There is a man, a brother, a second prince upon them, now, and he is lithe and elegant and lovely and beautiful in ways that Déodat is not, and yet, she thinks, this new one is not as fine a specimen, for his eyes are not cold and hard as the soldier-king's, and nor is his tongue. He bequeaths upon the thickening air a chime and softness that in some ways Liriope has been craving, for such is unknown to her, and she turns to him, this bright and cloven beast with his arch of a knife and moonlight smile, peering into the abyss of him as if he were some god-touched fool in the company of demons, and she admires silently the tender syllables his lyrical voice contrives - 'Roland' - and thinks it all the more befitting that his title is Thief. She returns his grin with her own mark upon her lips if only to ensure he and his accompanying gender are appeased, for his shrewd gaze has found her weakened against the elements and she wishes not to draw further attention to the fact, so her eyes dance for him her knowing and her jaw flexes in her silence and perhaps she is about to introduce herself, as good little half-girls do, but there is another asking, another instructing, and he has become them as quickly as death.

A king - no, a lord stands there before these three lesser, carved of some hellish ore so deep and so dark in color that she can hardly see where he ends. He has sliced through the tempest's gales and wind-ribbons as if they did not touch him, the frost and sheets of North and her mercilessness as if they did not exist, and she wonders if in his mind they didn't. He says little and still commands their absolute reverence, his desire for their attention hardly a plea but a tangible air that bleeds from him, his blue-velvet crown and oh those scars that echo in his booming and masculine sound; an air that demands to be felt, and Liriope feels it, tastes it, prays that it could be closer and yet also further away, take it away, for it is delectable, delicious power, but it is equally decay, and she is feeling a bit light-headed. Deimos, he has said, and she smiles to herself at how heavily irony has saturated the word, attempting to meet his gaze without betraying her masquerade, for her awe of him would have oozed from her every pore otherwise. "Liriope," she says, her own name painfully spartan in comparison, before she, blood-stained tiara slowly slipping, bends a knee and graciously bows at the reaper's charred and ghost-ridden feet, curls of auburn rivulets dripping from her neck and tangling with her lashes as they press against her face, and though the winds are harsher here, with her body coiled and mouth in a line, she will swear that she never tires of it.

There is a child's sudden voice on the wind, a brush against the taut and dimpled flesh at her side, but she listens to only the breath of the corpse as he stands living. The white and froth of the Basin's floor sticks to her when she stands, for she does not stand with haste, and when she speaks again - "I have come to serve you, my Lord." - she is purged of the whims of women, that is, of course, until this child; until there is a hollow body beside her blood-guide, her crimson prince - 'Hello, my princess,' - where there should be a son; until there is a woman, a stretch of porcelain and glass and ebon-skin with blue in her eyes and a voice where there should have been silence, standing, as if she is worthy, as if she is capable, inches from her Lord, from her fathers and brothers, from her betters as if she were one of them, as if she does not know the vast expanse of thick and warring space that separates they from she, but Liriope is only truly stunned, only truly disgusted not when she does not fall to her knees or kiss the earth on which her kings' hooves meet, but when she declares herself to be their soldier.

How fucking dare she.

"A soldier?" Liriope turns in a slow circle to touch every man's gaze with her own, removing herself from the space she shares with the hollow-child that clings, at least still, to her father's breast, watching to see if they mirrored her revulsion, lingering on the Thief, the sprightly and kind Roland, coming to a realization that they just did not see, and when she returns to this Sialia, this supposed gladiatrix, this oh-so-mighty war-farer with her white-faced welcome and her pretty little sword unsharpened, unused, she sneers, but says not what presses so quickly and burns so like bile at her throat, for to offend one of her superior's probable whores was not of the most suitable ways to gain their favor. "I would like to see how you earned such a title some day," she rasps instead as if her blood was not boiling over into her eyes.

"The language of war is one of few I am fluent in." And I truly doubt that you can speak it.