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

Five days until the Council.

I woke up staring at the ceiling with the calculation already running: sixteen signatories, eight likely against me, the Church with a signed anathema, a manufactured hero on his way to the capital.

And a conclusion I had spent two nights refusing to face.

With everything I had on the table, the game was lost.

So I did the only thing I hadn’t done since I woke up in this body.

I canceled my entire schedule.

Zelina was having breakfast alone in the greenhouse, with her gloves on and three open reports.

"I am hungry," I said, and I sat down.

"You have bags under your eyes." She pushed the tray toward me without looking up. "The eggs with southern pepper are mine. The rest is from the palace kitchens."

I took her plate.

Zelina looked up.

"My taster is on leave," I said, and ate.

They were good. Very good, with something toasted and acidic underneath that I couldn’t name, slum food made by someone who learned to cook for people who had nothing else.

Zelina didn’t say a word for four bites.

"I could kill you with this," she said at last. "With my bare hands, in your own greenhouse, and you would be dead before dessert."

"Yes."

"And you eat it anyway."

"It is good." I reached for the bread. "What do you put in it?"

She looked at me with her gloves on and the three reports forgotten on the table.

"Apple cider vinegar," she said. "And don’t ever ask that again in front of witnesses."

Lunara found me in the gallery mid-morning, with a worn out deck of cards I had requested from the kitchens.

"What is this?"

"A day off. Sit down."

"There are five days until..."

"Five days. I know. Sit down."

She sat down, sitting very straight, and placed her hands on the table. Then on her lap. Then on the table again.

We played four rounds.

I lost all four.

In the fifth one I saw her entire maneuver: two fingers, the card under her left sleeve, a movement so practiced it predated her code, predated her order, probably predated the sword.

Lunara Marr, incapable of lying to a judge with her life on the line, cheated at cards out of a campsite habit.

I didn’t say anything.

I poured wine, asked for a card and lost the fifth one too.

"You saw it," Lunara said during the seventh.

"Saw what."

"Vaelion."

"You are winning seven to zero. That is all I saw."

She leaned back in her chair, with her hair down because there were no servants around to look at her, and she lowered her shoulders for the first time in five years.

"My captains let me win for years," she said. "I knew it. They knew that I knew it. It was the only time of the month when nobody was my commander."

"Eight to zero, then."

"Eight to zero." She shuffled the cards herself. "And keep your mouth shut about this until the day you die."

"Deal."

Calista was sunbathing in the cloister of the orphans’ wing, wrapped in a blanket, with the white streak cutting through her pink hair.

She was recovering eleven days of her life that were never coming back, sitting in the sun, with a convalescent’s patience.

I sat on the step, next to her.

"I need a favor," she said. "The canons are coming tomorrow to inventory my things. Teach me a swear word I don’t know."

"You? You have the repertoire of a stevedore."

"I have a northern repertoire. I want foreign material." She smiled with her eyes closed to the sun. "Something they can’t report because they don’t understand it."

I taught her three from my other life.

The second one pulled a short and dirty laugh out of her, the kind that scares the pigeons.

"Repeat it."

I repeated it. She practiced it twice, with an impossible accent, and on the third try it came out with an intonation so perfectly venomous that I had to look away.

"What does it mean exactly?"

"That their family tree was grown in a stable with poor ventilation."

"It is beautiful." She leaned back against the warm wall. "Vaelion."

"Tell me."

"When this ends and they leave me without a roof... will you let me cook in the orphans’ wing?" She opened one eye. "Without a title. Without blessing anything. Just a woman with a ladle."

"I will let you have the whole kitchen."

"Good." She closed her eye. "Then I already have a plan for later. I haven’t had one since I was fifteen."

Saoirse’s tower was buzzing mid-afternoon.

I found the youngest of my wives arguing with a new construct, recently assembled, standing completely still in the center of the chalk circle and without a name on its chest.

"It won’t start," she said, without a greeting. "Correct matrix, correct runes, three inspections. It won’t start."

"Is it missing something?"

"It is missing the universe working the way it is written." She knocked on the brass with her knuckle. "This is number fourteen. The other thirteen started on the first try."

"Did the other thirteen have a name before they started?"

Saoirse went very still.

"I name them later," she said. "Naming them beforehand would be... "

"Unscientific?"

"Sentimental."

I looked at the nameless construct.

"Cardo," I said.

"Excuse me?"

"Its name is Cardo. Look at the rivets on its shoulder, they are bent outward. It is going to snag on every curtain in this tower and it is going to be unbearable."

Saoirse looked at me, then at the construct, then at me again.

Then she wrote CARDO on the brass chest in her tiny and perfect handwriting.

The construct lifted its head and gave her a clumsy bow.

She didn’t say anything for quite a while.

"Write down the hypothesis," I said.

"Written down." Her voice sounded strange. "With two witnesses, this time."

I looked for Miralys at the end of the day, when the sun was already setting over the archery yard.

I brought with me the glass vial she had given me weeks ago in a dark hallway, with its black seed inside and its label written in the southern alphabet.

"I am coming to ask you another day," I said.

Miralys lowered her bow.

She crossed the yard, took the vial, turned it between her fingers and reread her own label.

"It is a walnut seed," she said. "From my mother’s yard. The tree burned down with the house."

"And the label?"

"The label is the name of the person on whose grave I intended to plant it."

I held her gaze.

"Read it to me."

Miralys read it to me.

"Vaelion Ironveil."

The archery yard went very quiet.

"I kept forty-one vials over five years," she said, with that voice of hers that was rarely used and therefore never wore out. "One for every tree that burned. None of them planted. The dead do not let you plant."

"And this one?"

"This one I gave to you."

She pulled the cork out.

"Now it is your turn to decide where it goes, husband. I already decided the hard part."

We dug with our bare hands, next to the south wall, where the morning sun reaches first.

She placed the seed. I covered it.

Neither of us spoke. We stayed right there, shoulder to shoulder, with dirty hands, in front of a little bit of moved dirt that was not going to be a tree until long after all this was over.

"I have forty vials left," Miralys said at last.

"We can do it slowly."

"Yes." She stood up, wiped her hands on her dress and looked down at me, with her silver hair loose and a face I had not seen on her in five years. "We can."

That night I waited for the ding.

Five scenes, five investments, not a single one calculated. The System had material for a month’s worth of multipliers.

It didn’t chime even once all day.

At midnight, the blue window lit up on its own, without a quest, without an evaluation, without a reward.

[Integrity: 32%. No changes.]

[...thank you for today.]