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Gervase was watching my nephew steadily. “Now, how is it that you’ll be able to…Oh!”

The king broke off as one of Lulach’s eyes started crawling across his face, not stopping until it was past the bridge of his nose and perched above the other one. His arms shrank, withdrawing into the dressing gown, while a vertical ridge swelled across his body, extending from his torso and back. As his sides collapsed inward and his organs redistributed themselves, he grew taller, stretching up to nearly fifteen feet when he was fully flattened out.

By the time the dressing gown dropped off, he was more fish than man. Spiny rays had grown along the length of the ridge. His flesh had broken out in white and brown scales. He flopped toward the edge of the bridge, his legs twisting into tailfins, and I gave him a helpful shove. My nephew, the enormous righteye flounder, slipped over the side and fell into the water with a splash that sprayed droplets over us.

“You know,” King Gervase said after a few seconds of silence, “your family is very strange.”

Part II

My Sister, the Incompetent Serial Killer

Interlude

All Emperors Are Bastards

At this point, it might be useful to include a bit of context. Some grand historical events have been mentioned in passing without a great deal of explanation.

So here’s a story for you:

Once upon a time, there was a dipshit king who decided he’d very much like to conquer the country next door.

To be honest, there are so many dipshit kings who’ve done this that it’s impossible to keep count. All it takes is ambition, an army, and a lack of concern over how many people will die. Three things that most kings tend to have in abundance.

Some of those kings have won and some have lost, some have names that ring through history and some are consigned to oblivion, but all of them started out by looking at the borders of their lands and thinking, I bet I could push that back a little if I kill whoever lives on the other side.

In any event, the specific dipshit under discussion was, at the time, known as the Red King. His buddies, however, knew him as Osvald Augustus Maximus, first of his name.

He began his campaign of invasion and annexation when he was young and newly come to the throne. Along with his kingdom, the Red King had inherited a number of useful advantages. His lands came fully equipped with the large standing army essential to any realistic plan of conquest. His capital city was also the site of a prominent school of wizardry, which he promptly ordered to shift focus from abstract academics to practical applications like exploding people to death.

Finally, the kingdom directly to the east of his own was rich in grainfields and pasturelands but poor in any natural defenses that would keep a horde of soldiers from charging straight across.

“Those abundant grainfields and pasturelands would sure help to feed my large standing army,” the Red King mused. “Anyone can see that it’s an obvious natural pairing. It’s so obvious that they’d probably feel obligated to invade my kingdom if their grainfields could move around and do murders! But since I’m the one with the army, I guess I’ll have to do all the murdering.”

Conquering his neighbor proved so easy that he decided he was a strategic and tactical genius. Unlike many dipshit kings who come to this conclusion and promptly get their asses kicked, he turned out to be correct. Seeing no reason to stop at one conquest, he turned his attention to the next country in line. And then the next.

“Those countries threaten my borders by daring to be on them!” he thundered. “More to the point, I want them. And why shouldn’t I have what I want? It’s important to treat yourself sometimes. That’s just basic self-care.”

Soon enough, kingdom after kingdom fell before his flanking maneuvers, cavalry charges, and devastating surprise attacks. Each new land added to his resources and power. A mountainous nation he cut a bloody swathe through provided him with forges and mines. A coastal country whose forces he annihilated added ships to his navy. His armies swelled in size as he drafted recruits from the subjugated lands, and an innovative practice he introduced kept rebellion to a minimum.

The Red Emperor, as he now styled himself, kept the rulers of these lands in place as his vassals, but demanded that each of them send a son to serve in his army. With hostages in place to ensure their good behavior, very few monarchs were willing to risk a revolt.

“The wisest strategy is to turn enemies into allies,” the Red Emperor reasoned, “and what better way to forge an alliance than threatening their children with horrible death?”

All went well, and the Red Empire seemed poised to conquer the whole of the known world, until he began his attack on the island nation of Ecossia.

Calling it a nation may be overstating things; it wasn’t one in any conventional sense of the word. It had no single ruler and no unified government. Instead, it was a loose collection of duchies, principalities, city-states, and clans, all so closely interrelated by kinship that they hated each other beyond measure. Feuds and raids were constant. They stole sheep from each other so often that a ewe might travel the length of the country and back over the course of a year, propelled solely by theft. No one believed Ecossia would last very long against the might of the Red Empire. Most predicted it would fall within a month.

But much to the surprise of the rest of the world, the people of Ecossia quickly realized that they detested foreign invaders even more than they detested each other. For the very first time, they agreed to make common cause.

Oaths were sworn. Pacts were made. Small bands of unlikely heroes went on epic quests. Bards and warriors played riddle games with dragons, sailed to unknown lands in search of magical weapons, and threw evil rings into any handy volcano they could find. The Red Empire found itself losing battles that should have been easy victories. Rather than lasting a month, the war dragged on for years.

In the meantime, the Red Emperor found himself beset by other troubles. On his eastern border, the Green Empire was proving to be a vexing foe. A queen who wasn’t particularly fond of her son led an uprising in the west. Natural disasters ravaged his crops in the south. His coffers were emptying, and his people, used to constant and endless success, were growing restive.

So something unprecedented happened—the Red Empire made peace with Ecossia.

The Red Emperor addressed the assembled Ecossic chieftains at a grand conference, offering a permanent cessation of hostilities. “Now will you please, please stop throwing my rings into volcanoes?” he added. “Some of them had sentimental value.”

The armistice was not, however, made on equal terms. Even with all its troubles, the Red Empire still had more troops, more money, and more wizardry at its beck and call than Ecossia could ever dream of. When the treaty was signed, it contained a clause similar to the one the empire imposed on the nations it had conquered. If the emperor demanded it, a son from the ruling household must be sent to join his army. This was insisted upon above all else, and no amount of negotiation could change it.