Rise of the Unfavored Princess

Chapter 160: Ch. 159: Immortali-Tea

The first time Katya Duvernay had ever taken a life was when she was 11 years old.

Her etiquette teacher lay sprawled on the floor, her eyes bugged out and wide. A tongue thick and swollen lolled out of her mouth, the body’s sickly pallor further defiled by blue-black veins that were visible through her skin.

It was poison obviously. But not in her etiquette teacher’s cup, but Katya’s own. She had bribed one of the cleaning maids in her room, one of the younger ones who was frequently bullied and easy to manipulate. Giving the girl a little sweetness in the form of leftover treats and the occasional gold coin, it had been child’s play to convince the maid to sneak to one of the unauthorized and unsavory apothecary houses that littered the slums and West Bend and purchase a deadly poison.

Poisoning a person proved to be a delicate business, one that saw Katya pouring the little vial into her own teacup, before personally requesting that her teacher show her how to properly sip from the cup. The etiquette teacher had been much obliged to demonstrate until her throat began to swell up and the very blood in her veins began to burn her from the inside out like acid. The dramatic effects alone caused it to immediately became her favorite poison of choice from that day forth.

A tarnished silver spoon that had been in the teacup, clear evidence of poisoning if the teacher had thought to check, tumbled from the teacher’s convulsing hands. She’d stared at Katya in shock, with Katya observing the entire process, noting the way betrayal and horror had given way to the body’s urgent need to survive, which then gave way to death.

In truth, the first life Katya had ever taken was indeed when she was 11, but it was not her etiquette teacher, but the maid who had been assigned to buy the poison. The etiquette teacher was just the second of that day’s dirty business.

However, no one noticed the little maid’s death, who had been drowned in the pig slop like the lowly being she was.

.....

Her father had been summoned, just as tall and imposing back then as he still was today with the graying hair and wrinkling skin. In a mansion run with militaristic discipline and ruthlessness, his sharp eyes had quickly surveyed the scene and Katya’s fake cries of nearly being poisoned, before ordering everyone to clear the room. She had denied that the death was her doing with every breath until Chancellor Duvernay slapped Katya hard on her right cheek, leaving a mark that lasted 2 weeks and drew the amusement of her older brother.

“You’re too sloppy,” he had spat in disdain, not sparing the body on the floor another look as he stalked out. Her father rarely spared a kind word to her. But she had learned to read between the lines and learn the valuable lessons he imparted.

Katya could harm whomever she wanted, even those of rank, although she had to be a touch more careful with them than with the others. The Bryce family that the teacher had hailed from was a touch suspicious of her teacher’s death, only quieting down from some compensation from her father and a little help for one of their unmarried daughters to marry above her station. Not a word of the unusual death was mentioned in her social circles, maintaining the immaculate reputation that she had cultivated from the moment she could speak. A new and more subdued teacher was introduced mere days after the body had been taken out of her sitting room.

That was the beauty of being a Duvernay; the ability to play God in almost every aspect of life.

The House Duvernay had long held a firm grasp on the Holy Church, building up the national religion to the point that the imperial family needed to treat the church with respect in order to cement their legitimacy in the eyes of the people. The family had long been entrenched in politics since the early days as one of the few original Houses dating back to the start of the Erudian Empire. In fact, until the sudden usurp performed by the now Emperor Helio, the empire was named after the Erudian family but was truly run by the Duvernay family.

There had been a vacuum opened in the political arena after the coup by a rogue bastard prince who was too difficult to control. The ensuing madness sent many well-entrenched political families in Radovalsk and across the land into a spiral. But House Duvernay who had fought alongside the original Erudian royal family in the days of chaos before the empire was established understood something most other nobility had forgotten in their days of comfort and excess: chaos breeds opportunity.

Empress Katya Duvernay had met the man named Lord Bromely, originally a commoner with no background, in the blood-soaked months following Emperor Helio’s ascension. Extended members of the Erudian imperial family who did little more than party and leech off the empire’s wealth through taxes were turning up dead through “natural” causes. More territory was being acquired into the already sizeable empire at an astonishing rate, with neighboring kingdoms capitulating quickly once they heard that the new conqueror emperor had set his sights on their land.

“You are the one they call Katya,” the odd man named Lord Bromely had stated, sitting across the table from her with a rare ease that few possessed before a Duvernay. He was entitled to it, having wrecked the family’s plans by decimating the easy-to-manipulate emperor and crown prince and replacing them with a wild beast that bit everything that came near, save for his newly crowned empress and the Lord Bromely who smugly sat before her.

“I am,” she’d confirmed lightly, taking a sip from her tea cup. They met, surprisingly, in the back room of a tavern that was leagues away from the posh East Bend restaurants and salons Katya had grown up in. Yet she did not pay her surroundings any mind, focusing all her attention on the man before her who could get her what she wanted.

“You have no sisters?” he inquired politely.

Thoughts of scissors flashing in a garden and a loud scream flickered through Katya’s thoughts.

“Not anymore, unfortunately,” she replied, adopting a look of faint sorrow.

“Indeed. A shame for a life to be cut short so young, like a flower pruned in a garden before its time,” he sighed, throwing out the damning words like they were little more than his own thoughts on the matter. Yet they so aptly reflected what truly had happened in rear gardens of the Duvernay Estate 3 years prior, as if he were there watching her sister Beatrice scream and plead for her life. Katya had been thorough that time though, having become well versed enough to quickly dispose of any possible witnesses and disguise the death in such a way that even her father had thought it was a mere accident.

“I have long heard of your... sharp intellect,” Katya acquiesced to Lord Bromely. “Hence why I have seen to it that we find ourselves in each other’s presence.”

“You are too kind, my lady,” Lord Bromely chuckled, a friendly face at odds with whatever lay underneath.

“Not as kind as you were to that fishing village up north. What was it called again? Belen?”

The laughter ceased immediately.

“Indeed. That was its name,” Lord Bromely agreed. A faint smile still hung on his lips, but it was frosty.

“Whatever could you have found there that was important enough to vanquish an entire village to hide its value? It couldn’t be the rumors of forbidden curses being practiced there and the such?”

“You pry into things you shouldn’t, my lady,” the man warned, all traces of friendliness vanishing into thin air.

“Oh but I must. And I will continue to do so. You have two options. Aide me in getting rid of the current queen, preferably before she gives birth to an heir for the emperor, so that I may become empress. Or die. Like Beatrice,” she ordered calmly, acknowledging him for somehow knowing of her hand in her elder sister’s death.

There was silence for a moment. Katya’s hand had tightened on the handle of her teacup in anticipation, the taste of victory already upon her lips. She was no longer the incompetent 11-year-old of yesteryear. Now she was a player in the great game of power and she was playing to win.

“May I entice you with a third option?” the older lord finally proposed. He patted down his chest and pants as if looking for something, wearing homespun and simple clothes much like Katya so that neither of them would stand out.

“You may not.” The then teenage Katya contested scarcely before he closed his mouth. She was full of the heady confidence of youth at the time and was eager to press her advantage.

“I insist,” he pressed, clearly not intent on backing down.

Katya huffed out a breath of air. “Alright.”

“You are clever, young Miss Duvernay,” he began, although Katya was quick to brush away the compliment and hear the invisible ‘but’ in his tone. All of a sudden, she felt wary about what he had to say. “But I did take notice of your investigating of my whereabouts. I was a touch offended that you would have so little faith in my abilities not to notice what you were doing.”

“You jest.”

“I’m afraid I do not, my lady. What do you know of forbidden magic in Belen Village? Just rumors? Whispers here and there?” he tutted in a disapproving manner. “You remind me very much of my young emperor. Too quick to jump.”

At the time she had gritted her teeth at the insult, which had reminded her of her father’s verbal disapproval. But upon reflection, Katya was later struck by the way he had spoken of the newly enthroned emperor like the bloody conqueror were his pet dog. A man who held an emperor in the palm of his hand, wasn’t he very much like House Duvernay then, manipulating things from behind the scenes?

“Your tea,” he stated simply. “Or should I say, my tea.”

Katya blanched, as she had indeed switched their tea cups before he’d arrived just in case they were treated with some sort of poison.

“You switched the cups, didn’t you?” he inquired as he took his first long, leisurely sip. “That’s good. That is what I expected of you.”

“What did you put in it?” Katya demanded, her impeccable noble training stopping her from slamming her fist on the table, or even worse, lunging across it to strangle him. She wondered if she could kill him with her bare hands or if she would have to shatter her tea cup and slice him with one of the shards.

“I can see the murder in your eyes, young Duvernay. But it is too late.” She could see the amusement in his eyes as if he were watching a local theatre troop’s performance.

Katya took a deep breath, then another. When she felt stabilized, she asked yet again in a more polite tone, “What is in the tea, my lord?”

“Have you ever wondered why this new usurper emperor is so strong and has a presence so powerful it can kill? I know your family has tried to poison him at least once so there is no need to feign surprise,” Lord Bromely said. Katya maintained a blank expression, but despite learning more about her illustrious family’s operations, she had not known such a detail and it irked her.

He continued. “You know the mythos. The god Helio granted the Erudian family his blessing in the form of their golden eyes. They cannot be duplicated with magic or medicine, a symbol that has passed on generation after generation and blessed the imperial bloodline. You also know that Helio had, for lack of a better word, a counterpart.”

“The Devourer,” Katya cut in. She could tell that the old man was toying with her at this point, but she had lost so she had no choice but to sit through it.

“Yes. Akira the Devourer. Or Akira the Deceiver. He goes by many names and many faces, a dark part of Helio that managed to become its own entity. Akira is real,” Lord Bromely told Katya, a faint fanaticism sparkling in his eyes. “And I have managed to bargain with him to implement his blessing upon the young emperor.”

She didn’t believe a word coming from the old man’s mouth, so she said the next best thing.

“The tea,” Katya repeated once again.

“You see, true power lies in time. It is a gift incomparable to any wealth, pedigree, lavish mansion, or jewelry in the world. Because no matter what, we will all grow old and die. Today, I have ensured that you and I shall both do so at the same time.”

“No antidote?” Katya guessed. It was a good poison, she could admit. Her keen tongue that could distinguish various poisons hadn’t even picked it up.

“None,” Lord Bromely confirmed with a smile as if they were discussing the weather and not her life.

It was a perplexing conundrum for a young woman to find herself in, even one as politically savvy as Katya Duvernay had already been at that time. But she was no ordinary girl, accepting the fact of the matter with a promptness that impressed the emperor’s most trusted advisor, although Lord Bromely did not admit it.

“How often will you give me the antidote?”

“Once a month. You will feel lightheaded and irritable until it is administered,” he replied frankly.

Katya nodded, closing her eyes to digest the information. When they opened once again, they were blank, the terrifying emptiness that she had long mastered. She was not accustomed to any emotions outside of her occasional bouts of anger, which is what made her such an exceptional talent among the younger scions of House Duvernay. Katya knew what she wanted and she always made sure she got it.

“Now that you have sufficiently seen to it that I am under your thumb, you must do your part and tell me how I may attain my wish of being empress,” she said, licking her dry lips before boldly taking another sip of the poisoned tea. “And of this secretive matter you partook in at Belen Village. Poisoned or not, I would be happy to leak to the new emperor that his most trusted advisor murdered an entire village full of his loyal subjects for nefarious purposes.”

Lord Bromely looked on at her actions with the same amusement as before, his entire temperament far more unrestrained and loose than before. He seemed to take her for a declawed kitten he could toy with at his will; such was the luxury of having a failsafe in place. Someday, Katya vowed she would make him sorry for possessing so little wariness for her.

Underestimating others was not a concept Katya was familiar with, whether the other party was as insignificant as a stable boy or someone hailing from another prominent House. If anything, she would bide her time, spinning a web around her prey so delicately and carefully that by the time they brushed by a thread, it would be too late to escape. She leveled her insidiously calm gaze on her next prey as he began to finally tell her that which she wished to hear.

“What would you do with infinite time, my lady? With not only the entire empire at your heel, but the Old Continent and the unexplored ones further on. The time to unravel the mysteries tucked away in the long-forgotten parts of history, to explore frontiers that may extend beyond this world but into other ones. You see, we dug up some of those forgotten bits in Belen, a village that housed one of the last great warlocks centuries ago.”

“We?” Katya inquired. The newly ordained chancellor reached into his pocket, extending a delicate piece of jewelry that glimmered in the candlelight of the backroom.

“That is all I can say for now. But I do hope that as you prove your loyalty to us, you will be able to learn more about the greatest treasure that could ever exist. The treasure of infinite time, or in other words, immortality.”

She flipped over the jewelry in her hands, a silver interlocking symbol that resembled the number 8 tilted on its side. The words she heard in her ears were shocking, to say the least, especially considering that she knew that the smiling tiger of a man would not lie about such a matter when he already held her life in his hands.

“Immortality and time. Dabbling in such magic is illegal,” she stated, although the fact did not perturb her in the slightest. Despite the incredible revelations the man had told her, Katya’s interests did not align with such forbidden magic that could get her entire House killed. Irritation scratched at her as well as she realized he ignored her question yet again.

It had reminded the then young Katya Duvernay of the way her father often ignored her words in favor of her brother, the one sibling she couldn’t manage to get rid of.

“And once again, who is this ‘we’ you speak of? You failed to answer my question,” she demanded yet again. Like most noble girls, Katya was accustomed to ordering things from others, yet her imposing tone had no effect on Lord Bromely. He reached under the neck of his own shirt to reveal an identical necklace. The unusual charm hung on his thick, worn fingers, dangling like a carrot meant to attract a rabbit. Yet he still denied Katya the carrot she sought.

“Our members are secret, but we are many, spreading across the empire like a plague,” Lord Bromely half answered and half did not. “Welcome to The Order, Lady Duvernay, the true rulers of the known world and the infinite ones beyond it. And as our first order of business, no pun intended my lady, we shall see to it that you are made an empress.”

Katya let out a toothy, genuine grin, her first true smile in years. It was a gruesome thing to behold.