The air in the grand dining hall of Castelo Garcia was charged with an oppressive silence, so dense it seemed to smother even the crackle of the flames in the monumental fireplace. The light of late afternoon, once a spectacle of colors through the stained-glass windows, now seemed weak and dirty, casting long, distorted shadows over the jacarandá wood table. The residual smell of dinner—roasted meat, wine sauce, warm bread—had already dissipated, replaced by the cold odor of damp stone, burnt wax, and something sharper: the stench of contained panic.

  At the center of the immense table, far from the empty plates and crystal goblets, a profane object lay like a sleeping snake: an old copy of the Jabuticaba Journal. Its pages, rough and smelly with cheap ink, were open to the main headline, whose black letters seemed to scream: OURO BRANCO CONQUERED, ALBUQUERQUE DEAD.

  Sitting rigidly in the head chair, which by right of blood and marriage was now hers, was Baroness Inês, or better known as Baroness Blood and Garcia. Her fingers rested motionless beside the newspaper, her blood-red nails lightly scratching the chair's velvet. Her eyes, the color of dangerous dark amber, were glued to the words, re-reading each syllable with an intensity that would make a common man tremble. The heavy necklace with the scarlet gem seemed to weigh a ton on her chest, rising and falling with controlled but visibly accelerated breathing.

  The text was a knife, twisted with evident pleasure:

  "The Republican victory was consummated in mere days. In the same week that Lord Albuquerque and his once 'powerful' militia paid the final price for the arrogance displayed at the stream, his city fell. After reducing the main fort of Ouro Branco to dust with a display of overwhelming force, the occupation encountered minimal resistance. This victory confirms, conclusively, a truth many stubbornly ignore: the plantation owners, in their supposed glory, are nothing but paper tigers. They are torn apart by water, consumed by the smallest fire, blown away by the slightest breeze. Now, the entire captaincy will know the true power of the Republic! The battle, in its essence, was very simple..."

  It was more than a report. It was mockery. A declaration of war not just against their bodies, but against the very concept that sustained their worlds. Inês tasted the same metallic, sweet taste of blood she had so often felt in her mouth, but now it was the taste of her own impotent rage.

  The first to break the silence was Garcia, seated at her right. The same Garcia who, on previous nights, laughed with her about "fragile models" and "sublime expressions of agony." His face, once ruddy and confident, was now pale under his graying beard. He didn't slam his fist, but his closed hand trembled slightly on the table.

  "What an absolute disgrace!" his voice came out hoarse, distilling a fury that found no target. "After that fool Albuquerque, by some stroke of luck, cleansed his lands of that quilombo plague, we mobilized everything! Our best men, our gold... all to crush the rest of the mocambos while he recovered! And now? Now he not only lost it all back but was shot down like a dog! What do the reports say? That his brains were on the floor."

  Peixoto, to Inês's left, seemed to have shrunk in his chair. The intellectual, the calculator, the man of the monocle and the treatises on the economy of punishment, seemed a shadow of himself. He looked at the newspaper not with anger, but with a rational horror, like a mathematician before an equation that predicted his own ruin.

  "Lucky for us," he murmured, more to himself than to the others, adjusting his monocle in a nervous gesture, "our scouts discovered Albuquerque's defeat, and with that, we were able to repel our militia in time. They were almost in quilombo territory... they would have been crushed between two hammers."

  "LUCKY?!" Inês's scream echoed off the stone walls, a sharp sound laden with a venom that made even Garcia flinch. She raised her eyes from the newspaper, and her gaze was like that of the cornered animal she so loved to observe: fierce, unpredictable, deadly.

  "You call that lucky, Peixoto? You read this... this printed blasphemy and see luck? They are coming, you idiot! Mill after mill! Mine, on the plains, and yours, in the mountains, are on the list! And it was your pusillanimous plan that got us into this!" She jabbed the air with her index finger, the red nail like a drop of blood. "Let Albuquerque wear himself out against the quilombolas. We'll reap the benefits later." A cowardly rat's plan! Not a plan for lords!"

  Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

  She took a deep breath, the tight corset seemed to suffocate her. The memory of that night, in this very hall, when they laughed at Peixoto's warning, was now a burning coal in her mind.

  "We should have joined him! From the start! How I hate being right only in defeat! One day, his desperate message, begging for the alliance we refused... and the next day, this!" She struck the newspaper so hard the tips of her fingers turned white. "And along with it, their 'courtesy'! An ultimatum on cheap paper, 'suggesting' surrender! The audacity of those animals!"

  Peixoto stared at her, his face pale. The resignation he had shown that previous night had transformed into a chilling, frightening lucidity.

  "And if we had sent our troops, Inês? What do you think would be different?" his voice was low, but each word was as clear and sharp as the glass of his monocle. "Instead of five hundred bodies in Ouro Branco, we'd have a thousand bodies in Ouro Branco. Our men, our expensive Adepts, ground up along with his. And perhaps..." he paused, swallowing dryly, "perhaps surrender is the only mathematics left. Those who laid down their arms... lived. It's a datum. A fact. We could negotiate to keep part of the lands, the assets..."

  "BOW OUR HEADS TO THAT SCUM?!" Inês's scream was a howl of pure ancestral fury. She stood up so abruptly that the chair toppled backward with a crash that sounded like a gunshot in the silent hall. "NEVER! Over the corpse of my lineage! Over the bodies of my children! Never!"

  Garcia, seeing the complete breakdown, tried to fan the embers of bravado. He also stood, slamming his palm on the table.

  "And we will not surrender! We don't need to!" he bellowed, spreading his arms as if embracing the surrounding walls. "We have the castle! We have supplies, wells, mana! We can withstand a siege for months! They will not take these stones! Albuquerque had a toy house. We have a fortress!"

  "You're right," said Inês, "even if we lose our sugar mills, our families, our money is still here, we can start over!"

  Peixoto let out a sigh that came from the depths of his tired bones. It was the same resigned sigh from the night of the alliance, but now weighted with an "I told you so" he dared not utter.

  "And I have heard, from sources that are not pamphlets, that their weapons..." he began, his voice almost a whisper, "do not respect stone. The fort at Ouro Branco was masonry. They say it was disintegrated from a distance where our shooters couldn't even see the enemy. 'Artillery,' they call it."

  "And we have power!" Garcia roared, pointing an accusing finger at Peixoto. "That was your idea, remember? 'Quality, not quantity.' We hired the best Adepts! Earth, Ice, Fire! They can raise barriers, freeze attacks, hurl fire at anyone who approaches! We can strike back!"

  "And do not forget who we are!" Inês cut through the air with her hand. The scarlet gem on her chest glowed with a sudden, sinister inner light. A thin, deadly frost began to form on the surface of her empty wine goblet, cracking the crystal. The air around her cooled several degrees. "We three are heirs of pure blood and pure gems. I am not a helpless old woman. I am a Baroness of Blood. They will come, and they will find a winter of pain."

  Peixoto looked at the ice spreading on the crystal, at Garcia's beastly fury, at the newspaper that narrated the fate of a man as arrogant as they were. His rationality, his world of calculations and treatises, crumbled before that tsunami of raw emotion.

  "Your choice is insane," he said, his voice finally cracked, revealing the fissure of fear. "And then what? If, by a miracle, we survive here, cornered? What will we do? Buy slaves we cannot control? Sell sugar to the rats? We will live like ghosts in our own fortress, until the last crumb! This is suicide with honor!"

  "The Governor-General!" Garcia bellowed, like a man clinging to a log in a furious river. "He will come! He has a real army in White Sand! Troops, cannons, gold! He will not allow this republic of blacks to spread!"

  "And how long will it take for that savior to ride to us?" Peixoto asked, his voice now flat, dead. "Weeks? Months? Do we have that time? Albuquerque's supplies were greater than ours. And where is he now?"

  The argument spiraled, a vortex of fear, wounded pride, and desperate bravado. It was a grotesque echo of the confident conversation they had held in that same hall, when the greatest danger seemed to be losing a few slaves to a quilombo.

  It was then that the heavy oak door of the hall was battered open with violence, slamming against the stone wall with a thud that made everyone turn, their hearts stopping for an instant. In the entrance, the same young guard captain who once announced visitors was now unrecognizable. His armor was mud-splattered, a fresh cut bled on his temple, and his face was the very mask of terror.

  "My Lady Baroness! My Lords!" he shouted, his voice failing, hoarse with dust and terror. "The sentries... the scouts... it's confirmed! The bulk of the Republic's army... They are coming... directly for us! The dust columns are already visible in the valley! They will be at the foot of the castle... before the last ray of sunlight!"