THE LAST SWORD MONARCH

Chapter 2: A Debt of Blood

Darian rounded the hedge with four companions trailing behind him like hounds that already knew where the next kill would land. He stopped the moment he spotted Garrick standing near the girl beneath the plane tree.

He didn't recognize her. Serelis wore plain grey today, no crown, no visible guard, and Darian's mind filled the gap the only way it knew how.

"What's this?" It wasn't a question. "A servant, speaking to a noble without leave?"

"I only returned her books," Garrick said. "They fell."

"Did I ask you to explain yourself?" Darian shoved him backward, hard, straight into the leaf pile Garrick had spent the last hour raking. He kicked the basket over for good measure. His friends laughed and scattered the leaves further, delighted at how little effort this cost them.

Serelis watched from a few paces off. Her attendant caught her sleeve before she could step forward.

"Not here, Your Highness," the woman murmured. "Not over a servants' quarrel."

So Serelis stayed silent and watched Garrick kneel without a word of complaint, gathering the leaves again exactly as he had the first time. She couldn't decide which unsettled her more. Darian's cruelty, which she'd always known existed, or Garrick's refusal to answer it with anything at all.

Darian eventually got bored of a game that gave him nothing back. "Remember your place," he said, and left with his friends already hunting the next amusement.

The next afternoon brought no rest. Garrick carried an armful of linens toward the servants' residence past the western wing when a girl's voice, high and frightened, stopped him cold.

It came from inside an old storage room.

He should have walked past. He knew that even as he set the linens down and pushed the door open.

Darian had a laundry girl no older than fourteen backed against the wall, one hand braced beside her head. Two of his friends blocked the doorway, grinning like this was sport.

"Please," the girl was saying, "please, I have to get back to work."

Garrick didn't decide to move. His body simply crossed the room and pulled Darian back by the shoulder, and for one long second nobody understood what had happened.

Then Darian understood. His face went white with fury. "You dare put your hands on me?"

"Run," Garrick told the girl, and she bolted past the stunned friends in the doorway before anyone thought to stop her.

"Get him," Darian snarled.

Garrick had no training. What he had was seventeen years of carrying loads too heavy for him, of taking blows he never returned, and something in his body finally, finally moved to protect itself. He ducked one grab. Twisted free of another. Gave ground instead of striking back, because striking back had never once made anything better.

One of the boys grabbed a wooden stool and swung it at his head. Garrick shoved Darian sideways, out of the stool's path more than out of malice, and Darian's foot caught the table leg. He went down hard, forehead cracking against stone, blood running immediately into his eye.

The room went silent.

"He tried to kill me." The words came out disbelieving before they came out furious, before they hardened into the story he'd tell for the rest of his life. "He tried to kill me!"

His friends echoed it before the blood even reached his collar. They knew exactly what would happen to them if the truth got told instead.

By the time palace guards arrived, they found a bleeding noble's son and a servant boy standing over him. Nobody willing to say what actually happened.

Three corridors away, the laundry girl was stopped before she could find a guard of her own.

"Say nothing." A senior supervisor gripped her arm hard enough to bruise. "You'll destroy your family if you open your mouth about the High Chancellor's son. Do you understand? Nothing."

The girl, fourteen and shaking, had already learned that people like her didn't win against people like Darian. She nodded and went back to the laundry, hands trembling too badly to fold a single sheet straight.

Lord Zephar arrived within the hour, moving through the crowd with the calm of a man who had done this before. He comforted his son with one hand while gently steering every frightened witness toward the story he needed told.

"You saw him attack the young lord," he said, not quite a question, to servant after servant who'd seen nothing at all. Enough of them nodded, out of fear, out of wanting to be done with it, that by evening the story had hardened into fact.

"Take him," Zephar said, when Garrick tried once more to explain what actually happened. The guards didn't wait for him to finish the sentence.

Word reached the throne room before Garrick did. By the time he stood before King Evandor in chains, Darian's forehead was theatrically bandaged, his voice trembling with practiced outrage.

"He has always resented his betters," Darian told the king. "Everyone knows what House Arundel was. I suppose blood tells, in the end."

Garrick tried to speak. Every time he opened his mouth, Zephar produced another witness, pointed out another gap in Garrick's halting account. Nobody had ever taught him how to argue. He watched the truth slip further away with every sentence he failed to find.

Princess Serelis stood beside the throne and recognized him immediately. The boy from the garden. The one who returned her books and asked for nothing. She watched his face and saw no hatred in it. No cunning. Only the same tired honesty she'd seen beneath the plane tree.

She had no evidence, though. Only a feeling. And feelings didn't overturn testimony.

King Evandor listened with a stillness that gave nothing away. When the last witness fell silent, he didn't pass judgment.

"Take him to the Prison Quarters," he said instead, "until this matter can be properly investigated."

It wasn't the sentence Zephar wanted. His face stayed perfectly composed while the guards led Garrick away in chains, but the moment he was alone in the corridor, he summoned a man in a dark cloak who had been waiting near the servants' entrance.

His voice dropped low enough that no one else could hear.

"He is not to reach that prison alive," Zephar said. "See that it looks like he tried to run."