12 years ago

“Why are we doing this, again?” Jasper asked. “I thought we did enough damage to the leadership.”

For once, it hadn’t been me that asked. Lord Byron had insisted on taking Jasper and I along with him on his latest sojourn, and now the three of us were quietly cloaked under the effects of Lord Byron’s oath to—to Cyang, one of the sixty-four minor gods, the one that held domain over concealment. The lesson was fresh in my mind, one of the rare nonviolent ones where my father had worked with me instead of against, teaching me how to work with his oath and allow its effects to guide me.

The three of us, alongside two more of House Byron’s private military, were less than five meters away from a group of royal guards standing vigilantly at the main entrance to the castle, and not a single one of them had noticed that we were here yet.

I knew that oathholders were powerful—my tutor of oathlore had told me much about how it was oathholders that had shaped society as it was, providing everything from military prowess to everyday utility to amazing inventions—but it hadn’t truly clicked inside my mind until Jasper asked that question well within earshot of the guards and not a single one of the trained men and women standing mere steps away from us batted an eye.

“The current Crown Prince is one of the weakest-minded folk in his family, yes,” Lord Byron acknowledged, uncharacteristically open to the question. “Despite this, the current Crown retains a strong hold over their Houses, and the Crowned King remains strong against all adversity. If anything, their position has been consolidated. We must send a message to them if we are to continue our pursuit of the Crown.”

Sending a message had been a phrase that I’d heard all too often in the past year. I was growing sick of it. Every time Lord Byron used it, it was to justify killing yet another unimportant bystander, whether it was the group of peasant teenagers that had borne witness to the assassination of Anton of House Varga, the noble that had insulted him in court the other day, or in this case, the fifteen year-old girl that had been named Crown Prince. None of them were key targets, I knew—I’d sat in on enough House meetings for me to know that they wouldn’t contribute much to House Byron’s push for the Crown.

I wasn’t personally opposed to killing, but it felt… wasteful. Some of them were bad people, I was sure, and maybe some of the others might have presented an obstacle to our ambitions in the future, but so much of it was just wholly unnecessary. What was the purpose, then? Killing for the sake of it? Threatening the status of our House with every risky assassination, potentially setting us up for a downfall, all so that my father’s ego could be assuaged?

It could have been any number of reasons, but it was all waved away with those three words. Sending a message.

“Execute one of the guards,” Lord Byron ordered the soldiers we had with us. “Jasper, Lily, you two do one as well.”

Jasper sighed. “Do we have to? I’m sure we can enter without leaving a mess of bodies behind us. It might give us away, too.”

Lord Byron paused at that, then looked away. “Forgive me. I had thought I recognized a target amongst the guards. I appear to have been mistaken. Stand down.”

And if that didn’t smell of a complete and utter lie, I had no idea what was.

Killing just for the sake of it, perhaps. That explanation was growing more and more reasonable by the moment. It didn’t sit right with me. What was the point of potentially throwing away everything we were just for the sake of killing a few people and targeting the Crown in particular?

“Move in,” Lord Byron commanded. “We’ll enter through the side. The main is too prone to observation.”

And you didn’t think about that before you ordered us to kill guards? I shared a meaningful look with Jasper. For once, we appeared to be in agreement over the matter. Something was wrong with our father, and it was growing to affect his logical reasoning.

“Yes, my lord,” the soldiers repeated mechanically. One of them muttered something and drew their fingers through the air, forming a complex spinning shape in the air.

A spell. I hadn’t seen too many of these before, though my tutors had offered me some demonstrations. This was my first time I’d been brought on a Crown-killing mission, though, and thus also the first time I’d watched one of these magic patterns be deployed outside of training.

The soldier gestured outwards, and the pattern shattered, light particles exploding outwards. Under the warm darkness-that-wasn’t-really-dark cloak of Lord Byron’s oath, the spell wasn’t even noticed by the people right next to us.

“All clear,” one of the soldiers said. “No eyes on us, though I may need to recast when we get into the castle proper. Powerful wards on it.”

“Acceptable,” Lord Byron said. “Let us mobilize. One, keep your spell ready. Two, be ready to open an entrance for us.”

“Yes, my lord,” the two soldiers replied in unison. They moved to do just that, one of them forming white magic while the other’s glowed deep blue.

We navigated our way around the expansive outskirts of the royal castle, Lord Byron leading the way. He had a familarity with the place that spoke of countless nights spent planning out the most efficient way in, endless hours spent plotting on how he would walk around the place when and if his nascent coup was successful. I’d caught him staring at a blueprint of the castle one late night, though I’d refrained from asking him any of the burning questions on the mind. I had not wanted to put him into a foul mood.

Lord Byron had spent much time on his plans, and now he was putting one of them into use. A slightly modified one, I assumed given that this was the fourth or fifth time he’d broken into the royal castle, but one of his plans nonetheless.

In no time at all, we travelled through a rose garden, three plazas with burbling fountains at the center, and a side path that I was pretty sure was meant either for custodians or deer. At the end of it all, we found ourselves next to a narrow wooden door, one that I recognized as similar to the one House Byron used for the servants’ kitchen. A better make than ours, though, and significantly more polished. It didn’t even look out of place against the opulence of the rest of the castle.

“Two,” Lord Byron commanded.

Wordlessly, the second soldier tossed his burgeoning blue ball of magic at the door. I squinted at the pattern, trying to make out what it was. My oath tutors had said that it was a good practice to get into even though I wouldn’t be developing my oath for at least another year, claiming that identification of magic was important for a true understanding of it or something like that.

The structure of the spell seemed familiar, though I couldn’t quite place it immediately. Oathcloud, perhaps—no, it was too small for that. Definitely not a magic missile. Destructive Wave? No, it was too focused.

The sphere smashed into the door, and frost spread out from the point of impact. A heartbeat later, the second half of the spell made contact, and the frost shattered, taking much of the door alongside it. It made for an almost painfully loud explosion, but Lord Byron didn’t seem concerned, so I assumed that his oath could hide it.

When the dust cleared, the door was gone, revealing a narrow hallway into an empty kitchen, ready for us to enter.

Ah. I realized what part of the spell I had recognized. It was a modified siege spell. The same basic structure as a two-levelled Ram spell, I was pretty sure, though it was much smaller than it normally would’ve been.

And despite that, it had utterly obliterated the polished wood, destroying a door that had to have been at least a quarter meter thick with the snap of the soldier’s fingers. It would have taken a team of grown men working with knives at least an hour to accomplish the same utter destruction, I was pretty sure, and it would take me half a day even with an axe.

Oaths really were something, weren’t they? For a moment, I forgot about the mission, thinking instead on what my oath was going to look like once Father allowed me to obtain one. A focus on fire? Ice? Wind? Something else entirely?

I pictured myself casting that same siege spell, strong in a way that no uneducated commoner could achieve, and the image made me smile.

“Hey, Lily,” Jasper whispered, nudging me. “We must move.”

I snapped out of it, returning my attention to the mission. Lord Byron wasn’t even checking to see if we were caught up, and neither were his soldiers. Jasper and I jogged to catch up with them.

The inside of the royal castle was no less expansive and labyrinthine than the outside, but Lord Byron navigated it with ease.

“The Crown Prince should be sleeping in her chambers,” Lord Byron said, his voice low and quiet despite the continued presence of the Cloak spell he’d cast. “Follow me and use force as necessary to dispatch her guards.”

There weren’t many people wandering the halls at this hour, so we encountered no resistance as we made our way through the maze of a castle.

Soon enough, we had arrived at the hallway to the Crown Prince’s bedchambers. It was truly massive, a great hall in itself meant exclusively for the use of the Crown Prince, and it was furnished just like any great hall would be, complete with a massive dining table in the center and a number of cushioned seats scattered throughout the place.

This, at least, was guarded. There was a team of guards spread throughout the hall, maybe a couple dozen strong. They didn’t seem to be as affected by Lord Byron’s oath as the mundane guards had been outside, because they snapped to attention as we entered. None of them could seem to single out our position, the majority of them understanding that there was a threat but not recognizing where it was.

No, not none of them.

At the back of the room, there was a—guard? I hesitated to call them that—dressed from head to toe in blue armor, the color of which I could identify even in the dim lighting of the hallway.

They were looking straight at us, and they were ready to fight.

I recognized the armor. This—this adventurer, I realized, not a royal guard—they were the blue knight, an ever-popular figure in cheap copper-store novels and a favorite of newspapers when there was a need for someone attractive and mysterious to put on the front page. Surreal, to see them on the battlefield when most of my experience with them prior had come from reading. Well, that along with a chance few encounters when I had a training session involving another house—they sometimes were visible running a training routine or something similar nearby.

“Adventurer scum,” Lord Byron muttered. “Too disordered to enter the kingdom’s service. Chaos incarnate.”

I tilted my head at the blue knight, and I thought I could see them tilt their head back. For all that adventurers were those who had refused military service for the kingdom, the blue knight looked awfully like they were in the Crown’s employ right about now.

Then again, I knew that the blue knight wasn’t exactly your everyday adventurer. Their party was ever-changing, their abilities not fully known, and they took just about every quest that was offered.

Right now, that party was made up of only two others, both of them clad in dyed-red leather armor. They seemed to be having trouble spotting our exact location too, leaving the blue knight as the only one out of nearly two dozen who could identify us.

“…not my place,” they were saying, talking to one of the red-leather adventurers next to them. “Not the Crown’s executioner.”

They turned back to look towards us, building up a prism of a construct burning with blue and white light.

“Prepare to engage,” Lord Byron ordered. “Do not let any of the guards survive. Should the adventuring filth capture you, dispatch them as necessary. Ensure that nobody’s identity is revealed, no matter the cost.”

He paused, drawing a gilded dagger from his belt and handing it to me. “This means ensuring that none of you are taken alive. House Byron cannot fall here.”

“Understood, my lord,” the soldiers said. Jasper and I followed a moment later. Standard operating procedure, as far as I was aware, though I’d be damned if I was going to knife myself to support my father’s doomed efforts.

“Are you not fighting, Father?” Jasper asked. “My lord makes it seem as if he is not.”

“The name and face of Lord Wilson Byron are too well known,” the noble in question replied. “Furthermore, I will not be able to cloak more than myself once—“

The construct solidified into a disc, scattering light all around us, and in an instant the warmth of the Cloak spell disappeared. It was bright, far too much light for a single hall to sustain, and the halo of burning light was actively painful to look at. I squeezed my eyes shut, but it didn’t help all that much against the all-consuming light.

Five or ten seconds that felt like far more than that later, the light had dissipated.

When I opened my eyes, the adventurers had disappeared, evidently having done their job. Were they not serving as guards, then? Just an early warning system?

More importantly, they hadn’t been the only ones that had vanished.

Lord Byron was gone, and the two dozen guards that were still in the room were gradually turning the weight of their attention on us.

A heartbeat passed, then two. I backed up slowly, shrinking into myself. Don’t notice the little girl with a knife, please.

The air lit up with magic, so fast and so plentiful that I couldn’t make heads or tails out of the room-turned-battlefield. I recognized the ice of Soldier Two’s Und oath and the trail of flame left by Jasper’s projectiles, but there was far more that I couldn’t comprehend.

Bolts of plague, showers of stone, domes of fire, and a dozen other effects. I tried to apply the lessons of my oath tutor, and I got about as far as identifying a single dirt-brown storm of magic to be an upcasted Maelstrom spell before realizing that this was neither the time nor the place to be doing that.

The soldiers weren’t winning, and neither was Jasper. As I retreated, my dimunitive presence unnoticed amongst the chaos of the fight, I watched as one of the soldiers was downed under the fury of the combined magic, overtaken by a dozen effects that hit him so fast I couldn’t tell which one had been the one to slip past his defenses.

As I continued creeping back out of the hall. I watched as a modified Meteor spell slammed through the overstressed shields of the other soldier, knocking him down as well.

I had almost made it out of the hall entirely when I saw Jasper finally go down, the guards having finally turned their attentions onto him.

It happened so quickly that I almost missed it.

In one instant, he was whole and noble, the picture of a strong, well-bred heir to a great House entering battle, and in the next, his limbs had been separated from his body, the rest of him sent flying into a wall.

So this is the power of real oathholders…

Another spell hit him, then another. It was only when the sack of flesh that had once been my brother sagged to the ground that the barrage finally let up.

As he lay bleeding on the floor of the hall, his head rolled around to look at me, and Jasper’s eyes just so happened to meet mine. I couldn’t see him that well from this distance, but I still felt the impression of accusation.

Sorry, I mouthed, and I sprinted away, leaving my brother to die.