Death After Death PLUS 202-204

Ch. 202 - Brutality

For as long as he was moving quickly, Simon stayed on the trail. After that, he made his way up the slope, sticking to the largest rocks he could. Despite the fact that they’d fired two volleys, and he’d made a big show of being hit once, they still waited an awful long time before they started to fan out and descend down the slope. 

They definitely know they should be afraid of me, he said, repeating his earlier assertion now that he saw more evidence. 

Once they were moving, he stopped moving and waited for the nearest man to come toward him. He’d planned to draw his blades immediately, but instead, he found himself studying the man’s armor. It was irregular enough to make him a mercenary, but there were enough pieces of leftover Ionian kit, including a well-blackened breastplate, to mark him as a former soldier. 

His features, too, were Ionian rather than Murian, which he’d honestly expected. A bunch of army veterans? He wondered to himself as he waited for the man to pass by his nearly invisible shadowy form. I wonder which general it was I pissed off.

No sooner did the man move past him than Simon pulled his sword and swung it with both his hands at the back of the man’s neck. He had just enough time to turn at the sound of metal scraping on leather but not nearly time to dodge before Simon shattered his cervical vertebrae and dropped him like a sack of potatoes before he could make a sound. 

The group’s line was diffuse and continued on without him, but for a moment, Simon ignored them. Instead, he pulled out his skull-marked dagger and embedded it in the man’s throat, just above his collarbone, seeking to drain the last few drops of his life. This was going to be ugly, and if there was ever a time when he needed to feel a little younger and more energetic again, it was this. 

Simon held his blade there for the length of ten heartbeats until he felt the flow stop. That was enough for the rush to fill him. Though part of his mind said that he shouldn’t do this with everybody, another part of him hungered for it. Even with the metal as a filter of sorts, drinking in so much pure human life energy was far and away better than bleeding goats or slaughtering goat men. 

It was a pleasure he’d denied himself for decades, and now he craved it. In the short term, though, the only way to push that craving away was bloodlust. He approached the second man more cautiously, but now there was a certain looseness in his steps that hadn’t been there in a long time, and Simon was slitting the second man’s throat before he knew he was in trouble. 

As his dagger drank deep a second time, he regretted not doing this more often. He might have only drained six months of life from the first man and three months from the second, but at the moment, the intensity of it was enough to make him feel like a man of half his age, and with a burst of speed he no longer thought himself capable of, he raced toward the next target. 

Simon took out four of them and was almost on the fifth before someone shouted, “It’s not him. Bastard got away!” 

That warning was all it took for the fifth man to see the shadow of death approaching for him. He didn’t get to shout in alarm before Simon took his head clean off, but he did get to parry twice. Once high and once low. Each of those blows rang through the empty night like a bell. 

“He’s out there!” someone shouted. “He took out Leo. God’s Above, Leo and Philip both!”

They were on alert now, but Simon didn’t care. He heard a few crossbow bolts ricochet somewhere behind him to both his left and his right. They had no idea where he was. They were just firing blind.

Even worse for them, he decided, was that he was having a great time. He bolted toward the next one, only detouring to weave to the right enough to kick up a spray of scree before weaving back to the left. The result was that his sixth opponent was facing entirely the wrong way when Simon kicked the back of his legs, dropping the mercenary to his knees long enough for Simon to plunge his sword down through his collarbone and cleave the man’s heart in two. 

This time, he didn’t use his dagger to drink the man’s life force. He was already buzzing with energy. Maybe even with too much energy. He would regret the way he was using his vampiric blade when this was done. He’d promise himself that he’d never use it again, but that wasn’t quite true. 

The truth was that he’d never use it again unless someone deserved it. Murder was wrong. Even murdering bandits and drunks was wrong. Murdering people like the Unspoken might even be wrong in some circumstances; they might be awful, but at least they meant well in theory. In their minds, they were trying to save the world. 

As he considered this, he ran toward the seventh man, even as he was running away from Simon. He wasn’t running away from him specifically, of course. He couldn’t see Simon. He was running to get into formation. 

Assassins armed with poison and a plan that was trying to get him alone so they could take him out without ever having to risk their own necks? Their lives were forfeit. He hadn’t been this angry since he’d nailed Varten’s father to a door with a crossbow of his own. 

Simon hadn’t hurt anyone in years. He hadn’t killed a human since the bandits had tried to interrupt his time spent teaching Bertrand to make art. He was retired now. He taught kids how to read, and someone had hired these pricks to take him out and steal the rest of the time he might have shared with his son?

“Monsterous,” he spat as he shoved his sword through the man’s back, sending him troubling down the slope.

There were four left now, and part of Simon wished he could take prisoners for questioning, but given the power of magic, he knew that would be a fatal mistake. A talented warlock who could make his head explode with a word. 

Well, that’s probably a bit extreme, he decided. If they could have done that, they would have skipped the crossbows. 

That thought put prisoners back on the table, but he still decided that it was best not to risk it. Truthfully, he didn’t know if that was because he just wanted to kill them or not. He supposed it didn’t really matter, not after one of them cast a fire spell, sending a gout of flame arcing out into the darkness. 

The four of them stood in a circle now, shoulder to shoulder, practically daring him to try all four of them at once. It was a bad bet. Even as energized as he was at the moment, he knew he had trouble taking on three men on a good day as he was these days. 

“Tell me who put you up to this!” he yelled out as he ducked behind a boulder, in case a bolt of force lasted out at where his voice had been. 

“He’s here!” the youngest of the four called. “Ennis will—”

“Show some spine,” the older man growled, silencing the junior soldier before shouting. “Nothing personal. We were hired for a job, and clearly, we bit off a bit more than we could chew.”

Simon let the silence reign for a moment, trying to decide which spell he should kill them with and if he should do it one at a time or separately when the man that seemed to be the leader spoke again. “I’ve got some information, and I’d happily trade it for our lives.”

There were some tense whispers then between the leader and the mage. At least Simon was pretty sure it was between those two. It was too far away for him to say for sure. 

“I can’t say I trust those that use magic so flagrantly,” Simon called back, moving slightly after speaking again. 

“You know, I can’t say I blame you,” the man he’d been talking to said right before he drew his sword and put it through the neck of the mage, leaving him to fall to his knees and choke on his own blood. His hands were now free, and he held them up in a gesture of surrender. With a word, his two remaining men did likewise. “What say we talk like men, then, and I can tell you exactly what happens—”

He never finished talking. The mage had been silenced and killed, but death did not come soon enough, or perhaps it did, and what happened next was triggered by his death. Simon couldn’t say. Either way, the ground around the three remaining men erupted in a vicious firestorm, and when it was done, everyone was dead. 

“And that is why you don’t try to take prisoners,” Simon told himself. 

After that, he didn’t even really want to approach the bodies. He just sat there for a long time, running the scene over and over again in his head. Eventually, his spells wore off, and sometime after that, when his stolen energy started to fade, he went to retrieve his sword. 

He tried to think of a way that he should have handled this differently or better, but really, he couldn’t. He decided to wait for dawn to investigate the corpse of the mage and instead busied himself with the corpses he’d killed earlier that night. 

He found gold in every man’s pouch, which was unusual. However, the fact that it was neither Ionian, Brinish, nor any other kingdom he recognized almost certainly meant that it was Murani, which told him any number of things at that moment, and all of them were terrible. 

Although he searched the last bodies once the sun was up, he found no smoking guns. In fact, he became more certain than ever that the magic that had tied up loose ends so neatly was triggered by the mage’s death precisely because of how little evidence was left behind. He eventually found the mage’s amulet, but the forces it had channeled were a charred ruin, and it offered no clues about how it worked. 

Simon walked back to Ionar that morning, a day earlier than planned. Even though he found no trouble at any of the little villages he went back through on his way to the palace, he stayed ever vigilant, going so far as to buy a Shepherd’s colorful wool poncho to look less like himself. 

Just because he’d survive one assassination attempt didn’t mean he’d survive another. The whole way back, he worried about who else might have been killed, and he feared for the lives of both Seyom and Elthena. Ultimately, though, those fears were unfounded, and he found the palace little changed from how he’d left it. 

Seyom laughed at Simon’s ridiculous outfit, but when he saw the storm clouds in his expression, he quickly stopped laughing. Simon didn’t tell him anything, of course. Only that “my outing was a bit more exhausting than I was expecting, that’s all.”

Once he was shooed from the room, he laid out to the Queen what had happened to him. He told her a bit of a toned-down version, of course, because she would have to tell it to other people who didn’t know what he was capable of. Still, her horror grew with every word, especially after he told her of the mage that had self-destructed and showed her the coins his thugs had been paid in. 

“This will be war!” she swore.

Simon sighed at that. He needed to lay down. Now that the emergency was over, he could feel the cravings for more life force crawling under his skin like ants. He needed a week to himself just to zen this shit out of his system. He wasn’t going to get it, though, not with everything that was happening. 

On the plus side, now, I’m definitely a year or two younger than I was before all this bullshit, he thought, trying to find some way to tamp down all the emotions that were threatening to boil over inside of him. 

“It probably already is war, truthfully,” he replied, “Even though I wish it wasn’t. If I had died, they would certainly have used my lack of council to convince you to join the winning side, but if that is impossible, then a surprise attack somewhere on the northern border is probably only a matter of time.”

“Why would the Murani want to fight us anyway,” she answered with a shake of her head. “We’ve done nothing to them.”

“Ionar is just territory to be conquered,” Simon explained, “And in this case, the territory is particularly valuable because it allows them to outflank their current via a dozen different passes. Brin holds the line because it is so narrow, but if they had to defend everywhere at once, they would surely fall.”

Ch. 203 - Not so Surprising

The declaration of war followed quickly after that, but because of petty pissing contests in the wording of the agreement that had to be sabotage, the alliance that Ionar desperately needed took somewhat longer. Somehow, despite the attack on him and a few other scattered attacks throughout Ionar that were almost certainly the work of the Murani, it was months before Ionar officially allied with the Kingdom of Brin to push the invaders back in any real way. 

Unfortunately, that turned out to be about how long it took Simon to shake himself free of the terrible urges to use more transfer magic s. In the moment, his actions had been reasonable and even justified, but now there was no denying that it was a budding addiction. This time, he vowed not to let it control him. So, for better or worse, during that time, Simon's life changed almost as drastically as the world around him. 

The first and most obvious change was that he was always armed now. For a long time, he’d rarely even worn a dagger unless he was leaving the city. Now, he was always armed with both sword and dagger, and he made sure that Seyom was with a real short sword as well. Simon rarely left the palace after that day, and he never left the city. 

Instead, he spent all his time with either the children, the generals, or in seclusion, coping with the withdrawal symptoms of his foolish act and planning for what he could do in the face of the new threats. One thing that his most recent opponent's methods had done was make it clear that there was more he could be doing. Just because he didn’t plan to start using blood magic to fuel powerful rituals didn’t mean he couldn’t use the power of his foes to more effectively eliminate them.

These efforts all bore fruit, and as time passed, he felt more and more ready for any surprise. Still, it was aggravating that even in failure, the assassins had still managed to shatter the perfect little life he’d been building. 

He rarely held lessons in the gardens now, and even those were always accompanied by a detachment of the Queen's personal guards. Worse than that, though, was the fact that his curriculum had become almost entirely martial. 

Seyom was only just fourteen, and two members of Simon’s class were only twelve. They were old enough to know their way around wooden blades but far too young to worry about killing or dying. Yet those were now inevitable consequences of what he was teaching them. 

It was unavoidable. One assassination attempt would lead to more and next time, he was unlikely to be the target. So, he taught them basic first aid and where the most vulnerable spots on armored training dummies were. He taught the girls to aim for the throat of anyone that they suspected might be a mage, and he taught them all what signs to look for that indicated that magic might be afoot. 

He hoped they’d never need to use it, though. He wanted his son to be a competent warrior, but more than that, he wanted him to be a talented general and a wise leader. Reality, though, might not be giving him those choices. 

The Queen expressed in private that she thought Simon was being a touch paranoid, but she never did so in public, nor did she ask him to stop. Where the safety of their son was concerned, paranoia was acceptable, it would seem, as long as it did not cause too much of a stir. 

He wasn’t the only one who was more paranoid than usual, though. Guests to the palace were limited, fortifications were increased, and guard patrols were doubled.

Elthena eventually even took on a full-time poison tester, which was something she’d resisted for a long time. It was something that Simon had never worried about too much since poison was easy enough for him to handle, but it was a gesture that she was taking all of this very seriously. 

How could she not? The battle reports came nearly daily now, and though the fighting itself was still far away because the northern front was holding up well, that didn't make it any less inescapable. More than that, though, most legions were trained, equipped, and dispatched from Ionar, and the upper market had been converted into a drilling space and parade ground, making the sounds of battle inescapable, even from the palace. The northern cities and the island kingdoms still supplied money and men for the war effort, of course, but it was dwarfed by the capital. 

Still, when the hammer finally dropped, Simon was surprised only by the timing, not by its nature. He’d known that a betrayal was coming. He could feel it in his bones, even if he couldn’t figure out who the one to cause it would be. The Murian wielded money and magic as well as armies, so bribery was certainly a tactic that he expected.

Still, he hadn’t expected it in the middle of one of his lessons. He’d been in the classroom teaching the children about phalanx tactics and the importance of spears against cavalry attacks when he heard a scuffle in the hallway. That was unusual enough, but when armed soldiers in full kit threw open the door and demanded, “The Prince is to come with us immediately!” 

Knowing something was going to happen and experiencing it were very different things. Simon didn’t hesitate, though. He strode toward the Prince even as the two soldiers did, while Seyom looked around like a deer in the headlights. 

“What is the meaning of this outrage!” Simon shouted, waving his empty hands about as if he had no idea what was about to happen. “The Prince is in the middle of his lessons and is not to be disturbed unless the sky is falling, do you understand?!” 

For what happened next, it was imperative that they think him nothing more than a harmless old man. Any violence that happened in the same room as his pupils had to be as quick and precise as possible, or young lives would be shattered and lost. 

Of course, the fact that both men had swords in their hands and blood was pooling in the doorway where they’d taken out the Queen’s guard that had been positioned there made it more than obvious what was happening. The sneer of the man in the lead certainly made no secret of the fact that they were about to run Simon through and kidnap his son. 

That was the way coups worked. Capture or kill the high-value targets, then take control for everyone’s good. The Queen was a reasonably popular ruler, so he wasn’t sure this would go exactly the way that whoever was in charge wanted it to, but Simon aimed to make sure that it didn’t happen at all.  

When the sword came for Simon’s guts, he twisted just enough that it stabbed into his robes but missed his flesh. Then he grabbed the man’s overextended wrist and twisted it, disarming the first soldier even as he flung him to the floor. 

The second soldier had time to react to this and dropped into a ready stance. Simon didn’t hesitate. He reversed the grip on the stolen sword and shoved it through the man’s unprotected throat before he could raise his own blade high enough. Then he turned and stomped on the first man’s skull before he could rise and collapsed face-first onto the stone floor. 

Normally, Simon would have delivered a coup de gras then, just to be sure. The man was limp and probably had a skull fracture from the way his head had bounced violently off the stone floor, but with the way that his class was looking at him, now was not the time for more unrestrained violence. 

Instead, he picked up the second sword from where the man who was still in the process of drowning in his own blood had dropped it. “I hope that everyone has been paying attention because we are now going to have to fight our way to the throne room to make sure that all of you are kept safe,” he said, trying to keep his tone light despite the bloodshed that had just happened, and the shocked look on the faces of some of the children. “Now, quickly, don your arming jackets and ready your weapons. Time is of the essence.”

He would have preferred a couple more years before this had happened, he realized as he watched the door while the children burst into action. No, I would have preferred they’d never known war at all, he corrected himself. But if they had to know war, I just wish I’d had more time to train them. 

That wish was in vain. Unfortunately, you went to war with the army you had, not the army you wanted, which meant that Simon would have to do more of the fighting himself. 

For a moment, he thought about taking some of the dead men’s armor for himself, but he decided against it. He would have killed for the chance to return to his room and put on his own well-worn leathers, but at this moment, looking like a strange soldier was not likely to be an advantage. 

Instead, he waited impatiently for the boys to draw their swords and the girls to string their bows, and then he said, “Alright, we move as one. No matter what you see next, follow me, and just keep moving.”

Then he moved out into the hallway. There was no hiding the dead body; he didn’t even try. He just urged them to keep moving as he took the way that was likely to have the least traffic between where he was on the garden side and the grand hall. A quick look out some of the windows revealed that the city was placid, but he could hear chaos coming from the courtyard side. 

There was other fighting going on. It simply hadn’t spilled out into the city yet. Depending on who won, that was a foregone conclusion, though. As they transitioned to the south side, he saw exactly what he feared: an entire legion of at least 500 freshly minted soldiers marching up the long path toward the palace. If loyal soldiers controlled the gates, they’d never get inside. But then, if loyal soldiers still controlled the gates, he reminded himself, then the coup plotters weren’t doing their job. 

Simon wanted to rush there immediately, but with his tiny entourage, he couldn’t. Instead, he continued on to the throne room. Along the way, there was blessedly little fighting. There were two stampedes of servants and one soldier that Simon disemboweled as he was chasing after a particularly pretty maid. 

It wasn’t until he got to the main hall that he found real opposition. There, he found more than a dozen men facing off the last four of the Queen’s guards that were still standing. 

Simon’s first impulse was to behead all of them with a wave of force, but he decided against it. It was far too public for such an overt act. So, instead of that, he told his students, “Boys, stay back and defend the girls. Girls, do what you can to hurt these brutes, but aim carefully. Those bows won’t even penetrate light armor.”

He didn’t expect much, but as he drew his skull-marked dagger and prepared for real combat, he didn’t want much from them. A few arrows would cause a little chaos, and the archers would provide the boys with something to guard without feeling like they needed to strive for something more heroic. 

This place is going to be a bloodbath, he told himself. But there’s nothing I can do about that. 

Ch. 204 - The Truth Comes Out

Simon didn’t use magic to fight or hide as he rushed the soldiers in the rear of the rush, pressing toward the throne. There would be time for that once the chaos started and children weren’t looking as much at him specifically. 

For now, no one was looking at him at all. Instead, the soldiers in the front were fighting the Queen's guards while those behind them shouted angrily. “You’ve led us to this terrible crossroads!” one man cried.

We could have had peace if only you’d allied with the Murian. Then all of this could have been avoided!” another man shouted. 

Despite wearing identical armor in identical colors, the men managed to look like a mob, somehow. That spoke to both the poor quality of the men the army was being forced to induct now as well as just how green this group was. Half of them weren’t even wearing their helmets. Simon would make them regret that. 

I would kill for some armor right about now, he sighed as he strode toward his enemies. A toga was not the best outfit to do battle in. 

No one was paying attention to him. Why should they? The throne room was filled with dead guards and the bodies of other fallen traitors. There was no one left to oppose them.

All of them had thought they’d won. Why shouldn’t they? The Queen was cornered, and the palace was under siege. The traitors had won by every measure. Unfortunately for them, Simon was a fan of lost causes, and Elthena was one cause he’d never give up on. 

He opened by burying his dagger in the neck of one of the men and holding it there, letting it drink deeply. The man screamed, causing all those around him to turn, but that was exactly what Simon had been waiting for. As soon as they turned, he lashed out in a wide slash with his long sword, taking one man in the neck, one across the face, and one in the eye, blinding him on his left side. 

Simon was very overextended by that move and would have fallen over if not for the man who he was still bleeding with his dagger. Instead, he used him as an anchor and, after a moment, as a shield. Several men struck out at Simon as he retreated two steps, but they only struck their friend in the process. 

As his human shield slumped to the floor, Simon gauged the room. There were ten people in front of him, but six were still facing the other way, fighting their own fight. That left four, and two of those were pretty substantially wounded. Simon chose where to move next, based on those wounds, and moved into the substantial blind spot of the man who had lost an eye, using another broad slash to keep people back. 

He wasn’t trying to take any more of these assholes out. Even with the flood of life energy that was roaring through him, he was still far too old to take out four armed and armored men by himself. Even with the arrows that were bouncing off their armor here and there, that was a losing battle. What he needed to do was break the deadlock around the Queen and get those four soldiers back into the fight to even things up. 

“What are you thinking, old man!” the largest soldier yelled. “I’m going to make it slow for not knowing when to stay out of things!”

Simon ignored the threats. His only response to the man was a feint to keep him at bay, but even as he did so, his mind was racing, watching the ebb and flow of battle. 

Once he figured out the best way to break this conflict open, he whispered, “Vosden,” and thrust into the scale mail of the man in front of him. The man had been guarding high, expecting another blow to his unprotected face, but Simon knew that. Instead, he used a word of strength to go right through the armor that covered both his chest and back, along with the back of the soldier who had been standing behind him, fighting another foe. 

Simon's sword should have deflected harmlessly at such a clumsy strike. Instead, it went right through.

And just like that, their line started to collapse. Simon was forced to give ground after that, both because he was outnumbered three on one, as well as the fact that he no longer had a sword, but the blow he’d struck had already been fatal. A moment ago, eleven men had dominated the throne room. Now, only eight were standing, and half of them were wounded, their chokehold was already evaporating. Suddenly, the battle for the throne was not a one-sided affair, and the green soldiers were being cut down like grass by her veteran bodyguards. 

Simon smiled grimly at that, even as he moved further back into the corner to protect the children from his assailants. Part of him was trying to figure out the right spell to unleash in this moment, but before he needed to do that, the traitors broke. Reduced to only half a dozen men, they fled like the rats they were toward the courtyard, leaving only blood and death in their wake as Simon and his class approached the throne. 

“I had no idea you could fight like that,” one of the Queen’s bodyguards joked. “Pretty good moves for an old man.”

“The children keep me young,” Simon answered automatically. His mind wasn’t on what people might think of him or how well he’d thought. It was on getting the Prince safely to Elthna. She was moving quickly toward them, too, and he met her at the foot of the stairs. She didn’t sweep Seyom into her arms, though. It was Simon that she hugged, which took him by surprise. Normally, she would have never done such a thing in public, but after this, he supposed that he couldn’t blame her. She was a woman with an iron will, but everyone had a breaking point. 

“You kept him safe!” she gasped. “You kept him safe, and you came for me despite everything! I can’t believe how dashing you still are after all these years.”

“I would never let the Prince of Ionar be harmed while in my care,” he said very carefully as he tried to pull away. 

“The Prince is it?” she chided. “If this is to be our last day, do you think he does not deserve to know the truth?”

“My Queen,” the bloody captain of her guards cut in, “We have to get you and the Prince somewhere safe. The palace is not safe, and it may yet fall.”

Simon’s heart sang at the very idea of what she was saying, but the idea that she might regret it later, along with the sober words of the guard, held him back. “I think the time for talk can wait until the battle is won,” he shot back. 

She searched his eyes, and then nodded, and pulled away. “No, she insisted, pulling away from her guard’s grip, even as she held to Simon. I will wait no longer.”

“The truth about what?” Seyom asked, finally figuring out that they were talking about him. The other children milled around still, and past them, the guards. 

Everyone was listening, but at this point, events were out of Simon’s hands. There was nothing he could do as the Queen released him and hunched down to look her son in the eye. “Remember that I told you your father was a brave warrior who saved the city from Brogan and the tides of lava that almost washed over the city?” she explained. “I could not marry him because of the curse, but the Oracle herself told me that I should keep him close to you. She didn’t tell me why, but I am sure it was for this moment.”

“Wait…” the boy said, looking back and forth between the two of them in shock. “Master Ennis is my father?”

She nodded, with tears in her eyes. “He is, I promise you, and a more heroic one than any of us deserve.”

Simon wasn’t sure of that. He felt like something he’d done altered the timeline to cause this war. It might have just been the thorough way he’d cleaned up the zombies this time. A few zombies going north might have been enough to delay these hostilities for years or decades. It might not even have been me. It might have been my doppelgänger who caused this, he realized. 

Ultimately, the why didn’t matter. All that mattered was that he needed to solve this. Even if they weren’t his family, he would need to save these people. The love that he had for them both, though, only increased that urgency, and it was impossible not to see that love reflected when he looked at young Seyom once more. He was still so young, but his dark eyes shone with intelligence, and even now, Simon knew he would grow up into a fine young man. 

“I’m sorry I couldn’t tell you before now,” Simon said, wishing he had time to allow this moment to linger, but the longer he waited, the more dire things would become. “I would have, but it was your mother’s wish.”

“I understand,” he nodded. There was an awkward moment then, as the boy obviously wasn’t sure what to do, but Simon erased it by kneeling and hugging both the boy and his mother. 

“I love you both,” he said, “And when I am done we shall all talk about a great many things, but now I have at least one more fight to win, and need you both to do something for me.”

“What’s that?” Elthena asked.

“I am too old to fight what comes next without extraordinary means. So, no matter what you see me do, no matter what powers I unleash on our enemy, remember that I have not sold my soul to hell for dark powers,” he said very soberly. “I have learned all these things over a very long time, and today, I will have to put them to use whether I want to or not.”

“Magic?” Seyom asked. “What are you going to do?”

“It’s going to be quite the show,” Simon said, forcing a smile as he mussed the boy's hair and rose to his feet again. “You should go to the tower for the best view.”

Then he turned to the captain of the Queen’s guard and said, “You’ll see to it then? I’ll retake the gate, and I can count on you to keep them safe?”

The man nodded and then started shouting orders. At that moment, everything started happening at once. Simon wanted to kiss Elthna. He wanted to tell his son a hundred things, but there was no time. Simon might have a chance against a hundred men with magic, but if hundreds more showed up, he’d tap out long before they ran out of bodies to throw at him. 

So, instead, he watched them leave the room, and then he turned and picked out the best-looking sword from the carnage and focused on it for a moment. He thought back to all the illustrations and the sketches and designs he’d made over the last few years, and then when he had the pattern in mind for the rune blade of sharpness, which was supposed to work much like the one he’d taken from the dragon’s horde, he said, “Celdura Vosden,” and used the planning magic to embed the magical design into the metal permanently. 

The former was a weapon he’d wanted to make for some time, but he’d never gotten around to it. The technique, though, was something he’d practiced several times since the botched assassination attempt on him. It worked fairly flawlessly, transforming part of the steel in his blade to a gleaming silver directly without all the steps he’d used to create his dagger. So, as much as he liked to work metal, that was probably a skill he’d need less and less as time went on. 

Physically, the sword didn’t look that much different, but as he slashed it through a candelabra and the metal candleholders parted cleanly before his blade, he knew that it worked. “Now I’m ready,” he told himself, gripping both magical weapons tightly as he started to walk to the courtyard. 

While he would have loved to run back to his rooms and grab his leather armor, there was no more time for that than there had been to kiss Elthana. It was time to fight and save the whole Kingdom of Ionia or die in the attempt.