“You identified yourself as Strike Team Leader Faye,” Orchid said. “What’s your unit number?”

The woman in question had been extricated from her armor, forced to shed the mass of oathmade steel at swordpoint. She was still tall without it, looming a full head higher than me, but she wasn’t nearly as monstrously tall as she had appeared earlier. More important than her physical appearance, however, was the gambeson she wore.

It was white, made less so by the grime and sweat accumulated over the time spent inside her armor, and it was interspersed with thick strips of golden fabric. At her chest, two crests were emblazoned. I recognized one of them—two swords crossed over a laurel wreath.

With the kingdom’s colors on her underarmor and an authentic-looking Tayan crest, the majority of my doubt that she’d been lying about her position faded. She might be an impersonator, but the way she had top of the line enchanted armor as well as the skills to back it up did mean quite a bit.

The wind had died down at a gesture from this Strike Team Leader, the oathholder who’d been powering it seeing the writing on the wall and backing off. Similarly, there was no longer anyone smashing at Green’s shields, though the man still kept them up for safety.

“You’ll need more than a pretty voice to get me to talk, laddie,” Faye said with a smile, baring teeth. “Give and take, here.”

“I won’t ask again,” Orchid said, his voice commanding. “Give me my information.”

The effect of the spell was immediately apparent in both parties. Faye’s head shook, like she’d just snapped out of a daze, and Orchid recoiled, the effort of the magic apparently taking something out of him. He’d taken less of a hit, this time. Was it related to how likely the other person was to accept the order? Faye had essentially said that she would speak if bribed, meaning that she wasn’t fundamentally opposed to sharing the information she had. Did that reduce Orchid’s load?

I shook my head. I could reflect on powers later. For now, Faye had begun to speak, her voice sounding less lively, now, like she was reading a script.

“I lead the Seventeenth Ground Strike Team,” she enunciated.

“How many other oathholders are here?” Orchid asked. Another noble whispered something to him at that question, and he shook his head, mouthing back a word that I didn’t catch.

“Five—four others, now that she killed one,” Faye said, pointing at me.

I stared straight at her face, looking for a reaction. I must have painted a pitiful sight, right now, given that I was still barely healed and was putting most of my weight on the side of the fountain in order to stay half-standing.

“She has murderer’s eyes,” Faye said. “I don’t like her.”

One of the female nobles—Sarah, that one was called—snorted at that.

“Cut the commentary,” Orchid ordered. “Why did you betray the kingdom?”

“Money,” Faye replied easily. “Enough of a paycheck and most people will do just about anything.”

“You gave that up far too quickly,” Orchid said. “Answer honestly.”

This time, Orchid fell backwards, his legs falling limp like a marionette with its strings cut and another one of the nobles had to catch him. From their reactions, this happened a lot.

“Why did you betray the kingdom?” Camellia asked.

“Didn’t… didn’t betray anyone,” Faye said, the color of her face gradually growing closer the red of her hair, actively fighting to keep her words from getting out. “I live to serve my master, who… who lives to serve the kingdom.”

“Who is your master?” the other noble man asked. Chrysanthemum, that was his name.

“I… he is my master,” Faye said, confusion clouding her features. “I live to serve my master, who lives to serve the kingdom.”

“She’s been controlled, at least in part,” Chrysanthemum sighed. “Irritating. Her master is competent, at least.”

“Then we won’t get more out of her,” Sarah said. “Useless.”

“Hold on,” Camellia said. “Why did you ambush us?”

“I was told to attack traitors on sight,” Faye replied after a moment. “And my master told me nobles snooping around were traitors, and I live to serve—“

“Yes, I know, I know,” Sarah said, irritated. “Quiet down, worthless street trash. Where is your team? They must be disciplined with you.”

“Scattered to the four winds,” Faye chuckled. “Even I don’t know where they went. Better this way. You’ll never find out.”

“If she’s not going to give any information, we don’t need her,” I said, measuring my words.

I was still fragile, the healing that Chrysanthemum had given me imperfect and slow. Even if I wasn’t in pain anymore, there was still a fair amount of myself that was physically broken. Taking any sudden action or even talking too loud carried the risk of exacerbating my injuries while I lacked the sense of pain necessary to realize that something was wrong.

I hefted a dagger all the same, the magic flowing into it feeling as natural as my own limbs. “Once we get the other oathholders off our back, we should just dispose of her.”

“No, we don’t need to,” the jester said, entering the conversation for the first time. I hadn’t even noticed he was there, though his sword was still at Faye’s throat. “We play it civil like adults, give mercy when we’ve won. Be the better person.”

Faye turned to look at me, ignoring Kyle, and she made eye contact. For all that she’d said my gaze was murderous earlier, her eyes shone with malice and bloodlust. “Fuck you. You must be a plainclothed.”

“Plainclothed?” The jester asked.

“One of the fucking traitor-nobles,” Faye said. “They dress as commoners, hide among their ranks, and then when the time comes they fight on both sides. Every bit as nasty as a noble, wrapped in the guise of a peasant.”

“You’re calling her a noble?”

“Only a noble would be so casual with life and death,” Faye said. She spat at me, and I blocked it with a slash of my blade. “Only the worst of them.”

“You think you know the worst of the nobles?” I asked softly, turning the blade over in my hand. “I’ll show you.”

“And I bet you will,” Faye said, barking out an ugly laugh. “Go on, then. Kill me. You’ve already murdered my friend in cold blood, what’s one more? Show your true colors, and let my team rip them apart over my cooling corpse.”

“You’ve got it wrong,” Kyle sighed. “She’s an adventurer, just like me. Now let’s get on with this. We’re going to get somewhere safe, and you’re going to keep your squad from falling in on us.”

Faye remained silent, challenging me with her eyes. I studied them, green irises meeting my grey. She was angry, not that I needed her gaze to know that, but more than that she looked uncomfortable.

I continued staring at her, my stare cold and fixed. She looked away first, ducking her head away.

“Fine,” Faye grumbled. “Lead the way.”

“Put your hands out,” the jester ordered. “I need to make sure you aren’t about to pull some heroics.”

She acquiesced, and despite being so much taller than me she seemed meek as she did so, subdued. She’d been intimidated by just my gaze, no more than a terrified little girl after she exited her armor. A sheep in wolf’s skin, just like my father.

“And you call yourself an elite soldier?” I whispered. “Pathetic.”

“Green, Samar,” Kyle called. “We’re going to move. Change of plans, we’re going to get to a safe house before continuing the investigation. This is a big enough interruption that even big boss Alzaq is going to want to know about it.”

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“Acknowledged,” Green shouted, his voice regaining the irritatingly scratchy quality that he seemed to like for whatever reason. With the wind gone, the sound carried easily.

Samar, on the other hand, was still on the ground near where he’d been knocked down. He wasn’t dead, not even close. From the keening sound he made and the way he was on his hands and knees, looking over the region that his wife’s body parts had been splattered across, it looked like he might’ve wanted to be.

“Green, can you get Samar mobile?” Kyle asked, a surprising amount of warmth in his voice. “He’ll need help to move, and it’s not safe here.”

Green nodded, walking over to the grieving Bahu oathholder and allowing his shields to disappear behind him. No hidden assassin leapt out from behind them to backstab him as he did. Faye had been telling the truth when she’d said her team was gone, I supposed.

From there on, it was just the walk back to the Alzaq manor. I was fine walking without help, and so Kyle enlisted me to guard the flanks of the beaten party. The nobles, of course, had not been hurt whatsoever, aside from whatever side effects came with Orchid’s oath, and apparently the jester wanted to keep it that way.

It was an uneventful walk. We were mostly tracing our way back through less-populated areas of Dakheng, so there were a lot of potential places where attackers could be hiding, but after ten minutes had passed and we’d seen nothing more eventful than a stray family of birds, I began to relax.

Relaxing gave me time to think and reflect, and I didn’t really like that.

Simply put, I had lost. I’d been unable to damage her, all my efforts going to waste because of that damned armor. Kyle had taken pieces of it with him, ostensibly to hand over to the Alzaqs for investigation, and from time to time he was looking up from it and making comments. Faye stayed conspicuously silent each time he brought something up, so I was pretty sure he was right on the money with his words.

“I was right, when I was fighting,” Kyle said. “It gets gradually better at defending against one type of attack, so mixing it up weakens its ability to adapt. The glow indicates how attuned the armor is becoming against the last thing that attacked it.”

I’d been so brutally wrong. I’d assumed the exact opposite, during the fight, and it had cost me. I hadn’t even been able to be wrong with my own merits, either—it had taken the magical support of Kyle, a class eight oathholder, just to facilitate my ignorant attempt at breaking through, one that had ultimately rewarded me with a massive hit to the side. And to top it all off, I’d had to get healed by a noble asshole.

Stupid, stupid, stupid. I’d planned poorly, failed to properly assess the situation, and I had simply not been powerful enough.

The magic that Inome’s oath offered was abnormally destructive, that was true, but I still had a long ways to go if I were to become the Lily that I wanted to be.

Beyond that, the last thing the turncoat Strike Team Leader had said to me had left a bad taste in my mouth. As much as I wanted to pretend that her words had bounced off me, they had left an impact.

I knew rationally that there were nobles who weren’t wastes of air, too—Jasmine, Alex, Orchid—after all, they were the people I wanted to be if I ever managed to reclaim my House. As much as I distrusted the nobility, it wouldn’t do to forget I too had once been among their ranks.

Still, to be regarded as one of them? To be associated with the worst of the worst, just from my behavior?

It stung, and it drove me to wonder if that ill-fated family had truly left their mark on me.

You’ll always be your father’s daughter, the woman who’d birthed me had once said, and though I had done my utmost to distance myself from the mess that House Byron had become, I had always known on some level that it would never be enough.

With all my heart, I had wanted to be Lily Syashan, the powerful mage on her way to restore her name, but what had I done during my time adventuring?

I’d killed without hesitation. Killed prisoners.

This is different, I told myself. I fought a primordial. I fought in self-defense.

But then, said that damned voice of reason inside my mind, Would Lord Byron not have said the same? He fancied himself a defender of the greater good.

What’s to say I’m not doing the same?

I itched to do something, to fend off attackers for the investigators we were being paid to protect. That, at least, would be an act that was easily justified. I knew better than most anyone that morality in the real world was painted in shades of grey, but toeing the line for so long messed with anyone’s perception of right and wrong.

Come to think of it, the fact that I craved a confrontation right now was worrying in itself.

I slowed down a little, letting the rest of the group catch up. Green was leading the prisoner forward, Orchid was supporting a bloody, broken Samar, and the other three nobles were clustered in their own little group.

“Faye,” I said, looking at the woman in question. I tried to limit the amount of venom in my gaze before finishing my sentence. “How long have you been serving?”

“I don’t want to speak with you, plainclothed,” Faye said. “I was to take your lives for the good of Tayan. Your kind is unlike the rest of us. Given time, you would’ve taken these lives because you wanted to.”

“I’m no noble,” I said. “The polar opposite, if anything. Just a peasant girl from Syashan, sent there after my family’s fortune fell on hard times. I have no love for their kind.”

“Don’t pretend to be one of us,” Faye scoffed. “You and me, we’re both killers. But I’m a soldier. You’re a murderer. I can see it in your eyes, plainclothed. If you didn’t think it would be inconvenient, you would strike me down without a hint of emotion.”

“I would not,” I said, but even to myself the defense sounded weak. “If anything, I would kill the nobles who lord over us like they own our lives.”

“Hey,” Green said, cautioning.

“It’s fine,” I said. “They’re not listening. Nobles—this kind of noble, I mean, they never care.”

Sure enough, Orchid was busy actually being a decent human being and comforting Samar a few meters behind us while the other three convened even further away, talking amongst themselves.

“So maybe you aren’t a noble,” Faye said, her voice hard. “What difference does it make?”

“What?” I was more than a little surprised by the prisoner taking initiative in our conversation. “It makes all the difference.”

“It makes none,” she asserted. “At the end of the day, does the title of the hand holding the knife matter? A cold-blooded killer is a cold-blooded killer, noble or no.”

“I kill when necessary,” I said. “When the lives of others are on the line.”

“And you were ready to knife me when my hands were bound and my surrender given,” Faye retorted. “Don’t pretend to be someone you aren’t.”

“It’s not my fault,” I said, the words escaping my lips before I could stop them. “I didn’t choose this path.”

“Didn’t choose… how?” Faye sounded genuinely curious now, a bit of the edge in her voice disappearing.

I’d already said too much. “It’s not important.”

“Wait, hold on one second,” Faye said, the edge totally gone now. She sounded almost excited, now. “From Syashan, acts like a noble but claims to be a peasant, sent to Syashan because of nobles…”

“Shut up.” I didn’t like where this is going.

“Aren’t you the B-“

“Shut. Up.” I snarled, pressing a dagger to her throat so instinctively that I’d barely noticed the movements of my own hand. “You’ve said more than enough.”

“Sure thing, noble girl,” Faye laughed throatily, but she cut herself off when I didn’t move the knife. A prick of contact, and a thick bead of blood oozed out. “Showing us who you really are, huh?”

“Don’t kill the captive,” Green said, though he sounded more irritated than panicked. “What was that, about—“

“Don’t. Mention. It.” I enunciated the words slowly, staring him dead in the eyes. “You don’t want to open that can of worms.”

“I understand,” Green said. “I have my own skeletons that I’d rather keep in the past.”

“That makes a lot more sense, now,” Faye said. I caught a hint of unsurety in her voice, but that might’ve been because of the knife still at her throat. “Your attitude, your willingness, everything.”

“You knew about it,” I said. “You’ve been serving for a long time.”

“And that confirms it,” Faye chuckled. “Yes. Fifteen years and counting. I witnessed the events secondhand, I only know the vaguest details.”

“You were told the village I was sent to.”

“Yes. It was supposed to be a secret, but you know how these things are. Three days and all of Dakheng knew about it.”

Fuck. This was bad. Not world-endingly bad, but exceptionally bad nonetheless. There’d been rules to my situation, terms that I had been meant not to violate. I didn’t know how many of them still held over a decade after the event, but I really didn’t want to find out.

I could not be identified as Lily of the former House Byron. Not now.

“Give me a good reason for me to not silence you right now,” I said, knife still at Faye’s throat. The nobles still hadn’t noticed that anything was going on, as far as I could tell.

“No wonder you seemed so familiar.” Faye smiled, and it was an ugly smile, baring the teeth and not even maintaining a pretense of warmth. “You remind me of your father.”

The words hit me like a bullet to the heart. My arm dropped to my side. Faye heaved out a sigh of relief as I did, no longer bothering to maintain her fearless facade.

She was just a random soldier trying to get under my skin, I reminded myself. She would use anything to needle me without going far enough to provoke me to actual violence.

I took a deep breath, then another.

“Are you alright?” Green asked.

“Yes,” I replied tersely.

“No,” Faye said. “I’d like a nice massage, and maybe some wine as well. It’s been a long day.”

“Oh, shut it,” Green said. “Lily, I think Kyle wants to speak to you. We’re almost back.”

I walked away from them, increasing the speed of my steps.

“Mur-de-rer~” Faye called out as I left, singsong.

I gallantly kept myself from throwing a knife at her.

“Hey Lily,” the jester said, having just made an appearance from a nearby alleyway. “I scoped out most of the rest of the nooks and crannies on the way back to the manor. We should be all clear.”

I hadn’t bothered taking a deeper dive into the geography of Dakheng, simply readying magic so that I could fight at a moment’s notice, but I supposed that was helpful. “Thanks.”

“Of course,” Kyle said. He cocked his head. “You alright?”

“Of course,” I mirrored, my words devoid of energy. “I’m fine. We’ll be back soon, right?”

“Five minutes, give or take.”

“Lead the way.”

The jester had fully cleared the rest of path back to the manor, and we made it back without incident. I stayed close to Faye for the remainder of our journey, threatening her with a gaze every time it looked like she was about to say something potentially damaging.

When we got back, the manor’s doors were already open.

Inside, there was a flurry of activity. Servants, butlers, and maids ran this way and that, carrying platters and chairs and various paraphernalia that I had once known the names of.

Orchid led us in, navigating us through a series of increasingly opulent halls before opening a final set of grand double doors.

There was another noble family inside already, seated at a long table plated with exotic dishes of every kind. From the looks of it, they were discussing their findings with Lord Alzaq.

I recognized one of them, and the cloud that had weighed over my mind lifted some.

She looked back, and I saw confusion cloud her face before it lit up, a radiant smile appearing.

House Rayes was here, and Jasmine and I were together again.