Chapter 327: Power Play

“Hey Thea.”

“Yes?”

“You have a cute butt.”

“W—what?”

“You have a cute butt,” Syd repeated as she idly stared at her shy lover’s posterior. “Very cute. Like a peach. Makes me want to squeeze it.”

“Ah, um, w—well, d—don’t!” Thea shot back as she blushed a bright pink. “This isn’t a good p—place for, ah, things like that!”

“That’s fair,” Syd sighed while leaning her chin on the heel of her right hand. “But I can give it some attention later, right?”

“Oh—okay,” Thea said nervously as she looked around to see if anyone was listening. “Um, yes. Sure. Thank you,” she said, biting her lip. Then, her blush growing stronger, she added, “I think your b—butt is very, um, attractive too.”

“That’s good,” Syd smirked. “It’s about eyelevel with most people, so if I had an ugly ass, I don’t think I’d make a very good impression.”

Thea choked back her laughter as she covered her mouth with one hand. When a nearby guard turned his gaze on her, drawn by the noise, she quickly wiped the smile from her face and drew herself to attention, her demeanor matching the dour man’s attitude pound for pound. She was intent on presenting the guards watching Jadis with a wall of her own, so with a sigh of resignation, Syd let her conversation drop so as not to distract her loyal lover further.

Jadis was bored. Stultifyingly so. All the excitement that she’d felt upon arriving in the massive capital city of Eldingholt had disappeared hours ago. All that was left was the tedium of being left to ferment in a waiting room. She couldn’t even properly enjoy the sights of the magical city. The window to the holding pen she’d been placed into had the rather spectacular view of a shipping dock and not much else.

Jadis and everyone else who’d come from Far Felsen had disembarked from the ship some time shortly before noon. Jadis didn’t even really have to guess, since she had heard the bells of the timekeeper towers ring only a few minutes after she had stepped onto the dock. Unfortunately, just like her brief stay in the coastal city of Glitnir, Jadis had been immediately escorted by Runar and his cadre of knights to an officious-looking building where she’d been ordered to stay while the legal minutia of her detainment was sorted out.

From what Aurea and Sholto had told Jadis, it shouldn’t have taken all that long to get the ball rolling on a transfer of custody. Yes, she had to be detained, but due to the nature of her accused crimes as well as her status as a Nephilim, she should have been simply remanded to temple authority and what amounted to house arrest in the temple district until the trial proceedings were sorted. However, what should have taken no more than a few minutes was now dragging on into its fifth hour.

Everyone else had been given a greater degree of freedom, which meant her lovers had been able to come and go, bringing her news and updates. From what Eir had last been able to pass along, it seemed that the paperwork that needed to be filed to make the transfer official was taking an “unusually long time” to process due to “irregularities” in the reports. According to Eir, Vraekae suspected interference from the magistrate who ran the capital city. Why the man would be using his power and position to inconvenience Jadis in such a petty way was simultaneously obvious and a mystery. Obvious because Magistrate Holcomb was a firm supporter of First Prince Hraustrekr. A mystery because Jadis still had no answer as to why the prince was so invested in making her life miserable.

This was precisely why Jadis never wanted to get involved in politics. She didn’t know Hraustrekr. She didn’t know Holcomb, either. Yet for some reason, at least one of these two men felt compelled to interfere in her life, and the other felt compelled to aid him because of some political connection the two had. A connection that Jadis wouldn’t have had any clue about if it weren’t for the fact that Vraekae had her own political connections to a different prince. Which meant that because Vraekae was Jadis’ legal defense, Holcomb was just dragging his feet even more because she represented an opposing side in an ongoing political argument that Jadis did not understand and did not care to learn.

Maybe the whole arrest and detainment was a misunderstanding. Maybe the first prince had received bad information and acted on it rashly. Maybe he was genuinely concerned that the high priests and everyone else in Weigrun were being deceived and he just wanted to make sure the potential deceiver was thoroughly investigated before any irreparable damage was done. Maybe the prince was just a fucking idiot who got his rocks off by abusing his power.

Maybe.

But Jadis had had plenty of time to think over the several days she’d spent on the ship as well as the past few hours in the holding room. And from everything that she had observed, the facts seemed to point to one conclusion. Jadis was being targeted for political reasons.

You couldn’t make allies without making enemies. Jadis didn’t know if that was a quote she’d heard in a book before or something she’d bastardized from a movie, but either way she felt it was true. Because she was on nominally good terms with Vraekae, a supporter of Second Prince Kestil, Jadis was being attacked by First Prince Hraustrekr. At least, that’s how it seemed. Jadis didn’t know if that was true, not really, but no other reason she could think of made sense. The two royal siblings were at odds with each other, or so she’d heard, which meant that if she were ally to one, she was enemy to the other.

Except, Jadis wasn’t Kestil’s ally. Jadis didn’t know Kestil. She didn’t give two shits about the man beyond the fact that he was in some distant way the purse behind the budget for all the mercenary activity in Weigrun. That made him her employer in an extremely roundabout way, if only because he was the man who signed Vraekae’s checks. Sort of. But that connection was thinner than the paper it was written on.

Then again, looking at it from an outsider’s perspective, Jadis could see how someone could mistake her political alignment. She was working for Vraekae as a mercenary. More importantly, she was romantically involved with Vraekae’s cousin, who was herself the member of a house who supported Prince Kestil. That wasn’t a lot to go on, but it was more than the nothing that stood for the connection Jadis had with anyone who backed Hraustrekr. Apparently, if she had wanted to maintain an air of neutrality, she should have done more to cultivate some attachments to people who supported the first prince. People like General Egilhard.

Like that

was going to happen.

Her gut reaction to the useless general probably had something to do with her perceived alignments as well. Jadis didn’t like Egilhard at all, which was no secret from anyone who knew her. The fact that she was so openly opposed to a supporter of the first prince probably didn’t do her any favors in Hraustrekr’s eyes.

Whatever. Jadis didn’t want to stew on the princes much longer than she already had since it was doing nothing for her mood. Once she had her day in court, she was just going to be as clear and open as possible that she didn’t care about either man. An argument could be made that maybe she should throw her support behind Kestil just to spite the stupid crown prince, but Jadis balked at the notion. She still didn’t know anything about the second prince. She didn’t really want to side with one brother just because the other had pissed her off. For all she knew, he could be even worse than the older one. Ultimately, whether she ended up supporting Kestil later or not, she was still stuck in a guarded room for the moment with no way out until the asshole bureaucrats in charge decided to let her move on with her life.

Extreme violence was starting to look better and better with every passing second.

The doors to the stark stone room opened abruptly, drawing Jadis out of her thoughts. All three of her looked to the interloper with a glimmer of hope. That hope was quickly dashed when she saw the sour look on Aila’s face.

While Syd had been sitting on a stone bench on the far side of the room, Jay and Dys had both been walking in circles in the open space of the large room. Her circular path had put Jay closest to the door at the moment it was opened, so that was the body Jadis used to approach the unhappy-looking woman.

“What’s wrong?” Jay asked as she approached her redheaded lover. “Those blue eyes aren’t screaming good news.”

“No, they aren’t,” Aila said in her cool, calm voice. “The news is, in fact, obnoxious.”

Jay sighed, taking a moment to look around the room. Aside from her and Thea, Alex and Sorcha were also in the room, as well as ten heavily armored guards. The guards were Runar’s men, though Jadis only recognized one. The man had been one of the knights who had fought Jay and Dys back in Far Felsen and was also the same man who’d been bringing soup into her room when she’d woken from her coma. Sorcha had been spending her time trying to teach Alex some kind of card game Jadis had seen others play in the past, though their attention was now just as much on Aila as hers was.

Jadis had no intention of hiding any details from either Alex or Sorcha, and she honestly didn’t care if any of Runar’s guards overheard what they were discussing. With those thoughts in mind, she urged Aila to continue.

“Is the transfer not going through?” Jay asked, expecting the worst.

“It hasn’t been rejected, no,” Aila shook her head. “But Magistrate Holcomb has announced that he will need to review some jurisdictional laws to confirm the appropriate course of action regarding your case. He told Vraekae that he should have an answer in the next few days.”

“Days? You’ve got to be fucking kidding me,” Dys cursed as she kicked a stone bench in frustration.

She hadn’t meant to put that much force behind the action, but apparently it was more than enough to cause the whole stone bench, which probably weighed several hundred pounds, to jump off the floor by half a foot with a loud crack. Every guard in the room reacted by drawing their weapons and taking a stance meant for attack.

“Sorry, my bad,” Dys held up her hands, gritting her teeth as she motioned for the knights to settle down. “Just—just keep calm.”

The guards didn’t immediately put their weapons away, but once Dys moved the now cracked bench back into place and took a seat, they backed down. In an effort to dispel some of the tension in the room, Aila and Jay both took a seat on the same bench, just on the far end of it.

“Eir and Vraekae are both throwing a fit, metaphorically,” Aila continued her explanation. “It’s an obvious stall tactic. Vraekae and Eir are doing everything they can, but the high priests aren’t here to help them. They were called back to the temple district to report on what they learned on their unauthorized trip to Far Felsen. They might even be getting a slap on the wrist from the emperor. Apparently, he wasn’t happy about so many of them sailing to Weigrun without permission.”

“Okay, okay,” Jay huffed while shaking her head. “So, what are we going to do? What can we do?”

“Nothing,” Aila shrugged helplessly. “Nothing at the moment, in any case. We’ll just have to wait.”

“Wait where? Here?” Jay asked while doing her best to moderate the sharpness of her tone.

Aila wasn’t to blame for what was happening, so she didn’t want to take any of her anger out on her lover. There were other targets for her to focus on.

“Here,” Aila confirmed with a nod. “It’s the ‘neutral’ option, for now. I’m sure Runar has probably already argued that you should be thrown into a cell, but at least that isn’t going to happen.”

So. Hraustrekr really was determined to piss her off. Thoughts on how she might pay the piece of shit prince back flitted though Jadis’ mind while she ate a cold dinner with Fortune’s Favored. The rest of her companions had shown up a little after Aila, bringing with them food as well as some bedding for Jadis to use. They would be required to sleep in rooms assigned nearby, continuing the precedent of keeping her separated from her lovers, but at least she was allowed to spend time with them while everyone was awake.

The mood was dark. Any conversation topics that they might have wanted to discuss were dampened by the constant presence of the guards. In consequence, there wasn’t much for them to talk about and Jadis spent most of the meal quietly brooding. She appreciated the company that her friends provided her, but she found that she herself wasn’t making good company for others.

Eventually her companions were forced to say their goodnights and left Jadis alone in her mock cell. Even Alex had to leave, though she was once again obedient enough to Jadis’ requests to follow Aila just as she had in Glitnir. With her visitors gone, Jadis was left alone as the guards moved out of the room as well. With nothing but her unhappy thoughts to keep her company, Jadis stared up at the dark ceiling with three sets of eyes. For a long time, all was quiet. Eventually, she softly whispered a vow for her ears alone.

“I’m going to punch Prince Hraustrekr in his fucking nose.”

With that happy thought to comfort her, Jadis drifted off into a light sleep. While she’d intended to keep at least one of her bodies on watch, at some point the boredom must have gotten to her because she was suddenly awoken by a loud noise that startled her to full wakefulness. Since none of her selves had been conscious, the loud bang of the doors opening caused all three of her bodies to leap to their feet, arms raised for battle in case she was under attack.

It took her a moment to realize she was still in the holding room, and another second after that to recognize that she wasn’t being attacked by Demons or anyone else. It didn’t even look like it was morning, either, since a glance out the window showed dark skies and lanternlight. The person standing in the doorway wasn’t Aila or any of her other companions come to rescue her, either. Nor was it Runar or any of his knights. No, the blonde woman wearing armor who’d thrown open the doors was a stranger.

She was also an angel.

“Good reflexes,” the woman Jadis presumed had to be a Seraphim said as her cross-shaped pupils glanced across her form. “Jadis Ahlstrom, I presume. I am Lady Severina, Paladin of Valtar. I’ve come to escort you to the temple district.”

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