Inheritance law is one of the most important laws that a civilization can adopt, and it can be difficult to say which method is the best. In the north, possessions must be given from the living to the living. When a man dies, marriage is respected first, but when the spouse also dies, all is handed over to their chief. A good chief returns the property to the children of the deceased, but sometimes surrogate property is given. This lets them collect land for public works like defensive walls, expansions to garrisons, and so on. Of course, it also gives the chief power to assign wealth to those that support him and take it from those that would rebel.

In Aillesterra, a similar system is used among the clans, but they take it so far as to say that only the clans themselves own property. A troublesome comparison to say the least. Closest to Vassermark are the Central Kingdoms, who pass down everything to the eldest son. For many families, the tradition in Vassermark was essentially the same except that it went to the daughter rather than the son.

A family with multiple daughters, thus producing the curious tradition of a poly-spouse household unit, almost always produced a tangled mess of obligations. More often than not, lawyers had to sort through contradicting wills and bills of sale(1) and could only be saved by paying off the children of lesser standing to just take an amount and drop the matter.

The Ashe family faced such a crisis, and the prevailing theory was that Jarnmark would be simply divided between the girls as a lesser and greater. This was a common problem in Vassermark, one the people could understand even if foreigners could not.

The entire kingdom was holding its breath over the eventual death of King Arandall, the man who had inherited the crown for lack of a sister, and then taken a wife from the Central Kingdoms. By tradition, the crown would pass to his daughter, Kassandra, but rumor had it that he would favor his eldest son, Fredrich von Arandall. The reasoning had nothing to do with legal status but because there was no good marriage candidate for Kassandra.

And that was where Austin Feugard entered, the prince of the Kingdom’s Sword, as the Feugard ducal family was known. He had every hallmark of good breeding, a bright future he would surely craft by the sweat of his own brow and the might of his own intellect, and yet the king did not trust him.

I hardly fault King Arandall for such judgment. I often came to the same conclusion. Austin had a sly habit of intruding on one’s privacy. While my pupil was off preparing for the dance, I had taken an excursion to the southern lip of the city. One of my long term projects needed to be fed, and carrion was the best feed. Given the relative peace at the time, my source came from the gallows fields. I was trying to haggle with the guard captain in charge of the duties, who thought it entirely improper to talk such business on a holiday. I countered that day old corpses were just as good. The ground was cool afterall. We weren’t in the heat of summer.

I had just about convinced the man that giving murderers a proper burial was indeed too good for them(1), when Austin arrived. The son of the duke arrived in a small coach and disembarked, accompanied only by a single maid and she wasn’t some form of bodyguard in disguise. She was a demure girl with glasses, who I was familiar with because of her stigmata, which I dubbed [Witness]. It gave her a perfect recollection of events so long as she took the effort to commit them to memory. This made her something akin to Austin’s scribe.

I had to choose my words carefully.

“Master Feugard!” the guard chief said as he dusted himself off and straightened to attention. He was a middle-aged man unfit for combat, but his body still remembered the motions. “What brings you here?”

“Relax, relax. Today is a celebration,” he said, brushing sandy hair out of his eyes as he made to seem like he was looking at the pauper’s field before him. His gaze struggled to stick to me, because I had woven an illusion over my appearance, but the illusion was a weak thing, no stronger than what a stigmata might produce. Austin shoved the mental influence aside and grinned at me. Then he said to the guard, “I wanted to see the grave.”

“Of course. We stuck the sod right over here. You’ll excuse me, won’t you?” The guard’s request was to me, but I wasn’t given time to answer.

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“No need to excuse him. Master Amurabi is a friend,” Austin said as he gestured for the guard to lead on.

Perhaps I should have left at this time, but I knew he would play a role in the future. He would be competition for Lucius if nothing else. “You have a strong recollection, my boy. Last I saw you, you couldn’t even grow hair on your chin.”

Austin took it in good humor, for he kept his chin as clean shaven as a woman. “You left quite the impression, and I’ve heard what role you had to play in the creation of ley cannons. Fascinating design. I wonder how much was your inspiration.”

A tricky question, because the king was traditionally given the credit. “Inspiration comes from many sources, Austin. Might I ask what brings you here today?”

The guard answered, pointing to a recently churned spot of dirt. “Right here it is.”

The grave was unmarked, but Austin did me the courtesy of saying, “They hanged my sister’s killer yesterday. Cynthia, if you would?” His maid handed him a wine skin, which he promptly uncorked and upended over the grave. The fruity scent of wine did not spill forth. Rather the acrid poison of ammonia. “Horse, if you’re wondering. What he deserves, I say.”

I neglected to ask how he had collected a gallon of horse urine, as incredulous a claim as that was. “I’m sorry for your loss,” I said, wondering if I should feign ignorance of the fact. Her death meant there was no proper inheritor for his family but him.

The Feugard boy smiled at me, nodded his head, and turned to the guard. “Thank you. I think I shant occupy more of your time. ‘Tis a holiday, afterall. In fact, as a token of my appreciation…” he gestured to his maid as we began walking back to the entrance. She ran ahead while I was still pondering if I could make use of the situation. When she returned from the carriage, she had an exquisite bottle of wine pressed against her bosom. The yard keeper’s eyes almost fell out of their sockets when she handed it to him. I had no patience for listening to the man fall over himself kissing the nobleman’s ass, and it seemed that it meant nothing to Austin as well.

He had to excuse himself and head back to his carriage, but conspicuously paused with one foot on the step. He turned back and faced me. “Master Amurabi, I almost forgot to ask. Perhaps she’s with you here this holiday… I’d very much like to meet your pupil Ezra once more. If you can, tell her she has an invite to my table.”

The Feugard boy smiled as he studied me, and the fact that I did not smile back seemed to only deepen his glee. I told him, “Next I see her, I’ll pass that along.”

The boy bowed slightly and vanished into his carriage along with his maid. He left the guard chief in such a jubilant mood that I was able to collect my materials with ease, but I was distracted during my work.

To this very day, I wonder if Austin Feugard had foreseen the way the war in the central kingdoms would play out. If he had some insider knowledge of forces at play. Perhaps he simply deduced what was happening through his own intellect.

What the historical record can prove is that he sold his family’s share of grain orders at a modest profit shortly after the battle of Rackvidd. He acted while lesser mercantile actors still floundered. Thus, he extricated himself from the legal mire that grew to provoke the conflict between Lucius and Rodrick.

In fact, he pawned it off on a defunct, debt-ridden family no larger than the Solharts whom had betrayed the Feugards several generations back. For the crime of an ancestor failing to show up to war against Skaldheim, Lady Rivi discovered she had to sue Jeameux for damages when the summer-harvest grain meant for her granaries was seized by the forsaken paladin.

To make matters even worse, the church coffers were closed to Jean, with no explanation given. The bishop was effectively left destitute and with no recourse but to cling to the vulgar force of Lucius’ army. Unable to compensate the Rivi family, Jean had no grounds upon which to stop Lucius from restoring the stolen goods to their rightful owner and enforcing justice.

The Rivi family was thus nothing more than a pawn in the game. The legal proceedings were utterly mundane and hardly worth commenting upon even in a historical text like this. There was no true conflict there, because the coming war was desired by everyone.

Regardless, I felt the need to include this encounter because I found it most strikingly unusual. In retrospect it foreshadowed much, but at the time I could only make a few guesses. I was, after all, quite certain that he had been the one to kill his sister. The poor sod who had taken the fall was merely tying up a loose end.

I should like to note that the purchasing of corpses, while frowned upon, is a more common practice than anyone cares to admit. While perhaps five people in the world were blessed with a stigmata able to graft cadavers to the living, the study of the dead still holds great intellectual value to surgeons, apothecaries, and so on. Less scrupulously, hangmen typically have methods of harvesting such things as silver teeth from the dead. This is why I’ve never made much fuss about collecting materials from a city of any size enough to have vagabonds. As a rule of thumb, if the government had to bury them, nobody cares about them.