Abderus had been Exarch of Philgeonia for the better part of a decade, ever since he was granted that position by Emperor Pyrrhus in the aftermath of the infamous Siege of Eunon. The position of Exarch was no minor bureaucrat, but made Abderus almost an Emperor in miniature. The day-to-day operation of Philgeonia, a region so rge that it could easily be a great kingdom of repute and influence were it not for the influence of Chrysopolis, fell mostly to him. If and when the next invasion came over the border with Sarrania, Abderus would have to hold out as long as he could with his regional troops and the various fortresses scattered throughout his realm, until the Emperor had gathered enough forces to counter the threat properly.

  Thus, the man that Helen had been sent to seduce, the one who she would soon marry, was one of the most powerful men in all of the Macarian Empire. His influence could change the lives of hundreds, even thousands, and the sheer quantity of wealth, the number of troops and the quantities of goods that passed through his hands was beyond comprehension to all who were not trained in bureaucracy and management as Helen was.

  The problem was that Abderus didn’t seem to know how to manage any of it, or at least not particurly well. The first time her future husband’s errors were brought to Helen’s attention, the affair with the kitchen, she had assumed it was just a fluke, a minor slip of Abderus’s attention. But as the days passed, as it became more and more common for those who had concerns to bring them to Helen, she realized the sheer breadth and depth of the problem. Abderus truly possessed no idea how to run an organization as rge as an Exarchate. It was not merely that those things which he needed to give attention were left without it; but even in matters of delegation, Abderus seemed to have no ability at all to distinguish skilled subordinates from unskilled.

  The only part that Abderus had any command over whatsoever was that involving charisma. The people of Eunon saw him frequently, and his many appearances at feasts and various other events caused all to view him as magnanimous, pious, friendly, and just. Every time that somebody came to Helen to compin that his manager was being abusive, or that he was receiving contradictory orders, or that his district had been ignored for years, all were quick to assure her that they pced no bme upon her husband-to-be whatsoever. The more such incidents came to light, the less sure Helen became that they were correct in that attitude.

  It was early afternoon, and with the coming of winter so too had come her daughters, rain and cold. The thick clouds that shrouded Eunon cast the city in a grey half-light, such that as Helen sved away at yet another bit of parchment, she was forced to hunch forward to ensure that she could keep track of her line spacings even in the gloom. And this particur document did need to be as precise as possible, because it authorized the rewriting of Philgeonia’s governorships, transferring a chunk of nd rge enough to fight a war over from one governor to the other. The original borders had been drawn up based on the circumstances of the now-distant Macarian conquest, ignorant of ethnic or logistical barriers. That entire segment of nd was barely taxed, because there was no efficient way for the collectors of its official administrator to even reach it without passing through the nds of his neighbor!

  Such inefficiencies had become Helen’s life almost to a greater extent than her seduction of Abderus, and they were infuriating her. How could a man spend so many years in this role and learn nothing of how to carry about his duties efficiently?

  The door opened with a heavy clunk-thunk of metal, knocking Helen entirely out of her train of thought. She had selected this chamber, high up in the fortress, for two reasons: firstly its rge windows granted it a surplus of light so long as the sun was in the sky. Secondly, as it was the castle armory, few indeed felt the need to enter it except during times of great distress. Apparently, the tter consideration was not enough to stop Helen from being interrupted.

  “Damn you, what is it now?” Helen said, casting her pen aside as she rose. “There is always something new in this—”

  Abderus stood in the doorway, frowning with concern. “Apologies, my princess.”

  Helen paused, wincing internally before quickly moving to calm his mood. “Oh, my love,” Helen said, raising the pitch of her voice as she rushed to embrace her husband-to-be. “I had thought it was some servant come to bother me with yet more frivolous demands.”

  Abderus seemed almost confused as he met her embrace, returning it with only the gentlest pressure. “What were you doing here? I spent an age just looking for you. Only the Second Quartermaster could tell me where you were.”

  “I simply wished for solitude,” Helen said. “You know my nature.”

  Abderus nodded; but as, this simple excuse did not his curiosity sate. He gave Helen one more firm grasp around the shoulders, then walked past her, eyes fixed upon the pce where she had been when first he entered the chamber. He must have seen her bent over that table. Helen trailed behind him as he went, trying desperately to come up with some excuse.

  “I must find ways to busy myself, you know, given I ck the constitution for pageantry. So I took up other avenues of action; I swear I have done nothing behind your back, all that I work upon I have sent to you in the end…”

  While she babbled so, Abderus picked up the sheepskin scroll and, with an expression of pensiveness, skimmed quickly through its contents. Helen fell silent. She felt as though she were falling. Eventually, after an age, Abderus rolled up the scroll and turned to face her. His eyes squinted at her, brows knitted tightly together.

  “It was going to end up in your hands, like all the rest,” Helen said weakly. “But the court case between Governor Democritus and Governor Hecataeus has been ongoing for years with no resolution on the horizon. Surely you are aware of that, at least?”

  “Yes,” Abderus said. “It is not my pce to interfere in the just actions of the w.”

  “Of course not,” Helen said. She could no longer look Abderus in the eye. “But it is well within your rights to reassign nds in such a way, especially given that Hecataeus has failed so comprehensively to manage the nds given to him. It would bring the case to a swift end and increase the efficiency of Philgeonia in one fell swoop.”

  The room was so terribly silent all of a sudden that Helen could hear the soft rustle of Abderus’s fingers scratching at his curly beard. “Hecataeus will be furious.”

  “Perhaps. But you could just as easily turn it into a lesson in virtue. Shame him, and any anger he possesses may come to nothing. Or it may not.”

  Abderus’s hand came to fall against Helen’s cheek, and slowly tilted it up until she was once again looking into his eyes. A thousand little emotions ran across the wrinkles of his face; in the afternoon light he looked startlingly old.

  “Why did you not tell me of any of this? The suit between two of my governors has weighed on my mind for years, and here you are with a solution in a single sheet of sheepskin.”

  Helen’s breath quickened, and tears formed at the corners of her eyes. Memories poured back in, memories that she had almost thought banished by her new circumstances. Before Shirrin had changed her, there had been scars on her back, across her buttocks, on her chest, all earned from situations much like this one. Her whole body began to tremble, and for a moment there was no Helen, only Hesperos the sve-scribe.

  “No, no, do not tremble, my love. No anger fills my heart this day, and I would never hurt you. I am confused why you would obscure this act of brilliance from my sight!”

  Helen could not respond with words, but in a rush to compose herself she pressed her forehead to the middle of Abderus’s tunic, gritting her teeth against panic. Over a handful of breaths, she regained control, wiped away her tears on the reddish cloth, and then, when she knew exactly what she was doing, she open-handedly spped Abderus’s side.

  “You have shown no interest! Not a lick, not a spark, not a word! Have you not noticed how many of the orders you have signed these st weeks have come into your hand from mine?”

  “Oh.”

  “Oh, indeed,” Helen said with a scowl. “Almost every day since I came to this country I have been doing nothing but fixing the errors left behind by your ill management. This is but the test.”

  Abderus nodded, then broke out into a chuckle. “Well, damn me. It seems I have been upstaged by a woman.” He unrolled the scroll, looking it over once again. “Where might I sign?”

  “Nowhere,” Helen said. “It isn’t finished yet.”

  Abderus handed it back to her. “Then you’ll have to finish it at a ter time. Perhaps I will assign one or two of the fortress scribes to serve under you directly. It doesn’t do to have a princess ruining her vision hunched over a table.”

  “Thank you,” Helen said.

  “But that will come at a ter time. I… did not seek you out merely to ruin your privacy, Helen. And given the anger which I had somehow failed to see, it seems that I arrived at the perfect time for my true intentions. For the st few weeks, I believe, you have been entirely constrained to this fortress and its immediate surroundings. That must change. Helen, my wife-to-be, would you allow me to give you a tour of Eunon?”

  Abderus extended his hand in invitation, as though he were a much younger man inviting the object of his affections to a dance, and not a lord speaking to a woman to whom he was already engaged. It was so absurd a gesture that Helen could not help but grin.

  “Of course, my lord,” Helen said, taking his hand into hers and responding with a deep bow, “Let us set aside the worries of politics and… go for a walk about town?”

  “A ride,” Abderus said. “But close enough.”

  “On horseback?”

  “We’ll certainly not be riding upon the back of a cow, if that is what you mean,” Abderus joked as he began to lead her towards the door.

  “Would you believe me if I said I had never ridden a horse? I’ve only ever walked or gone around by carriage.”

  “Then it will be a unique experience twice over.”

  It was, indeed, a quite unique experience. The first chunk of the trip was spent just outside of the Fortress’s front gates, slowly teaching Helen the art of sitting atop a horse’s back without making a complete fool of herself. This would have been bad enough if it were just herself and Abderus, but the Exarch was never alone outside of the fortress. There were four mounted bodyguards watching the entire time.

  And then the rain came again, as it had in fits and starts throughout most of the day, and the couple was driven back indoors. When finally the rain abated, it was an awkward rush to get saddled up in what little time they had. Then, at st, Abderus and Helen set off on their tour.

  Eunon was built much like Chrysopolis was, though with no open water for hundreds of miles, the only thing to constrain the city was the necessity of walls. Eunon had many walls, of course, each built as the city had outgrown the previous ones, only to be outgrown in turn. Uniquely compared to just about any city Helen had ever heard of, Eunon didn’t even have a river; there had been a tiny stream that had fed the fortress, but it had been over a hundred years since the city’s water needs had been fed by anything other than aqueduct.

  Helen wanted to see the aqueduct, but Abderus was able to convince her to at least wait until he had shown off the parts of the city that he found the most impressive. That being, of course, the center of it all. Abderus and Helen rode through the agora, through the temple district and Eunon’s grand market, and Helen did her very absolute best to look impressed by it all. It was, unfortunately, mostly a lesser copy of the even vaster agora, temples, and markets of Chrysopolis.

  Except, of course, for the temple of Tazashun the Two-Faced. In Chrysopolis, Tazashun was a minor god, sometimes believed to be merely an epithet of the Golden Lord, given that both held domain over ores and mineral wealth. In Eunon, though, where they feared earthquakes as much as they loved freshwater springs, Tazashun was chiefest amongst the Old Gods. Within his temple sat an enormous statue, a great maul in one hand and a pick in the other, the head split in half with one part grinning and the other scowling. Most beautiful of all, however, was the statue’s composition: by some miracle of craft, it had been made out of at least twenty different types of stone, fused seamlessly together and polished until they shone.

  Abderus stopped, kneeling momentarily to pray for good luck. Then they were off again, to make it to the next destination before the rain restarted. That destination, to Helen’s annoyance, was still not the aqueduct. Instead, it y along the inside of the second ring of Eunon’s walls. Their horses raced through the first gate, giving Abderus only a moment to point out the exquisite stonework there, then down several streets until at st they arrived at a street referred to as Apollonios’s Way.

  “Apollonios was an artist,” Abderus expined. “And a madman. He believed in a philosophy of total abstention from wealth and property, and lived here, having only a sheep’s skin with which to shelter from the rain and surviving entirely off the kindness of his neighbors.”

  Helen grinned. “A luxury ideology. If everyone survives off the kindness of their neighbors, how will anyone have anything to give?”

  “Ha! Perhaps. But his ideology is not what he is known for. What he is known for is this.”

  They rounded a corner, the horse having slowed down to just a walk, and Helen’s breath was lost to her. It was painted across the inner side of the wall, a mural so vast that it could not be taken in all at once. As the horse bearing Abderus and Helen rode down Apollonios’s Way, as Helen could look at each segment one by one, she slowly pieced together what it was even depicting.

  It was an old myth, but a famed one, subject of many pys and much analysis by the learned men of Macaria. It was known as The Rape of Aikisma, and it was the story of a great king who, in his hubris, attempted to force the demigoddess Aikisma into marriage. Aikisma, rather than acquiesce to his desires, marred her own face and cried out for her father, Lord Ethirus. Lord Ethirus, god of justice, vengeance, and strength, then appeared to curse both his daughter for her damaging and the king who had done it.

  Traditionally, Ethirus appeared in stage adaptations as a rge man wearing a huge and ornate red robe, his mask bearing a terrifying half-man half-reptile image. Often, burning bundles of sticks would be cleverly hidden in the costume, shrouding the actor in acrid smoke and fumes. But Apollonios depicted the climax of the story in his own way, powered only by his own imagination and utterly unhindered by the limitations of the stage. The center of the image was Ethirus as dragon, an immense and coiling form of scale and horn, his many cwed limbs digging furrows into the earth. On either side, Aikisma and the king fell to their knees in horror and grief, fmes licking at them, while in the background the king’s city swarmed with biting flies.

  “How is this possible? A beggar could never make such a thing…”

  Abderus grinned. “He could if he had twenty years, and if two different Exarchs made sure to keep him supplied with paints purely out of curiosity for what he would make.”

  They rode down to the very end of the great mural, then doubled back. The second time, Abderus took the time to point out that the mural was far from the only thing marking Apollonios’s presence in the district. It had become something of a minor holy site for men who found aesthetic and craft to be the highest calling in life. Most of the shops around were potters, painters, weavers, and so on, and many of the buildings were decorated with other forms of wall art or small shrines to the Goddess of Beauty.

  Of course, there was little time, and so they had to ride on. At st, Abderus relented, and took his wife-to-be to see the aqueduct. It was an excellent aqueduct. All of its many arches were built from sharply-cut blocks of brown pteau stone, arranged in perfect lines and curves, stretching off into the distance. The sound of burbling water was soothing and familiar, and for a moment all the stresses of Helen’s new life in Eunon melted away.

  Until that burbling, bubbling stream of life-giving water was completely drowned out by the rush of the rain breaking out once again. Abderus, thinking quickly, threw his cloak over Helen and hurried her under the aqueduct’s arch to seek shelter, while the guards found it wherever they could, under cloaks or the neighboring arches.

  It was all very ridiculous, but while she was pressed against Abderus’s chest, a nexus of warmth amidst all the cold and the wet, Helen could not help but feel a fme of genuine affection. For all his faults, the one thing that Abderus could not be accused of was duplicity. He was as straightforward as any politician possibly could be. They had shared a bed for so many days, and before long, they would be married in fact as well as in the heart. He had gone to all the trouble of showing her his city, sheltering her from the rain, accepting her even when she raged against him.

  Was it wrong to be lying to him the way she was? Perhaps there, under that archway, was the time to reveal it all. She could spill her secrets, tell him of what she was sent to do, beg for forgiveness and impress upon her future husband the importance of her mission. Perhaps the truth would prove more valuable than lies. Perhaps she loved him enough that she could no longer bear to lie to him.

  Then the thought passed. Abderus could not be allowed to know that he was being maniputed. When the rain trailed off, the Exarch of Philgeonia left the archway and returned to his grand tour absolutely none the wiser.

  SaffronDragon