Chương 167: Chapter 163. A Helpful Hand

What the boys hadn't eaten at the inn, they made up for twice over here. The food came up the grassy rise in waves and kept coming. Some of it Adom knew, like fish, grilled and glistening, from river and sea both. Most of it he didn't: fruit that fell open into segments no fruit had any business being, glowing faintly at the core, and little charred parcels of leaf that breathed out steam smelling of every good thing at once. Strange, and very good.

They ate partly because the prince watched them do it with frank delight, plainly thrilled to have people to feed, and refusing would have been a small cruelty. And partly — Adom was a little surprised to find — because he was genuinely, hollowly hungry. That didn't happen to him much anymore. With [Primordial Body] he could go days without food or water and feel no worse for it, a few days without sleep too, if it came to that, and still think clean and fight sharp.

With his busy schedule as a magus and professor, he'd fallen into treating meals as optional. But he'd come to understand the thing he'd had backwards about that: yes, the body would run on its reserves indefinitely, the way a lamp runs on the last of its oil, but it simply ran better when it didn't have to. A body kept full wasn't a body forever deciding what to spend itself on. So he ate his fill, and let himself enjoy it, and for a while the business could wait. Then he was done, and it couldn't.

Adom set down his cup, sat back, and looked across the table at the prince, who had waved off the your highness twice now and asked to be called by his name.

"All right, Veyslav," Adom said.

"Let's talk properly. How can I help you?" The prince seemed caught off guard.

"Help me?" He set his cup down.

"Mage — no. You've misunderstood. I asked you up here for nothing at all. I wanted you to see my gratitude with your own eyes, to put a proper meal in you, to thank the man who—" He waved a hand, as if the rest went without saying.

"I want nothing from you. Least of all that you tangle yourself in this mess with my brothers and sister. It's an ugly, complicated thing, and you've troubles enough of your own without shouldering mine."

"I'm already tangled in it," Adom said.

"Your brother arrested Oberys this morning, and I crossed an ocean to speak with Oberys. So I'm afraid your business and mine are the same business now, whether either of us cares for it." He leaned in.

"Is there a way to get him out?" The prince's face fell.

"... I don't even know where he's being held. I've had people searching since the hour I heard, but Kazimir is careful, and the city is large."

"How long will the search take?"

"I couldn't tell you. Honestly." He spread his hands.

"And I'll be plain with you, since you've earned plainness; even once we find him, I doubt my brother lets him walk. Kazimir knows exactly what Oberys is to me. He took him to wound me, and he won't give a wound like that up willingly. Not while the throne's still in question." His jaw set.

"I expect he means to hold him until the succession is decided, one way or the other."

"Then let's decide it," Adom said. The whole table went quiet as all sets of eyes turned to him.

"I'll help you take the throne, Veyslav. Properly. Whatever it turns out to need, I'm in it. And in return, the moment you're crowned, you give the order, and Oberys walks out a free man." He let it settle.

"How does that sound?" The prince looked at him for a long moment. Then his expression eased — the tiredness lifting a degree — and he bowed his head.

"Then I'll be in your care once more, Adom." Adom paused at that, making the prince smile.

"I read the Sundar papers. Every morning, without fail, and I have done since the day your face first turned up in one. A boy from nowhere winning crowns at Krozball. The Ghost of Arkhos." He said.

"I knew you the instant I saw the picture, and I've followed every step since. The academy. The Magisterium. All of it." Adom felt his ears go hot under the mask, which was, he reflected, a deeply undignified thing to happen to a man his age.

"I always meant to come find you properly," the prince went on.

"Thank you in person like a civilised man, but I kept putting it off as there was forever one more fire to smother here, and then the king died, and after that there was nothing but fires." He shrugged.

"So I knew your name long before you walked into my garden, Adom. You needn't look quite so alarmed." Sam, whose mouth was full, chose that moment to weigh in.

"Mff so whmf th' phlan nuff?" …Nobody had the faintest idea what he'd just said. Sam then proceeded to swallow hard, thumped himself once on the chest to help it down, winced, and tried again.

"Sorry. Ahem. What I said was — what's the plan now?" Adom looked out over the garden, at the city of cloud and pale stone beyond it, and the high square somewhere in the middle of it where a blade had sat untouched in a rock for several thousand years.

"The sword in the stone," he said.

In the life Adom had lived once, Highmere had burned. It took only a single bombing to do it. One pass, one falling star of Dragon's Breath, and the city in the clouds became a memory. The why of it was a long, bleak chain, and it began with this same succession. In that telling, Kazimir won. He outlasted his siblings much the way he was outlasting them now, killed the last brother left standing, and took the throne alone, and he ruled. Long enough to have a son.

And the son, as sons sometimes are, grew impatient; unwilling to wait out a healthy father for a crown he'd already decided was his. So one quiet day he went up to the high square, and drew the sword from the stone for everyone to see. That was all it took. By the kingdom's oldest law the sword decides, and it decides absolutely; over blood, reign, over even a sitting king. So the moment the blade came free in the son's hand, the father was no longer king.

He was a man who used to be one, deposed by his own child, in front of his own court, with nothing left to appeal to. This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there. Kazimir did not take it gracefully. He fled, and went to an enemy of Oriscael, and gave them everything — its defences, its weaknesses, the seams in its great wards — and stood beside them when they came for the capital.

If he could not have the city, he would rather watch it fall than leave it to the boy who'd taken it from him. So Highmere burned, out of a father's spite and a son's impatience, and one weapon that should never have existed. A bleak story. But there were lessons buried in it, and one of them was very much to the point just now. Because there was one thing most people never grasped about the sword in the stone: it was no moral test.

It did not weigh a heart or measure worth or wait for some one true and deserving soul to come and prove themselves. That was the version people liked to tell, and it was wrong. The whole thing was a lock. The enchantment in that stone was a particular, ancient kind, fae-made runework, unreadable to all but a handful of souls in the mortal realm. The fae had set it there in the founding ages, keyed to whatever conditions pleased them, and walked away.

For thousands of years no one drew the sword, not because they were unworthy of it, but because no one could pick the lock. The son could, though. He'd been close with the fae and one of them had given him the method, like passing a friend a key. And a method, once used, does not stay secret forever. It almost always eventually leaked. Which brought it round to Adom. Because Adom, it must be said, was a nerd.

A runicologist to the marrow; tell him there was a fae lock no mortal could read, and he heard it as a personal challenge. When he'd come across the story in his first life, the whole sorry chain of it, and the leaked method that had unmade a kingdom, he had not been able to leave it alone. He'd read everything: the runes themselves, the structure of the working, the decipherment the impatient prince had been handed and that had since slipped loose into the world.

He'd done it for fun at the time, but he needed it now. The fae had built a second guard into the stone: the runes only answered to sunlight. They woke when it touched them and sealed the moment it left, immovable in the dark. A work like Adom's could only be done under open sky, in plain day. No slipping up at midnight to do it quietly.

Not that subtlety had ever truly been on the table though, because for the sword to make a king, the drawing had to be witnessed: ten souls at the least, by the old law, so that no one could pull the blade in some empty room at midnight and march down claiming a crown nobody saw him win. The rite had to be public, or it was nothing. Fortunately, the high square was about the most public place in the kingdom.

Thousands passed through it every single day, tourists and pilgrims and locals and idlers, drawn by the one wonder everyone crossed the world to see. Today was no different. Today there were hundreds within sight of the stone alone. Though, not one of them could see Adom. He was standing up there among them, invisible, and he was working. Crouched at the base of the famous rock, in plain view of half a kingdom's worth of witnesses, his fingers moving over the ancient fae runes, quietly rewriting the lock.

He worked slowly. That part couldn't be hurried, and anyone hoping for a dramatic flurry of glowing symbols would have been let down, because mostly, it looked like nothing at all, a patient business of reading what was there and coaxing it, a hair at a time, into meaning something slightly different. Up on the wide stone dais that ringed the rock, his friends handled the rest of the job, which was to be visibly and boringly present.

Because the sword in the stone was, among its other duties, a tourist attraction, and the kingdom ran it like one. For three silver leaves a head, any visitor who fancied their odds could climb the dais, set both hands to the hilt, and give the blade a good honest heave in front of everyone. Nobody had ever shifted it, which was rather the point.

Oriscael charged people to fail, people queued up to do exactly that, the coin rolled in, and the legend grew fatter with every red-faced tourist who came away empty-handed. One might call it unwise to leave a literal kingmaker sitting in an open square, free for any passing stranger to grab. But thousands of years of failure made a powerful argument. Warriors had tried it, scholars, genuine legends whose names still carried in songs. Yet every one of them walked away with sore hands and a lighter purse.

Adom's group had simply bought the slot. All of it; as many passages as Caelen's coin could quietly secure, back to back, the whole afternoon booked solid under a fistful of forgettable names. So Sam stood up there with his hands on his hips, admiring the rock like the tourist he was while Karion leaned on the rail looking bored, and Damus stood perfectly still, giving nothing away. And at the foot of the dais, the elven attendant was earning her wages.

"I'm sorry, sir. The platform's spoken for just now." The man in front of her wasn't really the problem. The problem was the small boy attached to his hand. He was perhaps eight, a fat candy lollipop lodged in one cheek, staring the attendant down without a flicker. Here was a child who had never once been told no, and it showed.

"Daddy," the boy said around the sweet— in a high-pitched, nasal, bratty little-boy voice with a kind of raspy whine to it— not looking away from her, "tell her to let me do the pull."

"My son would like to try the sword," the man translated pleasantly.

"They've purchased the time, sir. All of it, through midday."

"Daddy. Tell her."

"He's come a long way," the man said.

"Talked of nothing else for weeks. Surely there's a moment—"" Daddy. Tell her to let me do the pull."

"In a minute, champ." The man smiled at the attendant, entirely confident this would go his way.

"Look, between us. Who's actually up there? Three people standing about, not even trying. Let the boy nip up and have his go, and we'll be out of your hair." The lollipop came out with a small pop.

"I want to do the pull."

"I know, champ."

"I want to do the pull."

"Sir," said the attendant, bless her patient soul, "no one is going up just now. There's a list, and your son isn't on it. Three silver leaves buys an attempt when an attempt is to be had, and just now, there isn't one." She looked down at the boy, somehow not unkindly.

"There's a lovely fountain two streets over." The boy stared at her as though she had personally cancelled his birthday.

"I want to do the pull." He said again, sucking on the candy. Adom tuned the boy out. It took effort — the voice had a way of finding the gaps between his thoughts and wedging itself in — but he had a fae lock under his hands and nothing to spare for a child and his candy, so he let the square blur into noise and bent the whole of himself to the work. And then, finally, it was done.

The last rune settled under his fingertips, giving way to the small, careful changes he'd talked it into, and Adom let out a long breath of pure relief. The lock was open, and by everything he'd read, it would hold that way for about a day, give or take, before the fae runes shrugged off his meddling and slid back into the shapes they'd kept for thousands of years. But for that one day, the most exclusive throne in the kingdom sat free for the taking. Anyone who climbed up here and pulled would walk away a king.

Which meant it was time to fetch the prince. He sent the word down — Sam to Caelen, and Caelen to quietly bring Veyslav — and settled in beside the rock to wait, still invisible, watching the dais, the crowd and the endless shuffle of tourists. Almost an hour in, he noticed that it took longer than it should have.

Long enough that the first cold thread of wrongness was already working up Adom's spine when he spotted a man crossing the square: one of Caelen's, moving fast and not troubling to hide it, making straight for Sam. He reached him, leaned in, and spoke low into his ear. Adom had woven a listening spell the instant he saw the man break into a run, so he caught every word of it from where he crouched, fifty feet off.

He watched Sam's face go from pink to grey, and through the spell, he heard exactly what was draining the colour out of it. Kazimir apparently had eyes inside his brother's house, enough that Veyslav's every move came back to him near as it happened. So he knew. He knew about the square, the sudden block-booking, a brother gone abruptly fascinated with a rock no one had ever shifted. And he hadn't waited around to learn why. He'd sent men to the estate. They were storming it now.

And Kazimir himself was already on his way here, guards at his back, to climb that dais and pull the sword out of the stone with his own two hands. Adom let his head tip back against the rock and shut his eyes for a moment. Of course. Of course he had. Nothing, not once, ever got to simply work.

"... You absolute bastard," he told the distant shape of the palace.