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

"The steel the north bought is sitting in the south."

Miralys Fae walked into the map room two hours after the Towers emptied Saoirse’s tower, bow still across her back, eight sheets of shipping manifest in her hand.

I still had chalk dust on one sleeve. Zelina came in behind her without having slept either, carrying the recovery order she had not given back.

"Before we start," Zelina said, "that paper from last night was signed the day before. Whoever signed it reads our mail."

"I know."

"Then read this one with that in mind." She dropped the manifests on the table. "Same building. Probably the same desk."

For three weeks Miralys had given me four words a day. Today she brought numbers.

"Zelina followed those shipments as far as Corven pass."

"Zelina followed them as far as the chancellor wanted her to." Miralys spread the first sheet across the long table. "Look at the freight weight. Twelve thousand tons. Corven is a mountain pass."

"And?"

"And that weight doesn’t cross Corven in summer, never mind winter. It gets moved onto the water before."

She set her finger on the map where the north road touches the river, then dragged it down.

She dragged it down for a long while, all the way to the bottom edge of the parchment, where the empire stops calling itself the empire and starts calling itself the province I burned.

"You’re late," Miralys said, without looking up.

"I’m late with the river customs register." Zelina pulled a roll of paper out of her sleeve lining. "And for the first time in my life I’m not charging you for it."

"Why."

"Because I already collected. I emptied the strongbox of the man who signed it."

The river toll intendant arrived at noon under escort, with the face of a man pulled out of bed without an explanation.

I sat him across from the map table and offered him nothing.

"Nine transfers in four months," I said. "All at night, all under the northern seal, all bound south."

"Majesty, I stamp what passes. The route is signed in another office."

"I know which office. I want to know what they paid you not to read it."

I opened the Debt Map and looked at him.

Forty one threads came out of his chest. The thickest one ran upward, toward the west wing of the palace, woven in that dirty gold the Map saves for favors nobody ever pays back.

"You have a daughter at the college in Vell," I said. "Tuition paid through year thirteen. Your salary covers year two."

The intendant stopped looking at me.

"I can ruin you before dessert," I said. "Or you tell me who signed the transfer order and you walk out with your daughter still in class."

He took four seconds. I counted them.

"Chancellery," he said. "Personal seal. Not the office one."

Zelina slid the recovery order across the table without a word. Same seal, pressed the day before Saoirse ever set foot in that courtyard.

"Thank you. Go do your shaking somewhere else."

When the door closed, Miralys still had her eyes on the map, on the point where the river bends.

"Twelve thousand tons of steel," I said. "How many men does that arm in your country?"

"Four thousand. Five, if they’re mine."

"And how many does it take for a rising the empire can call a rising?"

"Eight hundred."

She sat down for the first time since she came in.

"He’s arming them so they’ll rise," I said.

"He’s arming them so they’ll lose." Miralys laid her open palm over the south, covering all of it. "A hero who just woke up needs a monster. The empire’s monsters are always the same people."

There was the whole play, curtain up.

The south rises with gifted steel. Roderic Alden marches, wins, pardons the survivors in a crowded square, and the empire crowns its savior over the ashes of the same province twice in five years.

The first time I burned them myself.

The second time Decimus was going to use them to light the boy’s torch.

"I can close the river," I said. "I can seize the last three shipments with the imperial guard and put them in front of the Council."

"Then the chancellor says the emperor disarmed the south so the south couldn’t defend itself against him." Miralys shook her head once. "He said it five years ago. It worked."

"Then I need someone to reach your people before that steel gets into their hands."

She looked up.

We both knew what that sentence was asking for. Asking Miralys Fae to hold back her own people was asking her to stand beside the hand that burned them, in front of the dead she had been carrying around in jars for five years.

An emperor would have asked anyway. So would a mediator, with better manners.

I closed the folder.

"Forget that," I said. "That was my play, not your duty."

I pushed the eight sheets across to her. On top of them went Zelina’s customs register, the names of the three barge captains, the list of southern garrisons with their real numbers. Last, the blank imperial safe conduct that had been sitting signed in my drawer for three days.

"That’s everything I know. I kept nothing back."

"Why are you giving it to me?"

"Because you’ve always fought your war for somebody else. For your father, then for me, now for him." I pushed the safe conduct one finger closer. "You decide. It’s your war."

Miralys looked at the papers without touching them.

"If I use this to arm the south instead of calming it, you lose the empire."

"Yes."

"If I use it to calm them, my people will know it was me who took their weapons away."

"Also yes."

"And which do you want?"

"I want the next time somebody decides the fate of your land at a table," I said, "you’re the one sitting at it."

She gathered the papers one by one and left without saying where she was going.

I found her at dusk in the small courtyard, the one with the broken fountain, kneeling in the dirt with her glove off.

Beside her, open on the ground, a glass jar. The label read Fae, east wall, third year, in handwriting that no longer existed in any imperial register.

She dug with two fingers. She dropped in a seed and closed the dirt over it.

"Don’t ask me if it’ll grow," she said, without turning around.

"I wasn’t going to."

"You were asking with your face."

She stood, wiped her hand on her thigh, picked up the empty jar. She turned it over once, then set it on the rim of the fountain upside down, the way you set down a thing that has finished its job.

"Five years carrying eighty jars," she said. "I never planted one, because planting means choosing where. I didn’t get to choose anything."

"And today?"

"Today somebody handed me the maps." She looked at me straight on, close enough that the courtyard got small. "Nobody has ever given me anything without telling me what it was for."

[DING]

[Investment detected.]

[Concept: you gave her back her war.]

[Valuation: SSS x1000]

[Warning: payout outside permitted range.]

[Integrity: 32% ▼▼ 30%]

[HERO, below thirty I can’t guarantee]

[...]

[Sentence incomplete. Sorry. It got away from me.]

I shut the window before Miralys could see my face.

"I’m going south," she said.

"With which of the two answers?"

"With mine." She pulled the bow off the fountain and slung it across her back. "Give me ten days. Don’t follow me."

"Miralys."

She stopped under the courtyard arch, half turned, one hand on the stone.

"If my people rise anyway, I ride with them," she said. "And that day you’ll have to decide whether you’re an emperor or a husband, because they won’t let you be both."