Margin call.

Two words to spook any veteran investor.

Have you ever traded on margin before? It's a wonderful concept: trading on margin. Instead of investing only your money, you can go to a smiling friend called The Broker and borrow his money to gamble too! Of course, our friend The Broker is taking on quite a risk by lending his money, so he charges interest on his loan. And if your investment does too poorly, he can margin call you: you can either throw down more of your own money or watch as he sells your investments to pay off what you owe him.

Simple enough, except here the investment was me, the broker was Lady Arianites, and being margin called meant losing my life. Politics and business: not that far apart.

"Balt, why are you staring at the soup?"

I sat on a bundle of hay, Ada by my side. Something rarer and rarer these days. "Oh, nothing much. Just wondering if it's poisoned."

Ada stared at the soup and then sunk his head into his hands. "This is all my fault, isn't it?"

"It is." I tilted the bowl of soup, skimming a finger along its surface. "That mother of yours hates me. But does she hate me more than she fears her, I wonder?" I licked my finger. Cinnamon.

Ada groaned. I put my mouth to the bowl and gave my Adam's apple some overdue exercise.

"You know," I said, wiping my mouth with the back of my hand. "today is yesterday's tomorrow."

"Huh?"

"The fears, worries, and hopes that motivated our decisions lead us to this particular future. And they'll shape the new concerns that will lead us to the next future, and the next. Are we skipping stones across the sea of time? If so, how lonely."

"Why are you getting so philo-- philo--"

"Philosophical? I suppose it is out of character." I looked at the bottom of my bowl. "I've been feeling out of sorts since I met that Arianites woman. I let myself get angry then. Angry and angsty and betrayed. Why? This body's backstory-- I-- we have nothing to do with each other. So why? I'm a man, an adult. Balthazar Ahu-Vairyo, future billionaire. Not a precocious thirteen-year-old bastard with a grudge."

"You, I can understand." I continued. "You were a child. Clay. Not fully formed--"

"Hey!"

"--it's not surprising that you grew attached to that woman whom you call mother, even though you had a mother, and a father, who loved you, who fed you lavash, sangak, and kebabs, who took you to the fire temple every second Sunday."

I don't know why I wanted him to get angry. To yell.

"...You sound sad."

I smiled, or tried to, but wasn't sure if I'd succeeding in tugging my lips any which way.

"Tell me, Adashir, am I dreaming? Am I a mentally-ill thirteen year old who dreamt up an entire past life to save himself a shred of dignity?"

"All I know, Balt, is that you're my brother. My Balt bro. The coolest dude I know, who is super smart and knows everything about, uh, everything."

"You'll get cavities saying things like that." Despite myself I smiled, for real this time. "You're right. I'm being silly, letting some middle-aged lady get to me." And when Ada leaned in for a hug, I hugged him back, so hard I could feel his heartbeat through his shirt.

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The store-room door had a busted lip and lay ajar. It being noon, the sun's arrows fell thick and fast, but over the floor the dust danced faster still, and yet everywhere the dust was whirling. We watched as it settled atop itself in the cracks below like so many heaped corpses.

The unmistakable cry of a conch. Then hoof-beats. Yelling.

"Stay here." I told Ada, and crept up to the door. Men were rushing about with spears, and in the distance I could see a moving cloud of dust. In minutes it would be at the courtyard.

"What is it, Balt?"

"I'm not sure." I said. "Maybe an attack." We were border nobility, after all. "Get ready to run. And I'd better not hear one word about being a hero or doing something stupid, reckless, and unprofitable."

"But I wasn't going to--"

"I hope so, Ada." We didn't pay guards to just stand around and look tough. Come on, earn your pay you dopes. Distract them. Die. Do whatever, but buy me five minutes. "Ada, stables. Now."

"But won't they hit the stables first?"

"Good question." I queried my cheat-skill: [All-Seeing Eye]. Once a day, I could ask it any question and get an answer-- but sometimes the answers were vague or non-nonsensical. E.g., asking "Will Lady Skantarii will try to kill me within the next month?" got me a haiku about Autumn toads. Damn goddess hadn't mentioned that in the skill description! Though I did notice that the answers got clearer the more I knew about the circumstances.

"Hooves will thunder to where they have first been shorn," said the skill. That was a yes, I think. But "first been shorn"? What, did they steal horses from this stable? And if they did, was the stable-master in on it?

"They'll hit the stables first." I said. "Logical, but ugh. Let's go grab two horses before they get there."

Ada nodded. See, surprisingly reliable. We sped through the gardens, sometimes cutting through hedges as we made for the stables. The pounding hoof-beats echoed the rampant beating of my own heart, and I was grateful for the dust-clouds that hid the enemy from sight. If we were spotted...

But while the riders drew closer and closer to us, we could not see them, and hoped, with a childish logic, that that meant they could not see us. Soon we sped through the servants quarters, with its sketchy wooden buildings, and arrived at the stables. Down the road we could see the outlines of horses and men on a cloud canvas that was drawing closer. Much closer.

The stable-master sat in a wooden chair by the stables, chewing, and as we arrived, he spit.

"Young master Adagios." His head bent in the parody of a bow and he made no attempt to get up. "An honor."

"Saddle two horses for us, Sen," I said. "And hurry." Good thing I memorized the names of the most important personnel working for the Skantarii estate.

His thick grey eyelashes whisked over towards me. "Bastard."

The hoof-beats sounded off so loudly that they drowned out the sound of my heart. My hand moved to my side, to the handle of my longsword-- a longsword I had bought with the remainder of my money. This was the only thing I owned in this world.

A hand came to rest on my wrist. I glanced to my left. Ada shook his head. "You heard what my brother said. Saddle the horses and hurry."

The man's arms rested on the handles of his chair, and with a yawn, he rose up, patting his knees. If he didn't hurry up, I was going to make sure he never walked again. The dust was getting into my eyes now and I grabbed Ada's arm and pushed him behind me, towards the stables, and somewhere that goddess was smiling at this stupid situation-- with my free arm I drew the sword-- damned if I knew what to do with it, becoming a swordsman in the modern era was inefficient allocation of time resources to say the least--

A rider trot through the dust, his conical helm framing a dark brown face, a serious, sad, and somehow familiar face, the sort of face one expected to see atop a statue in the national cemetery for the war dead; the sort of face that whispered, hearken, you men of today, and remember that even your most fanciful tales were spun from a kernel of truth--

Alright, enough abusing Tolkien. He had the face to be an actor for major Hollywood studio. The sort of actor they might hire to play a virtuous, brave, and unfortunately average-looking hero, so the public could admire that hero's actions without having to put up with his crooked nose, weak jaw, acne outbreaks, male pattern baldness, or any other sign that he had been, you know, human.

But as the dust cleared, I saw that behind him were other riders. One of them held a banner in his hands: three arrows, on a green-and-white field. That was the sigil of the Skantarii familia! So these riders were Skantarii troops?

...so that was why I had found the lead rider's face so similar. It resembled, in some aspect, Ada's face, and even the face I saw in ponds and on the bottoms of quality silverware, even as it outdid both.

But why had he come back now? Was it her hand that had commanded this? Was this her answer to the angry old grandma? The air was cool. Sweat stapled my tunic to the small of my back.

"Sir Demetrios," I said, forcing a smile. "Welcome home."