Die
Chris got to his feet and walked, unsteady on his legs.
"Where are you going?"
"Home. I have to go home."
He turned back to them and smiled.
"You knights wouldn't know how glad a man is just to have a house he can return to."
Yan let him go.
"Come back here tomorrow."
"Why?"
"I'll spend the day thinking it over, and decide what's to be done with you."
"Yes. I'll see you tomorrow."
Once Chris was gone, John spoke.
"Are you going to kill him?"
"I don't know."
"Hiding the Mana Helmet was impudent, I'll give you that, but..."
"Strange note in your voice. Have you taken a liking to him?"
"Once we part, I'll never see him again. What does liking him or not liking him have to do with anything? I only..."
"Only what?"
"I'm simply glad they settled on Smith as the culprit."
If the blame had landed on Tony, House Gerson would have paid dearly for it.
"And was Smith truly the culprit?" Yan murmured.
"I think he was," Bianca said.
Michael nodded.
"No one else could have done it. There wasn't time. And no one else had a motive."
"You think so?"
"Is there still something that troubles you?"
"Not particularly. And yet..."
"It isn't clean, then."
"No. The mage who saved Alex still nags at me."
"What about Chris?"
"We'll think a little longer on how to handle that one."
Chris swallowed and his whole face twisted. His throat hurt so badly that even getting spit down it was agony.
That man has a grip.
A little more force and the bones of his neck would have snapped.
What are they going to do with me?
Back when he lived in Javier Barony, lying had been a necessity of survival, and every kind of lie ran wild among the slaves. Chris himself had lied more than ten times in a single day just to get one piece of moldy, rock-hard bread.
Get caught in a lie and you felt no shame, and the one who caught you rarely scolded you hard. More often than not it ended with a smack to the back of the head. The slave overseers didn't overreact either. A light lie was let pass under a torrent of curses; a serious one finished with two or three lashes of the whip. They did not kill a man for lying.
Lies, he supposed, ran just as wild among nobles. If anything, the quality of those lies would be worse. A slave's lie was tied to the problem of eating, while nobles had long since risen above hunger, and when one of their lies came to light they were likely to laugh and let it go. Cases that ended in a duel would be rare.
"But a slave lying to a noble won't be laughed off."
Chris did not think he had lied. He had only hidden something.
The problem was that the knights thought he had.
They were not ordinary people. They would not overlook a breach of duty from someone beneath them.
What are they going to do with me?
The punishment would split to the extremes: the ultimate penalty, his head off his shoulders, or a scolding and release. It would be one or the other. There would be no middle.
Thinking he might actually face the extreme penalty left him feeling wronged.
What did I even do wrong?
He regretted crying in front of them. The tears hadn't been false. At the time he had truly been sad enough to weep, but looking back now, showing weakness to nobles left a foul taste. His pride was stung.
Why do I have to suffer this?
The answer came at once. Because he had no power. Because he had failed to become a mage.
"I should have become a mage."
Chris clenched his teeth and made for the Lion Pavilion. He didn't know the direct road from the VIP Guest Pavilion to the smithy, so he was taking the long way along paths he knew. If he struck out down an unfamiliar road just because it seemed right and ran into a mage like Harvey, that would be the end of him.
They'd rake through my memories and leave me an idiot.
He glanced over the Lion Pavilion and turned his steps toward the lecture halls. His thoughts branched and wandered with him.
Where did Smith hide the helmet?
The forest, surely. But the forest was too vast to search.
Past the lecture halls, he turned toward the smithy.
John is friendly to me. He won't argue for killing me. Michael will follow whatever the others decide. The problem is Yan.
Yan, he thought, would argue for punishment.
Bianca cries a lot, so she isn't a bad person, but... wait. Is it common for a knight to show tears like that?
The more he thought about it, the stranger it seemed. Knighthood was a man's business. For a woman to live among men, the hardships would be more than one or two.
Contempt would be the baseline. Discrimination, harassment—she would have suffered those too.
To get past that, she would have to show strength. She must never let anyone see her cry. The harm it would do was obvious.
And yet she cried in front of the commander and the vice-commander?
That was worse than crying in front of peers and seniors. The worst.
Come to think of it, Bianca's coming to the Tower was strange as well. Yan was the commander. Michael was the vice-commander. John was the finest knight of a count's house.
Set beside those three, a common knight whose rank and strength fell far short, included in the party, was suspicious no matter how you looked at it.
At first he had thought they'd brought her along to run Yan's errands. You could hardly send the vice-commander, or an old knight from another domain, out on errands. But they hadn't given Bianca any. If anything, Michael had run more of them than she had.
Someone who cherished Mark enough to cry at the drop of a hat, someone the other knights respected...
Chris slapped his thigh.
Royalty.
If she was royalty, everything explained itself.
"A person of high birth."
It also made sense that she was itching for a chance to tear Alex apart. A bastard of a marquis's house had sensed a bit of mana and tormented a prince. Of course she would be furious.
She must want to kill him badly.
Alex is coming to the VIP Guest Pavilion tomorrow too, isn't he? What punishment will he get?
Because of the high-ranking mage shielding him, Chris didn't think the man would die.
So that's backing, too.
It was bitter, and bleak.
The dormitory came into view ahead. He quickened his pace and went into the communal bath. After washing and changing his clothes, he headed for the smithy.
Paul and Ralph were unloading copper from a wagon. The copper went into making transit passes.
Chris slipped in between them as if it were the most natural thing in the world and carried copper to the warehouse.
"Hey, Chris. I hear you've been keeping company with important people lately."
Paul was mid-tease when he startled and dropped the copper in his hands.
"What happened to your neck?"
A bruise in the shape of a handprint marked his throat.
"I've realized my old conviction was right. Nothing good comes of getting tangled up with people above you. This is a medal of enlightenment, of sorts."
Ralph clicked his tongue.
"If you're going to wear a medal on your neck, make it a kiss mark. Who hangs a handprint there?"
"Fair point."
From the processing room, Charles beckoned. Chris set the copper he was carrying down in the warehouse and ran over. Charles said nothing in particular about the handprint on his neck.
"Go to the office."
"Yes."
Chris ran to the office and knocked.
"Come in."
He lowered his eyes and stepped inside. A middle-aged woman was working alone. Her hair was red as if it were on fire. Judging by her seated height, unless her legs were absurdly long, she was short.
"You called for me?"
"I did."
She held out her hand.
"Good to meet you. I'm Linne."
Chris shook it.
"Chris. The newest hand."
"I'm the chief blacksmith."
"What?"
"What? Strange that a woman's the chief?"
"No."
In truth it was a little strange. Charles, a giant who looked every inch the blacksmith, serving under a woman not even half his size—it looked bizarre.
"Looks like the knights worked you over pretty hard."
Chris rubbed his neck.
"It was fine until yesterday. Today there was a bit of trouble."
"Why did the knights come to the Tower?"
So this was why she had called him.
"Do you know the prince is dead?"
"I heard that story a while back."
"The king seems to have cherished Prince Mark a great deal. They came to look into what was left unfinished."
"What was left unfinished?"
"Whether the charred corpses were really the suspects', or whether the Tower just threw them any bodies it had. If the culprit is among the suspects, as the Tower claims, then who? If the killer is someone else, who is it, and what was the motive? Things like that."
"So what's the conclusion?"
"I think they've more or less identified the culprit."
"More or less?"
"There's no clear evidence."
"And because it isn't clear, your neck looks like that?"
"This is because of something I kept secret."
Linne smiled.
"Oho. Our new hire had a secret?"
"Who doesn't? People underneath have secrets of their own. That's how it is."
"And that secret rubbed the knights the wrong way."
"When you get down to it, it wasn't much of anything. But given what the business was, they were sensitive."
If the knights try to kill me, will the smithy protect me?
A bitter smile touched his mouth.
They only protect you if you've got power.
A Tower smithy might sound impressive, but from what he had seen working there as a hand, it had none. They boasted of making transit passes, but strip the boast down and they were making intermediate goods. It was the mages who breathed magic into the passes.
Armor was the same. The smithy shaped the form, but the mages inscribed the magics—lightening, greater strength, a fitted barrier, resistance to fire, to cold, to poison, and the rest. The essential work happened outside the smithy.
"Chris. What are you thinking right now?"
"That if I'd become a mage, I wouldn't have had to see treatment this filthy."
Linne laughed, loud and open.
"An interesting fellow."
Then she made an unexpected offer.
"Shall I transfer you to another section?"
"All of a sudden...?"
"Charles thinks well of you. Says you're diligent, for your age."
Working under Charles, you had no choice but to be diligent. Slack off and catch a hand like a cauldron lid, and your bones wouldn't merely break. They'd turn to powder.
"There are plenty of diligent people in the smithy."
"I hear you're paying to learn your letters."
"Yes."
"I prefer people who have diligence, and the will to improve on top of it."
When Chris hesitated, Linne added a word.
"At a time like this, you say thank you and accept."
"Thank you."
"Where do you want to go?"
The most respected section in the smithy was the one that made the intermediate pieces for magical arms. The best of those was where they made magical armor. Next came the shops that forged offensive weapons—swords, spears, axes, bows. If a raw novice slipped into one of those, the talk behind his back would never end.
"I'd like to go where they make the transit passes."
"Why the passes?"
Chris took out his own.
"It's fascinating that a little nameplate like this can identify a person and record where they go. If I could make the mages' passes, it would be an honor."
"Mages don't carry transit passes."
"Mage David had something similar, though."
"That isn't a transit pass. It's an identity token. A completely different thing."
"Ah. I see."
Linne held out her hand again.
"Keep working hard for me."
Chris took it.
"Yes. I'll do my best. But I don't think I can come in tomorrow."
"Why?"
"The knights summoned me."
"Wasn't it finished?"
"Not completely."
"All right. Come in the day after tomorrow."
Chris did not say that, depending on how things went, he might never come in again.