They met in a cellar three miles outside Vola Apertus's northern wall.
"Are you sure that this is the place?" Arbita whispered to Valens as their party crept through the woodland.
Her new husband grunted, shifting the drowsing Princeps Worldholder draped over his back. The stubborn kid had insisted on hiking the first mile and a half from the skyhaven, down the paved walkways that traversed beneath the aqueduct, and along the less-traveled roads to beyond the capital city's great wall. But weariness had won in the end, and he'd let his aedificans carry him at last. He was not completely asleep, judging by the calm flickers of the Trellis above, but the poor kid had to be exhausted.
"This is what his brother's team showed us in the Caeles," Valens said. "Not exactly one of his most spectacular holdings, is it?"
Technically they were just within the southernmost tip of Provincia Fulminis, the hereditary lands of the Princeps Worldholder that stretched from the Onyx palace straight north out of Vola Apertus.
Domi's lands, now. Arbita shook her head. It all still felt so unreal.
"Now, I know I'm just a Pullatus and don't know diamonds from dust," Merula said. The faint biting tone to her voice warned everyone not to make the mistake of agreeing with her. "But when they said 'cottage', I was imagining something a bit more... simple but elegant. Not this."
Arbita could not help but agree with the Pyrrhaeus. In fact, the cottage looked like something in which a Pullatus would live. The thatched roof appeared to be rotting and she dreaded to think what creatures had crept inside through the broken windows and ill-fit door.
"They want it to stay unremarkable," Radix pointed out. They were carrying a stack of books for Aix, trying surreptitiously to read the top one as they walked. Sidus, rolling his eyes, kept reaching out to steady them as they stumbled absently over roots and rocks.
"Well, they succeeded." Bellus was holding his tunica and paenula up to his knees to keep them from the mud.
Arbita's foot found a dead branch, which snapped under her shoe.
And just like that, they were no longer alone.
A tall man slipped between the trees, humming hilts clutched in both fists. Promenia wavered, a violet blur, where a blade would be and a crimson laurel smoldered at his throat.
Valens tensed, and Arbita drew back at the look on his face. She'd never seen him look so fierce. He was well known for his cool disdain, but this hot anger was new and disturbing.
"Pa!" Sidus said, his cheerful voice breaking the tense silence.
Arbita blinked. This must be Astricus, Sidus's father and Daedalus Adurere's foster father. The man who had consorted with Cercitis to kill Arbita's puer.
The man flicked a narrow-eyed look at his son, who sobered, and sheathed his weapons. Then he turned to Valens, or rather to Domi, and pressed a hand over his laurel. "Basilicus," he said, bowing his head.
Valens scowled at the man but lowered his alumna to the ground at the pointed glance from Bellus. Steadying the boy, he murmured something in his ear dryly.
Domi drew a deep breath, straightening. "May the Eyes pass over you." His voice was small but steady.
"And you also, Basilicus," Astricus said, lifting his head and dropping his hand.
Merula stepped forward, face stony. "I assume you're Astricus?"
The starholder frowned. "I am, and I am to be addressed as 'Prome', Eru--"
He did not get a chance to finish, as Merula moved forward with serpent-like grace and backhanded him in the mouth.
Arbita could only gape at the woman, feeling her heart plummet. Death. Assaulting a Lightholder, especially an Empowered, was punishable by death.
Valens cursed under his breath and glared at everyone as sizzles and sparks filled the wood, making everyone jump. "That didn't happen," he said through gritted teeth as he looked past Astricus's wide-eyed son to the man now dabbing blood from his lip. "Did it?"
The starholder looked ashamed. "Indeed, nothing happened." He spat blood and then looked at Merula, who stood before him shaking like a leaf, not in fear but fury. "I deserved that. You're the Princeps's Ma." It was not a question.
"If you ever touch him again, I will kill you and everyone who was in any way involved," Merula said through gritted teeth. "Do you hear me?"
"Ma, please," Domi said. Arbita glanced at the kid and bit her lip. He looked pale.
Merula swung to snap at her son, but then seemed to notice the same. She drew a deep breath, becoming as stone once more as she exhaled. She met the starholder's eyes, unflinching. "Let's go."
Arbita was not the only one to sigh in relief.
They followed the starholder into the cottage. The interior, strewn with cobwebs, dust, and debris looked every bit like the hut it appeared to be. But Astricus tugged on a mildewed cot and, instead of sliding aside, it pivoted on the ground, shifting ninety degrees to reveal a small opening in the pine floor.
"Watch your step, please," Astricus said. He glanced toward Valens. "We no longer have promenia lanterns to light our way."
Arbita followed her husband and puer to the edge of the hole, peering down. A set of steep stone stairs descended into blackness. She glanced at Astricus.
"The cellar below connects to a hewn tunnel leading into the Onyx Palace. It was built by your ancestors almost nine-hundred years ago, Basilicus," he told Domi, who nodded with an uneasy frown at the hole.
Built after the Pyrrhaei Rebellion had been quelled, he meant. Arbita grimaced. The entire Princeps Worldholder line had nearly been wiped out back then, not in a terrorist attack like fifteen years ago but the widespread uprising against Lightholder rule. Their magic had not been able to save them; indeed, if anything the failure of their magic was what had finely let them live and reinstated their rule.
Several days of dangerous and disturbing planetary phenomena as one after another Princeps Worldholder had been executed had finally convinced the Pyrrhaei that the Eternal Radiance was furious with their rebelliousness. The Trellis malfunctions had been widely interpreted as a sign of divine wrath and confirmation that Lightholders ruled by holy mandate.
A massive popular movement had risen then around the captive surviving Princeps, an eleven-year-old hailed as a savior. Within a year, she had been placed on the Throne of Solitude and crowned Keeper of Heaven and Earth, the first to bear the new title.
No wonder she had built her family a means to escape, just in case.
She was glad Domi likely did not know this history. The boy only looked weary, not afraid, as he said, "Well, let's go."
<>
Arbita didn't realize she was smiling until Merula, leaning against the ancient stone wall at her side, glanced at her.
She felt her cheeks heating, though she doubted the Pyrrhaeus could see it in the dim golden light of the promenia lantern they'd managed to light after Valens had summoned promenia to replace the particles he'd destroyed. "I'm sorry," she said, "I know this is very serious, but I just can't help it."
Merula followed her gaze to the pair of drowsy twins opposite of them. For the first hour of their transformation they had sat apart, Domi bashful and Daedalus stiff and regal. But once the deeper work of altering their appearances had begun, Cercitis had induced light sedation in both. The changes were not painful, but they could be uncomfortable and the royal physician had decided the twins' bodies had been stressed enough today. And so the pair sat slumped together like drowsing pups.
"I know, they're adorable," Merula said, but snorted. "A fact Domi knows and uses ruthlessly whenever he wants to escape trouble." She shook her head, eyes narrowing as Cercitis lifted Domi's arm to examine severe scarring there. But after a moment the murderer only put it gently into his lap, patting his hand before turning to Daedalus. Promenia hummed, sinking into the older twin, who squirmed in discomfort, lashes fluttering.
"Did you ever imagine that he might have a family?" Arbita asked, half out of interest and half to distract herself from the fact that the woman who had murdered Domi was now working on him and his brother. She hated it, but the other lifeholder was more skilled in such things than she was. There were reasons Arbita had asked Valens to recommend his mother Hedera to Bellus and Comitas as Domi's royal physician. She knew the limits of her own skills and felt no shame in it.
She glanced at her husband, rolling her eyes. He slept with his head tilted back against the wall, snoring like something dying.
Merula smirked. "Of course I knew the kid had family somewhere." She quirked a brow as Arbita glanced at her. "People don't abandon a kid in a fancy blanket like he was found in if the family is dead, Promerenti. He was no orphan, nor unloved; someone cared about him enough to wrap him in a promenia blanket to ward off the rain and cold. He had a family out there, somewhere."
Bellus frowned. "If you suspected he had a family, who didn't you turn him into the comitii basilica office? They would have taken him in and tried to get him home."
Merula cast him a sour look. "It wasn't safe for him. Think about it. If he'd been born out of wedlock, there would have been, what, minor fines? It's hardly a huge scandal among your kind. So I figured if his family didn't keep him, yet went to such lengths to keep him warm and dry, they must not have wanted him found. For his safety."
"And there are few people harder to find than Pullati," Aix said. He seemed to be listening to the exchange with half an ear, focused instead on Radix as the kid scribbled furiously in the margins of one of the eccentric lifeholder's books.
"Exactly," Merula said.
"Did you ever suspect that this might be his family?" Arbita asked, nodding toward the older twin. It was getting harder and harder to tell them apart. Daedalus's hair had already been shorn, earning a scowl from the otherwise serene Principis Heres, and Domi's own was slowly growing--a necessary waste of promenia--and the nasty scar on his forearm was fading even as it reappeared on Daedalus's own arm. The younger twin had also put on five more pounds of weight, while the same was melting away from his twin. With the transformation still in progress, the pair were an odd blend of one another's minor differences and it was making Arbita's mind spin with the strangeness.
"Hell no," Merula scoffed. "Why would I ever have thought he was royal? I'm Pullati, we don't believe in fairy tales, Promerenti." She smirked at her son as Domi yawned and stared dully down at Daedalus's arm like he'd never seen one before. "But I suspected he might be the kid of Lightholders. A Trueborn child, despite the lack of magic."
Arbita blinked. "Oh really?"
"Yeah. Too many brushes with death that he miraculously recovered from." The Pyrrhaeus shook her head. "He was sick as a child. Real sick. Yet every time he nearly died of some illness or injury, at the last moment he suddenly pulled through. Not a full recovery, mind you, but still, something always yanked the kid back from the brink."
"His prometus," Arbita said. "It can overcome suppression in dire circumstances to provide life-saving aid. It won't heal a person fully, but it will stop whatever is killing them so they can recover."
"Yeah, I figured." Merula swallowed, fists clenching in her lap. "A watchman hit him, once. Punched him. He was only seven and the bastard backhanded him. Blow didn't break skin, but the fall did. He landed on a broken bottle and cut up his arm." Her jaw stiffened. "I was able to heat a knife and stop the bleeding, but infection nearly took him, after. I thought if he survived it would still claim his arm. Then one eve I didn't think he'd survive until Brightening. Yet he woke and the infection was gone. No fever. No longer pale. Skin and eyes no longer that awful yellow. It took some time for him to get back up on his feet after, and I never let him snatch in the forum again, but he recovered."
"He'll be safer now," Arbita pointed out, heart aching.
The Pyrrhaeus glanced at her, scornful. "No, he won't. He's just walking into different danger."
Arbita could say nothing to respond to that. She didn't know much about how Pyrrhaei lived, let alone Pullati, but she knew enough to know that the woman's words were true.
The promenia hum in the cellar faded. Cercitis rubbed her eyes, and the twins stirred, straightening a little and looking at one another in astonishment.
"I'm done," she said.
Daedalus patted his twin's shoulder but glanced at Bellus. "You must erase our memories of this place. The cottage, cellar, and tunnel." He inclined his head to indicate his foster parents, Lumen, and Ardea, who would all be traveling with him to Urbs Hostiae.
"Of course, Principis Heres," the protocol handler said, and turned to Domi as the boy yawned widely enough to swallow the sky. "By your leave, Basilicus?"
Domi nibbled his lip but nodded. "Alright."
Daedalus smiled, the expression sad, as he rose to his feet and bent to help his twin rise as well. "Farewell, then, Basilicus. Good luck." He squeezed his brother's shoulders. "Remember that you can speak to me in the Caeles whenever you have need for such. Distance does not exist there. Do not worry, you are not alone. You are going to be all right." He gave his twin a light shake until Domi stopped avoiding his eyes. "Do you hear me?"
Domi looked close to tears, but he nodded and squared his shoulders. "Yeah." He offered a shaky smile. "Bye, brother." A hint of his normal spirit glinted in his eyes as he added, "Don't let Cerasus boss you around."