Black Arcana

The priest faltered.

A ripple passed through the crowd.

Malgrave's eyes narrowed.

Lucien spread his bound hands as far as the rope allowed.

"Why stop at desertion and debt? Add drought in the eastern fields. Add the plague three winters ago. Add the collapse of the south watchtower." His smile turned sharp. "Why not add the death of the Second Prince while you're at it, since you're all looking to pin everything on me anyway?"

A few nervous laughs escaped before dying almost immediately.

The priest looked scandalized.

One of Malgrave's knights muttered a curse.

"Mind your tongue," the priest snapped.

"Why?" Lucien asked. "It's the last thing they'll let me keep."

The laughter did not return, but several faces turned away to hide reluctant amusement.

Even now, standing beneath his own gallows, Lucien could still play the fool.

It was the role everyone preferred. Easier than admitting the charges had grown longer every year he remained alive. Easier than asking why a disgraced third son warranted such a public execution at all.

Lucien smiled despite himself. Conduct unbecoming. That was the one they had all believed long before the war gave them better words.

He remembered the day he had awakened his ability. Eighteen years old, dressed in formal white, standing before the altar crystal in the great hall while half the province watched. His brothers had awakened bright, useful powers. Gareth had called steel to his hand before he even knew the shape of a blade. Cedric had awakened a battlefield aura that strengthened nearby allies and made knights clap him on the back as though he had already won wars he had not yet fought. Marian, younger than them all, had awakened the rare gift of living ink, able to bind contracts, maps, and messages with magic that could not easily be forged.

Then came Lucien.

The crystal had gone dark.

Not black. Not empty. Dark, like a candle struggling beneath a cup.

A single card had appeared above his palm, thin as paper and cold as moonlight. On its face was a painted lamb staring at a patch of grass. Beneath the grass, half-hidden in inked shadow, metal jaws waited open.

The examiner had frowned. The nobles had leaned forward. His father had stopped breathing for just long enough that Lucien heard it.

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"F-rank ability," the examiner had said, unable to keep the disappointment from his voice. "Tarot Draw."

Someone had laughed. Lucien never remembered who did it first. In memory, it always became everyone.

Later, they tested it. They asked if he could summon fire, strengthen his body, heal a wound, bend metal, command beasts, charm men, or produce any measurable magical force

, read minds, or even glimpse the future in any useful sense. That last question had sparked a brief flicker of hope among the gathered nobles. Tarot, after all, was associated with fortune-tellers, prophets, and seers in old stories.

So they tested that too.

They shuffled sealed letters and asked him to identify which contained a confession. They hid coins beneath cups and demanded he choose correctly. They brought merchants, servants, and knights before him and asked what secrets they carried. They even had him draw cards before a horse race and a mock duel.

His answers were inconsistent at best.

Sometimes the cards hinted at possibilities. Sometimes they reflected a person's nature. Sometimes they seemed to mock the question entirely.

One card showed a crown above a stable hand's head. Three years later, the man inherited a distant estate from a forgotten uncle.

Another showed chains around a knight who appeared perfectly free. A month later, gambling debts ruined him.

Yet when asked who would win the duel, the cards produced a fish.

The duel ended in a draw.

No one knew what to do with that.

It was not nothing. Lucien had known that even then.

But noble houses did not raise sons on "not nothing."

They raised them on banners, land, swords, heirs, alliances, taxes, and war. They raised them to be useful or dangerous, preferably both. A son with an F-rank omen ability was neither. He was a stain with a name.

Gareth stopped inviting him to train. Cedric began calling him Fortune's Beggar in front of the squires. Marian, sweet Marian, still tried to speak to him at first, but Lucien had been eighteen and full of the kind of pride that bleeds when touched. He made jokes before she could offer comfort. He smiled until she stopped trying.

And his father...

Lucien looked toward the balcony above the great doors.

Count Aldren Valehart used to stand there after morning court. Always straight-backed. Always severe. A man carved from duty and old stone. When the examiner announced Lucien's rank, Aldren had not shouted. He had not cursed. He had not struck him or ordered him away. He had only looked at Lucien for a long, unreadable moment, then turned his gaze toward the next petitioner.

Lucien had spent years hating him for that.

It had been easier than wondering whether disappointment could hurt a father as much as a son.

The soldiers brought him to the foot of the gallows. The steps waited.

The priest kept reading, but Lucien stopped hearing every word. Treason. Cowardice. Failure. Absence. The charges blurred together into one long rope that had been twisting around his neck since he was eighteen.

Lord Malgrave lifted one hand, and the priest paused.

"Lucien Valehart," Malgrave said, his voice carrying easily across the courtyard. "By mercy of noble blood, you are permitted final words before judgment is carried out."

That stirred something in Lucien. Not courage, exactly. Courage had always sounded too clean for what lived in him. It was more like irritation. A last coal under ash.

He raised his head and looked at the man standing beneath his family's stolen pillars.

"Mercy?" Lucien asked. His voice rasped, dry and ugly. "You build a gallows in my father's courtyard and call it mercy?"

A few servants flinched. One of the knights beside Malgrave shifted his hand toward his sword, but Malgrave only smiled.

"Your father's courtyard?" Malgrave repeated. "Your father died in service to the kingdom. Your eldest brother died with him. Your second brother remains in imperial chains, assuming he has not already been fed to their pits. Your sister married where she was commanded and lacked the strength to endure it. The one you call mother passed under grief and sickness after this house fell into debt and disarray. There is no Valehart household left, Lucien. There is only land, and land must be governed."

Lucien's fingers curled against the rope around his wrists.

There it was. The clean version. The version written by survivors.