My mistake in dealing with Hayla did have at least one positive. For better or worse, we were engaged now. One day, she would presumably have gotten married anyway, and she and her partner would have worked together to lead the town. That’s what she had been working towards, and while the current situation was surely a little different from how she had pictured all that, I believed that she would indeed give it her all.
What supported this belief, aside from her words, was that she knocked on the office door early in the morning, while everybody else was still asleep, and she now stood before me and Tomar, looking ready to get started.
“Good morning, Tomar,” she said.
“Hey... You’re up earlier than expected. It’s fine if you want to relax a little longer.”
“That’s okay, I don’t sleep a lot. We can start right away if you’d like.”
I somehow managed to doze off once more last night, but since we apparently needed less sleep if Tomar and I both slept, we had both been up before the sun rose. I went to get a headstart on our work, Hayla arrived shortly afterwards.
Now that she had freshened up and gotten some new clothes, it was more apparent that Berla and her were related, because there was a certain resemblance. Though Hayla appeared a little more professional and driven. If she hadn’t had her ritual the year prior, I might have said it was unusual for a teenager her age, but even then it would presumably be appropriate for a future queen.
“Well, alright then,” I said. “Let me ask you a few quick questions if you don’t mind.”
“Of course not.”
“You offered us a lot of information yesterday. But in your opinion, is there anything that requires our immediate attention? Aside from Arax I mean.”
“That depends. What is the current climate like in town?”
She told me that she had heard bits and pieces of conversations between guards from her cell, but she was missing quite a few details. Especially how the citizens had reacted to everything that was going on. All of this was pretty much common knowledge, so I gave her a quick rundown of the events since we took over. From announcing special rituals, to Eissen and Grym, to Hati, the attack, and finally Arax. That last point came as a surprise to her, and her professional facade did slip for a moment.
“Wha!? You...” she started. “Ehem. You told them about Arax? That was a bold choice. What if you can’t beat it?”
“Don’t worry about that for the moment. Our chances are very good. Well, assuming that I’ll be able to prepare for it.”
“Ah. I understand, you want to know whether you need to prioritize anything before you do whatever it is you need to prepare, while I take care of the day to day business.”
“Right, that’s exactly it,” I said. I wasn’t always the best at explaining my reasoning, but that was a perfect summary of what I had tried to say in a roundabout way.
“I assume you have planned to use the next two weeks, until the next delivery is due... In that case, I believe it should be fine to ignore the other issues for the moment. It sounds like the citizens are very happy, which will make it difficult to act against you directly. Even if Lilly isn’t here.”
“Alright, though I do need to ask about one thing. What do you know about black stones?”
This was the one topic that could potentially be relevant to our experiments, because any new application of stones or scripts might be helpful in dealing with Arax. If she knew something about black stones we didn’t know yet, I wanted to learn about it as soon as possible.
“They’re being sold as depressants on the black market by the boss.”
I blinked unbelievingly as my mind processed this sentence full of new information. They’re being sold, so there were presumably more than a few out there. The “boss” was involved, some figure I had never heard about, who was apparently a threat somehow. And this happened on a black market, which’s existence was news to me as well. Perhaps the most important part was what they were supposedly being used for.
“As a depressant...?” I asked. “You mean... they’re drugs?”
“Yes. People grind them to powder and ingest them. They supposedly cause one to relax and see fascinating things.”
Stones... are used as drugs... That’s so weird that I really can’t imagine she would make this up.
“What about other stones...?” I asked.
“To my knowledge, black stones are the only ones that have such an effect.”
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‘You’ll have to explain to me what drugs are later,’ Tomar said in my mind.
My first thought was that it seemed crazy that Tomar and I hadn’t heard anything about this yet, but if you thought about it, you wouldn’t typically run across people using drugs at every corner of a small town. Even if people knew that it was happening, it wasn’t necessarily a topic for smalltalk. Simply put, if there wasn’t a reason to talk about it, you could very well not learn about something like this.
I did wonder where the stones were coming from though. If this guy was getting his hands on black stones somehow, and enough to deal with them, he was probably a merchant or a Fighter. Someone who was able to leave the town. Or at least he had to know someone like that, who could bring such wares inside. The ones with the most contact to the outside world were the merchants who traveled to Cerus, making them the prime suspects.
“Are there any side effects? Are they addictive?” I wondered.
I was trying to understand why this was noteworthy enough for her to tell me, but not enough of a threat for anyone to do something about it. Either black stones were harmless and the administration ignored them, or there were problems with them and we would have to do something about it.
“I did hear that people tended to want to get them again, because of how special the effect is, but we didn’t have any real issues yet. I mainly mentioned it because I figured you would want to know about this application for stones,” she said with a smirk.
So she did trick me a little, I thought. This was most definitely interesting, and I was glad we knew about it now, but when she mentioned black stones, I had something else in mind, and she had been well aware of that.
“Well played,” I said.
“Thank you,” she said happily.
“But you said the boss is a threat,” I continued. “If he’s smuggling stones into town, without going through the stoner agency, it should be simple to find him, no? There can’t be too many people of interest.”
“Honestly, this information is still very fresh, and we don’t know a lot about him yet. We did check the last two caravans that returned from Cerus, but there were no leads. He seems to be very careful. What’s special about him is that he’s apparently been active for years, without any higher ups learning about it. We did recently capture someone who worked for him, however, and he ended up shedding light on a few things, which we were then able to confirm with other sources.”
“Hm, okay. And why exactly is he a threat?”
“For one, he’s supposedly responsible for a series of thefts and murders. But he’s also reportedly against any form of centralized government. It appears like he’s been slowly building up a network of people he trusts or has leverage over, and he was preparing to topple the king. Now he is surely coming for you.”
So a revolution was essentially already brewing somewhere behind the scenes, led by this guy?
Even if that was the case, the opposition and him might be separate groups, since Grym and Eissen had most definitely been loyal to the king. Then again, maybe he could’ve used them, making them believe any actions against us were helping the king.
Unfortunately, this information didn’t really answer any important questions, though it did make me trust in Hayla a little more, since her judgment that it could wait was probably correct. Whoever this was, he was playing the long game, and he wouldn’t suddenly try to ambush us in the middle of the day or anything like that. This had supposedly been going on for years, so he either had a specific plan, or he was waiting for a good opportunity. Either way, we would hopefully be fine for the next two weeks. Not to mention that there were apparently no strong leads at the moment. What this did mean, however, was that we might want to be careful about leaving the town. Because if he was waiting for an opportunity, all leaders going on vacation would certainly be one.
“Hm, okay. we should look into that, but for now I need to concentrate on other matters.”
“Right,” she said. “I suppose now that the public knows, there’s no room for failure. You know, I would like to learn more about what it is you’re doing exactly some time. All we had were theories.”
“I can imagine...” I said, as I glanced at her suspiciously. Of course she would want to know more. That’s what the Rulers and the temple had wanted from the start after all, and right now, this knowledge was essentially ruling the town.
“It’s not like that,” she said, looking a little disappointed. “I mean it, that I want to get to know you better. We’re bound for life after all. But I understand if you need a little more time. Commoners don’t usually take the holy marriage route after all.”
“Yea...”
She was right that this would take some getting used to, especially because I wasn’t thinking of this as a done deal. For her, we were as good as married, and these magical contracts apparently had some curious clauses in them. Like not being allowed to go behind your partner’s back or hurting them on purpose. While I disliked having agreed to this on accident, the premise actually didn’t seem terrible. It essentially guaranteed that you would treat each other well, and that you would keep your promise of taking care of each other, or you would suffer the consequences.
What exactly happens when you break the rules was apparently unknown, however. Berla told us that someone once fell ill after beating his wife, and that he had been at death’s door for a while until he recovered and turned into a passable spouse. There had also once been two Rulers who basically killed each other, because one stabbed his husband, and then died himself by an unknown cause shortly after. The consequences were serious, so a holy marriage wasn’t taken lightly.
For Hayla, this apparently meant that there was no reason to have any secrets or reservations on either side anymore, as she couldn’t use what I told her to try and hurt me. While I understood the theory, I really wasn’t quite ready to act on it. Not to mention that if there were ways around it, she would probably know. At the same time, I had to worry about the consequences of me trying to break the contract, though nothing had happened yet. I was hopeful that I could at the very least study the script without getting smitten to death, and once I understood it, I would presumably also know the exact terms.
“Until you’re ready, we can at least do good work together,” she said. “Do you want to get started?”
“Sure, let’s do that,” I said, and started explaining what I was working on. This took a little while, but she really did know what she was doing, as one might expect.
I didn’t foresee any problems with letting her take care of all this for the moment, so I eventually began to prepare for the rituals that would take place today. The first special rituals in Alarna.