Gundam Wing Fan Fiction ❯ The Maids of Silva ❯ Chapter 12 ( Chapter 12 )

Maids of Silva by Happily Ever After

chapter twelve by Iris Anthe

There was something so deeply satisfying about having a luscious, deadly woman at your beck and call, King Treize mused to himself as the Lady Une finished buttoning the fourth in a sequence of form-fitting, gold and red woolen vestments that he was required to don as ruler of the realm. Ruling unimaginative, insipid peons was such dull work, but breaking the Lady Une and keeping her his servant was a certain source of gratification even after all these years. He had broken her when she was still just fourteen and had tried to murder him in his sleep. There had been some injustice against her pitiful little family. He'd had them all killed of course, but her. she'd had true potential, he'd seen it from the first. It had taken him almost a year to do it, but by the end she believed to her core that he was her master and that she was even pitifully in love with him. Every so often he would see pure murderous rage well up inside her, but she managed to always direct it somewhere other than onto him. It was beautiful to watch. She was just beautiful.

"I do not trust Dorothy," came the words that broke his reverie.

Treize sighed. The Lady's devotion to him, however, could also become tiresome in its paranoiac protectiveness. "What is it now, my dear Lady?" he asked her with as much patience as he could muster.

"She has failed to deliver what you requested. I suspect she even released the prisoners herself just to enjoy hunting them down, or worse in an attempt to undermine your control of the throne." Une paused noting the bored look in her master's eyes. "The captain of the royal guard is missing. He has started a rumor that the Princes are alive. I happen to know that he was last seen heading for Dorothy's estate. I think they are in league to overthrow Your Excellency. I ask your permission to deal with them immediately." Une kept herself as contained as possible. She wanted so desperately to prove herself to her master. She ached to kill someone for him, like a sloshing weight in her gut. If he would just let her kill someone for him.

Treize ignored her. He gently plucked up the red rose that Dorothy had brought to him days ago from a cottage by the enchanted woods. It had stayed remarkably firm alongside its white sister in the vase by his bedside. He breathed deeply, running the petals across his lips. Such a heavy fragrance. In the dead of winter the scent of roses stirred his loins as only the first hints of spring could.

So, Wu Fei was showing a little backbone after all? How delightful. The captain of the royal guard was legendary in his mastery of the sword. He had apparently bested everyone in the realm by the time he was only fifteen. But then, he'd never dueled with Treize. He smiled to himself remembering how he'd asked the young, Chinese man to spar with him the day after he came to the palace. What a lovely duel it had been. Such spirit, such fire. Wu Fei had truly wanted to kill him for murdering his king. That emotion of course had been his major weakness. When Treize unmanned him, he had begged for death, but Treize knew it would be a far more fitting revenge to require him to submit and guard his very life by remaining as captain of his royal guard. To see such smoldering hatred eating away at the little dragon was endlessly entertaining. But he hadn't for a moment expected him to find out about the Princes' enchantment.

Perhaps Une was right. Perhaps Dorothy had decided to bid for more power by playing against him. It was not utterly unthinkable. It was what he would do in her place, and they were kin after all. Wu Fei and Dorothy together could be a formidable foe. For the first time in days he felt invigoration flood through him. Ruling was truly only fun when your subjects resisted.

"Perhaps it is time we paid my cousin a little visit," he said out loud, in fact speaking only to himself though he used the royal we. He'd all but forgotten Une's presence in the room until he heard her sharp reply, "I will take care of it immediately your Excellency."

She was such a useful thing to have really.

-----

She had to put aside her fear. She knew it. Sally said it to herself over and over in her mind, but putting fear away wasn't as simple as organizing one's store of herbs! For one thing, she wouldn't normally be dangling down the back of a wounded fairy who was somehow still be able to leap thirty feet at a time from treetop to treetop while the rest of the fae population seemed intent on shooting them down! For another thing she had an intense and protective fear that Wu Fei would do something dangerously rash as usual and she just wouldn't be there to protect him from his own anger this time.

"It would be easier to carry you if you let your body relax." The quiet words filtered through her tense and worried thoughts. Somehow knowing that she was putting an extra strain on the only being keeping her from dashing to an awful death on the forest floor instantly cut through her mental preoccupations and she shifted immediately into her midwife persona. This was a life and death situation where you simply had to live from one intake of breath to the next and not think, at all, about what was coming next. She imagined herself in the birthing room, breathing with a woman just beginning to dilate and to Trowa's relief her body instantly conformed in a slump against him.

It was an act of treason to allow a human into the realm of Faerie ever since the disappearance of the Queen yet here Trowa was actually carrying one in on his back. All he knew, however, was his goal and there were very few souls capable of stopping the Lord Trowa of the Third House of Fae from achieving a goal once he set his mind to it. One sat brooding on his throne, and the other two were now captives of that foul smelling human wench who dared to hunt them down like animals. He would make it through. He would deliver this daughter of Yu Lian. He would rouse his king from the miserable torpor that had rooted him to the throne for so long. He could not fail.

-----

The realm of winter filled his senses. The pale sun's light filtered weakly through his fluttering eyelids as he walked, endlessly in pain. The wound in his shoulder pulsed with cold fire and the occasional jerk on the chain attached to the collar about his neck seemed to rip it open to bleed anew just when the crust of old blood had dried. The woman who led him faded from view, only the sound of her crunching footfalls let him know she was there. Her pale hair drifted with the wind, mixing in his delirium with the blowing snow so that he imagined it was her hair that howled madly and shook the trees around him, her hair that wound round his neck hard as iron and led him endlessly into the white world before him. He fled from the horror of her living winter hair.

His mind wandered to his youth, long gone, when the world itself was younger, still in its innocence and maidenly form. He recalled the long dance of Midwinter's Eve as it had been done by all of the women of his house, many of them his own sisters, swaying solemnly slowly, endlessly through the night while the Song of Making was sung by his father, the King of the Fourth House of Fae. The music swelled inside him, its slow, inevitable strength lending him courage and hope through the ordeal of his captive march. The wind itself began to mold itself into the song and individual flakes of snow in their myriad architectural wonders began to slow and drift before his eyes as though seeking his witness so their existence could prove true. "Quatre." He heard his name whispered in his dead father's voice.

Suddenly the cold iron bit more cruelly into his flesh tumbling him forward uncontrollably into the snow covered earth. Her cold, sleeping bosom offering him no cushion as he fell. The song was lost, falling away from him and he wept to feel the loss of his father's voice again after so many years of its eternal silence.

"Never speak that language again. You will not sing those songs. I will not hear them," the winter woman's voice was harsh, almost desperate sounding. He tried to focus on the pain in that voice, understand it better but all he could do was nod dumbly and stumble against the pain as she jerked him upward once again.

He hoped that Trowa was alive. He could not bear to think of the rose maidens, their innocence destined to be lost, the sound of Relena's scream as the arrow found its home in his shoulder. He could not sense the life of any soul through the spell of this collar that bound him. He could barely sense his own. Only slowly, more clearly as the endless time passed, he could sense only the soul of the winter maid who held him in her iron hand. Somehow he was destined to know nothing but her from now on.

-----

He practiced. Though they thought him idle, stupid in the torpor of his grief they did not know him well. It was not a thoughtless act by which he became Zechs Marquise, the warrior king. He did not simply place the silver mask over his face without making the change within. There was no Milliardo Peacecraft left alive in this form. Not anymore. And the warrior king practiced killing.

For nearly a thousand years he had lived in the peace of decline. After the bitter wars that had claimed much of the older generation of the Fae, including his father, the first and High King, he had put away the mask. He had agreed to decline, to yield the sweet mother of this earth over to the butchering hands of men so that his people might live in peace, fading slowly into another world entirely where the bitterness of the Earth could not penetrate.

But his wife, his queen, his only true love had refused to leave her garden untended. She insisted time and again that the mortal world needed her, that men would fall into brute savagery if they did not show them the slender path towards beauty. She'd had a weakness for the mortal women ever since raising that impertinent child, Yu Lian only to have her heart predictably broken when she died.

His fingers traced a well-worn pattern over the scrollwork of his silver scabbard. He would not think of it. He knew how to rid his mind of these endless, helpless thoughts. With lightning speed he rose from the coffin of his throne hearing his court react too slowly to rise before he was already gone, striding to his private space.their space.

There, with an agility and speed unrivaled by any being alive he practiced. He practiced killing. He focused until his mind and body sang with the cutting of his sword through the still air. He moved tirelessly, passionlessly, becoming less and less present until he reached finally that moment when he could almost sense her.

"Lucrezia," he could not stop himself from calling out as he felt her presence like a fragrance upon his skin. And with that utterance, once again he banished her completely and he was left panting and bereft, kneeling in the dappled light of the clearing where he had first lain with her, the ancient sword dangling useless from his slackened fingers.

Somehow he would find her, and on that day he would finally kill the one who had taken her from him. Someday he would have revenge. He ignored the feeling inside that told him she would only feel sad to see him so bent on violence. King Milliardo Peacecraft, after all was dead.