“Have you not heard this story, piccolina?” Mars queried, and when he did, their monkey scurried out from under hair, over to Mars, where she tucked herself inside his shirt as if she was pulling the covers of a bed up to her neck.

And as the tiny creature did this, Mars did not twitch, as if the thing slept just like that, next to his heart, every night.

“I knew they fought. I knew it was over a woman. But this was not the story I read,” Silence answered. “She was…well, not very romantically described.”

“That’s because you read the Airenzian version,” Cassius told her. “If you find it in Firenze, it will be far closer to the truth.”

“It does not have a happy ending,” Jorie warned.

“Oh no,” Silence whispered.

“They tore her apart,” Cassius announced tersely.

The room went silent and everyone regarded Cass.

“Sweetheart,” Elena murmured, curling her hand around his forearm.

“It is what you know, Silence,” Cassius said gently. “All you know of how it is comes from Airen. What you do not know is why women are treated as such in this land. The second born son of the Fire King was always the Sky King. Brothers, for centuries, millennia, who ruled their dominions side by side, in accord, even bloody harmony. Upon coronation, they’d assume the magicks of their realms. Fire and Sky. Until her. Until neither man could get beyond their own passions and desires and pride.”

He drained his glass, set it on a table by his side, and resumed speaking.

“And when they met to return her to the Green King so he could discover what she wanted, they clashed, magicks against magicks, with her in the middle. Some lore has them actually physically tearing her asunder, and their magicks exploded in grief and fury when they did, the Green King intervening in an effort to stop their power from destroying the earth. Other lore says that when the Green King saw what they were doing, saw his subject caught between these two powerful forces, he sent his magic to save her. The three magicks colliding disintegrated her on the spot. However it happened, this magic drove deep into the earth and up to the heavens and scorched all around for miles. And it heralded war that lasted one hundred and fifty years before a stalemate was finally called, Firenze broke in two and Airen was born.”

“I don’t understand why this would be why women were so awfully treated here, Cass,” Silence noted.