Chapter 44: The Hero Went South to Save a Rebellion That No Longer Existed

"He’s four hours ahead and he’s on foot. I can catch him before the ford."

Lunara already had the horse saddled when I came down to the yard, and she had her mail on under the cloak, which is how she argues without arguing.

"You won’t catch him."

"Majesty, he’s on foot."

"He’s on foot with seventy eight percent of a System on his back." I put a hand on the bridle. "The boy runs faster than your horse and we both know it."

Zelina came with the list before dawn, because when Zelina can’t sleep she counts things.

"Missing from the armory: one longsword, a pack, two loaves and a guard’s cloak." She turned the page. "And from the west gate cashbox, fourteen coins."

"He took money?"

"He took exactly one week’s guard wages." She shut the notebook. "Not one coin more. He counted it."

A man who steals a sword and counts the coins isn’t going to make a war. He’s going to perform a part.

Miralys came into the map room at seven with her boots already on and the answer already decided.

"Vareth."

"Why Vareth?"

"Because in any play your chancellor writes, Vareth is the stage." She put a finger on the town hall where she’d read out the manifests. "Eight hundred armed men in a town with low walls. The perfect place for a hero to save an empire from its own poor."

"Eight hundred men who aren’t armed anymore."

"Six hundred who loaded barges and two hundred who took the old road." She looked up. "Those two hundred are still stage."

We rode out at midday with forty riders, which is the exact number that invades nothing.

Lunara argued it at the gate.

"Forty won’t hold a town."

"Forty won’t frighten a town. That’s what I need."

"And if the two hundred are inside?"

"Then forty won’t frighten them either, and that’s still the point."

Bren Olvar rode with us without being asked. Nobody forbade it either. He kept three horses back from Lunara, at the exact distance a man rides when he no longer has a place and hasn’t been willing to leave.

We crossed the ford on the second afternoon and the forty went into the water to wash off four days of road, the way troops do when nobody is watching.

Bren Olvar stayed on the bank with me.

"I sparred that boy nine times in the yard," he said.

"And?"

"And he fights like somebody compensating. Shorter reach than he plays, elbow tucked in, everything driven off the hips." He watched the water. "I train those. They’re usually the smallest in the class."

"He isn’t small."

"No." Bren picked up a stone and didn’t throw it. "That’s what’s been bothering me for eleven weeks."

"Anything else bothering you?"

"He never went in the water either." He nodded at the forty. "Nine weeks in that palace and I never saw him out of that shirt. Not in the bathhouse, not in the yard, not once in the heat."

"Some men are private."

"Some men are." He put the stone in his pocket. "I’ve just never met a soldier who was."

We reached Vareth on the third day, at dinner hour.

There was no smoke.

There was a line of twelve carts in the square, and beside the town hall, eleven heaps of iron under tarps with a harbor clerk running a list.

The steel had arrived two days ahead of us.

And in the middle of the square, sitting on the edge of the trough with a longsword across his knees and the pack at his feet, was Roderic Alden.

Nobody stood around him. People walked past him with barrows.

"I’ve been here since yesterday morning," he said when I got down. "Nobody has asked me for anything."

"What did the mission say?"

He opened his hand without standing.

[MAIN QUEST: save Vareth.]

[Status: no conditions available.]

"I ran the whole way," he said. "Three days running. I came in the north gate expecting fire." He looked at the carts. "And there’s a man handing out plow blades with a notebook."

"The smith," Miralys said behind me.

"The smith asked if I’d come to help unload." Roderic dragged a hand down his face. "I said yes. I unloaded carts all afternoon. When we finished he fed me and asked where I was from."

"What did you tell him?"

"That I don’t remember."

Something went in his voice there, and it wasn’t the hunger or the three days.

"He laughed," he said. "He thought it was a joke."

I sat down on the edge of the trough next to him, which is not a thing an anathematized emperor should do in the square of the province he burned.

Forty of my riders and eight hundred southerners watching.

"The chancellor wrote this scene five years ago," I said. "The south rises, you arrive, the south falls, you pardon. And the empire crowns you on the ashes."

"I know."

"Since when?"

"Since you told me about the soup." He knocked a knuckle against the sword. "Three days running toward a fire somebody put out ahead of me. First time in seven years my System sent me somewhere and the somewhere didn’t cooperate."

Then he laughed, short and ugly, and it stopped halfway.

"Vaelion."

"Say it."

"If there’s nothing here to save," he said, "what was I made for?"

I didn’t answer right away.

A mediator learns there are questions you don’t answer, you hold. Thirteen years teaching that to widows who asked what a husband was worth.

"Get up," I said. "There are four carts left."

We unloaded until sundown, the empire’s hero and the south’s tyrant, in front of eight hundred people who didn’t applaud once.

When the clerk closed his notebook, the blue window opened on its own in my palm, and for the first time in seventy nine days it opened without anything having happened.

[Investment tracking: negative.]

[No action registered.]

[Integrity: 28% ▲ 29%]

[HERO, look at his number.]

Roderic had his hand open and was already looking.

[Load: 78% ▼ 77%]

Eleven weeks climbing. First time it had ever dropped.

"What did we do?" he asked.

"Nothing," I said. "That’s the point."

Behind us, at the mouth of the old road, the town hall bell started, and it wasn’t the hour bell.

Miralys was already mounted.

"The two hundred," she said. "Coming from the north, and not on their own."