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

The first thing Roderic Alden did upon entering the Council room was apologize for the mud on his boots.

"I come from the road Your Honors. They told me there was no time to change and I believed them." A short and truly embarrassed smile. "Now I understand that they lied to me."

Sixteen signatories laughed.

Sixteen signatories who had spent three hours tearing each other apart over a regency laughed all at once and genuinely like they had not laughed in the entire session.

Right there I understood the size of the problem.

Roderic Alden was twenty four years old with farmer’s shoulders and a plain face that improved every time he spoke.

No aura and no bearing. A tall guy who moved around apologizing for taking up space and two minutes later the whole room was oriented toward him without even noticing.

"Your Majesty." He crossed the room and stopped at the correct distance and the bow he made was exact to the degree. "It is an honor. Forgive the state in which I arrive."

"The honor is shared. Welcome to the capital."

"Thank you." He lowered his voice just for me. "And thank you for the Orden Marr matter. Word reached the north. A man in my village lost a cousin in those executions and he wept reading the exoneration."

He said it without calculation. Without looking for witnesses.

The worst part of all was that it was true because I had the Tongue dormant and it still showed.

Zelina on the balcony did not even blink. Neither did Miralys. Lunara moved her hand toward her hilt and returned it to her side.

And the court the entire court already loved him.

The next three days were a lesson in why Decimus Vanthel had been winning for twenty years.

Roderic did not make a single false step.

He visited the orphans’ wing and carried water for two hours without anyone watching him and then he asked for it not to be told and of course it was told.

He refused to stay in the noble wing. He slept in the barracks with the guard and ate from the mess and learned the names of sixty men in two days.

He publicly rejected the duke title that three houses offered him.

"I have not done anything yet," he said. "Ask me when I have done it."

Within a week the empire had someone to look at who was not me.

"He is good," Zelina said on the third night in my study throwing her folder on the table with more force than necessary. "That is the complete report. Six informants and three days and the only thing I bring back is that the man is good."

"Nothing?"

"Nothing. He pays his bills. He does not drink. He rejected two countesses with a diplomat’s tact." She dropped into the chair. "I bought the ugliest complaint the stable boy had about him. Do you know what he sold me? That Alden feeds his horse before himself and that messes up the stable schedule."

"Nobody is like that."

"Nobody I have met in twenty years of this trade." Zelina rubbed her eyes. "And look Vaelion there is what keeps me awake. A man raised for twenty years by Decimus Vanthel to be loved by an empire is exactly this perfect. The question is whether he knows he was raised."

Lunara evaluated him differently.

I found her in the gallery watching the training courtyard from above where Roderic had been giving free lessons to the new recruits for an hour.

"He is better than me," she said.

"Lunara..."

"Take it as a report and not as humility." She crossed her arms over the railing. "Look at his back foot when he corrects the high guard. You do not learn that weight with teachers. You learn that weight by fighting for real and this boy has never fought for real because the north has been at peace for twenty years."

"Then what?"

"Then someone placed twenty years of war he never lived right on top of him." She turned toward me. "And there is something worse. He fights like you."

"I fight awfully."

"You fight awfully because your head goes against your body." She looked at me with that battlefield attention that forgave nothing. "Your body when you leave it alone moves exactly like that. Same back foot. Same elbow height. I have seen it a hundred times in the courtyard Vaelion and it chills me to see it in another man."

On the fourth day Roderic requested an audience.

Alone. Without an escort and without the chancellor and with the exact same muddy boots.

"Your Majesty I will be brief." He remained standing. "The court wants an exhibition duel between us. Friendly they say. There are already bets in three taverns."

"I know."

"I come to tell you that I am going to refuse." He looked up. "If I fight you in front of the city whoever wins half the empire is going to read a message that neither of us wrote. And I have been here for four days. I do not have the right to write messages to anyone."

There it was again.

The right move made by the right man for the right reason.

"May I ask you something Alden?"

"Roderic please."

"What did they tell you that you were coming here to do?"

And for the first time in four days Roderic hesitated.

It was half a second. Less.

"That the prophecy fulfills itself when the time comes," he said. "That I just have to be where I must be and be the man I am." He ran a hand over the back of his neck. "It is a shitty answer isn’t it? I have spent five years not understanding it."

"Who gave it to you?"

"My teachers." He shrugged. "I never met the one who paid them."

When he left I stared at the closed door until a servant knocked to take away the tray.

Then I called upon the Map of Debts.

I should have done it on the first day. I didn’t do it and that delay had a name I did not like. I had not wanted to look closely at the man who was coming to kill me.

The world filled with threads.

The servant in the hallway with two gray threads toward his landlady and one toward his brother. The guards at the door with tangles of favors and bets. Zelina three floors below with her thin and recent thread that still pointed toward me and that I still hadn’t read.

The entire empire was a loom of debts.

I caught sight of Roderic in the courtyard from the balcony while he was crossing toward the barracks greeting four recruits by name.

And right there in the middle of a city made of threads I found what I had spent a week fearing without knowing I feared it.

Roderic Alden did not have any.

Not a single one not gray nor thin nor old. Nothing entered that man and nothing came out.

His mother was alive and collecting a twenty year pension his teachers raised him an entire empire counted on him and that man crossed the courtyard clean and whole and untied from the world.

No human being lives like that.

I leaned on the balcony railing and tested the Map against my own hand just in case it was broken.

It worked.

Three thick threads came out of my chest and one of them to my absolute surprise went straight toward the courtyard where Roderic Alden had just laughed with a sixteen year old recruit.