LTSV - Lost & Found 50 (Patreon)

Mira snapped her fingers to get Penny’s attention and gestured towards the Prince Regent—or, well, he’d be the former Prince Regent at this point, wouldn’t he? 

“Detain him,” she said, mostly for the benefit of the room. “Help Cecily with the others.”

Penny shimmered into visibility, already in her combat form. Then, even more Pennys winked into existence; Pennys of all different proportions, from the size of a feather pen to the rough equivalent of three large adult men. 

The ghost drakes converged on the remaining combatants, while even more flowed out into the hallway to go help outside since the nearest targets were already engaged. Some of the bigger drakes immobilized the body guards and held them still for Cecily to exorcise. Three of the medium drakes, including the original Penny, cornered Huranel up against the wall. They corralled him with swats from their long, broad tails and left huge cuts in the voluminous sleeves just in case he got any ideas about trying to slip past them. 

Their narrow maws hung open to reveal the clusters of translucent needle-like teeth that linked the insides of their mouths, which hid their secret second set of pharyngeal jaws that they snapped at the Huranel’s face, missing his skin by millimeters. H.R. Geiger would approve. 

All color fled his complexion as he sank to the ground, paralyzed with terror, but Mira thought they could still do better with that. Purple lightning wreathed her hands again and she pointed at him. An arc of incandescent light flashed through the air and entangled his arms and legs. Mira gestured and slammed him on the ground, face-first, and then clenched her fist. The magical energy that was tangled around his arms and legs converged on each other and left him hogtied on the floor in front of the people he’d thought, just a few minutes ago, were all at his mercy.

He tried to open his mouth, but Mira was tired of hearing him talk so she sealed his mouth with another gesture. 

“I told you that you were in good hands,” Adra said as an aside to Princess Millica. He leaned his cheek fondly on Mira’s temple as he watched her and her drakes work. 

Sir Hansford and the Templars caught up as Cecily finished up with the last of the subverted soldiers. She turned to him and pointed back down the corridor, “We need someone to escort these people out to where the enemy prisoners are being kept. The men here were under magical influence and that may be the case for the other combatants.”

Sir Hansford looked at the guards in their mismatched liveries, some of whom were practicing deep breathing with their heads between their knees. At least one of them hadn’t been able to keep from retching and was braced up against the wall by one arm with his head hanging down. 

“I see,” was all the Templar captain said. “Men, help get these people outside. The Saintess and I will take the Usurper into custody. I am immune to mental interference through the protection of my Oath and no mage living can subvert the Saintess’s will.”

“I…” Cecily looked Mira’s way and frowned at the way Adra was hanging off her. Mira couldn’t guarantee that he wasn’t doing it on purpose. He felt a little heavier against her as soon as Cecily turned their way.

“It’s fine,” Mira told her with a pointed look. She reached up to pat Adra’s cheek. “We’re fine.”

Cecily still looked like she wanted to disagree, but she took a slow step back and refocused her attention on the business still at hand. Mira could feel the trust her little sister was placing in her to not be Adra’s mind-controlled thrall and couldn’t help but feel just a little bit touched; Melody would have never. 

Maybe they’d both been doing some growing up over the course of these many, many lives. 

Princess Millica strode forth with Vesper at her side to take control of the action outside and to see for herself if her stepfather recruitment methods were entirely based in mind control. Vesper paused only to give Mira a quick hug. 

“Well done,” she whispered in Mira’s ear and pulled back with a complicated sort of look. She really did seem proud, but also sad. “Papa will also be proud of what you did today, but I want you to take it easy for the rest of the afternoon. Stay close to Adelram and let him handle it if there is any more violence. 

“I will,” Mira promised. 

“Adelram, escort Mira and the other Princesses to Rosepark for now,” Vesper directed Adra. “I’ll have more orders for you once we find out the extent of the damage, but plan for the ladies to be there overnight at minimum.” She strode forward, already issuing orders into her crystal.

“It will be as you wish,” Adra called after her, already reaching for his own crystal, but he paused as Andrei started to pass them and then stopped hard in front of Mira. “Can I help you?” Adra asked, silkily.

Andrei ignored Adra entirely and addressed Mira. “I was a fool for even thinking for a moment that I could be wrong about you,” he said quietly. “You could have stopped this whole thing before it even…”

Mira slapped him across the face before he could finish. Violet might have weighed less than a wet kitten, but Mira had plenty of experience using what little bodyweight she had to maximum effect. His head snapped back and he staggered, but he didn’t go down so she slapped him again on his other side.

“I don’t care what you do or don’t think of me,” Mira hissed, stepping into his space so they were nearly nose to nose. “Don’t make the mistake of falling for the lies you’ve told everyone about me. Your good opinion means nothing to me. The only lesson you should take away from today is that this…” she paused to indicate the blood on the floor around them, soldiers still limping away, and his father’s back receding in chains, “...is what it looks like when I decide to hurt someone. I don’t need to put tacks in anyone's shoes or push a little girl down the stairs. I certainly don’t need to hide in the crowd from what I’ve done. If I want someone dead, then they will be crumpled at my feet before the day is out.”

Andrei took a step back from her and then another, eyes wide as he cradled his smarting cheeks. She stepped forward to maintain the proximity because she didn’t think he’d gotten the message yet. 

“In future,” she continued, “Before you try to blame me for all your problems, consider that I don’t give a shit whether you live or die. You aren’t worth my attention. You are beneath my notice. If I don’t see you, then I don’t think of you. I don’t seek you out unless someone I do like makes me do it. Whatever obsession you think I have for you only exists in your head.” 

She stepped backwards, satisfied that she’s made her point, and turned with a careless backwards wave as she allowed Adra to escort her out of the room. “Think hard about the fact that you’re still alive and haven’t been ruined, then ask yourself if I’ve ever really taken an interest in being the cause for your grief.”

000

In the days that followed, Mira and the other Princesses were settled in at Rosepark behind what might well have been every single guard that Princess Millica had to spare, plus a few they probably couldn’t. Mira’s door was also being watched by a few beefy gentlemen in bowler hats at all hours.

The revelation that she was a critical cog in the Royal Family’s breeding program was made less upsetting than it could have been by the fact that they weren’t doing it for gross eugenics reasons, but were instead trying to preserve a distinct genetic marker carried by their family line without becoming Fantasy Hapsburgs. 

Now that she knew what she needed to be researching, Mira learned that the Covenant Barrier needed to be reactivated every five years and counted herself lucky that the former Prince Regent’s coup hadn’t succeeded, or else she would have been forced into a pregnancy as soon as he could arrange it. Princess Millica’s future plans did not include any of the Princesses even trying for a baby for four years at minimum. Mira and her fellow were all of a similar age and so none of them had finished their upper level education yet. According to the Royal Custom, Ladies of the Inner Court were not expected to attempt a pregnancy until after the age of twenty-five. 

Mira did not concern herself with what was going on outside Rosepark, for the time being. She knew how this was going to go. Right now, they were busy uncovering the full extent of what the former Prince Regent had done. Soon, though, the public executions would start.  

It would be slightly less awful because Cecily was living proof that almost none of the Prince Regent’s co-conspirators were doing it consensually. A few of the poor bastards woke up from his mind control missing actual years of their lives. That was another mess that Princess Millica had to be seen cleaning up. A lot of those men went into the care of the Temple District and no one knew yet if they would ever be able to resume their interrupted lives.

For her part, Lady Serapha had recovery facilities ready with almost the exact number of beds they needed at the ready. 

Sir Hansford and a contingent of senior priests led the search efforts in Huranel’s private apartments. They uncovered a secret study and workshop where they located the research and tools that led to him achieving such complete and perfect control over his victims. What those tools or research was, no one would ever know. Sir Hansford had it burned in situ along with everything else they found after Mira and Archmage Solvere reviewed it all to ensure it could be safely destroyed.

The mind control spell was inscribed on a broad sheet of leather, one broader than any single living creature could provide. She’d been afraid, for a second, that it was cured human skins that had been carefully stitched together when she found the first seam between sections. In this genre, anything could happen. Shojou went hard without warning, sometimes, but she was lucky and Archmage Solvere confirmed that the leather was actually lambskin from a particular kind of ram monster called a Jumbuck.

The application method of the circle seemed to be very similar to the diagnostic circle that Dr. Desmona had used to review Mira’s condition, back when she’d first arrived here. The target was laid down in the center and the operator activated the circle with his own mana, which imprinted their will upon the target.

“What a nasty piece of work,” Archmage Solvere commented as they burned the thing. “And I’m not just talking about the spell formulae. Whoever wrote that deserves to be shot.”

What she was referring to was the way the spell circle functioned, which Mira could only compare to one of those server rooms built by seven different engineers, none of whom had ever met, where there was a switch in the wall that wasn’t connected to anything behind the drywall or a can of Monster sitting on top of one of the server towers with a post-it note on it that read DON’T MOVE OR THE SERVERS WILL CRASH—and it was true.

Mira spent actual days trying to understand how the spell functioned and, by the time they decided it was too dangerous to risk anyone copying it to work on it any further, she was no closer to success than when she’d started. Arguably, she was even more confused than when she’d begun. It was the bumblebee of malicious magic. There was no way that it should function, except that it did.

Archmage Solvere, however, had kept her eye on the real prize and winkled out the only answer they’d really needed from their study of the circle; the reason why Huranel had never used the spell circle on his own son. The reason wasn’t out of affection and might also explain why he was so careful about what Andrei did and did not know about.

They’d figured out, early on, that the mind control circle was a multigenerational work. The circle was inscribed in several different hands and showed signs where parts of it had been scraped off and either replaced with new formulae or re-inscribed with the same language that had been scraped off. Like that hypothetical can of Monster, there were bits that the rest of the spell just wouldn’t work without and one of those areas seemed to be a bloodline protection that made it so that the operator could not apply the spell to anyone he was biologically related to.

So, it turned out that it wasn’t that Huranel wouldn’t turn his son into an obedient puppet, it was that he couldn’t, so he’d resorted to other, more insidious methods of controlling his future heir; by feeding his ego and his prejudices to make him resistant to truly learning anything except what his father told him.

Ironically, the spell would have worked on Princess Millica, but apparently the Huranel had never gotten an opportunity to use it on her. None of the affected men had been under for more than three or four years, which would have been well after the point where the Crown Princess would have been able to protect herself.