Mistakes had been made.
“A satyrian, Lady Angharad!” Cleon Eirenos exclaimed for the fourth time, eyes bright as stars. “Between that and the robbers, it was an encounter worthy of song.”
She hadn’t even killed the thing, she mutinously thought. So why was half of Chalcia convinced she had saved them from being murdered in the night by a tower-sized satyrian leading an army of lupines? A few of them had cheered her at breakfast, this was the opposite of spycraft! And she knew the source of it all, too. When she came down for porridge Mistress Katina had winked at her and loudly refused to be paid the second half of the travel fee because ‘saved my life, you did’.
While Angharad suspected the old woman had been trying to do her a good turn, the rumors spawned by whatever she said the previous night had swiftly got out of hand. While it was true satyrians were clever enough to use tools and open gates, they rarely attacked towns and certainly did not raise massive packs of lemures to do so. Chalcia was safe: it was a walledtown, with an informal militia guarding it. A fact that Angharad knew for certain because its captain had come to shake her hand.
Apparently by the second wave of retelling the highwaymen had been decided to be working with the lemures. These vile traitors were, Angharad was informed, plotting to destroy the town with the satyrian’s help so they might loot it afterwards.
It had been too much to hope for that these wild tales would not reach the Eirenos manor, and sure enough Lord Cleon himself came riding with the carriage having already drunk deep of the nonsense. Like everyone in Chalcia, he seemed convinced that her protests about the significant exaggerations were a mark of humility instead of Angharad stating the bloody facts.
As the alternative was a slow, infuriating descent into frothing madness Angharad instead grasped for anything at all that might change the nature of her conversation with the lordling riding besides her carriage. The Eirenos estate was not enormous but neither was it small, and barely half an hour out of Chalcia they had passed its boundary stones. The private road to the manor was in much better state than the one she had suffered over the last few days, which she complimented him on. He demurred in accepting her words.
“When Minister Floros was still regent, she passed a decree that every estate must maintain a road finely enough that the tax collectors could reach the manor within,” Lord Cleon told her. “Else a most unpleasant fine will be inflicted on the owning household.”
Clever of Lady Floros, Angharad thought. A ruler telling a noble household how to rule their own lands was sure to be met with resistance and rebellion, but to coach it in terms of tax collectors being able to reach said household would make any defying such a decree sound like they were avoiding paying their taxes instead or fighting to preserve their privileges.
A shame this cleverness had not also been put to work turning the roads of Tratheke Valley into something less deserving of indignation.
It was a pleasant enough trip to the estate chatting with an eager Lord Cleon, until they were past the outskirts and approached a small cluster of hills. Up a shallow slope, past the rise of the largest hilltop, finally waited the Eirenos manor.
It had a long, lime-white rectangular façade with a slightly angled red tile roof, and though it was not particularly large Angharad thought the row of large glass windows on the second story more than made up for it. Twin stairs – with a small passage between them slipping below and to the back the of the manor – went up to a triad of plaster arches bordering an open vestibule. There were shuttered windows on either side, and further out on the estate another two buildings. A guesthouse, Angharad decided, and some sort of annex.
The grounds were more impressive, a large pond flecked with slender reeds out front and a garden in the Asphodelian fashion spreading out in every direction: a mere step away from being wild, loosely paved paths winding through groves of orange and lemon trees as silver-leafed shrubs and long grass grew in clusters. Near the guesthouse, to the side of the manor, was a manmade clearing ringed by trees bearing yet-unlit lanterns, long tables already set in anticipation of the reception tomorrow. There was even a stone floor in the center for dancing.
Lord Cleon rode ahead, to make room for his coach, and Angharad saw through the gap in the drapes that on the front stairs waited a handful of servants in dark green livery. One of them bowed to the lordling and took away his horse after he dismounted, leading it around the back. As the coach began to slow, she watched the young lord be fussed over by a… sister? No, she corrected as the coach closed the distance. The fair-haired beauty embarrassing Cleon Eirenos, despite her youthful looks, wore too fine a dress to be anyone but his mother.
Angharad had not met many women taller than her since leaving Malan, but Lady Penelope Eirenos came close – and wore that height rather differently. Hair of red gold, wavy and so long it must reach down to the small of her back, crowned an elegant face with seductive lips and vivid green eyes. The hourglass figure barely contained by a loose pale blue gown had Angharad struggling not to stare, disbelieving that Lady Penelope was old enough to have a son. She looked barely thirty.
No wonder Lord Artemon had bought a herd of horses. Angharad might also be tempted to the unwise to put a smile on such a beauty’s face.
The coach came to a halt, and after the door was opened for her she was welcomed in a whirl of attention. Lord Cleon introduced the eldest of his servants, though none were named majordomo, and then pulled his mother away from giving orders to introduce her properly. Her beauty grew all the more dangerous from closeness, the slight marks of aging that Angharad now noticed – subtle laugh lines and wrinkles – only adding a certain undertone of maturity to the curves and smiled.
“My mother, Lady Penelope,” Cleon introduced.
“It is a pleasing to finally meet you, Lady Angharad,” Lady Penelope smiled.
“The pleasure is all mine,” Angharad assured her.
She had restraint enough not to seek to kiss her hand, trading curtsies instead. Lady Penelope had arranged refreshments, and while her luggage was brought upstairs she sat for lemon water and small talk. It was inevitable, of course, that questions would be asked about the run-in with the lemures and the poachers. Angharad did her best to dispel the rumors, with some degree of success.
“It is still quite the feat to drive off a band of poachers then escape a satyrian and his hunting pack,” Lady Penelope said.
Her gown wasn’t even all that revealing, Angharad reminded herself. It mere drew the eye to the slim waist and the contrasting curves around it.
“If Mistress Katina had not scared off the third poacher, I expect it would have gone quite differently,” she replied. “If we had still been skirmishing when the satyrian arrived…”
“I’m sure you would have found a way,” Lord Cleon firmly said. “Your heroics made a strong impression on the people of Chalcia.”
He shot a look at his mother after the words, the moment that passed between them hard for her to decipher. Lady Penelope, after the refreshments were well emptied, suggested that Angharad be given a tour of the manor’s surroundings. She accepted, naturally. Much of what she had come here to accomplish must be through talk with Cleon Eirenos, and a walk was fine enough setting for that.
Lord Cleon was eager to show her the grounds, though he took care that his enthusiasm would not go beyond what her limp allowed. He kept an eye on her stride, a hawk for signs of pain or exhaustion, and Angharad could not quite decide whether she was irritated or impressed. Regardless, it was gallant.
Cleon was not the kind of man she would consider handsome. His shorter stature and wisps of a mustache did not help. Yet he seemed to her a lord of respectable character and his conversation was engaging as he guided her through the garden around the manor, though she glimpsed through his affected calm the occasional burst of nerves.
She suspected he had rehearsed some topics, too, given the almost literary turns of phrase he occasionally used.
After an hour, in deference to her tiredness he suggested they retire to the manor for a time so they she might rest before he took her to hunt quail in the nearby woods. There had, to her mild frustration, been little opportunity for her to ask about what she had come to investigate. Patience, she reminder herself. Lord Cleon was younger than her, by a year, but he was no fool. She must not be suspicious in her questioning.
A room had been prepared for her on the highest story of the house, along with Lord Cleon’s own and that of Lady Penelope, and Angharad’s affairs had already been brought up. She napped for an hour, as offered, and had a small midday meal with the Eirenos.
Lord Cleon had dressed for the woods and ate carefully, constantly looking her way as if afraid that some small breach of etiquette would sour her on him, while Lady Penelope eyed the scene with open amusement. The beauty languorously ate orange slices, the light come through the window catching her mane of hair and wreathing her in gold. Her pale blue gown, cut in that Asphodelian way that evoked ancient chitons, should have been loose but was too filled by a splendid figure for it to be so.
It was an effort not to stare at those elegant fingers as she ate her meal, leaving most of the conversation to Lord Cleon as she observed them.
They went hunting afterwards, she in her traveling clothes and he attired like a proper woodsman. Angharad was no great huntress, but she knew how to use a fowler and Lord Cleon assured her the quails in the nearby woods made for easy hunting. The manor raised some of them in captivity before releasing them, to weaken the breed. The young lord offered to carry her gun, but she tucked it under her arm instead.
Within the turn of the hour he’d twice startled a quail into flight and snapped a shot that downed it, while her own struggles were… mixed. She caught a wing, once, but honesty compelled her to admit it had been pure chance. She’d simply never had to line up a shot so quickly, or on so small a target.
Angharad was not used to being unskilled and must not have hidden her frustration as well as she thought.
“New to fowlers, I take it?” Lord Cleon said.
“My father was a fine huntsman, but I never took a deep interest,” she admitted.
Mother had dabbled, but she’d always said that if she was to head out and kill an animal it might as well be a whale so the profit would be greater than a pot of stew.
“I imagine the sword took up much of your time,” he said.
Angharad shot him a surprised look. She had never spoken of being a mirror-dancer in Tratheke society.
“I asked a well-travelled cousin about your silver marks,” Lord Cleon admitted. “I apologize if you feel it untoward of me.”
“It is nothing hidden, the stripes are meant to be seen,” Angharad assured him. “It is only…”
She hesitated, looking for a sentence that would be neither a lie not too revealing a truth.
“I understand,” he grimaced. “The cane took the place of the sword.”
“Something like that,” Angharad precisely replied.
“In the interests of honesty,” Lord Cleon said, “I followed advice and also asked one of the royal sniffers as to whether or now a god endowed you with contract. I was informed that you were, though I know nothing more of the matter.”
She gritted her teeth, but curtly nodded. It was not an unreasonable precaution when inviting a foreign noble into your home. Indeed, it was to his honor that he would so straightforwardly tell her of it.
“Such knowledge can be asked for?” she said, surprised.
“If you ask coin in hand,” he said.
Angharad felt a silver of contempt. Not for Lord Cleon but the contractor taking bribes for secrets even when in the service of the Lord Rector of Asphodel. Sniffers were rare and valuable enough even the lesser of their kind would be able to take such liberties, which spoke well of Song. She was anything but the least of such contracts, yet held discretion as a virtue. Almost to a fault.
“I am contracted myself,” Lord Cleon continued. “It is a strange thing, to hold a god so close.”
Angharad raised an eyebrow. Not how she would have described it, but then she feared the Fisher as much as she respected his power. Closeness was not something she sought from that old monster.
“How so?”
“They see our weaknesses,” he said, “but in such a tight embrace it is inevitable we might glimpse theirs as well.”
The Fisher, Angharad thought, was the last entity she would associate with weakness. It abhorred the concept, and even as a diminished prisoner the great spirit remained a fearsome thing.
“I prefer to keep mine at arm’s length,” Angharad admitted. “We do not often see eye to eye.”
“I can sympathize,” Lord Cleon nodded. “Mine grew… odd, as time passed. Harsher, even as the granted boon thinned. I might not make the same choice now I did then.”
“Oh, mine thins not at all,” Angharad murmured. “Sometimes I worry of that.”
They left it at that, neither inclined to speak more in depth of their contract. Angharad knew, of course, of his. Song had skimmed his contract and told her of it. She felt guilt at that, but a shallow sort. He, too, had asked a sniffer about her. Angharad’s was simply the finer of the two.
They pushed deeper into the woods, Lord Cleon taking the time to show her how to more quickly snap a shot, and as the topic was on hunting she guided the river where she needed it to flow. First as to the many hunting grounds to which the Eirenos had rights, and his own experience with them. Then to what she wanted to know.
“I am told that the lictors patrol the valley in depth, now that there has been some trouble in the hills,” Angharad innocently said. “Do they not scare off the game when you take the field?”
He hummed, wiggling his hand.
“Most of the patrol routes have been the same since my father’s youth,” Cleon told her. “They do not change, and none come anywhere close to our hunting grounds. But there have been a few changes in the last few years, it is true.”
He frowned.
“The Lord Rector – it only began after Evander Palliades took the throne – claims the new expeditions are to drive back lemures, but before that mischief began in the hills there was no true need for that,” he said. “There has long been rumors that arms are being smuggled into Tratheke, so I have wondered if it might not be an attempt to catch the smugglers.”
“Smuggling from where?” Angharad said, as if disbelieving.
“The western hills, near the mountains,” he said. “That is where they stomp around most. It’s not done wonders for stag hunts in that slice of land, but it was always better out east anyhow. No great loss, though it sometimes has me thinking of selling our lodge out there.”
She considered, for a moment, telling him of the blackpowder and arms she had found in the wrecked carriage where the poachers had waited. Yet, weighing the matter, it seemed like there was little to learn by telling him. More importantly, it might be she had narrowed down where the entrance to the shipyards might be hidden: out in the western hills, near the mountains.
Not exactly a small stretch of land, but knowing that Eirenos lodge there was close enough to the patrols for hunting to be affected should help narrow it down.
Having learned as much without need for true skullduggery pleased her greatly, lifting her mood on the way back to the manor visibly enough Lord Cleon almost commented on it. He thought better, though, and instead began to tell her of the feast he was to throw the following evening.
“It will be mostly families from our part of Tratheke Valley,” Cleon said. “The Pisenor, the Saon and the Iphine foremost among them. From further out there will be only Lord Arkol, who did business with my father, and Lord Gule who was kind enough to accept my invitation.”
Angharad blinked in genuine surprise.
“The ambassador from Malan?” she checked.
Cleon seriously nodded.
“He has been a benefactor and something of a mentor, these last few years,” the young lord said. “I am pleased he was able to spare the time, given his duties.”
“Ah,” Angharad said. “That shipyard business, yes?”
Lord Cleon inclined his head.
“What the Kingdom of Malan wants with skimmers I know not, given their lauded ironwood, but I suppose everyone wants a piece of the Lord Rector’s pie these days.”
He paused.
“Good on him,” the younger man feelingly said. “Minister Floros can play the paragon all she likes, the lords of the valley know better.”
Angharad’s brow rose.
“I must admit I have heard little but compliments of Apollonia Floros’ character,” she said.
Even the Lord Rector seemed to respect her, according to Song, and they were sworn enemies.
“Oh, I’m sure she’d rather die than dirty even the least of her handkerchiefs,” Lord Cleon sardonically said. “Honorable to a fault, Apollonia Floros. So much that the very day the regency ended she withdrew all her troops from the capital and dismissed all her vassals and allies from positions of power.”
Angharad’s eyes narrowed. An honorable act, yes, yet…
“How many such appointments were there?”
Honor could be a knife, a daughter of Peredur well knew. Cleon grinned unpleasantly.
“Near every key post in the capital and valley,” he replied, and she winced. “And she had been resisting building back the lictors for years, volunteering her own men to patrol instead to raise the crown’s income. So when she pulled everyone out…”
“Chaos,” Angharad quietly said.
As if most the officers on a ship died overnight, leaving it to drift aimless and angry.
“The Lord Rector spent the first year of his reign struggling not to drown in that mess,” Cleon said. “And when the man proved his mettle, kept his head above the water, what was said?”
He wrinkled his nose in disgust.
“Praises for Minister Floros, at having taught him so well,” he scorned. “As if she had not just set a fire and watched with her hands in her lap as he fought to put it out.”
“Such disorder must not have endeared her to the valley lords,” Angharad ventured.
“It is good of you to think so,” Lord Cleon coldly laughed. “But you think too well of my fellows. Sleeping in a viper pit for too long has a way of making one grow scales. Apollonia Floros was firm and just and most importantly of all she ruthlessly ground the Trade Assembly beneath her boot.”
“While the Lord Rector has pursued a more… measured policy,” she delicately said.
Meaning he was not powerful enough to grind anyone under his boots and needed the Assembly’s support against the Council of Ministers besides. Lord Cleon nodded.
“I understand that in Malan honor is greatly prized,” he delicately said, “but most of my fellow lords prefer profit to principle. Even those with fine reputations. I would not have-”
And suddenly he hesitated.
“Is something wrong?” she asked.
He coughed.
“I understand that Lord Menander is something of a patron of yours,” Cleon said.
Angharad cocked her head to the side.
“While we are acquainted, and it was arranged for him to introduce me into Tratheke society, I do not consider him close to me,” she said. “We are not overly familiar.”
He searched her face for a moment, then nodded sharply.
“Good,” he muttered, then his voice firmed. “Good. Menander Drakos likes to act like the court’s kind grandfather, a man who takes no sides, but he is as ruthless as the rest of them.”
His lips thinned.
“My father, you might have heard, once tried to begin rearing horses.”
“I had,” Angharad cautiously said.
“Then you will also have heard it was a fool’s venture that nearly bankrupted our house,” Cleon said. “Lord Menander was the one who helped him obtain the horses, negotiating on his behalf, so he knew exactly how deep the debt ran and what our means were.”
The young lord clenched his teeth.
“And when the interest payments began to pile up, he slid in with his snake’s offer,” Cleon said. “There could be no loan, but oh he did love antiquities. And House Eirenos could buy them back when they had the means, he swore.”
Angharad’s eyes sharpened. That sounded exactly like what Song had tasked her with finding out.
“He bought house treasures,” she said.
“Gobbled them up like a pig at the trough,” Cleon bit out. “Always hungry for more. My family was granted treasures by the Lissenos, Lady Angharad, over our century of service to that line. Now they serve as adornments in his many manors instead. The man bought up everything he could, from paintings to papers.”
“He bought the whole collection?” Angharad asked.
The young man snorted.
“We’ve some correspondence in the annex safe still, I think, along with some statues,” he said. “Only dregs remain.”
The annex, was it? That was where she must look for what Song wanted. Tomorrow, Angharad thought, during the reception. It should not be difficult to feign exhaustion and sneak off. It could also be true, she reflected, that the desired information might now be in the hands of Menander Drakos. Bought years ago. In truth that might be best for the Thirteenth. Lord Menander knew of the Watch investigation and might well accept a request from Song.
“You have righted your house,” Angharad said. “Can you not buy them back as he promised?”
“He has been putting me off,” Lord Cleon darkly replied. “I thought to take this to the Lord Rector, but I was advised otherwise by Lord Gule. There are other recourses, he showed me, which would not bring shame to my father’s name.”
Sensible. Lord Gule was induna by birth, he would understand better than most the necessity of maintaining one’s name.
“But let’s leave that grim talk behind,” he said. “Come, let us find out if you can bag a quail on the way back.”
Alas, though many a tree branch suffered her wrath the birds all neatly escaped.
—
After a small evening meal and drinks in the garden, Lord Cleon retired for the night.
He apologized twice for it, but he was to rise early on the morrow and could not afford to be exhausted when receiving so many noble guests. Angharad waved all apologies away, perfectly understanding the necessity, though she requested a pot of tea so she might enjoy the quiet of the darkened garden for a span before retiring to her own rooms.
It was a little embarrassing how eager he was to accommodate her.
Night on Asphodel was different, so far from Tratheke. It felt like a true land again, with the distant pale stars and wind in her hair. The only lights still left on were a few lamps inside the manor, mostly around the kitchen, and strangely enough candles at the upper window of what Angharad believed to be some sort of annex. Hopefully it was not lit every night, else it would make sneaking there on the morrow significantly more difficult.
She had mostly finished her tea and it was beginning to run late when a maid returned to her table. Not, as Angharad had expected, to take away the pot and make inquiries as to bedding. She was bringing an invitation.
“Lady Penelope would speak with you in her parlor, if you are not too tired,” the girl said.
Far be it from her to deny the whim of such a beauty. Besides, Angharad suspected she knew what this was about. After having observed them over the day, Lady Penelope was now to either approve or disapprove of her as a prospect for her son. Disapprove, most likely, but that was only sensible. Angharad would not have wanted to wed herself, in their shoes.
A valet took her, leading her across the grass with a lantern until they reached the dark silhouette of the building.
Angharad had half-guessed the inside of the annex to be little more than a warehouse, but she had been wrong. There were wooden floors and hung tapestries, a single lantern lit and revealing shelves of dusty curios. Wrapped paintings were propped up against walls, to safeguard from vermin and the elements. The floors here were swept, but not well. This main room was too small to be the whole of it, and there were side doors hinting at the space being partitioned, but that was not where she was headed.
At the back of the room narrow stairs went up to the second story, where waited the candles she had glimpsed.
She sighed at the thought of more stairs to suffer, but limped onwards. The thick, iron-barded door at the end of the stairs was open. Through it, the noblewoman found a room that was halfway between the promised parlor and a gallery.
Half the den was crammed full of statues, bronze and stone, that went from simple busts to a large marble piece depicting a boy-child riding a swan. A few shelves of ancient, carefully tended books were tucked away against the wall while below them glass cases with iron honeycombing displayed empty wombs in the trembling candlelight. The precious pieces once filling them must all have been bought.
There was a heavy steel safe with two different locks, resting in a corner, and Angharad took note of it. Her short lesson on lockpicking would be of no use here, which meant she must find the keys.
The other half of the room was a lady’s parlor, wrested from the gallery. A wooden writing desk had been brought up and displayed some correspondence, but the heart of it all was a lushly carpeted salon with two elegant love seats flanking an oval low table. A small dressing table with a mirror also bore a handful of books, and to the side lay an elegant little loom which did not seem to have been used in quite some time.
Lady Penelope sat on a love seat, a cup of wine in hand, and Angharad swallowed at the sight: she wore only a pale embroidered nightgown, baring shoulders and drawing the eye to the generous swell of her breasts. A simple leather cord hung as a necklace, bearing two small iron pieces tucked away in her cleavage. Keys, Angharad thought. She let her eyes linger there an additional half-second to make certain that was truly what they were.
Well, that was one of the reasons.
“Lady Angharad,” the lady of the house smiled, resting her elbow on the arm of the seat. “I am pleased you could join me. Do sit.”
Angharad did, and the older woman poured her a cup of wine before leaning over to press it into her hand. She dutifully took a sip, then almost choked.
“Valley wine,” Lady Penelope slyly smiled. “Rarely great vintages, but surprisingly strong.”
“So I see,” Angharad said, then coughed into her fist.
Not something to drink too quickly.
“An evening conversation like this,” the fair-haired beauty said, “is how I should make inquiries into your background, Lady Angharad.”
The Pereduri sipped again at her cup, more shallowly this time.
“Implying you will not,” she finally said.
“There would be no point,” Lady Penelope said, “when you are about as interested in my son as you are in statuary.”
She hid her surprise.
“Lord Cleon is a skilled huntsman and a fine conversationalist,” Angharad mildly said.
“He also has a few years of growing left to do before inheriting the best his father’s looks,” Lady Penelope said, then paused. “You also occasionally look at me as if intending to devour.”
Angharad flushed in mortification, straightening on the loveseat.
“I meant no offense, my lady,” she said. “I only-”
The tall beauty waved her words away.
“It’s quite flattering, really,” Lady Penelope said. “And when I told our maid Elena to dip her neckline when serving you at midday you did not look, so you do not appear to be a philanderer.”
Angharad might have taken that as a compliment, had she at all recalled such a thing. She did not, but then that meal had been a balancing act of listening to Lord Cleon and not staring at his lovely mother’s graceful fingers.
“I do not consider myself one,” Angharad choked out.
Lady Penelope arched an amused brow. It was unfairly seductive on her.
“Neither does it appear you paid Katina to make a stir on your behalf, which dispels my first concern about you,” the lady said. “Given your character and obvious good breeding, you did not come here to take advantage of my son being taken with you.”
Her eyes narrowed.
“Had I seen you string him along today, we would be having a very different conversation.”
Angharad silently nodded. It was almost a shame that Lady Penelope’s expression softened after that. The tall older woman looking at her so imperiously had… not been unpleasant.
“I imagine turning away your first friendly face at court would have been difficult, even suspecting his intentions,” Lady Penelope said, not unkindly. “You must understand, however, that no matter sympathetic I am to your position I cannot leave him with even the illusion that pursuing you is possible.”
“It would be unkind to him,” Angharad quietly agreed.
The lady drank deep of her cup, then set it down.
“Good,” the older woman said. “Good.”
She sighed.
“I failed him, after my husband died,” Lady Penelope said. “Watched as he broke his own heart selling Lord Menander those old papers the man is so obsessed with. I will not see him so wounded again.”
“Lord Menander has an interest in papers?” Angharad said with forced casualness. “From Lord Cleon’s depiction of the tale, I thought him more concerned with artifacts.”
“Oh, he always put on a good show about wanting the jewels and the rings,” Lady Penelope snorted. “But I could tell what it was he was really after – papers from the days of the Lissenos, old land deeds and maps. He paid a fortune for them.”
Now why, Angharad thought, would Menander Drakos be so interested in these? Enough to pay good coin for them, anyhow. Something was afoot.
“Drink,” Lady Penelope ordered her.
Angharad drank.
“I will be telling Cleon,” she said, “that after having made inquiries into your background, while I do not find you personally unfit there is unpleasantness to your family name that makes you unsuitable.”
She paused.
“That will wait until you have left, the day after tomorrow. By all means you should enjoy your stay here, Lady Angharad, but do not accept an invitation to the manor again. Keep a respectable distance.”
The Pereduri silently nodded, for these were fine enough terms. In truth this might be the best way to cleanly end her ties to Lord Cleon, though for the kindness he had offered her she would attempt to find a way to repay him.
“I will take my leave, then,” Angharad said. “Thank you for your forbearance, Lady Eirenos.”
“Oh, finish your drink,” Lady Penelope sighed. “Or am I such terrible company you would prefer risking the servants talk when you emerge after a mere minute or two? I am supposed to be interrogating you.”
“I would never dare offer you such slight, my lady,” Angharad replied, inclining her head.
She had not drunk enough to excuse how flirtatious that had sounded. Yet instead of an arched brow, Angharad was graced with a smirk.
“I thought not,” Lady Penelope said.
Angharad was not one to refuse a beautiful woman curious about her, so she soon found herself skimming over the top of how she had been raised in Peredur – Lady Penelope complimenting the stripes when shown, and trailing a finger to see how the tattoo felt to the touch – as well a painting a picture of the cities she had visited on the path that eventually led her to Asphodel.
It was difficult for Angharad to consider herself well travelled, given whom her mother had been, but her tales about the ports on the way to Sacromonte garnered eager interest for Lady Penelope. The older woman seemed almost wistful when the City was mentioned, mentioning her parents had once intended to take her there for a span but that a sickness of her mother’s had prevented the journey.
When Angharad next eyed the candle, she realized that at least half an hour had passed and she was well into her second cup of wine. Hardly even tipsy, but there was a certain warmth to her cheeks that came in part from the drink.
“Never, truly?” she asked.
Lady Penelope sighed, leaning on her love seat and looking like a painter’s finest rendition of beauty of lush beauty.
“There was no true cause for me to leave Asphodel as a girl,” she said, “and I married Artemon at seventeen. I was pregnant within the year, and after that the troubles put an end to any notion of traveling abroad.”
“You could now, surely,” Angharad suggested. “Sacromonte is not so far by ship, and though it is a fading kind of splendor it is still a splendid city.”
Not that Tristan would agree. The man took a queer pride in hating the city of his birth more than most foreigners did.
“When my son is wed, perhaps,” Lady Penelope said. “I must confess that staying out here in the valley sometimes feels… confining.”
“I felt the same in Peredur,” Angharad said. “It was one of the reasons I so embraced the dueling circuit.”
Penelope chuckled, sliding a finger along the rim of her cup.
“You must think me hopelessly provincial,” she said. “Wed young and then buried in the country.”
“I was to be a country peer myself,” Angharad dismissed. “How could I look down on such a life?”
“Well,” Lady Penelope idly said, “I did live a little, before marrying.”
Angharad swallowed.
“Oh?”
“There are risks to dallying with a boy before one weds, but with a girl…” she trailed off. “Well, I learned a thing or two before being swept off my feet.”
An electric tingle went up her spine.
“Enjoyable learning, one hopes?” Angharad lightly said.
“Very,” Lady Penelope smirked, a sight that had her stomach clenching with want. “And I am not so old a widow, Angharad, that I have never thought of taking a lover.”
“It would be a genuine shame,” she replied, “if you did not.”
“The issue has always been one of timing and discretion,” the lady continued, pushing herself up to rest her elbow on the side of the seat.
It did not feel like a coincidence that this flattering pushed up the frame of her nightgown.
“I will be leaving the day after tomorrow,” Angharad said. “Never to return.”
Lady Penelope cocked her head to the side.
“So you are,” she replied.
She said nothing more.
It was madness, Angharad thought. Thoroughly unwise. But then she watched Penelope Eirenos sitting on that loveseat in that pale nightgown clinging to her curves, looking like a present in need of unwrapping, and madness struck her as the only reasonable course.
The moment the decision was made she shed the last of the blushes, instead smirking back at Lady Penelope. This, she knew how to do.
“It would be a shame,” she said, rising with her cane. “To end your education at a mere thing or two.”
She went around the table, green and heavy-lidded eyes following her as she did, before sliding next to her on the love seat. The cane was discarded, ignored, and even as Penelope’s hands went to feel up her arm and shoulder she leaned over the other woman. Flushed cheeks and bitable lips, all looking up at her with only the thinnest veneer of calm.
Angharad did exactly what she had been accused of wanting: she devoured Lady Penelope.
A surprised moan as she deepened the kiss, hands attempting to draw her in until she withdrew and dipped to nip at Penelope’s neck – she felt her shiver, kissing her way down to the shoulder as another hand trailed down the side of the nightgown until she found the bare skin of her legs.
“Angharad,” she gasped as her neck was nipped again, just enough it would not leave marks. “I-”
She silenced Lady Penelope with another kiss, heated enough their teeth almost clicked, and while the older woman pawed at her shoulders Angharad moved to slide a knee between her legs. Not yet slid all the way up, taking her time. She made a mess of the older woman, pulling down the nightgown to paw at those firm and rounded curves, to thumb her nipples and watch her squirm. Angharad’s hands ran up her bare legs under the nightdress, finding that the peach of her ass was exactly as full as the gowns had hinted – she almost groaned, the need to pull that dress off her an almost physical thing.
But she forced herself to patience, to taking her time as Penelope moaned and flushed red and nearly tore the strings of Angharad’s traveling dress getting her out of it. The widow’s eyes burned at the sight of her own figure finally bared, groping for her breasts, but Angharad caught those wrists and pressed them above her head even though she ached for attention.
Instead she knelt before Penelope, pulling the nightgown’s hem up to her waist and opening those long, smooth legs. She pressed a kiss against her thigh, then another few further and further up until the gorgeous widow’s hand in her hair was trying to drag her all the way between her legs. She shot up an amused look, hands keeping those thighs open and in place.
“Do pay attention,” Angharad said. “After I’ve shown you a new trick, I will be expecting a demonstration.”
Lady Penelope nodded, biting her lip, and Angharad leaned forward.
It was for the best the window was closed, for little of what followed was quiet.
—
The warmth of another body pressed close against hers was satisfying, something she had missed without knowing it.
All the more when Angharad’s gaze could stray down the curve of Penelope’s slender neck to her bare body, the blanket they had taken to sharing when dozing off hardly covering a thing. Her lover’s breath was deep, steady. In the throes of sleep. Much as she would prefer to simply enjoy the other woman’s embrace, she had a duty.
So Angharad closed her eyes and breathed in.
First she slowly, gently reached for the leather necklace bearing the keys. She caught the iron pieces and held them as she lifted the necklace off Penelope’s neck, but quickly realized there would be no passing it through those beautiful gold-red curls without waking her. So instead she carefully slipped out, bit by bit as not to wake Penelope, and padded over to the writing desk. There, standing on wobbly legs, she found a letter opener and returned to the love seat.
She cut the rope and lifted the necklace, waiting to see if Penelope would rise from slumber. She did not.
The letter opener returned to the desk, where she had found it, and move to the safe. The keys were small, small enough that she could hope the locks were not large either and so would not be noisy. That proved true of the first she opened, a barely audible click, but the second felt stronger against her grip when she turned.
Looking back at the sleeping Penelope, who the fading candlelight of the last candles lapped at hungrily – unless that was Angharad’s own gaze, which while sated still craved more. There was a snippet of guilt, but more of worry.
She covered the second lock as best she could with her palm to muffle the noise and turned the key.
It felt like a cacophony, so loud as to be deafening, but it opened. Another worried look back showed that Penelope had stirred but did not seem awake. Angharad cracked open the safe’s door, finding it mostly empty save for two things. One was a pouch of jewels, which she left untouched. The other was a small pile of letters, each bearing the ancient seal of House Lissenos in the corner.
These she brought out in the candlelight, gaze skimming them one after another.
She had in her hands correspondence between Lord Rector Hector and his mistress ‘C. E.’, which was lovely and rather poetic but likely not what Song had wanted. Still, it must have some importance for it to be kept in the safe instead of on the bookshelf. Was ‘E.’ for Eirenos? Not for her to decide, Angharad mused, and simply looked through all the letters before putting them back.
Out of thoroughness she closed the steel door, and that must have been one noise too many.
“What are you doing?” Penelope Eirenos coldly asked.
She did not turn to look at the expression on her lover’s face, which was sure to be a harsh thing.
Instead she released her contract.
—
Angharad Tredegar opened her eyes and breathed out.
She slid out of Lady Penelope’s embrace, leaving her to her slumber, and dressed before slipping out of the parlor. She fancied she felt the other woman’s sleepy gaze on her back as she left, retiring to her room in the manor. Not that Angharad would be able to sleep quite yet.
Her recall was only impeccable for a day after the vision. She would need to write down everything she had read before it faded, if she was to get Song the information she had wanted.
Pale Lights 
Fanart cast overview update. This was the chapter where I realized three of the four Asphodelian noble ladies introduced so far are very roaring cougars. I’m not sure what they are putting in the water here. Or maybe in the aether.
https://www.deviantart.com/gwennafran/art/1079180423
LikeLiked by 4 people
It’s kind of amazing that Angharad used her contract to have a James Bond moment.
LikeLiked by 6 people
I didn’t expect they’d actually have sex and I also didn’t expect the contract use. Nice chapter
LikeLike
I’d actually have been disappointed with the writing if she didn’t use her contract, here.
We already knew from Maryam’s experiments that there’d be no reason for her to actually take the keys and open the safe, if she can just do so in a vision without taking any risks of being caught.
I find it rather curious, though, that she didn’t at least once steal a glimpse to shoot one of those damn quails, as it should’ve been somewhat suspicious for her to manage that trick shot with the satyrian, making her the talk of the town, but suck so utterly at hunting.
LikeLike
Size matters when hunting.
LikeLike
“Mistakes had been made.”
~and just like that, I’m already hooked lol
LikeLiked by 3 people
Damn. That would be an even more OP contract if Tristan (or any spy) had it. He could probably find out anything about anyone anywhere, and no one would be able to detect that the secrets had been looked at or even that the room they’re kept in had been entered… because truthfully, it hadn’t.
So, of course, it is the contract given to the honor-bound warrior instead.
LikeLike
It did come up a few chapters ago that Tristan or anyone like him would likely quickly lose their grip on reality if they had Angharad’s contract. Her being an honor-bound warrior is a plus in this case, not a minus.
LikeLiked by 3 people
Yeah effective use of the contract for more esoteric things requires you to be Lawful.
Also Tristan wouldn’t be able to use it nearly as good in combat situations because he sucks at fighting. Song I guess could use it well.
LikeLiked by 1 person
100%. He would have gone the way of the Spider-Saint in the hold.
LikeLike
The letter that song wrote. What did Angharad miss in the nobles name?
LikeLike
just the oh-so-subtle similarity of “Lord Allazi” and “Port Allazei”
LikeLiked by 1 person
The contrast between Angharad at the beginning of the chapter and at the end is striking. She’s a terrible spy, but she has her moments of brilliance.
LikeLiked by 1 person
thanks for the chapter! Nice to see Angharad getting her moments as well
LikeLike
Cleon seemed to be a little awed at Angharad’s feat, but once that wored off he was pretty level headed. He made some insightful comments about the nature of Contracts.
Apollonia Floros is a pretty interesting character, she’s noted to be honorable and even Evander himself holds her in high regard but damn if she isn’t able to use honor like a knife. As seen with her pretty much setting the country into chaos.
Didn’t expect that Angharad to go after Penelope, well actually it would be more accurate to say Penelope went after her. Also holy shit she used that and her contract to get information, props to Angharad.
LikeLike
Angharad babe, Mirror Dancer is spelt M-I-R-R, not M-I-L-F
LikeLiked by 2 people
Angharad is unintentionally very good at espionage
LikeLike
It’s quite intentional. Spycraft doesn’t come naturally to her at all. She had to train with Maryam to become this adept.
LikeLike
I am almost sure Penelope is fully aware angharad is there to spy and seduced her to give her access to the keys and make sure she sees the safe.
not sure if the sniffer they hired got enough details for her to figure angharad used the keys with her contract but if not I assume she will offer her more chances to learn what she wants.
LikeLike
No, if she wanted Angharad to get the keys, she would’ve pretended to stay asleep in her vision, instead of questioning her.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Ah yes. Manor houses. Few monuments to theft more odious exist.
Obviously, many of the materials to build Eirenos Manor are not local to the area. Rare is the locale with fine wood, marble, and the materials for good glass all in easy reaching distance. Of course, the workers who brought in and crafted those materials were likely paid well. Wage slavery, in any system where it is possible, is of course nigh ubiquitous. Even well-paid laborers have the sword of destitution hanging over their heads at all times; there can be no uncoerced labor in such a system. But that is not the true theft implied here, and indeed paid labor itself would likely be one of the last evils abolished in the construction of a truly just system.
But how did the coin paying all those laborers wind up in Eirenos hands? Sure, the house now lays claim mostly to hunting grounds, but that was not always the case. Owning much of the valley means owning farms, and thus means cleaving farmers from the literal fruits of their labor. That house is the congealed time and sweat of generations of laborers, extracted one day at a time since the Eirenos first took a title.
And all so that stolen wealth could be squandered by Cleon’s father. Grandeur turned to crushing debt in a single stroke. And, historically, this too was far more common than not. Country lords have always been habitual debtors. The books of literal slavers ran red with both blood AND ink far more often than not despite being slavers. And always, ALWAYS, one of them steps in to pick up the tab and save their “peers” from destitution. From each according to their ability, to each according to their need, but only for the rich. Marx did not discover class solidarity. He recognized that it can and should be applied by workers, rather than just owners.
They will turn inwards and protect each other. Why shouldn’t we?
LikeLiked by 1 person
This is a funny statement because almost every Soviet head of state owned private mansions in the countryside. Why didn’t Kruschev live in his own concrete shitholes?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuntsevo_Dacha
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/03064227908532920
https://hum54-15.omeka.fas.harvard.edu/exhibits/show/russian_dacha/the-brezhnev-dacha–just-anoth
Inb4 whataboutism. Inb4 “you see comrade, the pigs need the extra apples in order to fuel their larger brains so they could do the thinking for the rest of the animals.” Inb4 ‘not real socialism’.
LikeLike
Your grasp of history is as appallingly ignorant as your grasp of technology. You keep throwing around the word “slavery” when it’s obvious you have never seriously considered either the legal definition of slavery or even the historical definition. Yes, these things have been studied and weighed by people far more intellectually capable and honest than you. A person is not a “slave” just because you think they are.
You also have not taken your premise of “fruits of labor” and what you prefer as an outcome to its logical conclusion. But we already know you can’t do logic.
This is why you’re tool of the powerful at best. When you can’t even navigate the real lines of sociopolitics, you are their tool. You think the monarchies that have existed for over a millennia haven’t seen your ilk before? There’s arrogance in your presumption, and then there’s hubris when you assume your opponents are incompetent.
LikeLiked by 1 person
can I just say that It’s nice to know that most people who bother to comment here are probably in agreement that bellerophan is really irritating and obnoxious. I kinda thought I was the only one for a while.
please dude, pull the stick out of your ass, stop looking for topics for your shitty essays and actually read and enjoy the story.
LikeLike
Alright, political philosophy grading time.
Thesis! It’s all about the thesis! Put your darn thesis up front! Just do it! Your thesis is that “CB is a tool of the elite” (paraphrased), but you only get into it in your third paragraph, at the very end. This weakens your argument, put that shit up front so we know why you are saying what you are saying.
Next, support your thesis! Where is your evidence? Your entire first paragraph is a whinging tirade about the semantics of slavery. That’s not evidence. That’s a supporting thesis, yes, but not evidence. Your second paragraph hints at evidence, claiming that CB hasn’t thought through their argument about the fruits of worker’s labor, but what is said conclusion you are hinting at? And you don’t even restate CB’s point you claim they misanalyzed, so we as a reader don’t know the necessary context to derive that conclusion ourselves.
Which brings us to: context. Why are you writing this here? Who is your audience? What do you want to convey to them? If your position requires other context to infer, why not write it in the location where said other context is freely available? If you don’t think about your context before writing, you risk the (less philosophically trained) reader filling in the missing gaps with their own biases and preconceptions. In this particular case, the gaps you left in your comment make you appear to be a fascist moron. I doubt that’s what you intended, or who you want to appear as, so sharpen up.
All in all, this is a terrible comment from a philosophical standpoint. I’d give it a D, as it did make a vague thrust at somewhat of a point.
Meet me after class.
LikeLiked by 4 people
@Scythia.
I don’t care about your essay format but I don’t mind fleshing out my points, but a few meta comments first.
Your criticism seems reasonable until you’ve followed any of CantankerousBullshit’s other comments and discussions in other chapters. You would realise he doesn’t really address any reasonable arguments that contradict his points. To this end, it’s a waste of time actually trying to discuss with him. This is evident in both my comments to him all the way back in Book 1 (where I was still attempting to be civil), and his comments to others.
I’m not CB’s mentor, friend, or educator. I am not trying to convince him, or, for that matter, anyone else. I’m making it clear his positions are 1) based on his own assumptions and factually false; 2) a poor exercise of logic (if it can even be called that).
Why don’t I make things clearer? Because these things are easily discoverable by anyone who makes it a point to do real research. I’ve already stated in a previous chapter’s comment that CB’s epistemic method is via the low bar of internet information. Literally, if you read Reddit or Twitter, you can find all of his talking points. It’s faux intellectualism. The fact that he can’t even get the basics right says a lot and for the most part, it’s not worth an essay.
Now onto why CB is making shit up when he uses the loaded word “slavery”.
The most basic legal definition of slavery is a human being who is property. A historian’s definition of slavery often further expands on this to include that slaves have no agency in of themselves under the law. Under the law, they can’t enter legally recognised agreements as their own agent. They have no protections. They have no rights.
Most peasant farmers over the last millennia do not fall under this definition even if you loosen the interpretation. Many tenant farmers were in fact on contract with the local nobility. Often they had to pay some form of rental fee for the land and the exact terms varied wildly depending on time and place. However, by and large, many farmers were allowed to retain the bulk of their own produce. Additionally, the local nobility adjucated on disputes, provided martial protection and other services such as roads. Again, we’re talking about a massive swathe of human history so there isn’t a “real” answer. The relationship between a lord and their tenants was definitely a give and take, but more importantly, the tenant had rights protected by law.
Small landholders who kept everything they farmed were less common but they definitely existed and weren’t that rare.
His “fruits of labour” comment is asinine because it’s not really about the fruits of labour. It’s circular logic about property ownership. Let’s follow his paradigm:
The inevitable coming of a full circle is an easy critical thought experiment. Seriously, this is grade school shit. As I said, CantankerousBullshit can’t do logic.
Even in a hypothetical, it shoudl be obvious that for all human needs, there are numerous resources of near equal significance to food where this form of power accumulation will occur.
Idiots like CantankerousBullshit invariably become a tool of power because his comments a) make it clear he can’t discern what power is, and b) that power is a natural consequence of ability.
So what’s power?
Let’s you need to build a bridge that’s a kilometre long and can support the weight of thousands of people and hundreds of cars, you can’t get the math wrong. One person, one mind, needs to check all the numbers to ensure that it’s correct. You can’t really split the problem apart either, and even if by some stroke of madness you were to do so, the splitting of the problem can only be executed by a mind capable of solving the entire problem.
You get this wrong, bridge collapses, people die. There’s nothing ethical about this.
This main architect of the bridge will naturally, as a consequence of their ability, have power in this project. He tells people what to do. He makes the design decisions. He determines what materials they need, in what quantities, and what schedules.
Who is more important to this project? The labourer? Or the main architect? Obviously the architect.
Now you’re a city. You need a bridge to cut down on travel time for everyone. What are you going to do? Give the project to some unknown quantity? You don’t have the math. You can’t tell if an unknown is capable of solving the problem.
You go with the tried-and-true architect because you can’t get this wrong. This isn’t school. There are consequences to failure. And bridges are not the most complex things humanity has ever invented and it’s just one example out of half a dozen technologies that a modern city might need to function.
What if the architect demands privileges as part of their compensation? What if they don’t want money and instead want their kid to be admitted into the best private school? What if they want the best doctor and the best clinic to treat their mother’s cancer?
If you have to make this decision for the city, are you really going to say no? You could, but then you still have the problem that you need a bridge. And what if the next architect wants something more unpalatable? There aren’t so many architects capable of solving this type of problem that you can solve your search problem via Google.
Now, extrapolate to monarchies that have lasted for over a millennium in the real world today. Do you really believe that over a thousand years, they haven’t figured anything out? Do you really believe that their power, rule and influence are tolerated by their people today if they spent blood like water? Do you really think their decisions are so poor that it’s “obvious” they should be removed?
CB is most likely American, probably lower middle class, and almost certainly Gen Z or at most, younger Millennial. This is important because it’s why his garbage about fictional nobility is utterly vile.
He incorrectly believes that being rich equates to having power (from prior chapters’ comments). I’ve only ever met Americans who think this way. Europeans, given their much longer history with nobility, tend to have a more nuanced view. If he were doing well for himself, he wouldn’t be posting the shit that he is.
He’s Gen Z because he thinks complex technologies can be effectively passed down via documentation. This was the first spat I had with him all the way back in the comments of Book 1. This is a very distinctly Gen Z belief that is blindingly incorrect. If you tried to make policy based on this incredibly arrogant presumption, civilisation will fall because the brutally complex tech that runs modern infrastructure wouldn’t have anyone who knew how to work it. This goes for electricity, telecoms, water, you name it.
If he’s American, statistically speaking, he’s never been within spitting distance of a person with real “power”. Maybe he’s met a couple of moderately successful people but there’s a big fucking gap between low level millionaires and the people who own the Federal Reserve Holding Company (as an example). One is just a reasonably successful player in our society. The latter is a true global elite.
At a guess, CantankerousBullshit would most likely identify as communo-anarchist but his general position is more likely to lead to increased regulation in practice.
In the US, this would lead to more laws that create more licensing structure and more regulations. All of it “for the people”.
This is exactly what the elite want. They love licensing in the name of protecting people. Because licensing creates more legal barriers that protects them from competition. They already have relationships with the government. A new competitor would have to struggle for years to establish the same level of familiarity and connections within government, and decent odds they fail at it. Anyone who has ever gone through this process knows it’s hard.
You can see this in banking, in insurance, pharma, oil, tech, just about every major industry. It’s telling they never fight licensing regulations that are on the docket.
I can understand that employment is hard for Americans and everyone else right now but the question you should be asking is why there aren’t ten times as many companies with ten times the number of jobs all competing to pay the best wages for the best candidates.
It’s why he’s a loser. If CantankerousBullshit was born in the most powerful country currently with some of the strongest legal protections ever for its citizenry and all the advantages therein, and he still isn’t doing well, whose fault is that really? Because nowhere else would he have gotten even half the advantages and privileges that he got in the US.
It’s why he’s a coward. Instead of owning up to the fact that he fucked up a lot of early decisions in life, he swaddles his ego by blaming the system going off of a fanfiction of reality that he doesn’t understand.
It’s why his shit is utterly vile that will only succeed at dragging others down. At the end of the day, he won’t get his preferred form of government but he’ll keep advocating for stupid shit that “tears at” the rich, never grasping that he’s entrenching the true elite’s power.
LikeLike
@Scythia
I would not respond to this…person. I was serious on a prior post when I said fascists should not be spoken to, should be treated as monsters fit only for exile or worse, and that indulging their desire to “debate” and “ask questions” is fundamentally a mistake.
And yes. This…person…is a fascist, or at the very least is playing one. It doesn’t get much more fascist than attempting to logically justify capitalism as arising from natural law with the claim that some human beings are worthless. They did that the last time I spoke to them. That’s monstrous, and anyone who seriously posits it as a logical premise deserves only mockery. None of their other points need be considered because the foundation is the kind of flawed that gets half the population of entire empires slaughtered when they inevitably lose the wars they start. So incorrect that the only remedy is wiping clean the slate.
You don’t need to debate this rhetoric anyway. Check the scoreboard: people who believe this nonsense always lose. Catastrophically, and in ways which kill millions. Debating the finer points of the ideology doesn’t advance human knowledge. We already know the endpoint lies in ruin.
Some might argue that, as these are the premises upon which American empire is founded, and America still exists, my claim that the people who believe this always lose is false. But history has not ended. Look at the current state of American empire and ask yourself how much longer we can last like this. Our hold over global economies is propped up by oil, a fuel literally destroying the biosphere. One way or another, that source of dominance will dry up, likely in our lifetime. Our military is absurdly massive, but that comes at the expense of everything else. Our infrastructure is crumbling, every metric of human welbeing lagging, and public sentiment towards all aspects of power has never been lower. The violent police state we are, or have already, sunk into can only last so long before the majority of people decide the law does not benefit them. This is the price of claims like that made by the…person you are talking to. The erosion of public faith in the society they participate in. A state that can only lose going long.
Some might take offense at my use of elipses before the word “people.” I do that deliberately, though, because I think it is a mistake to model fascists the same way you would random passersby. People have empathy and use it. Even if most aren’t the kind to stop and help stranded travelers, most will at least feel bad about not doing so. If they see someone hurting, they want to help even if they don’t know how. We’re fundamentally social creatures, people, and that means we care about each other at least a little. Fascists don’t do this. They see people suffering and consistently blame the sufferers. Not just for their own suffering, but for all suffering everywhere. See: all immigration discourse. They scapegoat and oppress, not out of need, not because they directly benefit, but because they have been told to do so by the peerless monsters they empower. They shred the bonds that keep society together, spend the resources needed to keep things running on pointless wars, and infect all discourse around them with their poison. This is not the behavior of people. It is the behavior of sociopathic predators.
I don’t blame them for being this way. The conditions which produce fascists are just as material as those which produced me. They aren’t born broken, they are made so by social and ideological machines built to do that. But once people are broken in this way, once the wall between us and them is impermeable, once they are enmeshed in the gears of the machine which turned them into one such gear instead of letting them be a person, saving them individually is no longer a viable strategy for dismantling the machine. Deconverting fascists is a noble goal, but it can’t be done quickly enough to stem the tide being created. The machine creating them must be shattered beyond repair first.
This is why I speak primarily against empire. That’s the machine which strips humanity from children and turns them into the husks known as fascists. And, fortunately, it isn’t effective at this. By all accounts, I should be on the other side of the divide. My background is not one which meshes well with my rhetoric. Even in the heyday of Nazi Germany, most Germans were not members of the party. No matter how it tries, empire can only truly break a fraction of us because what it tells us about human nature is a lie. Were it not so, were most people truly the predatory, self-centered fiends empire claims is our nature, society as a whole would not be possible. It is always through collaboration that our greatest works are accomplished, and so we are made in that image. Even if most people don’t go as far as me, they see the behavior of their racist uncle as reprehensible enough the “racist uncle” has become a meme. Even if they don’t understand why police as a whole must be abolished, show them video evidence of police violence and they will want it to stop. The truly abominable rhetoric must be couched in less explicit terms, the plots to commit open violence remain plots rather than open policy, and even during the Holocaust, when everyone knew exactly what was happening no matter the claims to the contrary, the veil of plausible deniability still had to be maintained because telling people your plan is mass murdering their neighbors will get your agents mass murdered instead. We are better than what empire makes us out to be. We can do better than empire.
LikeLiked by 2 people
@clavesoon
Yay! A somewhat coherent, decently well thought out position that is neoliberal in nature, not fascist, so that’s a huge relief. But honestly? I think it also shows that you and the author behind CB agree on far, far more than you think you do.
You think of GenZ leftists as stupid and ignorant of history. Some are, of course, but remember that GenZ is also the most educated generation in history, with the absolutely unprecedented educational resource of the internet available to them for their entire lives. They are smart. They know history. Some are also leftists that aren’t psycho tankies. That’s fine. Let’s discuss.
Yes, the manoralist economic form, where a majority of peasant farmers and a minority of large landholders coordinate labor and capitol respectively to build agrarian societies is the universal default for premodern societies. Your logic is sound. A just agrarian society will be split along a majority of peasant farmers and a minority of large landholders the exact same way as an unjust agrarian society, it’s just the nature of premodern economies. As evidence, look at the historical and archeological record.
Yes, technology and organizational complexity accumulates over time, based simply on individual free and mutually beneficial interactions. Humans like building a better life for themselves and their families. But that’s not the point of disagreement. CB has never said otherwise, to my knowledge. The real point of disagreement is: Who are the large landholders? Who are the peasants? What are their respective lives like?
And the answers to these questions vary wildly between societies, from more just arrangements: like in stone-age Cucuteni–Trypillia culture where “the village” as a whole was the large landowner, or some temple-bureaucracies of early Mesopotamia, to more middlingly just arrangements: like the monastery manors of the European middle ages or bureaucracy-conscious “large landowners” common in irrigation-centric systems of Egypt and China (though the exact forms varied widely there as well), to the absolute horrendous injustices that were the Spartan citizen or U.S slaver.
Those are the historical facts, and unfortunately your reason to be pissed off at CB over this particular post conflicts with them. Your argument assumes that when CB attacks nobility, they propose to abolish the “large landowner” of manoralist economics. But they don’t. They are saying that Cucuteni-Trypillia farmers had better lives than Spartan helots. By a lot. Which is true, very few people had worse lives than spartan helots.
As a side note: I’m trying to figure out which monarchy you are referring to when you say “extrapolate to monarchies that have lasted for over a millennium in the real world today…Do you really think their decisions are so poor that it’s “obvious” they should be removed?”. Probably the English monarchy? But like, dude, do you realize how hilarious it is that you are getting so upset over who you presume to be an American suggesting the abolition of the English monarchy? That’s comedy gold right there. And to be clear: no monarchy has survived for over a millennia in all of human history. Not one. You could make arguments for the Japanese royal line, or the byzantine roman empire, but one was a puppet for the majority of its existence and the other wasn’t a monarchy.
Moving on from your defense of nobility to your attack on modern American leftists. It’s so normal and pedestrian it almost boggles the mind. You call someone else an evil loser, a pawn of the elite, a vile individual… off the presumption that they are American, the presumption that they are a leftist, and the presumption that they support increased business regulation. I know so many people that don’t match a single one of those presumptions, let alone all of them!
And like, I agree with you. For America in the current moment, the best policies are those that break up large corporations and encourage diverse markets, strengthen labor protections, and decouple healthcare and employment. All of these policies massively benefit U.S small business, and they are left-wing policies! (For the U.S at least, U.S politics is so rightwing its nearly comical).
Clavesoon, the fuck? CB probably agrees with 90% of your policy goals. There is a reason they said that wage labor would be the last injustice to be abolished, because there are so, so many changes to make the world better that need to happen before that point. Including building more competitive markets!
LikeLiked by 1 person
Oh my god can we get better political interpreters for this web serial than no-materialism having Ancom vs federal reserve thumping Libertarian? Like, howabout people who actually understand the specific time periods the story is drawing from? Right now it’s like a religious argument with even fewer books.
Just to hit on some obvious stuff:
@clavesoon Your analysis about how pastoral landholding developers may have merit, but it just totally ignores the specifics of history that will always throw a wrench in the economic “rules” Libertarians like to think undergird reality.
Okay, so you have a stable home grown nobility that grew out of the farmer class and has achieved some reasonably stable balance between the needs of the nobility and that of the lower classes. But then what if the Norman’s invade, supplant the local nobility, plunder their wealth, and brutally rule over the populace in a way they can get away with because they already have wealth and labor coming in from Normandy. That’s how a lot of noble-peasant relations were established throughout history, not the nobility springing up naturally from the populace.
And then you move right on to modern architecture and bridge building as if it can be neatly backported to the past. No, architects throughout history are not all indenpedent contractors that can exclusively hold all the knowledge of architecture. It’s been done many ways throughout history and can’t really be generalized. For example parts of medieval europe where the architects were master builders or such from stonemason guilds. They do not hold the knowledge of how to put stone blocks together, they’re part of a larger unit of many different skills of how to cut the blocks, move the blocks, and where to find the stone that can’t be easily seperated.
@CB What is this, 2015? No, fascists are not specially vicious or sociopathic not-humans compared to the rest of us. For my money that kind of conceptualization comes from baby leftists who don’t like the idea of the proletariat being implicated in history crimes. Which I’m sorry, but that’s not how societies work, for an ideology to rule over society there must be some sort of buy in. Even if they weren’t Nazis your average German during world war 2 was still going to complicit with Nazi ideology to some degree. The antisemitism that spurred on the holocaust wasn’t some trick of the elites with the help of their unhuman fascist henchmen. It was the culmination of hundreds of years of rabid antisemitism that existed in all layers of society, not just nobles and rich people.
(For the record pro-capitalist people do the exact same thing, pointing to pogroms within the Soviet Union as proof that communism is inherently antisemitic, as if Russian peasants during the early 20th century needed help hating jews?)
The role of the elites in turning reactionary sentiment into fascism is propaganda to dehumanize the intended victims, which is a tried and true method that WORKS and affects everyone on all walks of life, no stripping of their own humanity required. You’ve been gradually flirting with the same kind of dehumanization for months here. Just because it’s targeting social classes rather than an ethnic or religious group doesn’t magically change dehumanization to something more noble and justified.
LikeLiked by 3 people
@CankankerousBullshit
Good to see you’re still a coward.
@trashdragon & @Scythia
You have to understand we have had multiple interactions at this point and my responses to him are based on more than his latest bout of stupidity. In this sense, I’m not trying to string together a perfectly coherent post because it would require too much referencing of old material.
I like trashdragon’s comment but I think you’re both operating on a misunderstanding. I’m not American. I don’t really identify with either American left or right or Libertarianism or whatever. I have obviously been there, studied there, and worked there, but truthfully, I have never much cared for the American value system or its political delineations. Having said that, I recognise that the US has a great many virtues, I greatly admire the theory behind the US legal framework and how it gets applied, and many of its people are quite lovely, but the particular brand of socialism/communism coming from the US is easily one of the most entitled and toxic things I have ever seen.
@Scythia
I’ll note that many of the inquisitory comments you’ve made or requests for information, while snarky, are things CB has never actually done. You don’t agree with him? He calls you a fascist, which is deeply ironic and is why I don’t treat him as any sort of peer. He’s not.
I’m responding because he’s misusing a loaded term “slavery”. He frequently presents his factually incorrect information as truth, and is broadly ignorant of…everything (even Marx, who he has definitely referenced in past posts) and then has the gall to act like anything that disagrees with his bullshit is immoral. He doesn’t even grasp that ethics needs to be predicated on real world outcomes.
You can make arguments about the differences in the quality of life between agrarian economic models for a farmer, but the life of a slave, which I feel I have illustrated, would be a whole different ballpark of bad. Bad for a farmer means dead for a slave. Also, regardless of how you perceive lord tenant relationships, his entire comment was a puerile attempt to extend the metaphor to modern employment circumstances, which is laughable, moronic and just plain wrong.
I actually didn’t reference the American left. As I said, I don’t give a shit about that. If you can’t recognise how business regulation is hampering the creation of jobs, you need to study history a lot more closely. You want an example? The Dodd Frank Act is a relatively recent example that was a reaction to the 2008 financial crisis. Pre-Dodd Frank, the cost of starting a bank was probably $300K in most parts of the US. Today? $30 million if you’re lucky. You can thank your Democrats for this. This isn’t a left vs right point. Obama was president, the Democrats were in power, and they pushed this legislation through.
Again, like I said, the incumbent banks didn’t fight this legislation. They knew it would mean hundreds of millions in costs per year dealing with compliance, billions over the years. And that’s cheap if it means they never have to face competition ever again. Banks have never treated their customer base particularly ethically, but you wonder why they’ve gone off the deep end in the last decade. Your Democrats basically made them a pseudo-class of nobility protected by law.
It’s why I say CB’s ignorance is dangerous, vile, empowers the powerful, and will drag people down. Yeah, things can always be better, but people like him don’t have what it takes to make things better. They can, through their bumbling, make it a lot worse.
Regarding, Gen Z being educated, the very best of American education is still the very best. But the rest? Not so much.
You want examples? Medical malpractice lawsuits have been steadily rising in the US. This is true in spite of US medical licensing having longer education processes than most other countries (though they are more flexible). With pass / fail grading metrics, the system is failing to filter out those who probably shouldn’t be doctors and leading to direct harm as a result. There is nothing ethical about averting “ableism” and creating harm.
One personal example is I recently interviewed a Computer Science grad from a very reputable US uni. Top 10 public school. He literally couldn’t code, not even in a high level scripting language. When asked how he got through his courses, his response was “I searched the internet for the problems”. Credit for honesty but what happens when you’re dealing with a problem that you can no longer Google?
Gen Z might be “more” educated on paper but the value of their education is objectively less. What’s the point of the degree if you lack the skills that the training is supposed to impart? Or more importantly, should you be allowed to be a doctor if you’re going to accidentally harm people? Should you be allowed to be an architect if you can’t do math?
This is where I critically deviate from CB. I recognise that the greatest accomplishments of humanity are through individual exceptionalism and those great accomplishments are then supported by the highly competent. To a large extent, US strength is built upon encouraging individual exceptionalism and risk taking. Americans really don’t get this until they’ve worked elsewhere, but if you come up with something truly groundbreaking, you have a much higher chance of success in the US than anywhere else. Everyone on the planet: Europe, Asia, Africa, LATAM, agree on this. The US is the most open market on the planet.
CB takes offense at the idea that there should be exceptional rewards for the exceptional and thinks that’s Nazism. Nazi philosophy was adjacent to absolute meritocracy. In an absolute meritocracy, if you lose too badly, you’re eliminated from the game, i.e. you die. I’m not proposing this, but there’s a reason the US out-teched the Soviet Union during the Cold War. The Soviets actually placed great emphasis on scientists and engineers. They lived in better housing with better amenities, had access to better food, and higher quality healthcare. However, their system encouraged results rather than risk. So scientists never pursued projects that would take more than a couple of years to deliver results because if they did, their whole life got downgraded.
This isn’t some deep philosphical point. This is common sense that CB doesn’t have because he’s a sheltered, broken product of a walled garden. He’s probably only now beginning to pay for his own poor decisions and doesn’t like it. I mean, no shit but he made his own bed.
On monarchies, there are several hereditary monarchies that would qualify. Japan usually tops any of the lists in pure length. The Thai royal family has been around for 8 centuries. The Norwegian crown is recorded as the longest lasting European state at over 1100 years.
If you’re also including families in power who no longer possess the title, there are near a dozen families in Indonesia who can trace their lineage back 10 centuries but no longer openly possess the title of Sultan. Same could be said for the Mewar in India and many more.
@trashdragon
Personally, I think Libertarianism is fundamentally flawed, but that’s a whole other tangent. The one part I agree with them is that good government is minimal government.
In my agrarian hypothetical, I wasn’t trying to reproduce a real historical scenario. I was attempting to control the possible variables that would lead to a centralisation of power, whether that be a social collective, a more formal government or a nobility class. The point is power accumulation would occur with or without external factors. I agree, with the possibility of external violence, it actually increases the possibility and rate of centralisation. This was a demonstration of the chain-of-events in a scenario advantageous to the opposing argument.
On the bridge analogy, I wasn’t trying to connect this seamlessly. I’m not here the write an essay. I’m stating his shit is wrong, and moreover, anti-civilisation. I don’t disagree that there are many approaches. However, all head architects of major construction works need enough math to be able to ensure the structure is stable, can support the weight, can weather the elements, etc. This is a lot of information, a lot of numbers, and it all needs to be in the head of a single individual. This person can’t get it wrong.
If you’re in charge and put up a building with a flawed foundation, you have to tear the whole building down. You can’t “fix” it. You waste a lot of people’s time, effort, and materials. This isn’t the same thing as just money. The cost of failure is real.
This problem gets writ ever larger for technologies that were specifically engineered to handle populations in the tens of millions or more.
LikeLike
Brother I hate to inform you but pretty much everybody knows CB’s posts are ridiculous. You’re being baited by a LARP/troll account themed on the comic-relief pseudocommunist pseudodemocratic turbo-bureaucracy from the author’s previous work lol.
Spending this much time and energy arguing against points the author behind the character also probably doesn’t fully agree with is a silly waste of your time.
LikeLiked by 2 people
@Rynjin
I replied to someone else in the previous chapter, but yeah I get it.
I wish I could believe he were completely trolling. I ignored him for most of Book 1 because I thought he was a LARPer too.
Then I met some American college exchange student in my corner of the world who actually believes this shit. And then I met another one. And another one.
This observation is not unique to me. I’ve had numerous people in my social circle comment on how the American cultural shift in the last 5 years is one of the most extreme things we’ve ever witnessed across generations Boomer to Y.
If Americans read this, I have to be honest, I think you guys should be deeply concerned.
LikeLike
This Cabal has such broken abilities lmao. I was getting annoyed with Angharad falling for a pretty face and banging bod again. But her use of her contract was a nice recovery.
Interesting that the young lord says his God is Waning. Or that his Mother is so young…you figure Angie would ask how old his mother is suppose to be.
LikeLike
It felt more like he said his boon was waning and his god was changing.
LikeLike
If Cleon does turn out to be an evil cultist and ends up dramatically facing down Angharad, she can bust out the ultimate ‘Yo Mama joke’ on him.
LikeLiked by 1 person
I do so much love reminders of just how bloody Thirsty Angrihad is lol
LikeLiked by 1 person
This is easily one of the horniest chapters yet. Girl does not stop even once.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Damn, that was savage… Getting that poor boy’s hopes up, only to then turn around and become a literal motherfucker.
Yeah, “not a philanderer” my ass! In that regard, Angharad’s basically Catherine, immediately after every skirt in line of sight, the only difference being that it needs to be (metaphorically speaking) an actual skirt, this time.
LikeLiked by 1 person