Page 15 of Poisoned Empire
“Keep your voice down.” Belisarius glared at the blonde. She paled.
Domina Amethyst gasped and choked, her eyes streaming with tears. Roxane patted her gently on the back.
“Water,” Milena wheezed.
One of the guards handed her a glass, and she drank as though parched, coughed a few times more and then breathed easy. Her eyes sparkled with wonder and delight as she stared up at the blonde.
“I think I just ate a mage.” Then she turned bemused amethyst eyes on him. “And you, Your Royal Highness, have very refined taste in mortal enemies.”
“Now that you’ve finished choking on my dessert, I believe you will explain yourselves.” Belisarius regained control of the situation. “Send them to my parlour and have them wait for my arrival. Now, Domina Sapphire, you will escort Domina Amethyst as if assisting an ailing friend. You, Domina Amethyst, will act as if you’ve had a touch too much to drink. I don’t think that should prove too difficult. Send for Nicephorus and Marduk when their absences won’t be noted.”
“Yes, Your Royal Highness,” the guard replied.
“Toodles.” The poison mage waved as she listed from side to side, playing her part.
Roxane whispered something panicked at her before the guard hurried them both away. The prince sipped his wine and contemplated the assassination attempt laid out before him. Was it happenstance that the only noble-born poison mage had sat down with him at just the right time to take a bite of the cake meant for him? Did he have more enemies than he thought, or was this attempt on his life related to the ritual? How did the poison mage fit into all this? He hoped the answers would be forthcoming. Until then, he would act as if nothing were amiss.
The wine soured on his tongue.
As soon as the guard escorted the two inside a room too opulent to be a humble parlour, the door was closed and locked from the outside. Even the looming threat of a royal interrogation couldn’t dull Selene’s excitement.
“Gods Iliana, I actually ate a poison mage! Do you know what this means?”
Iliana scowled.
“That the prince may be the one to behead me rather than my father?”
“No! It means I’m a top tier badass! Fuck, but that was painful. I only ever heard ofoneother poison mage surviving the concentrated poison of another mage, and whenhedied, a whole kingdom had to be abandoned!” Selene beamed. Truly, she was now a walking legend. No one would survive the blast radius ofherdeath fog.
Iliana sniffed, tears streaming down her face.
“Gods, how I’ve missed you.” She swept Selene up in a rib-crushing embrace.
Iliana’s tears dampened her spirits and focused her mind.
“What did he do to you? What has he threatened?” Selene demanded.
“He’s worse than a monster! All my sisters are to cut their throats withmyknives if I fail to keep people’s attention off of them or if I try to run away. He means to kill me when this is all over, I know it. Or worse.” She shivered. “What I saw in that household… His son whipped his youngest daughter nearly to death in front of me just to get me to agree to this farce. Then they laughed about a bet... Now I’m forced to impersonate one of my sisters, and I’m certain the praetor knows. I haven’t slept properly for two months, and I can’t do this!”
Selene knew at that moment that Magister Sapphire had to die. He’d broken a part of her friend. She patted her hand and stroked her hair as Iliana barely held back sobs, all the while deciding he would make a fine first test subject for her most painful and lethal of poisons.
“His threats are meaningless. We’ll deal with them together. The first chance we get, I’ll slip into your room, knock your sisters senseless, and then we’ll find every single knife of yours. We’ll strip them bare and torture them for information if we have to, but when your sisters die, it won’t be by your blades.”
“Thank you,” Iliana whispered between sniffles.
“Is that why you slipped a present to the prince? Were you going to ask that arrogant peacock for help?”
Iliana pulled away and wiped her tears, nodding.
“If anyone had the power to oppose the magister, it would be someone at the palace. I had no idea if you were... Anyway, yes, I enchanted a cheap, ceremonial knife to display a message when held. Even if he wouldn’t help, imprisonment is better than death.”
A skilled metals mage like Iliana could enchant a great many things into a metallic object, but metals, by and large, were only capable of holding one or two enchantments at most. Only the rarest of ores were capable of holding more, and only the Imperial Forge would ever have access to them, as Iliana had often complained to her.
“That’s my girl. I bet that shit father of yours didn’t even know that was possible, and didn’t take any precautions against your mage gift. Lucky, that. Daddy knew nearly every poison mage trick in the book, but I still managed to put in a little insurance policy.” She winked at Iliana, who seemed to be regaining her composure.
“Insurance?”
“Yup. If I croak, so will he, and every other trash person living in his castle and the surrounding area. I enchanted enough dormant poison there to make the whole place uninhabitable for a decade.”
