“This way! Hurry!”

Zephyrin stole a glance over his shoulder. The queen and a number of winded nobles were beginning to lag behind, less than a hundred meters from the palace’s inner courtyard. Though the crown prince and other young children had long since been taken into the arms of stout valets, greatly increasing their speed, it was apparent that the queen and one of her domestics were growing fatigued.

Adelaide-Estelle’s visage was unnaturally pale, while the girl’s brow was slick with perspiration, her damp fringe peeking out from beneath a white bonnet that had fallen askew in their mad dash. As if to imitate Zephyrin, the countess of Aurellis looked back as well and saw her sister-in-law’s struggles. “Marshal dy Cassade! A moment of respite, please…”

The marshal did as he was told and ceased dragging along his bad leg, but not without a grumbled oath escaping his lips. He scrutinized the second of the trailing pair dubiously. “So young, yet laboring so much to run? Rather odd, that. Miss, give us too much trouble and we’ll have no choice but to leave you behind,” said the soldier gruffly to the baseblood girl, leaning heavily on his sheathed swordstick.

Zephyrin was startled by the look of pure hatred the maid flashed in the old veteran’s direction, and even more perturbed by her visage’s near instantaneous return to blank neutrality as she schooled her expression in time for the queen’s regard, who inquired with soft solicitude, “My dear, can you continue?”

The maid dipped her head forward. “Madame, of course. But if I could just have a moment…” Her eyes narrowed as the marshal snorted and trundled off to review their make-shift formation.

The brief halt had allowed several stragglers to bolster the rear of their meager contingent. Among them were dazed soldiers who had sought refuge in the armory and the few remaining valets and servants, who, reinvigorated by the sight of their queen, needed little convincing to join her escape attempt. Whether they would hold firm to the cause when the specifics of their plan became clearer was a question that had to be put off for the present.

Zephyrin transferred his weight from one foot to the other, waiting uneasily as the company stood out in plain sight at the top of the Grand Staircase. The polychrome marble and bronze-gilt balustrades were certainly sturdy enough to serve as barricades, if the need arose, but the skylight above—shaped like a tennis court, and just as large—practically invited the enemy to drop a cannonball on their heads. As a precaution, Zephyrin discreetly strengthened the protective wards that he was sustaining around the queen and the closest members of her entourage.

He kept an eye on the queen as she conferred with Madame d’Aurellis and the few members of the king’s household who had cast in their lot with her. It should be Rudolf XIII leading this last-ditch attempt, the realization came to him with vivid clarity, it should be the ruler consolidating all his nobles and troops for this final sally into the heart of the rebel forces. But Adelaide-Estelle had assumed the mantle of responsibility, and he, child though he was, would have to supply for the gaps in her threadbare authority.

“Y-Your Majesty!”

Immediately alert, Zephyrin and several others looked down the staircase to identify the speaker’s voice. A soldier serving as a pall-bearer for a groaning comrade stared up open-mouthed at the distinguished new arrivals. The queen flung herself forward, her hands resting on the balustrade. “Monsieur! Your orders! Have you received any since noon? Tell me, without delay!”

The man made a visible effort to compose himself. “No, Madame!”

Adelaide-Estelle heaved a profound sigh of relief. “The order to retreat didn’t go through! Thank the Goddess!” Opening her eyes, the queen then addressed her followers earnestly. “There’s still time! A generous effort, my friends! One more generous effort, and we can still carry the day!”

As servants pushed and they burst through the palace’s grand doors, neither Zephyrin nor those under his protection were prepared for the sight that awaited them.

In the royal courtyard, beneath an ash gray sky steadily darkening to soot by the conjoined clouds of black smoke vomited by gun and cannon, an island of somber green was encircled by a black tide of humanity, rolling forward, gnawing, working an inexorable erosion by force of numbers. There was no end to the onslaught. A human breaker was rebuffed, then rolled forward again; where a pocket of basebloods was targeted and its members routed under shell and shot, another seamlessly interposed to take its place.

The King’s Guard was shrinking. That was obvious at a glance; well-entrenched though the defenders were, Zephyrin perceived that attrition would seal the end of their resistance long before the extinction of daylight. They were waging a defensive war, using the cannons at their disposal only sparingly; morale was waning; the day’s issue seemed already decided.

Unless the queen could revive and fan their valor to greater heights.

If Adelaide-Estelle was dumbstruck by the scenes of battle that awaited her, even more shocked were the men of the Royal Guard. Soldiers ceased to reload, officers forgot their orders mid-cry as more and more heads turned, men who had been hoping for reinforcements to instead make a stupefying discovery.

Then, a cheer was raised in gratitude for the ray that seemed to pierce through the oppression of a losing battle.

“The King! The King has come! Vive le roi!”

Zephyrin watched in dismay as false hope sprang up like a noxious weed among the clutches of defenders, gaining ground as word of the queen’s presence trickled from the officers to the rank and file. The reason for the misunderstanding was obvious: it was inconceivable that the queen should appear on the battlefield in the monarch’s stead.

However pale and strained the aspect she presented, Adelaide-Estelle’s appearance galvanized the men. From one moment to the next they seemed rejuvenated, with each ready to outdo his previous efforts; hearts and morale buoyed above the daunting surf of the sanguinary horde arrayed against them.

But would their morale deflate once they were disabused of their misunderstanding? Adelaide-Estelle stepped forward to address the king’s troops from the courtyard’s marble landing. Zephyrin redoubled the strength of the faintly blue, translucent ward enveloping her like armor. “Messieurs! His Majesty has two orders for you!”

Every eye, every ear that could afford to divert itself from the battle hung upon the trembling queen, upon her every word.

“First!… The Guard is to withdraw to the palace! The king wishes for peace!”

Seconds of silence elapsed during which no man seemed to breath, and which, by unaccountable coincidence, even the advancing rebels seemed to respect by a lull in their artillery.

“And the second…” The queen drew a deep breath. Undone, her powdered gray tresses fluttered freely in the breeze. “The second is to save the Cygnon and assist your sovereign liege’s relations as they escape from the capital! Men of the Royal Guard! I leave to your discretion how you may best fulfill the second order, before accomplishing the first!”

The roar that acknowledged the queen was deafening.

This is it.

“Vive le roi! Vive la reine!”

This was where history would change. His grand-aunt, who had urged her husband the king to inspect his troops, who had pressed a pistol into his hand, who had attempted to rouse him to a vigorous defense of the Isle—all in vain—would now spearhead the counteroffensive.

Zephyrin’s gaze strayed to his cousin the Cygnon, silently huddled behind Madame d’Aurellis besmirched lilac dress.

If we succeed today, he won’t be tortured. If we succeed today, she—

At that moment a gust blew strongly, clearing away swathes of smoke long enough for Zephyrin to make out the fir green and gold-embroidered uniform of a Royal Guardsman. A svelte youth—a sub-lieutenant, hardly older than a boy, no doubt inflamed by the queen’s appeal—stood out in the open, indifferent to the deadly crossfire and utterly unshielded.

His complexion was soft and pale, akin to that of a sheltered blueblood heiress, yet juxtaposed by a martial, aquiline nose and an eager, eagle-eyed gaze. A voice rose above the crackling gunfire and booming cannons, speaking in an impassioned accent that Zephyrin couldn’t quite place.

“Men, well do I know that if my father were present to lead this squadron you would stand taller against our foes! My youth and complexion both militate against me; prithee, turn them both a blind eye! The desire to render myself worthy of your service consumes every fiber of my being—let us not put off the hour of glory a moment longer! Where I fly, follow me! should I stumble, support me! if I fall, avenge me!”

The young guardsman’s bravado was warmly received. Zephyrin soon lost sight of the head of strawberry blond curls as the youth raced forward and leapt over a barricade to melt into the billowing chaos, but not before barely casting a ward over him in the nick of time. An even more childish looking drummer-boy was the next recipient of magical protection, followed by the dozens of soldiers who emulated the reckless charge into rebel lines.

Zephyrin cast ward after ward, tapping deeply into his mana reserves but ready to call upon the queen for the asterite’s return when the need arose. While supporting her soldiers, he appraised the far bank where the rebel army congregated.

Volunteers and crudely armed tradesmen were milling restlessly, impatiently awaiting their turn to join the fray. One man agitated a sanguine banner on which was inscribed a slogan or demand, too distant to be legible. There were also, of all things, cooking fires—fires whose purpose Zephyrin would have never guessed in a hundred years, were it not for an extract from the Emperor’s memoirs which now recurred to his mind in the full amplitude of its terrible significance:

The palace was assaulted by the vilest rabble conceivable by the human mind. Howbeit, the adversaries were disciplined and not to be underestimated, to which fact Rudolf XIII paid scant regard with consequences so well-known as to need no mention. Never, I am glad to say, never were any atrocities half so odious wrought upon my battlefields as those which were witnessed in that unfortunate courtyard after the slaughter of the Guard. And by well-to-do women! No indecency, no depravity was omitted by these well-dressed matrons.

Worse, not to be outdone by their women, undaunted by the ominous stormclouds that seemed to herald a downpour, the most ardent partisans of equality of blood thought the hour of slayings opportune for a singular repast. Terrible as it is write, widows had the burden of learning after the fact that the flesh of several of the fallen was stripped, roasted, and feasted upon by the victors. Let the historian judge the material with which I reestablished civilization, upon my ascension to the throne!

Once the mutilations were done and the place wet and raw with atrocity, what presented itself with greatest force to the spectator was the wrath etched with terrible lines in every gunpowder-blackened face; suspicion ever threatened the eruption of some new font of blood; a defiant will to maim and kill was flaunted with all the audacity of false virtue, like a brazen-browed harlot with counterfeit modesty in her eyes.

Though his attention was fully invested in the bloodshed before his eyes, it was in the midst of the discharge of firearms and tocsin’s clamor that a thought unfolded itself in the back of Zephyrin’s mind. Not in tranquil, impassible Elysia during his first life, not in the rural obscurity of far-flung Estrelti—no, it was now, in the thick of the action, embroiled in the very events which had been the object of some of his father’s most censorious lines, that he became conscious of an anomaly.

There’s something strange about my father’s words.

The thought that he had failed to glean the right meaning from his father’s allusions to the day’s events nagged at Zephyrin—but the mystery would have to wait. Suddenly he became aware of hearing the marshal’s guttural, barking tones over the hail of rebel bullets and sharp retorts of rifles. “Lieutenant-colonel, report! How many cannons remain in our hands?”

“Five! Three in the courtyard, two on the terraces! The two at the bridge’s outposts and the one at the outer gate have been lost.”

“Lost?” The marshal feigned incomprehension. “Monsieur, did you not just say they’re at the bridge? If you know where they are, they can hardly be considered lost.”

“But—” The officer’s eyes widened. “Marshal dy Cassade, are you suggesting—”

A slender rapier was languidly unsheathed. “Your boys have mislaid three cannons. I propose we get them back, and boot this riffraff back across the Seicwan while we’re at it. Any objections?”

“No sir!” The officer turned around and began issuing rapid-fire orders as the count smiled grimly beneath his metallic-hued mustache. “Dy Valensis!” he called. “Cover us while we… well, I’ll be,” he murmured, a hoary eyebrow rising incrementally. “All this time, and Adelaide didn’t tell me she had a second army waiting in the wings.”

Exclamations of surprise filled the acrid, blood-scented air as the rest of the soldiers belatedly made the same observation as the marshal. A false sky had formed around them, an artificial azure all-encompassing at first before it resolved into a pulsing paralleogrammatic mass, an implacable, rippling palisade repelling bullets and cannonballs alike.

And then it began to move.

Bearing down on the rebels occupying the alabastrine bridge linking the isle and mainland and its twin outputs, Zephyrin’s magic withstood the concentrated power of gun, cannon, and even the occasional malformed spell before sweeping aside their positions on the royalist side of the Seicwan.

His hand outstretched, gritting his teeth as he advanced step by step, Zephyrin maintained the breadth of his barrier to shield as many guardsman from incoming artillery-fire as he possibly could. Sweating profusely, Zephyrin released the grand barrier with a gasp as the Royal Guard surged forward. The last of the rebels flung down his pike and ran.

Dropping to one knee, his head falling back, Zephyrin released a long-held sigh as his heart and the leaden skies throbbed with jubilation.