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forgotteneilionora · 5 months ago

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For Love or Justice | Eilionora & Roderick

Flashback -- the night before the Ice Ball

This was meant to woo her. It was a strange thing, this meeting, brought by special invitation to her own Thone Room where a table had been lain just beneath her dais, intimate and set for two.

Roderick had replaced the simple bench Eilia had always used with a gilded and cushioned throne, and he did not assume it to hear each week whatever it was the people wished to say to him -- he assumed it to issue iron-clad commands. He assumed it, now, as his dining seat, with Eilia seated in a comfortable yet overwrought seat which was too low for the table at which they dined. This, she knew well enough, was yet another tactic, and despite herself, she smirked. Could it be he must work so hard to seduce a conquered queen?

"Why do you smile?"

Eilia looked up suddenly from her soup. The room was all but empty, simply the queen and the so-called emperor, as well as a volley of footmen who stood unobtrusive by the doors, whom Eilia imagined from their expressions, wished for all the world to exit the nearly silent chamber.

Each week, the emperor arranged at least one intimate supper with his would-be queen. Did he do that for those he had already wed, Eilia often wondered, or was this dubious honor meant to persuade an unwilling bride to the altar?

Eilia set down her spoon, arching a single brow at his inquiry. She could not very well tell him that she smiled because he was foolish -- though but two years hence she might have said as much. A conquest did something to curtail one's errant tongue, and high-vaulted pride, Eilia had found.

"This soup is quite splendid," said Eilia, fastening upon the first thought that crossed her mind though, in truth, she may have overplayed her hand.

"You like it? Then we shall have it at each of our suppers together," he said, looking towards one of the footmen, who nodded.

"I--" She did not like it quite that much, but it did not seem wise to object. And she did not wish to invite the question of why she had, then, smiled. "You are generous, Your Imperial Majesty."

He smiled a smile which did not reach his eyes. "It is always my intent to please those who please me, Your Grace."

"I see."

His glance was sharp. "You judge me for this?"

"I wish to better understand your character."

"And what characteristic is it that you would have better understood?"

Eilia paused, glancing down to her plate, the thick creamy bowl swimming with crab and scallop and lobster flesh. It was a moment which requested honesty, and Eilia liked honesty most of all. Tilting her expression to meet his, she gazed a moment into the sea-deep of his eyes and inhaled, steeling herself. "In truth, Your Imperial Majesty, I think I may say in all honesty that you and I little understand one another in...well, in truth, there are few respects in which I think our considerations align."

He visibly fought a sneer and Eilia squared her shoulders, preparing for wrath, but it did not come, not all at once, at least. The Emperor only stared and stared into his own dish and then, all at once, he dropped his spoon into it, and shoved it aside, leaning forward upon the table. His tone was a sharp thing, and cutting, his gaze a razor's edge. He was daring her, and Eilia knew that perhaps it would be better to step back, to plead for forgiveness of her female foolishness...but she raised her chin, instead, and curled her fingers around the arms of her chair as if she too sat a throne, and she met the cold-scalding wrath of his eye without fear.

"Do you know, Imperial Majesty, how many faithful Astairans died in the fighting? How many souls I sent to their deaths? I know the very number, repeat it to myself every morning and every evening as if it were a prayer, lest I forget how many I doomed -- how many died...for me. For my pride. For my ideals. For my crown." She swallowed hard. Her fingers tightened to white-glowing knuckles. "For nothing."

Roderick's face was a beacon, queerly bright in the gloom of the throne room as he leaned forward as if to better hear her. It occurred to her, then, that he did not often have the opportunity to speak with other rulers, others who understood what it was to send their people into the fray: his approach upon meeting other leaders was often to behead them. And he did not long sit with defeat, as Eilia did. His answer to such a feeling as she kept coiled in her gut, a hard, tight, choking knot, was the Pyre Walk. Had he ever endured hardship, she wondered with a flare of disgust, without lashing out like a child?

"I thought I fought for freedom, for justice, for the good of all," continued Eilia, leaning forward now, herself. "But all I got was death. Death and death and more death. Good men and women, true and loyal folk, gone forever to pointless ends."

Eilia shook her head. It was hard to breath, a rasping, retching, cloying clog in her throat, and she could not pull a full, a deep breath, could not feel the satisfaction in her chest because it could not break free, could not crack past the sharpness which ended in her shoulders. Her eyes burned and she breathed hard against the block. She leaned forward, clasping the edge of the table.

"How?" she whispered. "How do you do it? How do you settle yourself against all those souls, snuffed out forever by your own ideals? Your words? I cannot bear it." She pressed a fist to her breast. Her voice was tight but she pressed forward. It was this. It was this that she needed to know. This she needed understood; needed to understand. "I cannot."

Roderick's look was hard, eyes hooded as, at once, they fell away from hers, regarding the flickering candle that danced its death between them, burning down to its stalk. At once, he turned to the footmen with a dismissive gesture. At once, they filed out. At once the door shut behind him, and he turned to her.

"Astaira ought not to have asked this of you," he said.

Eilia's brows creased. "What?" Even in her own ears, her voice was a whisper.

Roderick shook his head. "You are only a young girl. It was cruel in these people to ask you to bear so heavy a burden."

"I am happy to bear it for them--"

Roderick shook his head sharply. "Do you know how I bear it?"

She sat forward, clinging to the edge of the too-high table as if it were a life-raft.

Roderick rolled his shoulders, sitting back into the chair. He nodded slowly. "Do you know why I conquered my first kingdom?"

She shook her head.

"I was seventeen -- did you know? -- old enough to think myself a man grown; young enough to be but a boy at heart. My father's...cares had landed him in an early grave, but my father was a weak man and he'd left the nation I inherited weak and poor and crippled. Our enemies, whom he had once cultivated as if he might by his feeble negotiations turn to friends, circled. They smelled chum in the water. They meant to cast me down, Your Grace, to destroy me. To dash all I held dear to death."

Eilia swallowed hard. His gaze was upon her, and her mouth was dry, terribly dry. It was a terror she knew well. "What did you do?"

"I did what I had to do, Your Grace. Do you imagine I relished it?"

"Yes," said Eilia, hastily. "Why else did you continue it?"

Silence. She looked to him, again. She expected to take in a face full of thunder, but instead she found he did not even look at her, his gaze resting, unseeing, upon the flagon of wine resting between them, viscous, but red as blood. "I did not have the luxury, Eilionora, of being a young woman. I did not have the luxury of resting in my marbled castle, safe amongst my high walls. I marched at the head of my men. I watched our foes cut them down, butchered till the river below ran red with blood, till even the mud beneath our feet was rusty with it, till the air smelled thick with it, sick and close as death. I--" he shook his head.

Candlelight flickered against the burgundy of the wine, as if it indeed flowed with some ghastly current, and the emperor looked and looked and looked. His face was unreadable in that shifting light. He was no man, now, she thought, but a slab of marble chisseled into features as lifelike as wax, but wherever his soul was, it did not now inhabit his body: it was lost on a distant battlefield, fighting, fighting, fighting, and Eilia shrunk back from the living corpse languishing across from her and, for a long moment, she said nothing.

She leaned forward, at last, and whispered. "How did you go on?"

Life came back to him as his gaze flicked to hers, ice-blue hues meeting her limpid ones as his mouth set into a severe line. "I was right. My cause was just. My god is good. I did not send those men to death, Eilionora: I sent them to paradise."

His gaze was a frigid hollow, stripped bear of any fat, stern and severe as absolutes, and Eilia shivered beneath it, swallowing hard against the clog in her throat. It gave slowly way, freezing and burning to nothing beanth the ice of his look, beneath the fire of her heart, something singing deep in her gut, red heart hammering against the cage of her ribs.

"I sent them one after the one, one after the other, one after the other to paradise. I sent them to the true God where now they feast at his right hand, where now they rejoice in his eternal halls, for they gave all that they had for him. Not for me. For him. For him."

She shivered against his cold, but heat hissed against her breast, kissing her lungs as her fingers closed hard against the arms of the chair not, now, for fear, but for cerainty. He does not bear it, she thought, and perverse hope curdled against her gut. He is too much a coward. He gives it to his god to bear and so alleviates his own guilt. He is no king if he cannot hold it. He is only a vessel. And, all at once, she nearly laughed, her lips quirking upwards, eyes brightening. I am the only true ruler in this room, she thought, and she let her laughter bubble into her blood, resting her head against the chair behind her. She was giddy, then, eyes dancing with the pale firelight, but her laughter was not for him, not really: it was for herself, for thinking even for an instant that he might be the real thing.

"Do you know what my father used to say?" asked Eilia.

Roderick cocked his head.

"He said that justice is the doing of those things which are difficult but necessary, without hope of reprieve." Raising her glass, she smiled at him, then. "To justice, Imperial Majesty. May we have always the courage to see it through!"

"To justice, Your Grace," said Roderick. "May God see it always done."

#roderick varmont #comment #drabble #for love or justice #idk what this is!!!!!#but it was at work today and picturing this going down and SCREAM #i had to share!!!!!!!#bc i feel like this goes to the v heart of what underpins them as rulers and like!!!!!!#anyway #here have a thing #this is a thing that absolutely no one (eilia included ;D) asked for #but have it anyway aklsjdfklsdjf #about

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