The Hero System Glitched And Now It Pays Me to Love My Assassin Wives

"You are going to want to buy something from me," Zelina said. She walked into my study at the hour when decent people sleep and spies send their invoices.

She brought black gloves and the smell of rain and a sealed leather tube under her arm.

She left it on the desk with the care of someone putting down a sleeping animal.

"Good evening to you too."

"Good evenings do not exist in my line of work. Only profitable ones."

She sat down without an invitation and crossed her legs.

"Sealed shipments from the chancellor. Six in three weeks and all of them heading to the northern border off the books. My network tracked them to the Corven pass and they turn into ghosts there."

"And what are they carrying?"

"That costs extra."

"Zelina."

"Your Majesty." She smiled without any warmth. "The rules of my world are three. Everything costs. Nobody gives anything away for free. Anyone who says otherwise is collecting in another currency. You should appreciate them better than anyone. You also make a living appraising things."

She was right and Zelina’s truths always came exactly like that wrapped in a price tag.

I opened the drawer and counted out gold without haggling and pushed it across the desk.

She looked at the coins. Then at me. Something in her face twisted a millimeter.

"You didn’t haggle."

"The information is worth it."

"You don’t know what it is worth. You haven’t seen it."

She collected the gold anyway coin by coin slower than necessary.

"The old Vaelion used to haggle for air itself. Five years of notes on his habits and the man never paid full price."

"And that bothers you?"

"It throws off my accounts." She broke the seal on the tube with her thumbnail. "And I hate unbalanced books."

The papers she unrolled were worth every coin. Forged cargo manifests and customs seals from two noble houses that hadn’t traded with each other in a decade and a dispatch signature I already recognized without the help of Appraiser’s Eye.

"Long crates," Zelina said pointing at the dimensions on the manifests.

"The weight of steel. Enough to arm between four and six hundred men depending on the packing. Heading north where your prophecy hero will wake up any day now."

She tapped the paper with a gloved finger.

"The chancellor is arming something near Roderic Alden. The obvious question is if it is an army for the hero or against someone else."

We worked until four. She connected threads between names and dates and routes with a dizzying speed while I priced every piece with the Eye. Between the two of us Decimus’s map took shape on my desk ugly and coherent.

Watching her work was an education.

Zelina didn’t take notes but memorized everything and corrected my written notes from memory. She pointed out errors in documents she had only read once upside down.

When she doubted a piece of data she marked it with a black-headed pin.

When she confirmed it she used a red one.

The board filled up with red with a consistency that spoke better of her network than any budget could.

"How many years have you been building this?" I asked at one point. "The network."

"Twenty. I started at nine selling kitchen rumors in the slums." She pushed in another pin. "The first year I earned three coins and two beatings. A good balance for that neighborhood."

"What about your brother?"

Zelina’s hand stopped over the map for half a second.

Then she drove the pin exactly where it belonged.

"My brother did the math. I procured things and he counted." Her voice didn’t change temperature and that was the tell. Nothing in Zelina ever stopped changing temperature except the things that hurt. "He was bad at lying and good with numbers. In my line of work that gets you killed. I got him killed."

"The tyrant killed him."

"The tyrant tightened the noose. I put him within reach." She looked straight at me. "Do not correct the bookkeeping of my dead Your Majesty. It is the only thing I keep up to date."

I understood and stayed quiet because a lifetime of mediation teaches you when an accounting book is not open for debate.

We went back to the shipments.

At some point I pushed the water pitcher toward her.

She rejected it out of reflex and then looked at it and smelled it. She poured herself a glass looking like she was betraying a founding principle.

"If it is poisoned," she said, "I respect the elegance."

"It is boring. Just like all my drinks since I met you."

"Compliment accepted." She drank. "Boredom is the luxury of the living."

Near dawn she rolled up the papers and stood up. She stopped at the door with her hand on the doorknob and her back to me. That was a rare thing for a woman who never turned her back on anyone.

"My informant at the Corven pass," she said. "The one who got the manifests. He was supposed to report yesterday and didn’t. It might be the snow."

"But?"

"But I don’t pay him to get stopped by the snow."

She left just like that and the report arrived two days later. It didn’t come by raven but by wagon. It was Zelina’s informant wrapped in canvas with a grayish blue face and black lips from a poison that made the palace doctor turn pale the second he smelled it.

Zelina lifted the canvas herself.

She didn’t let the doctor or the guards or me do it.

That man had died on her payroll and in Zelina’s code which existed even if she swore otherwise you look your own dead in the eye.

She looked at the dead man’s lips for a long time without touching anything. She had a stillness that was far scarier than any scream.

"His name was Petre," she said without anyone asking. "Twelve years in my network and three daughters. The oldest starts as an apprentice to an apothecary this fall because he paid the fee in advance. Men in my line of work pay everything in advance."

She tilted her head studying the color of the dead man’s skin.

"He knew how to run and he knew how to hide. He knew when a job smelled like a grave. This one didn’t smell like that to him. That means whoever killed him was someone you don’t run away from."

"Someone he knew?"

"Someone trustworthy." The word came out with disgust. "People like Petre only lower their guard for two things. Family and routine. His family is three hundred kilometers away."

She crouched next to the body and brought her face close to the black lips without touching them. She took one short professional sniff.

When she stood up she had a different face.

"Lunar aconite with a bitter resin base," she finally said in an inventory voice. "A seven to two ratio. Macerated for forty days."

"Do you recognize it?"

"I should." She pulled the canvas down with two fingers. "The formula is mine."

The courtyard fell silent. The guards looked at their boots. The doctor suddenly found his briefcase very urgent.

"Zelina..."

"I designed that poison three years ago for a single recipient."

She looked at me and I didn’t need Appraiser’s Eye to read the price of what was coming.

"For you. Only one dose exists in the world and it is locked away behind three keys that only I have. And it just killed my own man two hundred kilometers away from those keys."

"Someone copied it."

"Someone copied it and used it on my informant on my route with my chemical signature." She took off her gloves slowly finger by finger. "In my line of work that only goes by one name Your Majesty. It is not an assassination. It is a calling card."