We didn’t run into any commoners that recognized Orchid on our way to the meeting place. We definitely did pass commoners, and some of them were even armed and rushing towards the location we’d departed from, but few of them seemed to connect the tired, limping pair of travellers with the noble that they’d been ordered to kill. Given that most of them had probably never seen a noble in real life before, let alone Orchid Alzaq, I was willing to bet that they had been pointed at the exact building he’d been in as well as a general description of a male noble wearing a certain House’s uniform.

Well, we’d abandoned the dregs of his uniform in a dark alley about half a kilometer back, and neither of looked prim and proper enough to be considered noble at the moment. Combined with the fact that we were actively trying to keep our heads down, nobody gave us a second look.

“They knew where I was,” Orchid muttered. His voice was ever so slightly recovered, though he still couldn’t quite string together full sentences at a normal volume. “Fucking family.”

That gave me pause. I was pretty sure that was the first time I’d heard him swear. He didn’t seem like the type to do it, but from the sounds of it he’d had a rough night. I could sympathize with that, at least, if not much else.

“Let me get this straight,” I said, keeping my voice down to prevent any unwanted attention, “You got kicked out of the Alzaq manor, presumably to an extent that you feared for your life enough that you climbed down the side of that place. And then you went to an Alzaq safe house?”

“Wasn’t thinking straight,” Orchid replied. “Forgot. Wanted to sleep.”

“How long were you fighting in there?” I asked.

“Two, three hours,” he said, massaging his throat. “There were fewer of them at first.”

“Were they all trained?” I asked. “It’s really odd, seeing how so many of them are so well-versed in their weapon arts.”

“Not sure,” Orchid said. “Unfamiliar.”

Of course. As much as Orchid had some level of fighting experience, he gave no indication of having anywhere approaching the same level of education that someone like Jasmine or me or even Alex did. House Alzaq was a merchant House, not a fighter one, and it showed.

I sighed. “Fine then. I’ll assume they are for now, since that’s our worst-case.”

There was a lot more I had to say, but I saved it. Orchid had a dubious allegiance right now. I didn’t want to reveal any information I didn’t have to when there was still the potential for him to run away.

He can’t run. He isn’t with the Alzaqs. My own thoughts, but not ones that I needed at the moment. I tried to wave them away, yet I found them gripping onto my mind more firmly than usual.

Was I really just being too paranoid? Even if I didn’t wholly trust him, Orchid was highly unlikely to report any of my stratagems to my enemy, given that they had just cast him out.

Still, House Byron hadn’t been paranoid enough, and that had led to their downfall at my hands. Sure, I was no House Byron here, but there were still lifelong lessons learned from that disaster that wouldn’t go away so easily.

I could reconsider my morals and thought processes later. We were rapidly approaching the plaza where we’d been ordained to meet.

Orchid recognized the place faster than I thought he would’ve. He physically flinched as it came into view.

“You recognize it,” I said.

“The plaza where we encountered our major battle,” he whispered. “Of course I do.”

“A battle orchestrated by you,” I said.

“In part,” he admitted. “I know how little this means to you, but I wanted no part in it. Pleaded with Father to not go ahead with it, and yet we ended up with a member of our party dead.”

“There is no our,” I said neutrally. “There was the party, and there were the Alzaqs.”

“Knew not of when it would come, nor where,” Orchid said. “I tried to minimize damage.”

“Lot of good that did,” I muttered. I had no investment in the death of the one party member whose name I could no longer recall, but he’d made things more challenging for me and Jasmine, and that was going to be tough to forgive.

“I tried,” he said. “I failed.”

“Whatever,” I replied. “We’re here. Right in the same plaza where your soldiers decided to make our lives a lot more of a hassle.”

The warehouse we’d been designated to go to hadn’t been damaged during the fight, but much of the plaza had been. It’d been nearly a week since the day of the battle, but the plaza was still in the same state it’d been when we’d left it. Scorch marks marked the ground and buildings, the center fountain had been completely demolished, and there were still patches of brown where oathholders had been reduced to explosions of flesh and blood.

I led Orchid along, making our way to the warehouse. It wasn’t an impressive one, but it wasn’t under the control of any noble Houses, which made it perfect territory for a meeting.

The main door was far too large for me to feel comfortable entering through, so I located a metal door on the side. Probably a maintenance path of some kind.

I knocked twice, then looked around us, ensuring that nobody was around to hear me.

“Hi!” I shouted. “Anyone home?”

No response. I stood there for a solid minute, waiting, but I didn’t hear anyone inside.

Orchid opened his mouth to say something, then shut it again at a glance from me.

Had they gone somewhere else? This was the right location, I was sure of it, so—

The door opened, and I recognized Jasmine. Her face lit up as we made eye contact.

“Lily! You came back uninjured this time!”

“Hey, I don’t, uh… fuck, you make a good point.”

Jasmine took a couple of steps forward to close the distance between us and gave me a quick hug.

“Glad you made it back in one piece,” she said. “The others are inside.”

“I have a captive,” I said.

“I saw,” she replied. “Alex and I were speaking of the internal conflicts of House Alzaq. I am pleasantly surprised that Orchid remains living.”

“Hi,” Orchid greeted her.

“Come in,” Jasmine said. “Orchid, you look like you just came from a battlefield.”

“Not far off,” I said. “Shit, it’s like we stepped on an anthill. Half of Dakheng’s commoners came out for war.”

“Come in,” Jasmine replied. “We’ve been discussing the topic. Orchid, you too.”

She addressed him with such ease, like he’d just made a poor clothing decision rather than assist in a plot to kill most of the nobles in the city.

“Thank you,” I said. I was tired enough to not care all that much, and Jasmine was the politics expert. I’d leave my nose out of that, thank you very much. If there was an angle to use Orchid that involved politeness, I could follow Jasmine’s lead just fine.

We walked inside, following Jasmine. The door shut with a resounding clunk behind us, most likely indicating some kind of auto-locking mechanism. Impressive, especially for a civilian warehouse.

Come to think of it, I’d never really interacted with all too many commoners outside of a scant few when I’d lived in Syashan. That had been a village, but this was a town. It felt like they were still fundamentally the same people, so the differences shouldn’t have been that significant, but gods if I wasn’t feeling that the city commoners and the village commoners were two different species. They had access to oath-technology here, even those without oaths, and they didn’t seem to be burbling illiterates like the kids I’d met when I was younger.

I was going to have to take this into account. Despite having technically been a commoner for the greater part of my life, I wasn’t ignorant enough to miss my own biases. I had been underselling the worth of commoners for quite a while now, and while it hadn’t cost me anything just yet, continuing to do it might’ve very well resulted in the end of my life.

The warehouse was pretty impressive as well. Nothing like a noble’s manor, but then it wasn’t supposed to be. It wasn’t a type of building I was famililar with, but it seemed very efficient. Inside, there were shelves upon shelves stacked with cubical boxes, the contents of which I couldn’t identify from a glance. Those shelves were arranged in a grid pattern, straight lines in both directions to presumably maximize efficiency. Although impressive in scale, it was rather lacking in decor, which I had to admit made sense given the fact that nobody was actually supposed to be having a meeting in here.

Jasmine led us through the shelves, guiding us to the back of the whole place. It was mostly a straight walk, but there were a few twists and turns along the way where we slowed enough for me to stop and catch a glimpse of what this commoner warehouse was storing.

Caethus stones… reusable writing boards… oathlights…

There was far more advanced technology than I had thought there would be. It shouldn’t have been such a surprise to me, given that the Tayan Adventurer’s Guild was technically an organization that let commoners in and they had this type of equipment, but there was a disparity between the TAG—where I’d spent most of my times with nobles—and this place, a genuine commoner establishment.

At the back of the warehouse, we found a small meeting room, marked by another door. Beyond it was a cozy room around the size of one of the cubbies at the university library, and inside that lay friends.

Alex, Lukas, and Kyle. It had only been one night, but it felt like I hadn’t seen them in a while. They were standing casually around a meeting table, reading over a map of Dakheng that had had a number of colored lines drawn over it.

“Hey guys,” I said. “I lived.”

“Lily!” Lukas exclaimed. He gave me a little wave.

“You made it,” Kyle said. He was wearing a different clown outfit now. How many damn versions of that thing did he have? I couldn’t say he wasn’t pulling it off, but it was a little disconcerting how large his wardrobe apparently was. “There was more fighting in the streets?”

“A concerning amount,” I grumbled. “I brought someone. Say hi, Orchid.”

“Hello,” the noble in question said, bowing his head. He didn’t say more.

“Hello, Lily,” Alex said belatedly. “Hello, Orchid. I wasn’t expecting you to come of your own free will.”

“It was this or death by a whole bunch of bloodthirsty commoners,” I said. “If you can even call them commoners. They were like soldiers out there.”

“We were just discussing that,” Alex said. “Far too many of them have training beyond their station.”

“Not that there’s anything wrong with them actually having the training,” Lukas said. “But the amount of them is disconcerting. Of the commoners we have seen recently, the proportion of them that seemed to be professionally trained was higher than the proportion amongst even nobles.”

“Would you happen to know anything about that?” Kyle asked, cocking his head and indicating Orchid.

“One moment,” Orchid replied, his voice a bitter whisper.

“Oh, where are my manners,” Jasmine said, running her hands through her hair. “Gimme a second to get Orchid into shape. Orchid, stand still will you?”

“Thank you,” he croaked.

Jasmine laid a hand on his throat and mumbled something. I could see the spell structure form, fast and quick and perfect, though it flickered despite the impeccable construction.

All things considered, Jasmine worked very well for someone with a broken oath. The fact that she still even maintained this level of power spoke bounds about the person she’d been throughout her life. It took dedicated service to a god to keep an oath powerful in any way, shape, or form after breaking their core principles, but Jasmine had managed it with the god of hospitals as her patron. How many lives had she saved before she’d begun to take them?

“Thank you,” Orchid said again, this time at a normal volume. “It won’t last, right?”

“Twelve hours, as per usual,” Jasmine said. “It’ll fully degrade by twenty-four hours from now. We’ll get you a proper healer before then.”

“Assuming you aren’t here to reveal that the next stage of your traitorous plot has unfurled,” Alex said, the tension in his voice betraying his barely restrained anger. “People died last night, Orchid.”

“I know they did,” Orchid said. His face and shirt were still stained where he’d hacked up blood earlier, but his voice was entirely back to that of the confident young noble I’d been partied up with a few days ago.

Well, not quite—that confidence was gone now, largely replaced by an emotion I knew all too well.

Regret.

“Why did you do it, Orchid?” Alex sounded genuinely hurt, now. He wasn’t holding himself back. “You were supposed to be one of the best of us.”

“I didn’t want to,” he said. “My father sought to make a play for the Crown through betrayal, and I could not bring myself to betray him.”

Now if that didn’t sound familiar…

“Your situation sounds an awful lot like that of the children of House Byron’s,” I said, keeping my voice carefully level. “Does it not?”

“The parallel came to mind,” Orchid admitted. “Yet I was incapable of acting as they did.”

As I did. Thorn and Jasper had never had the opportunity to do so. Would they have? Or would their continued survival just ensure that they died a little later while still in service of the traitorous House?

Did I forgive them? Yes. I had for a long while now. Even when I’d been in the process of actively betraying my parents, I had thought of them as unwitting fools who’d been forced into something that drove them to their ultimate demise.

Orchid wasn’t all that much older than Jasper had been when he’d died. If things had gone differently last night, he might’ve met his ignoble end just like Jasper had.

I wanted to think that this was different, but I had to admit the facts. When I looked at Orchid, I saw a tool. One that had been used freely and tossed aside just as easily. I saw the face of what I might have been.

And I couldn’t decide on whether or not to hate him for it.

“Coward,” Alex spat.

“I am,” Orchid replied. “And a traitor, and a liar, and a murderer, and all the other names that you want to call me. I have failed.”

“I can respect a connection to the family,” Kyle said, flipping a—was that a revolver?—into the air and catching it with two fingers. “Sorry if my intrusion is unwelcome.”

“Alex, would you think about things the same way if it was your sister Hazel doing them?” Lukas asked, putting a hand on his boyfriend’s shoulder.

“No, but—“ Alex stopped halfway through his sentence, letting out a frustrated sigh. “I get your point, but I remain angered still.”

“You have every right,” Lukas said. “But I don’t think you should let it cloud your judgment. Especially since Orchid doesn’t seem to want to continue in his father’s steps.”

“I will accept punishment,” Orchid said. “However, I would request for it to be delayed until—until House Alzaq’s push for conflict is summarily ended.”

“You would go against your own House?” Lukas asked, surprised. “After saying you didn’t think you could?”

“I have to,” Orchid said. “Else every last one of them will meet their ends on the executioner’s block.”

“Turning over a new leaf, but not quite, huh?” Kyle asked, a humorless laugh passing through his lips. “Don’t worry. You’re in good company.”

I was pretty sure that he was talking about himself, but the words struck straight into my heart. That was me, wasn’t it? Promising to take a path other than the doomed House Byron’s and yet ending up the same merciless killer I had always been?

Not something that I needed on my mind right now. I returned my attention to the conversation.

“What have you discussed?” Orchid asked. “I may be able to provide assistance and intelligence.”

“There’s a number of plays being made,” Jasmine said. “So far, it’s all posturing. A few Houses have done minor raids on others’ storehouses with no casualties besides property damage. Alliances are being solidified, but the bulk of the conflict may take a while to develop.”

“I wish they would bring back the duels,” Kyle said wistfully. “Those were a much cleaner way to resolve things. Much quicker, too.”

“Why are you here, again?” Orchid asked. “I don’t mean that in an offensive way, apologies. You don’t have a stake in this conflict, do you?”

“I don’t,” Kyle said. “Green had even less of one than me, so I think he went home. For my part, though, I don’t like how the situation with the commoners is going. It feels like they’re far more violent than reasonable people should be, and I know the Dakheng people aren’t particularly more unreasonable than the kingdom norm.”

“He thinks there’s foul play,” Lukas said.

“You talked about the mental compulsion, right?” I asked. “That had something to do with it?”

“We did,” Jasmine said. “And also that we need to take into account the fact that the commoners are not one unified body. They may also have multiple parties in play.”

“I don’t suppose you’d happen to know anything about this,” I said, affixing Orchid with my gaze.

“There is more than one party,” he confirmed. “When my father coordinated with Alto Tempet, he left behind correspondence about his dealings. The groups that he commanded weren’t very trained, and apparently the agreement was to mostly use them as cannon fodder.”

“A far cry from the commoners we saw today,” I said. “They weren’t exactly top-tier fighters, but they were far more coordinated than other groups I saw.”

Seb’s group. I wondered if the guy was still out there somewhere. He had been a smart man. There was no way that he hadn’t survived the night, right?

“Furthermore, House Alzaq has attempted to co-opt a small portion of the commoner groups,” Orchid continued. “This was accomplished with varying degrees of success. I heard nothing of trained commoners that could feasibly turn a fight.”

“There may be an unknown oathholder in play,” Jasmine said. “With the mental compulsion, this is almost a certainty.”

“Father used those,” Orchid said with a frown. “I think.”

“It could be part of House Alzaq that you hadn’t interacted with before,” I suggested.

“It could be many things,” Jasmine said. “Going around in circles gets us nowhere. We must decide our plan of action.”

“There’s too many angles to cover,” Alex replied. “The Tempet conflict, the Alzaq conflict, and also the potential commoners?”

“Then we split our focus,” Jasmine said. “You have the resources to begin discouraging strikes from the Tempets, no?”

“We do,” Lukas said. “I believe.”

“Then have House Varga begin an initial response. I will communicate to my family that they are to cooperate with you in any manner feasible.”

“I’ll try,” Alex grimaced. “No promises.”

“I can come with,” Jasmine said. “Alongside Orchid, who we can discuss the Alzaq situation with more.”

“That leaves two,” I said. “You want me and Kyle to investigate the commoners?”

“Can you?” Jasmine asked. “I would request for Crown investigators to be put on the task, but…”

“The Crown investigators are compromised,” Orchid said. “That was one of the first tasks my father sought to complete.”

“Yeah,” she shrugged. “I apologize, but this is likely the optimal configuration. Orchid needs me to maintain upkeep on the healing, since as we both know, the situation is not the safest.”

It felt wrong to be separated from Jasmine again, but I couldn’t let my feelings take control of me. That way led failure.

“Fine, then,” I said. “Tell me what I have to do.”