Published at 24th of February 2024 10:32 am

Chapter 47

This chapter is updated by JustRead.pl

The good news was that nobody was hurt. The bad news was that I recognized two of the people standing outside the cell as Collectors. It wasn’t much of a stretch to connect the night we all disappeared with the theft of all the mana from their storage room. Even if they didn’t think we were involved in it, they’d likely want to know as much as they could about what went on that night.

But in all likelihood, they did suspect us. I’d put those Garrison villagers to sleep as well when they’d come to take us to Noctra’s manor, just like the Collectors who’d been in my way. Now that I thought about it, I was pretty sure one of the Garrison members standing there was part of the trio I’d hexed.

“You’ve brought trouble down on the village before,” one of the Collectors said. “Why should we believe it’s any different this time?”

“I was a child who made a mistake,” Father said hotly. “And why are you putting my daughter in a cell with me if you think I’m the one who caused this whole mess?”

“Shut up,” the Garrison man snapped irritably, giving Father and the Collector a glare. “Lord Noctra will sort this out as soon as he wakes up. I’ve already told Tsurai to go let him know we caught you skulking around out in the fields. Until he gets here, all of you, be quiet. I’m sick of hearing you all bicker.”

I recognized that man, Karad. He was the one who’d shown up looking for Father after that incident with the school teacher. He’d been a lot more polite back then. Now he looked harried and exhausted, not unlike Noctra himself. I wondered if he’d been in on the whole scheme and was even now expecting some sort of retaliation from the cabal that had secretly controlled our entire village.

I needed to get ahead of this somehow. Tsurai was presumably going to be finding Noctra’s body soon, if he hadn’t already. Father was likely to be blamed for the murder, all things considered. These people had already made up their minds that my family was guilty of something. They were just waiting for someone else to decide exactly what.

Was there a way to handle this without revealing myself? I could probably do it if I established a telepathic link with Father and just used magic while he acted as if he was doing it. I was more than practiced enough to cast even advanced spells without needing a focusing chant or any sort of ritual gestures, and I doubted there was anyone sensitive enough to mana to detect me if I was actively trying to hide my spell usage.

On the other hand, the amount of mana that would take was a lot more than I was prepared to spend. Even if I was willing, I would have at most two minutes of conversation before I was completely tapped out. Spreading it out to give simple instructions without allowing for Father to reply might give me enough mana for thirty commands, but if I cast a single spell with each instruction, it was going to be less than half that.

The other option was to come out into the open. I could probably convince people I wasn’t insane. Magic has a tendency to impress those who didn’t know much about it, even cheap, flashy, low strength spells. But I’d already seen how hard it was for people to connect the idea that I wasn’t a normal child with the concept that they should listen to me. Adults had a hard time taking orders from toddlers, even if they knew in their heads that the toddler wasn’t actually a toddler.

My real issue was that I just didn’t believe it was worth exposing myself to danger by revealing my existence. I’d left plenty of enemies behind as Keiran, maybe not nearly as many as I’d buried, but even a single one finding me in my weakened state would be enough to end things. It had already been a risk to tell my parents, and I still wasn’t convinced giving Senica a memory wipe was a bad idea. I didn’t think she’d spread the knowledge maliciously, but anyone who’d ever had kids knew exactly how bad they were at keeping secrets. It took a special breed to keep their mouths shut, ones who’d grown up having no one but themselves to depend on and who’d learned the hard way not to give an advantage away.

Senica hadn’t had that kind of childhood, thankfully.

I could break my family out of the cell and evacuate them back out of town. We’d need to steal enough food to survive for a few weeks at minimum and find a place I could fortify into something we could live in, but it was theoretically possible. Somehow, I doubted my parents would go for it. Their goal was to get everything back to normal. They’d only gone along with getting rid of Noctra because he was preventing that from happening.

I retreated from the town to make sure no one in any of the fields spotted me, then spent the next hour periodically scrying on the beacon Father had carried. It was in a pile with the rest of the supplies we’d had left upon returning home now. The spell didn’t require the beacon to be held by anyone in order to function, so that wasn’t a problem unless they decided to move it somewhere more than fifty feet or so from Father. At that point, I wouldn’t be able to manipulate the scry to keep an eye on them.

Eventually, Tsurai burst into the Garrison yelling for Karad. “Boss! Boss! You’re not going to believe this.” Everyone froze and peered at the man, who was breathing hard and looking around. As soon as he spotted Karad sitting at a table near the cell, he rushed over. “Lord Noctra’s dead.”

Karad shot to his feet. “What?”

“I waited an hour, but when he didn’t come out I started knocking on doors. He didn’t answer, but I remembered the latch doesn’t work right on that door near the atrium, so I poked my head in and found him dead in his study. It looks like someone stabbed him in the eye with a knife.”

“Spirits protect us,” Karad muttered. He gave my parents a suspicious glance, but they were just as wide-eyed as everyone else. “This mess just keeps getting more and more complicated. Go get everyone who’s not already on-duty and bring them here. You’ve got ten minutes before we set out.”

“You got it, boss,” Tsurai said before running off.

Karad turned to face the cell and stomped up to it. “How are you involved in this?” he demanded.

Father glanced over at Mother, then replied, “You’ve been sitting next to us most of the night. How are we supposed to have done anything?”

“Maybe we caught you on your way back out,” Karad said. “You got in to do the deed, then bungled the escape.”

“Let me get this straight. You think that my wife and I snuck into Lord Noctra’s manor with our six-year-old, murdered him in his sleep, and then got caught as we were leaving? Where do you think we were going in this scenario?”

“I don’t know. Why don’t you tell me?”

“Would it make a difference?” Father asked. “You don’t believe me anyway.”

“Because your story is that Lord Noctra, who’s lived here for fifteen years, suddenly decided that you were magically gifted, and that he was going to sell you off to some associates of his back in Derro. But you somehow managed to escape, your family came looking for you, and you all survived for a week out in the monster-infested wastelands. And you just coincidentally happened to get back in town the same night the man who supposedly wronged you died.”

“You can’t have it both ways Karad. If you think I’m lying about Noctra’s actions toward me, then what would be my motivation for trying to kill him?”

“Oh, I know you went to see him. It was two of mine who took you up there. What I don’t know is what happened while you were there. Did you want something and he refused to give it to you? Did you swear your revenge on him, then flee with your trouble-making wife just long enough for him to let down his guard? Maybe you lost your boy out in the wastes? Nobody seems to know where he is. Iskara disappeared a few days ago, too. You have anything to do with that?”

“I already told you what he did,” Father said. “Both to me personally and to the village as a whole. Come on, you know what that barrier looked like when we were young. Haven’t seen that in a while, right? So what’s all the tithing been for?”

“Lord Noctra told us it wouldn’t look the same after he fixed it,” Karad said. “I remember being gathered up in the town square when he made the announcement. You were standing not five feet away, over by Remat’s parents’ place, all by yourself because no one wanted anything to do with you after you got Teno killed.”

“He lied to us. He’s been lying to all of us for years.”

Karad laughed at Father and said, “So that’s it? That’s your whole argument? Lord Noctra’s a liar and we should all believe you instead? Do you think they’ll exile you or just kill you now and save you the walk into some monster’s belly?”

I’d expected some amount of pushback to the idea that Noctra hadn’t been the man he’d portrayed himself as, but this behavior went far beyond that. Either I’d seriously underestimated Noctra’s influence with the Garrison, or something else was going on here. Noctra had already outright subjugated Nermet. It was possible he’d used mental manipulation to make everyone in the Garrison view him far more favorably than was reasonable.

It was also possible Karad was in on it. I couldn’t see a good reason Karad would need to know, but just generally keeping the captain of the village guard on his side was a smart move for Noctra. If that was the case, it was likely that the Collectors would have an equally strong reaction. And I’d already assumed the Barrier Wardens had to know that the barrier was fake and were somehow okay with it.

With so many of the villagers who were in a position of authority already compromised, convincing everyone else that Noctra was a bad person might be even more challenging than I’d initially assumed. If I needed to dispel some mental compulsions on better than thirty people, I was going to need more mana. Maybe I could be more strategic than that and just target the ones at the very top. Noctra probably spent more time and effort on them anyway.

This was all just speculation. I had no proof that anyone other than Nermet was under any sort of compulsion. Father was not well-loved in the village and a respected man who’d been protecting the villagers—at least as far as they knew—for fifteen years had been very obviously murdered with what was extremely suspicious timing. If it had been safe to leave my family out in the wastelands for even one more night, I’d have done it just to avoid linking them to Noctra’s death.

The proof to exonerate my family was back in the manor, but someone with some magical expertise was going to be needed to explain to the Garrison members what they were looking at. I tried to think if there was anyone like that in the village, and immediately came up with the one person who was respected, knew about mana manipulation, and had absolutely no reason to lie to protect Father.

It looked like I was going to go to school after all.

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