ANTONIO

We watched in horror as the woman who bought us walked away, leaving us under the jurisdiction of the middle-aged woman with a sternly-set face. She and some other men gathered their group and hustled them into a building that looked nothing more than a residential property from the outside, but had been hollowed out in the inside, with a gathering of chairs in a wide circle, facing inward. She had all of them sit as she stepped into the far corridor to speak with a small, hunched man in dark robes.

“What’s going on?” Tols asks me under his breath, seated on my left. My fingers twist nervously into the fabric of my pant leg. I don’t know. I haven’t known what to do since before my father came to visit me all those months ago. How long had it been? I’d lost track of days, and Simon had long since lost track before I was introduced into his world.

Simon sits on my right, his lips in a thin line. All of my moves so far have been modeled after Simon’s advice. My pride bubbles up, and I’m afraid to relay the question over. He looks pensive, and I can’t imagine that he knows any better than any of us in this instant. Were we slaves? Were we indentured servants? Were we free? The fact that we were all still bound led me to believe we weren’t technically free, but they’d left us alone in a room without guards.

I’m not the only person who realizes this. Some of the men look at the door, eyes drifting from the woman and the man in the corridor talking under their breaths. Someone gets to their feet and starts to meander toward the door, and the woman’s gaze sharpens on us. She steps into the room. “If you want to leave, go ahead, but you’ll have to figure out how to get your hands undone.” The man freezes and slowly turns to face her. She addresses the rest of us, “If you’ll just give me a moment with Mathieus, I’ll explain your situation and give you gentlemen some options.”

The man looks around at the rest of us, then shrugs and sits back down.

“We haven’t decided if you’re prisoners yet,” she tells us, a gentleness creeping into her stern voice.

I feel myself bristle. What did that mean? They hadn’t decided? Isn’t that something one decided when they purchased people?

I rub the web between my forefinger and thumb and stare at the floor. In either case, it wasn’t like I had the power to do anything about my situation.

She eventually claps her hands and comes to stand in the center of the circle. “Alright, thank you all for sitting quietly while I sorted out our next steps.”

No one says anything.

She turns to look at each of us individually. Her eyes land on Tols and she smiles a sad smile at him and tucks her fingers into her pockets. I want to stand in front of him and block her gaze, but what she says sets me on even more uneven ground than I already feel that I’m on.

“I’m sorry you all have been along for this terrible ride,” she says. “Many of you, I imagine, have been taken from your homes without reason. Some of you might not even know why you’re here, or even where you are.” She gestures around, as if her hands can encompass the small village they’ve entered into. “This is Reisau. Welcome.”

There’s an uncomfortable shuffling in the chairs. What did this have to do with anything? Weren’t we going to be put to work?

“In regards to your current situation, we have options.” She raises a finger. “We let you loose, you go into the hills. You find your way home. You’re free.” There’s a surprised murmuring and some people move to stand. She raises her hand to silence us. “Or,” she continues when it bubbles into an uncomfortable silence, “you stay in your situation just a few days longer and we offer you room, board, and wages.” She gestures to the beastmen, though I know she isn’t excluding the rest of us. “You will never need to hide yourselves again. You can live your lives out as you are.” She hesitates and winces, “But this, unfortunately, requires some additional… questioning.”

I frown and open my mouth, but it’s Simon who speaks first. “What does that entail?”

She nods to him, “Excellent question. You might not like the answer, but for our town’s safety, it’s absolutely necessary.”

“You’re going to question us under the influence of a truth serum?” Simon infers. My heart constricts and fear pulses through me. The use of truth serums hadn’t even crossed my mind when she’d mentioned questioning. If he decided to stay in Reisau – not that I had decided at all – I could have easily lied my way through an interrogation.

The introduction of a truth serum made my situation far less tenable, if it had been secure at all.

His finger taps anxiously on his thigh for a moment. “And we are consenting to this?”

“Yes.”

“What questions are you asking us?”

At some point during the long wagon ride here, Simon became the group’s leader. The heads all around the circle nod simultaneously.

This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

She nods at him. “We’re going to ask all of you why you were arrested in the first place. This will establish if you are a danger to our community.”

“You’ve already established we are safe in your community,” Simon poses, eyes narrowing suspiciously. “And you’ve also offered us our freedom. Say some of us aren’t truly innocent of our crimes, you’ve revealed yourselves to be a safe-haven.”

“That’s determinant on whether you believe me or not,” She tilts her head at him. “Do you see any beastmen walking around? Or necromancers?”

Something strums within me, and I’m reminded of the pale woman who brought us here. It feels like an itch I can’t scratch, like something is hovering in the back of my mind, just out of reach. Why did her name sound familiar? Whitman…

“No,” he admitted.

“Then you don’t know if I’m lying or telling the truth,” she splays her hands. “I’d prefer to question each of you, of course, but again: you aren’t prisoners here. I will not hold you against your wishes. You are free to leave.”

The murmuring starts up again, and Simon is silent for a long moment, considering.

I clear my throat, “So you’re saying we have one of two choices.” She nods. “What happens if the questioning results in the guilt of the questioned?”

“We try them for their crimes using our own jurisdiction processes. Depending on severity, we will deliver them to Torsen.”

I swallow. Returning to Torsen, where I was sold, was not an option. I could leave now, but where would I go? There was no home for me anymore. I half expected that my father was behind my abduction to begin with and Luis had always been his eye and ears throughout my campaign and into my reign.

To everyone’s surprise, Tolstoy is the first to stand, his ears laying flat against his head and his usually bushy tail limp behind him. “I’ll consent to the truth serum,” he says aloud, even as his voice wavers.

The other beastmen stand beside him and nod.

Someone across the circle, a human, stands and holds his arms out. “I’d like to leave, if it’s the same to you.”

She nods and gently unties him. The man looks stunned. He thanks her quietly and departs. The door closes behind him and the rest of us stare after him in surprise, but soon some of the other men are emboldened and are, similarly, released. In only a few minutes, only six of us remain: Tolstoy, Nicholas, and Oryx, Simon, a young man across the circle from us, and myself.

All eyes turn to me, and I realize I’m the last person to decide. I swallow hard. Simon takes my arm gently. “This is only a decision you can make for yourself, Tony.”

Tols looks at me longingly, his ears twitching. I imagine the road beneath my feet and the hot sun beating down on me on the road, of the dark forest on either side of the road. I think about my brother’s face when I appeared before him: covered in road dust and my clothes little more than rags. Then I thought of the beastmen in front of me, and his friends. Knowing they chose questioning over returning home because they knew they could not return home safely jarred me. Something needed to change, and if anyone was going to change it, it was going to be me. I needed an army.

My eyes level with the woman and I nod. “Okay.”

I position myself in the room so that I am the last to go. If anyone notices, it’s not immediately obvious. The day stretches on until the light fades into sunset. Once someone has been brought out of the room, they do not return when Maggie, as we’ve come to learn her name is, comes to fetch the next person. She tells us that we’re being moved into a room to sleep off the effects of the truth serum someplace safe. Whatever safety means, I know we cannot know for certain.

The beastmen go first, one after the other until it is only Simon and me remaining. When Maggie comes into the room she gestures to us in turn. “Well, which of you gentlemen are up to the plate?”

Simon pats my back and stands. “I’ll go,” he tells me. “I imagine you’ve got a lot to talk about.”

I blink at him, startled. “What do you mean?”

He just smiles. “I’ll see you on the other side, I hope.” And he follows Maggie out of the room.

His words gather in my head in confusing clumps of memory, as if he had told me something in code with a cipher I hadn’t learned. Had he picked up on my secret? Did he believe I was a war criminal from the war with Cainern? Did he know the truth, that I was the cause of all of this suffering in Led? There wasn’t any way he would have learned that, I rationalize. It was abundantly more likely that he believed I was some sort of soldier from the war.

Whatever Simon was questioned for took a bit longer than with the others. The sun disappeared and the town was filled with the sticky sweet cool of the summer night. In the distance, I heard some doors opening and closing, some people chattering in the street before dying into the gentle hum of crickets. Footsteps skipped up the road and the door eased open. A small girl peered into the room, her skin was pallid and her eyes were set deep into her face, almost too bulbous for their sockets. Her hair was blonde and thin, and her lips were a blueish white. When her eyes land on me, they narrow and widen in shock. “What are you doing here?” she asks, striding into the room. Her words are certain and steady, as if they aren’t uttered from a young girl’s mouth. As if she knows exactly who I am. The hair rises on the back of my neck, and fear stirs in my stomach.

“Sorry?”

She crosses her arms, “You were missing for months, why are you here?”

I frown, perturbed. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

She smiles sweetly, knowingly. “Where’s Maggie?” A childish lilt replaces the strange, unnerving maturity. I wonder if I’d imagined it at all.

I nod toward the door. She smiles, showing black gums. My heart sinks into my stomach in surprise. “Thank you!” she coos and skips out of the room. My stomach flip flops over itself as reality sinks into my stomach, and my mind churns into itself as it processes that the little girl who was speaking to me just moments ago was, in fact, dead. The name Sybil Whitman clicks into place, as the memory of the scroll Luis had given me flickers into place. The list of known necromancers and their sympathizers. The last necromancer of Led was the woman who had bought and offered us our salvation.