story [the jet locket]

[dubonnetcherry]

Title: The Jet Locket
Fandom: The Elenium
Characters: Martel, Petrana (original)
Rating: PG13 to R for disturbing themes.
Warnings: Character death, adultery, stockholm syndrome.
Gratitude: AJ very helpfully beta'd this for me and generously provided a summary, and basically all of my flist sat through rambling about it after I powered through the rough draft over the new year. Titling lyrics used are Sarah McLachlan's Stupid, which...is basically the themesong for Martel/Petrana, yes.
This story is for Tara.

Summary: In the background of events in 'The Elenium,' Lady Petrana finds herself unwillingly caught up in old personal affairs as Martel pushes his way back into her life.

an unsent letter.

My own lady,

Our engagement is broken; I have not forgotten. You will forgive me this small impertinence, paling as it does in comparison to the rest of them. Nevertheless, you are my own and I must rely upon you to remember, as I have always relied on you. I've wondered, lately, what you could have been thinking of when you came to me outside Demos; I knew that you would and you did, but I'd anticipated a different sort of greeting. I recall it took some time for you to come to your full indignance, that you did greet me, that I surprised you. I wonder most of all what you'd come for. I wonder if you'd have come with me if I'd asked - I wouldn't have asked that of you, but perhaps I should have. Do you think so? Does it weigh on you that I didn't? How many times have I not thought of you. I've never needed to, with your inventive hands and sharp laughter to draw my attention when it wanders - but I have wandered too far and we are altogether more apart than I imagined we could be.

You aren't unconquerable, but you wish you were; you asked me once why I wanted to marry you and this is why. I thought I could preserve in you what I loved before it was stifled and destroyed, but I can see it dying every day, left to childhood when there's no true need. You will grow and grieve and forget, and become stately, and for that I am more sorry than you'll ever know. But perhaps you won't. Perhaps I will remind you of your troublesome heart the way you reminded me of my manners. Perhaps I will be near, by chance or by design, and perhaps I will take back what is mine and what I lost by mere thoughtlessness. Perhaps you hate me a little less than you have loved me.

Perhaps, even, you would understand if only I'd explain it to you - you've always tried your very hardest to understand, and so often you do. Your mind is very quick, and I wish you'd stop pretending otherwise. Ladylike is what a lady is, and you are clever. I wouldn't have had you any other way. If this nonsense settles as you grow, it might almost be worth the tempering of your temperament. (But do stop that.)

Here I suppose I could tell you where I am, and what occupies me; I think not, as beyond the untrustworthiness of messengers I am considering your tendency towards spitefulness that sometimes overcomes your cleverness and forethought. You understand that there are those - your father among them - who I could do without the unexpected pleasure of. The entire Pandion order, as an example off the cuff. Sparhawk, in particular, was forthright about what he thought ought to be done with me - but you must always trust Lady Sephrenia. I can't, but you can and I expect you to. Do you understand me? If you need counsel, go to her first of all. Your mother is a fool, a fool who knows nothing of the people she disdains, and if you allow your weakness to make her your guide you are not half the woman I wanted to marry. You could be so much more than you are; I wanted to make you so much more than you are.

On the subject of marriage - if it crosses your mind what became of your ring after you threw it (I see you had practised as I said), you might ask me. And I might have it for you, in due course. There are things to be set right, and I know that when I have you will still be my ally.
  You are my own, my lady, and I will see you again.

Your servant,
    M.

sleep has left me alone
to carry the weight of unraveling where we went wrong
it's all i can do to hold on
to keep me from falling into old familiar shoes

The idea was that if Davidias carried their daughters, Petrana would take Romiar and they might get to the stables in time to get safely clear. Flames already billowed out of the castle's lower windows and she forced her thoughts away from the sight of her dead servants or her husband drawing his sword in sleeping trousers. Davidias couldn't be in all places at once and it never occurred to them that such an attack might be aimed at her. Petra assured him that she could hide well and move quickly alone, then sent him to the children and took her hound and a knife for some measure of protection.

It was a gross miscalculation that they'd pay for dearly.

"Petra," Martel murmured, walking into her line of sight. "I remember how you think, milady. I'm glad."

The knife fell from her suddenly nerveless fingers as she took a stumbling step backwards, speechless.

"I'm afraid the Alcione is too late. I thought you'd be in a fit about the girls, so I prudently took them before the fire started. Which means we don't have all that much time before he realizes and doubles back to find you." He smiled thinly, catching her in his hands as if she weighed nothing and taking her with him. "I don't care to wait around for him, as I am on quite a tight schedule. You'll forgive me in time."

When she found her voice it was to shriek for her husband, but Martel leaned in against her ear. "I won't hurt your children, Petrana, but you might want to come and see that for yourself. I'll understand if you can't take me at my word."

"Why?" she demanded, her hands straining against steel in an unsuccessful effort to free herself. "For God's sake, Martel, you madman-"

"I am exquisitely sane and we'll talk about it - at length - when we're free of Gatas and your little girls are settled. Be quiet."

"If I won't?"

"Don't make me kill the knight, darling. I will if I have to." The chiding tone he took chilled her in a way that a threat made in anger wouldn't have.

It didn't escape her that he didn't threaten her, that he chose to take her daughters, that he treated this like a small inconvenience that she would come to see as necessary.

In all the years since his betrayal, she'd sometimes thought of following him. The idea he'd return for her had been laughable.

Petra wasn't laughing, but she wasn't the only one or the only reason. Martel had secured a nursemaid and had Iola and Isaune sent to a Thalesian estate outside of Emsat, part of some peculiar arrangement she only half-followed - but he kept her near enough to learn a great deal. He trusted her with his secrets, if not out of his sight.

"Annias," she startled, and found Martel's hand pressing her back into her chair.

"This was your 'errand'?" Annias sneered at him, not bothering to address her directly, and they both bristled.

"You have your entertainments, Primate, and I've got mine. Let's keep them quite separate."

"Martel," Petra began, quietly.

"The library, my lady, go please. Don't be anywhere else. The royal chaplain and I have much to discuss."

She examined his face, the unfamiliarly hard lines of it and his sharp eyes on a man she barely remembered. Annias was afraid, she knew without looking, and she obeyed Martel with the thought that she'd rather not find out why. His warnings were largely unnecessary; guardsmen watched her steps through the townhouse and Martel's spell wouldn't let her wander without his knowledge. Escape was only a concept, with no substance to it yet.

At first she'd thought that she might be some kind of hostage, but weeks passed and all she became was a companion. They shared a bed, but he was scrupulous in not touching her - while he was awake, she amended, pausing by the bookcase - and mostly courteous. As courteous as Martel had ever been, at least - there was little courtesy in chaining her to his side and tearing her family apart because he felt lonely, and the thoughtlessly selfish decision was so very like him. Enough that she'd laughed a little at the absurdity, through the tears he hadn't seen. Laughing in his face had been less wise, but she'd done that, too.

The sardonic look he'd given her-

Petra turned a page and pretended for a while that her book was diverting. It wasn't, but chasing her own thoughts in circles wasn't helping anything.

Hours later, she heard him at the door - felt him through the spell that kept her near. He didn't speak or come in, and when the silence began to madden her she broke it sharply, "It's winter, Martel, and the heat is escaping."

"A thousand apologies," he said dryly, pulling the door closed and resting against it instead. "Are you becoming accustomed to me again, lady, or resigned?"

Petra closed the book she hadn't read. "Which do you think it is, my lord?"

"I think I remember hearing you say those words that very way a hundred times before." He dropped leather-wrapped papers on a table behind her and walked to the fire. "We're leaving soon, regardless. Lady Sephrenia will feel me here sooner or later if I dawdle longer, and it's not time."

"This is treason, you know."

"You say that like it's somehow worse than anything else I've done." He sounded vaguely amused - tired, too, but amused. "It is. Not for that, though. My lady, it's a great deal more than mere treason."

She looked at him over the side of her armchair, critically, and then away at nothing. At something other than veiled truth and reflected fire. "He'll come for this. Rendor isn't so far that he won't come."

"Let him. In fact, I rather hope he does. What a shame to do all this if he didn't."

"Your merriness is the most inappropriate thing I can imagine. Will we go to Thalesia?" Petra took refuge in thinking of her children, rather than the implications of what he was saying. It was in her best interests, for now, to cooperate.

He sank into the chair opposite, shrugging. "Briefly, if you like. We have a little time."

"What about your schedule?"

"Am I going to hear about it until we go? I made a little time. Besides, I have business there."

Petrana made a small noise of assent. "If I asked what all this is, would you tell me?"

"You still haven't asked why I took you."

"Please pay less attention to what I haven't said and more to what I have."

He chuckled. "I might, if you asked. Do you want to know?"

"Yes." She hesitated, though, and he shook his head.

"Not yet. Why don't you ask why you're here?"

"I'm not sure I want to know that," she replied crisply, setting the book aside and rising.

Martel caught her by the wrist as she passed him, holding her in place. "Your being here is a fool's errand of my own."

"It is certainly that." She tugged until he let go, and then stopped, staring at the mark left behind. In a small, sick voice she asked, "Whose blood is this?"

There was a pause, and then he swore and rose after her. "No one important," he said, glancing at the wet stain on his cuff and taking out a handkerchief to wipe her wrist clean.

"You're getting sloppy," she told him, to cover the moment with something less fragile.

"Distracted. Perhaps you'll stay in Thalesia for a while."

"You could consider letting me go."

"I did that, remember? Terrible thing. No, I prefer to have what's mine to hand." He pocketed the bloody cloth, watching her.

"'Yours'," Petra drew her hand away again, retreating toward the door. "I was. I'm not." She shook her head. "All those years have done something to you, Martel, and I don't know you. You certainly don't know me. I don't know what you want."

The only problem was he'd always been able to tell when she was lying. Judging by the odd smile he gave her in lieu of an answer, half-truths were as incriminating as they'd ever been.

The journey out of Elenia was miraculously uneventful. She hadn't travelled without a carriage since they took an unplanned trip through Arcium's vineyards when they were still engaged - and it charmed her less this time. Adus didn't travel with them, but Krager reported in periodically and Martel's more select mercenaries made their party more colourful. The problem was, she reflected, Davidias couldn't know who had sacked their castle, or where to look now. She weighed how likely it was that he might suspect - perhaps enough to go to the men he refused to trust, the men who could help them.

Who she hoped could help. The lordly way that Martel handled himself in Elenia wasn't reassuring Petra about how well the Pandions had taken care of their renegade the last time.

"What is that you're wearing now?" Martel's voice drew her from her thoughts and it took her a few moments to realize what he was referring to.

Her fingertips went to the edge of the jet, and she groped for a suitable explanation. The spite and grief that had driven it aside, the act itself seemed like the last thing he ought to know about. "A mourning locket. Don't you recognize the design?"

"Mother had one similar, yes," he drawled, "but I wonder who it is you lost. I don't remember you wearing it before."

"I'd forgotten I was wearing it, truthfully."

"Oh, I believe you. But now you're avoiding the question."

"Martel, you're unwholesomely observant." The snap in her tone made him laugh, and they continued in silence until he spoke again, just when she was positive he wouldn't.

"Are you disappointed that I'm not truly dead, my lady?"

"I prefer your brooding silences to these leading questions. The melodrama suits you better."

Martel stilled in turning his head, and Petra held her breath until he laughed, mostly an exhale. "You've grown claws in my absence."

"Hardly. If I did-"

"-you were much nicer when you laughed more-"

"-then I had to and it was your doing." He stopped again, but she'd waited years for this and she went on in a low, furious voice - even now too aware of her words, of being listened to. "You abandoned me with all of your mistakes and I have carried them with me, year after year. Yes, Martel, I wish you'd died. Honorably, some battlefield - if only you'd had the decency to be someone who could be forgotten. No. I left Elenia because your name never had. I did nothing, and all of your mistakes stain my children, and now you come back-"

Martel wheeled his horse and reached for her reins, but she dug her heels in and pushed the palfrey into a run. She could go a ways - as far as she liked, but he'd find her. He'd done something and they felt each other like another limb, always there. It made running away, even briefly and for spite - for a fit of pique, she mocked herself - so much less satisfying.

Besides, his horse was faster.

She rolled out of her saddle and let her ridiculous skirts cushion her fall in the grass, and moments later heard the clink of metal, the thud of Martel following her down. "I'll make you a queen," he offered nonchalantly, as he breathed hard from exertion. "Maybe. Better you than Arissa."

"You're out of your mind," she said, and let her head fall back. "And you don't listen."

"I listen well enough. What would you have me say?"

"Say you'll let me go."

He knelt, leaning over her. "I thought you were tired of being lied to? You have to stop changing your mind on me."

"You can't do this. It's stupid. Tactically, even-"

Martel laughed, pulling her up with him. "You're going to critique my tactics now? You are so pious speaking of your husband and my madness, but you fall so easily into old patterns." He lifted her onto her saddle and kissed her palms before pressing them together and letting go. "You love me, and I'm more patient than you know."

Petrana understood, abruptly.

"Just me," she said, looking down at him with dawning realization. "Do you think I have less will than they do? Was I just easier to claim? You were here already so you'd have something back? Martel."

"We'll reach the port tomorrow if we go on now," he said, instead, and they said no more that afternoon, or that night. They didn't speak, but neither of them slept well and Martel emerged from their tent in an ill humour the following morning. Petra opted not to push him any further for a while, not until she knew better where he might land. Underneath the devil-may-care attitude that he strolled through Eosia with, he was more volatile than she'd realized. The edges that he'd bared in betrayals weren't gone, merely better veiled and if anything, sharper. He stalked the edge of their makeshift camp as it was dismantled and she watched, feeling as if she'd done nothing but watch for months, maybe for too many years beyond that.

The sense of helplessness made her tired, weighing down on her shoulders and leaving her no peace.

"Courage," Martel murmured, his hands on the back of her hips. "We have a long way to go, still."

"How far?" she asked, not turning.

"Chyrellos. It's not the endgame, but Chyrellos."

"Cluvonus-"

"-will die naturally without ever seeing me, my suspicious little artist."

Petra shrugged him off and went to collect her cloak, cold in more ways than she could count.

"My humble home is honoured, Sir Knight," Stragen drawled, his hand falling to the side of his ostentatious Thalesian throne as Martel stepped forward with Petra on his arm.

"I'd truly love to polish my old court habits, Milord, but time is of the essence, you understand. Our agreement?" He touched Petra's hand and smiled thinly.

"It stands." The thief prince scrutinized Petra, coming down from his dais. "Let's talk more privately, shall we? Your countess is looking awfully pale."

"The weather here doesn't agree with me, Milord Stragen," she murmured, escorted between them to an anteroom.

Stragen barked a laugh. "I imagine it doesn't, at that."

The door shut and Martel sat heavily. "I won't impose on you long," he said briefly. "I have business that my lady isn't suited to."

"I understand entirely."

From there they hammered out the rest of the details, as Martel would pay highly for this favour regardless of how long Stragen had courted his expertise. Petra could follow most - if not all - of the conversation, but essentially she'd stay in Emsat until Martel returned for her. This time she'd have her children, though, and she wasn't sure whether she was more relieved to have them with her or concerned about caring for small children in a den of criminals.

Stragen kept smiling at her, and the fact that he was genuinely charismatic did nothing to improve her mood.

"This is temporary," Petra said, nearly a question, holding Isaune against her hip while Martel checked his precautions.

"Until I'm done in Rendor, yes. Where's- there it is."

"Why here? Why all of these extra arrangements?"

He dropped his pack on the bed. "I don't trust my associates not to try and take advantage of any leverage they can find. Stragen has other priorities and he isn't as stupid."

"If this is safer, I hate to think-"

"Then don't," he suggested shortly, rubbing his hand over his eyes.

Petra surrendered Isaune to the nurse and closed the door, sitting down. "Martel."

"This was a terrible idea."

"It was."

"It's a complication I don't need."

"I can get back to Deira from here, this can be over, Martel, please-"

He scowled at the mirror. "Over my dead body. Better yet, over your husband's. You stay."

"Idiot."

He kissed her hair. "See? You're not afraid of me any more."

"I never was," she corrected.

"Liar." He left his hand on her shoulder, briefly, then sighed and straightened. "There are worse fools than me having all sorts of success lately. Have a little faith."

"Oh, I have plenty of faith. She pulled his pack into her lap and began picking through it to be sure he had everything without really thinking about what she was doing.

Martel noticed before she did, and she might not have if he hadn't stopped, wryly amused, to observe.

She flushed and set it down.

"Thank you," he said, mildly.

"I'm not giving you absolution," she told him abruptly. "That's what this is, isn't it? You weren't in love with me then and you aren't now. You only want someone to forgive you and the ones you do love won't."

"I loved you," he disagreed, ignoring what it didn't suit him to answer.

"Not as much as I loved you. Not enough to think of me."

"Aren't I here now? I burned half of Gatas to get to you, Petrana." His fist hit the table and she flinched, but didn't stop.

"Only because now I have something you want." Her knuckles were white.

"Does it make you feel better to imagine that I'm heartless and always was?" he demanded. "Do you enjoy pretending you didn't know me?"

"Yes!" she shouted back angrily. "Yes, it does, I would rather have loved a lie than sit here knowing that I loved all of this in you as well, I am so tired of atoning for your sins!"

"Commit one or two of your own, then," he goaded her, challenging. "And never so much as consider apologizing."

"And then would you be satisfied? Would company in your apostate be all you want from it?"

"I'd rather you burn with me than be wasted like that."

"You're a wonderfully inspiring man, you know. If I didn't know better, I'd be damned a thousand times already - but I do." She curled her hands in her skirts and refused to watch his pacing.

"You don't really give an inch, do you?" Martel snorted. "Or you'd so like not to. No, you know better, and you're still moving like you don't."

"Well done, my lord, you're distracting."

All the warning before he kissed her - in an obnoxious cliche - was a twitch of his hand before he reached for her. It had been more than a decade since he'd touched her that way and back then he'd rarely done it angry. Her back hit the edge of the bedstead and Martel moved enough to let himself speak. "You'll reach for me next time, Petra, mark me."

"You're sure of yourself," she said, still too close to look away and trapped there, catching her breath.

"I didn't make you respond," he pointed out, offensively reasonable about it as he released her.

Emsat didn't pause for Elenian politics and Petra found that life in Stragen's court kept her easily as occupied as any other - with, she thought it somewhat ironic, rather more freedom than she'd had in Elenia or Deira. Most of them assumed she was Martel's mistress and there wasn't anyone in a position to be particularly scandalized; she found herself grateful for the elbow room and put it aside without letting herself examine the feeling.

Stragen and Martel, she discovered, barely knew each other personally and when she caught herself thinking of what famous friends they could be she forced herself to think of whose daughter the blond thief was dandling on his knee.

How long since she'd thought of Davidias made her feel distinctly uncomfortable; on one hand, her concern for her children (their children) took up only so much of her attention, and on the other it piqued her to take any more guilt for either Davidias or Martel.

"Never marry, Stragen," she advised, taking Iola back.

"Are you worried about the Pandion or the Alcione, Countess?" he returned, entertained.

"Yes," she answered tartly.

"Oh, I thought so. I do like you Elenians, my lady - you manage to get your politics into everything."

"Davidias is a Deiran."

"The poor bastard."

"Your ladies are coming along well," she said, unsubtly changing the subject - to the matter of her impromptu etiquette school. Stragen had felt as long she was going to be there, so ladylike, she might as well make herself useful.

"Even...?" He let it hang there.

"Most of them," she amended without blinking. Her rapport with the man who was effectively her stand-in jailer had come surprisingly easy when she'd found he had a particular affection for the outcasts of the upper classes. Cynically, she suspected it had more to do with a perception of them being easier to relate to amongst those who'd thrown him out and who he still harbored resentment and envy for; he never let his own scandals go far from his thoughts. Either way it made him more pleasant company, if worryingly like that of the man who'd entrusted her to his care.

Martel's absence from Emsat grated on her in unanticipated ways; the sense of him in the back of her mind was unfamiliar and had her turning to see a man who wasn't there. It made a more effective leash than she'd initially given him credit for, the longer they were twisted around one another like that. She was never entirely sure of how much privacy she had in her own mind; logically if this enchantment went both ways then she had as much as he did, but she understood too little of the secrets to trust her reasoning of them.

On the other hand, she doubted he'd have successfully kept his opinions to himself if he'd been privy to some of her thoughts.

"Sparhawk?" she echoed Martel incredulously, carrying on two arguments with him at once as they alternately ordered the maid to pack her things and then to cease and unpack them again in the midst of their conversation.

"In Rendor," he confirmed with only traces of the animosity she knew wasn't far beneath the surface. "With Lady Sephrenia. He does have a way of getting in my way."

Petra's mind raced. The contact she'd had with Martel's brother in the years since his disgrace was minimal, but they had maintained it occasionally until he vanished into his exile. If that exile was over - if he was moving against Martel's master - well, she'd been sure he would, but believing and knowing were still wildly different and knowing meant-

Eventually she realized that he expected her to say something. "Old habits," she managed, distracted, "you always needed someone to pull you back and it was almost invariably him."

"Not any more. Why isn't she packing? Pack her things, the Countess is coming with me."

"Leave them-"

"Petrana."

She swallowed, and nodded once to Hueta. "The girls?"

"I have other plans." He frowned out the window. "They'll come to Chyrellos, though, the two of them and you."

"Annias isn't worthy of the mantle - even you can't think this is anything but complete madness."

"He's got his uses, limited as they are. And if you'd like to appeal to my respect for the church, I wouldn't hold your breath."

"I was appealing to your ego. This is beneath you."

"Petrana, I have a lot to do and I intend to do all of it. You can argue until you're blue in the face if you must but I'd really prefer not to waste my time or your breath." The phrase 'sweet reason' was obscenely misleading as a description of tone.

"You're going to drive me mad," she complained, picking up her skirts and moving toward the door.

"A little variety in your favourite announcement." He tossed a pendant into the air and caught it before letting Hueta take it to be packed. "I approve."

"You would." She exhaled and stopped in the open door. "I know it's dreadfully convenient for you if my maids can't speak, but the quiet is almost as maddening as you are."

"Obviously I need to work harder."

Hueta didn't need a tongue for Petra to know when she wanted to laugh.

Petra's life became a series of such surreal rendezvous - traveling with Martel, living with her daughters in out of the way homes when she wasn't and never staying in them too long, moving steadily around Eosia. The girls were too young to find the change in their routine more than tiresome, and young enough that it could still become a routine. Every day that passed this into their idea of normalcy battered at her ability to keep faith in holding fast.

The problem was that he'd always been the best of the very best, and it was difficult to convince herself that he'd fail simply because she wanted him to and she knew if he failed, it'd be his death. Sitting next to him, talking with him, eating with him, lying by him at night - it was very difficult to pray for his end right by his side. Even as the months progressed and all of them grew sharper, the pressure that bore down on Martel only seemed to harden his resolve.

His sleep was restless and his eyes were haunted, but his path had been set with the poisoning of the queen that she still thought of as Aldreas's child. If he did fail now, she still wasn't sure of what would become of her or her family. He treated her like a wife and he'd been seen to do so, with her apparent cooperation - she'd been condemned by the court of public opinion once before, and with less evidence.

"I can feel you thinking," he muttered irritably, and when he didn't turn Petra merely examined the scars on his back and said nothing. The conversation wasn't one she was in a hurry to have, regardless of how her pensive mood disturbed his sleep. Eventually he exhaled, and rolled over. "Fine. What is it?"

"All of this." Petra rested her face on her hands, curled on her side. "You couldn't turn back now if you wanted to, could you?"

"Oh, I could. Then I could be executed for treason, among other choice crimes that hard little monarch feels inclined to dredge up in detail." He feigned considering the options and snorted when she hit his shoulder. "Petra."

"Don't be so snide. It's too late at night." She rolled onto her back and sighed. "Aren't you tired of this?"

"Be more specific or I'll begin to think you're fishing for compliments."

"Fighting battles that you're so much better than for men unworthy of your efforts, out of a lack of anything better to do."

Martel chuffed. "Revenge is an age old justification for bloodshed, darling."

"Revenge for what?" She sat up with a look of pure disbelief. "No, truly, would you tell me how badly you were wronged?"

"Petrana, must you."

She threw the blankets off her and swung her legs from the bed, disgusted. "Apparently."

Martel yanked her back by her nightgown. "Please."

"I can't stand you sometimes," she hissed, lowering her voice before she might raise it enough to wake anyone else.

"When do you like me better?"

"When you're asleep."

"Well, then. Lie down and I will, and so will you."

"You want me to go with Annias." Petra's tone was flat.

"You'd rather take infants with my army? He won't jeopardize his shot at the throne."

"How do you intend to explain my presence there? I've been missing for more than a year." She watched Isaune take a few steps toward Martel before slipping onto her backside and being lifted absently into his lap.

"I don't intend to. We'll be careful - and how many people in Chyrellos will recognize you, hm? You'll be careful. If anything goes wrong, get into the basilica."

"What are you doing?"

"Something very, very foolish. Worthwhile, though, if I can do it. You go with our ecclesiastic friend, my lady, and I'll find you in Chyrellos."

She held her hands out for the child, still frowning at him. "I may poison him myself. You know they'll all be there for the elections, how easily I could-"

"You could. Not easily, I think, but you could." He kept his grip on Isaune, bouncing her on his knee.

"Let me put her to bed if we have to leave tomorrow." She jerked her hands at him again.

He surrendered, smiling faintly.

That night, Martel was proved right about one thing and wrong about another. Petra did reach for him - cursing herself and doing it anyway - but not out of anything like forgiveness. God would forgive her for wanting to comfort someone she loved, she reasoned, someone inexorably bent on his own self-destruction. For a few hours she could make truth out of broken promises and grieve some other way.

Being angry with him was easy - he wouldn't apologize, he wanted all things and all his way - but she'd understood him before and she still understood him now. Unfortunately, understanding him had been half of how she'd fallen in love the first time.

Sin a little, he told her. So she did, and if it was in part some selfish desire to have this - to be the whole of his thoughts and the center of one of his obsessions for the first and last time - the one time she could almost without a doubt do anything she liked and then forget it - have it forgotten - that was entirely between her and God. She couldn't justify her decision, and she stopped trying when her attempts all rang hllow in her own thoughts. She pushed thoughts of a husband she'd not seen in too long out of her mind to deal with later.

Later would hurt. Later she would call herself complicit and not merely waiting - but this was a small thing to give before she took her chances.

Martel smoothed his hand over the side of her hip. "In fairness," he murmured in answer to nothing she'd said, "we've been sharing a bed since Deira and I know you know all about how we, as Elenes, adore our logical conclusions."

"Don't talk," she advised him, resting back against his chest. "I like you better when you don't talk."

"Mm? Why?"

"You tend to be more honest." A pause. "Don't."

His hand froze, then lifted away. "You'd have laughed."

In the months that they'd spent together, their times of truce had been few - civil conversations turned into shouting matches and it would always be Petra who breathed out and spoke first later, when they ignored the arguments that they'd only have again in due time. The moments between were weighed down with awareness of the situation and so it was with no small amount of suspicion that Annias watched their quiet, amiable preparations to separate the following morning. The lack of tension was making him visibly uncomfortable and Petra took vindictive pleasure in his discomfort, in taking away his smug steadiness in the face of Martel's private plans showing signs of unraveling.

Annias was always less sure of himself when he didn't have someone else to lord anything over. Petra didn't intend to spend the entire journey to Chyrellos in a carriage with the Primate and the Primate's ego if she could possibly help it. Wariness suited her as long as he didn't talk.

Martel laughed just behind her, altogether too knowing, and the thought of how much she was coming to think like him and in tandem with him dropped the bottom out of her stomach. She smiled over her shoulder instead of letting it out, and focused on what she remembered of her few visits to the holy city.

"You're putting me directly in the path of your army," she said urgently, stopped on the carriage step and praying that he didn't choose today to finally agree with her and change his mind. Chyrellos would also put her mere streets away from the highest ranking churchmen and with any luck Elenia would have sent Pandions to see the election through. It would be the closest she could hope to come to stealing away with her daughters, and she suspected Martel would never let her go with them if he thought for a moment she was planning anything. Better not to change her behaviour too much.

He scrutinized her, then, as if he might know there was something in her argument that was only rote - but he kissed her instead, since for once he hardly had to bend. "Trust me."

"Only when I've run out of options. Goodbye, Martel."

"For now."

Martel had had few options that accounted for the children as well and for once his inability to properly factor her into his plans served Petrana. Annias cared much less about anything to do with her, and her peculiarly privileged confinement along with Annias's lack of clarity about it in orders and his awareness that Martel would likely string him up by his toes if he mistreated her gave the church soldiers a rather inaccurate picture of how much authority she had in their conspiracy.

('Any'.)

The Primate's obsessive focus on the Archprelate's mantle made it even simpler, if not as easy as she'd hoped; she had to talk very fast to get an escort to the basilica with her children after he'd left to attend to the elections. Slipping away from the soldiers in order to get further into the holy place wasn't as hard as she'd anticipated, but trying to do it with two young children and no assistance meant she'd had to get a little inventive and then bite the inside of her cheek and pray she had the right priest when she caught him by the elbow and pressed her younger daughter into his arms. She had no intention of going down underneath the holy place to wait for where she knew Martel would be.

Desperation could create some very strange situations, she reflected, smiling until they were further out of earshot and then hissing, "Sanctuary, Father. I want sanctuary."

Petrana could be swayed and seduced by the heady sensation of Martel's obsession, the depth of it that she'd seen in him many years ago and wanted more than she thought she'd ever want anything with her young, young heart; the Countess of Gatas couldn't afford to sacrifice herself to him.

In the end it was Sephrenia that she saw and not the Pandions she'd been expecting - it felt suitable, if intimidating. Petra went to where the diminutive Styric woman sat and knelt there, taking her hands with a sense of relief at not quite yet having to contend with armed men again. "You know Martel is here," she blurted, not sure where else to begin.

"With the army outside the gates, Countess, I do know that. How is it that you do?"

"Martel came to Deira before Elenia," she told her, "I was with him in Cimmura. What happened in Gatas was him, too, I know it mustn't have seemed entirely connected if you even heard of it in Elenia-" she paused, but Sephrenia only shook her head briefly, gesturing for her to go on. "He took me to Thalesia after that, before he went to Rendor."

"Stragen mentioned that he'd sheltered Martel's mistress," Sephrenia said, delicately, and Petrana found herself stopping to sift through an assortment of her own responses before she could say anything to that. Stragen? Where in God's name was Stragen, then?

"That's not precisely how I saw it," she settled on. "All I'm asking is that I be able to protect my children here somehow. I'll send word to my husband when I can, but Martel's command knows me and- if there's anything I can do or tell you to aid, I will. Please. He told me to go to the basilica if anything went wrong in Chyrellos, that he'd be beneath it. Everything has been wrong for more than long enough." She exhaled. "I want no part of where he's going."

Sephrenia rose, bringing Petra to her feet with her and pressing her hands to her shoulders. "Vanion is going to want to speak with you," she said, "and so is Sparhawk."

"I understand. Of course. And - my lady," Petra hesitated, "there's something that I'd like for you to have."

After long enough that Martel's unseen link felt natural, it didn't occur to her to mention the enchantment on her even as she thought of finally reuniting with her husband; she didn't wonder at how he'd left them connected. He still expected to reclaim her, and so of course he had.

The interviews were, in the opinion of the Countess, utterly tedious - but at the very least they were all pressed for time and very little of it was wasted. Vanion had no more patience for losing time now than he had when he'd served alongside Petra's own father, and Sparhawk had long since filled the place Martel left behind in the Order. If she was honest - and for now it seemed honesty was her most valuable commodity - then she could admit that Sparhawk had to be temperamentally better suited.

It wasn't that Martel hadn't taken his responsibilities seriously - in a sense she believed he still did - but rather that he would always have had the kind of ambitions that lead brilliant men into mischief. Sparhawk correctly viewed his existing duties as plenty enough for anyone, and his straightforward lack of interest in powerplays made him a useful leader and ruthless enemy.

Martel liked his games too much - maybe more than he enjoyed their rewards. Petra let her mind drift as the knights conferred, allowing herself the might-have-beens before they'd have to be well and truly put away.

"My lady," Sparhawk interrupted her thoughts, "just a few more things. Do you know where they'll go after Chyrellos?"

She shook her head. "He wouldn't say. He said he wanted to have a few things in place first and was very mysterious about it all - you know how he can be."

Her slightly too informal aside made Sparhawk smile, odd in a way she'd often seen mirrored on Martel's own face in recent months. "Yes," he agreed, "I do. Is there anything else you think we should know?"

Petra wracked her brains, frowning. "Well - the Primate isn't very important, ultimately. Martel's made it clear that he was convenient, and if he should become inconvenient then there are - I'm sorry, my Lords - plenty of corrupt churchmen." She prudently ignored the sound Vanion made, and how much it sounded like agreement. "I might be able to recall some of the names he suggested, but I daresay he might have been pulling them from air to light a fire underneath Annias."

"Did it work?" Vanion asked wryly.

"How do you think I had the use of church soldiers, my Lord?" Petra's own smile was wintry. "Truthfully, gentlemen, Martel's been very preoccupied and he's taken great pains not to expose me to much of what with if he could help it. Here in Chyrellos he simply had no alternatives left."

"He protected you?"

"And my children, Lord Preceptor." The fact that Martel had been the one to put all three of them in danger in the first place didn't escape anyone in the room.

"Do you know why he needed you?" Sparhawk pressed, and at the question she'd been waiting for, Petra hesitated again. "Do you?"

"I wasn't part of their conspiracy," she said first, "not willingly or unwillingly. Martel called it a 'personal errand' and Annias objected. In a manner of speaking it might have been somehow my own doing-"

"You've gone by me a little quickly, Countess," Vanion noted.

"When he left Demos to go into exile, I followed him and I wouldn't leave him be until he made me. I think he finds Azash a colder comfort - I don't know if this really matters, my Lords."

"He's lonely?" The old knight's tone was incredulous, but Petra watched his eyes as much as Sparhawk's impassive face and wouldn't have said what she found there.

"We all have our regrets, my Lord. If only some of us would stop trying to set theirs alight."

Vanion's laugh hurt to hear.

The days until that reunion dragged, through the siege and the battles in the streets of the holy city, through her relative unimportance in the grand schemes that she was growing more and more tired of, through the somehow monotonous whirlwind of a small world reorganizing itself. Davidias, who feared her and his children long since dead, still hadn't been reached by a messenger when the small party carrying the Bhelliom reached Zemoch, and she found herself alone with the distant clash of steel. The subtle spell that Martel had cast reached out from Azash's temple and when he went to his knees, Petra fell with him - clawing at her chest for blood that wouldn't be spilled there, worlds away from the fatal injury that echoed across her nerve endings.

Gasping through someone else's last moments on the floor of a church in the free city was the most unique way to notify one of a loss and one Petra would have foregone if she'd been given a choice in it. She was aware of bustling around her, of hands at her elbows and calls for a physician; wan and swimming in borrowed exhaustion, she let herself be guided and moved and waited for the pain to recede to a cold ache.

It did in time, as somewhere on the floor of Azash's temple Martel's eyes fell on the jet locket around his little mother's throat and laughed, a wet, gurgling sound that came out weakly. "So she's safe," he said, seemingly out of no where. "Good. Good. You don't need that, little mother, no more than my lady. Haven't I already been mourned?"

Sephrenia sensed the question behind his inability to put aside archness even on his own deathbed, and the way she lay her palm against the side of his face was nearly benediction. "Don't fish for compliments," she chided him in, in a soft voice that ached.

"Sorry, mother," he whispered with a brief flash of humour, and Petra felt an echo of the warm sense of Sephrenia's blessing before Martel passed.

She rode out the backfiring of his broken spell installed on a chaise in one of the quieter rooms, leaving behind a fleeting sensation of hollowness, and peace.

Later, Petra blamed the incident on a 'hysterical faint' and after witnessing so closely the twisted intrigues of church politics she felt far less concerned about misleading clergy. Explaining it truthfully was out of the question; all she wanted was to box the experience with the rest and remember how to forget something she knew she never would.

Isaune had been young enough when they were taken that now her father held her in his arms, she very vocally protested this hugely-built stranger's gentle hands. As Petra moved instinctively to take the child back and settle her, Davidias's eyes fell on the bare place at his wife's clavicle where a jet pendant used to hang.

Instead of answering his unspoken question, she turned her attention decisively to their daughter and leaned against his side, certain that there were details her husband could do without knowing and equally certain that all the weeks building up to this long awaited reunion hadn't given her quite long enough to decide what he could do with knowing, or how she was supposed to tell him any of it.

The things she couldn't tell him numbered significantly more than the things she could, and she'd always deny aloud being even capable of understanding what the words she used to curse Martel's name in her mind even meant. "It's only been so long," she said, her hand on Isaune's back, "you mustn't worry about it, she doesn't mean anything by it. You know she couldn't."

"We'll get better acquainted," Davidias promised, wincing as Isaune's protesting temper tantrum threatened to become a full blown unhappily wailing fit. His jaw still ached where she'd seen fit to reach up and take a firm grip of his short beard, just to make her displeasure unmistakably clear.

"I hope your Lord will understand that I have more need of you at home than he has of you away from it, then." Petra tucked Isaune's blanket and paced with her until she began to calm, bundling her afterwards into the temporary bassinet that had been set up. Soon they'd need something bigger for her, if she was any judge, and she tapped her fingers against her wrist while she thought, moving around the room in search of something else that needed doing.

"Petra," he said, quietly, after she'd finally conceded that there was nothing in the nursery left to do except leave it and was beginning to think of doing just that, "when I arrived in the city we were silent for hours, and now you're so restless I can't hear myself think. Will you please sit and speak to me? I know you need a respite."

"I didn't say-"

"I know," he repeated, "that you need a respite. For God's sake will you take it?"

"Don't use that tone," she said, automatically, "I've only just got her to- Davidias-"

With his hands at her wrist and elbow, Davidias marched her firmly from the room, pausing briefly on their way out to speak with the maidservant waiting there. "My lady is taken ill," he declared, daring either of them to contradict him, "and I believe what she needs is a bit of peace and quiet. Immediately. See to the children, would you? They're supposed to be sleeping."

"Yes, my Lord."

"Davidias-"

"Enforced peace and quiet, Petrana, come away."

"You are the most infuriating man," she said, after the door had closed, "and I missed you more than you'll ever know."

He touched her face, there in the hallway. "I thought you were dead, woman, I have a better idea of it than you think."

"I'm resilient," she reminded him, turning her face up in the flickering light of the torches.

"It seems to me that you've told me that once before." He smiled, faintly, and she thought that she could see lines on his face that hadn't been there when she'd left him. Even their previous separations could hardly have prepared them for this one, and this time it had been Davidias who waited without news and in time without the expectation of her return. He looked more tired than she remembered, but he walked like a weight had been lifted from his shoulders and whenever she turned around he seemed to be there, watching her, as if he thought she'd be gone again if he risked looking away. She wondered irrationally if this was how it had felt to Martel when he'd looked at her locket and understood what it meant, the grief that he'd been a focus of but not a party to and how it hung between them.

Unsettled by her observations, Petra fell back on their traditional banter; something in the slow way that Davidias thawed was a new kind of pain that she hadn't seen in him before and she wanted to reassure him with normalcy. She tried for the tauntingly superior tone she'd adopted a thousand times before - usually on the subject of her worldly Elenia. "You weren't simple or young enough to be a proper innocent, my husband. It was quite plain to me you simply didn't understand noblewomen aren't any more made of glass than any other sort of woman."

"And my lady wonders why they call her my temptress," Davidias said, wryly. The old joke was as reflexive as anything she'd said - unfortunately, under the circumstances, it was far bleaker than it had been before and her eyes hardened where some other time they might have dropped.

"No," she said, in an even tone and distant voice, "I don't."

He gazed at her for too long, and then he asked, "Do you remember when you told me that the first time, Petrana?"

Mutely, she shook her head. It seemed like she'd been saying something to that effect for most of her life, and it had begun to blur in her memory.

"Well, I do. I'd been courting you for a bit and I was visiting again. I'd been there a week and it was nearly time I had to leave - I remember that I didn't think it was going very well. Under the circumstances I was making a point of being exceptionally patient and, of course, very respectful. Or that was the idea." He reflected on it briefly, while Petra caught up with him. "In practise you weren't sure if I had the slightest idea what in the blazes I was doing there and, despite the fact that I'm going to flatter myself by saying you'd taken a shine to me, you were getting remarkably impatient about it. I took you for a turn around your mother's garden and I was telling you about something fairly meaningless when you put your hand on my wrist and said to me - I remember this part clearly - 'I am resilient, Sir Knight'. You kept walking past me while I tried to decipher what you meant."

"I remember when you courted me," she murmured. "You wouldn't do anything improper, and that was all very well, but you persisted in treating me like fine bone china into the bargain. I didn't need another guardian to keep me ignorant or someone afraid of his own hands, it drove me mad."

"I know. I never could stand your mother's garden, but I loved you then and there. I still hate the garden, and I still love you. I'm making plans to keep on loving you for just as long as I'm able, but I'd like to know before I try just how much of my wife he took with him when he fell. That's all."

It was perhaps the most direct way the subject had been addressed - now or ever, and as far as that went it was easily the calmest it had ever been when Davidias managed to bring it up. She stared up at him, startled, and put her hands to his face without thinking. "All of me is here," she promised fiercely. "You've never doubted how much I love you before, and I need very much for you not to choose now to start."

"It's not that that I'm worried about," he muttered, but he kissed her and they said no more of it.

(The enchantments that Davidias had placed on the locks to that small room in Petra's usual wing of the castle hadn't protected it from fire, and Martel's portraits had been lost.)