Free Princeps' fury by Jim Butcher

obligation to maintain the status of her office, as well as fulfill its duties.

    Aria’s study could easily have been mistaken for a garden. Several fountains chuckled quietly within, and growing plants were everywhere but upon the several bookshelves spaced around the walls. The fountains drained into a pool in the center of the room, and furylights of every color twinkled at the pool’s bottom like tiny, jeweled stars.

    Lady Placida herself arrived less than a minute later, striding into the room with confidence, energy, and purpose. She was a very tall woman, with lovely red hair and, like Isana herself, appeared to be a young woman in her early twenties. Also like Isana, she was in fact a good deal older than that. She wore the green-on-green of the House of Placidus in her gown and long tunic, and in the trim of her white traveling cloak and gloves.

    “Isana,” she said, coming toward them, holding out her hands.

    Isana took her hands and received a kiss on the cheek. At the touch, Isana felt the wrenching anxiety beneath the High Lady’s practiced, serene expression. “Aria. What’s happened?”

    Lady Placida nodded politely to Araris before turning back to Isana. “I’m not yet certain, but sealed orders from the First Lord arrived, and my lord husband has already left to mobilize Placida’s legions. We are commanded to leave for the capital at once.”

    Isana felt her eyebrows lifting. “Only us?”

    The High Lady shook her head. “Half a dozen of my husband’s most powerful lords have been summoned as well—and from what the messenger said, similar summons have gone out to the entire Realm.”

    Isana frowned. “But . . . why? Why do such a thing?”

    Aria’s expression remained calm, but it could not hide the woman’s worry from Isana’s senses. “Nothing good. Our coach is waiting.”

 

    CHAPTER 5

    Isana had been to the great hall of the Senatorium only once before, during the presentation ceremony when she and several others had been brought forth in front of the Realm as a whole and introduced as new Citizens of Alera. At the time, dressed in the scarlet and sable of the House of Aquitaine, she had mostly been too self-conscious—and, she could admit to herself now, ashamed—to notice how large the place was.

    The Senatorium was built from sober, somber grey marble, and was ostensibly large enough to hold not only the Senate, which included the Senators and their retinues, but every Citizen of the Realm of Alera as well. Isana had been told, at some point, that it could seat more than two hundred thousand souls, each and every one of them able to see and hear what transpired thanks to the cleverly arranged furycraft in the construction.

    It resembled an enormous theater more than anything else. Upon the bottom and center of the Senatorium was the actual half circle of seating for the Senate, presided over by the Proconsul, the Senator with the most votes within the body of the Senate itself. Then, rising in rank upon rank upon rank, bench seating stretched up and out for hundreds of yards. Looking down upon the Senate floor, one had only to lift one’s eyes up a little to see the First Lord’s Citadel, the heart of Alera Imperia, rising above the Senatorium.

    “What’s so funny?” murmured Lady Placida.

    “I was thinking how one couldn’t help but notice how large and threatening is the First Lord’s Citadel up above us upon entering,” Isana said. “It’s hardly subtle.”

    “That’s nothing,” Lady Placida replied. “When leaving, the view is of the Grey Tower. An even more poignant vista.”

    Isana smiled, and glanced over her shoulder to see that Aria was correct. The Grey Tower, that unassuming little fortress, was a prison built to hold powerless even the strongest furycrafters in the Realm—and was a silent statement that no one in Alera was beyond the reach of the law.

    “One cannot help but wonder,” Isana said, “if whichever First Lord presided