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

"Show me your right hand, Bren."

The training yard at six in the morning was raked sand, twelve practice posts, and a sixty one year old man already sweating before the sun came up.

Bren Olvar lowered the wooden sword and showed me his hand.

Three fingertips were shiny and printless. New skin. Steam skin.

Lunara stood on my left, three paces back, where you stand when you haven’t decided yet which side of the yard you’re on.

"How many?" I asked.

"Twenty six." He didn’t ask what I was talking about. That was already an answer.

"I sent thirty."

"Four I never opened." He drove the sword into the sand. "They came on Mondays I was ill. I put them away and later they weren’t there."

"Weren’t where?"

"In my chest. Locked." He looked up. "I’ve spent four months not knowing who else gets into my room, Majesty, and I told nobody, because a man who steals stolen letters has nowhere to report it."

Zelina, under the yard arch, stopped pretending to look elsewhere.

"How long have you been sending copies?" I asked.

"Since the year the south burned."

Lunara took a step. I raised two fingers and she stayed where she was, and that cost me more than everything else.

"Explain."

"The man who burned the south took no advice. I asked for audience fourteen times and was refused fourteen times." He leaned on the post. "So I started sending copies to the people who could stop him."

"To the Towers."

"The Towers first. The Chancellery after, once it was clear who actually ran things."

"Did it work?"

"Twice." He counted on his fingers, the way he counted levies. "The ninth year he was going to raise nine thousand men on the eastern border. The Towers cut his credit before the first banner went up. Those nine thousand are alive."

"And the other?"

"The twelfth. He was going to burn the port at Halden over a tax. A report reached him saying the port was eighty percent his own property." He wiped his mouth. "I wrote that report using figures from his own accounts."

"And the twentieth year?"

There he looked down.

"That one I sent late."

Lunara spoke for the first time, and her voice came out the way a voice comes out after twenty years of obeying a man.

"Master."

"Girl."

"Don’t call me that today."

Bren Olvar nodded slowly.

"This week’s letters I handed over Monday afternoon," he said. "All three. Including the one to the river garrison."

I’d had the Debt Map open since I walked into the yard.

Nineteen threads came out of Bren Olvar’s chest and not one ran toward the west wing. All of them pointed down. Toward the guardhouse. Toward the barracks. Toward the troop kitchen.

One ran to a widow’s house in the low quarter, thick and old, from a funeral paid nine years ago.

Another to a sixteen year old at the forge in the second courtyard, placed there by him last winter.

Not one thread of dirty gold. Not one.

The old man had never once collected.

"What did they pay you?"

"Nothing."

"Bren."

"Nothing, Majesty. That’s the problem." He pulled the sword out of the sand and offered it to me hilt first, which is how a master of arms surrenders. "A bought traitor can be bought back. I can’t."

Lunara Marr drew.

Not toward him. Toward the sand in front of her own boots, and she left it standing there with both hands on the pommel.

"Twenty years," she said. "You taught me the oath of the sword."

"And you kept it better than I did."

"You taught me a sword that serves two houses serves neither."

"Yes."

"So?"

"So I taught you well and applied it badly." Bren looked at the post beside him, the same one where she’d broken four wooden swords at eleven. "You serve. I’m done."

"The year the south burned I was eighteen," Lunara said. "I asked you what you do when the lord you swore to is wrong."

"I remember."

"You said you tell him to his face. And if he won’t hear it, louder."

"Yes."

"You never said you write to somebody else."

Bren took his time, and when he answered he didn’t raise his voice.

"Because they were going to listen to you, girl. Not to me."

I took the wooden sword out of his hand and threw it on the pile.

"I’m not hanging you," I said.

"You should hang me."

"I should, yes." I turned toward the yard arch. "You’re going to write letter twenty seven this afternoon. I dictate."

"They’ve been reading my hand at the Chancellery for twelve years. They’ll know if I lie."

"You won’t lie. You’ll report what happened yesterday." I counted on my fingers. "That the emperor ordered the river crossing closed Tuesday at dawn with two companies. That the order went out signed last night. And that the master of arms considers it a mistake."

Bren lifted his head.

"That order doesn’t exist."

"It will this afternoon, dated last night, and I’ll sign it in front of you so you can swear you saw it." I stepped closer. "Everything you tell the Chancellery is true. It just arrives two days early about a river I don’t care about."

The old man closed his eyes a moment and opened them with the arithmetic already done, because a sixty one year old master of arms calculates distances faster than an appraiser.

"Moving twelve thousand tons forty eight hours early means barges at night," he said. "And at night only one landing stays open."

"The one below Corven."

"Eleven men guarding it."

"Eleven men." I put a hand on his shoulder, which in twenty years I’d also never done. "She’s coming with six hundred."

"Majesty, if this goes wrong, people die over a letter I wrote."

"If it goes right, they die too." I let go. "But fewer, and in the place we picked."

Lunara pulled her sword out of the sand and sheathed it without cleaning it, which in twenty years I had never seen her do.

"I’ll carry the letter," she said.

"You don’t have to carry it yourself."

"Yes I do." She didn’t look at me when she said it. "If he writes a false letter and somebody has to die for it, I’d rather it be me than somebody else."