The cafe that we’d ended up in wasn’t something I would’ve exactly called a safe house. It wasn’t the most conspicuous building, but it wasn’t like it was actually hidden away from any prying eyes. Then again, maybe that was the point—having something so mundane that any investigation would just roll over it.

To hear the veiled lady talk about it, though, I was getting the impression that it was more because the Church didn’t have knowledge of this place’s existence.

“It truly has been far too long,” she said, blowing on a cup of tea. There were still bloodstains on her dress from where she’d walked past the still-alive oathholder that I’d stabbed in the throat. She hadn’t even paused to check on them.

I didn’t want to be talking to this woman. I didn’t want to be breathing the same air as her. Over the years, I’d learned enough coping mechanisms for me to not be physically affected by our current state, but memories of what she’d done to me—of what she’d made me—were enough to set my fight-or-flight instinct off multiple times over.

Not that we could leave. Apparently, she’d branched out from being House Byron’s resident killer-maker to becoming one of the best users of oathtongue I’d ever seen. Comparing her to Orchid was like comparing an ant to the boot that crushed it. I had barely been able to offer even token resistance against her spell. Maybe it was because she was giving more direct, simple orders which I knew were harder to fight against, but it was terrifying how easy it had been for her to get us to follow her lead into this “safe house” here. She hadn’t used her oath to ask us to do anything besides follow her and not attack her, and I dearly hoped it would remain that way.

“What do you want?” I asked. She hadn’t restricted our speech. Yet.

“Conversation, little Lily,” she said. “Nothing more. Have some tea.”

I eyed it suspiciously, the overly ornate teacup a clear indicator that this humble cafe was not what it said it was. From the outside, this place had apparently been closed for repairs for months, a symbol of the unfortunate state of this part of Dakheng. The inside belied that in every possible way.

Fuck it. I took the cup. It wasn’t like she was going to poison it or anything. She could’ve easily told us to stand still and killed us where we stood. Maybe there was a reason she hadn’t done that and had instead waited for this opportunity—like, for instance, if violence broke the overly powerful effect of the oathtongue—but then if that was the case she could have simply left us for the Church to finish earlier.

All told, it meant that I could drink the tea without worrying it was going to be poisoned or drugged or whatever was in vogue these days in the capital.

It was, I had to admit, really good tea. I wasn’t much of a beverage drinker at all, but even I could tell that this brew was superb. Kind of like what I had as a kid, honestly, which didn’t help the whole “Church-as-nobles” impression.

“Conversation,” I repeated. “I highly doubt that you decided to lie to the Church’s face and kidnap me and Kyle here—“

“Hi,” the jester cut in, waving a card around. I had no idea when he’d gotten that and how it’d broken through the “no weapons” command, but that was Kyle for you.

“—just to talk,” I finished.

“We will simply be conversing,” she said. “What you decide to do is up to you.”

“Sure,” I said. That’s a lie. What was the point? Was her oathtongue not strong enough to order us to do something more complex? Why did she even need us?

“You’ve grown, little Lily,” she said.

“Tends to happen when a bit over a decade passes, yeah,” I said, taking another sip. “You haven’t changed. Except for the whole speaking part. That’s creepy.”

“It is creepy, right?” Kyle commented, not apparently caring if the veiled lady was about to speak. He hadn’t been poured a cup of tea, but he took one for himself anyway, taking a sip to punctuate his statement. “I knew it wasn’t only me.”

“Come to think of it,” I said, interrupting the veiled lady even as she opened her mouth, “I don’t think I’ve ever heard you talk properly. I have no idea who in the fuck you are beyond the person who brainwashed me a decade ago.”

“You may learn in time,” she said, finally able to get a word in edgewise. As she spoke, she smiled slightly, as if there was an inside joke in her words that only she understood. The veiled woman sipped her tea, lifting the veil just enough to allow me to get a glimpse of a pale face and lips that must’ve had some Nacea or Ditas oath enhancement done to them to make them a red as vibrant as any apple.

“I’ve had it up to here with nobles and their cryptic bullshit,” I complained. “And yeah, fuck you, you get to be in the noble circle too. You were a Byron once, weren’t you?”

“Contractor,” she said, her head moving in a way that might’ve indicated a frown behind the veil. “Never part of the family.”

“Sure looks like you were trying to be,” I said. “And are, come to think of it. Also, I still don’t know why you’re here.”

“Then allow me to complete my sentences,” she replied.

I looked at Kyle. He shrugged nonchalantly, almost as if to say your move.

“Sure,” I said. “Go ahead.”

She lifted her veil to take one more sip of tea before beginning.

“There is a struggle occurring in this city between the old and the new. The Church, sticklers to their traditions and the glory of being Chosen, represent the stagnation, the danger of sloth. The nobles, ever seeking constant grwoth, represent greed, their inevitable fall awaited by many of those whom they have harmed along the way.”

“With you so far,” I said. The words she said were true, but the way she said them… it was almost rehearsed. They might actually have been. There was a bit of a practiced feeling to them that made me think that she might not have completely bought her own argument.

Either that, or this wasn’t her real argument. If that was the case, which was pretty likely, we had other problems on our hands.

“They will fight,” she said. “They will fall. In honesty, I care not which of them survives the battle.”

“Now that’s something I can agree with,” I said, meaning it. From what little I’d seen of the Church in Dakheng, they’d become their own wannabe Crown. When it was a group of rich assholes against another, it became very hard for me to pick which side I wanted to come out on top.

Well, unless the specific rich asshole family happened to contain Jasmine in it, I supposed.

“However, what I see within them is an opportunity,” she continued, her voice growing less ethereal and more… excited? I wasn’t sure if that was the right word for whatever this odd quickening was, but she was definitely getting more energetic. “When one-eyed men take an eye for an eye, it is the sighted beggar on the side who may arrive and win the day.”

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“You want to make a power grab,” I said, snorting. “Of fucking course you do. Who doesn’t?”

“I have the ability to,” she said, sounding more convinced of this one fact than I’d been of anything in my entire life. “The Church is distracted, the nobles prepared to engage in war. With the leverage that the Church has over them, certain Houses will take the bait and protect the Church from the other members of the nobility. If all goes well, both organizations will be a flaming wreck at the end.”

“And if they don’t?” I asked. “If they aren’t? What happens then?”

“That,” she said, “Is where you come in.”

“I don’t like the sound of this,” I muttered, quiet enough that she didn’t pick up on it.

“I don’t like that,” Kyle said, significantly louder.

“You don’t have to,” the veiled woman said with a shrug. “It is simply what will be.”

“You want us to be your soldiers,” I said.

“Not want,” she said. “I will have you.”

“Why?” I asked. “If you were just looking to gain power, you could’ve just backed one of the sides harder. I get that you’re supposed to be dead to the nobility, but the Church is strong. Stronger than us.”

“The Church is fractured,” she said. “Idealistic. Two aspects that mix together like oathholders and pacifism. They lack the imagination of the nobility. They only rise now because they grow wary of a threat in the east, not because they have ambition.”

“You were a pretty ardent part of the nobility, if I remember right,” I pointed out. “Had your fair share of time stirring around in my brain, didn’t you?”

“I cannot return to the nobility,” she replied, actually sounding a little pained. “But even if I could, they too have stagnated.”

I stared. This wasn’t the first time I’d heard this. Nor the second. No, this was a sentiment I’d heard time and time again, one that hadn’t been exclusive to my upbringing but had been a major feature of it.

“Oh, you poor fucker,” I whispered. “Byrons got their hooks in you good, didn’t they?”

“House Byron was a stepping stone,” she said, and for the first time in our conversation so far she sounded less than perfectly of herself.

“I’ll fucking bet,” I said, shaking my head. “It’s the same. It’s all the same.”

“Lord Byron was an idiot,” the veiled woman said, a hint of anger—the first actual emotion I’d seen her express so far—creeping into her voice. “He was shortsighted and foolish and he gave his opportunity away.”

“Enlighten me,” I said, not disagreeing.

“He had perfection within his grasp,” she said, reaching a hand out to cup my cheek. Her hands were cold and unforgiving, a far cry from the warmth that Jasmine could give me. “He had you. He had me.”

“So that’s your entire plan,” I said, fighting the urge to draw back. Drawing back would’ve been a sign of weakness, one that I couldn’t afford when we were talking like this. “You just want to repeat what you did to me but with more people?”

“Uh, what did she do to you?” Kyle asked. “And am I hearing it right that you’re a Byron?”

“Yep,” I said, too many emotions flowing through me to bother denying it any further. “And she brainwashed me. Used some kind of oathtongue that took effect over time and became a core part of who I was and am.”

“It was beautiful, little Lily,” the veiled woman said, stroking my face again. I shivered, the urge to slap her away almost too great to deny. “And we can be beautiful again.”

“She’s already started,” the jester realized. “Seb. The commoners with ridiculous competence.”

“Indeed I have,” she confirmed.

Fuck this. Fuck all of this. If there was one thing I absolutely fucking despised, it was letting one more godsdamned person inside my mind. Even this one. Especially this one.

“Do we get anything out of this?” I asked. “Kind of hard for me to justify going along with this.”

“You get to live,” she said. “And you may be reunited with your lost… friends, I suppose you could call them.”

I did my best to not react to that line, but I was pretty sure I’d failed from the way the veiled woman cocked her head at me.

“You do want them back, yes?”

At that moment, all the rational arguments I’d made started crumbling. They didn’t fade, no, but the fact that there was a clear-cut way I could get Jasmine back—that was almost enough to make the decision for me immediately.

“Where are they?” I asked, my throat suddenly dry. I reached for the teacup, taking another sip.

I could almost hear the victory in her voice when she spoke. “Would you like to know?”

“Hey, hold on,” Kyle said. “Look, Lily, I get that you wanna get back with your girlfriend, and I want to see that too, but can we stop and think about what this means? It sounds like she had a role in the uprising, and—“

“Shut up,” the veiled woman snarled. “The adults are talking.”

Not that Kyle’s any younger than I am. Maybe I was mentally older. I’d been forced to be someone more mature than I was when I’d been a kid, after all.

I looked at the jester nervously, saw him open his mouth and close it without a single word coming out. Terrifying.

As much as Kyle hadn’t been able to finish speaking, the sentiment had gotten through, and it was an ice-cold bucket of water over my thoughts to wake me up. Agreeing to go with her here had consequences. I’d practically be pledging my alliance to a third faction that was neither noble nor Church.

Kyle had brought up a true point, and it was one that I hadn’t dwelled on enough. In my defense, we had been either under the influence of a spell or actively fighting since we’d seen this lady for the first time.

The veiled woman had been the Church’s force multiplier. She’d been the one behind the scenes, manipulating the commoners. The one who’d powered them up, presumably working with the Church to get them good weapons, and sending them off to their deaths against noble forces.

And now she’d decided to strike out on her own, potentially taking all those influenced with her.

“No revolution was ever complete without a blade and an oath,” I quoted, realizing what her game was. “You’re building an army.”

“No,” she said. “I already have one.”

________________________________

The warehouse that we’d left just a few hours ago felt different now. Where before, there’d been a bunch of lost commoners idling away their days after their failed revolt, it hummed with activity now.

I’d accepted, in the end, and once Kyle’s restrictions had been lifted he had as well. It had been a choice that wasn’t a choice, really, given the amount of power that she had over us. Halfway through our conversation, more of the oathholders draped in white had come to join us, and then the decision to escape had become impossible.

One glance at him afterwards had been all that it took for me to know that he and I were on the same page.

She was going to have to die.

As much as I wanted to be the person Jasmine wanted me to be, one who could calculate the possibilities of doing the greatest good for the most people, I wasn’t. I was who I was, and even though parts of me might change, I was always going to be a killer at the end of the day. And for once, I could say that this woman was unequivocably a killer.

She’d said something about a “threat in the east”. She hadn’t cleared up much when we’d been walking, but she’d mentioned it some. The same rising god I’d heard mentioned a couple of times, a disgustingly powerful oathholder who went against everything the Church stood for, gaining and breaking oaths like they were cheap toys.

That sounded like Nishi. The man had never fully denied being that figure, and I had a sneaking suspicion that the man who could [SPEAK] like a god was someone that the Church would be worried about.

That was what this whole Church conflict was about, then. After the first burst of betrayal, the one that had led to the fall of House Alzaq, the Church had capitalized on the chaos, tossing its hat into the ring and attempting to take the Crown for themselves and…

And what? Use the power to fight Nishi? I didn’t know what their end goal was, and I didn’t know whether to be more scared of that or the fact that they might’ve actually been in the right. Nishi had been nothing but good to me so far, but even I could envision him growing bored and deciding to annihilate the entirety of Tayan in an afternoon at some point.

So many players, so much chaos. We’d wound up on the side of someone who wasn’t even supposed to be involved based off of threats and the promise of saving the rest of our party. Once we got them, I was going to kill her. I didn’t know how I was going to break free from the oathtongue, but I’d done it before. Even if it had taken the assistance of the Crown’s finest then, I was going to figure out a way to do it again.

After we saved them.

The veiled woman had mentioned something about the Church’s stronghold not being in any specific headquarters of the city but rather underground, but there hadn’t been specifics on where to go and what to do. Never specifics. Nothing that would let us out from under her leash. I suspected that it was going to stay that way for a long time even after we moved on from saving Jasmine, but I had a forgotten god on my side that was going to have something to say about it.

Not that I knew what it was. I still didn’t know what we were doing, but now, standing in this warehouse I had some idea of who we were doing it with.

“Hi again,” Seb said. He sounded more coherent now than he had earlier. A looser leash, now that his master is here. His presence and the atmosphere of action triggered by the entrance of the woman in white had as much as proved that the morning’s troubles had been her fault. The Church’s too, but hers in particular. “You’re with us?”

I thought of the sides—the warring nobles, the old man of the Church and its various factions, whatever the fuck this oathtongue-facilitated movement was supposed to be.

I looked at Seb, then at Kyle, then at the veiled woman whose name still remained a mystery to me. I looked within, felt the anxiety of not knowing what was next, the desperate need to reconnect with the girl I loved and my friends, and, if I looked deeper, the [INTEREST] of something more than myself.

“Yeah, I’m with you,” I lied.