Chapter 2

Zephyr is granted asylum and pledges her life to Queen Jaia.

The history of the nation of Vilvia was fraught with bloody battles, wicked politics, near-genocide and uneasy treaties. Murder and slavery and violence, rebellions and punishments, and monarchs with iron fists that closed ever tighter around the necks of the people they ruled. It was a history that was written and rewritten many times over, by many different hands, but it could not blot out the atrocities that happened on the way to becoming what it was today.

Jaia had ruled the Kingdom of the North for ten difficult years, stepping into her mother's shoes at the height of her bloody, violent reign, and from her first days on the throne, had begun to scale back the laws and arrangements set in place by the previous queen. Mera had been ruthless, enslaving the dwindling population of monsters that still inhabited the land to work in the mines, building and training their army into the fiercest warriors the country had ever seen, tightly controlling the actions of ordinary citizens and always, always planning to invade the South Kingdom. She had fought and killed her way to the top during the third great battle of Vilvia, when the country had ended up in a stalemate and had been divided down the middle by a great wall, impassable to all by law, except with express permission from both rulers.

The peace treaty between the North and the South was laughably weak, held up only by trade between the kingdoms and a shared agreement to allow the remaining monster population to live in the forest that bridged the wall in the east. Jaia's second act as Queen had been to meet with King Lysander of South Vilvia to strengthen it with her name and her seal. Their peace was to continue a while longer, as long as both kingdoms upheld their ends of the bargain.

Her first act had been to immediately stop the monsters working in the mines and send them home to their mysterious forest, ending the slavery that had darkened the steps of the castle for so long. In replacement, she had offered good wages and protections to any of her people who wished to work, and the people, unused to being allowed so much freedom and money and tired of the rigorous, mandatory training Mera had required of them, eagerly flooded the mines with hard working men and women. Ten years on, the citizens of North Vilvia were thriving.

Not all were happy with the changes. Early in her reign, Jaia had been subjected to assassination attempts that left her wary of even her own council. She became reclusive and paranoid, wore armor under her clothes, employed bodyguards and tasters and doctors, and kept up the weapons training that her mother had instilled in her from an early age. Some nights it was hard to sleep, listening to rustles in the dark, the sound of her own breathing, the faint footsteps of guards outside the castle windows. Side-eyeing her bodyguards and food tasters and lady's maids, never leaving the castle, and as the years passed by she wondered if this was how it was supposed to be. Lonely except for advisors and council member who she knew would turn on her in the right circumstances, burdened with nightmares, forced to write to vapid princes in a pretense of trying to secure the succession of the throne and to entertain King Lysander at the annual Treaty Ball.

Lysander had been described by her mother once as a vicious idiot with dress sense. Jaia wasn't entirely sure what the relationship between to the two monarchs had been during the decades following the Third Great Battle that divided the country, but she would describe him differently. Vicious, yes. Everyone had heard the tales of war crimes he had committed and rumours of how he had treated his wives. Idiot, though, he was not. He was a man who had ruled South Vilvia for longer than she had been alive, and it was only through ruthlessness and cunning that he had stayed on his throne all this time. He was cold and calculating and his smile made her uneasy, made her wonder what he thought about when he saw her. Did he see her as an upstart girl who ruled with a bleeding heart and a soft touch that would get her killed? Did he think about how she had only earned the throne by slitting the throat of everyone in her way, only to fumble the power when she had it?

Under his gaze, even in her finery and armor, the man made her feel like she was standing on a precipice, and one wrong move would tip her over the edge and onto a waiting sword below. Like she was still just a teenager with hands covered in blood and bile in her throat and a numb sense of victory as she stared down at the body of her mother on the cold stone floor of the great hall. She knew for a fact that he was only biding his time under the uneasy peace treaty that the kingdoms both benefited from. One day, his patience would run out.

Now, as she stared at Lysander's seal burned into the monster's arm, she wondered how much more she had missed. "I don't understand... why..."

"The King has enslaved some of us to work underground," the monster told her, eyes sharp as she watched Jaia take in this new information. "You did not know? He has laboratories and workshops and furnaces, and he makes us stoke the fires and melt the ore and pour the metals into casts. He steals us from our home and brands us like he owns us. But I escaped."

Jaia felt sick, but there was a slightly more pressing matter than the fact that Lysander was using the monsters as slaves as her mother had that needed to be addressed. "Why not return to the forest? Why seek asylum here?"

The monster grinned a wide, toothy grin. "Because I took something from him, something he will not stop searching for. I could not lead them to my home, my family."

"No doubt he knows you have come here."

"No doubt," the monster agreed. "But I have no doubt that you will protect me."

How could this creature know that it would be protected here? Jaia hadn't even made up her mind about what to do with it. She gave the monster a hard look, reserved as she gazed up at it. "And why is that? Why do you not think I would turn you out?"

"Because you just told me you want to make up for your mother's actions. And because I know that he will try to kill you, and I can offer protection in return for yours."

And there it was. She knew it was true. In every cold smile, in every gleam of his eyes as he gazed down at her in the flickering candlelight of the ballroom, in his very touch as she was forced to dance with him, Jaia could feel his intentions. And that intention was to kill her. One day, someday, maybe soon, maybe later. He wanted her throne and her resources and her kingdom, and he would have them, one way or another.

He had tried, long ago, during the first weeks after her coronation, to court her. Even as a girl of fifteen, she knew that no alliance with him would last. He would kill her in her sleep on their wedding night if she gave him that chance. She had turned him down and it had angered him. She had been watching her back ever since.

"You know this for certain?" she asked anyway, not wanting the confirmation of everything she already knew to be true but needing to hear it anyway.

"His Majesty thought we would not understand when he discussed these matters in front of us," the monster scoffed. "He mentioned his plans many times. As well as a prophecy. Always the prophecy, he wanted to avoid it badly enough to kill you."

Jaia didn't know of any prophecy. If she was involved in a greater plan divined by the heavens, she had not been notified of it. "What plans? What do I need to watch for?"

The monster tilted its head, smiling down at her. "Grant me asylum and the protection of your kingdom, and I will tell you all I know and protect you with my life."

"Why?" The question slipped out before she could stop it. "Why would you try so hard to protect me?"

"Because I believe you are our only hope. The only hope we have to achieve peace in Vilvia, North and South and Forest. And for that, you need to stay alive."

She felt her mouth go dry, and her chest squeeze. No one had expressed so much faith in her, not her mother, not her advisors and certainly not her council. In her ten years of ruling, dodging death at every turn and trying her best to undo decades of damage, she had never heard anyone express anything so powerful as this hope in her rule. She found herself nodding, curling her fingers in her skirts. "I will publicly grant you asylum on behalf of the country of North Vilvia. King Lysander will not touch you if he wishes the treaty to remain in place."

And the monster gazed down at her, eyes intense, before slowly kneeling to the ground and bowing it's great head in front of her. "And I pledge myself to your protection from now until my death. I am yours to command."

Jaia reached out with shaking hands, and unlatched the cell door once again.

Author's Note

All comments welcome.