The Partnership

Five people are born in nine years. Three of them will be murdered by a fourth.

Severin Falkenrath in 1209, in Old Darkwood, to a family of minor merchants who put him out while he was still a child. Lucien Alvaro de Castillon in 1214, in Fatima, to a family with nothing. Leopold von Lachsenhausen in 1215 and Victor von Lachsenhausen in 1218, sons of a king, one pointed at armies and the other at treaties before either of them could read.

Ava Montclair in 1218. She is the only one of the five who dies the way people die.

King Aldric of Lachsenhausen wants Fatima, and Fatima belongs to Luxemburg.

So he does not take it. He arranges for it to fall apart, pays for the unrest that follows, and marches in to restore the order he bought. It is 1228 and it works.

Homes burn during the suppression. One of them has two people inside it, and their son gets out with the marks of it on him for the rest of his life.

Fourteen years old. He has just learned, with total clarity and no use for it yet, how a kingdom is taken without ever declaring war.

A travelling merchant named Armano Salvius finds a wounded boy on the road in 1229 and takes him in, for no reason beyond finding him there.

Three years of something like stability. Then, in 1232, Lucien Alvaro de Castillon persuades him to extend credit to a lord who turns out to have nothing. Armano Salvius is ruined and dies that winter.

It is the first thing Lucien builds and the first thing he destroys, and the two are the same act. He does not appear to notice the pattern. He flees to Bellum Castle carrying the guilt and none of the lesson.

In 1233 two men meet at Bellum Castle.

One has lost his parents to a manufactured war and his benefactor to his own cleverness. The other has been alone since his family put him out, and has spent twenty-four years since learning what people will do if you give them a reason.

The alliance is cautious. Neither of them trusts easily and neither of them has anyone else. That will do for a foundation; most things are built on less.

They are both wrong about what they have found. Lucien thinks he has found a partner. He has.

Ava Montclair marries Lucien Alvaro de Castillon in 1238, and in 1241 her family’s money and her family’s contacts open the mountain passes.

The Bellum Castle Trade Route is the first safe way through. Cliffhanger is the first town on it. Goods that could not move before begin to move, and the two men who made that possible stop being nobody.

Everything the empire will ever do runs on this. Not on the immortality, not on the armies. On a road.

The tournament at Glaceus Arena in 1243 is where the last two arrive.

Leopold von Lachsenhausen sees armed men who need paying and a route that needs protecting, and takes a share of the profits for the protection. Victor von Lachsenhausen sees further and joins as the voice that will make it all legal, treaty by treaty, for the next century.

They are bored of their father’s caution. They are also, both of them, entirely unaware that the man shaking their hands has spent several years poisoning him.

The arrangement becomes a friendship. That is the part nobody is lying about.

Ava Montclair dies in childbirth in 1249. Elias Castillon lives.

What she says to Lucien Alvaro de Castillon at the end is the only warning anyone in this story gets from someone with nothing to gain by it: *”You’re becoming the very thing you hate.”*

Two years later the grain King Aldric of Lachsenhausen has been eating for years finishes what it was sent to do. His sons inherit. His sons are already partners with the man who killed him, and will die still not knowing.

Lucien has now avenged Fatima by doing to one family what was done to his. Ava was right in 1249 and he has eleven years of evidence and still does not hear it.

In 1257 the four of them give themselves a name.

*Avari.* The greedy ones, in a dialect old enough that most people would need it explained. They choose it themselves, and they think it is funny.

It is the most honest thing any of them ever does.

Between 1258 and 1264 they take Lachsenhausen without a battle.

The mechanism is the road. Lachsenhausen depends on the Bellum Castle Trade Route for what it buys and what it sells, and the men who own the route adjust both until the kingdom cannot function without their goodwill. Then Leopold von Lachsenhausen and Victor von Lachsenhausen, who are already its rulers and already The Avari, make the arrangement formal.

King Aldric of Lachsenhausen sent soldiers into Fatima in 1228 to take a town that was not his. Thirty-six years later his sons hand over his entire kingdom without anyone drawing a weapon, and one of them does it standing beside the man who poisoned their father.

It is the same theft. It is only better done.