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Typically, the bastard son of a minor count would not get a very good seat at the coronation of the new King Glen Baskerville, but Jack Vessalius was not your typical son of a minor count. Princess Lacie Baskerville was of the opinion that he was decidedly abnormal and there was something deeply wrong with him, but she, the abdicating king, and her older brother the crown prince all enjoyed his company, and so Jack got a seat of honor for the rite.
Personally, Lacie wasn’t all too sure this was a good idea. Levi—the former King Glen—found whatever was wrong with Jack deeply amusing, but Oswald, who was to be crowned king today, had only stopped finding it unsettling because he was glad that Jack liked Lacie, and because Lacie and Levi both acted like they trusted him.
Well, Lacie liked Jack a great deal, but she didn’t trust him as far as she could throw him. She didn’t know what his game was. He pretended to love her—he didn’t really—he called her brother his best friend—if Lacie commanded him too, he would have skinned Oswald alive. The only one of their number that Jack didn’t seem to behave inconsistently towards was Levi: occasionally, he would exchange glances with Lacie at some of Levi’s more ridiculous antics, but mostly he paid Levi the exact amount of mind he paid most people who were not Lacie Baskerville and whom he could not use for his own purposes—that was to say, no mind at all.
That would change tonight, probably. A lot of things were going to change tonight, and the relationship the royal family had with Jack Vessalius was probably the least important of all of those. Tonight would mark Lacie’s greatest triumph—and her greatest defeat. It would mark the end of Levi’s reign. Most importantly, it would mark Oswald ascendance onto the throne that he had fought so hard to earn, and the beginning of the best reign the country would ever see. Lacie was sure of this, and there was a part of her that was terrified that, by inviting Jack to a seat of honor up near the other Baskervilles, they had damned that bright future.
But Lacie Baskerville was not a woman who showed her fear, and so, even though she had wanted to give Jack the wrong date for the ceremony and cut him off without even a goodbye rather than let him pose a threat to her brother, all the while leading up to the ceremony she sat by Jack’s side, and held his arm when necessary, and talked with him, and laughed when she was supposed to, and Jack talked to her, and laughed when he was supposed to, and neither called the other out on their lies.
Maybe that was cowardice. Wouldn’t be hard, not really; Lacie was well aware that she’d been a proper coward about some things, like talking to Oswald about what his ceremony meant, really meant, for her and for them as siblings, and if she was being a coward now about Jack, too, well—maybe she’d earned it. Maybe it was her right, as princess, as sacrifice. It wasn’t her right as Jack’s friend; whether or not they were really friends was still up in the air even now, but if they were friends, real friends, proper friends like Lacie and the Core of the Abyss were, then she owed him an explanation and a goodbye, like she’d given to the Core, like she’d given to Black Rabbit, the little dragon she’d been hand-rearing in secret.
She had not given Oswald an explanation. She would not give Oswald a goodbye. Levi had been the one to give Lacie an explanation—a bad one, and she’d found one better within a week that she hadn’t shared with anyone except the Core—and they had not said goodbye. Lacie knew that Levi feared she would pull something and stay therefore alive, and that he wanted to say I knew it if that was the case. Lacie, for her part, did not respect Levi enough to give him something he didn’t ask for that Oswald wasn’t getting too.
Jack was different from Levi and Oswald even there, of course—though he knew as they did that Lacie had been rearing a dragon, he hadn’t ignored Rabbit like those two had. He had laughed at its antics, made mumumumum noises at it with Lacie when it chewed on her hair, because that was exactly how the little dragon had sounded when it was trying and failing to get itself her hair for a nest. Maybe Lacie should have said something, if only because he’d been so good about her little dragon—but she couldn’t risk it on the off chance that he would be upset when she said goodbye. When she had left Rabbit with the Core, it had tried to chase after her, making distressed rii rii rii noises as if trying to say her name, even though it was far too young to learn language yet. She had almost turned back for it—and if Jack begged her to stay, she couldn’t lock him away in the Abyss to shut him up. He hadn’t asked why the dragon wasn’t on its usual perch under Lacie’s hair, either, or even noticed it was missing, and he hadn’t congratulated Oswald on his coronation or Levi on his retirement, so Lacie told herself that she didn’t feel too bad about it, and if a part of her did ache at the lie, she told herself that that was just pregnancy hormones, or maybe some slight trepidation leading up to the ceremony.
It had been a long road, getting here. Oswald hadn’t been guaranteed the crown. He and Lacie had been expected to fight over it, and whoever came out of top would get the country, and whoever lost would be sacrificed to the Abyss, food for the dragons. Well, Lacie had always liked dragons, and more than that, she’d always liked her big brother, and so she’d put up just enough of a fight those first few years so that nobody would think to introduce another heir into the mix, and then had thrown all she was into making sure that Oswald would be crowned. Levi had confronted her about it, some three months ago, and that confrontation had ended in the suggestion of an experiment, which had shortly been followed by the worst sex of Levi’s immortal life. He’d had a breakdown afterwards, even though he’d suggested it, and he didn’t seem to have the slightest idea why he’d been so upset. Lacie had had an idea or two—it was one of the reasons why she’d made sure they talked every aspect of the sex out before and after—but she’d kept it, like so many other things, to herself. This was partially because of her other reason for making Levi talk the sex out with her twice: it was hilarious to watch him get more and more distressed about fucking his sisterdaughter while having no clue why he was distressed about it.
The next time they’d fucked, as an experiment on Lacie’s part, he hadn’t been anywhere near as upset, and that hadn’t been anywhere as near as amusing for Lacie, but that was alright. They’d both gotten what they wanted out of it, and now Lacie was pregnant. She thought that Levi might have another breakdown when he met her child, but unfortunately, she would never get to see it: she’d be dead by then, sacrificed to the Abyss, food for the dragons. If she wasn’t eaten, and she got out, it wouldn’t be until another Glen had been crowned, and a Glen who didn’t sacrifice anyone with his coronation at that: an entirely unrealistic concept for anytime in the near future, because Oswald didn’t know that was an option, because Lacie had gone to great lengths to keep that information from him, because it would immediately put a target on his back for the Jury to shoot at.
Lacie always had valued her brother’s life higher than her own.
The ceremony crawled to its starting place; Lacie laughed, and said goodbye to Jack, and tucked her earring into his hand before walking up to the dias, a spring in her step. Oswald had asked her if she might flee the ceremony, have a servant (passionate Charlotte, maybe, or little Lily) sacrificed in her place, and live on in secret, and had looked at her like his heart had been torn in two when she’d laughed in his face and said no, of course not, Lacie Baskerville did not shirk her duties and anyway Charlotte was too charming and Lily too little to kill, and none of the other members of their household would even elicit enough of a reaction from Oswald to be worth sacrificing. Even now, when he saw her take her place near the thrones, arrayed in all her finery, Oswald looked like something deep in his chest had died, just a little, as though there had even been a chance for Lacie to slip between the cracks of morning preparations and escape.
(There had been, of course. Oswald had seen to it that she’d had half a dozen good chances to get away, and ten more bad ones, because Oswald knew that Lacie did not believe in the goodness of the Jury, and she did not believe in the traditional method of becoming king, and she did not believe in throwing her life away for nothing. But Oswald’s ascendancy to the throne wasn’t nothing to Lacie—it never had been—and she’d taken every chance Oswald had left for her and every one he hadn’t and let them slip away like an embarrassed lover into the night.)
The coronation ceremony started. All eyes in the room were on Oswald, other than Jack’s, which still resided on Lacie, and Oswald’s shoulders were tight, and he was upset. Lacie felt somewhat bad for this; she hated hurting her brother, and she knew that her death would hurt him terribly—but at least he would be alive to hurt, and safe, and Levi would have his child born and reared in the Abyss, and Lacie would have safety for her family and a companion for the Core. Everyone was getting what they wanted here, except for maybe Jack, but Jack would get over it in time. It wasn’t like he had any other option here, after all. He would move on, eventually. And maybe, if Lacie was very, very lucky, he would move on from faking that he loved her to really loving Oswald, and then her brother would have a clinically insane, truly devoted companion for his rule, which was really all Lacie could ever want for him.
The vows were stated. Oswald’s shoulders tightened further. Levi relinquished the crown, and Lacie took it from his head with a smile, walked over to her brother, crowned him King.
It was at this point in the ceremony that Levi, years and years ago when he had been in Lacie’s shoes, had cut his own brother’s throat out and taken the crown for himself; when Lacie merely stood on her tiptoes and placed the crown on Oswald’s head, tucking a stray lock of hair behind his ear as she took her hand away, her brother’s face fell in disappointment. She dropped to one knee before him, the very image of a knight swearing fealty, though she didn’t take her red eyes away from his anguished purple ones. His hand, trembling so lightly that only Lacie noticed, reached out and brushed against her cheek, and then he stood there, paralyzed, looking sick to his stomach and on the verge of keeling over dead himself.
“Go on, Nii-sama,” Lacie murmured, smiling up at him with every ounce of cruelty in her. “Finish me off quick.”
Oswald flinched; anyone who looked at his face now would be able to tell that he was upset, though everyone who wasn’t Lacie, Jack, or Levi would have thought it was a very slight upset, as though he had eaten something that mildly disagreed with him, and not as though he were standing on the edge of a mental breakdown and preparing to take a leap. But before Lacie could hiss some more encouragement at him, he swallowed his bile and spoke.
“Lacie Baskerville, Ill Omen,” he said, and his voice was even and authoritative, and Lacie had never been prouder even as fear made its way along her veins, because Lacie did not want to die, had never ever wanted to die, and she would be dying now in short order. “You are a direct threat to the peace of the Abyss, and so I sentence you to death, and may you never return.”
Oswald looked shattered, looked an entire wreck, and Lacie opened her mouth again, to forgive him in hopes of easing some of that desperate pain she’d inflicted on him, but before she could do so terrible hot black chains were wrapping around her, and Jack was screaming, and Oswald looked like he wanted to cry, and Levi’s face was blank and amused and tight, and then Lacie knew no more.