I enlisted with the Blood Knights in the eighty-second year of the Blood God’s reign, when I was twenty years old. This was somewhat older than most recruits, but my path in life had been dominated by other factors, and I had yet to seize any particular control over it.
The previous year, my father was stricken with a consumptive infection of the lungs and–mercifully, perhaps–passed quickly. It wasn’t precisely the attack in Piraeus that had brought about his end: His injuries healed mostly, leaving him with a limp and limited function in his right eye. But it had, in hindsight, been the beginning of a downward slide.
He, of course, did not return to the city from then on, for the very reasonable desire not to become a martyr or scapegoat to either side in the thinly-veiled conflict now ongoing between the Knights and Piraeus’ self-determinative Atheist faction. But I suspected it was also deeper than that, a phobic unwillingness to face even the place, much less the people, which had subjected him to that trauma. The result was that he was confined to our home and grounds, occupied by not busy, increasingly present and irritable to Mother, the servants, and myself. That he was moving so much less than he had been, that even his limited mobility in that limited space was painful for him–it all meant that even before the infection set in, he had become little more than a cruel, vaporous reminder of his former self. I found it striking that when he died, not even Mother truly mourned.
The legacy he left, though, was complicated for everyone. Despite his many enemies, Father was still regarded as one of the most talented artisans in the region. Our family’s honey fetched an outright exotic price as far away as Kol, and even despite our lifestyle of rural borderline-nobility, the business had been shockingly frugal. It turned out Father had left behind a fortune in silver, valuable goods, and stock certificates in a number of successful merchant companies, each of which had been paying dividends for years. The future of the apiary was, of course, uncertain, but it quickly became clear that Mother and I were in no danger of starvation. What was less clear was whether either of us had any desire to carry on Father’s work.
Eventually we settled on a course. Our head servant, Giuseppe, the very same servant who had sought help for Father the night of the attack, would take charge of the apiary, and when Mother passed, he would be the one to inherit it. I, meanwhile, had taken my father’s rejection to heart and fully accepted I would have no future in beekeeping, truly assumed I had no aptitude for it. And my mind had belatedly wandered to the political unrest in Piraeus, and tectonics of power I now saw shifting around us. So it was with not insignificant enthusiasm that I renounced my inheritance and made my way to the city, determined to stand on the right side of history.
Despite my ardent opposition, I have little doubt that if the political skirmish I arrived in had taken place even twenty years later, the Atheists would have won handily. Though the Knights were formidable warriors, anti-Kolai sentiment ran deeply through Piraeus, and they were outnumbered–possibly a hundred to one. Their advantage was that the Uprising of the 79th was fresh in the collective memory of the Kolai dominion: Only three years earlier, the city of Cantabyz, the source of the majority of the Dominion’s iron, had declared open rebellion against the Magni Kolai. The Blood God’s arrival at their gates–his first public appearance in a decade–claimed over 10,000 lives.
In the wake of this event, Piraeus’ cooler heads overwhelmingly opted to lie low, leavin the Knights to contend only with the Atheist’s firebrands. My allegiances were unconflicted. I had no grievance against the Kolai’s taxes, and the only meddling I had seen from the Knights had been clearly on the side of justice. It did not matter that when I arrived at the chapterhouse, the squire on duty in the hall urged me to consider that I would very likely not become a Knight without any magical talent I knew about. And it did not matter that my enthusiasm was met by a bemused chuckle from the only Knight in the hall at the time. I had existed too long in a state of terror at the unbelonging I had felt from my father, from the apiary, from the indolent, insular people of Piraeus. I knew that the Blood Knights–even simple service to the Blood Knights–was something greater that I would be glad to be part of. The Knight Captain’s speculative nod, when it came time to provide him my reason for enlisting, was tepid vindication. But it was enough.
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