Sylas Vane opened his eyes to the sensation of not feeling pain.
It took a while for the realization to come through.
For two years, it had been the dull throbbing in his withered hand, the fiery spear of pain in his liver, and the daggers in his knees as he lay on stone.
Pain had accompanied him when he woke up each morning, and pain had greeted him when he laid his head down to sleep.
Now he lay on a bed, a proper bed with a mattress not impregnated with mildew and lice, free from the coarse scratch of worn sheets, and sunlight came through a window (his window, in a room no larger than a closet, but his nonetheless) and illuminated his right hand.
His fingers twitched.
Sylas Vane stared at his hand.
The claw that had been his right hand for twenty-four long months flexed and unflexed, slow muscle movements bending the knuckles back and forth.
It was not the feeling of pain, or of pleasure, or of movement, but of nerve endings that had long since deadened, now coming back to life.
The door creaked open.
Elena Vance came into the room, a tray in her hands.
She was in her morning self, all severe lines scrubbed away in favor of a silver braid pinned back with a ribbon, the black, bruise-like shadows under her eyes set off by the fine, delicate bones of her face.
She was not as tall as Sylas would have expected, barely coming up to his shoulder, and not as broad in the shoulders either.
Nineteen, twenty maybe, and not as intimidating as the noble houses wanted their mercenaries to be.
“You’re awake,” she announced, setting the tray down with a metallic clatter.
“Good.
Magical restoration is more effective on a conscious subject.” She set the tray down on the small table: a broth, some crusty bread, and a flagon of water steeped with herbs and copper.
“Drink it all.
The mana transfer will leach your calcium, and you’ll break your bones if you try to wield a blade before the third day.” Sylas pushed himself up on his left elbow, his right hand (the dead hand) helping, muscles screaming in protest.
“You speak of me wielding a blade as if you expect it to happen,” he said.
“You will,” Elena said evenly, sitting on the bed and rolling up her sleeve to reveal the delicate scars crisscrossing her forearm.
“You will hold a blade in forty-five days, in ninety days you’ll be competent, and in a year you’ll be better than you were before the wyrm.” “And in two years?” Elena smiled.
“You will be splitting mountains in two.” She placed her hand on his forearm, and the world exploded in Sylas Vane’s mind with golden light.
He felt the magic flow through him, the tendons and shattered bones knitting themselves back together as the magic of the Golden Touch rewrote the damage in his memory.
He looked, and he saw veins of gold thread running up his arm, entwined with the black veins of necrotic tissue like ivy on a crumbling stone wall.
[DAILY INVESTMENT: ASSET #3] [RESTORATION: 0.02% → 0.05%] [NERVE REGENERATION: 3% COMPLETE] [ESTIMATED TIME TO FUNCTIONAL RESTORATION: 42 DAYS] Elena withdrew her hand and swayed on the spot, and Sylas noted the almost imperceptible paleness of her skin, the way her fingers trembled on their way down.
This was a drain on her, and she did it anyway without a word of complaint.
“Why?” he asked.
“Your price-to-earnings ratio was irresistible,” Elena said, standing and smoothing the front of her coat.
“Get dressed.
Lucien found us an estate, and we leave this afternoon.
And Sylas?” “Hmm?” “Don’t thank me.
Thank me when you can hold a sword.
Then we will discuss your dividend structure.” She left him alone in the room, and Sylas sat in the sun and flexed his fingers.
Hope was a most dangerous and terrible thing to feel in the wake of wyrm poison.
The estate was a ruin.
Elena stood before the iron gates, absently leafing through the papers that Lucien had produced with the satisfaction of a cat who had just killed a mouse.
It was a minor noble’s country house, gutted by fire five years previously, on the edge of the capital but not within the city, and the ruined manor stood at the end of a crooked driveway with the stables intact behind it and the gardens overrun with thorns that had given the estate its name.
It was perfect.
“Three hundred and ninety-nine crowns,” Lucien declared, adjusting his spectacles.
He always wore them, despite being perfectly capable of seeing without them, because it made him look older, and less like a bastard prince and more like a man of letters who dealt in secrets on the side.
“The landowner was desperate.
Gambling debts.
I bought it through three shell companies.
As far as the Registry is concerned, this property belongs to a religious charity that teaches magically disadvantaged veterans.” “Which is technically true,” Elena observed.
“Technically true is the best kind of true,” Lucien said, shouldering past the iron gates, which groaned in protest.
“It will require some work, but the thorn bushes provide adequate security and the cellar is larger than it looks.
I suspect it was used as a smuggling tunnel by the old gentleman’s grandfather.” “Will it hold up if we have to defend it?” Kael asked.
The former knight moved like a shadow among the thorns, his hand resting lightly on the hilt of his sword.
“How many approaches are there?” “One,” Elena said.
“It is surrounded by high walls and the thorns can be woven into barriers.
The cellars provide ample space.” “Good,” Kael said.
“We will make it our base of operations.
No one will think to look inside a ruin.” “Do you want to see it?” Elena asked.
She ascended the steps to the main hall, the door hanging askew on its hinges.
With a boot, she sent it swinging inward, revealing a cavern of dust and light, with birds scattering from the rafters.
“This is Vance Portfolio Holdings.
Lucien, you have the east wing.
Set up your end.
Kael, you have the grounds.
Sylas—” She stopped, as if she had forgotten him.
Sylas was a knight, but not a man of business, and a ruin was not the sort of place a crippled knight would have any use for.
“It is a ruin,” the knight said.
“It is a fixer-upper,” Elena said.
“No Academy regulations, no Duke’s spies, no palace protocol.
It is ours to make into whatever we wish.” She turned to face the group, Kael on her right, Lucien on her left, and Sylas in the doorway, his right hand curled against his chest like a bird.
“This is where we build,” Elena said, her voice echoing in the cavernous hall.
“Where the portfolio compounds.
Understand?” They looked at her—a King of Hell in the disguise of a guard, a bastard prince in the garb of an accountant, a crippled knight who had learned to uncurl his fingers—and nodded.
“Good,” Elena said.
“We begin, then.” The work began in earnest the week after the acquisition.
Lucien took possession of the largest remaining room in the east wing, papering the walls with maps, genealogy charts, and financial records.
He set up a courier system using street urchins who would sell their services for a crust of bread and a warm bed.
He filed away seventeen official documents, created four dummy corporations, and identified six members of the Imperial Council who were in hock to the wrong people.
Kael cleared the thorn bushes out of the inner courtyard, carving a practice yard out of the overgrown garden.
He measured the distances and marked them in the dirt, and set up targets—first stumps, then sacks of grain, then practice dummies made of the estate’s fallen trees.
He patrolled the walls at night, his B-rank aura suppressed but no less keen, and no one came to the estate unbidden.
And Sylas worked on his arm.
It was agony.
The nerve endings were alive with sensation, but the muscle tissue had atrophied over two years of lying motionless.
Every morning, Elena would apply the investment, and every afternoon, Sylas would force his fingers to close around objects: first a wooden spoon, then a leather ball, then a practice dagger that Kael had found in the cellar, left by smugglers.
On the seventh day, he held a sword.
It was only a practice blade, blunted and dull, that Kael had found in the bottom of the cellar—certainly not the finest weapon in the Empire—but Sylas wrapped his fingers around the hilt and the weight was familiar in his palm.
The muscles in his arm shook, his tendons screamed in protest, and tears of pain and something close to joy streaked down his cheeks, but he did not stop.
He raised the blade, then brought it down in an awkward arc that would have felled a drunkard.
“More,” Elena said.
The sword sang through the air again and again, until the seventh day ended and the eighth began.
By sunset, Sylas could perform a basic set of forms without dropping the blade.
By moonrise, his right arm was a mass of purple bruises, and Elena had to force him to stop.
“Depreciation,” she snapped, wrapping his arm in cold compresses.
“You’re damaging the asset.
Rest is part of the growth cycle.” “I can feel it,” Sylas whispered, staring at his hand as if it had grown wings.
“The sensation in the blade.
I can feel it again.” “Good,” Elena said.
“Because tomorrow, Kael’s going to hit you.” The spar was on the eighth day.
Kael kept his power in check.
Elena had warned him, specifically, not to use the Shadow Step or his demonic aura, to hold back until his strength was equal to a D-rank fighter.
Even so, he was a terrible opponent, moving with a grace and power that belied his unassuming build.
Sylas barely caught the first blow—shock alone almost wrenched the sword from his hand—and parried the second.
The third caught him across the ribs, a deft little tap that would have broken him if he’d been at full strength.
“Again,” Kael said.
Sylas went on the attack, a clumsy rush of motion that Kael deflected, sending him sprawling with a flick of his wrist, the practice blade tumbling end over end across the dirt.
“Again,” Kael said, and drove the blade into the earth between Sylas’s feet.
They went at it for an hour, until Sylas’s arm shook and his face was a smear of blood, but a feral grin curled his lips.
“You’re slow,” Kael said, gasping.
“You’re weaker.
Your form’s rusty.” “Yes,” said Sylas.
“But you still don’t flinch,” Kael noted.
“You don’t run from the fight.
That is…
good.” Elena stood in the stairwell, the candle’s glow spilling over the page of her ledger as she recorded notes.
A few brief figures—Kael’s advancement, Lucien’s reach, Sylas’s improvement—added to a growing body of information on a small, rising graph.
Asset #3: Combat instincts intact.
Psychological profile: High resilience.
Recommended training intensity: Maximum.
That night, Sylas located Elena in the study.
She was hunched over a tablet of parchment, making a spreadsheet out of candle wax as she noted the upward trend of Kael’s combat aptitude and the growing span of Lucien’s network.
Mostly busywork, the sort of thing she was likely to do all night if she wasn’t careful.
“My lady,” said Sylas.
Elena looked up and found him on his knees, not in the ingratiating dog fashion knights sometimes did if they knew their master, but in the kneeling of a man before a king.
“I am not whole,” Sylas told her, “but you gave me back my hand, my pride, my purpose.
I am yours, not as your slave, not as your asset, but as your knight.
And when I am strong enough, I will be your shield until the day I break.” Elena tucked her ledger away and came to him, running her fingers across his cheekbone in a gesture that might have been the Golden Touch if she’d touched any part of him, but her eyes weren’t gold, and all she really did was smile.
“Good boy,” she said.
“Don’t break.
Appreciate.” [TICK: Asset #3 training initiated.
Estate acquired.
Faction headquarters established.
Loyalty: 8 → 35.]