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

"I’ve brought you your way out, Majesty. Read it before you spit on me."

Decimus Vanthel set the folded document on my study table the next morning and sat down without being invited, which had been his way of saying good morning for twenty years.

I read it.

Voluntary abdication, in writing. Exile in any province I chose, inside the empire or beyond it. A lifetime allowance from the imperial house.

All five kept their titles, their lands, their own guard. The anathema charges went into the archive. The south got a general amnesty and not one more shipment.

In exchange: a public renunciation, read out by me, handing the empire to Roderic Alden by the will of the man who no longer deserved to hold it.

I ran the Appraiser’s Eye over the document out of professional habit.

[True value: the paper is honest.]

[Every clause will be honored.]

[I’m sorry, HERO.]

Thirteen years pricing settlements taught me to recognize the exact moment the other side stops fighting and starts offering well. That moment is the dangerous one. That’s when people sign.

"You want me alive," I said.

"I want you irrelevant. It lasts longer." Decimus folded his hands. "An emperor dead today leaves me five popular widows and a province full of steel. I learned that in your Council. You taught me."

"And the boy?"

"The boy needs a throne, not a corpse. I’m buying him a clean one."

"With my signature."

"With your signature." He stood. "You play at redeeming yourself with five women, Vaelion. I keep five million people alive. Tell me again which of us is the monster."

He stopped at the door for exactly long enough.

"It was never cruelty. It’s stagecraft, and I’m offering you the only third act where nobody buries anybody."

I went to them one at a time. I didn’t want a table, because at a table the loudest one wins, and not one of the five deserved to lose that way.

Zelina read the document twice and went hunting for the trap with a pencil in her hand.

"There isn’t one," she said at last, and she sounded insulted. "Sign it."

"No charge for the advice?"

"I’ll charge you in whatever province you pick." She put the pencil down. "Pick one with a port. I hate the countryside."

Lunara read it standing up, the way orders get read.

"I swore you my sword," she said. "I swore it so it would be worth something."

"You swore to serve me."

"I swore you wouldn’t die inside somebody else’s script." She handed the document back with both hands, the formal way, the way that hurt. "Survive. Even far from here. I’ll carry whatever they say about me after."

Calista heard the whole offer sitting on the bench in the kitchen garden, no habit, hair loose for the first time since they brought her here.

"I already spent my miracles," she said. "I don’t have one left to ask anybody to lift you off the floor."

"I’m not asking you for one."

"Good, because I was going to say no." She stood and put her hand on my arm for a full second. "Go. Live ugly and old and far away. It’s the only thing I can bless without lying."

Saoirse received me in the borrowed hall the Towers had left her, no tower, no constructs, a chalk circle half drawn on the floor.

"Probability you survive if you stay: between eleven and nineteen percent," she said. "The range is wide because I can’t measure you."

"And if I accept?"

"Eighty six." She crossed something out in her notebook. "Accept."

"Saoirse."

"I wasn’t finished." She looked up, and for once she wrote nothing down. "If you go, my only interesting problem goes with you. Go anyway. I’ll find another one."

It came out as an insult. In her language it was the closest she had ever come to saying stay.

Miralys answered from the south by crow, four words, in the handwriting of somebody who doesn’t write much.

I already gave you my answer.

Underneath, smaller, added later:

Live, idiot.

I went back to the study that night with the document and didn’t open it.

A good settlement is a good settlement. This one was. Nobody died, all five were left standing, the south got to breathe, and the only man paying was the one who had been wearing a borrowed body for three months.

Thirteen years teaching people to sign deals like this, and only now did I understand why my clients used to sit there staring at the pen.

Signing closes the case. Staying open is the only thing that lets you keep asking questions.

The blue window lit up on its own.

[System query.]

[Can I ask you for something?]

"You can."

[Accept it.]

[Please.]

I looked at those two lines until the candle burned down a finger.

My broken System had paid me for smiling, for cooking, for forgiving, for keeping my mouth shut. It had charged me for every refusal. It had said thank you.

In three months it had never once asked me for anything.

"Why."

[Because if you stay, the thing that has to happen will happen.]

[I’ve spent seven years trying to keep it from happening.]

[Integrity: 30%. No change.]

I sent word to the Chancellery that they would have my answer at dawn.

Then I unhooked my belt, left the ceremonial sword on the table beside the unsigned document, and walked out of the study with empty hands for the second time since I woke up in this body.

The first time was in my own bedchamber, three months ago, in front of a woman who came to keep her vows.

The guest wing was dark. The guard at the door was Lunara’s and asked nothing.

I knocked twice.

Roderic Alden opened it in his shirt, awake, a book in one hand, not a single weapon in the room.

He looked at my empty hands before he looked at my face.

"I knew you’d come tonight," he said. "Come in. There’s something I have to show you, and I’ve had nobody to show it to for seven years."