Raceel did not expect this... Judge to keep to his bargain, but once again the decision had been taken out of his hands. The nobility might be corrupt and wasteful with their King-given power, but they weren't careless with their own lives. Even the offer had been made with a score of armed men between Raceel and the messenger, and their leveled spears communicated clearly what refusing the offer would mean.

The plaguemancer might be an ally – they hadn't spoken on the road, but the southern kept giving him these looks, as if sizing him up – but the other two... Raceel wasn't sure about them. A dirty peasant and a boyish troubadour, from the looks of him. Performers had a certain energy compared to farmers or warriors, and this one had the light sense of Iylihe about him.

What a worthless god-of-the-Circle to voluntarily follow...

The Iylihite kept shifting his weight, his fingers tapping out imaginary tunes in impatience. The peasant had made the effort to stand a bit off to one side, as if trying to distance himself from everyone else. Raceel glanced over at the plaguemancer and met the unnatural gleaming gaze fixed upon him, and a silent understanding passed between them.

The southern's god was Ku'eb, and Raceel's Koruen. They might stand on opposite sides of the Circle in all religious texts, but of all the known gods, Raceel saw them as strangely harmonic.

Nature's merciless fury, and the bloody aftermath of war. In both, it was those who came after the conflict that thrived.

If they had been brought here to die, so be it. Raceel almost hoped they would try it.

~

The Brightshield House didn't have the money to buy new allies. Their last King's Favor had been spent to forgive a massive debt, and yet it hadn't refilled their emptying coffers. Not even their militia had the numbers to effectively hinder their rival House, though the head of the family was desperate enough to turn to battle had they not been so clearly outmatched.

Desperate enough to turn to the Church-Fortress of Rehena when all other options, save submission and humiliation, proved impossible.

The Favor of Rehena could buy many other boons, and all it took was a boy.

Raceel was four.

There were three Paths available to the Children of Rehena. At the age of eight, when given the choice, Raceel chose the Path of Noble Combat – the path of the paladin. Over the years, he rode under the banners of a dozen lords, his service lent out when and wherever the King or the Fortress decided it was necessary, but he acknowledged none of them as master. The Fortress Paladins fought for the glory of the Stallion of Victory, Rahena the Valiant, and all mortal lords were merely pale reflections of the Rahenian Ideal.

These thoughts, and others like them, formed the foundation of Raceel's life. Everything was filtered through one facet of the Circle, and the surety of Rahena's Law – of honor deciding battle; battle deciding strength; strength deciding honor – made life so very straightforward.

Until life broke the Law.

Dishonor won a battle. Raceel was the only one to survive the ambush in the Mountains.

Those who had not fought condemned the ones who had. Raceel was cast out.

The weak and twisted and wrong were held in honor. Raceel...

They shattered his sword. They drowned his warhorse. They burned his unsullied armor. The First Mare would not speak his name, and those he had held as brothers turned their backs upon him.

So he went home.

The Brightshields had survived. He didn't know them, but he knew enough to find them. A sister he had never met lead as regent, and a younger brother he had never known existed waited to come into his title. The right to be called “heir” had been lost to Raceel for two decades, but the strangers who shared his blood did not do what his raised-brothers had done. They embraced him, despite it all.

But it was not just the High Priestess or the Paladins who had forsaken him, in the end. Rahena himself had turned away, for dishonored followed Raceel like a hungry hound after blood. The King's Favor was turned against House Brightshield, and the Fortress did not protect them this time.

Raceel awoke to fire, and a locked door.

The House Brightshield burned, and Raceel found the heir's blackened bones lashed to the front doorframe where he had been hung, living, as a sign. Not just defeat, not just submission, but punishment. The servants lay where they had been shot in the back as they fled the estate, and the Brightshield soldiers burned together in a pile before the gates.

The Writ fluttered on a flagstaff between the wall gates and the front doors, thrust between cobblestones. Sewn into cloth with red thread for any to read, the reason for House Brightshield's destruction read simply:

~Thus to all who betray their King.~

It was signed by the Second Stallion, witnessed and confirmed by the Duke whose lies had painted Raceel and the Paladins who'd fallen in the Mountains the aggressors. It had been carried out by the Brightshield's rivals with the aid of the Duke's men.

Crows came to pick over the dead. Koruen's birds, who always came to profit when Rahena's herd had finished their work.

Honor, glory, and praise to the warhorse, and a feast for the crows.

Honor to the warhorse, until he was drowned. Then... another feast for the crows.

When Raceel hunted them all down, one by one, he didn't do it Rahena's way. The Black Shatterblade fought like the scavengers.

~

The clink of chains in the hallway prompted the four prisoners to look quickly behind them, back to the doors through which they had entered minutes ago.

The fifth prisoner came shuffling through, hands and feet locked in shackles whose chains were still attached, only instead of a wagon floor they were held in place by a pair of guards. Two more guards came behind, watchful for any sudden movement.

The man between them, if man he was, prompted a different reaction from each of those in the room. The plaguemaster hissed aloud and drew back, speaking for the first time since his capture in twisted, untranslatable words. Metcenzerin cursed in the far more common tongue, then clamped his mouth shut as if realizing he had spoken aloud only afterwards.

Raceel understood the reaction, though he wondered how those untrained in Circle-meditation could pick up on the aura of wrongness surrounding the fifth prisoner. Perhaps it was simply the man's strange garb they were unnerved by. A featureless mask of differing cloths crudely sewn together completely covered his face (though it did not cover the whole of his head) with dark glass lens set over where the eyes would be. Dull but dark greyish-brown hair stuck out awkwardly to one side where the mask ended, matted and uncared for. The rest of his clothes marked him clearly as a man of the King's City, the capital, with his long, buttoned coat and high collar and polished boots. Dark gloves covered his hands and vanished into the sleeves of his coat, but the fingers of the gloves had been cut off. His exposed fingers, thin and pale and trembling, were the only indication there was actually flesh and blood beneath the heavy clothes.

And he was small. As much as Raceel towered over everyone else present, they all towered over this fifth prisoner.

It was that last fact that made Daerth, alone among those in the room, left in confusion by the quick and negative reactions. There was nothing for his forest-trained mind to sense, and, unlike Metcenzerin, he had not wandered the Kingdom listening for news from every traveler he passed. He saw merely a short, physically unimposing cityman without a weapon surrounded by guards.

The horror stories of the Stitcher hadn't reached the backwater nowhere that was Woodedge.

~

The King's Circle – a proud, borderline arrogant name for a proud, borderline arrogant city.

In the center of the Kingdom it lay like a great never-sleeping dragon, curled around the mountainous King's Palace. Buildings towered over the wide cobbled streets. They were so tall and so closely crowded that the streets were all arranged in lines east-to-west, else sunlight would only be able to reach the ground at noon.

You were not considered a real lord of the realm if you did not own a residency in the center district, and you were not considered an intelligent lord of the realm if you did not have a representative at hand at the King's Palace at all hours of every day. It was in the King's Circle that favors were granted, alliances were made, wars were won, and territory lost.

Cathedrals of Rahena rose above the common buildings, the shadows of their rearing horses reaching far from lofty perches. The lesser temples of less acceptable Circle-gods lurked timidly in those shadows, from the humble gatherings of Ebetu playing the squire to Rahena, to the forbidden worshipers of Aros waiting and scheming as patiently as their patron.

The greatest scholars of the realm gathered in library and university; musicians played to rapt audiences in the echoing chambers of grand concert halls; traders and merchants crowded every inch of market-space for a chance to sell to the biggest crowd in the Kingdom. And between the tall walls of great achievement, humanity seethed in close and tense proximity, struggling to breath in a sea of business.

Where there were people, there was sickness.

Where there were people, there was injury.

Where there were people, there was death.

Nowhere else in the Kingdom had the art of medicine advanced so far. Priest and scholar, teacher and practitioner, had woven the power of the Circle and nature's talent for self-repair into a mixed art-form, powerful enough to pull even the closest to death back from the black abyss.

Of course, it was difficult. It required resources, time, from men who had so very little for so many people. Of course, it was expensive.

Common healers, common doctors, had tried to find the balance together. Some claimed they had. Some admitted they couldn't. None of them could bring it to the common, the lowly.

A failing heart cannot be healed...

They didn't have anything more to try. The Circle-worshipers had come and done their mutterings, and they had left with the words, “We've done all we can.”

Useless.

They could cut into the woman's chest when she succumbed, pull out her heart to try and find out what had gone wrong. It wouldn't help her, but perhaps it would help another. Some day. That was all the doctors could do. “We've done all we can.”

Hopeless.

Uselessness and hopelessness did not become a doctor. A doctor held death in one hand, and life in another. A doctor who dropped his hands in a shrug and dismay... that was failure, and cowardice, and... and...

Men had done everything in their power. The Circle had done everything in their power. The doctor, he had not. He just had to look outside.

It seemed to simple afterwards. You don't need to repair the failing heart. You just have to find a healthy one.

She lived. They said it was impossible, and yet she lived.

Nor was she the only one.

He watched from windows, followed amid the crowd. Trained eyes can see the limp, the stagger, the cough, and extrapolate so much more. They needed him, though they wouldn't know it. And then... then to find the solution. The cure.

He watched for them, too. It had to be the right parts, and they couldn't be diseased themselves.

A few drops in a glass, a brief struggle in a dark alley. You had to subdue them quickly, but you couldn't kill them. He became very good at it after the one with the knife. Had to take a bit more from that one. A doctor couldn't perform surgery with a finger missing.

Thread and needle... quick and clean.

They realized after a few months. They started hunting him. Why? His patients always got better. Some of them were sick when they first woke, but that always passed, and it had to be worth it, right? They never had to pay, they never had to say thank you, they never even knew he was treating them. He got them when they were sleeping, or when he put them to sleep, and worked in the dark so no one would ever know.

Anything for the patients. Even if it meant working at his own risk.

They caught him a year into his practice. They accused him of crimes, of murder! He gave them names, the patients he had cured. They didn't care. They didn't get it. It was his job, his duty, his only duty. The patient had to survive.

Even if it meant the Tower of Punishment.

At least they let him work. Even naturally talented fingers have to keep practicing to maintain their skill. He had to get creative, though. They gave him the burns and the breaks and the bleeding, and he found ways to mend it. Sometimes he had to get help from his friend beyond. The twisting was tricky... the nails and brands easier... the starvation easiest. They let rats in to chew on his toes.

He kept a careful tally. The King had sentenced him to five years. They had said it would end after five years. He couldn't wait to get back to work for the people. One hundred days and thirty-five, and they realized their mistake. A man came in to talk, not to test his pain tolerance. He had clothes and an offer for the doctor. New patients. Fresh patients. In exchange for... something. It didn't matter. The answer was yes.

~