Chapter 398 - 397- Celestia Earned Credits
Millbrook Square — Twenty Minutes Later
Viktor removed his cloak.
The evening air of the market square was cool enough to make the removal notable — the specific chill of a northern border autumn finding the gaps in a tunic — but he did it with the ease of someone who had decided that the cloak had served its purpose and was now an unnecessary layer.
He folded it over his arm.
He rolled his left shoulder — the joint making the specific sound of a shoulder that had been held in the same position for too long while doing something that required stillness, the pop of it settling back into comfortable configuration.
He looked at the square.
The market stalls were packing up. The fountain caught the last of the evening light. Somewhere in the middle distance, two of Celestia’s knights were carrying what appeared to be a load of firewood for an elderly couple, which was the third time today that specific image had appeared, and Viktor had found himself noting it each time with the specific attention of someone updating a mental document about what these people actually were.
He reached into his other pocket.
The artifact.
Small — palm-sized, roughly oval, the stone of it warm from his body heat, the etching around its circumference the work of Eldrin’s contact at the eastern market, a craftsman who specialized in recording devices for clients who needed plausible deniability about what they’d witnessed.
It had been running the entire time.
Everything Cassius had said. The figure’s responses. The transaction. The vial’s description. The agreement.
Every word, preserved in the crystal matrix of the recording artifact, ready for use in whatever context Viktor eventually decided to use it in — which might be immediately, might be months from now, might be the specific moment when having proof of a crown prince’s division agent conspiring to attack a ducal heir became the most useful thing he owned.
He turned the artifact once in his hand.
Then looked at his tail.
The black appendage — currently visible, curled at his side in the evening air outside the range of anyone near enough to see it, the spade-tip resting against his hip — was watching him with the specific quality that his tail had when it was being used as an audience.
Viktor looked at it.
"’Shai,’" he said.
The tail’s tip moved.
"Aren’t I too evil?"
The spade-tip rose. Fell. The incubus tail version of a shrug, which Viktor had learned to read over the months as: ’relative to what, exactly.’
"’Relative to,’" Viktor said, as if answering, "’a man who was going to do this anyway.’"
The tail was still.
"He was going to target the Ktorian knights with or without me," Viktor said. The square was quiet enough that he could speak at conversational volume without concern. "His unit’s been compressing since this morning. Fellan was already talking about killing hunters at the table before I even made contact — Rett confirmed it when I was in earshot outside the back window."
The tail tilted.
"What I did," Viktor said, "was point that energy at a specific target, provide it a specific tool, and attach a recording device to the transaction." He looked at the artifact. "When Cassius moves against Celestia, I’ll have proof of who sent him and what they gave him and what they promised in return. Which means I’ll have proof that the crown prince’s division is running operations against a ducal heir in a border territory."
The tail considered this.
Then performed what Viktor had learned to interpret as: ’and this is what you wanted from the beginning.’
"I needed Celestia to come here under circumstances that put her in my debt," Viktor said. "Or at least — that remove the institutional suspicion she arrived with. If I simply invited her, she’d come as an evaluator. If she comes because someone just tried to ’drug and ambush’ her escort and there’s an artifact recording who ordered it—" He put the recording device back in his pocket. "She comes as someone who owes me the answer to the question of ’how did you know.’"
He put his cloak back on.
The tail curled back into its usual position along his spine, invisible under the fabric.
Viktor looked at the tower.
At the golden-green of the World Tree’s canopy visible above its peak, the last of the sunset catching the leaves in the specific amber that made them look lit from within.
He had been standing in this square for approximately forty minutes.
In those forty minutes: he had established contact with a target, delivered a false but functional intelligence package, provided an artifact capable of incapacitating a target for exactly as long as he needed, attached a recording device that would document the subsequent events, and arranged the spatial pieces such that Celestia would arrive at the tower — where his wives and his pregnant household were currently residing — as someone who needed something from him rather than someone who was here to assess whether to need something from him.
He breathed.
The evening was ordinary around him.
"’Too evil,’" he said, to himself, to the tail, to no one in particular.
He turned toward the tower.
And stopped.
Market Street — Same Time
The credit notification arrived on Celestia’s interface at the moment she put the last bundle of kindling down.
She straightened.
The old woman in the doorway — eighty if she was a day, with the specific resilience of a person who had been surviving northern winters for eight decades and had developed an efficient relationship with the effort — had insisted on paying for the help and had been redirected three times before accepting that the young woman in the silver armor was not going to take coin for carrying wood.
"’You’re a good girl,’" the old woman said.
Celestia, who had a duchy, a knight’s title, and a father who expressed approval through the assignment of increasingly difficult military objectives, received this assessment and found she had nothing to add to it.
"’Stay warm,’" she said.
She turned.
The interface flickered at the edge of her vision — the credit system, which she’d been monitoring throughout the day with the peripheral attention of someone who had other things to do and was doing them — and the number in it was:
’’1,003.’’
Celestia looked at it.
Blinked.
Looked at it again.
One thousand and three.
Behind her, she heard the sound of the old woman’s door closing with the warm-wood sound of a door that was well-fitted and well-maintained, which in itself was a kind of testimony.
Her knights were spread across the market street’s end — six of them, the evening wrapping around them, each in the process of completing or concluding whatever had occupied the last hour. She could see Greaves helping a man right a fallen fence post at the lane’s edge. Torrin was returning a borrowed hammer to a smithy two doors down. The others were converging by natural gravity, the unit closing back toward itself as the day ended.
They all had interfaces.
She’d asked them to monitor, which was not the kind of order that needed to be given twice to the Ktor escort.
"’Sergeant,’" she said.
Greaves arrived at her shoulder with the efficiency of someone who had been waiting for the call. "’My Lady.’"
"’What are your numbers?’"
He checked. "’Eight hundred forty, my Lady.’"
She looked at the others as they arrived — the brief pause of each of them glancing at their interface and returning their eyes to her face.
Eight-forty.
Nine-twelve.
Seven-eighty.
Eleven-oh-six.
Nine-fifty.
And then Torrin, arriving last, wiping hammer-dust from his gauntlets: "’Fourteen hundred, my Lady.’"
Everyone looked at Torrin.
Torrin had the specific expression of a man who was trying to be modest about a number and wasn’t quite managing it.
"’You carried an entire cartload of timber this afternoon,’" Greaves said.
"’And helped re-seat three window frames,’" Torrin said. "’And found a missing child.’"
"’The child wasn’t missing, he was hiding.’"
"’The mother didn’t know that.’"
Celestia looked at her unit.
At the numbers in their interfaces — all of them, the full spread, the accounting of a day that had started in a market square and ended with a credit balance that meant something specific in this particular town.
Her knights — the Ktor escort, the Bulls as the capital called them behind their backs, the unit that the crown’s intelligence arm regarded as blunt instruments in silver plate — had spent one day in Millbrook and had, without instruction beyond ’we’re here to understand this place,’ simply done what they did.
The thing they always did.
She looked at the tower.
At the arch.
"’We can enter,’" she said.
Not dramatically. Not with the weight of announcement — just the statement of a fact that had become true, delivered in the same voice she used for ’the horses need water’ and ’dinner in an hour.’
But her knights—
They made a sound.
Six knights in silver armor, in a market street at evening, making the sound of six people who had been doing something difficult all day and had just found out it worked. Not quite cheering — they were Ktor trained, they didn’t ’cheer’ — but the specific collective sound of people who are genuinely, uncomplicatedly glad.
Greaves was smiling.
Greaves, whose face did approximately one full expression per year, was smiling.
Torrin’s fist hit his own pauldron with the muted ’clank’ of a man expressing satisfaction through the only available medium.
Celestia looked at them.
Something moved through her face that wasn’t quite a smile but was in the same family as one.
"’One at a time or all at once,’" Greaves said, practically.
"’Together,’" Celestia said.