Grumbling and bitching under his breath, Terry got up from the bed and went over to the door. He thought about asking who it was. Of course, if it was someone who meant him harm, they’d probably just kick open the door. The guy who owned this place didn’t deserve that. And if it was someone who didn’t mean him harm, it’d just make him look as paranoid as he felt at the moment. Basically, a lose-lose situation. So, he opened the door. Remdell was standing there, looking guilty and uncomfortable. Oh, this can’t be good. Terry stepped aside and let the farmer come into the room. There was one maliciously uncomfortable chair in the room that Terry didn’t offer to the Remdell. That would have been uncalled-for cruelty. The farmer didn’t seem perturbed by the lack of apparent hospitality. Instead, he was shifting back and forth uncomfortably and not quite meeting Terry’s eyes.
“What can I do for you, Remdell?”
The farmer glanced up at Terry for a second before his eyes dropped back to the floor.
“I… Um… I need to tell you something. But I need you to promise me something first.”
“What’s that?” asked Terry.
“I need you to promise me that you won’t do anything rash.”
“No,” said Terry, his voice hard.
“What?” asked Remdell, clearly shocked by the flat refusal.
Terry was a little shocked by it himself. He wasn’t usually that decisive or that firm with other people. He cast a suspicious mental eye at the other-knowledge. Was there some kind of leakage going on? Was he being infected with that other personality like some kind of bizarre, magical, personality-rewriting virus? The other-knowledge seemed like it was docile or even asleep. Maybe it was just all of the stress starting to catch up, shortening his temper. He focused on Remdell again. In for a penny, thought Terry.
“The fact that you want a promise like that means you know I’m going to be angry. It also means you know I’m going to be right to be angry. So, I’m not going to promise that I won’t do something rash.”
The farmer hunched in a little on himself looking miserable and defeated.
“That’s true enough,” said the man. “It’s about Harena.”
“What about Harena?” asked Terry, just feeling a headache about to land on him.
“She’s going to tell the church what happened, in the alley I mean.”
“She doesn’t know what happened in the alley,” said Terry. “I’m quite certain of that.”
“She thinks she does.”
Terry ground his teeth. Of all the ungrateful things that someone could do, he fumed.
“Did she tell you what I walked in on?”
“She did,” Remdell admitted. “I’m grateful to you for stepping in. I never liked that boy, but I didn’t know… I didn’t realize what he’d been doing.”
“And she wants to throw me under the…” Terry almost said bus, only to realize that it wouldn’t mean anything to the other man. “Under the cart. Based on assumptions. After I helped her?”
Terry was aware that there might be just a tiny little bit of hypocrisy in his words. He had actually killed that guy. Sort of. He wasn’t sure exactly how much responsibility he owned and how much belonged to other-Terry, but that wasn’t going to mean anything to anybody else. It had been his hands that did the deed.
Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
“Please,” begged Remdell, “you have to understand. She’s always been like this.”
“An ingrate? Yeah, I believe that.”
A part of Terry was glaring into the middle distance at where he imagined the powers-that-be were sitting in recliners, eating popcorn, pointing at him on some magical equivalent to a high-def TV, and laughing their asses off. Of all the people he could have met in the entire world, they had him meet some prissy, self-righteous, holier-than-thou girl who lacked the mental dexterity to tell the difference between the spirit of a principle and the letter of it. All of which conspired to make her too honest for her own good, to say nothing of his own good. He’d gone south to avoid a war, and they’d set him up to come into conflict with the, if manga and anime logic held true, absurdly powerful and corrupt church. Oh, goodie, goodie, gum drops.
“She’s honestly not an ingrate. It’s just… This is all because of her mother,” said Remdell.
A look of such profound loss and grief overtook Remdell’s face that it arrested Terry’s fury enough for him to get a grip. He could see that he’d been working himself up to do, well, he didn’t know what. Probably something rash, he admitted to himself.
“How so?” he asked the farmer.
“We didn’t always live out here. We used to live in a city called Alisten. Beril, my wife, she was a paladin. Honestly, I don’t know what she ever saw in me. I was just one more face in the crowd, no one special, but she took a shine to me. We didn’t become farmers until after she was pregnant with Harena. She adored her mother. Always wanted to hear stories about her adventures. But Harena was so young. You simplify things for children. You tell them to always do the right thing. To always tell the truth. You know you’re going to have to explain that things are more complicated later, but life has a way of getting you off track. When the war started in the north, Beril’s old friends came looking for her. Begged her to go with them. She told them no, but I could see it in her eyes. She wanted to go. To fight. To be a paladin again. So, I told her to go, and she did. She never came back. We got word eventually that she fell in battle. ”
“I’m sorry,” said Terry. “It’s hard losing people, but I’m not sure I see the connection.”
Remdell took a shuddering breath and said, “The very last thing Beril told Harena was to always do the right thing. To always tell the truth. After her mother died, it became this thing, like it was just set in stone inside of her. I was so lost after we found out Beril died that I wasn’t a very good father. When I finally came out of my own grief, I couldn’t get through to her that there was such a thing as too much truth. That always telling the whole truth could do more harm than good.”
Terry considered that in silence for several moments. He wasn’t a parent. He’d never lost a spouse. He had a very limited understanding of what those kinds of things did to people. He’d been an adult when his mother died. He wouldn’t have claimed to anyone that he’d handled it well, but he had processed it through an adult lens. So, his common ground with Harena there was exceedingly small. He got that she wanted to keep to something that her mom had told her to do, but there were limits. Sanity had to have a voice somewhere.
“Look, principles are… They’re good and stuff, I guess, but this isn’t going to be some minor inconvenience for me. The people the church will send after me aren’t going to try to arrest me. There won’t be a trial. They will come to kill me, which means I’ll have to kill them if I want to live. You know it. I know it. And unless she’s telling herself a lot of lies, your daughter knows it too. She doesn’t get to condemn people to death just because she wants to feel like she’s doing the right thing. She’s not a child anymore, so it’s sure as shit time that she stops acting like it.”
“I know! I know! I just don’t know how to stop her,” said Remdell with that pleading tone in his voice again.
Terry was getting angry again. This girl was playing around with people’s lives like they didn’t matter. Not that Terry had a personal investment in whoever the church was going to send. They might all be evil bastards who had it coming, but they might not be. If they were just the equivalent of some beat cops trying to get through their shift and back home to their families, he didn’t want to have to kill them. He shouldn’t have to carry that because Little Miss Glares-A-Lot was living in a fantasy world where doing the right thing meant screwing over people who helped you.
“If you can’t get it through her head, then I will. Where is she?”
“Please don’t kill her,” begged Remdell falling to his knees and clutching at Terry’s shirt.
It was the single most awkward, uncomfortable thing that had ever happened in Terry’s life, and that was a high bar to reach. He’d once been pantsed in the high school cafeteria. He’d honestly thought that was going to be the high-water mark for personal embarrassment. Yet, here I am. I cannot believe people have power fantasies about shit like this. How fucked up does the wiring in your brain have to be to want to see a grown man grovel and cry?