On horseback, the journey from Stuhhofen to the Palace of Yvailles would take four days or three if he only took short rests. However, he was in no rush to see the king and the council again, so he planned for a four- or five-day trip.

The problem with taking his time, though, was that he was recognized everywhere he went, and just passing through a town would set him back a half-hour at minimum. It hadn’t been like this when he had first departed from Rove.

News traveled slowly and only through bards, traders, and clergy members. Stuhhofen’s citizens had been largely concerned with the news of the prince’s death, but that either hadn’t reached the other parts of the kingdom or it was being withheld for the time being.

However, it had been more than two weeks since the fall of Rove, and that was enough time for the news to start its transformation into a story. The tale of the Hero of Rove, the 58th Divine Paladin who had felled the city gates with his bare hands, had become ubiquitous and greatly exaggerated for dramatic effect.

It wasn’t the attention that bothered him. He had had his fair share in the past, especially after the Battle of Wetshard. And even if people didn’t know his name or reputation as a paladin, they would guess from his white armor that bore the royal emblem that he was someone of high status.

It was the citizens’ fervor that was most startling. Whether it was a small hamlet of fifty people or a large commercial city of thousands, they greeted him with reverence. They followed him, asking questions and requesting stories. Some reached their hands out to him, begging for the privilege of rubbing his armor; it was said that doing so would grant them divine fortune.

He had known that the siege would bolster his reputation, but this was on a completely different scale. It was only after listening and dissecting the stories that they told of him did he realize how short-sighted he had been. It also made him recall a conversation that he had had with Olivier.

A year ago, he had visited him at his mansion, and they were drinking and arguing over pointless things as per usual. With the alcohol lightening his mood, he declared that Calorin might finally be experiencing peace.

Olivier frowned as if he had said something remarkably stupid. “Something like that, maybe. But I don’t think I’d describe it as peaceful.”

“What do you mean?” he asked, annoyed by his friend’s pessimistic attitude. “It’s been three years of King Mathieu’s rule and the most difficult tasks I’ve received are monster subjugations. For me, that’s peace.”

“Remember when I said that every king created a new society, a new Calorin?”

“Yeah, you said that a long time ago. But you were right, weren’t you? King Mathieu’s Calorin is not the same as his father’s.”

“No, my phrasing was wrong. What I should’ve said was that every new king has an opportunity to create a new Calorin.”

“Don’t you think King Mathieu has seized that opportunity?”

“It’s too soon to say. Take His Majesty’s most recent trade regulations. They extend throughout the whole kingdom, but not everyone follows them. The king still has a lot of work to do. In order to create something anew, one must ensure that the parts of the previous system have been holistically eradicated.”

“So, like a rotting apple?” he asked, trying to make sense of his friend’s words and his own dizzying vision. “You have to get rid of it or else it’ll spoil the bunch.”

“A trite example, but yes, something like that. You said the kingdom was a landslide, didn’t you?” Olivier downed his mug. “You might have a point after all.”

“I don’t know how you do it, but you somehow get more condescending when you’re drunk.”

“That’s because you get more stupid when you’re drunk.”

He hadn’t thought much of that conversation, especially because it devolved into them throwing petty insults at each other. It was only now that he understood what Olivier had been getting at.

The sanguine Calorin he had grown up in hadn’t suddenly become peaceful as he had thoughtlessly proclaimed that night; it had just been dormant, slumbering for the past four years.

During the peak of his reign, King Maxime had sent highly skilled orators and clergymen to give speeches of his divine right to rule and the necessity of Calorin’s holy wars in culling the heretics. The propaganda was initially met with resistance, especially from conquered territories, but King Maxime was a tenacious man, and it eventually became wildly successful.

So successful that the citizens still wholeheartedly believed that Calorin’s duty was to eradicate the heretics. The Siege of Rove, the first major battle after the death of King Maxime, made for a dazzling tale as it was being spun as a story of a prince and a paladin in white armor joining hands to suppress heresy.

The fact that the siege started as a border dispute had become irrelevant. Nor did it matter that the citizens of the Republic of Rove had been devout believers of the Lord.

Four years of peace wasn’t enough time to undo forty years of King Maxime the Bloodstained, and a chill ran up his spine as he came to that epiphany. Even dead, the fearsome man who had commanded him to commit a multitude of atrocities wasn’t gone.

Righteous victory was exactly what the people had been expecting from King Mathieu the Temperate, and he had finally granted it to them. As Roel made his way to the palace, he witnessed over and over what this single battle had done to the previously tranquil kingdom and his own reputation.

The citizens offered everything to him. Wherever he went, someone would insist to pay for his meal or his stay at the local inn. They pressed upon him extravagant gifts of meat, fruit, and salt. They gave him things they couldn’t afford, things that he could easily buy hundreds of because of how handsomely the kingdom rewarded him.

One time, as he was passing the outskirts of a small village, too tired to deal with the crowd who would greet him if he entered it, he had been stopped by a small group of people carrying a basket of dry corn. National news spread slowly, but local news moved quickly, and someone from a nearby town must’ve told these people that he would be traveling through this road.

“Please forgive us, Sir Roel, Hero of Rove, but the harvest was poor this year, and all we can spare you are these bushels of corn.” The man at the front of the group, presumably a village chief, was the one who spoke to him. The chief knelt with his head bowed to the ground, and behind him must’ve been his family, a wife and six children, who all knelt with him.

The peasants were in a woeful state. They wore patchwork tunics of coarse wool, and underneath it, they were little more than skeletons, their tanned skin pulled taut over their bones. Along their forearms were discolored bumps, yellow-pink patches of flesh that were possibly the symptom of an infectious disease that had recently run rampant across the countryside. They kept their heads bowed to the ground, perhaps worried that he’d be offended if they looked at him.

When he didn’t say anything, the village chief nervously spoke up. “I’m sorry if this meager offering displeases you, sir. But we had to honor you somehow for bringing the Lord to the poor souls in Rove.”

“No, that’s not the issue,” he said, and although his words were firm, he felt like he was collapsing from the inside.

It was almost winter. If they hadn’t been taxed already, they would be soon. The church would collect a tithe, one-tenth of a family’s annual income, and then the lord of the territory would claim another percentage, the exact amount dependent on the nature of the lord and his own financial ability to pay the king’s taxes. Despite that, the family offered the basket to him not with spite but with blind devotion.

He saw one of the boys sneak a glance at him before quickly looking back down. He knew what the boy must be feeling: his heart was thumping loudly in his chest, his lips dry, and he eagerly bowed as low as he could, ignoring the pain shooting down his back.

He knew all too well. At one time, a time that came before he had gotten lost in the woods with his friends and started his trek up the hill, he had been this boy.

He had grown up in the north, and he had suffered through the short, desolate days of many winters. They were winters of widespread famine; of huddling around the hearth and hoping the fire would keep burning; of knocking down the makeshift door to his neighbor’s hut after not hearing a response and finding the entire family dead; of wondering for hours (because what else was there to do in the winter?) if it had been the frostbite or starvation that had killed them.

“Keep it for yourself,” he said gently. “Please, you need it more than I do.”

“Hero of Rove, we –”

“I will not accept it.”

He placed some coins on the ground for them and rode off without listening to the chief’s protests. He took one last look at the family before they vanished out of sight – their heads were still bowed to the ground except for the boy he had noticed earlier. The boy was staring straight at him, his eyes wide with admiration, and Roel wondered what kind of expression was on his face as he stared back at his past.

This was just one encounter of many that made him resent how foolish he had been when he was younger. When he had first become a paladin, he had seen the peasants, who consisted of almost the entire population of Calorin, as nothing more than crowds of admirers. He had kept his armor on to impress and flaunt, ignoring the fact that he had spent his first twelve years as one of them. No, that wasn’t completely it. He had kept his armor on to vehemently insist that he had never been one of them.

But now, he saw them for what they were, these victims of starvation, poverty, and pestilence. They were short, miserable lives, their backs stooped from bowing to the nobility and praying to the Lord, and the hope and admiration they had in their eyes when they saw him made him feel like an imposter.

And that’s why he kept his armor on. True, it would be much easier if he disguised himself and went along his way without being stopped every few hours.

But who was he to deny them of their hero? It didn’t matter that he was playing right into the deceased king’s propaganda; it wouldn’t be the first time. If he could alleviate their misery just by wearing his armor and playing the hero, then he would do it.

He refused their gifts and prayed that their winters would be calm. He accepted their reverence and let them touch his armor when they asked. He told them stories, trite tales of slaying monsters that contained equally trite morals that they had heard many times before, but the crowds listened quietly and earnestly because he was the one doing the telling. In return, he listened to their troubles, and when there was a problem that he could resolve, like a beast preying on their cattle, he would help them.

They thanked him profusely, but all he could feel was the guilt that had been accumulating for years. “Can’t you see that my kindness is thinly veiled pity?” he wanted to scream at them. But instead, with his hand tightly gripped around the hilt of his sword, he told them a different truth: “Of course, it was the least I could do.”

And finally, after nine days of what should’ve been a short trip, he arrived in the capital city of Yvailles just as the next string of news broke. Everywhere he went, peasants and nobles alike were talking about it.

It was what Rados had warned him of in Stuhhofen and what he had suspected when he was told to assassinate the prince: King Mathieu had declared war on the Graecian Empire for the murder of his brother, Prince Ghislain. The Graecians, the king stated, were angered by their rightful conquest of Rove, and had sent assassins to torture and kill the prince in retaliation.

For Calorin, a kingdom that lived and died on its ideals of honor, the concept of casus belli, an act that justified a war, was an important thing. Heretics were a threat, but that on its own wasn’t enough to start a war. There had to be an honorable reason, whether it was a hereditary claim to a territory, a border dispute, or, in this case, unprovoked aggression.

King Maxime had exploited this several times, and that was how Calorin had tripled in size. Only a foolish king openly disregarded the feelings of his people, and it was a wise king who stoked the flames of the people’s anger and directed it to fuel his wars.

Prince Ghislain had been not just royalty and the younger brother of the king, but also the commander of the now-famed Siege of Rove. The well-timed news of his death would start a large enough fire to sustain several wars. A cruel but clever sacrifice by one called The Temperate.

However, the cruelest part of the whole thing was the ones who cheered the loudest at the news of the oncoming war weren’t the nobles who were making plans to maximize their gains. It was the peasants. They, the wretched victims of a much more insidious war, spoke with excitement and zeal.

And of all the paladins, it was he, the man who the stories claimed to be by the tragic prince’s side from rise to fall, who they lionized as the first hero of a holy war that he had been ordered to start.