Thirteen minutes. It only took thirteen minutes for Crowned King Edward to arrive. I had been counting the seconds up as an armored guard held my arms behind my back, doing my best to maintain the facade of a confused live-in who had wandered into an unexpected situation, and I was more than a little surprised when the man arrived so early.

Even at this hour, he was still partially in uniform. Not quite the full regalia that he wore to formal balls and parties, but enough that anyone looking at him would know he was royalty even if his face wasn’t so recognizable. That face had been immortalized in paper and stone across the kingdom, printed in newspapers and carved into steles.

He was a lot taller than me, chiseled features and black hair staring down at me from what felt like a full meter above, and the Crowned King radiated presence like no other man I’d ever met had. Even my father didn’t hold this much sway over a room he owned, the pressure of the royal’s presence almost physically tangible. The passageway between gates felt like it was shrinking with the Crowned King in it, not large enough to fit him on his own, let alone the other people crowding around us.

“Sergeant Kane,” King Edward said, his voice quieter when there were fewer people to be addressed but no less forceful in manner, “Please explain why you have drawn me out of the quarters at this hour.”

“We caught an infiltrator, majesty,” the aforementioned man said immediately, his voice gruffer and sharper than it had been when he’d been greeting the other Crown nobles earlier. “She is—“

“She is a child,” the Crowned King cut in. “Give me the facts, Sergeant, not your conclusions.”

“Yes sir,” the oathholder replied. “After the incursion at the gates, I decided to ensure the safety of the three ambassadors we sent to the Byron funeral earlier today. While we were returning to the castle, I detected a presence behind us, but it wasn’t moving and it didn’t appear to be immediately threatening, so I chose to prioritize the safety of those I was escorting. I thought that would be the end of it, but then afterwards I was escorting my lady—“

“Hello,” the woman with him said, giving the Crowned King a small wave. “I wanted to check the records of an experiment about—uh, I mean, from a few years ago. To cross-reference. And the Kane here insisted on security.”

“Yes, we came to the library,” the sergeant said. “We were leaving just now when the gates opened and I detected the same presence as before. There’s hints of an oath signature, I think, but nothing fully fledged yet. It’s very distinct.”

“I… I don’t know what’s going on,” I tried, forcing myself to unfocus my eyes. Sell the overwhelmed lost girl.

“Lily of House Byron, correct?” the Crowned King asked, his voice suddenly gentler. “Guard, please release the girl. She’s no threat.”

“But—“ the noblewoman said.

“She has just come from her own blood’s funeral,” said the King, his voice booming and harsh once again. “Would you go so far as to believe a grieving child would do this?”

“I do,” the woman said defiantly. I flicked my eyes towards her, catching the cold calculation in her eyes.

This wasn’t emotionally driven, which meant one of two things. Either she was actually scared of a nine-year old child or she was trying to make the Byron House look bad. If I had learned one thing about nobles in my short existence, it was that one of those options was significantly more likely.

“Do what?” I asked. Better to pretend I didn’t know what had happened. The more I could fake being an idiot, the less distrust I would gain. That wouldn’t appeal my case to the noblewoman in here, but it might to the King. One of those opinions weighed a lot more than the other, and it sure wasn’t the woman’s.

Sure enough, the guard released his grip on me. I shook my arms like I’d been rather shaken by the hold. I hadn’t, obviously—Lord Byron’s training had seen that I would never fold to something so simple as base restraint—but I was fairly sure that even most other trained children my age would react similarly.

“Worry not, young one,” the King said, kneeling down to my level. “Do you remember what happened when you came in?”

He knows I’m not a live-in. Surprising, that someone of his importance would pay that level of attention to detail for such a minor issue.

“The carriage exploded,” I admitted, purposefully keeping my voice small. If he knew that I wasn’t a live-in, then he could probably correctly assume that I had come with the Byron procession. No point in pretending otherwise. “I—I didn’t know what it was, but I remember the bad men using them once when they killed my brother, and I—I wanted to get away and the gate was open and—“

“It’s alright,” the Crowned King said, standing to his feet again. “Kane, this is consistent with what you heard, correct?”

“It is, majesty,” the sergeant said, bowing his head. “However, I still do believe that—“

“That a child detonated an explosive in her own carriage and then used that as cover to enter the castle grounds?” the King replied, disbelief and disdain coloring his voice. “Accept reality, Kane. In your report, you stated that the guards claimed that there would be more hostiles. Perhaps it was them who planted the device.”

“It wouldn’t be the first time,” the sergeant acknowledged. “Still, I find it suspicious that she decided to enter the royal castle’s grounds, tail us, and then attempt to break into the library later. Besides, what was she even doing with the guards?”

Think, think, think… I needed to answer here, or the flow of the conversation was going to get away from me. There were a number of minor inconsistencies in my story, ones that when put together painted a rather unflattering picture of my intentions here tonight. Right now, the Crowned King seemed to be buying my story, but if the sergeant was allowed to speak unchecked I could see a problem occurring.

Alright. He had mentioned earlier that trauma from my brother’s death might have moved me to act out of the norm tonight. Could I use that?

“I was... I was leaving the funeral,” I said, trying to force myself to well up tears. I couldn’t quite manage it, unfortunately, so I settled for rubbing my eyes. “It was too much for me. I couldn’t—I couldn’t stay there, so I went with the guards. I just wanted to get out of the place and then I was here and then I was inside the grounds and I didn’t know if my guards were okay so I was running and then—“

“But why the library?” the sergeant cut in. “Why would you come here?”

You’re awfully flippant when the ruler of the kingdom stands not two meters away from you, I thought, giving him a nasty glare while he wasn’t looking. Whether that said more about the Crowned King’s character or the sergeant’s, I wasn’t sure, but either way it was a pain in the butt.

“I like libraries,” I answered guilelessly. “I remembered where this one was.”

That wasn’t even a lie. At home, the library was where I spent the rare few hours not doing physical training. Usually, it was to read philosophy or oath theory, but I could find an enjoyment in that, a pleasure in the peace that accompanied reading. Nobody was going to hurt me inside a library, and there was so much I could learn from them.

Now, the Crown’s library, on the other hand, that I wanted to get into for slightly different reasons. Sure, there were plenty of books on how to gain oaths at home, but my mother and father kept telling me that I just wasn’t ready to gain one yet. If I could find a more obscure one, hidden to the ages, perhaps censored for its power, I might be able to gain an oath strong enough to impress even them. Enough for me to make my own place in the world.

I didn’t voice any of that, of course, and I kept my ambitions off my face.

“I appreciate the efforts, Sergeant Kane,” the Crowned King sighed, suddenly seeming like a rather tired human instead of the demigod the kingdom presented him as. “Please, take some rest. We have determined that there is no immediate threat, and frankly I think this girl needs her time to rest as well.”

“…fine,” the oathholder grumbled. He looked at me one more time, still suspicious, but he must have decided it wasn’t worth his time because he looked away, shaking his head. “I apologize for wasting your time.”

“Do not apologize to me,” the Crowned King said. “Perhaps to the girl. It is not a waste of time to call me for what you believe to be an emergency, but it is a waste of a child’s innocence to falsely believe they are a criminal.”

“I’m sorry,” the sergeant told me after a moment, and he managed to make it actually sound more than half genuine. He might even truly have been sorry.

“I accept your apology,” I said, keeping my eyes downcast. One obstacle removed.

The noblewoman decided that now was a pretty good time to leave, and she did just that, excusing herself to the Crowned King. A moment later, the oathholder followed.

“I am sorry you had to go through that,” King Edward told me, the regality back again but the voice still soft and warm. “Would you like to come into the library? Take a rest?”

“Yes, please,” I said, nearly unwilling to believe my luck. I hadn’t interacted with the Crowned King directly before—was he always this friendly?

I knew that he had been cultivating an image as an easily approachable royal of the people, but the extent to which that apparently applied was far greater than I thought it would be.

He gestured for me to follow him, and I did. A moment later, a guard followed us, and I moved closer to the Crowned King, somehow worried that if I didn’t stay close, the fragile house of cards I’d built would come tumbling down in instants.

Then we passed the threshold into the library, and I forgot my worries for a moment.

It was massive. I’d thought the library we had at home was expansive, but this one absolutely put it to shame. The ceiling was the first thing I noticed, almost twice the height of the room we’d been in before, and it was absolutely plastered with paintings of significant points in Tayan history. I recognized a scene of the founding of the capital city, then one of the great truce between our nation and the budding one of Yelian.

Before I could get too immersed in that, though, my eyes were torn away by the books, aisles upon aisles of them sorted neatly by purpose, name, and any number of metrics that I couldn’t glean at a first glance.

I’d foolishly thought that this library would generally follow the same structure as the one we had at the Byron manor, but it absolutely did not. Rather than have all the bookshelves static and mounted on the ground, this library had them everywhere, from a bunch that were attached to walls high up; a couple that were horizontally oriented, the books in them not falling out through some mechanism or magic; and even a few that were suspended in midair, hanging from the ceiling by thin metal wires. Throughout the whole place, clear glass paths led up, down, and across, transforming the library into a proper artwork in itself. Despite it all, it still had a sense of organization to it, signs indicating which paths led where and signifiying the purposes of the sections.

It felt positively criminal that access here was restricted. If given the choice, I wanted to stay here for at least a few weeks before even considering leaving.

“Stay here for as long as you must, little Lily,” the Crowned King said. “I will call for your House when you are ready. Is there anything you would like to read in particular?”

There was. I hadn’t been in here all too many times, but a quick glance around was enough to reveal the layout. While each bookshelf had its own label, they were all generally arranged into sets, the various sections remaining largely self-contained despite the interconnected nature of the place.

Research/Artifacts. That label was enticing like nothing else. Out of the choices here, it was the only one that radiated power, like it was calling for me to come and see what I could gain.

“I’m rather interested in the recent research our great kingdom has to offer,” I said, testing the waters. Most noble children were at least this precocious now, I was pretty sure. I wasn’t alone in having enhancements applied to my mind, I knew that much. “Would I perhaps be able to catch a glance?”

“I feared you might say that,” the Crowned King sighed. “Children these days grow far too quickly. I do wish we could return to a day when the innocence of childhood was something to be preserved.”

That… wasn’t quite a no.

“I’m sorry,” I said, unsure what I was apologizing for, “But I am interested. I was reading up on oath theory recently…”

“It’s not an issue,” the King said, his voice still uncharacteristically soft. “You just need to promise to one of our fantastic workers that you won’t speak of it, okay?”

“Alright,” I agreed.

The mind-alterers. I knew of them from past discussions with my father about what this library held. They were a set of massively powerful oathholders to Nacea and Ditas who could create a near inviolable contract with any given target once given their consent. It was an effective way to prevent information leakage, I supposed.

That was fine. I had been planning on sharing the information here, but if I was the only one who could gain, that was no real loss, was it?

So long as I don’t betray my family, my voice said inside my mind. So long as I stay loyal.

“Guard, please ensure she remains safe and within regulations,” the Crowned King said, a hint of steel returning to his voice. “I shall attempt to sort out the issue we have encountered.”

“Yes, majesty,” the guard with us said with a salute. I started a little, having almost forgotten that he was there.

With that, Crowned King Edward left and I had free reign inside the library.

I glanced at the very well-armored, very armed guard. Free reign within reasonable limits.

It took me a couple tries to find the right entrance, but I did manage to find a glass bridge that led to the research section, which was mostly tucked away in a corner but did still possess some of the more esoteric bookshelf setups.

The guard hadn’t said a word while I’d tried and failed to use different paths to get there, but he’d still stuck close to me the entire time. At least he wasn’t treating this like a training session. A small victory, but I could accept that.

The bookshelves were tall themselves, I was realizing. At a distance, I’d seen that the research bookshelves seemed shorter than the others, but they still dwarfed me in size, nearly twice my height for the smallest one.

There was so much here that I probably wasn’t going to be able to make it through a significant chunk even if I had a week to look through things.

Still, that didn’t mean that I wasn’t going to be able to find anything good. Each individual bookshelf was sorted into its own category, from Altered Generation to Alignment Theory to Multi-Oath Interaction.

I turned my head sideways, my small steps loud against the glass walkway, and I skimmed the bookshelf categories. There were enough of them to make my head spin, but I persevered, searching for one that would be useful to me as soon as possible.

I strode back and forth for a minute, not finding anything terribly useful to a girl without an oath, and the guard strode with me, their jackbooted steps much louder than mine. After a couple repetitions of the fruitless routine, I realized that there were, in fact, bookshelves in the air above me.

Another glass walkway led up there, arranged like a set of spiral stairs, and I took them up. I glanced around the library from my elevated position. It looked like a proper work of art from here, bookshelves beautifully arranged with worked artisan glass pathways that somehow added to the scenery of it all.

I tore my eyes away. There were more important things for me to be looking for right now.

“Here we are,” I whispered to myself, coming to a stop.

This bookshelf was marked Esoteric Oaths and their Obtainment. It was smaller than many of the others, but there was still a sizable amount of literature here.

I stepped forth onto another shimmering path, watching my step even when I consciously knew that the glass wouldn’t be that fragile, and I started looking for books.

There were a lot here, and while I was tempted to just take them all down one by one, I quickly realized that a good deal of them weren’t going to be immediately helpful. That… honestly made sense. I did want to get a unique oath, since I’d worked enough on my fundamentals that I was sure I would be able to pull it off and it would be a certain boon to House Byron, but a number of these just were not guides to that. I supposed that made sense—after all, this was research, not a beginner’s manual, and there was so many of them that there were sure to be a lot of duds—but still, it was a little aggravating to see so many of them with titles alog the lines of On the Theoretical Existence of a God of Cups.

As I circled around the bookshelf, I started to get a touch disheartened. Sure, I hadn’t come in here expecting to instantly gain power, but it would’ve been nice to learn something, at least, and that irritating guard was still right behind me.

Eventually, though, I did find something that differed from the trends of the rest of the shelf.

“A Treatise on Oaths Deemed Heretical During the Continental War,” I read. A clunky name, for sure, but this looked like it might actually have something beyond theory.

I sat down right where I stood and opened the first page.

From the opening, it showed promise. I’d known the rough outline of much of what had happened during the continental war, courtesy of my history tutors, but the introduction of this piece went in depth into the role the multifaith Church had played. They had been a major player during the continental war, their powers far greater than they were today, and despite technically not taking a side, they had dictated some of the rules of engagement, their wrath falling down hard against those who dared defy them.

Sadly, the first couple of gods it discussed—a sub-minor one that had been used to destroy a city during oath alignment and another that had held domain over the loss of faith—were only discussed in their historical context, the actual methods to gain the oath lost to time.

I started flipping pages faster, skimming to reach new sections. History, history, theory, oath too damaged to parse…

This book was starting to look like a wash, too.

Or at least, it was until I flipped a page and I saw a fully intact ritual chant covering one half of the paper.

These couple of pages felt different somehow. Like they’d been planted there, the paper differing ever so slightly on this side from the rest of the book.

The commentary wasn’t taken properly either, written in the margins rather than officially printed out like most of the rest of the book had been.

God—unknown name—unknown focus—definitely has a focus—highly destructive, was outlawed in the mass banning, never seen in action—artifact to form oath was found during excavation—requirements partially known

That entire scrawl of hastily written notes on the sheet caught my interest. Destruction… House Byron was dearly lacking in firepower, and I was in particular. And the requirements were known already?

I read on.

Process likely involves…

The next couple of lines were scribbled out. Theories? Attempts that hadn’t quite worked out?

The final line was partially stained with a brownish-red mark that I was fairly sure wasn’t ink.

…killing one’s family members, indirectly or not.

My heart stopped for a second, and I only realized that I had forgotten to breath when my body forced me into it a moment later.

I should have put the book down, I knew, move on to the next one. Find a more reasonable one.

And yet I found my fingers passing over the passage again, my lips whispering the words.

I could read oathtongue. If I executed the requirements, I could form the oath.

Was I willing to do it?

Deep breath. In. Out.

Thinking on it again, I was reminded of one of the lessons Lord Byron had given to me, one pounded into me over my years.

Rise at any cost necessary.

I could do—

A massive lance of pain speared through my head, my vision disappearing in both eyes, the sight of stars replacing it.

I fell to the ground, numb to my surroundings.

“…needs help! Get me a Nacea oath, now! She...”

“…not stable. Can’t quite tell what this is. Can I get another…”

“I think I got the immediate effect. Going for the next…”

When I came back to my senses properly, I found myself looking at an array of three concerned faces.

Kneeling over my prone body were the Crowned King and two of his oathholders.

“There’s a mental compulsion on you,” one of them explained softly. “We identified what and where it was. We were waiting for you to wake before we asked your permission to remove it.”

“It’s not your enhancements, if that’s what you’re worried about,” the other added before I could respond. “It’s entirely separate from them, as far as we could tell from its signature.”

I couldn’t quite remember what had triggered this, but I found my hands to be clenched into fists.

Paper was crumpled underneath one of them. There was something important there, a connection to be made, but I could look into that later.

For now, I needed to get whatever had caused that mind-shattering pain out of my head.

“Yes, please,” I croaked.

The two oathholders put their hands on my shoulders, and slowly I felt barriers lift inside me.

A wave of emotion hit me, muted but still very much there.

It didn’t overwhelm me, the feelings very much detached from myself, but I could still feel them wash over me.

Anger. Disgust. Sadness.

Hatred. More intense than the rest.

Hatred of what I had become. Hatred of my family, for making me into this.

Of myself, for accepting it.

They said they’d removed the mental compulsions, but I still couldn’t bother to give a single damn about whether these two lived or died. That hadn’t been a magic effect. It had been trained.

I clenched my fists tighter.

Someone was going to die soon if I had any say in it.

“Crowned King Edward,” I coughed out.

“Yes?” the royal in question asked, his voice filled with concern. More concern than the godsdamned Lord Byron had ever shown me.

“I have something to tell you.”