After my tea with the princess, I pull Lance aside and ask him, “What did you think?”

Lance hesitates, then says, “I think the princess is innocent, simply because she can’t possibly be lying about loving her father, but she’s trying to find an advantage in this situation by any means necessary. She wanted to convert you to her cause, or at least find out what you know. She’s a wily one, you did well to hold your own, and not give her more information than you did.”

“I don’t feel I did well,” I reply with a shake of my head, “I felt shaken and inept.”

Lance pats me on the shoulder, “You did well considering how little experience you have,” he said encouragingly.

“That whole thing was a show to unnerve me, prevent me from thinking clearly and it worked, I felt weak. When Eleanor started threatening to execute me like that, I got scared, even if I knew it was probably a bluff. I don’t think I’m the right person for this job, maybe someone braver, more confident would have been better,” I confess.

Lance shook his head, “Let me share what my father once told me, courage isn’t about not having fear, it’s about facing your fear and doing your duty regardless. Only fools wouldn’t feel fear in that circumstance, but you pushed on, kept your cool. I think you’re too hard on yourself. Also, I think the king knew what he was getting when he asked for you, he wanted someone who had no ties to the noble factions on either side of that dispute, someone who could remain neutral in the squabbles between his children. The fact that you’re a powerful wizard was just a bonus.”

I nod and felt slightly better. I took a deep breath. “The queen might still be a suspect, despite all her theatrics, she did little to reduce my suspicion. Also, the fact that the princess is a mental mage could explain why the king’s mental magic defenses were almost triggered if she used her powers on someone else while near him… it might have nothing to do with the soul theft.”

“I thought Reginald acted a bit strangely,” Lance observed, “Something felt off about his behavior.

I nod in agreement but feel like I’m missing any information that would let me link the old court wizard to the whole affair. He could simply be regretting his life choices now that things have come to this point. Reginald would know how much damage inquisitors could cause, and they could end up finding him culpable somehow. But if that was the case, why did he seem angry that I was delaying their arrival?

From the political side, once the princess had started explaining her motivations, there wasn’t anything that seemed relevant to the theft of the king’s soul. She claimed that her brother the eldest prince was originally the crown prince, but he’d talked about ideas that the Mage Guild did not like. Specifically, he wanted to start a lower school for mages aimed towards preparing them for admission into the Magnus Academy. The Mage Guild had forced her father to name the second prince the heir instead. The princess wanted to restore her eldest’s brother’s rightful title, because she believed in his ideas.

Anyone who could cast a spell was called a mage. And the most common way for a mage to get good enough to get accepted into the Academy was to find a trained wizard to apprentice under first. Most mages had almost no real training and simply relied on wands produced by wizards the Mage Guild trained. In other words, the system was set up so that wizards had an oversized influence. The Mage Guild kept control by limiting the total number of wizards, and making no effort to properly train the vast majority of mages.

In the Adventurers Guild, mages were given practical training in combat and healing, but nothing else, meaning that they could never pass the admission exam which required an understanding of magical theory. The Adventurers Guild had no interest in losing mages to the Mage Guild, so they limited what training they offered.

If I hadn’t encountered Blackwing, I’d probably never have been able to pass the exam, she’d been my first true teacher. She’d taught me what I’d needed to know, and I felt an enormous debt of gratitude towards her.

By supporting a “prep” school, that would properly prepare mages for the admissions test, the eldest prince would be throwing the whole system out of balance. The Mage Guild would be forced to accept larger class sizes at their Academy. Wizards would become more common, and many of those new wizards would feel loyalty towards the kingdom where they received their early training, rather than the Mage Guild. This kingdom would become more powerful than its neighbors, possibly forcing the other kingdoms to create “prep” schools of their own, undermining the Mage Guild’s monopoly on advanced magic study. After all, if even if a pre-schooled mage didn't manage to become a full wizard, they'd still be better trained than most other mages.

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I shook my head, all of that got me no closer to solving this crime, but it made me think that the princess had no idea what forces she was toying with. I understood her argument, sure, but she acted like this was all a game, with no regard to the risks she was actually taking. The Mage Guild was a dangerous foe, and it had a good reason for acting the way that it did.

History taught us that in the past, magic was much more widely taught to all mages, and the result had been a society ruled by mages that ended in a cataclysmic Great Mage War. Society had not fully recovered from that, but the lessons learned had led to the formation of the Mage Guild tasked with regulating what was and wasn’t legal magics, and reducing the number of wizards a kingdom could employ to one; the court wizard. This was all done to try to avoid the possibility of another destructive mage war. So far it had worked, there had been very few wars between kingdoms, and they were of limited scope, fought mostly by soldiers and wand-wielding mages. The princess and the first prince were risking starting a magical arms race that could end that fragile peace just to weaken the power of the Mage Guild.

Primrose believed the princess was only supporting her eldest brother as some sort of ploy to let the princess be the last woman standing when it came time to inherit the throne, but if that was the case, it didn’t really benefit her at all to have her father be comatose. The princess had been cagey in her answers while under the effect of the truth spell, admitting she'd like to be queen, but claiming she had no intention of harming her brothers.

Nothing of the whole discussion had been conclusive, and towards the end, my attention had wandered. While listening to the princess, half my mind had continued to work on the problem from a different angle, and now I needed to confirm a few things.

“Let’s go back to talk to Conrad, I think I want to ask a few questions,” I told Lance.

“What happens when the king receives a visitor?” I asked Conrad, almost as soon as I entered his office.

“You mean the security arrangements?” He asked, scratching his chin. “Can you be more specific?”

“Does he meet anyone alone?” I asked.

“No, unless the king specifies otherwise, two guards will remain in his room with him at all times, and two will remain outside. The night before he fell comatose he did not meet with anyone alone, not even his wife. They do have separate bedrooms and since his health has started to fail they are not often intimate.”

I rubbed the bridge of my nose wishing I didn’t need to pry into these private details, but pressed on, “So he was never alone with anyone, and no one saw him touch some artifact and then fall over comatose.”

Conrad laughed, “Of course not, this whole affair would have been over much sooner if one of my men saw that happen. What is this about, what information do you have?” Conrad asked.

“The king had to have touched whatever stole his soul, so I’m trying to pinpoint when and how that happened,” I explained.

“The king retired for the night, and in the morning, no one could wake him…” Conrad mused.

I frowned, thinking deeply. I was getting close, what was I missing? “So after the last visitor left for the night, the king was still fine. But sometime later that night, he touched something that caused him to collapse comatose in the middle of his room?”

“He was comatose in bed, with his nightclothes on. The butler wasn’t able to wake him up in the morning. The guards were also present that morning, they let the butler in with the king’s breakfast. There wasn’t any way the butler could have pressed some artifact against the king without us knowing.”

“But no one stayed inside the king’s room while he slept.”

“Two guards stationed outside the only door to his room all night, his bedroom has no other entrances, not even windows.”

“Did any visitor give him anything, a gift, something he might not have touched until later?”

Conrad checked his reports, reading through what each guard had written down about what had happened that day. Conrad frowned. “The king’s nephew, Alexander, gave him something he’d found in the dungeon. An amulet that would ensure a good night’s sleep.”

I stared at Conrad, stunned he hadn't mentioned this before, “And this didn’t raise any alarm bells?”

“Of course we had that amulet examined, there was an enchant that did what the duke said it did. Besides, up until you mentioned it, we had no idea his soul had been taken… how were we supposed to know? We didn’t know that the artifact had to have touched the king, we didn’t even know an artifact was used. Up until you showed up, we all thought the king’s condition had been caused by some obscure poison,” Conrad defended himself.

Damn, I’d almost had it before, when Conrad had commented on my robe appearing to eat Blackwing, I’d been thinking about how that would make my robe a cursed piece of equipment. Had this all been caused by a cursed artifact? Only the dungeon produced cursed gear and finding a curse was deliberately made difficult by a dungeon. It required a skilled enchanter to discover hidden curses, and I was the only skilled enchanter working for the kingdom. Saddly, I'd been away inside the dungeon, or I might have been asked to examine that amulet personally.

Even ignoring the possibility of a curse, only the dungeon core knew how to create an artifact that could steal souls. And who’d recently come from the dungeon? The king’s nephew who’d I’d gone to try to rescue only for him to show up unexpectedly and go visit his uncle as soon as he got back.

I’d had all the clues all along, I thought bitterly, mentally kicking myself. I could have figured this all out before having to sit through that torture with the queen and princess.

“Where is that amulet now?” I asked.