“I need a meal,” Falin said as he tossed a few copper coins onto the counter. They clattered onto the wooden surface and released an almost rhythmic humming as they wobbled. “What do you have?”
The innkeeper blinked, staring at the coins in silence for a moment, then at Falin, then the coins again. Could the man not hear properly?
Finally, when the coins went still and the noise stopped, he cleared his throat and spoke. “Just some stew in the pot, Sir Knight. I’m afraid we don’t have many options.”
Though his words were respectful, there was a suspicious edge to them. He regarded Falin through narrowed, skeptical eyes as he pocketed Falin’s coin. Ignorant rural humans. He could not expect these people to recognize his face here as many did in Seris and the surrounding area, but they could at least show the proper deference rather than look at him like some kind of villain.
The man even had the audacity to examine one of the coins before putting it away, though that may have had more to do with the coin itself than with Falin. That, in itself, did not speak well of the innkeeper. What kind of backwater was this if he was skeptical of a Talsian arga? It was almost sad that he was so unfamiliar with the greatest nation his people could lay claim to.
“Give me that, then, and some water,” Falin said.
Propriety as both a Sacred Knight and a nobleman of Gotria forbade excessive drinking while on duty. Humans couldn’t be wrong all the time, much as they tried. The best way to avoid excessive drinking was not to drink at all, though Falin enjoyed a cup of wine every so often in his free time or when duty had him staying in Seris. Much as it galled him to admit, Talsia’s wines put Gotria’s to shame. He had yet to find a better drink.
Now, though, he was working, and he would be for some time yet. He considered himself on duty until he returned to Seris. As such, Alcohol wouldn’t touch his lips for months. A bit of a shame, but he would live. He wasn’t a drunk who couldn’t live without a drink every five minutes.
“Coming right up, Sir Knight,” the man said. He called to someone in the back to warm up a bowl. They shouted back a confirmation, then the innkeeper gestured broadly around the room. “Sit wherever you like, please.”
Falin nodded and took a seat at the counter. No need to take up a whole table just for him. That might have been more consideration than the likes of these humans deserved, and it was certainly more than they would have given him—or any reltus—if not for the uniform he was wearing, but he was determined not to let them drag him down to their rock bottom level.
The innkeeper continued glaring at Falin as he sat. He didn’t say anything for a while, but his eyes never left Falin. Oh, he tried to make it look like they did, polishing glasses and cleaning the counter, but he was always watching Falin out of the corner of his eye and did a poor job of hiding it. Then, when he had run out of things to do, he just pretended to stare into space, still obviously looking at Falin, before he seemingly tired of his farce and simply looked straight at Falin, still silent for a moment.
“I’ve got feed for sale, if you have a horse,” the innkeeper said at last.
Falin scoffed. “You must not get many Sacred Knights here.”
“That we don’t,” the innkeeper said slowly, as if uncertain he should share that information. “Don’t get much of anyone, really.”
Well, wasn’t that just the surprise of the century. The reasons were sure to remain a mystery throughout the ages. While using a mount was far from unheard of, Sacred Knights, stronger ones especially, did tend to travel on foot for myriad reasons. Horses tended to die in an instant if a serious threat arose, for instance, and many Knights could move faster with motomancy anyway, if the situation demanded it. For some missions, the convenience of a mount or wagon was still useful—carrying a lot of supplies could be awkward even if one was strong enough, for instance—but it was rare that it was worth caring for the animal and maintaining the vehicle for a Paladin.
In Falin’s case, while all that still held, the real reasons were more symbolic. To let the people of the area see him more directly, without placing himself above them. He deserved to be above them, of course. He was a Paladin and a son of one of the greatest noble houses in Gotria, in all of Ysuge. It was neither arrogance nor a sleight against them, merely the reality of the situation. But he had long since learned that the Executive Council was deaf to such concern, blinded by their delusions of equity.
Those delusions were the whole reason he was here, in this wretched northern hovel. With peacetime arriving, the Paladins were shifted to roles other than fighting. In particular, using their prestige to aid in negotiations or diplomacy. Such was his assignment at the moment, to travel to the southeast and use his position to help persuade the kings of the region to offer aid to more damaged parts of the country. That, itself, he did not take issue with. The central south and southwest were in ruins. Entire cities had been wiped off the map. This was a task that needed doing, and having a Paladin ask personally would put some pressure on these rulers to accept.
Alas, he could not use a direct route that would take him through home, as he had two secondary assignments. First was to take the route he had been assigned, snaking through rural, human-dominated areas of the continent in order to help acclimate them to both relti and Sacred Knights. While not scorned like the former, the latter still held a sort of mythical status in many areas where people had not had many chances to interact with them. The Executive Council wanted citizens to see Sacred Knights as people they could turn to for help, not idols on some unreachable pedestal. Something that needed doing? Maybe, but he did not see why he had to waste his time and patience doing it, especially when he was superior, and was also tasked with proving it. Some might have viewed this as a first step, to build rapport before establishing the proper order, but they would have been wrong. It was important to establish the dynamics of power first, rather than give commoners, humans, and those who were both the wrong idea.
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Second among his supplemental missions was to investigate a few areas along his route which might hold important information pertaining to another ongoing matter. Some scars to the landscape indicated clashes between powerful motomancers, and a Sacred Knight captain’s corpse had been discovered near one such scar, mangled and burned. The captain’s squad had a suspect, but the amateurs’ memories had been distorted by grief, and all they had been able to supply was that the suspect was female and looked like a reltus. As all high-rank demons did. Technically that wasn’t true. They had provided more specific descriptions, but they had varied so much that that was all they were left with as reliable information. Humans were so useless. Tiransa too.
So, it fell to Falin to look for anything useful, though he wasn’t optimistic about finding anything. Ordinarily, this wouldn’t have called for a Paladin’s intervention. All indication was that the culprit was long gone, and there was no reason to think they were Paladin-level anyway. Sending a captain just in case something strong was lurking about would have been enough, if not overkill itself. But he was going to be in the area anyway, so they might as well have him do it to be safe. In and of itself, that made sense, and he had no problem with it. However, with these sites being in their current state for months, it was unlikely there was any evidence worth looking for, so it was just going to be a waste of time.
As if all that wasn’t bad enough, the Seventh Paladin was supposed to be crossing his path soon enough. It was possible—and he very much hoped—he would miss her, but propriety and explicit orders demanded he go out of his way to meet with the insolent hag if they happened upon one another. That was not even to discuss anything important. It was nothing more than courtesy she did not deserve. The hag didn’t deserve a second of his time, nor did he deserve the absolute torture of spending even a second in her presence.
A boy in his late teens emerged from the back and placed a steaming bowl of stew—or what the innkeeper alleged to be stew, anyway—a carafe of water, and a tankard before Falin. The boy’s eyes wandered over him, fixating first on his dark green hair, then on his lavender eyes, and, at last, his uniform, even following the cloak down as it hung toward the floor off the back of the stool.
“What is it?” Falin asked. He was supposed to be seen, but that did not mean he needed to be stared at like some curious bauble.
“N-nothing,” the boy stammered. “Just…are you really a Sacred Knight?”
“Of course I am,” Falin snapped. What kind of stupid question was that? “I am Falin Rivelda, Thirteenth Paladin. Address me with the proper respect, boy.”
The boy’s eyes lit up. “Wow. A Paladin? You barely look older than me!”
Falin scoffed. Such ignorance. In all likelihood, he was over three times the boy’s age. Still, the boy was practically an adult. It was absurd not to know something as basic about the world as how relti aged.
Not realizing he was a Paladin was more forgivable. His uniform marked him as one, but said markings were relatively subtle and not well known among the general populace. They were more for the benefit of other Knights.
“Stop bugging customers and get back there,” the innkeeper said.
“Sorry,” the boy said. “Good meeting you, Lord Falin.”
With that, he retreated into the kitchen. At least someone around here had some manners, even if that was all he had going for him. The others did not seem ready to learn from his example.
“Did you hear that?” one man whispered to a companion. Poorly, of course. A reltus’s hearing wasn’t significantly sharper than a human’s. The man was just too loud. Of course, these people couldn’t even whisper right. “He says he’s a Paladin. Told you he was a reltus.”
“He could be lying,” the woman to his right replied. “Could be a trick.”
Of course they thought he was a demon. The fools. They could not even blame it on their race. No one in Seris assumed every reltus was a demon. For that matter, even villages in the middle of nowhere in Talsia had less ignorant townsfolk. They had the advantage of the Sacred Knights, home to increasingly many relti, being in the country, but even so, it did not take that much effort to educate oneself.
Nevertheless, Falin forced a smile at them. They paled and fell silent, but at least he had tried to be friendly. Even as a Paladin, he had to do as he was told if he was to advance, as was his and his family’s wish.
Many conservative noble houses in Gotria and elsewhere pined for their private motomancer forces and bemoaned their fall in the face of the Sacred Knights. There was no shortage of relti who could remember the twilight of that era. House Rivelda was more progressive. They recognized a continent-wide force, unified and impartial, as a good idea and as an opportunity.
If they were to fill the top ranks of such an organization, they could spread their influence throughout the land and prove reltus superiority while they were at it, after the human-dominated Sacred Knights had made so many forget. So, that was what they aimed to do. That was the core reason Falin was here. He took his responsibilities as a Knight and Paladin seriously as both one of them and a nobleman, but he had joined because of father’s scheme. There were others like him, not to mention other relti who had joined for unrelated reasons. The Twelfth Paladin and the dead former Second were both among the latter, but they served the cause whether they realized it or not.
Thirteenth was a far cry from the top ranks, but Falin had time. He would still be in his prime when most of his colleagues were decrepit or dead. Many would retire soon, anyway, moving him up again. He had been Eighteenth during the war.
Falin ate his lunch with slow, deliberate motions. The food here did not deserve proper etiquette, but Falin was loathe to discard it. The “stew” was much too watery to be called as such. It was a soup, plain and simple, but it wasn’t good at being that either. The broth had the favor of a rich and flavorful stew that had been watered down, not of a proper soup’s broth.
In the broth there was meat and assorted vegetables. The meat was overcooked and under-seasoned, while the vegetables were mushy and blasted with so much salt he couldn’t taste the actual vegetables at all. He might as well have been eating rock salt every time one found its way into his mouth.
At last, he was done. He pushed his bowl away, took a sip of water—which he was genuinely impressed at this point to find that they had not messed up—and stood.
“Will you be needing a room tonight, Lord Rivelda?” the innkeeper asked.
“No, thank you,” Falin replied brusquely.
It was too early to stop for the day, and he had no desire to stay in this disgusting backwater town if he did not need to.
“I suggest you and the others review how you treat your betters,” he added.
Not waiting for a response, he turned and walked out of the building.