Fallen Eagle

1st Week of September, 1460

Smoke, heat, and sweat were the only things that truly reigned inside a blacksmith’s workshop. Theodorus stood amid an abundance of all three, speaking to a man who had lived among them for so long that they seemed to have worked their way into his very skin.

Zotikos was coated in soot from brow to wrist, charcoal dust settling so deeply into the creases of his face that they had become a part of his skin. Behind him, a clay forge bloomed with orange light while dark iron rested among the coals, slowly brightening toward a furious red.

“Your order is just about done an’ ready, milord. Is it to yer liking?” The man was all thick forearms and pale scars cutting across them, standing nearly a head taller than him and had the broad, heavy build of someone capable of lifting an anvil without complaint, yet he watched Theodorus with the fragile nervousness of a child awaiting judgment from a stern tutor.

Theodorus had commissioned the tools in large a quantities across the small smithies spread across the northern villages, paying in fair amounts of food and coin, something which surprised the craftsmen themselves. Suyren’s modest surplus had steadily grown as villages had begun buying into the small loan scheme and the monthly market fairs were slowly gaining traction. It was not much coin by the standards of a proper state treasury, but enough to keep several craftsmen busy, which in his mind was a worthy investment in the future.

He picked up the nearest basket scythe and ran a thumb carefully along the back of its curved blade. The edge had been hammered thin and sharpened reasonably well, though faint irregularities remained where the metal had cooled unevenly. The curve itself was sound, sweeping outward far enough to cut through a broad handful of grain without placing too much strain on the wielder’s wrists.

Above the blade sat a light basket woven by the village wickerworkers, its ribs fitted into small iron loops Zotikos had forged along the shaft. It would catch and gather the stalks as they were cut rather than allowing them to scatter across the field.

Theodorus tested the second handle next. It was little more than a smoothed length of wood connected to the main shaft by a thin braided cord of horsehair. Held in the off hand, it gave the user some control over the basket’s angle and helped steady the tool through the cutting motion. The binding pulled taut when he extended it, then loosened cleanly when he brought his hands closer together.

“It is more than acceptable, Zotikos. Do not worry yourself over that.”

The blacksmith released an audible breath, his great chest sinking with it.

A moment later, he seemed to realize he had betrayed his nerves and straightened sharply, as though the relief had been some breach of manners.

“This will help your village for years to come,” Theodorus said, moving the conversation forward so the man did not linger on his unease. “You should be proud of the work. It cannot have been easy to produce so many with the limited means available here.”

“I make do, milord.” Zotikos bowed humbly.

Behind him, two young boys worked the bellows, struggling to keep pace needed for the orange fire. It flared and faded rather than holding a steady heat.

It was no masterwork. The blade was heavier than Theodorus would have preferred, and the basket sat slightly crooked against the shaft. Yet considering Zotikos had produced it inside a hut scarcely large enough for the forge, with a single battered anvil and two half-trained apprentices, the result was surprisingly good.

Theodorus had left its construction to Zotikos and the local wickerworkers, providing only clear instructions and showing a working prototype he had made in Suyren weeks ago.

The result had been a surprising variety of basket scythes across the northern villages. Some had deeper baskets, others longer shafts or differently curved blades. A few were almost certainly worse than his original design, but Theodorus had no objection to allowing the variations for now. Small workshops often had to adjust the tool to what materials and existing frames they had on hand, so enforcing standardization would not be easy. And who knew, they might stumble upon something better, a useful improvement that could later be copied and standardized.

Crude trial and error was still research and development, however medieval the setting.

"This is as fine a weapon as you have ever crafted," Theodorus stated.

“I’m not sure how this here could be so useful, milord,” Zotikos admitted.

“Do you know the greatest problem we face during the coming harvest, Zotikos?” Theodorus asked.

The blacksmith remained carefully silent, eyes lowered. People here were accustomed to receiving answers from their lords, not being invited to question them.

“It is not a lack of cultivated land,” Theodorus continued, “or even drought. It is a lack of people.”

He set the scythe back on the bench and turned toward the doorway. Ducking beneath the low lintel, Theodorus left the cramped heat of Zotikos’s workshop and stepped into the village beyond.

“The war in the north stripped the land of its most precious resource.” Theodorus gestured toward the village around them.

Empty houses stood between those still inhabited, yards slowly surrendering to weeds. Beyond them, broad fields stretched across the slopes, some only partly tended by the families left behind, others already being abandoned to thistle and wild grass, though the grain was still there, if in lower quantities.

“We tried to restore order after the rebellion ended, but by then entire families had already packed their belongings and gone searching for greener pastures. Others fled into the hills and turned to banditry.”

Near the farther edge of the village, Theodorus could make out several of the families rescued from the bandit hideout, returned to their abandoned homes to take up their work again. They were a pale shadow of the numbers they had been, a reflection of just how many had been taken away in that terrible landslide Georgius had caused.

“There may be grain enough in the fields, but no hands to collect it.”

Christos and the rest of his entourage looked across the quiet village with more thoughtful expressions. The problem was simple when laid out plainly, but dangerous all the same.

“And that will help?” Zotikos asked, pointing toward the basket scythe.

“With a sickle, a reaper usually gathers a handful of stalks with one hand, cuts them with the other, and lays them aside to be bound into sheaves,” Theodorus explained. “It is precise work, but slow, and it keeps the labourer bent over for most of the day. A regular scythe cuts a wider swath, though the stalks can fall unevenly and must still be gathered and aligned afterward.”

He lifted the basket scythe and tapped the woven frame with two fingers.

“This catches the stalks as the blade passes and lays them together in a more orderly row. Used properly, it reduces the time spent gathering and arranging the grain before it can be bound.”

Theodorus turned the tool in his hands, feeling its awkward balance. It was heavier than an ordinary scythe and would take practice to control. An inexperienced user could easily twist the basket into the standing crop, scatter the cut stalks, or exhaust himself before midday. Yet even a flawed improvement had value when labour was the rarest resource in the north. And they would have a few weeks to train in its use until harvest came around.

“And that,” he said, gesturing toward the green fields spreading around Sanavli, “is what may allow us to reap all of this before the grain overripens and begins shedding into the soil.”

He could, in theory, divert the former bandits and labour crews to assist with the harvest. However, doing so would mean delaying the cement project. The basket scythe offered another answer. It allowed a single family to manage a larger plot, which mattered now that there was more farmland than people could readily cultivate.

Even if the coming harvest proved poor, the northern villages would no longer be entirely dependent on outside grain or the goodwill of distant officials. With enough food secured and enough time spared, they could begin repairing what the war had broken.

For the first time in years, their future might rest in their own hands.

The sharp sting of nettles against Cassandra’s hands was an oddly welcome pain, softened by the warm sweetness of wild thyme whenever her skirts brushed across it. A gardener’s work seemed to be a constant struggle against decay and overgrowth, with every living thing either dying too quickly or growing somewhere it had no right to be.

They had given her thick leather gloves fit for the work, though the nettles still found their way through the seams, leaving behind little burning marks that tingled whenever she bent her wrists.

Cassandra wiped the sweat from her brow with her forearm and regarded the corner of the garden she had claimed for the morning.

She had cleared away the dead flowers, yellow grass, and broken stems, but the work had left shallow wounds of churned earth scattered among the surviving flowerbeds. They stood out terribly against the ordered beauty around them, like holes in a piece of fine embroidery.

Cassandra knelt beside one of those patches, hunched low over a small green offshoot she had discovered spreading beyond the flowerbed. Its thin roots had crept into the loose soil between the old stones of the Nomikos loggia, searching for whatever little moisture had gathered in the shade.

She eased it free with both hands, careful not to tear the pale roots, and placed it into the small hollow she had prepared.

“Now you can live and grow to your full size, little one,” Cassandra whispered.

She had taken to speaking softly with the plants under her care. At first, she had done it only once or twice without thinking, but it was often enough now that she could call it a habit.

Imagining their silent company made the garden feel a little less lonely.

“Go ahead and stretch wide,” she told the offshoot, patting the earth gently around its stem. “There is plenty of room here.” Cassandra pressed the soil down with the tips of her fingers.

She sat back on her heels and looked across the rest of the yellowing garden. There was still far too much to do. Some beds had recovered under regular care, their leaves showing fresh green beneath the older growth, while others seemed determined to fade no matter how patiently she tended them.

Watering had become the hardest battle in the scorching heat. The plants drank every droplet from her watering can with desperate greed, so Cassandra had begun carrying the water out early in the morning and again near dusk, when it seemed to stick in the soil longer.

Weeding was at least more straightforward. Find what grew in the wrong place, and pull it out by the root.

It became a much tougher job to do when you had to do so for unwanted intruders not of the prickly kind.

“Still at it?” Stefanos’s voice rose behind her, interrupting the quiet rhythm of her work.

“Hmm-hmm,” Cassandra answered without turning around.

She still did not know how she was meant to feel about him. Learning that Stefanos had been responsible for that mysterious warning she had received about the Captain's betrayal had unsettled her. The knowledge had placed a dozen older conversations beneath a different light, and she had spent the weeks since avoiding him whenever she could manage it without appearing openly rude.

“What are you doing now?” Stefanos asked.

He seemed to sense the awkwardness between them. Some of the hardness and deliberate callousness he had worn around her eased over the past few weeks. It was as though he had stopped trying quite so fiercely to place a wall between them.

“I’ve been trying to repopulate this stretch,” Cassandra explained, brushing her hand slowly through the dark soil. It broke apart beneath her fingers too readily, dry and loose. “Nothing I plant here seems willing to grow so far.” Stefanos stepped nearer, trying to peer into her work, though he remained outside the bed. “So I took little offshoots from some of the healthier plants and moved them into a quieter corner. I thought they might grow stronger there without having to compete for water or sunlight. Now that they are larger, I am putting them here.”

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Like most things in the garden, Cassandra did not truly know whether she was doing it correctly. She had only half-remembered images of her mother to guide her: pale hands parting leaves to inspect their undersides, a quiet voice instructing a servant where to cut, the faint scent of crushed herbs clinging to her sleeves afterward.

Perhaps moving the offshoots was necessary. Perhaps it was only some affectionate little ritual her mother had enjoyed.

In the end, it did not matter very much. The garden deserved to be cared for in the same gentle way her mother had once cared for it.

Cassandra was only borrowing it in a sense. The garden would always be her mother's.

“That is an awful lot of work for such a small stretch of earth,” Stefanos said, resting a hand against his chin. “Surely you could place stones there, or some other decoration that would fit among the plants. I hear that is what is usually done on dead ground.”

“I was the one who trampled it,” Cassandra answered quietly, keeping her eyes on the soil and fragile shoots. “It is only right that I mend it properly.”

The words landed more heavily than she intended. Stefanos looked from the damaged bed to her and fell silent.

“What did you come here for?” Cassandra asked, smoothing earth around the nearest stem.

“The sun has nearly set,” Stefanos said, nodding toward the fading light beyond the wall.

“So you came to make certain I obey the captain’s little curfew?” The mention of him still drew a bitter smile from her.

“You cannot work from sunup to sundown,” Stefanos replied, avoiding the question. He leaned against a tree, trying for carelessness and failing badly enough that Cassandra noticed.

“Why not? I am still learning how to finagle my way around the task you gave me. I have no guide, and no one to tell me which plants need shade, which need more water, or when I have cut too much away. Working slowly and watching what happens is the only way I know to keep from damaging the garden further.”

“I see you looking at your hands,” Stefanos said, and the strange turn in the conversation made Cassandra face him. “I see how pained you are whenever you notice the calluses taking root there.”

Cassandra drew her hands against her chest, hiding them beneath her sleeves. Heat climbed into her face. That was a part of her she hadn't thought anyone had noticed. And now that it had, she was finding she did not want anyone to.

“If you work too hard, they won’t mend,” Stefanos’s words felt far away, fading into the background.

Her fingers curled beneath the cloth. They felt hideous now, marked by cuts, blisters, and hard patches where the skin had once been pale and clean. They belonged to a servant hauling buckets and scraping dirt from stone, not to the girl she remembered waltzing through this castle. They were the grimmest reflection of the life she now lived.

The garden lost its gentleness around her. Cassandra rose and gathered her tools, still taking care to leave the bed tidy.

She led the way out of the garden. Stefanos stumbled a step behind her, surprised by the abruptness of her departure.

“Is everything all right, Cassandra?” he asked, concern roughening his voice.

“No,” she said, walking into the corridor with her back held straight, “but it is nothing you can help with.”

She forced her shoulders level, chin raised. It was one of the few things captivity and service had not beaten out of her. And right now she just wanted to feel like a piece of herself again.

“Cassandra, wait-” She paid him no heed. Maybe she should have.

Around the bend ahead, Zeno Makris appeared with a small entourage at his heels. Cassandra had never seen the nobleman at rest. He was forever moving from one obligation to another, issuing instructions or chasing some fresh task as though stillness were a failing.

Cassandra’s breath caught. He was the reason she wore a covering over her hair and lowered her face whenever men of rank passed nearby. Because of him, she moved through the residence like a frightened servant, always aware that one careless glance might expose her.

Until now, she had only seen him at the edge of halls or across crowded rooms, never close enough for him to study her. Now they were walking directly toward one another.

Cassandra stopped, fear emptying every sensible thought from her mind. The hesitation lasted only a moment, but it was long enough for Zeno’s eyes to find hers.

She lowered her gaze and stepped against the wall, folding inward as her months of service had taught her. The royal bearing she had carried from the garden vanished beneath the shape of a girl trained to make herself small.

She heard the steady rhythm of footsteps on worn stone, each one drawing closer and sending her heart beating faster against her ribs.

Stefanos rounded the corner only a moment after she did. Cassandra kept her head lowered, but from the small glimpses she caught of his posture, she saw the instant he realized what had happened, though he recovered admirably.

“My lord,” Stefanos said smoothly.

“Stefanos.”

Zeno’s voice was of a smooth cadence, each word pleasant to the ear and every syllable drawn out just enough to be proper. There was something extremely cultured in the way he spoke, a smoothness that made even an ordinary greeting sound deliberate.

“Who is-” he began.

“Lord Theodorus has called for your presence.”

Cassandra had to struggle not to look toward Stefanos.

The misdirection was admirably done, spoken just early enough that it did not quite become an interruption. Invoking the Captain was dangerous, but perhaps it was the only thing important enough to pull Zeno’s attention away from the girl standing against the wall.

He had only seen Cassandra’s face once, and even then only briefly, months ago. Surely he could not remember it clearly. So long as he had no reason to stop and look closer.

“…Did he say the reason?” Zeno asked.

The pause before the question seemed to stretch much longer than it truly did. Cassandra kept her eyes fixed on the stone near her feet and tried to breathe evenly.

“He did not specify,” Stefanos answered without hesitation. “I believe it concerns a message from the capital.”

The excuse was beginning to sound dangerously ambitious to Cassandra. If the Captain had received no such message, the lie could collapse the moment Zeno reached him.

She could only trust that Stefanos knew what he was doing.

“I see.”

Zeno turned toward the young cupbearer standing behind him.

“Inform Stathis that I will discuss the latest patrol reports with him another time.”

The boy vanished almost at once, barely pausing long enough to bow before hurrying down the corridor.

“If you will allow me to lead the way,” Stefanos offered.

He drew Zeno’s attention back toward himself while Cassandra concentrated on becoming as unremarkable as possible.

“Of course,” Zeno said lightly.

Cassandra could almost hear the polite smile in his voice.

She remained where she was as they passed, head bowed and hands tucked carefully against herself.

Then Zeno stopped in front of her.

Cassandra’s heart seemed to seize.

“Curious,” he said. “I did not know we had a gardener.”

His voice did not sound suspicious. If anything, it held only mild interest.

That did nothing to calm her.

“Carissa began only a few weeks ago,” Stefanos said, without the slightest break in his performance. “She has been tending to the loggia.”

“I shall have to visit it sometime, then,” was all Zeno said.

His footsteps started up once more, carrying him farther down the hall with Stefanos beside him. Cassandra remained frozen for several breaths after they had gone, afraid that moving too soon might somehow call them back.

Her heart beat so hard in the quiet corridor that she was half convinced someone else might hear it.

The moment she felt safe enough to leave, she hurried to her room, shut the door behind her, and climbed onto the bed. She curled in on herself atop the blankets, hands pressed close beneath her arms as though she could still hide from the encounter.

It had been far too close.

They had avoided disaster by the narrowest margin, and the only question was how long they could keep this whole house of cards standing before the smallest breeze finally brought it down.

It was a tremendously interesting discovery Zeno had just made.

He would never have imagined that the former heiress of old Lion Adanis, a girl supposedly sent away to meet whatever fate Theodorus had arranged for her, was still prowling about Suyren under everyone’s noses, serving as a gardener, no less.

The absurdity of it almost made him smile.

It had been a completely accidental discovery that had fallen into his hands as if a gift from God.

Zeno had seen through the nervousness clearly. The one-armed servant boy had hidden it admirably, but not perfectly. Too much hesitation, the way he redirected the conversation a tad too quickly.

A true master of whispers would have smoothed over those wrinkles, but he supposed it would be too much from a sixteen-year-old boy. He said that, but his co-ruler was exactly that age. It was honestly astonishing that he was co-ruling an entire frontier with a teenager. But the boy had made an unbelievable blunder.

Being caught harbouring an exile, and one tied so closely to Adanis besides, was no small matter. At the very least, it could invite criminal accusations. At worst, depending on who chose to make use of the knowledge and how loudly, it could become something considerably more dangerous.

Of course, Zeno had shown nothing of his recognition.

A sensible player did not reveal his hand merely because he had drawn something useful. First came understanding. Then leverage. Only after that did one decide whether the card ought to be played at all.

“My lord.” Stefanos knocked firmly against the door. “Lord Zeno is here to see you about that urgent matter you discussed with me.”

Zeno very admired the nerve of it.

The phrase was almost certainly some improvised warning meant to give Theodorus a few precious moments to invent an explanation. To his credit, the one-armed boy had not wavered once while constructing the lie in the corridor, although it had still been trivially easy to see through.

If anything, the misdirection had only confirmed that there was something worth hiding. To be fair, had the boy done nothing, Zeno would have stopped and questioned the girl until something gave way, so the only real avenue to escape detection would have been to choose a different path from the very beginning.

It was clever enough, on the surface, to hide the girl as a servant. The disguise had worked, after all. Zeno had been in Suyren for some time and had never noticed her.

Yet from a strategic standpoint, the decision was idiotic.

Did they truly expect him to remain oblivious forever?

That thought offended him more than it should have.

Not because he had been deceived. Deception was part of the game. He respected a good disguise when he saw one.

No, what irritated him was the assumption that such a fragile arrangement could be maintained indefinitely with him none the wiser.

“Ah, yes. Enter.”

A muffled voice came from the other side of the door.

Well, that confirmed what Zeno had already begun to suspect - Theodorus was involved in this whole ridiculous plot.

The possibility that he was not had always been slim, but Zeno had kept it alive all the same., perhaps against his better judgement. In truth, he had almost hoped for another answer.

These developments were useful to him, certainly. Yet Zeno found himself reluctant to believe that Theodorus had made such a simple mistake. It was so unlike him.

Over the past months, Zeno had developed a genuine respect for the young nobleman. In questions of efficiency, calculation, and the proper use of limited resources, they often saw the world in much the same way, though that did not make them friends.

Men like them could cooperate for a time, even admire one another, but eventually their interests would clash. Zeno had already realized they were reaching for the same goal. The same Crown.

And when that happened, respect would matter less than position.

There could only ever be one man holding the better hand after all. And Zeno intended that to be him.

The door opened.

“Lord Zeno, please have a seat.”

Theodorus gestured toward the chair opposite him. His hands were folded near his mouth, fingers idly brushing at the sparse beginnings of a moustache.

Zeno took the offered seat and settled comfortably into it.

“What is this missive your man spoke of?” Zeno asked, and his curiosity was entirely genuine. He wanted to see what Theodorus would invent to attempt to escape this current predicament.

Surprisingly enough, Theodorus produced an open letter bearing the royal seal.

Zeno accepted it and gave the parchment a brief examination before turning to the contents. The folds were still crisp, the wax recently broken, and there was none of the soft wear that came from a letter being carried about for days in a sleeve or satchel. It was recent, almost certainly received that morning.

So Stefanos had likely known of the letter’s arrival, Zeno’s lack of knowledge of it, and capitalized on the stretch of luck. Canny.

Zeno’s eyes moved quickly over the blocky script, which he recognized as the hand of the Megas Doux.

“The Crown is granting us greater liberty in how we organize military readiness across the north,” Theodorus explained, “and in the use of the nomad tribes we have recently brought into alliance.”

That caught Zeno’s full attention.

The concession was significant, far more significant than Theodorus’s calm delivery suggested. It confirmed just how far Theodorus was being enabled.

Theodorus had so far enacted a radical, bizarre restructuring of northern administration, stretched customary practice, and somehow the Crown found reason to look elsewhere.

The village charters had been the clearest example of this blatant favoritism. Zeno and Theodorus had been careful to frame them as temporary necessities, little more than emergency measures designed to keep the northern bureaucracy functioning and squeeze badly needed revenue from territories that had become almost impossible to administer after the rebellion.

The argument was not entirely false, and the early results were proving promising.

Revenues had begun to recover, and unrest had been diminished to grumbling, something half expected of half-starved peasants. Villages that had once seemed ready to empty themselves into the hills were slowly returning to order.

That success, of course, granted them a great deal of forgiveness, but it alone would not have been enough without someone above them deciding that the questions were less important than the results.

Zeno kept his expression pleasantly attentive, but inside his mind calculated matters coldly.

At last, the path ahead of him was becoming clear.

He had no idea how Theodorus had managed to gain such an amount of goodwill from the Megas Doux. Zeno himself had laboured under Panagiotis for years and had never earned anything approaching this degree of indulgence. The man was famously difficult to impress and even harder to persuade.

It was senseless and moronic, frankly, but it did not matter anymore.

Theodorus had that favour. Zeno had the means to use it.

He would allow the young lord to continue pushing his brilliant, reckless little ideas across the north. He would support the reforms where they proved useful, refine them where they were clumsy, and ensure their successes became rooted deeply enough that no sensible government could later afford to tear them out.

At the same time, he would keep records of every irregular order, stretched authority, dubious association, and, of course, every concealed exile.

Evidence did not need to destroy a man immediately. It could be much much more useful if preserved until the right moment.

When Zeno had collected enough, arranged properly and presented with suitable restraint, he could place the entire case before the Crown. By then, the north would already have been transformed, and someone would need to assume stewardship of Suyren and the surrounding territories afterward.

Someone experienced.

Someone already familiar with the administration.

Someone who had, naturally, helped preserve the useful parts while quietly preventing the worst excesses.

Zeno nearly smiled.

Perhaps there would even be enough to implicate Panagiotis in the process. That would depend on how carefully the man had covered his involvement, and Zeno was not foolish enough to underestimate him.

But if the opportunity presented itself...

The position of Megas Doux was hardly beyond imagination.

Now, that would be amusing.

His uncle had spent an entire lifetime cultivating influence merely to stand as an equal to Panagiotis. Zeno might reach the same heights before he reached thirty.

He lowered the letter and listened as Theodorus continued explaining the practical implications of the Crown’s decision.

Theodorus had influence, freedom, and an unusual talent for producing ideas no one else would dare attempt.

Zeno would squeeze out every drop of genius he could from the boy, wringing everything out of his darling little status to push for his own agendas and reforms. Then, once Theodorus had been all used up, Zeno would cast him aside like a discarded rag, wrung dry and stained beyond any further purpose.

He had never considered himself above using whatever tools fortune placed in his hands to get ahead.

His opponents would simply have to accept his apologies in advance.