The Traitor’s Mercy by Iris Foxglove

Chapter 1

“Sabre. Darling. Head up.”

Sabre de Valois opened his eyes. His mother, her long, red-brown hair draped with ribbons even as she stood in just her cream underdress and bare feet, lifted her chin a fraction. The executioner’s rope lay snug around her bare neck.

Sabre took a shaky breath and raised his head.

The crowd that had gathered to watch his family die looked more like they belonged at a street fair than a hanging, with vendors lining the plaza and children running about underfoot. Some of them held bits of bright cloth in their hands—pieces of Sabre and his family’s clothes, his mother and sister’s gowns, his own suit, stripped and tossed into the crowd as souvenirs. Sabre could hear bells ringing further down the hill, the sound of heralds delivering the news to the lower city; That the de Valois family had been discovered conspiring against the crown, and were dragged out of their own summer ball to face the king’s justice.

The executioner fitted the rope around Sabre’s neck. It was heavy and coarse, and when it was tightened, Sabre glanced at his mother, who was staring into the crowd. Her gaze settled on the raised stairs where King Emile de Guillory sat, watching them as though he were nothing more than one of the hundreds of commoners crowding the square, and her bound hands twisted and clenched behind her back.

When the executioner fitted the rope around his sister Elise’s neck, Elise let out a soft sob, and Sabre turned to her. She was trembling, hot tears in her eyes, her blue shift clinging to her legs.

She’d only turned sixteen that morning.

“Elise,” Sabre said. “Ellie.” He looked at the executioner, a lean, expressionless man in a dark suit and rough leather gloves. “Sir. If you could let me hold her hand.”

His mother made a soft sound beside him, a warning, and the executioner slid his dull gaze over Sabre.

“Please,” Sabre said. “Just her hand, that’s all I ask.”

The executioner turned from him, and Elise took a ragged breath. She raised her chin high, like her mother, and closed her eyes.

“Please,” Sabre said, one more time.

“Sabre, that’s enough.” His mother always held an unnatural dominance in her voice—Sabre’s father said it came from the fact that she was a distant cousin of the royal family, inheriting the power of their bloodline. But Elise’s dominance was a soft thing, and Sabre was as much a natural submissive as his mother was a dominant, so blood could only go so far. As it was, Sabre went still, and Elise clenched her hands tight behind her back.

“Look at him, Sabre. Elise.” Their mother’s voice was sharp as a blade, cutting through the chatter of the crowd. “Look at the man who would kill his own kin to keep his power.”

The king shifted on the steps, leaned back on one arm, and raised a hand. Sabre tensed, prepared for the floor beneath him to give way, but nothing happened. The executioner stepped to the edge of the platform, and a young girl in a page’s livery raced through the crowd like a minnow through a school of fish.

“Sir,” she said, bowing smartly. “His majesty the king requests to speak with the prisoner Sabre de Valois.”

“What?” Elise twisted to stare at him, brown eyes wide.

“Elise.” Their mother barked out the order like a commander. “Eyes front. Be silent.”

“I don’t understand,” Sabre said, as the executioner slipped off the rope around his neck. A susurrus rose from the crowd, hundreds of voices whispering and calling out as Sabre was taken by the arm and wrenched away from his mother and sister.

“Wait,” he said. “Wait, shouldn’t they—Shouldn’t you let them—"

“The king asked for you,” the executioner said. “By name.”

“Mother,” Sabre tried to twist to look back, but the executioner was surprisingly strong for his size, dragging him behind a row of the king’s guard. The crowd pushed against them, seeking a better look. “Mother, should I ask him—"

“Ask him for nothing,” his mother said. “Any promise he makes will come at a cost too dear to pay.”

“Ask him to let Mother go,” Elise shouted, as Sabre was pulled out of sight.

The line of the king’s guard shifted and flowed like a tide against the shore as the crowd surged to break through, and Sabre was close enough to the palace steps to see the litters where the noble houses of Staria were being held. Every noble he’d ever met was there, watching him as he was dragged, barefoot in just an undershirt and thin gray trousers, to the steps where the king was sitting. The only one missing was Prince Adrien. Had he known? Was he the reason Sabre was being pulled off the gallows? Sabre was almost glad he couldn’t see him in the throng. He didn’t think he could handle knowing that Adrien was there to watch him die.

King Emile had none of his son’s sympathetic nature. He looked more like Sabre, or his father, another cousin in a tangled web of royal breeding. They had the same reddish hair, a sturdier frame than Adrien’s willowy, beanpole shape, the same line of their jaw. The only difference lay in the king’s eyes—blue, clear and pale as a winter sky.

The king didn’t even glance Sabre’s way when Sabre was dropped at his feet and pushed to his knees. He kept his gaze fixed above him, to the platform where Sabre’s family stood, waiting.

“So,” he said. “The submissive of the de Valois. I haven’t seen you since the winter solstice. Dabbling in treachery, are we? And here I thought your hobby was…dancing? Swordplay? A little of both, I think.”

“Your Majesty,” Sabre said, twisting his hands behind his back. “We weren’t conspiring against you, I swear.”

“Now, that’s a lie.” The king turned his gaze to Sabre, and the only thing that stopped Sabre from shrinking into himself was twenty years of dealing with his mother’s flares of dominance. The king was nearly as strong as she was, but not quite. Perhaps he knew it. “Your mother has been conspiring against me since we were children. It’s healthy, they say, to keep an enemy or two around. It’s like hunting. Do you hunt, Sabre?”

“I’ve…once,” Sabre said. “Not since my father—"

“I wasn’t asking for your life story, boy, I know that. The point is, if you hunt all the deer to extinction, you’ll be proud of yourself for a season, and then you’ll come back the next and find nothing satisfying to shoot. Leave a doe or two be, and you’ll have enough sport to last for years to come.”

Sabre swallowed around a dry throat.

“Your Majesty, if there were a trial, you would—"

“Have to listen to lawyers? Yes. Odious business. There’s a simplicity in a hanging.” The king smiled down at Sabre, and Sabre quickly looked away. “But no, I don’t think you knew of any treason. You were too earnest when you asked after my health, last we spoke, and your mother and sister are…bold personalities. It can’t be helped if a submissive bows to the pressure of their dominant family.”

“Please, Your Majesty.” Sabre leaned over his knees, half bowing. His mother had muttered about the king often enough, but treason? He certainly couldn’t think it of Elise, who only wanted to catch the eye of her lady’s maid, who Sabre caught reading poetry to her just a week before. “I can prove our innocence. I’ll do it myself, if I have to. I’ll do anything, Your Majesty.”

He bowed, pressing his forehead to the ground. It made his stomach churn to do it, to bow as a submissive would to their dominant before a king who ordered his family to the gallows, but he kept his forehead pressed to the stone.

“Oh,” the king said, and Sabre shivered at the light brush of fingers over his hair. “To inspire such devotion.”

Sabre grunted as the king pressed a booted foot firmly on his back, holding him down. “Tell the executioner to let them hang.”

“No.” Sabre struggled to rise, but the king was a powerful man in more than just his dominance, and he couldn’t wriggle free from under his foot. Sabre could feel his breath go hot on the stone beneath him. “No, Your Majesty, please, I beg of you. I beg of you.”

There was a sound of a door slamming against stone, and the crowd erupted in a collective gasp. Sabre closed his eyes as the nobles around him began to applaud, polite and scattered like the first pattering of rain on a roof, before the applause rolled over the crowd, building up into a storm that drowned out even Sabre’s broken, gasping sobs.

* * *

They said Laurent de Rue,former courtesan turned noble and proprietor of the House of Onyx, had a heart full of nothing but ash and silver coins. That all he cared about was the reputation of his House; the one nobles contacted in coded letters, sent by hired servants attired in unknown livery, for those desires the traditional pleasure houses couldn’t satiate.

It was said that Laurent had ambitions to replace Jasque de Yvain, the noble who was ostensibly in charge of the pleasure district, and it was whispered in the ballrooms and drawing rooms of the Starian elite that it wouldn’t be long before he did it. Laurent had earned his noble title by not only paying off his debt in the fabled House of Gold—the most exclusive of the pleasure houses—but by convincing King Emile to let him take over the near-defunct House of Clay and turn it into the House of Onyx, which catered to the stranger fetishes of the Starian nobility.

Or the commoners who could afford it, which made him something of an aberration; courtesans were typically an indulgence restricted only to the nobility. Staria understood that its thriving merchant class was wealthy, but they were still enmeshed in the old ideas, that money meant little without a title to hold it up. Laurent had met plenty of nobles who were trapped in the sticky web of genteel poverty, slowly starving in their crumbling manors, freezing to death in homes with ten or so hearths bereft of wood.

A silver coin was a silver coin. If a wealthy merchant from beyond the fabled Ring of Stars—the districts in Duciel that surrounded the palace—could afford the services of his House, Laurent had no intention of turning them away. He’d supplemented his own income in the House of Gold by fucking wealthy merchants on the side, those who resented the nobility with less coin were allowed a thing they were not. It seemed only fair he did not prohibit his courtesans from paying their debt the same way.

“It’s a pity,” Julien d’Albert said, examining his nails. “This poor noble. Did you hear he watched his family hang? Dreadful, just dreadful, so I heard. They thrashed on the gallows so long, I hear people left out of boredom.”

Laurent pasted a bland, disinterested look on his face. “Mmm.” He could hear the salacious eager tone in d’Albert’s voice, as he pretended to be above petty court gossip even though they were anything but. Laurent had been chosen for the House of Gold by this man, who’d fucked him for a week or so after Laurent’s First Night, until another pretty courtesan in training caught his eye, and Laurent was left to pay off his debt in peace.

He’d never paid Laurent for the privilege of suffering his rather boring, pedestrian attentions. It was his right as the house proprietor to take Laurent to bed, of course. The courtesans in the House of Onyx, however, were used to Laurent’s professional distance, which was unusual for a proprietor in the pleasure district. He didn’t impose on what little free time they had, and even if he did wish to hire one of his courtesans for an evening, he would have dutifully noted the usual cost on the ledger to account for it. So far, he had yet to indulge.

The man in the center of the gathered circle of House Lords was not enjoying himself. He was naked and collared, his reddish hair worn long, though free of the proper nobleman’s ribbon—removed before they forced him to climb the steps of the gallows, Laurent imagined—and he was trembling on his knees, gasping softly, tears falling onto the marble ground of the open-air pavilion in the complex that made up the pleasure houses.

“He’ll be off to the whorehouses in lower Duciel,” said Lady Amalie de Reve, the proprietor of the House of Silver. “Taken by those who want a taste of what it’s like to bask in the golden light of the king and his chosen stars, I imagine, until he’s too used up and thrown to the brutes on the street.” She snapped open a fan and said, in a voice throbbing with disingenuity, “what a sad end to his charmed life.”

“Careful, darling,” murmured Lord Marcel de Cuivre, proprietor of the House of Bronze, as he grinned at her. “Your claws are showing.”

She shrugged. “We are nobles. His family were traitors to the crown. Am I supposed to feel sorry for him?”

Trembling there in the circle of unmoved lords and ladies, Sabre de Valois said something under his breath and tilted his head, letting his hair fall over his face. Trying to hide.

“It’s not the whorehouses that await this one,” Lord Julien said, dismissively. “King Emile’s law was clear. If by nightfall he went unclaimed by the pleasure houses, by dawn he’d greet the quarry quart.”

“How dreadful,” said Lady Amalie, smiling in satisfaction. “Let him end his cursed life hauling stones for the baths in which he used to soak. I’ve seen enough.” She snapped her fan closed and walked to the center of the circle, then tipped de Valois’ face up to hers. “I hear it took your sister four minutes to die. I bet it felt like an eternity. They say she wet herself in fear. And your mother, watching you subjugating yourself before the king while she and her daughter swung and choked. She cursed you with her dying breath, did you know?”

“Lady Amelie, really,” Lord Marcel said, indulgent. “The boy will be tormented enough, come dawn.”

“How I wish I could see it,” Lady Amelie said. “When your back breaks under the marble, and they let you die screaming in the sun.” She kicked him, hard, in the ribs. And then again, so that Sabre curled in on himself and drew his hands over his head, either protecting it from further blows or trying to block out the words about his mother and sister’s last moments.

“All of this because his mother never hired her again,” Julien confessed to Laurent, under his breath.

“Starian nobility keeps their grudges ever at the ready, like an Arkoudai with their sword,” Laurent responded, watching Amelie leave on Marcel’s arm.

“Yes, but one mustn’t forget, it’s the young man’s fault.” Julien tsked and turned away, dismissing the crying young noble as easily as he did Laurent’s fake moans of pleasure in his bed, years ago. “At any rate, I’m hardly going to put him on offer, my house has standards. Lord Laurent. Good day.”

He, too, turned and left.

The guard sighed and turned to his companion. “Call the quarrymaster.”

Laurent studied the miserable, shivering young man who’d been left there in the square. The king must have known none of the pleasure houses would want to take him, this son of a woman hanged for treason, even without the apparent personal grudge. King Emile had forced this poor noble to stand on the gallows with a noose around his neck, waiting to die beside his family. Then he’d offered the hand of hope, only so Aline de Valois could see her son bow in subjugation and beg before she’d hanged.

Now, unwanted and in disgrace, he would be taken to the quarries. It was back-breaking labor, hauling the marble used for the nobility’s decadent homes, and men like Sabre never lasted long. If the unfamiliar work and dangerous conditions didn’t end them, the others who were condemned to toil there did. It was a prison sentence for those who weren’t born and bred for such work. Julien had threatened Laurent with it a few times, when his natural dominance showed on accident and insulted his client.

“Maybe we can have fun with this one, first,” the guard said, sneering, as if Laurent wasn’t there. The strict class divide in Staria caused quite a bit of pent-up frustration for those who weren’t at the top. Sabre, who was related to the de Guillory line itself, had quite a long way to fall. “Nice long, leisurely trip to the quarries. We can switch off.” The guard’s cock was pressing against his pants. He looked at Sabre like a starving beast might eye up a herd of weakened deer.

Laurent put his dominance into his voice, speaking sharply. “There is no need to call for anyone, and I’m afraid you’ll have to sate your lusts elsewhere. I’ll take him. You’re dismissed.”

For a second, the guard looked like he might argue. But Laurent’s stare was unwavering, and the guard lowered his gaze after a moment and muttered, jerking his chin at his companion and wandering off.

Alone, Laurent approached Sabre, who hadn’t moved from his position. He was curled around himself, sobbing, already turning red in the heat of the midday sun. Laurent went down on his haunches and laid a careful hand on Sabre’s shoulder. The young man flinched hard and drew in closer, trying to make himself invisible.

“If you can get to your feet for me, I’ll put my coat on you. It will be warm, but it should keep your skin from the sun and give you something to hide in.”

Sabre didn’t look up.

Laurent sighed. “My name is Laurent de Rue. I’m the proprietor of the House of Onyx. Come with me, and let’s see what we can do about you.”

* * *

Sabre didn’t thinkhe could stand.

He wasn’t sure he deserved to. Not with Elise dead, and his mother’s last sight of him as a traitor, a coward who would kneel for the king who let them hang.

“You should go,” he said. His voice was hoarse, low, his mother’s years of elocution lessons lost the moment the platform fell.

“You’ll find I don’t have to follow your orders,” said Laurent de Rue, sliding his hand under Sabre’s arm. “Stand up. Can’t have you crawling through the streets—they haven’t been swept yet.”

Sabre slowly pushed himself upright. He swayed slightly, blinking in the sun, and shivered at the memory of his mother’s voice, sharp and commanding.

Head up.

“No, we’re not doing that,” Laurent said, grabbing him firmly by the arm as Sabre started to fold in on himself again. Sabre barely noticed when Laurent draped his coat over Sabre’s shoulders. “Put it on.”

Sabre responded automatically to the dominance in Laurent’s voice, relieved, in some small way, to have an order he could follow. Something simple. He tugged on the coat, but it wasn’t quite big enough to cover him all the way. Sabre was trim enough, for a noble, but his shoulders were a bit more filled-out, a weak shadow of his distant royal cousin.

“Thank you,” he said, in that same soft, broken voice.

“You might reconsider that,” Laurent said. He kept a hand on Sabre’s arm, guiding him through a maze of familiar streets that warped and blurred as they walked, nothing but smudges of color against a pale sky. “Do you know what the House of Onyx is?”

“Yes.” Sabre touched the collar at his throat. It was gold, made of clever interlocking scales that didn’t catch at the skin. It had fit him perfectly, when the king locked it around his neck. Like it had been made for him. “I’ve been there. To the House.”

“You have? I thought your family had views on the pleasure district.”

“Yes, exploitation of the poor,” Sabre said. He’d heard his mother’s lectures on the subject often enough. “My friends wanted to go, but I...I paid the girl and went outside. She’s probably still there, isn’t she?”

“Probably, yes. So you know that we cater to more particular needs, then?”

“Yes.” It was part of the appeal. If a noble had a desire that could lead to an awkward talking-to at one of the other Houses, they discreetly applied at the House of Onyx. If he’d known they had proper dominants there, Sabre might have actually stuck around, that night, found someone who could wield a flogger properly, not drop halfway through and leave Sabre to his own devices. He’d only heard about their resident dominant after his friends were done, and by then it was too late to run back in and change his mind. Now, he couldn’t see the point.

“So long as you’re aware of what you’re getting into.”

Sabre laughed hollowly. It sounded terrible. “The king set my debt at fifteen hundred crowns.”

Laurent stopped in the middle of the street. There were pink rose bushes billowing up over a wall at his back, bursting with blooms. They framed him on either side like an unusual fur ruff. “Did you say…are you certain.”

It wasn’t a question.

“That’s all he told me,” Sabre said. He took a breath. He wasn’t sure of the last time he’d done that. “I don’t think I can stop walking. Sir. My lord.”

Laurent took his arm again. “It’s not far.”

Sabre peered at the houses that lined the street on either side. He hadn’t even noticed that they’d passed into the pleasure district. There was the House of Copper, with the stone lions at the gate. The House of Iron had a courtesan tied to one of the severe stone pillars, looking mildly bored. The House of Stone wasn’t even a proper house, just a pavilion with a cellar they said went down three flights. Courtesans eyed them as Laurent guided Sabre past the main Houses, down a side street lined with small empty buildings. At the end of the street, the House of Onyx stood with a single violet light flickering at the door. Black curtains draped over the upper windows and trailed down almost to the street, and Laurent stepped up to the door and pressed a panel next to the frame.

The door swung open, revealing a young man in a raven mask, feathers curling around his round face.

“My lord,” he said. “It’s been dead today, thanks to the hanging, but Nanette has one of her regulars, at l—oh.” His green eyes blinked behind the mask. “Do you need help, my lord?”

“This is our newest,” Laurent said. “He’s a little rough around the edges, at the moment. Let us in, Yves. And stop wearing out the masks, you know they’re for clients.”

“Yes, my lord.” Yves took off the mask, revealing a mess of pale hair, and stepped aside.

The last time Sabre had been in the House, he’d only stayed long enough to explain to the poor girl he’d hired that he was a submissive, actually, and hadn’t paid much attention to his surroundings. Now, he passed through the entrance, where nobles donned their masks and were led by the host to their courtesan of choice, and into the main lounge. A courtesan was already there, a man a little older than Sabre with glossy golden hair, wearing nothing but a black loincloth draped with silver chains. He scrambled out of his ungainly sprawl when he saw Laurent enter, and pushed back his hair.

“No using the lounge during working hours unless you’re ordered to,” Laurent said.

“Yes, but no one’s here except for the cat woman,” the courtesan said. “They’re all watching the traitors dance, aren’t they?”

Sabre stiffened, but Laurent squeezed his arm once, a warning.

“It’s been over for an hour,” Laurent said. “And I suspect some of them may already be on their way. Easy,” he added, softly, when Sabre’s breath hitched.

Nobles. Coming to the pleasure district. Sabre knew his mother wasn’t exactly an easy woman to love. His father was friendly enough, loyal to the king and a veteran of his army, but he died on a hunt with Elise when Sabre was fourteen. Too many nobles with a grudge would have no qualms taking it out on Sabre with his mother gone, and if they knew he was given to one of the pleasure houses—

“—a new courtesan in training,” Laurent was saying, somewhere beyond the roaring in Sabre’s ears. “When Nanette is done, send her and the others to my room. There are a few extenuating circumstances with this one.”

“Is he sick?” Yves was pulling out a heavy black ledger that looked almost the size of his torso. He grimaced at Sabre. “Because you look sick.”

“I might be,” Sabre said.

“Not on the carpet, please.” Yves set the book down on a plinth with a grunt. “I’m on cleaning duty.”

“He’ll keep that in mind,” Laurent said. He gestured at the other courtesan and snapped his fingers. “If I don’t see you at Nanette’s door when I pass by…”

“Yes, my lord, at your service, my lord.”

“Brat,” Laurent said, but there wasn’t any heat there. The dominance in his voice strengthened, filling the fog in Sabre’s mind. “Come. Keep walking.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Courtesans call the proprietor of the house my lord,” Laurent said, towing him up a set of plush, carpeted stairs. There were more violet lights scattered throughout, giving the dark walls the effect of a cave, glittering with precious stones just out of reach. “If I’m not a lord, clients won’t treat me like one, and then they’ll think they run the place. Do you understand?”

Sabre struggled to breathe again. It was never so hard, before. “Yes, my lord.”

“I’ll add you to the ledger soon. I can’t mark your debt until the king sends a clerk to confirm it, but you won’t be taking clients yet.”

“What?” Sabre blinked slowly. They passed a closed door, and Sabre jumped at the sound of a smack and a squeal of pain. “I don’t understand...I thought it would start tonight.”

“Courtesans are trained, first, when they join the Houses,” Laurent said. “I can’t unleash an untrained whore on the world, can I? Well, I can, but it won’t do either of us any good. You’ll do this properly, which means no clients tonight.” He caught Sabre with his gaze, shadowed in the dim light of the stairwell. “Repeat it so I know you understand.”

“No clients tonight,” Sabre said.

Laurent turned from him, heading up the stairs, and snapped his fingers twice. “Follow me.”

“Yes, my lord.”

Sabre’s heart was hammering so loudly he could feel it in his ears. He stumbled up the steps after Laurent, forgetting a lifetime of dancing and fencing lessons, and shuddered when they reached a single door at the top floor. The door was outlined in silver, and there was a relief of a line of women winding up a mountain, carrying vases on their shoulders. A dragon appeared on the other side of the mountain, sinewy and wild as a snake, fangs bared.

“I don’t trust you in your own room, yet,” Laurent said, pushing open the door. “You’ll be staying with me until I know you won’t try to do anything rash.”

“I don’t think I can do anything,” Sabre said. He touched his arms. He was shaking. He didn’t know when he’d started that. “I even knelt for the king, when he…gave the order.” His voice trailed off at the end, barely a whisper.

“Yes, I heard.” Laurent sighed. Sabre would have called him lovely, a few hours ago. He had a delicate face, framed by long hair that looked almost violet in the light of his room, muted by a silver that suited him far better than some of the more fashionable nobles he knew. His eyes were the same gray, almost ghostly, and Sabre found himself holding his breath, waiting for him to laugh, or sneer, or admit that it was all a ruse to get the traitor’s son alone.

“I won’t pretend that what happened to you wasn’t terrible,” Laurent said, and Sabre frowned, slightly. “But you won’t have time to grieve properly. Few ever do. It will be unpleasant, I imagine, but if you don’t fight me, I’ll see what I can do to keep the worst of it at bay.”

“Why?”

Laurent shrugged. “Anyone can look at you and see you weren’t a traitor before this started.”

“Before?”

Laurent turned into his room, lavishly decorated in grays and blacks and silver. “You may not have enough time to grieve, Sabre,” he said. “But I expect you’ll have plenty of time to learn to be angry.”