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

The Regency Council was convened at nine the next morning with sixteen signatures and a speed that is not improvised.

"He had it drafted," Zelina said reading the summons on my desk. "Look at the margins. This document has been waiting weeks for an excuse."

"What exactly is a Regency Council?"

"The mechanism by which this empire gets rid of emperors without calling it a coup." She turned the page. "It is convened when the throne is incapacitated by madness or minority or divine curse. An anathema fits into the third one with offensive convenience."

"And what does it do?"

"It votes. If the majority considers the incapacity proven it names a regent." She looked up. "You keep the title and the palace and the pretty clothes. The regent keeps the empire."

"Nine days."

"Nine days." She rolled up the document. "I am going to need my entire budget and twice your patience."

What followed were four nights without sleeping well.

Zelina set up the operation from my study because hers had three walls with neighbors and mine had a tower above it with Saoirse measuring mana twenty four hours a day.

Black headed pins for the doubtful things. Red ones for the confirmed.

Sixteen signatories of the Council. Sixteen lives to take apart.

"This one votes with Decimus out of fear," she said pinning a needle. "This one out of debt. This one out of conviction which is the worst of the three because it cannot be bought."

"And this one?"

"This one votes for whoever wins. Our only guaranteed alliance as long as we win."

On the third day the strange thread appeared.

Zelina found it in a place where nobody looks for conspiracies. The chancellor’s personal accounting. The domestic kind that is filed for tax purposes and nobody ever audits because it contains nothing.

It contained something.

"Eighty four annual payments," she said. "Small identical and sustained amounts. They come out of Decimus Vanthel’s private fortune and not the imperial treasury. They have been going out for twenty years without a single delay."

"To whom?"

Zelina placed the list on the table and turned it toward me.

Eighty four women’s names.

I recognized the third one. I had read it two weeks ago in the registry of families who went up to the gallery of honor to see the clean banners.

"They are widows," I said.

"They are the widows of the Orden Marr." Zelina leaned on the desk with both hands. "The two hundred and thirteen executions left one hundred and ninety families without a pension because an order condemned for treason loses its rights. The empire cut off everything on the exact same day."

"And Decimus..."

"He pays them. Out of his own pocket. Since the month following the executions." She tapped the list. "The man who signed the transfer of the file that condemned them has spent twenty years supporting the widows he manufactured."

The study fell silent.

I had built an entire model of Decimus Vanthel. A cold administrator and a monster with a cause and a man who buys peace with other people’s lives. The model worked. It explained every single one of his moves since day one.

And it did not explain this.

"Guilt?" I asked.

"Men with guilt confess sooner or later. This one has spent twenty years paying in secret without a receipt and without glory and without ever stopping signing new files." Zelina rubbed her eyes. "I hate this list."

"Why?"

"Because I spent four days building the portrait of an efficient monster and everything fits perfectly except for eighty four payments." She looked at the list with genuine professional resentment. "People who do not fit ruin my sleep. I already have one of those open cases and he sleeps two floors up."

"Do we tell Lunara?"

Zelina took a moment to answer.

"Eighty four widows from her order supported for twenty years by the man who made them widows." She ran a hand over her face. "I do not know what that does to a woman with a code. And I do not like not knowing."

"I will tell her. Today."

"Why today?"

"Because I am already keeping a secret in this house and it is not sitting well with me."

I said it without thinking and regretted it before finishing the sentence. Zelina snapped her head up.

"What secret?"

"The day I can tell it I will tell it."

She held my gaze for exactly three seconds. Then she went back to the map and drove a black pin with more force than necessary.

I told Lunara at noon in the courtyard with the list in hand.

She read it standing up. Name by name.

"The one from Vell," she said touching the seventh one. "Her husband carried my banner."

Then she folded the list and handed it back to me and stared at the training post without hitting it.

"I do not know what to do with this," she finally said.

"Neither do I."

"Good." She picked up her staff. "Then we are going to hit things until we think of something."

It was three in the morning.

We had been at the board for fourteen straight hours. At some point during the last four she had stopped working on the other side of the desk to work on this side sitting shoulder to shoulder without either of us mentioning it.

"Zelina."

"Mmm."

"Four days. Your entire network. Three burned informants." I put down the quill. "And you have not sent me a bill even once."

Zelina’s hand stopped over the map.

"I am keeping track."

"That is not true. I saw you cross out the last page the day before yesterday."

"I am keeping track," she repeated and her voice came out half a tone lower, "somewhere else."

She turned toward me.

Very close because we had been working very close for hours and up until that second neither of us had calculated exactly how much.

"I am going to do something," she said. "And then I am going to explain to you why it means nothing."

"Zelina..."

She kissed me.

Without preamble and without permission. She did it with the exact same resolve she used to drive red pins with one hand on my neck and the other still resting on the map of the sixteen signatories.

It lasted exactly as long as she decided it would.

When she pulled away her breathing was unsteady and she had the face of someone who just found an addition error.

"Good," she said. "Fee collected."

"Excuse me?"

"Four days of work. Three informants. I just paid myself." She picked up her gloves from the table with hands that were not fully working. "It is settled. You owe me nothing and I owe you nothing and tomorrow we continue with the sixteen."

"That payment does not cover even half of your fees."

"I know." She was already at the door. "That is why I chose it."

And she left.

I was left alone with eighty four names and sixteen pins and a list that refused to fit together. I also had the uncomfortable certainty of having been appraised and bought and paid for in a single move by a woman running away from her own ledger.

I went back to the payments at five in the morning because work is all you have left when the rest cannot be thought about yet.

Eighty four annual payments. Ordered by start date.

The first eighty three started in the same month which was the one following the executions of the Orden Marr twenty years ago.

The eighty fourth payment was different.

It was started eight months before all the others. Before the executions. Before the trial. Even before the arrest of the knights.

It did not go to the capital or to any of the widows.

It went to a village on the northern border.

I pulled the lamp closer and read the beneficiary’s name twice because I did not believe it the first time.

Mary Alden.

Mother of Roderic Alden.

The chancellor had spent twenty years paying a pension to the mother of the hero of the prophecy.