Fallen Eagle

4th Week of July, 1460

“It is the end of the line, Georgius,” Theodorus called across the open space between them.

Nearly fifty armed men listened to the exchange with apt anticipation, though for very different reasons. Theodorus’s soldiers with the taut patience of men ready to advance. Georgius’s bandits with the hollow-eyed tension of men who felt the ground giving way.

“Far from it, little brother,” Georgius replied, lingering on the affectionate term as if mocking him. “If you want my little self, you’ll have to come get me.”

Theodorus did not rise to the bait. Provocation was one of the last weapons Georgius had left to draw him forward and turn a collapsing position into one last ugly gamble.

“I will make you all an offer again,” he said, directing his words past Georgius and toward the men clustered behind him. “If you surrender yourselves willingly, I will offer you a pardon for all crimes within my power to absolve.”

His voice rang high and clear over the pale grass and loose stones of the hillside.

“You have until the sun is halfway down in the sky to do so. Walk to our position unarmed, and you will live. Refuse, and your lives are forfeit.”

A weight settled over the men beside Georgius, visible in lowered shoulders and eyes flicking between their commander and the armed ring tightening around the hill.

Many of them were simple farmers who had been pressed into banditry and were now regretting it. They were driven by the fear that Georgius had held their families in his hideout. And that was a fragile link to hang your loyalty on. One Theodorus would take advantage of.

“I know some of your families were held captive in Georgius’s hideout,” Theodorus sat upon his grey horse, cloak shifting faintly in the wind, hoping the image of command would lend weight to his words. “But I am here to tell you that we have taken Georgius's main hideout and saved them. He holds no sway over you any longer.”

Wide eyes greeted the declaration. Theodorus did not even need to spend coin to sway Georgius’s men now. Not when the truth itself could turn the scales.

“Please,” Theodorus continued, softening his voice just enough to matter. “Surrender, and you can see your families again. You can return to your villages and live something close to a normal life, far away from this.”

They had no reason to believe him at face value, technically. Yet the fact that he knew about their families at all was difficult to explain, and the fact that Georgius was trapped before them made the claim harder to dismiss. It gave those men something they had been lacking for some time.

Hope.

“More lies, more deceit,” Georgius snarled from behind the felled wood, teeth bared like an animal’s. “When will you stop playing your little games, brother? Fight me like a man!”

He drew his sword and raised it toward the sky, the blade catching the lowering sun in a brief flash.

“I challenge you to a duel. Let us settle this how our father would have wanted.”

Theodorus rolled his eyes. The manoeuvre reeked of desperation.

“Do you not know how to solve your problems with anything but a sword and yelling?” he asked. “You lost, Georgius. I don’t have to step into your reach to prove it, and I don’t need to do anything else to push you over the edge. I only need to finish this properly.”

He turned his horse away.

“Where are you going?” Georgius shouted after him. “Hah! You were always a coward! Do you think this is the end of me? Do you think you can kill me? You’re welcome to fucking try! Georgius Sideris is no coward!”

His voice tore out of him until it cracked, raw and furious enough to echo over the hill. To Theodorus, it sounded less like defiance than the final howls of a wolf that had lost its pack and still could not understand why the forest no longer answered.

Stathis waited near the main body of troops, stoic as ever, his hand resting near the pommel of his sword.

“Ensure all the exits are surrounded,” Theodorus commanded, ignoring Georgius’s tantrum behind him. “No gaps. No heroics. We let his men decide how much his pride is worth to them.”

Stathis nodded and went to lead the Pronoia men-at-arms and Christos’s squad around the periphery, angling them toward the side trails Gerasimos had marked out beforehand. The scouts had spent hours creeping around the hideout in secrecy before Theodorus’s advance party caught up, mapping out the likely exits without letting the bandits know the noose was already being measured to fit around their necks.

Theodorus remained with the Genoese main force, led by Federico, who studied the hideout with a cautious eye. It was a sharp contrast to the contempt he had shown before Georgius’s trap, when the Genoese had still mistaken mountain bandits for little more than armed vermin with poor discipline.

“Now we wait?” Federico asked. “Or are you planning another assault?”

Theodorus followed his gaze.

Unlike the main hideout in the hollow, this one was sparsely populated, and its defences were almost nonexistent by comparison. In a way, that was far more conventional. Mountain bandits did not usually build palisades around their dens. They lacked the knowhow, the tools, and more importantly, the desire to advertise where they slept.

A hideout survived by being hard to find, not by announcing itself with timber walls like some miserable little fort. The main one had likely been Georgius’s doing, and only possible because of his knowledge of military fortifications.

This hideout was lodged against the dented side of a wooded hill, tucked between uneven slopes and dark pines. Only a handful of natural approaches led to it, and those had been choked with felled trunks to narrow the paths and make any charge stumble before it reached the camp.

“I am done waiting,” Theodorus said, iron entering his voice. “In truth, the time I gave the bandits to surrender is the time it will take to prepare a little surprise for my brother.”

He had taken the variables into account. There was no room left for sympathy or error. The innocent would surrender and flee, or they would die standing beside Georgius.

“He has nothing left,” Theodorus continued, eyes fixed on the hill, “and by tonight he will have even less.”

He could order an assault now and likely win. But likely was not enough, and would lead to needless deaths. Georgius could be reckless if he wished, but Theodorus would not leave the outcome to pride and momentum.

Federico gave a single nod. “Very well, Comandante.” There was a large measure of respect in the word. “I look forward to seeing what you have in store.”

After the avalanche ambush, and Theodorus’s prediction of it, Federico had become far more willing to listen when Theodorus spoke.

Theodorus answered only with a smile.

It was a dangerous thing, stretched thin at the edges.

“Those damned idiots!”

One of the last lieutenants still worth a damn cursed as a cluster of greener bandits broke from cover and made a run for it down the slope.

“Is that Lambros?” the man asked, disbelief twisting his voice as he spotted the poacher leading them.

Georgius could not say he was surprised. The bastard had always been a coward and a rat, the sort of man who would gnaw through a rope and leave the rest of the crew hanging if he thought it bought him another hour of life. He probably believed he was dead anyway, even if they somehow survived this, after failing to throw the Crown off their trail for a second time now.

Georgius couldn't say he would have spared him. The worm had laid his hands on Nadia, after all.

But just because he was not surprised did not mean he wasn't fucking furious.

“Shoot them in the back!” Georgius bellowed.

His men jolted into motion, turning from the palisade and dragging their bows into position as the deserters ran. There were around ten of them, scrambling across the broken ground with all the grace of frightened goats, backs hunched as if that would save them from arrows. The distance was long, and the trees broke the line of sight in places, but Georgius did not give a damn.

“Loose, you useless cunts!” he roared, spittle flying from his mouth. “Put them down before they reach the enemy!”

Georgius had set sentries around the hideout’s periphery, scattered along the hill. The group that had defected had been watching the main entrance through the abatis, while Georgius and the rest were positioned farther back near the huts. That meant the fleeing bastards had a head start to reach the open clearing just outside the Crown’s line.

The only thing aiding them was that the abatis had been dragged shut as soon as the Crown was spotted. The tangled wall of felled trunks, sharpened branches, and thorn slowed the fleeing cowards.

A few runaways got trapped in the tangle and became easy targets. One twisted his ankle between two trunks and went down screaming. Another caught himself so badly in the thorns that he had to hack at his sleeve to get free.

The trouble was the sheer shittiness of the bows in Georgius’s camp, and the fact that most of the men holding them were barely passable bowmen on their best day. The arrows arched weakly over the clearing, falling short or striking with so little force that even the padded coat the bandits sported could blunt them.

The others did not look back for the men they left behind. They kept running, stumbling over the last debris and throwing themselves toward Theodorus’s line as though salvation waited there with open arms.

The survivors reached the Crown soldiers and dropped to their knees, weapons tossed into the ground. The Theodorans moved with irritating discipline, stepping forward to receive them, search them, and usher them past their own line and past the small trench the Crown forces had been digging outside Georgius’s encampment for some inexplicable reason.

“Goddamnit,” Georgius gnashed out.

He looked around at the sorry state of what remained. Twenty men, if he was being generous, and seven of those looked like scared peasants who had found weapons by accident. Seeing the others spared by the Crown might give them the wrong sort of courage soon enough.

“What do we do now, boss?” one of his henchmen asked, looking around at the remaining men.

They had already been hard-pressed to stop any meaningful assault from the elite troops the Crown had brought to the fight. Now they were fewer, shaken, and trapped behind dry wood.

“Have you tried all the exits?” Georgius snapped at one of the remaining bandits, a narrow-shouldered little bastard tasked with slipping through the hidden paths by the simple virtue of being one of the smallest men they had left.

“Aye, boss. Me and Lambros tried all the ways out.” The bandit glanced toward the place where Lambros had made his escape. “The Crown’s watching all of them. We nearly died trying to leave through one.”

So that was why Lambros had bolted. There was no way out of this one. Georgius caught Nadia’s look from the central hut. She stood in the doorway with one hand on the frame, her face pale and empty. It made him angry

He felt the rage swell in him, hot enough to choke on. At fate. At his luck. At Theodorus. At himself most of all.

A commotion rose near the main abatis, and Georgius turned sharply toward it. Crown soldiers were moving forward in a tight knot, mail glinting beneath their cloaks and helmets lowered against stray arrows. Several carried lit torches, while others had small satchels hanging from their hands, dark liquid dripping from the seams. It did not take a genius to understand what they planned to do.

“Form up!” Georgius bellowed.

His men scrambled into position and loosed again, more from panic than skill. It was completely fucking useless. The soldiers wore proper mail and helmets, and most did not even bother to raise their shields against Georgius’s shoddy weaponry. Arrows glanced from iron caps, rattled against mail, or buried themselves harmlessly in the dirt.

The Crown men reached the dry barrier and smashed the satchels against the wood. Oil or pitch soaked into the dead branches, shining black in the sun. Then they touched their torches to the oiled wood.

In the dry heat, the abatis was little more than kindling. Fire crawled along the thorns, then leapt higher, hungry and bright, turning their last defence into a spreading wall of smoke and heat.

As he watched the enemy retreat behind the small trench they had dug, he finally realized its use. It was a firebreak meant to stall the raging inferno they meant to unleash.

“Get the water from the well!” Georgius barked.

He stomped toward it himself, because standing there shooting arrows at armoured men was proving about as useful as spitting at a stone wall. He snatched up a bucket and shoved it hard into the hands of the nearest unfortunate.

“Move, damn you!”

The men scrambled to obey, trying to form a line toward the front, but before the first bucket could be passed halfway, a hail of bolts greeted them from the enemy backline.

The bastards were trying to pin them in place. Worse, Georgius had no good way to stop them. The Italian dogs Theodorus had brought along carried crossbows with steel frames and brutal limbs, weapons they braced low and fired from kneeling ranks in a steady rhythm. They shot like men who had done this a hundred times before, each rank loosing while the next prepared without panic.

The iron-tipped heads punched through the sorry excuse Georgius’s men had for armour - mismatched wool, patched leather, old cloaks doubled over the chest. It all meant little against proper weapons. The front two bandits nearest the abatis went down in a screaming heap, one clutching at a bolt buried beneath his ribs, the other clawing at his throat as blood poured through his fingers.

Georgius ground his teeth hard enough to hurt.

They were outclassed in every aspect that he could be bothered to count. Whether it was arms, armour, training, or every other damned advantage his brother had stacked on his side.

“Fall back,” Georgius said, the words dragging out of him with effort.

There was no choice left but to watch the only thing separating their flimsy hideout from the incoming carnage go up in flames.

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The fire spread quickly through the felled wood and thorns, feeding on everything they had dragged there for protection. The abatis cracked and hissed as the flames ate through it. Branches popped. Sap spat. Thorn and bark collapsed inward in glowing chunks, and the smoke curled upward in thick black ropes at first, then rose into a spreading cloud that stained the sky and rolled back over the camp. Georgius’s men crawled back toward the huts, desperate for relief.

Inside their little wooden prisons, all they had left was to count the seconds until the inevitable.

…

Georgius sheltered with Nadia in the central hut, eyes fixed forward through the shutter slats. Beyond the cleared, still-smoking path where the abatis had stood, a line of foreign enemies advanced in a wall of interlocked shields. They came slowly, trudging through ash and heat.

A few projectiles flew from the hut windows, desperate things hurled by desperate men. The shieldwall swallowed them easily.

Then the soldiers began dismantling the closest huts. Some hacked at the walls with axes while others flung torches in high arcs, sending fire onto roofs and dry beams. The dwellings began to burn one by one, smoke gushing from their seams as the bandits hiding inside were flushed out coughing and half-blind.

Georgius could not even hope they would kick down the doors like idiots and get themselves skewered for the trouble.

A burnt smell reached him from behind.

He turned briskly. The wood along the rear of the central hut had begun to spark and blacken, little tongues of flame licking up through the cracks. They had come from behind as well.

Georgius grit his teeth and grabbed Nadia by the armpit. She looked dazed, her face pale beneath the grime and smoke, as if some part of her had already retreated from the world around them.

“Say I raped you,” Georgius told her.

The words cut through the oppressive silence between them.

“What?” Nadia asked, blinking up at him in confusion.

“My brother won’t coldly kill a harmless civilian,” Georgius's voice was tight with urgency as the flames licked upward towards the ceiling. “ Play the victim, and you might get out of here unscathed. There are no villagers left to disprove it here. There's a chance for you.”

Nadia held his gaze for a long moment, searching his face for the reason he would offer this now, of all times. Georgius was not surprised when she nodded.

In the end, people like them used whatever they could to survive.

Even each other.

Georgius kicked the door open hard enough for the hinges to shriek and hauled Nadia after him as though she were fighting him every step of the way. She stumbled when he shoved her, and he threw her aside roughly enough that she hit the dirt with a cry.

“Come get it, you motherfuckers!” he screamed.

He pulled his bow and loosed a single shot at the advancing soldiers. The arrow struck one of their shields with a dull crack and left no mark worth seeing.

Georgius broke into a sprint anyway, sword in hand, legs pumping beneath him as he charged toward the mailed line. For one glorious, stupid heartbeat, he imagined crashing into them with enough force to split the first man open and make the rest remember his name.

Then the crossbows fired, shots coming low, below the waistline. Georgius realized the bastards were trying to take him alive.

Only two struck true, and he was wearing proper mail beneath his bayette, better protection than most of the sorry fools who had followed him into this ruin. But these were no village bows with warped limbs and weak strings. They were Genoese crossbows at close range, steel-tipped and mean enough to punch through mail like his.

One bolt slammed into his thigh. Another tore into the meat near his left knee.

Georgius went down in a screaming heap, his charge ending in dirt before he even reached their shields.

Flat on the ground, he could do little when they came for him. If he had imagined a valiant last stand, it was a laughable thought now. There was no song in it, no dignity. Only pain, smoke, and men in armour closing in like hunters approaching a wounded boar.

“Fucking bastards!” Georgius roared, swinging his sword in a wide arc as the soldiers spread around him.

They did not indulge him. They kept out of reach, shields angled, spears levelled toward his chest and arms.

“Fight me like men!”

He tried to stand and felt his left knee give out under him. The bolt lodged there dragged a scream out of him that felt more feral than man. He hit the ground again, rolled onto one side, and clawed at the dirt as he tried to right himself before the ring closed fully.

He could not end here. He would not.

He would take at least one of them. Just one. One of the bastards would bleed for this. And if they dragged him near Theodorus, he would murder his little brother with his bare hands, rip that calm little smile off his face, crush his throat, and-

He didn’t get to finish the thought as the butt of a thick spear crashed into his helmet.

Then Georgius's world cracked white, then vanished.

They met the main force halfway along the nearest proper path, where the track curved around the northern mountains that sheltered the bandits and their hideouts.

Dust hung low over the road, kicked up by boots, hooves, and the dragging feet of exhausted prisoners. Behind Theodorus, the captured bandits were hauled along in ropes, some limping, some silent, all equally miserable.

Zeno stood at the head of the waiting force and led his black stallion forward when their approach was spotted. Behind him waited the main body of the Suyren militia and sergeants, along with the villagers recovered from Georgius’s hideout. The former captives looked hollowed out by fear and hunger, gathered in uneven clusters around the soldiers as if staying close for protection.

Theodorus quickened his pace and moved to the front, bringing Boudicca to a halt about a carriage’s length from Zeno.

“Strategos,” Zeno greeted with a small dip of acknowledgement, though his eyes fixed on the bound bandits being dragged behind Theodorus. “I see the assault went well.”

“Hypostrategos,” Theodorus replied. “How many survivors were you able to recover?”

“Not everyone,” Zeno said, shaking his head. “Of the two hundred civilians trapped in the hideout, about fifty died there or will soon. We lost a dozen of our own men in the stampede to leave the hollow.”

Theodorus let the words settle.

The picture was grim. Georgius had lost handily, but even cornered and beaten, he had still managed to collect his payment in blood. This was the kind of victory that left a bad taste in the mouth.

Iohannes trotted toward them from the side, his horse breathing hard beneath him.

“Where is he?” he asked, searching Theodorus’s ranks.

Theodorus raised one hand.

Christos stepped forward and dragged a limping prisoner into view. Georgius had been wrapped in double the ropes used for the other captives, his arms pinned tight and his body forced upright more by the men holding him than by his own strength. Blood had dried dark across his thigh and knee, and every step made his face twist with barely restrained pain.

Theodorus had not bothered to have his wounds cleaned or dressed.

“It is a success, then,” Zeno remarked. “The campaign lasted a little less than a week, so within the acceptable range we had envisioned. The rest of the bandits should fall soon enough once we parade this sorry excuse before them.”

He looked down at Georgius with open disdain.

Georgius glared back with hate bright enough to burn through exhaustion, though whatever answer he tried to give came out as a muffled snarl beneath the gag tied around his mouth.

A brown stallion came galloping in their direction from near the rear of Zeno’s column.

Iohannes took only a moment to gaze upon Georgius’s sad, defeated pose before he ordered the men. “Get this animal into his cage.”

Two men came and dragged Georgius farther down the line, placing him deep enough within the formation that escape was a fantasy and close enough that Iohannes could keep an eye on him. Georgius stumbled once, caught himself badly on his injured leg, and was yanked upright again before he could fall.

“I’m not sure I can call it a success,” Theodorus said, his face drawn tight.

Zeno regarded him for a moment.

“We did the best we could with the resources at our disposal,” he said. “We knew the bandits were a threat, but we chose to stabilize Suyren before the outlying settlements. We could not station defences in every village, not with our shortage of manpower and coin. And patrols made by green recruits would not necessarily change anything and would mean slowing down our building projects for the castle town. It was a calculated gamble.”

"All of this could have been avoided if I had stopped him at the siege," Theodorus's words came from somewhere he had tried to smother beneath layers of apathy. Despite all his carefully cultivated control, he felt it slip more and more as of late. "If I had commited to chasing him..."

“All those children you rescued from his manor would have been burned alive. ” Zeno laid a hand on Theodorus’s shoulder, and Theodorus was surprised by the gesture. "That is not a kind fate, I can tell you that much." Theodorus saw a flicker of pain in Zeno's countenance. Was it an act, or truthful?

In truth, he had not fully believed Zeno’s pledge of allegiance after their conversation with Father Thaddeus. The man was not so mellow as to forgive and forget merely because an apology had been offered, at least not in Theodorus’s estimation. Zeno struck him as a man who buried resentments rather than discarded them.

And yet Theodorus felt there was a kernel of truth in this. The same way they had solved this threat together, they had also made the decisions that had led to it. The blame did not become lighter because someone else acknowledged it, but it hurt less knowing someone understood his choices.

And maybe that was enough.

…

1st Week of August, 1460

“I was told you wanted to see me,” Pantelis said as he stepped through the wooden planks nailed to leaning walls that served as a doorway.

His voice was a far cry from the stout, stubborn man who had fought Theodorus on nearly every reform he had sought to implement. It was frayed. Uncertain. Broken.

“I wanted to talk to you about what comes next for Kerasia,” Theodorus said, gesturing to the seat opposite him.

He remembered the first time he had spoken to Pantelis across this very table, back when he had still been only an aide with borrowed authority. Much had changed since then. Too much of it had been bought in blood.

“There is no next,” Pantelis said as he sat. His hands rested heavily on his knees, fingers curled against his trousers. “Kerasia is finished.”

“The bandits have been quelled, and most of the missing village families have returned,” Theodorus said.

Over the past few days, he and Zeno had undertaken a brutally swift campaign to force the surrender of the remaining hideouts. Georgius’s lieutenants had been interrogated thoroughly, and in some cases offered to get away with their lives in exchange for every location, trail or cache they knew of. Pardons had been given to the farmers pressed into becoming outlaws, while harsher but still useful terms were offered to the less blood-soaked bandits. In doing so, Theodorus had taken the teeth out of the threat and gained a ready source of cheap labour from the convicted criminals, whom he intended to bind to his building projects.

“We also recovered a good portion of the stolen grain,” Theodorus continued, “and we will supplement it to ensure Kerasia does not go hungry.”

He spread a handful of grain across the old table. The kernels rolled over the worn wood, small and pale beneath the light. Ripe with promise, if one had enough faith left to see it.

“You can start over,” Theodorus said.

“Start over?” Pantelis chuckled darkly. “So we can be robbed again of everything we have?”

He looked at the grain scattered across the table as though each kernel had personally insulted him.

“This grain you hand us will end up in your coffers by year’s end. In your granary. If we are not robbed by bandits, we are robbed by the Crown.”

His voice gained strength as he spoke, the words spilling out with the force of something held down for decades. It was not only grief speaking now, or anger at Georgius and the men who had burned his fields. It was the bitterness of a bleak life that had taught him every promise came with a hook buried somewhere inside it.

“Grain can’t bring back lives, my lord. And promises can’t buy back trust.” Pantelis pushed the kernels away.

He had always had a streak in him, hard and stubborn enough to scrape against any authority placed over him. This was disrespectful in the extreme to a noble, which was why Theodorus had held the meeting in private - to not be forced to imprison Pantelis to save face - and why he had not punished the headman for the outburst he had given when Theodorus arrived at Kerasia.

Because Kerasia needed Pantelis if it was going to heal.

More than that, Theodorus believed in cultivating the people he found within the Principality. If they were to stand any chance against the Ottomans, he could not afford to waste competent men simply because they were difficult. And he had been proven so recently. The quick resolution of the bandit threat could be attributed to Gerasimos's skills. If he had never brought the old man back from the brink of death, that would have never happened.

Pantelis, for all his stubbornness and jaded view of the world, was a competent headman.

Theodorus needed to win him here. And he knew how.

He had lived Pantelis’s frustration several times over in the twenty-first century. The same exhaustion. The same feeling of being ground down by forces too large to punch and too distant to blame properly. So he knew exactly what to say.

“So what?” Theodorus said, his voice cutting across the room. “You’re giving up on all the people counting on you? Pathetic.”

Pantelis’s head snapped up.

“I suppose it is easier to blame the Crown for your own mistakes,” Theodorus continued. “If you hadn’t run straight into the bandits in some misguided attempt to stop them, Kerasia might not have lost its grain at all.”

Pantelis surged forward and grabbed Theodorus by the sleeve. His fingers clenched tight in the fabric, knuckles whitening. The wattle and daub of Pantelis’s home seemed to close in around the two of them.

“What do you know of the choices I have to make?” Pantelis asked, voice cold and measured.

“I know you are taking the coward’s way out,” Theodorus answered, meeting his eyes.

Pantelis froze.

“Hard lives mean hard choices, and you know this one is the easiest. It hurts less to throw everything away than to fight for something you know can still be taken from you.”

Pantelis could not hold his gaze after that. His eyes fell to the side, and some of the fury went with them, leaving only the tired old wound beneath.

Theodorus grabbed Pantelis’s arms back, forcing him to face him.

“You have no choice,” he said, giving him no reprieve. “This is bigger than you. There are people counting on you, and you have to suffer for them when there is no one else willing to bear it. That is what it means to lead.”

Pantelis looked back at him.

Many things moved through his face then. Sadness. Exhaustion. A softness that grief had not entirely killed. Then something harder settled over it, scouring away the doubt in the end. Because that was who he was.

“Very well, my lord,” Pantelis said.

A measure of himself seemed to return with the words.

“I will strike a deal, and this time it is from me to you. Bring the change you promised me. Give over everything of yourself that you have to make it come true if that is what it takes.” Pantelis’s eyes held the frozen grief and haunted ghosts behind him. “Make the hard choice, because all of us are counting on you.”

Theodorus felt that familiar pull settle in his chest. A charge being placed upon him.

He did not need it. This was a burden he would gladly take.

…

A crowd had gathered on the beaten earth of Suyren’s central courtyard.

Beneath the shadow of the keep stood a wooden platform raised just high enough for all to see. It had not been adorned for the occasion. The boards were old, plain, and rough beneath the sun. But the men atop it were anything but ordinary.

Bound in ropes, beaten, and bruised, the worst offenders from Georgius’s band were lined in a straight file to await their final judgment. They looked like creatures dragged out from a ditch after a long rain. Filth clung to their hair and beards, and their clothes were ragged from tears gained on the road and stiff with old sweat from standing in the scorching sun. Some whispered half prayers to God, as if some last attempt at faith could save them from torment in the hereafter.

At the head of the formation knelt Georgius, pale, sweating, and almost boneless where he sagged against his ropes. The bolt wound in his knee had festered badly, the flesh swollen and angry beneath the bandages, oozing bloody pus whenever he shifted. He had been kept alive for this moment and little more. His face had gone vacant, emptied by fever and pain, and he did not even bother to move when clods of mud and stone struck his chest and shoulders, projectiles thrown from the crowd.

“Order! Order!” Suyren’s crier called, his voice crisp and loud enough to cut through the restless noise. “The Lord of Suyren will now speak.”

Theodorus stepped into plain view of the populace.

This was the final use he could wring out of Georgius. He would use his brother’s corpse to galvanize the people and show them what Crown justice looked like when turned against those who preyed on the weak. It was as fitting an end to him as Theodorus had imagined.

“The Principality is a holy state!” Theodorus began, framing the words in the way the religious crowd would best understand them. “It is one that has survived by His grace alone!”

The people cheered, the sound rising unevenly at first before swelling through the courtyard. Theodorus raised his hand toward the condemned men.

“These men, however, sought to go against the goodness Christ preaches and bring the devil into our midst. They are thieves, rapists, and murderers, where once they had been brothers, fathers, and sons.”

The crowd booed them relentlessly. The noise thickened, ugly and eager, until it pressed against Theodorus from all sides. He felt a flicker of discomfort at the bloodlust he was inciting, but swallowed it down and kept his face composed. Ruling in a medieval state meant using crude methods toward necessary ends. He did not have the luxury of pretending otherwise.

“And none are worse than Georgius,” he said, letting the words carry, “my own brother.”

The courtyard quieted a little at that.

“It saddens me to see how far he has strayed. Even now, I wish he would welcome back the Holy Father and repent.”

Theodorus looked down at Georgius with sorrow. Georgius glared back through the feverish haze, hatred still alive in him where almost everything else had burned away. Perhaps he knew Theodorus well enough to see this was only a performance, and hated him all the more for it.

“But his crimes are too many,” Theodorus continued. “And I am a son of this Principality, and of God, before I am his brother. So I sentence these heinous fiends to execution, that they may serve as an example of the justice the Crown metes out.”

The crowd surged into uproar.

Christos stepped onto the platform carrying a greataxe that looked made for his massive frame. Its blade was broad, heavy, and freshly sharpened. One by one, the condemned were dragged forward and forced to kneel. Some cursed. Some begged. One tried to twist free and had to be slammed down by two men before Christos brought the axe down.

The sound was heavy and final each time until it came the time for a thin, reedy woman with a wild shock of black hair. She thrashed incessantly on the arms of the guards who had to hold her by the armpit.

"Get your disgusting hands off of me! You miserable cunts! Curse you to hell and back!" She howled. Despite an admirable attempt at portraying herself as a victim of Georgius's depravities, Theodorus had been thorough in his investigation of each of the accused's crimes.

While the abuses Nadia suffered were tragic, the things she allowed and incited even amongst the captured women in the bandit camp beggared belief. It seemed she enjoyed heaping upon other women what she had suffered herself.

That Georgius had tried to cover up for her also told Theodorus that there was more to their relationship than what met the eye.

And that was why Georgius was made to watch as Nadia's head rolled onto the bloody planks, face trapped in horror and anguish.

By the end, blood had darkened the block and run in narrow lines between the platform boards. The crowd’s fury had shifted into something quieter, more intent, as if the repeated blows had taken some of the heat out of them and replaced it with grim satisfaction.

Then only Georgius remained.

He was dragged forward and pushed onto his knees before the block. His eyes found Theodorus first, burning with a hatred that promised he would haunt him to the afterlife and back. Then his gaze shifted to Iohannes, who stood at the front of the crowd, implacable as stone. Iohannes showed no joy at seeing Georgius brought so low, but there was no remorse in him either.

The gag was pulled from Georgius’s mouth.

For a moment he only breathed, ragged and wet.

Christos raised the axe.

“In blood and iron!” Georgius roared, dark eyes wide with a vengeful promise.

The blade fell.

Theodorus felt the finality of it before the crowd began to shout again.

Unbidden, a tear slipped down his cheek, carrying a sorrow that did not fully belong to him. It came from the original Theodorus who still lived somewhere inside his heart, mourning the sight of their father’s hopes for all his children ending on a bloodied block in Suyren.

With one violent swing, he had severed the hatred that tied him to the past.

Now came the aftermath. And the chance to look towards the future.