Published at 24th of February 2024 10:33 am

Chapter 74

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I sat in my home-turned-prison and watched another ‘secret’ meeting between the four adults who ran the town in my scrying mirror. Shel made no effort to hide why she was leaving the arbor any time they had one, and after my argument with Karad earlier, I’d expected an emergency session to be called.

“He was torturing them?” Melmir asked, his face trying to convey far more disgust than he actually felt. If there was anything I’d learned about the head of the Collectors over the last month, it was that he was the kind of kid who’d pulled the legs off of spiders just to watch them struggle. It was a good thing for the world he’d never amount to anything more than a petty tyrant making a handful of people miserable in a backwater village no one had ever heard of.

“I didn’t catch the first one, but from what my men described, yes. He had some kind of spell that didn’t do anything but cause pain that he used repeatedly to force them to answer questions,” Karad said.

“And you just stood there and let him,” Solidaire pointed out. “Some might say that makes you every bit as culpable.”

“What did you want me to do, club him over the head and drag him out of there? That child is too dangerous. If I’d attacked him, I’d have had to kill him.”

“That would get you exiled or executed,” Shel said. “Dangerous he might be, but he’s also undeniably useful. We’re trying to punish him for the whole Noctra thing, but the fact of the matter is he was right. He was right about the mana, he was right about the debtors, he was right about the barrier. Gravin is always right. And, for now, he’s still willing to help us.”

“I threatened him with exile today,” Karad admitted. “He didn’t seem to care. Gravin truly thinks he’d survive just fine out in the wastelands. Maybe he would.”

“You know what your problem is, Karad?” Melmir asked.

“I’m sure you’re about to tell me,” the Garrison leader muttered.

Melmir talked right over him. “It’s that you can’t decide if he’s a child or an adult. You keep trying to treat him like a kid, but then something happens and you need a mage to sort it out, well then he’s an adult. But only for a few hours until you don’t need him anymore. Then it’s back to pretending he’s a normal boy. You can’t have it both ways.”

Well, that was a surprising bit of insight from an unlikely source. My respect for Melmir rose just a notch. I still didn’t like the guy and wouldn’t trust him with any real measure of power, but he’d apparently been paying enough attention from the sidelines that he’d called Karad’s issue perfectly.

“So which is he then?” Karad asked.

“He behaves like an adult. He thinks like an adult. If that outlandish story of his is true, he’s older than the entire village combined. So treat him like an adult. He’s supposed to be under house arrest, but he comes and goes as he pleases. Stop letting him. That soft spot in your heart you’ve got for him because he helped out your nephew? Grow some callouses over it and start treating him like the criminal he is.”

That was not the direction I wanted the conversation to go, but I couldn’t really have expected any better considering the source. It looked like my time in Alkerist might soon be up, and if so, I needed to take care of a few things before I left.

“And what do we do the first time we try to tell him he can’t do something and he refuses to cooperate?” Solidaire asked. “It seems like every day he shows us some new magic that we have no defense against. He could be watching this meeting right now, just sitting there laughing at the thought that we have any control over him. Or worse, maybe he sees us as threats and we’re about to go the same way Noctra did.”

He was half right. I wasn’t going to kill any of them, but at the same time, I wasn’t going to let them run my life. I had my own goals to achieve, and while I had invested some time and mana into the village, it wasn’t anything I wasn’t willing to walk away from. Having a relatively secure place to sleep and ready source of food and water was convenient, but nothing I couldn’t manage myself.

I’d really thought I’d have more time to consolidate my power before I left. The Wolf Pack’s quick reaction to my assassination of their assets in the village had completely screwed up my timeline. I wasn’t ready, but I could make do, and it sounded like it might be time. Things had escalated far too quickly, perhaps in part because I’d misjudged just how threatened they all were by me. If I tried to dig in and hold a place here, it would end in bloodshed and my family would likely end up paying part of the price.

“The way I see it, we’ve got two options. We either let Gravin run wild, doing whatever he wants, and hope the spirits protect us, or we treat him like anyone else. He’s not above the rules, despite what he seems to think,” Melmir said. “He doesn’t just get to decide he’s going to ignore being placed under house arrest, not that that was an appropriate punishment for committing murder. He should have brought us proof so we could act on it instead of taking it into his own hands.”

“And if he doesn’t agree?” Shel asked, cutting Melmir’s rambling.

“The same as anyone else, obviously. Exile or execution.”

“You want to kill a child? What is he, four? How do you think the village will react to that?”

“I don’t see where we have a choice,” Melmir said. “Either we get control of him, or he’s won.”

“We could try working with him instead,” Shel said dryly. “He’s actually pretty reasonable about requests.”

“That’s the same as letting him do whatever he wants,” Solidaire said.

“So, what, it’s about your egos? You need to know that you can crush him with the weight of your laws, and just as important, he needs to know it? It’s no wonder none of you can get along with him.”

“Shel,” Karad said. “He tortured two men today. No one told him to do it. No one authorized it. He didn’t even bother to inform us that he was going to do it. You can’t do stuff like that on a whim. And it’s not the first time he’s gone off to do whatever he wanted. He’s not supposed to leave that house. That was the whole reason we put him out-of-the-way. I’ve been letting it slide, and that was a mistake.

“He looks like a child, but he’s not. You didn’t see him fighting that other mage. He didn’t even flinch when bursts of fire were exploding in his face. He’s not new to violence, and he’s not afraid to murder someone. Knowing he killed Lord Noctra was one thing. Even watching him ambush that mage in the cave was disturbing for all it looked like an accident, but he killed that last mage without hesitation. He’s a man trapped in a child’s body who is far too comfortable with removing problems using lethal force. I am afraid of what’s going to happen to this village when he decides we’ve become a problem to be handled.”

The meeting went around in circles for another hour. Shel tried to defend me, but it was painfully obvious that she was more interested in what I could do as an asset for the village—and herself, since she was still working on igniting her core—than she was in my personal wellbeing. That didn’t offend me, but it did mean that I would only have her support for as long as I was useful. Melmir and Solidaire were against letting me stay, though Solidaire was surprisingly bloodthirsty about it. His proposal was that they kill me in my sleep once I’d shown Shel how to ignite more cores.

Karad and Melmir advocated for exile, the former as a softer solution to the problem and the latter because he was too afraid of retribution if they tried to kill me and failed. To be fair, he was right. I was willing to work with the village council, but the second they moved against me or my family, I’d slay them without hesitation.

The thought that I might object just as lethally to being exiled as I would to attempted assassination apparently hadn’t entered Melmir’s mind. In all fairness, I was planning on just leaving after I finished my preparations and made my final threats, so in a way, he was right.

After ensuring the village council had no plans to move before the morning, I let the thin thread of mana I’d been running into my mirror’s inscriptions snap. I had a lot of work to do tonight, and not a lot of time to do it. By this time tomorrow, I would be gone. Ensuring my family’s safety after I left was my top priority.

To that end, I had some modifications to make before morning. The mirror needed two beacons added to it, and I planned to strengthen the durability enchantments on it. It would be the core of my family’s defense, after all. I couldn’t have it being shattered by someone like Karad or Solidaire. Since completing these tasks before anyone thought to try to stop me would make everything easier, it was going to be a long night.

***

I arrived at my family’s hut about two hours before dawn. It had been trivial to slip out of my own prison without alerting the now-three Garrison guards sitting outside of it simply by walking through the back wall. Carrying my mirror with me through the arbor had been more of a challenge, mostly because it was almost as tall as I was and twice as wide.

Nobody was awake when I arrived, which suited my purposes just fine. I pushed the curtain aside, cast a light spell that had just enough mana to give dim illumination to the interior of my parents’ hut, and took a seat at the table. The mirror itself was left leaned up against a wall.

My family lived in a hovel, no better or worse than the dozens of other hovels that surrounded them. Things could be so much better with access to better resources and knowledge, even here in the middle of a desert with no mana. But the leaders of Alkerist had made it quite clear that they valued control over progress, so the current state was how things would stay.

Father sat up in bed and blinked up at the light I’d hung in the air. “Gravin, what are you doing here?” he asked in a bleary voice. “How early is it?”

“Earlier than you’d like to get up, or later than I’d like to stay up, depending on how you want to look at it,” I told him. “I need to teach you how to use this mirror I made, and I don’t have a lot of time to do it. Some things have happened and I’ll need to leave the village for a while, so this is the only way we’ll have to communicate.”

“What?” Father asked, all traces of sleepiness gone from him.

That woke Mother, which was fine. Senica’s snores continued uninterrupted from her tiny pallet off behind my parents. I’d wanted to talk to them first anyway. My sister didn’t need to know all the details, like that a quarter of the council wanted to murder me in my sleep and another half was willing to settle for just exiling me.

“Come here, let me show you how to make this mirror work,” I said. “I’ll explain everything while you practice.”

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