LTSV - Lost & Found 57 (Patreon)

Duels, by their nature, were usually pretty quick. 

Mira had seen movies where the actors drew it out over several minutes, climbing all over the scenery, but that usually wasn’t the case in her experience of real duels. Either you won within a few strokes or you lost in the same timeframe, especially in the case of ‘first blood.’

This duel had been going on for perhaps a minute as the boys circled each other, lunged, and defended themselves. Randall was still calm and patient, but Andrei was starting to lose his composure. Sweat was beading along his temple and his teeth were gritted. There were sweat patches forming under his arms. His pupils had narrowed down into furious pinpricks. He was struggling and he hated it.

Randall feinted left and Andrei was just tired enough to fall for it. His blade pierced Andrei’s guard and slipped upwards on an unerring path towards Andrei’s jaw. 

You could see in Andrei’s eyes that he knew he was about to lose.

Then Mira felt a tingle along her spine that was swamped by an immediate wave of profound disappointment. In the ring, Randall’s pace slowed and Andrei’s sped up—unnaturally, so. He dipped away from the tip of Randall’s blade and used the fact that Randall was stuck in an extended lunge to step, turn, and use the rotational force of his body to open up the entire exposed side of Randall’s face. 

Cecily screamed. Alan bellowed in outrage next to her while William used his entire body to keep them from lunging forward.

Bertram bellowed, “HALT!”

Randall fell to his knees, hands clenched around his wound to try and stem the bleeding. Good luck, it was gushing blood like any headwound. From what Mira could see, his eye had been spared from the path of Andrei’s blade, but only just. The cut might actually be deep enough to scar, despite magical healing. 

Andrei stood over him, chest heaving, with a wild smile spread across his face. “Too bad, friend,” he panted, eyes bright. “It’s my win.”

“Andrei of Wraithwood loses due to fraudulent use of magic in a competition of arms!” Bertram continued, as though Andrei hadn’t said anything.

Andrei whipped around and finally saw the way everyone was looking at him; Bertram’s flat expression, Cecily’s disgust, the way Alan was clearly spoiling to get in the ring with him next, the cool disappointment in Princess Millica’s eyes, and Bryn standing at the edge of the duelling ring with wide eyes and his mouth fallen open in dismay.

Then Andrei looked down at himself and saw his free hand and sleeve had turned bright red with a hazy aura of mana effect that had entered the visual range.

One of the failsafes Mira had included in the duelling ring spell was to make it flag any illegal use of magic by dying the mana effect bright red. Andrei had used a momentum exchange spell to slow Randall’s motion and speed up his own. He likely only had enough mana for a second or two, but that was all he’d needed. The Null Field aspect of the circle would have suppressed any mana leakage from reaching the visual—if Mira hadn’t accounted for that when she threw together her spell. 

“I…” Andrei looked around at the people staring at him. “...I didn’t!” He turned in a slow circle, looking for a sympathetic face, and found Bryn staring at him. “Bryn! Tell them, I wouldn’t!”

Bryn shook his head and stepped backwards. The dismay on his face matched what Mira was feeling in that moment. 

Yes, she’d been afraid this would happen, but she hadn’t actually believed that it would. 

Peleon was supposed to be a hero. He was meant to be one of the good guys! It was true that Mira had never been a particularly evil villain, although she’d fake it for a little while if she thought it would move the plot along or help to encourage the protagonists into fulfilling their own potential. Her role was usually shaped by circumstance and flawed outside opinions of her, but that didn’t mean their stories didn’t need heroes.

Something of what Mira was feeling slipped the net of her control and she said what was probably on a lot of minds right now, certainly Bryn’s, “You were supposed to do better than this!” she cried out. 

Unfortunately, Andrei failed to be chastised. Instead he whipped around and, for a second, it was like they were back in that foyer right before he’d slapped her. “You!” he leveled a finger at her as he bore down on her position. “You did this! You haven’t taken enough from me, is that it? First my lover, then my father and my freedom, now you’re coming for my future?”

Mira felt her lip curl as disgust finally overwhelmed her disappointment. 

“You’ll never stop finding ways to blame me for your shortcomings, I see,” she spat and in that moment she really felt like Violet. She had all Violet’s most critical memories now and they surged up to overtake her, just like when she’d met Bertram. “The second you think you might experience a consequence, you’ll turn on me with your finger pointed like the judgement of God, as though I have no purpose other than to be the pebble in your shoe! If there’s no one left to take your side then look in the mirror before you look at me! Cecily left you because you hit a woman in front of her! Bryn was taken away because you refused to listen when he asked you to leave our house and you made him suffer the consequences of your choice!”

“I never liked him to begin with,” Alan volunteered even as William shushed him. “In case that wasn’t clear.”

“I cannot speak for Princess Millica, but it seems to me that she’s given you countless opportunities that you’ve thrown away,” Mira continued and stomped forward to meet him in the ring, ignoring the noises of concern coming from behind her. It might have been Bertram. It might have been Vesper. It might have been Cecily. It might have been Adra. It might have been all of them at the same time and she didn’t care. The voice of a dead woman had possessed her and she was going to speak. “What would happen to any normal man who behaves the way you do; hitting whomever you like and cheating to get your way? They would have been thrown in gaol long ago! Are you so blinded by your own privilege that you think you’re immune to the consequences of your own actions?”

“You…!” Andrei reached for her front with one hand and raised his other, but Mira wasn’t about to have this go down the same way twice. She caught him by the forearm, hooked her foot around his ankle, and used his momentum to send him plowing face-first into the ground.

She could have stopped there. She should have stopped there, but her vision had gone red and there was no convenient seizure to cut the legs out from under her temper this time and having him eat shit in front of their entire peer group was the least of what she had planned for him.

Andrei came up with his fists balled and the last thing she saw of him, before an enormous dark shape appeared between them was the faint look of surprise on his face as he looked up, up, up—at Bertram Coventry. 

Mira’s stomach somehow managed to drop into her shoes and fly into her throat at the same time as the part of her that was still possessed by Violet’s grief and fury was suddenly presented with the sight of her father defending her. 

Neither Mira nor Violet had ever had any complaint with how Bertram managed her engagement, or at least Violet hadn’t complained past the age where she realized she had no better solution for the problem of Andrei. She knew that her father had no right of refusal when it came to a royal marriage decree and she saw how hard he worked to keep Andrei’s visitation time at Fort Nightfall to a bare minimum. The Lord Warden of the Central Corridor was meant to be the Queen’s most loyal blade, the one who defended the Capitol from men and monsters alike. The very nature of his oaths to the kingdom prevented him from retaliating against Andrei’s insults to his child; a fact that the former Prince Regent had taken ruthless advantage of. 

Mira could now see that Bertram had been forced to play a long game by sending Vesper into Princess Millica’s service to reinforce their hereditary bonds with the Crown and to protect her as the next Queen. Getting Millica on the throne was the fastest, surest route to protecting both his children, the country they lived in, and the institutions he was sworn to uphold.

The one correct choice that Andrei had made, in terms of his own welfare, was to not back his father in the moment of the coup. Now, however, he’d just surrendered all the privileges he’d managed to retain through his one moment of loyalty and then he’d tried to hit Bertram Coventry’s daughter for a second time right in front of him.

Someone caught her behind the knees with a study forearm and lifted her off her feet. “You don’t need to watch this part,” Adra said as he turned her to face away from the two men before she heard the sound of a fist hitting flesh and a sound of pain. Adra carried her off (despite her best efforts to get down, she wanted to see the show!!) to where Cecily had Randall laying down with his head in her lap.

“Try to keep looking up,” Cecily hiccuped as she worked on his face. There was a new quality to her mana and she was visibly struggling to control her power. Randall’s wound, however, was already scarred and she was working to reduce it as much as she could through the use of her divine mana. 

She spared Mira a stern glance, “We are going to discuss your choices later, don’t think we won’t!” 

Mira held up her hands in surrender, while also trying to crane her neck around Adra’s shoulder to see what Bertram was doing. He hadn’t stopped with a single punch and it had just occurred to her that someone should go stop him before he accidentally (on on purpose) managed to kill Andrei.

Princess Millica was already headed over that way, but she didn’t say anything until she was close enough to put a hand on Bertram’s elbow as he raised his fist for another blow. “That’s enough,” she said.

Bertram turned to look at her and the look in his eyes was as close to madness as she had ever seen him. He didn’t lower his fist, but Mira could see Andrei using the pause to scramble away from him, closer to the Princess. 

“Highness,” Bertram rasped. “I have endured for years, in service to my oaths and the name of this nation. You cannot ask me to spare this…”

Princess Millica shook her head. “I need him alive to stand trial,” she explained.

Andrei had managed to crawl to her feet and stopped, frozen, when she said that. He looked up at his sister with one eye already starting to swell shut. “Sister?” he gasped. 

Princess Millica looked down at Andrei before dropping down into a crouch in front of him so that they were eye level. “I have made it clear since you were a child that, though I will grant you your requests, I will not shield you from the consequences of your choices. We have had this conversation many times, Andrei, and you have yet to believe me. You have always seemed to think that I am telling you these things just for form’s sake, even when I have proved to you time and time again that I am and have always been serious,” she told him. 

“I agreed to annul your engagement. I agreed to release you from the duties and restrictions of being a part of the royal family. Now, you have no allies who are obligated to protect you and you chose to use offensive magic within the Palace Complex. That was even before you raised a hand in anger to one of my Ladies. You have studied these laws. You told Lady Violet, yourself, that magical duels were forbidden on the Palace Grounds and then you chose to use magic. Do not try and tell me that you didn’t cast that spell, we all saw you about to lose. None of us here today are fools.” Princess Millica stood and waved over the guards. “Take Mr. Wraithwood into custody.”

This ending felt inevitable, but Mira still had conflicting feelings in her heart. She looked at Cecily, who was helping Randall to sit up. William had produced a flask from his pocket and was helping Randall to take a drink while Alan was poking at the new, pale scar decorating his cheek and making light jokes about how it made him look like a pirate. 

That scene was familiar to her. These people were familiar to her. The care they were showing to one another was the most familiar of all, but now she was questioning everything she thought she knew about them. One of the few enduring truths that she could rely on in all her long lives was that these five were the good guys. Even when everything else in her existence was uncertain, that one truth endured—until now. Did they all have the potential to turn into another Andrei? Or had Andrei always been an exception to their dynamic and Mira had never been close enough to them to see it when the cracks started to form in their bond?

She would have started to spiral and then keep spiralling, except she felt a contact from Penny right as it started. She closed her eye to see what Penny wanted to show her and—oh, my. This show wasn’t over yet. There was another pair of loose ends that were about to tie one another up.

Mira patted Adra’s shoulder. “Let me down, darling,” she told him. “I need to go somewhere. Cover for me?”

“Oh?” Adra replied and let her down onto her feet. She felt him add some more shadow mass to her sleeves before he released her. 

Cecily snapped around to stare at her, having overhead what she said to Adra. “What do you mean; cover for you?”

Mira smiled, blew her a kiss, and let Penny know that she was ready to go. Then (at least from everyone else’s perspective) she winked out of existence.