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

"The witness has a condition, Your Majesty, and no one in this room is going to like it."

The crown’s lawyer was a small man who sweated in winter.

In front of him, on the council table, the Marr case grew in folders every day,.

We were two weeks into the reopened trial and two weeks into doors closing.

Three witnesses had withdrawn their statements.

Another two turned up transferred to border garrisons with orders signed before I even asked about them.

The chancellor’s machinery worked without noise, without traces, without haste.

"The army needs quiet, Your Majesty," he told me in the hallway, with his usual courtesy. "I give it quiet. You give it folders. We shall see which weighs more."

"How many witnesses do we have left?" I asked.

"One, Your Majesty."

"A month ago there were nine."

"A month ago Your Majesty hadn’t declared war on the empire’s judicial apparatus," the lawyer said, and wiped his forehead again. "With all due respect."

The respect was unnecessary. The count was what it was.

One witness remained.

The last one who saw the original documents of the Marr Order’s supposed treason before they were sealed.

A retired military scribe, old, sick, with an archival memory and no reason to like me.

And his condition had just arrived in writing.

"He will speak," the lawyer said, wiping his forehead, "if Your Majesty first signs his son’s pardon."

"What did the son do?"

The lawyer swallowed hard.

"He poisoned Your Majesty’s father. The previous emperor eleven years ago."

The council room fell silent.

Lunara, standing by the window, present as a party to the case without asking anyone’s permission, barely turned her head.

The tyrant’s memories served up the full story without me having to ask: the old emperor agonizing for a whole month, the court smelling the succession, a kitchen taster condemned for life in the cliff fortress.

The closed case that founded the tyrant’s reign.

"The witness asks that I pardon my father’s killer," I summarized. "In exchange for the truth about Lunara’s knights."

"Yes, Your Majesty."

"Justice against justice."

I dismissed the council and remained in the empty room with the only person whose opinion carried weight in this.

Lunara didn’t approach.

She spoke from the window, looking out at the training courtyard where her order used to form up.

"Two hundred and thirteen of mine against a confessed poisoner." Her voice came out flat, controlled, guarded. "The calculation is easy, Your Majesty. Even for you."

"The calculation is easy. That’s why I don’t trust it."

"Since when does the tyrant distrust numbers?"

"Since a dying scribe bets his last card on an impossible pardon." I approached the window, stepping beside her, both of us looking at the empty courtyard. "Think about it. The son has been buried alive for eleven years. Why does the father think I would sign his freedom? What does that old man know about my father’s case that makes the unthinkable thinkable?"

Lunara took her time to respond. When she did, the question came out in a lower voice.

"You think the poisoner was innocent?"

"I think this empire has a habit of closing cases with the cheapest culprit. Your order knows that better than anyone."

Her reflection in the glass looked at me. The real Lunara kept looking at the courtyard.

"Eleven years," she said. "Eleven years rotting on the cliff for a bought crime and his father keeping quiet and counting, waiting for the only reign where the card could be played."

"If he was indeed innocent."

"You already believe he’s innocent. I can hear it in the way talk." She turned from the glass toward me, and the distance between us was the same as always but something in the room made it feel shorter. "You used to read people for money, you said. Was that man never wrong?"

"He was wrong one out of ten times and the nine good ones didn’t bring his sleep back over the bad one."

"And with us? With the five of us?" The question slipped out before she could stop it; it showed in how her mouth hardened afterward. "What number did we get in your appraisal, Your Majesty?"

I could have dodged it. Silver Tongue was sleeping, and elegant ways out were plentiful.

"I appraise you every day," I said. "And every day the number comes out different. It’s the first time that’s happened to me with anyone."

Lunara held that for a moment.

Then she turned back toward the window, and in the reflection of the glass, where she thought I couldn’t see her.

"If you sign that pardon," she said, "the court will say the emperor pardons regicides. Every enemy you have will use it. You’ll pay with the only thing you have left, which is the crooked crown on your head."

"Yes."

"And you’re still considering it?"

"I’m still considering it."

"For my dead?"

"For your dead, and because I want to read my father’s file with my own eyes before deciding who killed him."

Before deciding, I made an unannounced visit.

The empty palace chapel, the one without mirrors, the one the tyrant visited in the early hours according to Zelina’s files.

I wanted to see what a monster looked at when no one was in front of him.

The answer was a wall.

Bare stone, an altar without a saint, two pews worn down in the exact same spot. Someone sat there a thousand times, always in the same place, staring at the same blank wall.

I sat where the wear marked the spot. I looked at the wall he looked at.

And at eye level, carved with the point of something small, almost invisible beneath the candle soot, I found a single word scratched into the stone.

’Forgiveness.’

Without an addressee. Without a signature. Scratched and scratched over again, year after year, until it formed a groove.

I left the chapel colder than when I entered, and with the growing suspicion that the monster I inherited had basements that no file was ever going to show me.

That night, the cliff fortress sent me the complete file under four seals.

I read it twice, with the Appraiser’s Eye buzzing over each page, that new skill that showed the true value of things... sometimes.

The file told a clean story. Too clean: a taster with gambling debts, a vial found in his room, a confession in three days, a trial in five.

Eleven years ago, the whole empire needed a quick culprit, and the archive manufactured one for them with the efficiency of a bakery.

Over the poisoner’s signed confession, the Appraiser’s Eye wrote a single word in my vision, blinking in an appraisal language I was starting to understand.

[True value: bought.]

I turned the page. Over the list of witnesses from the old case, the Eye worked line by line.

[Bought. Bought. Transferred. Dead in service. Bought.]

And at the foot of the file, on the signature of the official who closed the case eleven years ago, the skill took its time before spitting out the price.

[True value of the signature: an entire career.]

[The office that paid it is still paying.]

The office. Once again a room instead of a man.

I was beginning to recognize the handwriting of this empire: Decimus didn’t sign crimes. He signed structures, and the structures committed the crimes on their own, year after year, maintenance included.