The progenitor of the younger branch of House Manere, Palenti's second filius Ledo was apprenticed in Abrisia in 191. He was brought to Evasendia at the founding of the Order of Cholae in 198 and was declared mage without sigil in 206.
From the beginning, Palenti had encouraged competition between his two students. They were very different personalities, the filii of Palenti: while Luke was charismatic, forthright, dominating and argumentative, Ledo was more given to indirection and subtlety, insinuation and manipulation. Nowhere near Luke's equal in terms of either magical power or theoretical insight, and more than a decade behind him in training, Ledo seemed fated to spend his entire life in a futile attempt to keep up. The contest, however, was not as unequal as it at first appeared: while he could not compete with Luke in demonstrations of sheer magical might, it was doubtless Ledo who better understood the subtler ramifications of Palenti's teachings on the nature of power. His constant challenges to Palenti's authority were to shape the development of House Manere throughout the pre-diaspora period.
While history records that Palenti founded House Manere in 200 largely in response to Luke's training by other magi, it was actually Ledo who exhibited the greater interest in the teachings of the other Founders, and it was probably Ledo's interest in the physical enchantments of Touccio which Palenti found particularly threatening. Similarly, it was Ledo who first decided to disobey Palenti's prohibition on cross-House training, and it was he who dared copy out portions of Palenti's jealously-guarded grimoires to offer to members of the other Houses in exchange for secret training in their arts. Luke himself was only to follow suit much later, and then only once he learned of his younger brother's activities.
In 210, having been declared a mage by the Council but still considered an apprentice within House Manere, Ledo nonetheless chose to take on a student of his own. Characteristically, his actual adoption of this youth went unnoticed by the Order for some time; by the time it was detected, Ledo presented it as a fait accompli. His response to questions about the legality of this act was later to appear prominently in Palenti's own Principia Maneris: "If it is not forbidden, then clearly it must be allowed." It was in response to this challenge that Palenti further delineated the distinction between a mage and a sigil-holder within House Manere and specified more fully the rights and privileges permitted to each.
In 225, however, Ledo went one step too far when he decided to take as his second apprentice a girl. As he had his first student, he presented her to the Council as a fait accompli, once again citing in defense his favorite Manerean precept. Indeed, what he had done was not forbidden—nowhere had Palenti ever explicitly stated that House Manere was to be an all-male House—but the founder's misogyny was notorious within the Order; Ledo's act could be read in no other way than as a direct attack on the principles Palenti held most dear. Forced to cede to the pressure of the Council and recognize the girl as a Manerean apprentice, Palenti was furious. He had responded to Ledo's previous tests of his authority with ill-concealed pride, but after 225, his affection for his second student was shattered, and he was not to speak to Ledo again for eight years.
Ledo himself seems to have responded to this event with similar hostility. Always ambitious, after 225 he became obsessed with the desire to defeat his master in a duel and wrest the title of Primus Manere from him. For the next seven years, this was to be his driving goal.
While Luke repeatedly tried to win his sigil from Palenti throughout the 220s, Ledo simply bade his time. It is recorded that once, asked whether he was simply waiting for Palenti to die of natural causes to become a sigil-holder, Ledo responded: "Patience is not a virtue. It is a vice, but one I hold most dear." Most of the Order's members believed Ledo to be hopelessly unambitious; they naturally assumed that Luke would eventually succeed Palenti as the Primus Manere. Only several of them, those who had bothered to get to know the founder's quiet younger student, suspected otherwise. Palenti himself was among them: asked in 224 if Luke's most recent challenge concerned him, replied that it was not Luke he was worried about. Most, however, assumed that Palenti was referring to the rising political tensions within the city; it was only later that this remark came to be seen as a reference to Ledo's ambitions.
While Luke delved deeper and deeper into political partisanship throughout the 220s, Ledo was never to take a stand on the political issues dividing the Council at this time. Remaining on friendly terms with both sides of the dispute, he devoted his time instead to magical study, and some have said that during this time his theoretical understanding came to surpass even that of his more cerebral brother Luke. Although teaching a student of his own, Ledo continued to learn from the magi of other Houses, particularly Eleanor's first filia Merula, who would prefer to see him than Luke succeed Palenti as the Primus Manere and consequently taught him much of the art of vim.
Ledo knew full well that he would never be as magically powerful as Palenti. He had also observed from Luke's failed attempts to win his sigil that the chief obstacle to Palenti's defeat was the founder's powerful parma magica. He therefore resolved to use his Eleanorean training in vim to create a spell which would disable Palenti's parma; when his master's shield was down, he felt convinced that even a simple spell, combined with the element of surprise, should be enough to allow him to prevail.
By 232, Ledo had very nearly succeeded in creating this spell. The principles all seemed right, but somehow the actual casting continued to elude him. He was never to complete it: this same year Luke, suddenly noticing his younger brother's great leaps in magical progress over the past years and guessing what he was up to, raided his laboratory and stole his lab notes. The better theoretician, Luke was able to complete the spell, which he named Wind of Mundane Silence, first. Luke defeated Palenti and succeeded him as Primus Manere later that year.
It is recorded that Ledo's realization of his brother's theft of his research was the only time he was ever seen to lose his temper. He challenged Luke immediately, and upon his defeat was the first Manerean to be subject to the ius victoris. Nonetheless, Ledo was to remain on friendly terms with Luke, neither resenting his theft nor begrudging him his ascension to the leadership of the House. His resentment of Palenti, however, was only intensified, particularly once Palenti announced his intention to retire to Covenant Sol Media Nox in distant Gaetan—a move which would make it inconvenient, to say the least, for Ledo to seek him out for future challenges. Angered by this turn of events, in 232 Ledo left Evasendia to travel with the south-bound diaspora party to Rhythnor. He founded Covenant Melos later that year with the aid of the witch-king Helde, whom Ledo apprenticed in exchange for his support early in 233.
Some believe that the thwarting of Ledo's ambitions in 232 permanently embittered him not only towards Palenti, but toward humanity as a whole. His post-diaspora writings reveal a cynicism about human nature that at times borders almost on an idolatry of cruelty, and certainly after 232, he was to become increasingly abusive in his dealings with others.
Ledo won his sigil from Palenti in 234 at Covenant Sol Media Nox. Doubtless inspired by Luke's tactic of several years before, Ledo managed to get his hands on Palenti's lab notes by bribing the younger members of House Savacion to steal them for him in exchange for the enjoyment of his apprentice, by now grown into a young woman of renowned beauty. He returned to Covenant Melos shortly thereafter.
This action, while it might have gained him his sigil, did not win Ledo any great status within the Order as a whole: once the story became known, many within the Order took to calling him 'Leno' ("the pimp"). Nor did it endear him to his defiled apprentice, later given the mage name Ebriola Pretia ("the drunken bribe") in reference to this incident. Ebriola would never forgive her master for using her in this way: upon her return to Melos, she threw herself into her studies with a vengeance, challenged him to a duel for her sigil immediately upon her graduation to magehood in 240, and to everyone's great surprise, defeated him soundly due to the aquam magics she had been studying secretly ever since 234. Thus liberated from his authority, she left his covenant immediately, and she was to express no great remorse two years later when she heard of his death. Ledo's tactic did, however, give rise to the founder's approval of the inclusion of women within House Manere: Palenti had been favorably impressed with Ebriola Pretia—presumably he saw in her qualities other than her utility as a bribe for loutish young Savacions—and after 234, his attitude toward the idea of women in his House changed dramatically.
In Helde's seventh year of apprenticeship, Ledo declared him incapable of learning Cholaeic magic and refused to continue his training; in 239, he insisted that Helde leave the covenant and not return. This was to prove a fatal error: one year later Helde returned with an army and lay siege to Covenant Melos, which fell in 242. Ledo survived the fall of the covenant and was captured by Helde's men, but when he learned that Helde had given specific instruction that he be taken alive, he killed himself rather than fall into his erstwhile student's hands. He had raised two students to magehood:
- Strophius (M4a), from 210 to 225
- Ebriola Pretia (M8), from 225 to 240
The Order's perception of Palenti's younger filius is largely the work of the fourth century Cristoferean historian Contumacia, whose biography of Ledo, The Quiet One, portrays him as the prototype of the underhanded Manerean manipulator. The surviving branches of Ledo's line, however, all descend through his grandson Vindex, who in his martial ardour and vindictive passion far more closely typifies the Manerean type associated with Ledo's older brother Luke.
