CHAPTER FIVE

Ceres was floating above islands of smooth stone and beauty so exquisite she almost wanted to cry. She recognized the work of the Ancient Ones, and instantly she found herself thinking of her mother.

Ceres saw her then, somewhere ahead of her, still robed in a mist. Ceres sprinted after her, and she saw her mother turn, but she still didn’t seem to be gaining on her quickly enough.

There was a gap between them now, and Ceres leapt, holding out her hand. She saw her mother reaching out for her, and just for a moment, Ceres thought that Lycine would catch her. Their fingers brushed, and then Ceres was falling.

She fell into the midst of a battle, figures flailing about her. The dead were there, their deaths apparently not stopping them from fighting. Lord West fought beside Anka, Rexus beside a hundred men Ceres had killed in as many different fights. They were all around Ceres, fighting one another, fighting the world…

The Last Breath was there in front of her, the former combatlord as bleak and terrifying as he had ever been. Ceres found herself jumping over the bladed staff he wielded, reaching out to turn him to stone as she had before.

Nothing happened this time. The Last Breath knocked her sprawling, standing over her in triumph, and now he was Stephania, holding a bottle in place of a staff, the fumes still acrid in Ceres’s nostrils.

Then she woke, and reality wasn’t any better than her dreaming.

Ceres woke to the feel of rough stone. For a moment, she thought that maybe Stephania had left her on the floor of her room, or worse, that she might still be standing over her. Ceres spun, trying to come to her feet and continue the fight, only to realize that there was no room in which to do it.

Ceres had to force herself to breathe slowly, fighting down the panic that threatened to engulf her as she saw stone walls on every side. It was only when she looked up and saw a metal grille above her that she realized she was in a pit, not buried alive.

The pit was barely broad enough to sit in. There was certainly no way that she could lie full length. Ceres reached up, testing the bars of the grille above her, reaching down for the strength to bend or break them.

Nothing happened.

Now, Ceres felt the panic starting to rise. She tried reaching down for the power again, being gentle with it, remembering how her mother had corrected her after Ceres had burnt out her powers trying to take the city.

This felt the same in some ways, and yet different in so many more. Before, it had been as though the channels along which the power flowed had been burned through until they hurt too much to use, leaving Ceres hollowed out.

Now, it felt as though she was simply normal, although that felt like less than nothing compared to what she’d been only a little while ago. There was no doubting what had done this either: Stephania and her poison. Somewhere, somehow, she had found a method to strip Ceres of the powers her Ancient One blood gave her.

Ceres could feel the difference between this and what had happened before. That had been like flash blindness: too much too soon, fading slowly with the right care. This was more like having her eyes pecked out by crows.

She reached up for the bars again anyway, hoping that she was wrong. She strained, putting all the strength she could muster into trying to move them. They didn’t give in the slightest, even when Ceres pulled at them so hard her palms bled against the metal.

She cried out in surprise as someone threw water down into the pit, leaving her soaked and huddled against the stone of the wall. When Stephania stepped into view, standing over the grate, Ceres tried to glare at her in defiance, but right then she was too cold and wet and weak to do much of anything.

“The poison worked then,” Stephania said without preamble. “Well, it should. I paid enough for it.”

Ceres saw her touch her belly then, but Stephania went on before Ceres could ask what she meant.

“How does it feel to have the only thing that made you special taken away?” Stephania asked.

Like having been able to fly, but now barely being able to crawl. But Ceres wasn’t going to give her that satisfaction.

“Haven’t we been here before, Stephania?” she demanded. “You know how it ends. With me escaping and giving you what you deserve.”

Stephania dumped another bucket of water on her then, and Ceres leapt at the bars. She heard Stephania’s laughter as she did it, and that just drove Ceres’s anger. She didn’t care if she had no powers right then. She still had a combatlord’s training, and she still had everything she’d learned from the Forest People. She would strangle Stephania with her bare hands if need be.

“Look at you. Like the animal you are,” Stephania said.

That was enough to slow Ceres a little, if only because she wouldn’t let herself be anything Stephania wanted her to be.

“You should have killed me when you had the chance,” Ceres said.

“I wanted to,” Stephania replied, “but events don’t always give us what we want. Just look at how things have gone with you and Thanos. Or me and Thanos. After all, I’m the one who’s actually married to him, aren’t I?”

Ceres had to put her hands against the stone of the walls to keep herself from leaping at Stephania again.

“I would have cut your throat if I hadn’t heard the war horns,” Stephania said. “And then it occurred to me that it would be an easy thing to take the castle back. So I did.”

Ceres shook her head. She couldn’t believe that.

“I freed the castle.”

She’d done more than that. She’d filled it with rebels. She’d taken the people who were loyal to the Empire and she’d imprisoned them. The others, she’d given chances to, she’d…

“Ah, you’re starting to see it now, aren’t you?” Stephania said. “All those people who were so quick to thank you for their freedom turned back to me just as quickly. I’ll have to watch them.”

“You’ll have to watch more than that,” Ceres snapped back. “You think the rebellion’s fighters will let you sit here playing queen? You think the combatlords will?”

“Ah,” Stephania said, with an exaggerated show of embarrassment that made Ceres dread what was coming next. “I’m afraid I have some bad news about your combatlords. It turns out that the best of fighters still dies when you put an arrow in his heart.”

She said that so casually, so tauntingly, yet if it was even half true it was enough to break Ceres’s heart. She’d fought alongside the combatlords. She’d trained alongside them. They’d been her friends and her allies.

“You just enjoy being cruel,” Ceres said.

To her surprise, she saw Stephania shake her head.

“Let me guess. You think I’m no better than that idiot, Lucious? A man who couldn’t enjoy himself in the slightest unless someone else was screaming? You think I’m like that?”

It seemed like a fairly accurate description from where Ceres was standing. Especially given everything that was likely to happen next.

“Aren’t you?” Ceres demanded. “Oh, I’m sorry, and there I was thinking that you’d put me in a stone pit, waiting to die.”

“Waiting for torture, actually,” Stephania said. “But that’s just you. You deserve everything you get after all you tried to take from me. Thanos was mine.”

Perhaps she really believed that. Perhaps she honestly felt that it was normal to try to murder your rivals in relationships and life.

“And the rest of it?” Ceres said. “Are you going to try to convince me that you’re basically a nice person, Stephania? Because I’m pretty sure that ship sailed the moment you tried to send me to the Isle of Prisoners.”

Perhaps she shouldn’t have made fun of her like that, because Stephania hefted a third bucket of water. She appeared to consider it for a moment, shrugged, and dumped it over Ceres in a wash of freezing cold.

“I’m saying that nice doesn’t come into it, you stupid peasant,” she snapped as Ceres shivered. “We live in a world that will try to take all you have from you without asking. Particularly if you’re a woman. There are always thugs like Lucious. There are always those who want to take and take.”

“So we fight them,” Ceres said. “We set people free! We protect them.”

She heard Stephania laugh at that.

“You actually believe that foolishness works, don’t you?” Stephania said. “You think that people are basically good, and all will be well if you just give them a chance.”

She said it as though it were something to mock, rather than a good philosophy for a life.

“That is not life,” Stephania continued. “Life is a war, fought any way you can find to fight it. You give no one power over you, and you take all the power you can, because that way you have the strength to crush them when they try to betray you.”

“I’m not feeling very crushed,” Ceres retorted. She wasn’t going to let Stephania see how weak she felt in that moment, or how empty. She was going to create the pretense of strength, in the hope that she might find a way for reality to follow.

She saw Stephania shrug.

“You will. Your rebellion is currently fighting a battle with the army of Felldust. It might win, and then I will trade you for a path out of the city with all the wealth I can take. My guess, though, is that Felldust will wash through the city like a wave. I will let them break against the walls of this castle, until they are ready to talk.”

“You think men like that will just talk to you?” Ceres demanded. “They’ll kill you.”

Ceres wasn’t sure why she gave Stephania that much of a warning. The world would be a better place if someone killed her, even if it was the armies of Felldust.

“You think I haven’t thought it through?” Stephania countered. “Felldust is fractious. It cannot afford to have its soldiers sitting, laying siege to a castle it cannot take. They would fight amongst themselves in weeks, if not before. They will have to talk.”

“And you think they’ll play fair with you?” Ceres asked.

Sometimes, she could barely believe the arrogance Stephania showed.

“I am not a fool,” Stephania said. “I have one of my handmaidens preparing to play the part of me for the first meeting, so that if they try to betray us, I have time to flee the city through the tunnels. After that, I will present you, kneeling and in chains, to First Stone Irrien. An offering with which to begin peace negotiations. And who knows? Perhaps First Stone Irrien will find himself… amenable to joining our two nations together. I feel I could do a lot alongside someone like that.”

Ceres shook her head at that thought. She would no more kneel on Stephania’s command than on that of any other noble. “You think I’m going to give you the satisfaction – ”

“I think that I don’t have to wait for you to give anything,” Stephania snapped back. “I can take anything I want from you, including your life. Remember that, in what follows: if it weren’t for this war, I would have shown you mercy, and just killed you.”

It sounded as though Stephania had as strange an idea about mercy as about everything else in the world.

“What happened to you?” Ceres asked her. “What made you into this?”

Stephania smiled at that. “I saw the world as it was. And now, I think, the world will see you as you are. I can’t kill you, so I’ll destroy the symbol you made yourself into. You’re going to fight for me, Ceres. Again and again, without the strength that made people think you were so special. In between, we’ll find ways to make it worse.”

That didn’t sound so different from anything Lucious or the royals had tried to do.

“You’re not going to break me,” Ceres promised her. “I’m not going to collapse and beg just for your entertainment, or your petty revenge, or whatever else you want to call it.”

“You will,” Stephania promised her in return. “You’re going to kneel before the First Stone of Felldust and beg to be his slave. I’ll make sure of it.”