Fallen Eagle

3rd Week of May, 1460

Shackles and bumpy roads made for poor companions, but they were all Apostolos had now.

He had been blindfolded and restrained as soon as he confirmed his intent to sign away his birthright. Turns out a prisoner only needs to be treated well until he has done what his captors demand of him. After that, fairness became an indulgence no one felt obliged to provide.

Not that he minded. He had expected as much, in fact. It was the price for saving his sister. For all his faults, and against all reason, he trusted Theodorus to come through on that promise, if nothing else.

It was funny, in a bitter sort of way. He ought to hate the Captain for everything he had done to his family, for the way he had smiled and wormed his way into their family - into Apostolos’s inner circle - during his stay in Suyren while playing them from the start. Yet Apostolos did not hate him.

The rebellion had never been some noble cause crowned in righteousness. They had simply been players on different sides, and for all the sins Theodorus had committed, Apostolos had committed just as many.

Perhaps more.

But maybe he could still avoid hell if some good came from what was left of his life.

The carriage began to slow, its wheels grinding against the road as it climbed a sharp incline. The change in motion told Apostolos they had arrived even before his escort confirmed it.

“Get out,” the man said, practically spitting the words. “We’ve arrived, and the people wish to see what’s left of the rebellion.”

Apostolos swallowed.

Rough hands seized him before he could gather himself. Someone dragged him upright, another pulled at the knot behind his head, and the blindfold was ripped away with as much rough force as they could put into it. Light struck him like a blow. He blinked hard, willing the world to return in fragments of pale sky, dark shapes, and the harsh outline of soldiers standing nearby.

People had gathered all along the main road through Mangup, packed close against its sides, watching the carriage with the hungry attention of those who had been promised a spectacle. Their faces blurred together at first, a mass of open mouths and narrowed eyes, but he could feel their judgment almost individually. The road rose ahead of him toward the keep, that vast grey-white fortress squatting atop Mangup like a crown of stone and limestone, its walls cold with indifference to his plight.

Apostolos felt his heart begin to hammer in his chest.

A guard shoved him forward, and the iron around his wrists clinked loudly enough to draw fresh attention from the crowd. He was made to walk at the head of the carriage like some conquered animal led to market, his pace dictated by the men flanking him and the slope beneath his feet. Jeers followed him all along the procession. Shouts of traitor intermingled with the ‘rebel’s cub’ or the ‘last rotten branch of his House’. A clod of mud struck the ground near his boots and burst apart, staining the hem of his tunic.

He kept his head high through it all.

That, at least, he could still do. His hands were bound, his future had narrowed to a cell and a sentence, but he could hold his spine straight. He owed his Father that much. He owed himself that much.

A whole arrangement of guards had been posted to receive him when he reached the keep’s entrance.

It was obvious they had been warned of his arrival well in advance. This was not merely custody. It was a play, staged carefully for the populace, with Apostolos dragged through the main road as proof that the rebellion had been broken and its heir reduced to chains.

At the head of the guards stood a bald-faced man in dark crimson laminated armour, his posture severe enough that the men around him seemed to straighten merely by proximity.

The Megas Doux.

“Apostolos Nomikos, you are the son of Adanis Nomikos, the traitorous commander of the North who rose up against the Principality,” he stated, loud and clear, and Apostolos could not help thinking that his voice sounded like rocks grinding together. “You have lost. Your rebellion has failed, and your father is dead.”

He spoke as if Apostolos had been a fulcral part of the rebellion, and not a son pushed to its periphery, useful only to lead the broken militia brought along as fodder. The crowd cheered as the Doux laid out the collapse of Apostolos’s life.

“You will be taken into custody,” the Megas Doux continued, “to be judged on the morrow by the Prince himself.” And that was it.

There was no further condemnation or speech about justice or mercy. Apostolos had been displayed, named, and diminished. Now the stone could swallow him.

The guards took him by the arms and ushered him into the bowels of the white-grey giant. The air cooled almost immediately. The roar of the crowd dulled behind him as the doors and walls thickened. They moved through narrow corridors and down turning stairways, deeper and deeper, until the pale limestone around them seemed to darken by degrees.

The smell reached him before the dungeon did.

The dungeon was overcrowded and smelled of stale straw, sweat and filth mixed together with the sour human stink of men held too close together with too little hope.

Apostolos recognized many of the men incarcerated there. Remnants of what had once been his House’s retainers looked out through bars and shadows, their faces gaunt, bearded, and reduced to filthy prisoners.

Just like he was now.

They ended their trek before a more inconspicuous cell set farther back from the main passage, where the torchlight reached only in weak, wavering strips. One of the guards opened the barred door with a scrape of iron, shoved Apostolos inside, and left him to stumble over the filthy straw without ceremony.

“We will talk later,” the Doux said.

Apostolos turned toward him, unsure of what that meant, but the man was already walking away, dark red armour fading into the dimness of the corridor.

The door clanged shut, and all of a sudden Apostolos was alone.

In a way, settling in to wait was more unsettling than facing the ire of an entire city. Outside, the hatred had been loud enough to meet with a lifted chin. Here, the darkness gave him nothing to resist.

“Apostolos.”

The voice came from the corner of the cell, aged and strained enough that he almost failed to recognize it. Apostolos turned, peering into the gloom, and his eyes widened in shock.

It was Dysmas, his father’s main retainer, his second in command, and the man who had taught Apostolos how to hold a sword properly.

Apostolos rushed across the cell, chains clattering at his wrists as he dropped to his knees beside the dark corner where Dysmas lay half-propped against the wall.

The first thing he noticed was the dark bloom around the man’s abdomen, badly patched with layers of linen that had once been white, but closer to a dark burgundy now, blooming like a flower opened in blood.

Up close Apostolos saw he also sported a bandaged hand, a split lip, and a face marred with purple bruises on one side.

“You’re hurt. What happened? Was it during the battle?”

Apostolos reached for the wound, fingers unwinding the filthy linen. It looked as though it had not been changed in days.

“Just a flesh wound,” Dysmas said, trying to brush it off.

The sight beneath the bandage was not pretty. Glossy flesh showed through the opening, swollen and angry, with sickened matter gathering bright yellow at the surface. The smell that wafted up was diabolical.

“I will call the jailors,” Apostolos said, already moving to rise. “Someone has to see this.”

Dysmas caught his wrist before he could stand. His grip was weak, but there was enough command in it to stop him.

“Don’t bother,” he said, and there was no fear in his voice. Only certainty. “Do you truly think they will care to dress wounds for an enemy?”

“You’re valuable as a potential ransom,” Apostolos argued.

“I might have been,” Dysmas allowed, “before you were dragged down here, that is.” His gaze moved over Apostolos’s shackles. “If you’re here, then the House…”

The old man could not bring himself to finish. Somehow, that silence seemed to pain him more than the wound.

“What happened?” Dysmas asked, and there was so much packed into that question. Apostolos did not know where to even begin… with the writ he had agreed to sign? With the fact that everything his House had built seemed to have collapsed overnight?

His mouth opened, but no words came.

“It’s fine,” Dysmas said softly, understanding the look behind his grimace. “Don’t say it. I’m not sure I’m in any shape to hear it anyhow.”

He tried for a joke, but it came out weak and flat.

Apostolos smiled anyway, gripping the soldier’s hand harder than he needed to.

“How did father…”

The question died on his lips.

Dysmas looked older then, and studied him for a long moment, as if weighing whether the boy before him was ready to hear of his father’s end.

“Charging the enemy,” Dysmas said at last. “A valiant last charge. They came at us so quickly that we never stood a chance.”

“I see.”

Apostolos had thought knowing might bring some measure of closure, instead, all he felt was sadness opening wider inside him, a hollow place he knew he would never be able to fill again. It came upon him all at once, a giant tide he could not hold back

Apostolos wept as he had not let himself weep since learning of his father’s fate. There in that cold, dark cell, with chains at his wrists and a dying mentor beside him, he was no lord, no patriarch, no last remnant of a broken house.

He was only a boy grieving his father while waiting for the end.

…

The dungeon’s metal bars groaned open some time later, after Apostolos had spent his tears and slipped into a thin, bruised sort of sleep. Dysmas nudged him at the side, and Apostolos woke with a sharp inhale, disoriented.

“Apostolos Nomikos.”

The gravelly voice centered him instantly.

“Come with me.” The Doux stood beyond the gate, key in hand, frame darkened by the poor light of the corridor. He turned the key with a clean twist, and the cell door opened with a reluctant shriek of iron.

Apostolos struggled to rise. His limbs felt stiff from the floor, his wrists sore beneath the shackles, but found relief soon enough when the Doux released him.

“Where are we going?” he asked.

It had been hours, at least, though he couldn’t tell more than that. There was no light where they had placed him, and time seemed to lose track of itself in the bowels of the keep. A day could have passed. Or only a handful of miserable hours.

“I told you we would talk, didn’t I?” the Doux said.

Apostolos was surprised to find that he had meant it.

He followed more out of habit and uncertainty than anything else, leaving Dysmas behind in the dark. The guards did not drag him this time, simply falling in around him as the Doux led the way through the keep’s inner passages, past walls of scuffed, pale stone.

Every servant or guard they passed by bowed as the Doux went through.

The entire keep seemed to move in anticipation of the man’s next need, tightening itself around his presence. It was a humbling display. Not even his father had commanded this much raw respect and authority over the household.

The Doux did not ask for deference. He did not need to order it. He expected, and people tried desperately to live up to that expectation.

They eventually reached what had to be the man’s study.

The room was almost offensively bare. There were no tapestries or anything resembling decoration there, only an aged wooden desk, a narrow liquor cabinet, and a shuttered window that let in a scant grey line of light. It didn’t look too far apart from the cell he had just left.

The Doux bade him to sit and Apostolos lowered himself into one of the guest chairs. The wood was hard, the back too straight, the seat framed in an awkward shape. Something told him it was deliberate.

“Why are you here?” the Doux asked before Apostolos could gather himself.

That question was not what Apostolos had expected.

“To subject myself to the Prince,” Apostolos forced himself to answer as steadily as he could, “and ask for his forgiveness for the rebellion my family brought upon the realm.”

It was the answer he thought any noble of the Crown would want to hear. Whether it was the right answer, he could not tell. The Doux’s expression gave nothing away. His face might as well have been carved from the keep around them.

“I am told you seek exile for your family and the release of Nomikos retainers.”

So news had already reached him, likely from Theodorus’s letter.

“Yes,” Apostolos confirmed.

“Why should the Crown not punish the traitors and put them all to the sword?” The Doux asked with the voice of a man examining a military report, weighing costs without sentiment.

“I am willing to formally sign a writ foregoing mine and House Nomikos’s claim to the North,” Apostolos said. “I can present it publicly to the Prince in court.”

He knew how valuable such a thing would be. A public surrender of the Nomikos claim, offered by the family’s own Patriarch, would be a political victory of significant merit for the Prince.

“What value does your word hold?” The Doux watched him.

“I am the ruling Patriarch of the family,” Apostolos tried.

“An exiled and imprisoned one,” the Doux said.

Apostolos had no answer to that.

The Doux rose from his chair and placed his hands behind his back. He was not a large man in the way some soldiers were large, all shoulders and noise, but held a heavy weight all the same.

“Let me tell you what I see,” he said. “I see a desperate young man attempting some foolish scheme to do what he perceives as noble and good.”

He turned toward the window, placing his back to Apostolos.

“I have a subordinate asking me to show leniency to a political weapon and the son of a traitor.”

Apostolos went still.

Theodorus? Had he asked the Doux to spare him?

The thought unsettled him more than it should have. Their bargain they had struck had not included himself, only his sister. Why would he…?

“And I am left wondering why I should.”

The Doux turned back to him and fixed Apostolos beneath a boring gaze, “You hold no power, have no followers.” It stripped away a little bit of Apostolos each second he suffered under it.

“My kin will listen to me,” he challenged, reaching for the only solid ground he could feel under his feet.

“Your own father didn’t,” the Doux cut in. “I’m told he did not even trust you with the main host, that he relegated you to the levy militia.”

He paced closer, slow and deliberate, and Apostolos felt a cold trickle move down his back. How did he know that? Had some frightened retainer spoken too freely under threat, or had the information been pried from them by harsher means?

Suddenly, Dysmas’s wounds took on another light, and Apostolos felt sick.

“In fact, I heard that was the only reason you survived the ambush while everyone else died.”

The Doux’s voice came from behind him now, circling the chair as if Apostolos were some accused man placed in the centre of a trial. Apostolos found himself unable to turn. He sat held in place by the words alone, every one of them sliding beneath his skin.

“Does it pain you to know that you avoided their fate only because your father did not trust you? Because you were not deemed enough?” Each accusation fed the quiet fire already burning inside him. These were not new wounds. They were the same questions he had asked himself over and over again. “Or are you happy?” the Doux asked, tone deceptively soft. “Happy that you did not die like a dog alongside them. That your father died so you could flee with your miserable little life.”

Apostolos rose from his chair, the legs scraping hard against the floor. Anger and terror flushed through him, hot and reckless, in equal measure. “I will not have my father’s death besmirched like this,” he said, and it wasn’t a threat, but a promise.

“Your father was a liar,” the Doux said, and there was cruelty there now, emerging from a face severe enough to frighten young children into silence. “And he was ready to sacrifice not only your life, but your entire family’s, for his own gain.”

“You can besmirch my name,” Apostolos said. “You can say my father made mistakes, and I will not deny all of them. But I will not allow you to speak on his love for our family.”

He looked the Doux straight in the eye and tried to master the tremble in his hands. He was likely killing himself now. The knowledge sat cold beneath the anger, and he was utterly terrified. Yet what kind of man would he be if he said nothing here? What worth would remain in him if he allowed even this to be taken?

“He cared for us,” Apostolos said. “You know nothing about what we meant to him, or what he meant to us.”

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“What does family mean to you?” the Doux challenged.

The pressure in those obsidian eyes was immense. This was a taunt, a threat, and a test all at once. Apostolos did not try to give him the correct answer this time. He gave only his own.

“It is the reason I live,” Apostolos said. “And it will be the reason I die.”

Silence reigned in the office.

Apostolos felt, more than saw, a pause settle over the Doux. The man regarded him in the quiet, measuring him without mercy, judging the naked worth of whatever stood before him once land, title, army, and inheritance had all been stripped away. Apostolos felt seen through - exposed by the second most powerful man in the Principality. Still, he kept his spine straight through it all, ready to face death if that was what came of it.

Then the pressure lifted, and Apostolos could breathe again.

“You may leave,” the Doux said at last. Whatever decision he had reached, whatever emotion had moved through him, remained infuriatingly closed behind that stone-carved face.

“But what will happen-”

“You will learn of your fate tomorrow. I do not make those decisions, the Prince does.” The Doux eased himself into his chair as if the matter had already passed. “But rest assured, I will speak with him over what I have learned today.”

“And what have you learned?” Apostolos asked.

The Doux only smiled and returned to his work, utterly unconcerned that a high-ranking prisoner was still standing in the same room as him. Apostolos could not help being baffled by the nonchalance. He could seize something remotely sharp from the desk or cabinet and try to skewer him, yet the Doux appeared entirely untroubled by that possibility.

Or perhaps he had already learned enough of Apostolos to know he had nothing to fear.

…

Apostolos had seldom entered the vaunted Sky Room in his life, and never as a supplicant.

Now he entered it in chains, and he could not afford to be overwhelmed by the grandiose sweep of its contours or high windows pouring daylight across polished floors and watchful faces.

“Announcing Apostolos Nomikos,” the crier called, his young voice carrying cleanly through the hall, “son of Adanis Nomikos and patriarch of his House, who has come to petition the Prince.”

Apostolos shuffled forward as best he could with the chains hanging from him. Each step dragged a quiet clink from the iron, and the sound seemed obscenely loud in the spaces between murmurs. A wave of whispers spread almost immediately, rippling through the gathered nobles and courtiers like chimes with the wind, but Apostolos did not let them pull his attention away from the one man who truly controlled his fate.

The Prince sat upon his stone throne on the raised dais, a thin man of sharp features and a white beard, his height and bearing making him seem larger than he was. He carried himself with that particular stillness rulers cultivated, as if the entire room existed only after his permission had been granted. Beside him sat the Princess, one hand moving idly through the hair of a small boy dressed with sandy hair and in finery too elaborate for his age.

So even the Principe had been swiftly replaced following the Crown’s victory.

Apostolos had heard that the heir apparent had been blinded by his own father. This was the bloody world of succession, and Apostolos felt the full coldness of it settle over him. This was where his fate lay now.

“My Prince,” Apostolos began.

His posture was nothing like the pride he had shown in the Doux’s office. This was a calculated display, and it sickened him. Not from any arrogance he might have of himself, but from the duplicity of the act.

“I come to you not as a rebellious instigator,” he said, letting his voice carry, “but as a defeated son.”

He turned slightly toward the audience, enough to acknowledge them without seeming to plead directly to them. Their faces were cold masks of indifference, curiosity, or contempt. These people did not care for his plight. They cared for the spectacle, for the breaking of a House that had dared to rise and failed.

“The war my father started was a mistake. I will not dispute that,” Apostolos continued, each word tasting of ash. “I come here not with a demand, but with a request. Not all of my kin were complicit in the rebellion. I ask that you release them. I request that my family be exiled instead of put to death. We do not have to set foot again in the Principality, as we do not deserve such a thing after the crimes committed in our name, but I ask only that you do not kill us all.”

It was a weak plea, and precisely what they wished to hear. The only thing of worth left for him to offer - a political victory for the Prince, a public surrender wrapped in the language of justice.

The chains pulled awkwardly as Apostolos lowered himself, forcing him to move with ugly care. He pressed one knee to the polished floor and hid away the bitterness clawing at his throat.

“In return,” he said, “I will renounce my claim to northern Theodoro, and submit myself to your justice to show my sincerity.”

The Prince looked on, his face arranged into a mask of measured judgment. In those brown eyes Apostolos found no pity.

“Your announcement to renounce the North holds no weight,” the Prince said at last.

His voice had an almost regal quality to it, smooth and carrying, each word placed for the benefit of the entire hall.

“Neither you nor your family holds any true power over it anymore.”

Apostolos said nothing. There was nothing to say. If he were to die now, at least he had tried. He had tried to save his family. He had tried, however late, to do the right thing.

“But I will show mercy,” the Prince declared, gazing down upon him. “Because a ruler must discriminate between justice and vengeance.”

As he spoke the words, he did not even gaze down at Apostolos, as if they were not meant for him.

“Killing your father was justice. Killing you would also be justice. But killing every man, woman, and child who bears your name would not.” The Prince had turned to his audience, pacing his words as if he were an orator in a play. They were the true recipients of this mercy, the ones meant to remember and repeat it. “It would be vengeance. And so I declare that the House Nomikos is officially exiled from our holy lands, never to set foot here again.”

He swept one hand across the hall, gesturing toward a cluster of copper heads gathered beneath guard at the side of the chamber.

“Your kin are released, and I will not kill them.”

Apostolos saw cousin Remus, the sole black-haired Nomikos, all gangly limbs and height, nearly collapse from the proclamation. The young man looked at him with feverish gratitude, tears standing bright in his eyes.

“And you,” the Prince said, turning back to him. “You I shall place under house arrest, as my formal hostage.”

Murmurs swelled so quickly they seemed to come from the walls themselves. Apostolos stared upward in shock.

What?

He had been certain he would perish. His eyes flicked toward the stern man standing to the right of the dais, searching for some sign from the Doux, some assurance that this had been his doing. The man’s face betrayed nothing.

“You will serve as an example,” the Prince continued. “So your family knows never to return without facing the consequences.”

The Prince’s eyes narrowed, and Apostolos could not help but swallow.

He was alive.

But at what cost?

He would not rot unseen in a dungeon, but live where the Crown could watch him, where his name could remain useful, where his survival itself could become a warning to every scattered remnant of his House.

Apostolos lowered his gaze to the floor.

He was now a bird trapped in a cage.

4th Week of May, 1460

“Inside. Now.”

Theodorus had never heard Iohannes’s voice be anything but stern and uninviting, but he had also never heard it quite so incandescent with fury. The words cracked through the entrance to the Sideris estate before Theodorus had fully crossed it, carrying all the warmth of a jailor ordering a condemned man toward the block.

“Sit,” Iohannes commanded when they had arrived at his office.

He himself dropped into his own chair with a snapping crack of wood.

Theodorus did as instructed, lowering himself into the seat opposite his brother with exaggerated care. He tried not to show any amusement at the situation. Truly, he did. But there was something uniquely difficult about maintaining solemnity in this particular one.

“Now explain.”

Iohannes’s visage was cold, his hands steepled before him in his usual dramatic fashion. It did nothing to hide the clenched jaw and flared nostrils behind it, though.

“Whatever do you mean, dear brother?” Theodorus asked. It took a monumental effort of will to keep his expression smooth, but he could not resist teasing him.

“Do you think this is a game?” For as quickly as he had sat down, Iohannes was back on his feet, chair scraping behind him. “Have you forgotten what you did to me the last time you were here? Sitting across from me at this very table?”

His eyes were so furious that sparks nearly seemed ready to fly from them.

“Noooo?” Theodorus lied.

“SIXTY HYPERPERA!”

Iohannes exploded with such force that a clerk in the room beyond audibly startled. His face had drawn itself into a snarl, pinched in outrage.

“You had me give away sixty hyperpera to bankroll that ridiculous extraordinary tax to fund the privateer scheme!”

He began pacing around the room, one hand slicing through the air while the other seemed to be restraining itself from reaching for Theodorus’s throat. The only thing holding him back, Theodorus suspected, was the fact that he needed his younger brother alive long enough to repay the debt.

“And not only that,” Iohannes continued, gathering steam with each turn, “but later I discover that the coin and supplies I nearly bankrupted myself to provide were spent funding a certain Adanis Nomikos. I am not sure if you have heard, little brother,” he barked, his tone dripping with irony and scorn, “but the man led a rebellion against our very Prince.”

He threw both hands toward the ceiling as though appealing to God, the rafters, and every patron saint of honest accounting.

“Not only that, he lost!”

That, apparently, was the final and most unforgivable insult. Iohannes completed his circuit of the room and collapsed back into his chair as if a balloon suddenly deflated of air.

“Now I am not merely out of coin, timber, and grain,” he said, the rage beginning to gutter into something flatter and more bitter, “I am implicated in supplying a rebellion I had no part in.”

He leaned back in his chair and gave a short, humourless laugh.

“I wonder if the Crown is already out there looking for me, having crushed the Nomikos and Genoese both.” His mouth twisted. The informal channels he had so carefully cultivated to feed him news from the capital had, in this one instance, turned into a curse.

“Perhaps I should simply pack up my meagre belongings and devote myself to becoming a travelling peddler,” Iohannes mused, staring somewhere past Theodorus with the hollow contemplation of a man considering his own financial funeral. “God knows I certainly do not have ready coin for anything else after you robbed me. At least this way I might keep my life. Perhaps I could trade that commodity for something down the line.”

Theodorus could not help his smile.

Only Iohannes would find a way to speak of his own continued existence as an asset with uncertain market value.

Iohannes caught the smile, and terror seemed to course up his spine. “Unless…”

He jolted as if dragged awake from a nightmare and put as much distance between himself and Theodorus as the room allowed, staring at him now not as a brother, but as an assassin who had been rude enough to arrive without warning.

“They sent you?” he breathed.

“Iohannes-”

“You will not take me alive,” he declared with complete seriousness, steel entering his voice as one hand edged toward a letter opener on the desk.

Theodorus laughed then, unable to restrain himself any longer. He had never known a paranoid Iohannes could be so hilarious, though he had long suspected the possibility.

“Calm yourself, brother,” he said once he could speak again. “I have not been sent by anyone, and no one is after you.”

“What are you here for, then?” Iohannes narrowed his eyes at him, clearly deciding that Theodorus’s direct denial had only made him more suspicious. “Because whenever you arrive smiling and speaking gently, I find myself poorer, endangered, or both.”

“To make you a proposition,” Theodorus said, allowing a cunning smile to settle across his face.

“No,” Iohannes said immediately.

“I assure you-”

“No.” Iohannes denied him with such vehemence that the word struck the room like a slammed door. “And do not look at me like that. You will not trick me again.”

“Can I at least try to convince you?” Theodorus asked, blowing a strand of hair away from his brow, this was getting to be mildly annoying.

“No.” Iohannes shook his head, lips pressed into a hard line. “I do not punish you or cut off ties only because you are my last remaining brother.” That Georgius was still alive was a technicality at most.

It warmed Theodorus more than he would have expected that, despite everything, his brother would still say such a thing.

“It would take an earth-shattering, heaven-defying, utterly unreal explanation or piece of information for me to even consider any further plan coming out of your mouth,” Iohannes continued.

He trailed off as he noticed that Theodorus looked entirely at ease with the ultimatum.

Iohannes’s expression flattened with immediate dread.

“What is it?” he asked.

“Oh, nothing much,” Theodorus said, all innocence and mildness. “Only that I would like to inform you that I have been appointed Commander of Suyren following the Crown’s reclamation of the North.”

The statement echoed into the sudden quiet of Iohannes’s study.

For a moment, the man himself seemed caught in some private battle between delirium, anger, joy and comprehension, his mouth opening and closing as it waged in the confines of his mind. Eventually, he settled for a sigh

“Explain yourself,” he said, placing a hand to his forehead as if fighting off a sudden headache born entirely from exasperation.

“I played a modest role in withstanding both the nobility’s insurrection and the Genoese siege,” Theodorus said, the smile refusing to leave his face, “so the Prince saw fit to award me joint stewardship of Suyren Castle.”

“Joint?” Iohannes asked sharply, because even amid shock he still knew where to dig.

“I have been named Strategos of Suyren and the northern domains, while Zeno Makris has been named Hypostrategos.”

“Unbelievable,” Iohannes muttered, the word barely making it past his lips.

In the space of a single year, his little brother had gone from a useless scholarly fop to Iohannes’s direct superior. It beggared belief. Worse, it offended the natural order of the world as Iohannes understood it.

Alas, it was also, ultimately, to his advantage. Which was beyond irritating.

No matter how much Iohannes hated the smirk plastered across his younger brother’s face, the truth remained impossible to ignore. If Theodorus held authority in Suyren, then the Crown was not hunting Iohannes. That at least relieved some of the tension from his shoulders.

“The Nomikos family has been rooted out,” Theodorus said, leaning forward, “and they have left a gaping hole in their wake. A hole in the bureaucracy, finances, and practical control of the northern lands.”

Iohannes seized on the thought at once, as Theodorus had known he would.

“Do you mean to offer me a position in Suyren?”

It would be a healthy dose of nepotism, certainly, but hardly beyond the habits of the post-Byzantine states. For all the ugliness in such arrangements, they had their uses. A relative in office meant an indebted ally. An indebted ally with wealth, scribes, supply connections, and an intimate knowledge of local obligations meant power that could actually be exercised rather than merely proclaimed. Together, they could pool their resources and tighten their grip over the northern region far more quickly than Theodorus could manage alone.

“I cannot,” Theodorus said. “The Prince is wary of such things following the rebellion, and while I am nominally the ruler of the North, in truth it is a co-rulership with my Hypostrategos. Zeno would never allow such a blatant reach for power.”

Theodorus was not fooled for a moment as to what Zeno Makris would think if he tried to centralize authority entirely into his own hands. The man had not been elevated to serve as decoration.

But for what was to come, Theodorus needed more than a title.

“So I came to request your aid,” Theodorus said, spreading his hands in a gesture that was just shy of humility. “I will be blunt. We do not have enough learned men to manage the North adequately. I am currently looking to recruit educated young men to form the beginnings of an administrative corps.”

Iohannes crossed his arms in thought.

It went without saying that helping Theodorus, his new liege, with something so relatively minor was to his benefit. That did not mean he liked it. His expression suggested a man being asked to swallow vinegar and call it medicine.

“And what do you need me for?” he asked.

“You have connections with them from your trade deals,” Theodorus said, referring to the lumber and wine arrangements Iohannes had set up while heading the supply system of the coalition. “I need you to set an example.”

“Speak with them,” Theodorus continued. “Make them amenable to the potential prestige of sending second sons into service. Men who might otherwise linger uselessly around estates can become clerks or officers of account. There is honour in serving the Crown’s northern administration, if we convince them to see it that way.”

“Anything else?” Iohannes asked, knowing his brother did not ask for only one thing most of the time.

“And I want you to induct your holdings into the Northern Chartered Villages.”

Iohannes’s brow furrowed. “What do you mean by Northern Charter?”

“A document outlining the fixed dues your villages owe you,” Theodorus explained. “Written plainly, sealed properly, and recorded so the terms cannot be changed from year to year on a lord’s whim.”

Iohannes frowned, and this time the objection seemed less performative. “How would that account for variance in yield from year to year?”

Of course that would be his first concern. The nobility would not be eager to reduce the ambiguity of dues when they were the ones who profited most from ambiguity. An excellent harvest could be called middling, and whatever was left taken for themselves.

“We can establish separate rates for good harvest years, regular harvests, and poor harvest yields,” Theodorus conceded, he would rather keep the greed manageable and transparent than subjective. “But the terms will be outlined according to thorough surveys of the land, which every noble should conduct.”

“That is yet another burden,” Iohannes said. “Surveys are not cheap, and they are not quick.”

He did not refuse outright only because he was now, technically, Theodorus’s direct vassal. That fact still seemed to trouble him every time it brushed against his thoughts, like a splinter lodged in his skin.

“I can make it worth your while,”

Iohannes’s eyes narrowed at the gleam in his brother’s gaze.

“The northern treasury sits empty,” Theodorus said. “The Nomikos either spent it on the rebellion or carried off what remained when they fled.”

Iohannes barely had time to process that dour piece of news before Theodorus pressed on.

“The northern administration cannot function penniless. We are scrounging up what we can, but it is not enough.” Zeno had already contacted nobles from across the realm to sell off the gaudy possessions of the late Adanis Nomikos, but the Principality was not rich. At most, they could expect values in the range of fifty to one hundred hyperpera for the totality, and even that assumed buyers with ready coin rather than promises or favours. They were still combing through the countryside estates once held by the Nomikos, but held out little hope.

“So,” Theodorus said, “we plan to issue bonds to our noblemen in order to gather currency.”

“Bonds?” Iohannes repeated.

“We receive direct currency, supplies, or other usable goods from our vassals,” Theodorus said, flicking a coin idly between his fingers, “and in exchange we promise them, over the coming years and proportional to the amount given, various monetary concessions. A share of bridge tolls or market fees. Even tithe reductions in future years, where appropriate. All proven in writing, sealed by the northern administration, and treated as a legal obligation.”

Iohannes’s stare sharpened.

“For every good paid to us now,” Theodorus continued, “we return the equivalent later, and more besides. Not as a vague favour, but as a recorded debt.”

“You want to ask for loans from your vassals?” Iohannes grasped the crude outline of the idea in his mind, and the incredulity on his face was unmistakable. The very notion seemed to violate several laws of lordship and common sense at once.

“The incentives are too low,” Iohannes said.

He produced a coin of his own from somewhere inside his sleeve, a spotless specimen that caught the light far more cleanly than the slightly damaged one Theodorus had been toying with.

“You are only offering money in return,” he continued. “Vassals will expect privileges. Autonomy. Rights they can pass on to their sons. They would value those far more highly than coin promised back at some later date.”

It was not an absurd objection. In history, rulers did occasionally borrow from their vassals, but such measures signaled desperation and almost always came tethered to concessions. A lord who lent coin to his sovereign expected more than repayment. He expected leverage. Exemptions, local privileges, judicial rights.

Theodorus was trying to approach the problem as if he were running a counting house rather than governing a half-broken frontier.

“That is not something we are prepared to offer,” Theodorus said, forestalling that entire avenue before Iohannes could follow it any further. “Because we are not merely offering more money back. We are offering the revitalization of the North.” He produced another coin, outnumbering Iohanne’s one two to one. Both were pitted and ugly, but were worth double all the same.

Iohannes lifted his brow.

“The money lent by the nobility would be spent on specific projects outlined in the agreement itself,” Theodorus continued. “Road repairs, bridgework, mills, storehouses, irrigation channels where the land allows it, fortified granaries in more exposed settlements. Projects they can look at, measure, and profit from. That way, the nobles can see that the money benefits their estates as much as it benefits the administration.”

He leaned back slightly, letting the thought settle before adding to it.

“A proportion of the profit from those projects could also be agreed upon, depending on the size of the investment. And the works need not be limited to Crown land. They could be undertaken on noble land as well.”

“But such things they could build themselves,” Iohannes said, seizing the obvious counterargument. “Why would they enter into such complex arrangements merely to surrender a proportion of their own profit?”

“Because,” Theodorus said, smiling, “we would handle everything for them.The logistics, hiring of personnel, manpower, the selection of craftsmen. The legal ramifications, documentation, surveys, identification of opportunities, and management of the budget.” Theodorus rattled them all of in quick succession. “All those arrangements are the true obstructions behind investment. Most nobles are not opposed to making money. They are opposed to uncertainty, inconvenience, and the possibility of looking like fools after committing coin to a failed venture.”

Nobles were human beings in the end. Lazy, disorganized, cautious when risk touched their own purse, and remarkably willing to do nothing if action required too many steps. If the Crown could give them confidence in a project, and handle the dirty work for them, then it would be almost as if money entering their pockets by itself.

“The scribes,” Iohannes realized.

That was why Theodorus wanted to recruit a small army of bureaucrats in Suyren, especially from the local nobility. He needed learned men who knew the land, men with family ties to the estates, men who could guide arrangements, offer informed opinions, and feel personally invested in the success of the endeavours.

“But who will guarantee these contracts?” Iohannes asked, recovering enough to narrow his eyes again. “The Crown has not been the most trustworthy in recent years.”

His gaze made the implication plain.

“Well then,” Theodorus said, with a brightening smile that immediately made Iohannes wary, “it is most fortunate that, in the Genoese peace deal the Crown has just brokered, Italian counting houses will be allowed into Theodoran lands. And it is equally fortunate that the Bank of St. George is experienced in these complex arrangements.”

The financial behemoth would serve as the third-party guarantor, holding the entire fragile arrangement together for a small slice of the pie.

Iohannes stared at him.

“By God,” Iohannes said in disbelief. “It is almost as if you were part of the negotiations and slipped that in deliberately.”

He saw Theodorus’s jagged smile and could only sigh.

“Of course you did.”

He did not know whether to laugh or cry, so he settled for sighing again, more deeply this time, as if releasing the last of his belief in a sensible world.

Iohannes understood the beauty of the arrangement, even if he had never seen anything quite like it. In mainland Italy, commendas and other complex financial partnerships were commonplace enough, but here in mountainous Crimea, they were unheard of.

So where had his little brother, who had never cared for finance one whit a year ago, learned of such a thing?

“I need you to be the most pristine follower of the new administration’s policies,” Theodorus said, his expression turning intent enough that Iohannes straightened in his chair despite himself. “No matter how radical they seem. No matter how unorthodox, inconvenient, or unfavourable they appear at first glance. I need someone respectable to prove that compliance is not weakness.”

Iohannes’s gaze sharpened.

“Do this for me,” Theodorus continued, “and I will arrange for you to become the custodian of the Northern bonds. We need someone who can manage the flow of investment, gather support, cajole hesitant nobles into issuing projects, and speak well of the administration in rooms where a higher authority would only make them more defensive.”

Theodorus would use Iohannes to crowdfund for investors essentially, and make him work for the privelege of being associated with the endeavour and earning some influence.

He would have no official title, of course. Nothing that Zeno Makris could object to, nothing that looked like a naked transfer of power into Sideris hands. The Hypostrategos would only see more and more northern nobles buying into the administration’s projects, more surveys being conducted, more dues being recorded, more coin flowing through properly witnessed contracts.

The true shape of the arrangement could remain politely unnamed.

Iohannes fixed his brother with a steely gaze. For a long moment he said nothing, measuring the risk, the profit, the danger, and perhaps the strange creature his little brother had become in less than a year.

Then he held out his hand.

“You have a deal, little brother.”

This brother of his had outwitted him in matters of commerce and coin, to say nothing of war, politics, and whatever other dark arts he had apparently acquired while no one had been looking. Iohannes disliked that immensely. But he also knew that he needed Theodorus at his side if the Sideris family was to thrive.

Once again, he would gamble on his brother’s ventures. So far, Theodorus had never missed.

Theodorus took his hand and shook it.

“Now,” Iohannes said, rising from his chair and pacing toward a small wooden cabinet, “there is only one matter left to discuss.”

“Numbers?” Theodorus guessed, smiling.

“No,” Iohannes said, smiling back as he placed two cups on the desk and filled them with wine. “I want to know what adventures my little brother has been up to.”

He raised his cup.

“Oh, brother,” Theodorus said, lifting his own, “if only you knew.”

The cups clinked softly between them, wine trembling against the rims, and the sound marked a deal well struck.