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Cassiel's Daggers	By : bewaretheshort1 Category: G through L > Kushiel's Trilogy Views: 1881 -:- Recommendations : 0 -:- Currently Reading : 1
Disclaimer: I do not now, nor will I ever, own Kushiel's Legacy, or its affiliates written by Jacqueline Carey. Any characters and/or ideas are the exclusive property of Jacqueline Carey. Furthermore, I do not make any money from this.

Chapter List
- 1-One
- 2-Two
- 3-Three
- 4-Four
- 5-Five
- 6-Six
- 7-Seven
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My name is Edouard d’Aiglemort, son of Marc, Duc d’Aiglemort, and his beloved wife, Nicola. My brother, Emil, is heir to all of our father’s titles and holdings. I say this not to brag, but rather to acknowledge a little known fact. Indeed, it is too oft forgotten or ignored that most of those sworn in Cassiel’s service can trace their lineage to one or more of the Great Houses. It is true that there are among our numbers those of us who hail from peasant stock, but by and large, it is the nobles who can most easily spare a second-born son to such a life. This is not to say that we are peers of the realm by any stretch of the imagination. We forswore that privilege when we dedicated our lives to being Perfect Companions to our charges, as well as any right to inheritance and other such filial ties. Some say that is why the tradition of sending younger sons to the Brotherhood was born, and I cannot bring myself to wholly disagree. I have seen full well what can happen when politics, cold practicality, and ambition outstrip familial loyalty and the law.
But for a quirk of fate, I might have stood to inherit in place of my twin brother. Understand that I am not bitter, nor have I ever envied my brother his fortune. Had I been born first, things might have fallen out differently. What might have been is never given to us mortals to know, and we must make do with what was and what is. As to that, our parents were quite surprised by the sudden presence of a pair of healthy boys.
I suppose it must be mentioned first that our parents were much loved by their people. Marc d’Aiglemort had roused the Allies of Camlach one memorable winter and sent the Skaldi raiders back through the passes, earning himself a deserved reputation as a brilliant military leader and war hero. Nicola le Garde was a bright jewel of Camlach, who caught our father’s eye. They wed out of love, rather than politics, yet they were as well matched in that as they were in love. Would that they had such luck to spare to children.
Emil and I were our mother’s third pregnancy, and the only one that made it to completion. The first, I was told, failed due to a skittish horse and rocky ground. Though our parents mourned the loss of the child, our mother was young and hale and it wasn’t long before her belly began to swell with life once more. However, her fall from the horse had left a legacy neither she nor the chirugeon who tended her could have foreseen. She lost the child in her fifth month, and was forced to bed rest for another three weeks after. Our father swore by Camael’s sword that he would not put his beloved through such distress, but he did not count on our mother making an oath to counter his. She had sworn to bear him a child.
I need not explain that after some years, our mother finally got her heart’s desire. This time, a chirugeon was on hand from the day she announced her condition. Marc d’Aiglemort would take no more chances, and when our mother was minded to ignore the chirugeon, he was there to enforce his orders. Despite all care and effort, our mother nearly lost us twice and she was confined to her bed for the last months of her pregnancy. When the time came, it was with enough complication that put us all in mortal peril. Indeed, I arrived blue-tinted and the chirugeon had to breathe life back into me.
For all the problems we gave our mother in the womb, and on our journey out of it, we were healthy. Our father swore, and made our mother swear, to never again put herself through such pain. This time, the oath held. Our mother never bore him another child. Instead, she devoted herself to Emil and myself.
I may not remember the exact color of her eyes, or the scent of her hair, but I will never forget the stories she told over the crib my brother and I shared. Spoken in her breathy voice – she never fully recovered from our birth – she spun such tales as Camaeline women are wont to tell their sons, stories of battle, conquest, and of Camael himself. Our favorite, however, was to hear of how our father convinced our mother to give in to his advances and wed him. Martial as the scions of Camael are, we are D’Angeline as well, and love makes as good a story as battle.
For the first four years of our lives, Emil and I were the darlings of Camaeline nobility. We represented stability in the duchy of Camlach and the virility of our father’s loins. So happy that we had survived the birth that nearly killed us, our parents treated us both as beloved heirs, though my brother was sole heir to our father’s titles and holdings. If there were any favoritism shown my brother, I do not recall it those early years. Yet, as we grew in happy childhood, learning at our father’s knee all it meant to be of the loins of Camael, our mother’s health slowly failed her.
The strain of two lost children and a near-fatal pregnancy had turned her body into a frail thing. She caught cold too easily those winters, recovered too slowly. Our father worried and fretted, and though I was but a child and knew nothing of this, I know my father well enough to know that he would have seen our mother’s fragility for what it was. It was in the winter of our fourth year that our mother caught cold for the last time. If this was different from any other time, I never knew. All I knew was that one night she went to bed early to rest, and never woke the next morning.
Our father was devastated, and the whole of Camlach mourned with him. As for Emil and I, the twin sons of Nicola, we were only confused and upset that our mother was suddenly gone from our life. A child so young has no concept of death, even the martial Camaelines, and it was a bitter lesson indeed – both to learn and to teach. I remember that Emil would stay up all night in hopes that our mother would return, keeping me up with him, afraid that our mother would visit with us none the wiser, and afraid that sleep would bring another loss in our young lives.
When the nurse had caught us at it for the sixth time, she scolded us so sternly that we confess our fears. She wept with us, and told our father. How he took it, I do not know, but he laid a pallet in our room to let us know that he would be there in the morning, and that he would not disappear in the middle of the night. At the time, I was only grateful that I had proof that our father would not leave. I had no way of knowing that he could not bear to sleep in the bed he shared with his beloved wife.
He slept in our room with us for the first year, until he judged that enough time had passed that the incident had faded from our young minds. At first, my brother and I plagued our father to return to sleeping in the floor or our room, but he was firm about this change, and eventually we relented to accepting our own company. By then, we had each of us come of age to be taught the beginnings of swordsmanship.
We had been gifted small, wooden swords on our fifth birthday, and our father took turns with his men to teach us the rudimentary, base skills. When it wasn’t swords we were learning, it was such skills that are later built upon to teach us discipline, pain tolerance, and quick reflexes. Our tutors were ever mindful of our young age and tender bodies; nevertheless, they pushed us to our limit almost daily. Though it has been years, I still look back at those lessons as the very beginnings to what I am today, and attribute as much to them as to my later training to my abilities.
A child is often a self-centered thing, and my brother and I were no different than any other child in that respect. Though I noticed a woman in the mansion in which we made our home, I paid her no heed until our father announced his engagement to this woman.
We were six at the time.
Etaine Shahrizai was a beautiful woman cast in the canon of her House. Her hair was raven, so true a black that it shone blue where the light touched it, and her sapphire eyes all but glowed in her pale face. I remember when I first saw her, one arm delicately holding on to our father’s, smiling serenely while he escorted her towards us.
“Emil, Edouard, say hello to Etaine Shahrizai,” he told us, his voice bright with good humor and fondness. My brother and I made our bows and greetings, as was expected, more than a little overawed by her. In truth, we had little contact with any nobility outside of Camlach, and she shone like a dark flame in our county of pale-haired, dark eyed Camaelines.
“It is a pleasure to meet both of you,” she told us, curtsying with a brilliant smile. “Your father speaks of little else.”
I remember seeing a look flash through those sapphire eyes, and child or no, I knew she did not like either my brother or myself. But she smile and curtsied, and charmed my poor, bereaved father into matrimony. I cannot say that my father loved her; it has ever been my opinion that he never loved another but his Nicola. But I think that he saw his sons bereft without a guiding female presence in their life, and sought a wife that would not remind him of what he had lost. If he was politically motivated, so much the better; Etaine fit his needs, and he hers.
Emil and I were scrubbed for the wedding and dressed in the colors of our House and county. Earlier in the day, our practice swords were taken by our nurse after she caught us dueling after our bath. Of the ceremony, I remember only chaffing at the stiff, new fabric and wanting only to find my practice sword and try and beat my brother into the ground with it. At some point, there was cheering, and we cheered along with them, Emil and I, not knowing what change in our life this betokened.
It was some time later, when Etaine began showing signs of having lit a candle to Eisheth to open the gates of her womb, that she began to show the deadly courtier’s skills House Shahrizai is renowned for.
I had been raised on stories of warriors, and Etaine was shrewd enough to guess as much. It was she who described the Cassiline Brotherhood to me. It was too easy to divert my mind away from the ascetic denial that is ingrained in the Brotherhood with tales of Cassiline prowess in defeating armed and prepared opponents with little more than daggers. I was only too excited to become a part of these elite warrior-priests. After convincing me, it was a small matter to convince my father that this was in my best interest.
Our father, who had lost his beloved Nicola just four years after our birth and had spent a year camping in the nursery to alleviate our fears and loneliness, was far too easy to manipulate through his children. It is said that the scions of Camael think with their swords, but for my father, I say he thought with his heart. His only desire was to see his children happy, even if it made his own joy fade. I had said before that a child is a self-centered creature, and I still hold true to that statement. Had I been a little less preoccupied with my own concerns, I would have seen the pain it caused my father to relinquish to this request.
Thus, was I introduced the politics that would ever impact my life, for good or ill, at the tender age of six years.
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Cassiel's Daggers