“The Church maintains a set of catacombs underneath the city,” Seb said, waving his hand over a table-wide map of Dakheng. “Entrance points are here, here, here, here…”

Seb was under the influence hard. I didn’t know why the veiled woman hadn’t done the same to us—my working presumption was that, just like how it had been when I was a kid, the brainwashing had to be done across a longer period of time to take that level of control, which hopefully meant she couldn’t mindfuck us with a single sentence—but whatever the case, Seb and a few of the commoners that followed him were pretty much her sock puppets now. He was still the same probably-not-actually-a-commoner underneath, but there was a thick layer of the veiled woman’s influence over that. From time to time, he spoke with a voice that definitely wasn’t his.

A mouthpiece. It was a little terrifying to watch, and I was glad that there was something stopping the veiled lady from doing the same to us. Maybe it was our oaths? I couldn’t be sure, and until I was sure what it was I wasn’t going to stop worrying about it, but we weren’t under the influence and that was what was important right now.

“The nobles know about this?” Kyle asked. For all that he knew the gravity of the situation we were in, he either genuinely didn’t care or was really good at putting up a facade. My money was on the latter. “The catacombs?”

“Of course,” Seb said. “Why wouldn’t they? Can’t take a shit in this city without a noble knowing.”

“Cool,” Kyle said. “And they haven’t attacked it yet?”

“They never have reason to,” Seb said. “Most of the time, they’re totally empty. A member of the Crown might go there to oversee a ceremony, but that rarely occurs.”

“You know an awful lot about this,” the jester said. His tone was flippant, but I could almost feel the care with which he was picking his words, navigating his way around the thick tension in the air. “Thought you were a commoner.”

The veiled lady cocked her head, and Seb followed, mirroring her motions in real time. A shiver crawled its way up my back.

“I have information,” they both said in harmony. The veiled lady fell silent, allowing Seb to continue. “She helped with that.”

And you might not be a commoner. I’d had trouble placing why Seb had felt so off to me before, but the last few hours had crystallized some of that, clarifying the situation. I couldn’t be a hundred percent sure, but he’d felt off because he acted like I had. Anger towards the nobility, calculations and manipulations to use people to fight for his own power, and a lack of regard for human life.

Maybe it was just me projecting my own struggles onto him, but I looked at him and saw a twisted mirror. What I could’ve been if I hadn’t found people—one person, really—that had steered me onto a better path.

If my guess was right, then Seb had also once been a member of the nobility. It would explain how comfortable he was with and around oathholders, something that commoners generally didn’t handle well at all, and it would explain his grasp of noble practices like this.

Not that it really mattered when he was practically dancing on a marionettist’s strings, but I felt some sense of kinship towards him. Even if it was misguided, I could feel the beginnings of something that might have been an obligation.

Figure that out later. Deal with the immediate situation first.

“What’s the plan?” I asked, picking my words to avoid treading on toes. “Not ours. Our enemy’s.”

“The Church wants to upturn the nobles,” Seb said. “In order to do that, they need to accomplish a number of tasks.

“First, the Crowned King and the Crown Prince. The former is the undefeated commander who guides the forces of our kingdom, the latter the face of civil relations and politics. The Crowned King is one of the most powerful oathholders born after the continental war, but the Crown Prince is still new to her post. The issue arises in that the Crown Prince is replacable in large part due to necessity brought upon the continued assassinations of those in the position during a period of time known as the Poisoned Crown.”

It might’ve been my imagination, but I could swear he turned to meet my eyes in that moment. Oops? It wasn’t like I could undo what the Byrons had done.

“Thus, their priority will be on slaying the Crowned King. Despite efforts by the Crown Princes to decentralize over the years, the fact remains that the bulk of Tayan’s power rests on the shoulders of one man. Should the Crowned King die without a strong heir, Tayan will likely die with it. The Church’s goal is to slay him and take the reins of the kingdom from his hands before it can plunge itself into chaos. This is the first aspect, and it is the one that they are likely attempting to accomplish with their ‘final victory,’ as they call it.”

I glanced at the veiled woman. She hadn’t moved a muscle, but even an idiot could tell that what was being said was as much hers as it was Seb’s.

“The second part of their plan is the people. During the anticipated transition period, it is possible that the people will rise against the unfamiliar. However, due to the failure of the nobility to properly care for the people beneath them, the Church did not have to have much of a hand in turning the people against the Crown. They did coordinate the revolts, ensuring that the nobles would have their hands full dealing with commoners who had been taught the ways of combat.”

“A simple task, really,” the veiled woman said, entering the conversation smoothly. Well, more of a monologue than anything else. “As one who used to service the nobility myself, I have much experience with delivering packages that can enable reaping the benefits of intensive training with none of the investment.”

Wait, she could do that? Then why had I never had that done? Had my father never thought to use the opportunity to strengthen me?

Or maybe I had, and Lord Byron was just a sadistic fuck who liked torturing his children with “training”. Sadly, that made a lot more sense than the former.

“They seek to smoothly transition power,” Seb said. “Even as we speak, the nobility plots against itself, making plans four levels deep to roll the dice and slay each other. They are weakened, and with the power of the people on their side, the Church believes that it can take the royal castle without much issue.

“This is, of course, false. We are the people, and we have decided to no longer serve another institution that would enslave us.”

That line was definitely more for the people who were less controlled around here. A justification to switch from one master to another. A thin one, given that this master apparently had the exact same fucking goal as the Church and nobility both, but one that most people accepted. Even then, I could see that there were signs of unease in the crowd, people murmuring to each other. The commoners can think for themselves after all.

The play that the veiled woman was making was stealing the Church’s forces out from under them, then. They would have their core force of Chosen—maybe even enough to take the castle—but nobody to consolidate the power with, no army of the people to back up their claim to the Crown.

Hell, every side in this fight were noble in everything but name, weren’t they?

Fucking politics.

“We will take the Church, and then we will take the Crown,” Seb said. “We have the element of surprise, and that’s what matters.”

“How you plannin’ on doin’ that?” Kyle drawled. “Last I checked, you don’t have the oathholders they do.”

“Multiple steps,” Seb said. “First, playing our enemies off each other. The Crowned King and the Church should weaken each other enough for us to come in and wipe them up. Second, their own captured oathholders, of which there are at least two dozen, are being held in the catacombs right around here, in the vicinity of the underground parts of the royal castle itself. Lady Laur was supposed to subjugate them and enable the Crown’s force multiplier, but they will instead be moved to fight the Church.”

That was Jasmine that she was talking about through him. Part of their plan was going to involve essentially throwing meat at the grinder and hoping that something would stick. I had to admit that I was a little surprised that the Church had kidnapped so many oathholders—though if most of them weren’t noble, I could understand why there hadn’t been an uproar—but the rest wasn’t news to me.

Of course the lady that had fucked with my head for years wasn’t going to generously reunite me with Jasmine, Alex, Lucas, and the kind-of traitor. There wasn’t a benevolent bone in her body, and believing that for even an instant would’ve been idiotic of me.

No, this was always something that I’d had to plan for. Now we had knowledge of where our targets were and context of who had taken them and why. I wasn’t going to be able to break away right now and take them on my own. The experience with the ridiculously powerful Chosen in the branch we’d just left were enough to convince me of that, but there could come a point during the fight itself in which I could break off, take my friends, and leave. Whether or not that step also involved backstabbing the veiled woman—Lady Laur, apparently—would come down to what happened in the moment. I was leaning towards a yes on that issue, though.

“Specific details of what will need to be done will be distributed as necessary,” Seb said. “The catacombs are a complex maze, so you must remain with the group or you are dead.”

The murmuring was increasing. More unsurety, more people wondering whether or not this was actually what they wanted to do.

“I remind you that we fight for our people,” Seb said, and this time it sounded more like he was in control. It wasn’t something that most people would’ve noticed, but his words were less stilted, just a touch, and Lady Laur had relaxed her posture a little. “We fight for all of us. Us, here, we will fight in the dark so our brothers and sisters can live in the light. When we win, it will be a new world. One in which the nobles can no longer cut food to us, where the Church no longer demands us to beg for scraps. One in which we can stand as our own, free city.”

There wasn’t a deafening cheer, not exactly, but there were shouts, whoops, and more than a few people voicing their support for it. It hadn’t been the most moving speech, but it didn’t need to be. Seb’s people loved him, and as much as I wanted to say that he was fighting for the wrong side, he was kind of correct.

What had the nobles done for the people? The Church had done more, perhaps, but it had never been enough. To make it worse, now they were doing their best impression of the people that hoarded money, food, and knowledge. The people went hungry and they got sick and all the information about oaths that might be able to save them or even just give them a voice was kept locked away in hidden libraries, private vaults and Church stores that no commoner could access.

As much as I knew that Lady Laur’s ultimate goal was going to have nothing to do with the liberation of the people, I couldn’t help but agree with Seb.

There were good nobles. Jasmine had opened my eyes to that. Even the Crowned King himself had been a good, fair man from what little I remembered of him. But the presence of a few good people weren’t enough to save an institution that oppressed, an institution that killed its own people through inaction or intent, an institution that hampered the kingdom from being what it could be.

I couldn’t think of a great way to solve this. Whoever came out on top in this situation—the nobles, the Church, Lady Laur’s third faction—there wasn’t going to be any lasting change in the rulers in anything but name. It would be more of the same shit, more of the divide between nobles and commoners, more House Byrons and the consequences of that.

Ugh. One problem at a time. We could figure out how to fix society later. For now, I needed to focus on getting Jasmine back and surviving to tell the tale. From the sound of it, she and the other adventurers were going to be used as a distraction for this faction. I trusted in them to keep themselves alive for at least a short period of time, but we needed to break away from Laur as soon as possible.

I didn’t let any of it show on my face. Lady Laur had turned her veiled face on me as if she knew I would react to her plan, and I made sure to stay carefully indifferent, like I hadn’t understood the ramifications of her plan.

“So what do you need me to do, exactly?” I asked. Seb was expounding on some part of the plan that was apparently going to involve subduing a Church oathholder and turning them against each other somehow, but that wasn’t my job. Subduing wasn’t what I did best, and Lady Laur had to know that.

“Is it not obvious?” she asked in turn, tilting her head. “Kill what gets in our way.”

“Right.” I nodded. That was what I’d been used for as a kid, and it was all that she’d ever seen of me. Why should the veiled lady ever assume anything different about what I did? There wasn’t anything more to me. At the beginning and end of the day, I was a killer, through and through.

That’s not true. A conversation I’d had with Jasmine sometime during the ridiculously hectic last couple of days floated to mind.

She really did treat me too kindly. Maybe I could be more, live up to the image of Lily Syashan that saw, but try as I might, this was simply who I was.

It doesn’t have to be.

I winced. Arguing with a mental image of a noble girl, huh? I’d really fallen that far…

It wasn’t like Jasmine had never killed anyone. She and I both knew that there were times when it was absolutely necessary to permanently remove an obstacle. Somehow, that made it worse, knowing that she believed in me to make the right choices, to kill only when I needed to.

Fuck. I wanted to believe I was having a crisis on whether or not I was going to obey and kill the Church oathholders in my way, but at length I had to admit what was happening.

It was guilt I was feeling. Guilt for actions I hadn’t taken yet but that I knew I would, actions that I knew I would feel good about in the moment.

I’d already made my choice.

Anything to get her back. If it meant failing to be the perfect girl she thought I could be, that was fine, as long as I could keep her with me. If—when, I mentally corrected myself—I was with Jasmine again, it wouldn’t be on me to make and justify these decisions. I would have my conscience back in the form of a cheery noble girl who couldn’t help but to help me.

And I was going to kill anyone that needed to die in order to achieve that.

“Lily?” Kyle asked. “You good? You’ve been kind of staring at nothing.”

I looked up, snapping out of my thoughts. People were moving now, mobilizing and grabbing weapons and armor and whatever else they needed for an underground catacomb rush.

“Sorry,” I said, my resolve hardened. “Got distracted. Enlighten me on what’s next?”

___________________________

We’d returned to the Church branch that we’d raided earlier. Bit of a twist of events, that.

“Was this you?” Seb asked, gesturing at the insides.

I took a glance at the wreckage. It looked a lot worse now that we weren’t actually fighting. Beautiful stained glass windows had shattered and fallen into a million pieces across the floor, wooden benches smashed into the ground, and of course there were the multitude of still-unconscious bodies on the floor.

“Might’ve been,” I said.

“Good,” Seb said. “Then it won’t be an additional enemy.”

Now that we were actually in the execution phase of the plan, he’d been given a little more freedom. He was still very obviously under the influence of Lady Laur, but it wasn’t as direct as it had been earlier.

It was well past midnight now. I was rather glad for the fact that oathholders tended to need less sleep than mundanes, because I was sure that if I was a regular human being I would’ve been passed out at this point. It had only been a little over twenty-four hours since this entire debacle had started, but half a thousand kingdom-altering events had occurred within that time period.

“I wonder what they’re going to call this in the history books,” I said.

“The Glorious Revolution or something as meaningless if Laur’s troops—er, we, I mean—win,” Kyle said, playing around with a card again. “The Unnecessarily Painful and Bloody Execution of a Bunch of Rebels otherwise. That’s my bet.”

I snorted. “Sure.”

According to Lady Laur, who’d actually started speaking in the latter half of the planning part of this operation, there were at least five or six other cells of commoners that would be doing the same thing at the same hour, taking over other Church branches and co-opting their entrances into their catacombs.

Not for the first time, I wondered how large her influence spread. From context, it was pretty obvious that she’d been the leader of the Church branch that we’d first attacked, the one that had left for the headquarters, which meant that she’d held influence over this branch at least. But to also control that many other commoner groups as well as having some way to actually enable their entrance into Church branches… just how far did this woman’s influence reach?

Not far enough to win her the Crown. I didn’t know where the sentiment came from, but it was bone-deep. On some level within me, I was absolutely sure that Lady Laur’s bid for power was going to fail. Why or how, I was still unsure, but it was like I knew that it wasn’t going to work.

Dangerous assumption to hold. Lady Laur was powerful as all hell, and letting my guard down around her just because I thought that the Crowned King would be able to outpace her was a shitty plan that would almost certainly lead to my death or brainwashing.

There wasn’t anything left to be done. The branch was empty, and all the weapons and miscellaneous items that the commoners had chosen to gather together had all been taken from the warehouse where we’d begun.

The entrance to the crypt was deep within the branch. There’d been a hallway behind the altar of the central hall, and Seb led us down it, an oathlight in his hand. We must’ve walked for a solid five minutes, descending down spiral stairs for half of it and ignoring every path that branched off the central one, and then we were here.

For the entrance to what was supposed to be a city-wide network of catacombs, it was unimpressive. Just a simple wooden door with a lock in it.

“Please do the honors, Seb,” Lady Laur said, and he moved to obey, drawing a hefty key from within his pocket.

Seb unlocked the door, and things started going wrong.