The S class Guide belongs to the Duke

~Chapter 8~

Elewisa read the line three times, her finger pressed so hard beneath the words that the brittle page creased. Once a relic fused with a living host, it could not be retrieved.

There was no way to take it out.

"No," she whispered to the empty aisle. "No, no, no."

She turned the page. Her hands would not hold still. She turned the page. Her hands would not hold still. The next entry matched her sketch line for line: the national treasure of unknown origin, kept under imperial seal, its theft answered with execution. Beneath it, in a cramped and fading hand, the author had added a note. The relic was the gift of Auren, goddess of binding, given to mortals so that Guides and Espers might be joined as one.

A goddess. Elewisa stared at the line until the letters blurred. In the river, with water in her lungs, she had begged some goddess for one more chance. She had never imagined the answer would be something that could get her killed.

The ink had gone brown with age, but the last word of the paragraph was still sharp enough to cut.

Stolen

"They'll say I stole it," she told the book, as though it might argue. "An unknown maid fused with the empire's relic by mistake, who would believe that?" No one. They would never let her finish the sentence. Her head would leave her shoulders first and roll across a marble floor.

A cough sounded at the end of the aisle.

She slammed the old book shut so hard the dust jumped off its cover, shoved her sketch into her apron, and dragged a stack of household ledgers over the top of it all.

Halden stood with his hands folded, one gray eyebrow raised. "The count ordered rest. I do not recall him ordering research."

"I am resting, Mr. Halden." Her voice came out too bright. "Haven’t picked up a broom all day."

"I see." His eyes dropped to her knuckles, white against the table. "You have been here since noon. You have not turned a page in ten minutes. I counted."

"I was thinking."

"A dangerous habit." But his tone eased. "He asked about you, twice this morning. Between meetings. Between letters. Between informing me the Duke's men were not to be given the good tea." A faint sniff. "They have already been given the good tea."

A laugh tried to leave her and came out cracked. "He seems busy."

"And worried. The two are not the same, and he is very bad at telling them apart." Halden studied her face a moment too long. "Is there something you wish to tell me?"

The words crowded her throat. Halden, who had slipped her honey candies when she was nine and pretended not to. Caius, who had given up a whole night and an important meeting to sit beside a fevered maid. She could not hand them this. Anyone who stood close to her would be standing in the path of an executioner's blade, and Caius could not afford to stumble at court because of her.

"No," she said. "I'm only tired."

"Then be tired somewhere with a window." Halden turned to go and paused. "Also, do avoid the east yard, if you can. Half the yard’s in a mood and the other half is drinking. You'd hate it."

"The east yard," Elewisa repeated, too quickly.

Halden looked back, his eyes narrowing. "Nowhere you should be."

When his footsteps had faded, she sat very still. Then a soft chime rang behind her eyes and gold light bloomed against her lids.

[Guide five (5) F-Class Espers. Time remaining: two days, twenty hours.]

"How do I even tell an F-Class from anyone else?" she muttered to the table.

The table, naturally, had no opinion. Crying would solve nothing, so she wiped her face with the heel of her hand and made herself think in order. First, the mark. If it flared in front of the wrong person, nothing else would matter. She opened the reward in her mind, warmth pooled under her collar, and when she tugged the fabric aside there was only plain skin. Four hours, the system promised.

Second, the Espers. The count's knights trained in the east yard, and where there were Espers there was talk.

She pulled her hood low and slipped out of the library.

Getting out was easy. Getting across the yard was not.

She kept to the shaded side, hands buried in her apron pockets, head down. The east yard sprawled wider than she remembered — packed dirt and low stone walls and a half-dozen sword racks hauled out into the morning light. Hailan blue on one side. Black coats on the other. And a wall of cold stares between them.

She found the gap behind a stack of crates and made herself small.

The training ground stank of sweat and old iron and someone's bad temper.

Cedric stood at the edge of the east yard with his arms crossed. Across the packed dirt, the count's knights drilled in tight rows, Hailan blue stitched across every chest. On his side, his own unit worked in black coats, ignoring them with a discipline that was itself an insult.

"Look at them," a knight muttered, loud enough to carry. A broad man with a red beard, Sir Brannic if Cedric remembered the roster. "The Emperor's lapdogs, marching in with a day's notice to take half our yard." He spat into the dirt. "You'd think he'd have the decency to send word. Or is that what they teach at the academy now?"

Laughter rippled down the row.

The academy. Cedric's face did not move, but something behind his ribs shut like a door. He had bled on that training floor beside Caius once. They had both been laughing.

Nevan edged closer, his jaw tight. "We serve the same empire, Captain. Are you going to say something?"

"No."

"Not even a small glare? Your glares are famous."

"No."

Nevan huffed and gave up. Cedric let the knights' voices wash past him, because his mind was still standing in the mud by the river, listening to a drenched girl tell him that this was the first time they had met.

He had written it off as shock. Now he walked it back. In the entrance hall, Caius had torn her out of his arms and demanded to know what he had done to her. Caius had been told, in that moment, exactly who had pulled her from the lake. And in all the hours since, at her bedside, in his office, Caius had not said a word of it to her.

She did not know. Caius had let her not know.

One sentence would fix it. It was I, in the lake, in the dark. Cedric turned it over and set it down. Gratitude was a leash, and he had no wish to hold the other end of one. Let her think him a stranger in a borrowed jacket. It was simpler. But he filed away the count's silence and wondered what it was protecting.

"Nevan."

"Captain?"

"About the maid. Have you got it?"

Nevan went very still, as though Cedric had asked him to recite a love poem. "Have I what?"

"The information I requested."

"You are asking for a report before it is finished. In six years, that has never happened." He cleared his throat when Cedric only looked at him. "

“I’ll deliver it to your room tonight captain."

"Good."

A pause. Nevan tried to look casual and failed. "While we are on things you are avoiding. The Emperor's replacement. You said you would see them tomorrow. That was two days ago."

Cedric exhaled through his nose. "I have not forgotten."

Something moved at the edge of his vision.

He turned his head a fraction. Along the far wall, half hidden behind a rack of practice swords, a small figure in a worn gray hood was edging toward the yard in short, careful bursts, freezing every time a knight glanced her way. She ducked behind a barrel. She peeked out. Her plain apron showed clearly beneath the hood.

Elewisa.

She was supposed to be resting. Her master had ordered it. Instead she was creeping along the wall of a training ground full of armed men, hiding like a thief, and watching his unit with an attention that was not casual in the least.

Cedric's curiosity cooled, slowly, into something much harder.

Elewisa pressed her back against a stack of crates and held her breath until two knights marched past, their boots crunching gravel inches from her hem. Only when they had gone did she dare to look out.

The count's knights she knew by sight. But the men in black coats were new, tall and tight-shouldered, moving with a discipline that made the knights look like boys at play. The Duke's elite troops. A few had drifted to the water barrels near her crates, close enough that she could hear every word.

"Third time today," one of them grumbled, tipping his head toward the knights. "The bearded one looks at us like we are something on his boot."

"Let him," said the second, scraping a dipper against the barrel. "They are a house guard. They have never seen a real gate. Forget them, Doran. Did your mother stop crying yet?"

"Not yet," Doran said. "My cousin presented, Pell. Little Tessa. A Guide."

"Congratulations."

"Do not congratulate me, my mother has been boiling the same pot of tea since sunrise. She wants to wait until spring to register."

Pell nearly choked on his water. "Wait? She cannot wait."

"She says Tessa is too young."

"The Empire does not care how young she is. You have ten days from the moment she presents. After that she is unregistered, and unregistered Guides do not get asked, they get collected." Pell jabbed the dipper at him. "There is a testing center in every sector. Ours is a day's ride. They read the mark, rank her, and write it down."

"And if the rank is high?"

Pell shrugged. "Then she belongs to the Empire before she belongs to your mother. That is the point of the Registry."

"That is the point of everything," Doran muttered, and the two of them drifted off arguing about whose turn it was to haul water.

Elewisa let her head fall back against the crates.

A testing center in every sector. A room where someone read a mark and wrote it into a ledger. A place built to find girls exactly like her. And she had not registered, and had no way to, and the clock had been running for days.

She was still staring at nothing when a voice spoke directly behind her, close and low and far too amused.

"What's a tiny thing like you doing here?"