Theo’s opinions were—to borrow a word from the Champion Saint’s journals—shit.

  “Back home, there’d be lectures all the time on the importance of proper combat training,” the noble boy insisted. “To hear you babble about your father’s lessons being a nuisance is baffling.”

  Their latest debate—at least what passed for ‘a debate’ between them—bordered on nonsensical, but neither boy wanted to be the one to lose.

  “Babble?” Alaric raised an eyebrow. “It’s just the truth. I know for a fact that the average city-dweller doesn’t really lose sleep over their combat prowess. That’s the domain of guards, warriors, and maybe adventurers. And I’m not any of those things, nor do I want to be.”

  “It’s a show of weakness,” Theo shook his head. “Everyone needs to know how to handle themselves in a fight. Assuming you can just go and avoid ever being involved in one, as an excuse to never learn, is just a sign of a na?ve outlook on life.”

  Alaric squinted. “How much physical combat training do you have?”

  At that, the boy he’d grown to consider a friend—solely because neither of them really had many other people to talk to—rolled his eyes. “I’ve little need for such things, honestly,” Theo raised his hands, and a stream of water danced between them. “The divide between mortals and us with potential is just too wide, no offense.”

  Alaric didn’t even bother standing up, simply raising a fist. He stopped just short of actually hitting Theo’s face, and his friend screamed.

  Theo fell back, stumbling off his chair. “Hey!”

  “Sorry. I couldn’t see you over the divide between us mortals and your mighty self.”

  “Wave take you!”

  He laughed, a bit too shameless. “We’re coming at it from different perspectives, I guess. For me, it’s normal for my father to have this type of attitude, but I also know this isn’t how normal people work, not really.”

  “Only in isolated places like these,” Theo shook his head as he stood and made an effort to pat all that imaginary dust off his clothes—he’d been on the floor for mere seconds at most. “I suppose we do see it differently because of that. But for one, I wouldn’t want my butler to be some servile weakling who couldn’t defend me if it came to that.”

  “If that’s how you see it, then I don’t think we’re even on the same page here,” Alaric scowled. He’d grown familiar enough with how the noble boy operated to know this was around the time when he’d start divagating in an effort to change the topic.

  “Are we not, now?”

  “No,” Alaric disagreed. He wisely chose to pretend his own family didn’t also have a butler in their employ—he was in no position to call Theo spoiled, but he also wouldn’t expect that random old woman he rarely saw to pick up arms in the event of a crisis. That wasn’t what a butler was for. “But by your own admission, combat can take many forms, no? You clearly think splashing around will make a difference.”

  “That isn’t ‘splashing around’, Alaric,” Theo hissed out. “Misconstruing my arguments isn’t a valid debate tactic!”

  “People used to fight wars out in the open, but a true war has not befallen us in generations,” Alaric quoted his governess as he watched Theo finally sit back down, for all he thought she was wrong about that. Zayden’s journals had made it quite clear he considered his clashes with both the fell and an unnamed Prince to be ‘all-out war’.

  It struck Alaric then that exposure to such texts was a likely reason for how little he cared about Theo seemingly being a high noble. And that was without even getting into his upbringing.

  When you knew your father had fought a Prince—an Executor—and lived, it was hard to treat something as small as a noble like a big deal.

  “Your point being?” Theo narrowed his eyes.

  “I won’t pretend I know what it’s like to be a noble, having to worry about schemes and inheritances, and whatever else it is you people do,” Alaric started. His conversation partner never confirmed or denied his assumptions, and today was no different. “What little I know from what my stepmother’s let slip is that no one just does things in your face. So I find it odd that you have such a strong opinion on how people can’t just choose to not be fighters, when people like you should be more worried about being stabbed in the back than being challenged in combat.”

  Theo went quiet after that.

  I win.

  “Do you know why your father feel the need to teach his children to fight, if you don’t share whichever views he has?” Theo asked, breaking Alaric away from his internal celebrations.

  Alaric considered this. “Beryl understood, I think. My sister, the one we can’t seem to find,” he’d mentioned her before, but it didn’t hurt to clarify, not when the boy was prone to being absentminded. “She was always the most… adventurous of us. Anselm would have been a smaller version of Father if he could have had it his way, but our mother thought his interest in alchemy should be nurtured. I don’t think Father ever necessarily agreed, but she was the one in charge. Or so I’m told, on both counts—I was but a month old when Mother died.”

  Theo winced. “My apologies—I didn’t intend to bring up something sensible.”

  “It isn’t sensible, not really. At most I mourn not getting to know her, but I can’t grieve the woman herself. Anyhow—as I was saying, my father has his views about what people should be like, and he jumped at the chance to have someone to teach. He was like that with us both, Kristoffer and I. Bernie did put a stop to it eventually,” Alaric couldn’t help but snicker at the nickname his stepmother had earned out of his little niece. “He was part of a Hero’s party, as was Mother. So I wouldn’t expect either of them to have the same outlook as most people, and I never really felt the need to judge anyone who does or thinks differently.”

  “A Hero’s party, you say?” Theo raised an eyebrow. “You’ve got my interest now.”

  “Really, just now? I could have sworn I’d mentioned this before, in any case,” Alaric blinked, shaking his head. “It isn’t something people bring up at all times, but it also isn’t a secret. They were part of the Champion Saint’s party.”

  This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it

  Theo bristled. “The Champion Saint?”

  “Yes. Why, have you heard of him?”

  “That person is… I wouldn’t say reviled, but disliked by the Foremost. Perhaps by her circle as well—I honestly don’t know that much.”

  Alaric stared at the boy, earning himself an odd look in return.

  “What?”

  “Theo, whatever the prerequisite knowledge to understand that statement is, I don’t have it,” Alaric admitted. “I suspect whatever you mean by Foremost and circle comes from a specific context—so I have no idea what you just said.”

  That got a Devilsdamned grin out of the noble boy, who cracked his knuckles as if he were about to perform one of his flashier tricks with mana.

  “Ah, finally. Something you don’t know enough about to argue with me on it,” Theo said, as if that didn’t make him look even worse than when he’d been refusing to concede the point long past the expectations of rationality.

  “At least one of us knows when to admit we don’t know something.”

  “Oh, shut up,” Theo scoffed. “You know what Saints are, right? Right?”

  “Obviously.”

  “Good, good. I just had to check, and if you hadn’t known, you would have just admitted it,” he winked. “Think of it like how Champions can have parties attached to them—Saints have people around them, if less officially so. They have crafters who make the objects their summoned Heroes need, Forgers for their Skills, and younger Saints seeking the guidance of older ones. Communities form from that—circles. And the liaison between them and the Crown is the most prominent of Saints—the Foremost.”

  Theo had practically recited that—no doubt something he’d learned from one of his lectures, despite his constant complaints about them.

  …I guess we aren’t that different. Alaric realized, much to his horror.

  “And you’ve seen this before?”

  “Aye,” the Nurtraz woman nodded. “Never with a Grēd?cavan child, though. I’d thought you people weren’t prone to it.”

  Kristian had never quite questioned how Bernadette’s butler had found this woman and hired her, before. He’d noticed the foreigner, certainly, but she was just one nameless figure among their numerous staff, as far as he’d been concerned.

  “Back home, it wasn’t uncommon, if it is what I think it is,” Ingebj?rn had been telling another member of the staff when Kristian overheard her. After chasing the butler down to inquire about the maid’s name—he was perfectly capable of being tactful when he could simply to appeal to someone he needed something from—he’d sat the woman down and told her that which he had not told his own children.

  Ingebj?rn had insisted on seeing Benedikt for herself, anyway. She was nothing but a maid, and a mortal one at that, yet the confidence with which she spoke was enough for Kristian to take her seriously.

  “Mana fluctuates by location, at least that’s what the village matron once told me. I never had a passion for childrearing myself, you see,” the foreign maid explained. “Time passes, and generation by generation, the people adapt, especially if the environment isn’t a hospitable one. But certain isolated places never quite got to be steeped with mana until relatively recently, and the people there weren’t made for it. You of all people would know there’s a reason why the system changes otherworlders, when they’re summoned. A body from those worlds of theirs would never endure a stroll around these parts.”

  Kristian nodded.

  “Those people, here, are long gone. But they had descendants. So every now and then, you’ll have bad luck. You’ll get a child who simply can’t handle it. It’s a fact of life for us Nurtraz, that our ancestry carries with it the risk of a foregone conclusion.”

  “An ancestry neither my wife nor I share with your people,” Kristian countered. The truth was, all his life, he had heard the cause of high mortality rates among the Nurtraz was their frankly uncivilized way of life. They had a more communal culture that snubbed the natural progression of how people flocked to cultivators who could maintain order, and rarely produced powerful individuals as a result. They weren’t particularly knowledgeable or skilled.

  Granted, Kristian couldn’t recall a single other instance in his life in which he’d so much as spoken to a Nurtraz. None before Ingebj?rn.

  “You never know with that kind of thing,” the foreign woman shrugged, nonchalant as always. “It just happens—I know it’s cold, but it’s a fact. As I said, I’d never heard of a Grēd?cavan child drawing the short stick like this.”

  Kristian’s eyes narrowed. To this day, they’d kept Benedikt in the warded room usually reserved for a newborn’s first year—their one and only attempt at bringing him out had his youngest breaking out in hives.

  They had understandably refused to make a second attempt, but that had done little to prevent the boy’s condition from worsening. Though the effects were less pronounced here, his skin still cracked at the gentlest of touches, and sores still formed where his body met the blankets.

  Bernadette rarely visited her youngest son anymore—she could not bear to see the child she thought she’d hurt when trying to wrap him into a hug.

  “And will it improve, once he gets older?” the would-be patriarch of House Rīsan asked his employee, his tone even.

  Ingebj?rn gave him a strange look. “Sir, I don’t think you understand,” she seemed to hesitate for once, licking her lips as if to stall while slowly considering her next words. “He isn’t going to grow up.”

  “What do you mean?”

  A part of Kristian knew, but he asked anyway. The weight of the foreigner’s claim had yet to settle, and all he could think of was how she couldn’t possibly mean what he knew she meant.

  “This,” Ingebj?rn motioned to the lines on the wall, the symbols that marked the edges of this chamber Katrina had so long ago commissioned for their children. The materials had been of her own making, for all she’d overpaid an enchanter into handling the finite details. “This might help, for a while. A short while. But you’re trading valuable moments away, time the boy could be spending with your family, for however long he has.”

  “As we’ve discussed, bringing him out safely has proven impossible—and this chamber wasn’t built with many visitors in mind.”

  The Nurtraz woman exhaled. “I am not… in a position to be telling you what to do. Not with your children, at any rate. What I can tell you is what we would do, back home. Children are no less valuable just because they won’t outlive us. They are still something to be cherished, and even if we mourn the fact that they may never get to have lives of their own, never truly become their own people, the sooner we accept that, the sooner we can learn to love them as they are.”

  She reached out, laying a hand upon his shoulder. He did not push her away, in no small part because his mind had yet to parse her words. “Loss hurts. Before my sister was born, I was overjoyed. I told myself all about how much fun we would have, and what a great older sister I would be. And when she came into our lives, she did not stay for long. We still had our fun. And when she was gone, I cherished the time we did have together. The space in my heart, for her, will never be empty. I won’t pretend I understand what it might be like for a parent. But just keeping the child alone in a room, never to see the world or his family… Don’t deny yourself, or your family, the chance to get to know him. The chance to have him as their brother, for you to have him as a son. You’ll regret it more than anything in the end, if you do not.”

  “Leave at once.”

  Ingebj?rn flinched, pulling away, but she did not leave. Her lips parted as if she were about to speak again, but Kristian did not give her the chance.

  Fists clenched, he took a step closer to her, ire flowing fully through his visage as his fragile grip on Intimidation slipped. “Get out!”

  The foreigner needed no further warning to rush out of the chamber, and Kristian exited moments later, if only in a different direction.

  Foolish Nurtraz and their primitive views! Of course her ability to identify the problem had not been a guarantee that she would know of a solution. It had been inane of Kristian, to believe for even a second that she could have been of any further assistance.

  Before he knew it, Kristian had reached the forest. His exact location was lost to him, and he had little interest in changing that.

  That idiot woman was wrong. No, it was not possible for there to be nothing he could do—the people of her homeland must simply have lacked access to the resources he had. Harvestables were only the start of it.

  Kristian screamed anyway, visibly shaking in place, and for the first time since the battle that claimed Zayden’s life, the very world seemed to shake alongside him.

  He’d bleed the land dry of its harvestables if he had to, enlist the aid of whomever necessary. Whether they were feeling cooperative or not.

  Nothing had stood in his way when he had to pick up the pieces after the Champion Saint died.

  And certainly, nothing would stand in his way now.