Fallen Eagle

Chapter 84: Past the Threshold

The air inside the ivory tent, where the diplomatic talks were to be held, carried the same pungent weight it had the first time the two states had met. The delicacies laid out upon polished trays were just as extravagant, the servants just as numerous and attentive, their backs bent in flawless postures of practiced deference. It was a display calculated to impress, to smother the senses beneath silk, perfume, and abundance.

For all the world, the setting might have been the exact same as before. The Theodoran officer cadre sat with rigid posture, untouched by the spectacle around them, as if the silver plates and scented wines were no more than pieces of furniture. Their armor was simple, almost primitive compared to the spectacle around them, but it was immaculate, every ring of mail clean, every surface maintained with the severe pride of soldiers who meant to advertise discipline rather than wealth.

The ivory tent had been raised in the very same place as during the first negotiations. The hill stood far enough from the main line of fighting that it had been spared from the chaos of the life-and-death struggle of the Principality. Beyond the opened flaps, the grass and lilies still danced in the wind, swaying with serene indifference, as though oblivious to the carnage, mud, and powder smoke that had settled over the land around them. The contrast was almost offensive. Beauty persisted with an irresponsibility to the men staining their lifeblood onto the dirt below.

And yet, for all these similarities, two things had changed so sharply that they altered the entire tenor of the meeting.

The first was that the Genoese delegation had arrived on time, and the second was the utter seriousness stamped upon the faces of the Italian merchants. They watched their Greek counterparts with the hard intensity of hawks measuring distance before a strike, none of the earlier disdain or studied casualness remaining.

The message was clear enough. Genoa was ready to treat them as an actual belligerent power now. Which also meant they were ready to negotiate from a more realistic starting point.

“What is the Serene Republic’s counteroffer to our initial proposal, then?” Sir Silvanus asked once the stiff greetings between mortal enemies had been concluded. “Have you had time to reconsider it after our last meeting?”

He could not quite keep the thin edge of satisfaction from his voice. The last time, the Italians had treated them as provincials scarcely worth naming.

“The initial proposal was indeed ambitious.” The Italian who answered was the same diplomat who had conducted talks before. Last time, he had dispensed with introductions entirely, as though names were courtesies beneath the circumstances. This time, however, he had introduced himself as Camillo, the first dignitary of the Consulate of Caffa.

“We propose the following,” he continued smoothly. “The Principality of Theodoro will cede Funa Fortress and the surrounding lands of the traitorous noble Philemon Makris. In lieu of destroying harbour infrastructure at Kalamita, the Principality will instead cede customs rights there to Genoa for a period of fifty years.” He smoothed the hem of his tunic despite it being devoid of creases.

“Finally, the Principality will grant favoured merchant status to Genoese traders within its domestic market, and in return Genoa will issue favourable tariffs for all non-agricultural goods produced by the Principality.” Camillo smiled and there was something predatory in it, the look of a man dressing appetite in the language of reasonableness. “We trust this will prove a more manageable arrangement.”

It was a terrible deal. But it was also far more manageable than the previous absurdity, which meant this was no final offer. It was an invitation to haggle, dressed as magnanimity. Genoa had accepted, however reluctantly, that Theodoro could not simply be bullied into surrender by theatre and pressure alone. Theodorans had shown resilience, patience, and a willingness to absorb punishment without panicking. But negotiations were not won by stoicism any more than wars were won by surviving the first volley. At some point, one had to engage.

And so, for the first time, the Theodoran officers actually began to discuss the terms among themselves.

“Their principal interests seem plain enough,” Captain Athanasios murmured, keeping his voice low enough that the translator would not catch it. “Access through Funa into the eastern corridor, preservation of their absurd monopoly over tariffs exerted on our goods, and the crippling of any meaningful commerce through Kalamita.” Since Leonidas’s death, the captain had come to occupy a greater weight among the officers of the Crown army.

“The offer of favourable tariffs was specific,” Silvanus said, equally softly. “Too specific. There is something buried in that clause.”

“Offering sovereign land to the Italians is beyond question,” Poseidippus declared, making no effort at all to moderate his volume. “And so is handing our port to those thrice-damned merchants.”

A few frowns appeared among the Genoese nobles as Eraldo rendered the outburst into their tongue.

“Calm yourself,” the Doux told his brother. “We are at a diplomatic meeting, not a war council.”

“I know,” The look Poseidippus gave him made it plain that nothing in his outburst had been accidental. “I’m just letting them know our bottom lines clearly.” As Hypostrategos of Kalamita, and in practical terms its acting commander since Panagiotis served as Megas Doux in the Capital, he was far too accustomed to formal councils and loaded speech to lose control by mistake.

“There is no trick,” Theodorus said, drawing the officers’ attention toward himself before the exchange could drift any further. “Not in the sense you mean, anyway. They have made their priorities clear enough, but used flowery language to misdirect us. What they want is simple: wine and obedience.”

That left several of them silent for a beat. They understood the sentence well enough on its face, but with Theodorus there was often a second layer sitting beneath the first, some larger frame into which he had already fitted the pieces while the rest were still examining them one by one.

“Explain,” the Doux said. His tone was firm, though Theodorus suspected he had already arrived at many of the same conclusions.

“Control of Funa is not merely about troop movement,” Theodorus replied. “Yes, it would give them a clean corridor between Caffa and Mangup, one they could use without asking leave of anyone, but that is a red herring to throw us off,” Theodorus reached a hand to his mouth to stop any attempt at lip reading.

“But the eastern lands are also the most fertile wine-producing territory in the Principality, and the most developed in terms of presses, storage, and the wider infrastructure. Those lands alone account for roughly half our wine production.”

However much one might despise Philemon Makris, you could not deny the man’s role in building up Theodoran viniculture to the extent it had. It was the only Theodoran produce that could viably be exported.

“And the customs demand at Kalamita is not really about revenue,” he continued. “Not primarily. Our overseas trade is too meagre for that to be the true prize. It is about preventing us from bypassing Genoese taxation and exporting wine directly through our own port.”

From the corner of his eye he noticed movement among the Italians. A few of the merchants were watching him now with open curiosity, their attention snagged by the spectacle of a teenager quietly commanding the focus of the Theodoran officers.

“First they tried to stop us from building seafaring vessels at all,” Theodorus said. “Now they are shifting to a more indirect means of suppression. If they hold customs authority, those dues will almost certainly apply to our own shipping as well. And there is nothing to stop them from scaling the charges to cargo value, which means every hull we load with wine becomes expensive before it even leaves harbour. Add to that the need to find buyers independently, build a trading fleet from scratch, insure the risk, and operate under conditions designed to bleed us...”He trailed off, making sure the point landed.

“They do not need to ban us from maritime commerce outright. They only need to make it marginal. Costly enough, inconvenient enough, risky enough that selling through the Genoese network at Caffa remains only slightly less profitable, but vastly easier. Especially for a state in our current financial position.”

Understanding gradually dawned on the officers gathered around them. These were not the sort of blunt military demands that any landed soldier could spot at a glance, but subtler mercantile mechanisms buried inside polite language and carefully measured concessions. A soldier unfamiliar with commerce might hear only tariffs, customs, and privileges. A merchant republic heard instruments of leverage.

The Genoese were being clever. They were trying to drag the discussion away from obvious seizures of land and into the softer, more indirect language of economics, where dependency could be built without needing to be named outright. If Theodoro dismissed the various nuances buried beneath the offer, the Republic would secure much of what it wanted without having to pay the political cost of demanding it plainly.

“Ceding sovereign territory to the Genoese Republic is not something the Principality is prepared to entertain,” Sir Silvanus said at last, turning back to the delegation opposite them after the Theodoran officers had debated the matter at length. “Nor are we willing to surrender the customs duties of Kalamita for so long a period. On the matter of the ‘favoured merchant’ status you proposed, however...” His eyes sharpened slightly as he let the sentence hang.

Favoured status, in practical terms, meant Genoese merchants would pay lower tolls and tariffs while moving through Theodoran lands and trading in Theodoran markets. It would give them an easier time buying and selling than even local Theodoran merchants, allowing foreign traders to undercut domestic ones inside their own economy. On its face, it looked like an appalling concession.

Yet it was not without possible advantages.

For one thing, if the Crown wished to avoid placing its own merchants at too severe a disadvantage, it might be forced to reduce tariffs and duties on Theodorans as well. Genoese traders would still enjoy the better rate, certainly, but the difference between five and seven percent was a far less crushing gap than one between ten and fifteen. Transport costs would always eat into Genoese margins regardless. That alone would preserve enough space in local markets for Theodoran merchants to remain viable, if not exactly comfortable.

“We are prepared to offer such status to Genoese merchants, provided several conditions are met,” Silvanus continued. “Theodoran merchants would expect the same status in Genoese provinces of the Black Sea, with a flat five percent tariff on all Theodoran goods.”

That earned immediate scoffs from the Genoese side. Genoa did not grant favoured status to others; it received it. That was the natural order of things, as far as they were concerned. The value of the Genoese trade network was immense, stretching across ports and markets Theodoro could not hope to rival. From their perspective, reciprocal access was almost laughable. Genoa offered reach, buyers, and infrastructure. Theodoro offered little but a minor market and the irritation of being difficult.

“Additionally,” Silvanus said over the murmurs, “all Theodoran wine exports must be at the port of Kalamita, for which Genoa may collect customs dues for a period of five years.”

That changed the room.

Murmurs broke out at once among the Italians as the merchants bent toward one another, discussing the proposal in quick, intense bursts. The counteroffer had given them something real to weigh now, something neither wholly dismissible nor immediately acceptable. Yet amid that low eruption of calculation, three men stood apart from the rest, their attention fixed not on their own colleagues, but on the Theodoran delegation.

Camillo the diplomat, his light brown hair tied back into a small, neat ponytail. The veteran commander named Baccio seated beside him, his head shaved clean, his full beard streaked with white. And the Consul himself, his portly face unreadable, hazelnut eyes boring into the Greeks across from him with renewed concentration.

Theodorus could see what had caught them. The Theodoran counterproposal had not been framed in wounded pride or military ultimatums, but in the language Genoa actually respected. More than that, it showed a willingness to negotiate within systems of value, tariffs, and market control rather than retreating into the safer vocabulary of honour and outrage.

These Theodoran warriors kept surprising them.

The Doux met the Consul’s gaze directly, neither blinking nor shifting first. For a moment the tent seemed to narrow around that single line of sight, two rulers measuring one another in silence. Each was a titan within his own sphere, one forged in the hard arithmetic of trade and maritime empire, the other in the grim demands of command, land, and survival on a narrowing frontier.

At last the Italians seemed to arrive at some private consensus, their murmurs fading as Camillo spoke for them.

“The bilateral granting of favoured merchant status is unacceptable,” he said smoothly. “The Genoese mercantile network reaches far wider than your own, with sea lanes extending across much of Europe and access to eastern luxuries carried west through the nomadic clans of Central Asia. Reduced tariffs on Theodoran wine exports are likewise not something the Republic is prepared to negotiate at present, nor can we accept your insistence upon a singular trade route through Kalamita.” The wording was measured, but the meaning beneath it was not. “To make such extravagant demands without ceding at least the eastern stretch of territory is wholly unreasonable. Might I remind you that it is we who presently control the fortress and the lands under its domain?”

They weren’t wrong, military possession mattered more than elegance at the negotiating table, and Genoa held that powerful bargaining chip at their disposal.

Theodorus resigned himself to what were likely to be long, drawn-out discussions.

Like any competent negotiator, the Genoese would resist on every point where resistance might yield advantage. Every clause would have to be argued over, and nothing would come cheaply.

From the high rocky shelf on which Mangup stood, the war below looked almost small at first glance. That was the strange thing about height. It could make even ruin seem distant. Men became dark specks. Tents became pale blotches on the land. The winding earthworks looked less like desperate fortifications and more like scratches dug into the plain by some giant hand.

But Stefanos knew better than to trust distance.

For more than a week now, the Crown army, the Principality’s last true hope in the field, had stood against a larger, better armed, better supplied Genoese host that seemed to hold aloft splendour and arrogance in equal measure, like a banner swaying in the dusking sun.

And yet, against all reason, the army was still there. It had survived a cannon barrage that should have smashed the camp to splinters in a day and broken whatever remained of the men, of his Lord.

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That should have been heartening.

Instead, Stefanos felt despair sour his tongue with a bitter taste he could not spit out. All of this felt like a delay, dragging out an ending that loomed over them. The thunder the Italians had dragged to Mangup had not gone away just because the camp still stood.

And now the army had dug itself in.

Stefanos knew little of warfare beyond what he had picked up from listening, watching, and trying to follow the turns of his Lord’s mind. He was no captain or tactician, but he did not need to be any of those things to understand one ugly truth. By burying themselves deeply into the ground, they had cut off their own escape path. They would either endure an onslaught they couldn’t hope to or die.

There was no retreat left.

His lord was down there, surrounded by enemies and burdened by decisions no one else could make, fighting for all of them while Stefanos remained trapped behind stone and height and injury, able only to watch. The helplessness of it pressed on him worse than pain ever had.

“Staring at them all day will not help them, you know.”

The old voice came from behind him, gentle but unyielding. Stefanos did not need to turn to know who it was.

“Nor will standing on the walls help your recovery,” Demetrios added, moving close enough to offer support without making it too obvious, which Stefanos appreciated. His hand came discreetly to Stefanos’s only arm, steadying him as he swayed with the wind.

Even after more than three weeks, Stefanos’s body still felt only partly returned to him. He could at least pull himself upright now, but only in short bursts, and long walks drained him with humiliating speed. Elias the physician had even forbidden him from exerting himself for more than an hour each day.

He cursed his weakness. He should be grateful he had survived at all, but he couldn’t remain idle, not right now.

So he spent much of that precious hour climbing the long stairs to the wall, only to stand here and look down at the army.

“How am I meant to look away?” Stefanos asked. His eyes remained fixed on the siege lines below, as though he might undo them by force of will alone. “Our lord is down there fighting for all of us, and we stand here doing nothing but waiting and praying.” The words came out of him with a bitterness he hadn’t had before.

No, he did have it. He’d just buried it beneath layers of self-serving humbleness, because he was afraid of showing it to the world.

“We have done our part,” Demetrios said softly. “The battle he is fighting now is not one we can help him in.” There was no rebuke in the old man’s face, only sadness. It sickened Stefanos, that he was giving up already.

No, that wasn’t quite right, it wasn’t just the defeatism in Demetrios’s words, but that he was right.

So he stood there in silence, looking toward the camp below, and hated how small he felt beside the immensity of war.

Demetrios stepped up beside Stefanos and looked out over the expanse below. Stefanos wondered what Demetrios saw when he looked upon these rugged peaks and the devastation spreading beneath them. What did it look like for a man who had lived so long within the Principality and served the Sideris household for decades?

He must have seen crises before, each arriving with the same promise of ruin, only to pass in time into memory. Maybe for him this was just another storm to be endured.

Stefanos could not accept that.

“We got our Lord out of Suyren. You made certain the letter of the rebellion reached the right hands. We did what we could.” Demetrios’s voice was steady, but there was something strained in it, as if he was trying as much to persuade himself as Stefanos. “Where he has gone now, we could not follow.”

That was not entirely true. Demetrios could have followed if he wished. Stefanos knew why he hadn’t.

“And now there is only one thing left for us to do. Pray.”

For the first time Stefanos saw clearly the faint outline of desperation beneath the old man’s calmness. Before being maimed, Stefanos would have never have noticed it. But many things were clearer to him now.

“I cannot accept that.”

The words came out sharp, Stefanos turned abruptly and shrugged off Demetrios’s hands. They were warm, steady, comforting. They were a crutch he would not lean on any longer.

“If we cannot help our Lord, then it is because we have failed him.” Stefanos said, brown eyes glaring at Demetrios, mouth set into a line. “Because I have failed him.” The bitterness in the last words surprised even him.

He pushed past the battlements and the patrolling soldiers with awkward, halting steps, leaving Demetrios behind without another glance.

The stairs down were difficult. He had to stop several times, one hand pressed against the wall, his breath shortening with the effort. Pain flared at his side, but Stefanos neither complained nor called for help. He forced himself onward, step by step, refusing to yield even to the trembling in his legs.

He should be grateful he had survived at all, and he was still not sure how he’d evaded Death’s grasp. He had felt its cold touch intimately before, but what had happened…it went beyond that.

He had been gone past the threshold and was somehow heaved back to the land of the living once again.

He did not know why God had brought him back, but he was done wasting his life on being meek.

He was done being weak.

The scratch of ink across parchment and the smell of stained vellum had never seemed so nauseating to Theophylact as they did now.

“Kerasia’s headman has requested an audience with you, Master Steward.”

The report came from a stout soldier lingering just inside the doorway of Theophylact’s study, his posture deferential despite the mud still drying at the hem of his tunic.

“He has travelled to Suyren to discuss next season’s tribute. He claims he is owed a reduced tax this year, given the extraordinary levies imposed in five of the last ten.”

Theophylact tried to consider the matter while also drafting a reply for one of the lesser nobles who had written asking for news of the rebellion, but he had never been good at handling several things at once. His thoughts tangled too easily, one worry snagging on the next until all of them became a knot in his chest.

“T-tell him I w-will receive him at l-lunch,” Theophylact said, keeping his eyes on the parchment before him. “He c-can explain his request in m-more detail then.”

It was, he knew, little more than pushing the problem further down, but he’d found in the weeks left singlehandedly managing the Nomikos estates that that had become a talent of its own.

Getting back to the letter, there was nothing much he could say, in truth.

Missives from the rebel army had been suspiciously absent for the past week. Theophylact would have expected at least some courier to arrive demanding more grain, more mules, more anything. That absence of pressure felt wrong.

Another knock sounded at the study door.

Theophylact’s hand froze over the parchment.

“C-come in,” Theophylact called, and this time it was a servant entering to trouble him.

“W-what is it?” he asked, more brusquely than he intended.

He was beginning to understand some of his Lord’s habitual dismissiveness. The sheer number of people who sought out the master of a castle each day was staggering. Petitioners, servants, messengers, stewards of lesser households, men with grievances, men with inventories, men with requests they insisted could not possibly wait.

Though in Theophylact’s case, the comparison only went so far. He still had all his ordinary responsibilities on top of this endless procession, which made the burden feel less like lordship and more like drowning while others handed him additional stones.

“The servants are complaining there is not enough produce for tonight’s feast,” the man said.

Not this again, Theophylact thought darkly.

“The provisioning orders were mixed up once more, and we cannot contact the duck breeder. That arrangement had been a personal contact of Lord Hypatius.”

Damn that snake Hypatius. He had withdrawn to the main estate at precisely the moment when Theophylact would not have minded having him nearby to help sort through this chaos, as dangerous and terrible as the man was. He’d suddenly retired to the main estate and left behind a trail of half-legible arrangements and personal ties that no one else could properly untangle.

“J-just remove the duck from the m-menu,” Theophylact said, pinching the bridge of his nose. “Serve something else.” He had too much on his plate already.

His mood soured further the instant he registered the inadvertent pun.

“But-” the servant began.

“Go.” Theophylact cut him off with more force than usual, and the man bowed himself out with commendable speed.

At last, blessedly alone again, Theophylact bent back over the cramped lines of his letter. He had barely reacquainted himself with the thread of his own sentence when a third set of knocks rattled against the blasted door.

“W-what is it n-now?” he demanded.

The door opened to admit his assistant, the meek Nomikos boy who had effectively been saddled to him. One look at the lad’s face wiped the irritation from Theophylact at once. He had gone pale and carried the hollow look of someone carrying heavy news.

“Master Steward,” the boy said, voice tight, “there is news from the front.”

That got Theophylact fully upright in his chair.

“W-Well?” he asked, anxious to learn more news, and secretly hoping that the Crown somehow prevailed. He had not forgotten on which side his friend was fighting.

He’d even been subtly hindering supplies to the main host, but was scared to do anything too overt.

“Men have come back from the front,” the boy said, swallowing. “Survivors. They say they come bearing grave news.”

Theophylact felt the word strike him before the meaning fully assembled.

Survivors?

One could almost smell the fear rising from the gathered nobles in Suyren’s great hall.

With most of the men away on the grim business of war, the family council was now composed chiefly of Nomikos women, and Cassandra needed only a single glance around the room to understand how dire matters were even before she reached her seat.

Everywhere she looked, shoulders were held too stiffly, hands folded too tightly, and faces arranged into a calm that convinced no one. She entered at a rapid, nervous pace that mirrored the room’s energy and meant Hilda had to practically run just to keep pace behind her.

At the centre of the hall stood two men caked in mud, looking half returned from the grave. Exhaustion clung to them so completely that Cassandra found herself wondering how they were held upright

Their gambesons were fine and they wore mail beneath, marking them as men-at-arms rather than common levies, whereas the strips of burgundy cloth tied about their arms betrayed their allegiance.

Cassandra’s heart gave a violent leap at the sight.

They were men of her father’s army, and they had not come back flushed with triumph, but streaked with dirt and hollow-eyed. There was a vacancy in their expressions that frightened her more than open grief might have done. It was the look of people still moving because they had not yet been given permission to stop.

A cold feeling began to open in Cassandra’s stomach.

She knew then, before anyone spoke, that whatever news they carried would not leave the hall unchanged.

“What happened?” Eliana demanded from the high-backed chair beside their father’s armchair, the seat no one but the Lord himself ought to have occupied. “You arrive filthy and foul, dragging mud across our carpets when you are meant to be fighting a war. Did you desert the army?”

Her older sister’s tone was sharper, crueler even than the usual, but Cassandra could hear what lay beneath it. Eliana was afraid. The cruelty was only the shape her fear had chosen.

“War?” one of the soldiers whispered. “That was no war I was a part of, it was a slaughter.” The words came out like a hiss dragged through parched lips.

“We lost, my lady,” said the other, his eyes never leaving the floor. The admission seemed to cost him something vital merely to speak.

The hall broke into whispers and half-formed exclamations, disbelief rushing through the gathered audience like wind through dry leaves. The news felt too enormous to fit inside the chamber, whispers sounding from within every corner.

“Lost?” Eliana repeated, her voice strained now with confusion rather than scorn. “Then where is the rest of the army?”

From the edge of Cassandra’s vision she saw the stuttering steward hurry into the hall, his anxious little steps halting only when he reached the far side of the throne.

“There is no army, my lady,” the first soldier said, and then barked out a laugh so bitter it hardly sounded human. “It perished on the field against the Crown.”

“Nonsense!” Eliana exclaimed.

Cassandra could hardly blame her. The Nomikos host had not marched out alone. It had gone to join a force meant to outnumber their enemies two to one, filled with men who were supposed to be the better soldiers besides. It had all seemed so certain when they left, so wrapped in the familiar confidence of banners and armour and noble assurances. How could such a thing simply vanish?

“It is the truth,” the second man said, more firmly now, as if some last reserve of duty had forced him upright. “They took us in a wooded vale. An ambush. They hit our leadership in the first minute, rode straight through them before the army could properly form itself. After that...” He swallowed. “After that the battle was over.”

Eliana gave a small, strangled gasp.

“Then father-”

“Lord Nomikos is dead,” the soldier said.

Silence fell over the hall.

No one moved. Cassandra could hear the crackle of torches, the faint rustle of fabric, someone drawing breath too sharply and not quite releasing it again. The words had landed, but her mind would not let them settle. Her father was dead. The sentence existed, but it had not become real.

Then Eliana swayed and collapsed from the chair, crumpling to the floor in a pale heap. The nearby guards startled into motion, rushing to lift her as the spell over the hall shattered all at once.

Pandemonium followed.

Women cried out in disbelief, clutching at their children, knowing they were lost. A few began to weep openly, tears ruining powdered faces and careful composure alike, while others pressed trembling hands to their mouths as if they could hold back the horror by sheer force. One elderly noblewoman followed Eliana’s example, fainting and having to be caught by the man beside her.

The few noblemen present looked scarcely less shaken, some barking frantic questions at the soldiers, others standing rigid and bloodless, as though movement itself might confirm the nightmare. The great hall, which so often seemed built to contain dignity, now could not contain grief.

“What will we do?” Hilda whispered beside her.

Her voice suddenly matched her size. All thirteen years of her were gathered into that frightened little sound.

But Cassandra could not answer.

She felt frozen where she stood. Her father was dead. Their army had been destroyed. The power of their house had been broken in a single afternoon somewhere far from home. She wanted to rage at the world, wanted to force the enormity of it into some shape her mind could hold, but the whole thing felt unreal, as though she had been lifted outside her own body and made to watch someone else’s tragedy unfold from a polite distance.

It reminded her, absurdly and horribly, of when the Captain had drugged her into senselessness. That same floating dislocation. That same helplessness.

The Captain.

The thought struck her so sharply that it seemed to cut through the numbness.

Was he somehow behind this?

It was a ludicrous thought. He was only a minor noble, an officer with only a single battle to his name. He would not be placed in charge of an army surely. He didn’t hold the weight to topple something as large as her family’s fortunes.

And yet Cassandra could not shake the feeling that he stood somewhere behind this calamity, hidden just beyond her sight, like a dark thread running through a tapestry only now beginning to reveal its pattern.

She shook her head. None of that mattered right now. Hilda looked as though she might collapse at any moment, and Cassandra had no right to drown in her own shock while her little cousin needed something solid to cling to. She had to be steady for her. She had to become, however suddenly and imperfectly, the anchor she needed to survive this storm.

Cassandra drew Hilda close with the fierce tightness of someone trying to force strength into her own limbs. Hilda folded into her arms at once, burying her tears in Cassandra’s dress.

“We must send scouts out at once to confirm this news!” one of her older cousins cried, his voice cutting through the chaos. “How can we trust the word of these men alone?”

There was desperation tucked beneath the sharpness of it, the unmistakable note of a man pleading for some excuse not to look directly at the truth.

Others seized on it immediately. Nods spread through the hall, eager, grateful nods, the kind people gave when offered a thinner and thinner veil to hide behind.

Half-formed plans followed, tumbling over one another in frightened disorder, each more far-fetched than the last. Hiding the family’s wealth before word spread. Preparing an escape to Genoese Caffa. Ransoming the household with non-existent silver. Every proposal seemed to begin and end with fear for one’s own skin. Cassandra heard no one speak of duty, of those still in the field, or of what remained to be salvaged.

“My brother.”

Her voice cut through the room.

The noise faltered at once. Faces turned toward her. The crowd, the soldiers at the centre of the hall, even the stewards and attendants hovering at the edges all seemed caught by those two words.

“What happened to my brother?”

The two men looked at one another, pausing as if sorting through memory clouded by exhaustion and horror.

“He is alive, we believe,” the first said at last. “He commanded the main body of levies, and he managed to withdraw with more than three hundred men.”

The mood in the hall shifted again, sharply enough to feel almost physical. Not hope exactly, not yet, but something adjacent to it. A crack through which it might enter.

The rebellion was still alive.

“How many men survived the slaughter?” Cassandra asked. She made herself put iron into the question.

The soldiers exchanged another uneasy glance.

“We cannot say for certain, my lady,” one admitted. “We were only with the retreating force for a short while before being sent ahead to carry word of the disaster.”

“Last we saw,” the other added, “the two lords together still had nearly five hundred men between them. They were retreating toward Funa, though under constant harassment.”

Cassandra let out a slow breath. The shape of things was beginning, however dimly, to emerge from the panic.

“Then the path before us is clear.”

She gently disentangled herself from Hilda’s desperate embrace and stepped toward the centre of the hall, turning to face what remained of her family’s gathered household. All those frightened eyes fixed upon her at once. She felt their need before she could name it. They looked like sailors after a storm, catching sight at last of some distant line of shore and willing it to be real.

They wanted someone to steer them.

“We must remain steadfast,” Cassandra said. Her voice trembled at first, but steadied as she went on. “We gather what fighting men we still possess here at Suyren as survivors return from the defeat. We restore order. We account for stores, coin, and horses. And we prepare for the possibility that the worst may yet come. If it does, the entire Nomikos household must be ready to evacuate east through the Genoese passageways.”

No one interrupted her.

That silence, more than anything else, made her understand that they were listening not because she was the cleverest person in the room, nor the eldest, nor the most entitled to command. They were listening because fear had hollowed them out. Someone had to speak with the voice certainty ought to have had.

“And we send word to my brother.”

She swallowed, hiding the fresh wave of worry that threatened to rise in her throat. She could feel the heat of their attention on her, fevered and searching, as though they were already measuring whether she might truly bear the weight they were placing upon her. Cassandra did not know if she could. But she knew she had to try.

“Tell him to come home.”

Apostolos had promised her he would return, and she clung to that promise now with the stubborn force of prayer.

Until he did, Cassandra would hold the house together.