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“Antonio.”
“Good to meet you, Antonio. I want you to cross the room and sit down with those people over there.” I nodded at the chained-up group. I needed to get all of the people I had to protect into a single clump.
The boy scurried behind me to the group and sat down next to Darin. Thomas’ son was watching me. They were all watching me. I needed to chat Aaron up to confirm exactly what god I was dealing with. The white feather was pretty clear, but verifying never hurt.
“Love what you’ve done with the place, Aaron,” I said. I kept my tone conversational. Having him lash out randomly wasn’t the plan. “And this must be Garvey?”
The old man gave me a startled look.
“You broke my ward,” Aaron said.
“Yes.”
“How?”
“Hitched your cows to an iced wagon.”
He thought about it and grimaced. The mother of all headaches raging in his skull was making it hard to think.
His voice was tired. “Did Claudia send you?”
“No, but I’ll let her know I dropped by the next time I see her.”
“Are you a knight?”
“No. Who was the girl?”
“A pet. What do you want?”
I pointed to the chained-up people. “You’re a slaver and a human trafficker. When you sink that low, you have to expect a reckoning.”
He didn’t say anything.
“I was hoping for a hint of shame or regret,” I said. “This is very disappointing.”
“A mercenary,” he finally said, as if the word was slimy. “How much did they pay you?”
“I’m doing this pro-bono.”
“Why?”
“Because you’ve become a problem I decided to resolve.”
“Did I now?”
“Looks that way.”
“Do you even know who I am?”
“I can make an educated guess. You were a knight-enchanter. Most knights do two years in the Academy. You did four, because wards require advanced training in environmental magic and magic theory. The Order invested in you, and they like to get their money’s worth, so they would have offered you a 20-year contract, which you must’ve agreed to since your runes have osmium in them.”
He gave me a slow golf clap, wincing. His head still hurt. “Congratulations. You put 2 and 2 together.”
“The Order trained you and promised to house and support you for the duration of that 20-year contract, which started when you graduated. The minimum age to enroll in the Order Academy is 18, you finished at 22, and you look to be in your thirties, so you didn’t do your deuce.”
A hint of life sparked in his sallow eyes, then died down. “That’s right.”
“They really don’t like to kick knight-enchanters out. What was it? Incompetence? Couldn’t be, not with the quality of that ward out there. It had to be greed.”
“Some people call it greed. I call it proper compensation.”
“You would’ve been paid as a Class V. That’s over a hundred grand per year.”
He stared at me as if he pitied me. “Is it funny or sad that you think 100K is a decent amount of money? I would figure it out, except I really don’t care.” He made a wrap it up motion with his hand.
“How much did you want?”
“I wanted my due. I gave them all of my twenties. Oh, what a great honor it is to be a knight of the Order of Merciful Aid. So much honor. Such a noble goal. Trudging through shit and blood every day to be wrung dry for the sake of people who won’t even thank you, only to finally end up back home, exhausted, and then have to check if you can afford a bottle of Glenfiddich to drown your sorrows.”
I held my left thumb and index finger apart a little and made a sawing motion with my right hand.
“Are you playing a tiny violin?” he asked.
“Yep. The name of the song is ‘My Heart Bleeds for You.’”
He grimaced. “You’re an annoying little fly, aren’t you?”
“Yes, but you’re still talking to me. How often do you get to talk to someone who understands the Order, Aaron? Tell me, what finally did it?”
“I turned thirty. The night before we’d gone into a sewage treatment plant. There was a small hydra in it, and it threw us around like we were fucking toys. I woke up that morning. My legs hurt. My whole body was black and blue. It hurt to sit up. It hurt to piss. I’d soaked in a tub for an hour the night before, and I could still smell rotting human shit on me. It was in my hair. On my skin. I reeked of it. I looked at myself in the mirror and I decided I was fucking done surviving. It was time to thrive.”
“This doesn’t look like thriving to me.” I indicated the room.
“This came later,” he said.
“Ah. Let me guess. You started to moonlight. The Order doesn’t like that.”
“I was done caring what the Order likes.”
“But still, they really don’t like to kick knight-enchanters out. You guys are a significant investment for them. They would’ve ignored your little side jobs.”
