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

The Church’s letter arrived sealed with white wax and good intentions.

Calista read it standing up in the orphans’ wing with her hands bandaged and a child clinging to her skirt.

I read it later. She handed it to me without saying a word and Calista has comments for everything even for the bread.

The bishopric summoned the Saint to publicly certify the sainthood of Emperor Vaelion Ironveil.

A three day deadline.

"It is a trap," I said.

"It is a beautiful trap."

Calista detached the child from her skirt with a caress and sent him to play.

"If I certify they will make the court understand that the Church blesses your reign. I lose the only thing I have which is a clean word. A saint who certifies tyrants on demand is never believed by anyone ever again."

"And if you refuse?"

"They retire me."

She said it just like someone says it is raining.

"A spiritual retreat at the motherhouse. A very pretty garden in the mountains with no visitors and no mail."

"How long do those retreats last?"

"It depends. Sister Vennia went into retreat nine years ago." She smoothed the paper on the table. "Her letters stopped arriving after four months. The motherhouse explained that she had embraced silence."

The orphans’ wing smelled of broth and cheap soap.

Forty three children counted by her every morning and half of them inherited from the purges of the tyrant whose body I was walking in.

"I am going to block it," I said. "The bishopric depends on imperial tax exemptions. I can delay three years of paperwork in a single afternoon."

"No."

"Calista..."

"I said no." She turned to me and all the sweetness was still there intact with a bit of steel underneath. "If you protect me the whole empire will see the Saint protected by the monster. You will confirm the story they want to tell and you will turn me into your ornament."

"I prefer a living ornament over a disappeared saint."

"I know. All the men who have saved me preferred that." She tilted her head and those golden eyes inspected me without any rush. "Do not save me Vaelion. The men who save me always collect their due later. It is the part that never fails."

"And what if this one does not collect?"

"Then he will be the first." She smiled. "And I have gone twenty three years without meeting the first of anything."

She took the letter and left me there among the cots with forty three children making noise and an answer I had not managed to give.

I went back that night.

Not out of strategy. I went back because the orphans’ wing was the only place in the palace where nobody appraised me and because the afternoon conversation had left a stone in the shoe of my thoughts.

The door to the healing room was slightly open.

Inside alone with the bandages from her hands undone on the table and a bowl of reddened water Calista Bloom was talking to herself.

What she was saying was not a prayer.

"...sons of a one eyed goat and a tax collector," she recited pressing her knuckles, "may your fingers rot from counting tithes and may hell charge you interest..."

I stood perfectly still in the hallway.

"...with the exact same bishop who sold me at fifteen the exact same one and on top of that he gives me a three day deadline like he is doing me a favor you perfumed bastard I hope you choke on your own incense..."

Her voice was raspy. She had spent hours praying in public and cursing in private and her throat was paying for both.

Her hands were split open. Raw flesh. The hands of a healer who cures others and cannot cure herself without spending days of her own life in the trade.

I could have gone inside.

I could have said something understanding the kind of things people say and she would have gone back to her character in half a second and thanked me sweetly and I would have forever lost the only honest version of Calista this empire allowed.

So I left.

I went down to the kitchens and woke up a cook and asked for the only thing I could think of and went back up.

I left the jar of honey on the windowsill of the healing room on the outside where she would find it in the morning without knowing who it was from.

Thyme honey. For the throat.

I went to sleep without telling anyone.

[...]

[Investment tracking: negative.]

[No registered action.]

[Integrity: 33% ▲ 34%]

[...accounting error. Reviewing.]

[...error persists.]

I looked at the blue window in the dark hallway.

Nothing. No evaluation and no multiplier and not a single line of that broken syntax of its. My System had not seen it.

A jar of honey on a windowsill did not seem like an investment to it even by mistake.

And right there in an empty corridor at two in the morning a man who had spent a month manufacturing goodness with a calculated return discovered that he had just done the first good thing of his life in this world that was worth absolutely nothing.

I laughed alone. Quietly. Like an idiot.

Then I went to bed and slept for six straight hours which was something that had not happened to me since the night of the knives.

The next day Calista walked into my study unannounced.

She carried the honey jar in her newly bandaged hands and a color on her face I had not seen in the orphans’ wing or at dinner or anywhere else.

"The cook on duty has very cheap loyalty," she said.

"I paid him in bread."

"Right." She left the jar on my desk half empty. "How much did you hear?"

"The part about the perfumed bishop."

Calista closed her eyes.

"And the part about the one eyed goat?"

"That too."

"Good. That was the good one." She opened her eyes and looked straight at me without a saintly smile and without picture perfect sweetness. "Do you know how many people in twenty three years have heard that and not looked at me differently the next day?"

"How many?"

"You." She leaned on the desk close much closer than consorts lean on imperial desks. "And you did not say anything. Not a joke. Not a lesson. Just... honey."

"Your throat was destroyed."

"Yes."

"And your hands were worse."

"You did not mention that." She looked down at her bandages. "Not even to ask me to take care of myself. Everyone asks me to take care of myself. It sounds like charity and tastes like an order."

The study was silent. Outside the courtyard was starting to fill up.

"I came to tell you my decision," Calista said. "Before you hear it from someone else."

"Say it."

"I am not going to certify you." She raised her chin. "I am going to refuse in public in the basilica in front of the entire city. They will retire me to the motherhouse. And from that garden in the mountains my silence is going to weigh more on the bishopric than anything I could scream here."

"That is martyrdom."

"It is the only weapon they left me Vaelion."

And right there with her destroyed hands and her raspy voice and the honey jar between the two of us Calista smiled at me with all the sweetness of the pulpit.

"So I am asking you for something since you seem good at listening today. When they take me away... do not come for me."