss, and further recklessness to try to win everything back. One bad decision after another, compounding failure and frustration upon each other until the night left you destitute. And so a mighty tower is toppled by the removal of a single brick.

“Not that I’m much of a gambler,” Guy insisted, reading the disbelief in his wife’s face after he explained the term. But I tell it true—Uncle Augustin was the one who told me that. Gambling was amusing enough, an excuse to drink and game with friends and strangers, but the involvement of money had a way of turning those friends into adversaries or sycophants, piercing the veil of that grey area betwixt them where all the best relationships lied.

Little point remained in dwelling on it, though. “The fact remains that your deftest techniques, supplemented with the arms of my most loyal guards at the height of their numbers, lost you the day. Now you are wounded, my forces turned traitor or fled, and the dirty churls outside our windows curse our names, lost in their hopeless delusions. What, exactly, do you think will win you this battle, when you so decisively lost the last?”

Valentine’s eyes darkened, rage in her face, but instead of answering the unanswerable she simply changed the subject, attempting to elide her loss of the argument with a bit of rhetorical sleight-of-hand. “I’m confident that I can surpass your contributions on that day. If I can manage to avoid being taken as a hostage and then cowering under a table the moment I’m freed, I’ll still come out ahead.”

Not my proudest moment, perhaps, but I feel rather vindicated in my decision by the fact that you were shot with a pistol and I was not. “You wouldn’t be fighting me, sweet wife, but the Mountain and his skulking thugs, kitted out with the very pistols that felled you last time, and Leclaire before you.”

“The tower of our strength may be shorter, but it has not fallen. And I’ve built a floor above it that’s invisible to all.” Valentine smiled. “I’ve concealed my strength, exaggerated my injuries. They think me out of the fight, and won’t be expecting any retaliation. Even now, I could bring this castle crumbling to the ground.”

“This castle that we’re standing in, my dear?” Guy shook his head, rolling a florin between his fingers. “This is a situation that calls for a subtler approach. The right florins in the right pockets have ensured that the Viscount of Miroirdeau is my creature, my voice in the rebel’s pathetic councils. His passionate calls for temperance have already spared our lives and secured us chambers better suited to our station.” At least, compared to the dungeons they’d proposed before. “The right order at the right time will ensure our freedom, with no need to rely on your proven record of combat success.”

Hopefully soon. The money’s running out. It didn’t help that the accommodations were so dismal—there would have been more florins left for intrigue had so many not needed to be spent on news, food, wine, and silence from the guards. A two-hour visit with Louise alone had cost Guy five hundred florins it had pained him to spend bribing the guard, though the necessity of such a visit after so cruel and prolonged a time of captivity could hardly be denied by any reasonable person, even Valentine.

Not that Guy intended to ponder that particular quandary of ethics with her any time soon. For all that they’d made the appropriate mutual arrangements in private before the wedding, it was generally agreed to be poor form to pay five hundred florins to visit your sworn protector while your wife was on the verge of death.

The less Guy provoked the High Priestess of Tauroneo, the better their chances at quashing this uprising together before moving on with their lives. He had to believe it was possible to set things right, even after Lucien had abandoned them. I gave that boy his first taste of single malt and showed him places in Guerron he’d never have found without me, and this is how I’m repaid? Leclaire’s poison in his ears, Guy had no doubt, but a king’s duty was to lead, not follow. Lucien loved his wife sincerely—that much was plain to see. But there was love and then there was committing yourself to the folly of standing by your wife as she drove your forefathers’ empire into the ground.

Annette was easier to understand—they’d always hated each other. He’d done her a good turn in finding the mountain boy and puppetting him through the trial to victory, but she’d probably seen the favor as returned when she’d left him in charge of Guerron. A Guerron that she had left on a shambolic foundation so that I would be stuck holding the bag.

It was all so unfair, the trials that Guy had to endure, but he shouldered that burden with dignity and poise as befit his noble birth. If some people couldn’t honor the demands of their station with so basic an act as protecting their family rather than leaving them to rot, Guy still would not allow their failure to force him down to their level.

It was incumbent upon him to be better, to set the sort of example that Fouchand would have been proud of, and free the city he’d called home from Fernan Montaigne’s cruel grip.

“There are three principal obstacles to our setting things to right. Any plan of ours must resolve them all, lest we end up right back here, or worse.” It was no secret that many of the Bougitte soldiers that had accompanied Valentine for the wedding were still in the rebels’ dungeons, condemned to the dank and dismal existence of a petty prisoner. If the Mountain’s lot rebuked their counteroffensive, it wasn’t hard to imagine them consigning Guy and Valentine to the same, their noble birth be damned.

“I imagine our captivity is the first?” Valentine asked, actually listening intently for once. “My strength is limited, but I’m sure that I can punch through the walls and find myself a passage out. Perhaps a way into that underground tunnel they used to infiltrate the castle.”

“Excellent.” Seeing her still so afflicted by her wounds after four years, Guy had feared her magical contributions would be much more limited. “But getting you—us—out of here isn’t the trickiest part. We’ll need allies, greater in power and number than those who failed us four years ago. Otherwise we’ll be nothing more than a creature at court, kept around as a cautionary tale and mocked to our faces.” Such failure was not an option, even if it would be better than remaining a prisoner.

“We have House Bougitte. My parents might be cretins, but I’m High Priestess of Tauroneo and Lady of Guerron, whilst my brother Andréa is a blustering fool. They understand that I’m their future, and they’ll fight to defend that once they hear that I’ve recovered enough to take on that mantle.”

“All the more so after Laura’s unfortunate end, I don’t doubt.” Guy nodded, noticing Valentine wince at the name. “If I recall correctly, your family could marshal three hundred soldiers at its peak, less the eighty still in the rebels’ dungeons and another third to fully garrison the Stone Tower.”

“My father can still wield the power of Flammare’s flames at the cost of his life, we should not forget, though I cannot know if our plight would move him to use it, no matter the opportunity it presents to the family.”

“We can hope, at least.” Guy turns his thoughts to other potential allies. “Louise will fight in our name, and she has other friends in Monflanquin. Sire Raoul de Montgallet and Madeleine Lazare were freed, but they understand our plight better than anyone else could. And there are others who might be sympathetic. Leclaire has so callously disregarded the rights and liberties of all noble peers in her rush to consolidate power that other lords and knights might flock to us once they see that we have a real chance at success. Miro Mesnil, perhaps, for all that he keeps close company with the Fox-King.”

“Do we? Have a real chance of success, I mean. Friends are one thing, but they haven’t helped us so far. There’s a question of reliability. What of your forces?”

Unfortunately diminished. “I cannot know how many in Dorseille will still heed the command of their rightful liege after Leclaire’s had four years to get her hooks into them, but at best I might be able to call another four hundred to arms. Is that sufficient to retake the city, when the rebels have hundreds upon hundreds of peasants to throw into the meat grinder without the slightest care for their lives? Sages, new and traitors both, who wield the power of flame that helped win us the White Night? Not to mention those geckos.”

Valentine shook her head, finally seeming to realize the weight of the odds stacked against them. “It’s not enough. Even if I could fight at full strength, the Mountain put up a surprisingly good showing. With Charles des Agnettes aiding him with Fala’s power and the geckos calling on yet more fire, I don’t know that I could prevail as the only sage. If the rebels hadn’t killed Yves, maybe, but you’re right that it’s important to know your limits. All the more so in your case really, since you, of course, have nothing to offer in a battle.”

“My presence will inspire the troops!” Guy rebutted, a touch indignant. “But I’m not so arrogant as to think my skill as a warrior is any better than average. My talents lie elsewhere.” Whatever his faults, Uncle Fouchand had always been understanding about that, even back when Guy had been his squire.

“Oh, you have talents?” Valentine chuckled cruelly. “Across the water from Torpierre lies Gaume, capital of the Condillac Duchy. Right now it’s governed by a council of regents, all of whom refused to aid Duke Fouchand against the Avaline menace, and are unlikely to be any bolder in the name of our claim. But the little duke is soon to come into his majority, and an individual could prove much more pliable than a group.”

“Devious,” Guy praised, rubbing his hands together in anticipation. “He’ll be eager to prove himself, and how better than by showing up the Fox-King by liberating the city where he was raised? Miroirdeau can dispatch a letter to him through the appropriate venues, inviting him to marshall his forces against the Guerron rebels in exchange for choice lands from the Guerron duchy and obeissance from its rightful Duke.”

Valentine hesitated a moment. “You’d break with the Empire?”

“It’s not an action I take lightly, but Lucien and Leclaire left us to rot, and my cousin right alongside them. What right have they to rule Fouchand’s domains? By allowing this injustice to continue, I figure, my cousin has well abdicated her rights, leaving me the rightful heir to my uncle’s domains. And with his pick of the best of them, little Étienne Clément is likely to agree.” Guy felt a smile begin to overtake his face. “Even the veterans of the White Night among the rebels cannot hope to stop the full might of Condillac.”

His wife nodded slowly, coming around to his position. “With luck, Tauraneo can keep Corva in line as well, and ensure that her High Priest has the appropriate spiritual incentives in addition to the earthly ones. Fala may prove troublesome in that regard,” she admitted. “It would be better if we had the Gauntlet of Eulus to trade, offering Corva a memento of her erstwhile partner and reminding her of the injury Avalon did to them both.”

“Magnifico may know where it ended up,” Guy realized. “He used it to fight Aurelian at the moment of his ascension.” And didn’t even lose, remarkably. The King of Avalon could be a valuable resource if used appropriately, but it would be foolish to forget that he was dangerous in his own right. “Which brings us to our third problem—the Treaty of Charenton.”

“The what?”

Ah right, she’s been abed in and out of consciousness, and without my paid informants. It would be absurd to expect her to be up-to-date on all the actualities of the past four years. “The rebels made common cause with the Prince of Darkness. The blackheart was so thirsty for power and vengeful against Leclaire that he sanctioned his father’s captivity in exchange for formalizing the rebels’ claim of Guerron and depriving the Empire of the city.”

“That’s diabolical. Even my parents wouldn’t—Wait.” Valentine frowned. “So we have to convince the Duke of Condillac not merely to roll over a band of rebels, but to declare against an ally of Avalon? Do you not realize how much weaker that makes our position?”

“I was the one who just told you about it, dear. I assure you, I’m quite aware. You’ll note that I identified it as one of our three most difficult obstacles to overcome.” Guy plastered on a saccharine smile. “I know it can be hard to understand these complicated plots. You’re a warrior, it’s understandable that this is all a bit beyond you.”

“Whereas you’re the deft planner, amassing the right decisions and allies to lead us right here into this cell.” Valentine glowered. “The problem isn’t this treaty and it isn’t their alliance. It’s not even Avalon; it’s convincing the Duke. If Avalon hears of Guerron’s liberation as a fait accompli, Magnifico in our custody, I find it doubtful they’ll raise a fuss. Lucifer Grimoire can still take satisfaction from the sundering of the Empire and the political irrelevance of his father, which it sounds like were his primary motivations.”

“You’re right,” Guy realized, the insults he’d been readying forgotten. “Which means that we need to be able to assure them Avalon won’t stand for the rebels, despite the Treaty. And I think I know just how to do it.”

“Oh?”

Guy pulled out a pen and paper, writing his orders down for the Viscount of Miroirdeau, including the message for the young Duke Étienne. Afterwards, he added another order, the key to ensuring this plan’s success.

“How?” Valentine asked, irritated that he hadn’t responded.

“We’ll tear this whole rotten usurpation down from the inside.” Guy chuckled, at last feeling the optimism and joy he’d been so accustomed to before this calamity had struck. “And they’ll never suspect a thing until it’s too late.”