“You just left him there like that?” Jasmine asked. “Not that I am judging you, but I am surprised you were able to do it so casually.”

“I attribute that to Lord Byron,” I said. “He taught me how to kill and how to divorce myself from the act. Jasper was my brother, but I rarely even saw him other than when we were at formal events. We happened to be related by blood, but that did not make us family.”

“I suppose that’s true,” Jasmine said, shifting in her seat. She sounded ever so slightly uncomfortable, and I couldn’t really blame her. Her childhood, as far as I could tell, had been spent with a functional family.

“Sorry, I know you can’t relate,” I said. “It’s just how it was for me, you know?”

“I understand,” Jasmine said. “And no, I cannot relate, but that does not make your past struggle any less valid.”

“Thank you,” I replied. I was about to get back into telling my story when a thought that had been hanging around for a while came to the forefront of my mind. “Hey, Jasmine?”

“Yes?”

“We’ve been sitting here for a couple hours now, right?”

“Just about.” Jasmine glanced off to another side of the room, where a pendulum clock slowly ticked away the seconds.

“Has nothing developed during that time? From what you said, there’s going to be conflict.”

“To be fair, I have been spending the supermajority of that time with you,” Jasmine said, huffing out something between a sigh and a laugh. “I believe that this was the best use of my time, mind you, but it is true that I have not had access to the latest updates.”

“Do you anticipate there being any?” I asked.

“Not particularly,” Jasmine said. “The involved Houses are, apart from House Alzaq, all rather traditional Houses. Nobody would dare to begin a conflict with midnight treachery.”

I winced. We did.

“The time of House Byron was an unusual one,” Jasmine said. “And not every House adopted its exact practices. None of the ones involved in this particular conflict are ones that took great influence from your former House—“

The phrase “former House” hit me out of nowhere. I hadn’t been expecting those words, and by all rights they shouldn’t have been a problem, but old scars died hard. I must’ve still reacted somehow because Jasmine paused, noticing the shift in my expression.

“—from House Byron,” she corrected herself. “I am sure that Mother and Father are up right now, discussing our next steps, but if there was anything major, they would notify me about it. They like to keep me in the loop.”

“Your parents seem like good people,” I said, smiling tiredly. “Not bad, especially for nobles.”

“They are,” Jasmine agreed, giving my hand a squeeze. “I wish you could have had a proper childhood with someone like them to raise you.”

“I do too,” I said. “But like you said, what’s happened has passed. These are the cards I was dealt, so I’m going to make what I can out of them.”

It wouldn’t be fair for me to make this all about my suffering. Jasmine had gone through plenty as well—she’d had a good pair of parents, but that was by no means a guarantee of the quality of her childhood. We’d both struggled through dark and light to get to where we were today, and nobody could deny that.

“I do believe that that is a good mentality to have,” Jasmine agreed amiably. “I’m glad that you chose to play them with me.”

The words I was going to reply with got stuck in my throat, and I could hear a fierce blush coming on.

“Of course,” I managed.

“On a different subject,” Jasmine said. “I know that there’s still more to your story, but I think this is important to know. What are you going to do in the event of war?”

“What do you mean by that?”

“The Tempets have declared conflict already, and both sides seem to be pressuring other Houses to their sides, creating factions. The Crown has allowed all of this to happen, yes, but similar events have preceded war before.”

“All over a few dead nobles, huh?” I asked. “It’s been a long time since I had to think about politics.”

“The short explanation is that those few dead nobles were the matchsticks that set the firewood alight, where the firewood is the already tenuous relations between the Houses.”

“Sure thing,” I accepted. “So I ignited existing tensions. Oops?”

“Why did you do it?” Jasmine asked. “Kyle, Alex, and I stopped a couple Alzaqs ourselves because we identified that they were making a play at the ball, but what moved you to do it?”

“My identity is, uh, not something that is supposed to be known,” I said. “The existence of a living Byron would be an embarrassment to the Crown, and the traitor nobles figured out I was a Byron via a particularly perceptive Strike Team Leader.”

“There are others who know?” Jasmine frowned. “Just how harmful would it be if your secret got out?”

“Rather harmful,” I said. “I can explain, though it’ll take a while. You’re not getting sleepy yet?”

“It has been one hell of a night,” Jasmine said. “Hard to sleep after everything happened, and I do want to learn more about your history. I’m honored that you trust me enough to share with me.”

“And I’m glad that you’ve been taking it so well,” I said. “I know I’ve said this already, but I expected a more dramatic response, I guess?”

“We’re both grown women,” Jasmine replied easily. “And I can believe that you haven’t had the opportunity to interface with the most people in the last decade or so, given the timeframe and what else you’ve told me of your past, but I’d also like to believe that we’re both reasonable people. The fact that you’re communicating is already more than enough.”

She looked like she wanted to add something else onto the end of that sentence, but she held her tongue. I thought back on what I knew of Jasmine, and I remembered those furtive misdirections, those not-quite-full truths. Was she trying to reciprocate my gesture and tell me more about herself?

If that was the case, then I absolutely wanted to know what was going on with her life, but I could wait. There was still more to explain about myself, after all, and I wasn’t going to be rude and interrupt my own story to ask for her past. She could share it if and when she was ready to.

“Anyway,” I said. “You were asking about how harmful my identity was.”

“I was,” Jasmine acknowledged.

I felt for the god-threads that made up the magic powering my oath, reaching for them and intertwining them with my words. When I spoke again, I infused images into the words, not quite a full attempt at godly communication but instead a way to convey the scenes where my memories took place. A conscious effort now, rather than the accidental additions I’d been doing earlier.

“Well, I skipped over a lot of minor details, so we’re rapidly approaching the end of my time as a noble,” I said. “A few months after Jasper died, things were starting to get real bad…”

“We are gathered here today to mourn the loss of my son Thorn,” Lord Byron said, his voice embodying a specific timbre that I’d grown too familiar to hearing recently. Perfectly pitched to evoke the image of a man holding himself together after experiencing a great loss.

It was eerie, the way he consistently kept that exact same tone, without any variation at all. I was sure that I wasn’t the only one who had noticed it, but then again Lord Byron hadn’t invited all too many people to this funeral, and those people were largely from Byron branch families with the exception of a Crown official or two.

“Thorn was a promising young man,” Lord Byron said with that controlled quaking voice that I knew was a sham. “After Jasper’s untimely passing, Thorn sought to compensate for the loss of House Byron’s heir with conviction.”

And by conviction, you mean that you guilt-tripped him into assassinating a dozen other nobles of his age. Thorn hadn’t liked it, going so far as to even complain about it to me of all people, but he’d done it nonetheless.

“He carried out his duty admirably,” Lord Byron said. “Thorn represented House Byron as well as he feasibly could. My son trained with the most powerful oathholders of the kingdom—“

Those were our oathholders that he was referring to. I hadn’t yet had the opportunity to train with them beyond my tutoring sessions, but Thorn and Jasper had both had their oaths before they died. Their training had been quite a few steps ahead of mine.

“—and he became one of them,” Lord Byron continued. “Before his demise, Thorn was well on his way to representing House Byron as one of the Crown’s elite.

“Alas, just as a mishap by House Ther took my last child, House Tempet has now committed the same grievous sin.”

This was the critical moment. I scanned the crowd, finding the few members of the Crown that had deigned to be present at the funeral tonight. It was a tough task, given that I hadn’t had much interaction with the branch families and couldn’t really tell them apart from the rest, but there were a few minor aspects about these nobles that indicated their status.

One at the front of the small crowd of attendees, one in the center, and a final one next to the second. Their posture was ever so slightly straighter than those around them, their dress just a touch more formal, more dignified. A small crest on their sleeves indicating that they were of House Tayan, easy to miss at first, sealed the deal.

Those three—and maybe another one or two besides—were the only people that truly mattered at this event. I watched them carefully, analyzing their reactions.

“Thorn made to parlay with one of House Ther’s ambassadors,” Lord Byron said, maintaining a fascinating mix of pain and steel in his voice. “Tragically, it was at this time that House Tempet decided to act on their existing conflict with House Ther, attempting an assassination of the Ther ambassador. Thorn was caught in the crossfire.”

My father fell silent, and though he kept up his facade of a grieving man I knew what was going on beneath those eyes. Just like me, he was gauging the response of the Crown, assessing if they believed his story or not.

Thorn had gone to meet a noble from House Ther. That much was true—in fact, it had been Lan, one of the House’s most renowned mediators. His goal, however, had not been peace.

As the designated overwatch, I’d observed from afar as Thorn’s attempt to kill him, goaded on by the words of Lord Byron, had been stopped in its tracks by a hidden bevy of guards. I’d watched as Thorn triggered a last-ditch explosive device, a creation by one of the branch family’s Aedi oathholders that Lord Byron had forced us to carry at all times ever since Jasper had died.

I had sat there silently as Thorn ended his own life with Lan Ther’s, watching as my father reacted with not despair but annoyance. Like he’d lost a prized horse or a carriage, rather than his own flesh and blood.

The Crown officials didn’t know any of that, though. From their reactions of quiet sympathy, heads shaking in sadness, it looked like they bought into his every word.

“As Houses of great standing,” Lord Byron started again, evidently having determined the same, “Neither House Ther nor Tempet deserves for us to enter conflict with them when they are already experiencing their own struggles.”

He had them. I could see the Crown officials in the crowd hanging on to his every word. At Jasper’s funeral, they had been less reactive, and so Lord Byron had pushed for fewer concessions. Now, though, he could have asked for the world and they might have delivered.

What had changed? I knew that the Tempet-Ther rivalry had been heating up, with more Houses joining the fray on either end. Perhaps the amount of conflict occurring there had been sufficient to convince the Crown of Lord Byron’s tale.

“I would, however, formally request the Houses to be sanctioned by the Crown,” Lord Byron said, taking a deep breath as if he was actually emotional right now. “I fear that I request too much, but for Thorn, I believe that—“

“The Crown hears your request,” a woman spoke.

I looked at her, processing her voice. Not the Crown Prince. Lord Byron hadn’t been bold enough to bring her in, it seemed—if his gamble didn’t pay off, having the Crown Prince here to witness it would have been suboptimal, to say the least.

“The Crown hears your request,” a man repeated. A moment later, a third said the same line, and the three seated attendees that I’d been observing rose to their feet as one.

“We will ensure that the proper measures are taken,” the first woman said.

“The Crown does not tolerate the involvement of non-conflicting Houses in a conflict,” the second man added.

“Thank you for bringing this matter to our attention,” the final woman finished.

“I… I appreciate it,” Lord Byron said, and he turned away, wiping his eyes.

Hiding a smile, no doubt.

His ploy had been successful. The “proper measures” here could be anything ranging from the imprisonment of a House leader to the revocation of financial privileges to the co-opting of a House’s military force, but whatever the case was, it would do damage.

Destabilization was the name of the game, I knew. Father had had Thorn and I at his strategy sessions with increasing frequency of late, and I had a general grasp of what was happening. The conflict that we’d sparked with our string of assassinations was already weakening major Houses, and setting the Crown on them would cause both those Houses and the Crown to take a hit in terms of their solidified powerbase.

Weaken the Houses around us, and nobody except the Crown will stand in our way. Lord Byron had pounded that point into our heads over and over, but now…

I wasn’t even properly in attendance of my own brother’s funeral. Earlier, I’d been instructed to keep watch over the place to observe if any of the Crown nobles made a suspicious move, and now I was camped out on a nearby hillside, using a lensed scope to watch the proceedings and a Caethus stone to listen in on the speech.

The casket was closed. Not enough of Thorn left for anyone to observe, I’d imagine, though of course Lord Byron had subtly blamed that on the warring Houses.

What use was it to weaken the other Houses when our own members were dropping like flies? Half a year ago, I’d had both my brothers, and now the next generation of the main Byron family had been reduced to a fraction of its size. Of my uncles and aunts, only one was still alive, the rest lost during the last few years through military service or assassination.

I was the heir now, the one with the best claim to the next open spot at the head of the House. On some level, I could appreciate that, revel in the fact that I was going to obtain the power, prestige, and wealth of the entire family when either Lord Byron perished in battle or Lady Byron passed the matriarch role to me, but on another I wondered if there was even going to be anything left for me when that time came.

We’d expended much of our manpower—some of the branch families and their associated soldiers had gotten directly involved in the ongoing conflict, and the number of people in attendance now was two-thirds that of the number we’d had at Jasper’s funeral—and Lady Byron had made it clear that we were leaking money like a sieve.

Everything hinged on us winning the Crown, but I was growing to believe that that was becoming an unfeasible dream.

Sure, we were destabilizing the other Houses, but the Crown still held strong and we were losing steam.

A flicker of movement from the crowd brought my attention back to the ongoing funeral.

The Crown officials were leaving, having whispered words of… encouragement? Faith? The Caethus stone didn’t pick up whatever they said to my father, but his reaction told me that it had been good news for him.

I followed them with the scope as they left, all the way until they fully returned into the main manor. Servants would guide them back to the front, I knew, and that would take a while.

I put the scope down and pocketed the Caethus stone, sitting up from where I’d been laying down in the grass.

There was a much faster way to get to the front of the manor, I knew, one that didn’t involve going through the twists and turns of the massive main building. I sprinted away from the hill, heading for the building.

“I’m following the Crown officials,” I vocalized into the stone. “Advice?”

“Stay hidden, Lily,” Lord Byron said back, his voice a quiet hiss. He must have still been speaking at the funeral. “You are the last sane heir I have. Do not let House Byron end here.”

Nicer than usual, all things considered. Our situation really was getting bad, wasn’t it? I never thought I’d see the day where his voice would have anything approaching warmth in it.

I made my way through our fields, taking a side path that I’d familiarized myself with over the years. One of the ones we’d done “field training” in before all of this had gone to shit.

I made it to the other end of the manor twice as fast as the Crown nobles. By the time they arrived, escorted by a crew of our servants, I was already waiting in a carriage behind them, the driver deferring to “the young Lady Byron.”

“Follow them,” I ordered, indicating the carriage that the others entered. “And set up guards for them to mask our presence.”

“As you wish.” The driver spoke into his own Caethus stone, barking out orders for the other personnel waiting in front of the manor.

When the Crown nobles left, their carriage marked with a temporary House Tayan banner, it was with an accompaniment of four other carriages, three of which would be ferrying guards and the last one carrying only me.

It was time to see how the Crown would react. Were they strong enough to mount a response? Did they still maintain as much power as they had before the Byron campaign?

My purpose was not quite what my father’s was. My father sought the betterment of House Byron.

I sought the betterment of myself.

Who was it worth supporting? House Byron was losing momentum and burning people, but the Crown might be too. House Byron had unnecessarily slaughtered innocent nobles by the dozen, but then the Crown may have as well. Did House Byron still have a shot at the Crown? Did I like the idea of a world in which Lord Byron wore the Crown?

Tonight’s observation was going to be crucial.

Let’s see where my allegiances should lie.