They questioned the commoners in the old dining hall, one at a time, behind closed doors.
The Holt knights took over the room like it belonged to them.
They moved the long tables against the walls, put a single chair in the middle of the floor, and set up a desk in front of it with a lamp and a stack of paper.
The students of Class D sat on benches in the corridor outside and waited to be called.
Nobody talked much.
Every few minutes, the door opened, someone came out pale and shaking, and a knight read out the next name.
Mira went in before him.
She came out twenty minutes later with her jaw tight and her hands in fists.
“They asked about you,” she said quietly, as she passed his bench.
“Over and over.
Where you were on Saturday.
If you ever talked about Holt.
If you hated him.” She looked at him.
“I told them you were too busy carrying things to hate anyone.”
“Thank you.”
“Don’t thank me.
Just don’t be stupid in there.”
The knight at the door read his name.
Aren stood up and went in.
The captain of the Hawk Knights was a lean man with a short grey beard and very still hands.
He did not stand when Aren came in.
He pointed at the chair, waited until Aren sat, and then looked at him for a long time without saying anything.
Aren let him look.
He kept his shoulders a little hunched and his eyes a little low, the way a servant sat in front of a lord.
He let his hands shake slightly in his lap.
It was not hard.
In his old life, he had sat across from tax investigators, angry partners, and once a very calm man from a very large bank who had wanted to know where eleven million dollars had gone.
The trick was never to look calm.
Innocent people were nervous.
Only liars were calm.
“Aren,” the captain said finally.
“No family name.
Servant class.
Rank F.” He looked at his papers.
“Lord Darius beat you in front of the Academy on the day of your trial.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Witnesses say he threw you at a Rank D monster in the Training Rift.
And that he called you Zero, and made you kneel in the training yard, and once broke a practice sword over your back.”
“Yes, sir.”
“That is a great deal of reason to hate a man.”
Aren lifted his eyes for a moment, then dropped them again.
“Lord Darius is a noble, sir.
I’m a servant.
Hating him would be like hating the rain.”
The captain wrote something down.
“Where were you on Saturday night?”
“In my bed, sir.
In the scholarship dormitory.”
“Can anyone confirm it?”
“Fenwick Gale sleeps in the room next to mine, sir.
The walls are very thin.
If I had left, he would have heard the door.” Aren paused.
“And he snores very loudly, sir, so I would have heard if he left too.
Neither of us did.”
It was a good answer, because it was partly true.
Fenwick did snore.
The door to Aren’s room did creak.
He had climbed out of the window instead.
The captain looked at him for another long moment.
Then his eyes dropped to Aren’s hands, folded in his lap.
To the scabs across his knuckles.
“What happened to your hands, boy?”
Aren had known this would come.
He had thought about wearing gloves and decided it would look worse.
“I fell down the dormitory stairs, sir.
On Friday.
I was carrying Lady Ashgrave’s books.”
“You fell down the stairs.”
“They’re very old stairs, sir.”
The door behind him opened before the captain could answer.
Aren heard heavy footsteps on the stone floor, slow and uneven, the steps of a big man in armor who had walked a lot in his life.
The captain stood up at once.
“Your Grace.”
The Duke of Holt came around the chair and looked down at Aren.
Up close, he was enormous, with a grey beard and a face like weathered stone.
His eyes were red at the edges.
He smelled of horses and old wine and something else, something that Aren had smelled once before, at a funeral in another life.
“This is the one?” the Duke asked.
“The commoner my son wrote about?”
“Yes, Your Grace.”
The Duke looked at Aren.
Aren kept his head down and let his hands shake in his lap.
“Look at him,” the Duke said finally, and his voice was thick with contempt.
“A servant with a combat aptitude of zero.
He could not kill a chicken.” He turned away.
“You are wasting time, Captain.
My son did not die at the hands of this.
Find me someone worth hanging.”
“Yes, Your Grace.”
“Get out, boy.”
Aren got out.
He did not sleep that night either.
He lay on his mattress and listened to the Academy.
He listened to the Holt knights changing guard at the gates.
He listened to the rumors moving through the scholarship dormitory, passed from room to room in whispers.
By midnight, he knew most of what had happened that day in the Headmaster’s tower.
The Duke of Holt had demanded that Vivienne Ashgrave be arrested.
Corwin, the Ashgrave steward, had been forced to admit that she had gone alone into the Old Quarry on the same night that Darius disappeared.
The Duke of Ashgrave had arrived from the capital by fast carriage at sunset, and the two dukes had shouted at each other in the Headmaster’s office for an hour, loud enough to be heard on the stairs.
Vivienne had been confined to her rooms in the Ashgrave wing until the matter was settled.
Aren lay in the dark and did the math.
If the Holts could prove anything at all, or even make enough people believe it, Vivienne would be finished.
Not hanged, probably.
The Ashgraves were too powerful for that.
But expelled, disgraced, sent home to her father’s estate, never allowed near the Academy again.
And with her, every investment he could ever make would be locked away somewhere he could not reach.
His Primary Anchor would stop growing.
His only real source of returns would be gone.
Those were good trader’s reasons.
He held onto them.
At one in the morning, he got up, cut open the side of his mattress, and took out the small glass vial he had hidden there two weeks ago.
It still had a faint bitter smell.
The label tied around its neck said Ashgrave, Vivienne in the alchemist’s neat handwriting.
It was the real one, the one he had taken out of the cabinet.
The one Darius had paid Pell to poison.
He wrote a note on a scrap of paper, in large, plain capital letters, nothing like his own handwriting.
THIS WAS IN THE TONIC CABINET THE NIGHT BEFORE THE CEREMONY.
IT IS NOT CLEARWATER.
ASK PELL WHO PAID HIM.
The Headmaster’s tower had four Holt knights at the bottom door.
Aren did not use the bottom door.
He went in through the kitchens, where the night porter’s keys still opened everything, and up the narrow service stairs that the maids used to carry firewood to the Headmaster’s office every morning.
The stairs were dark and very old, and they came out behind a small door in the wall beside the Headmaster’s fireplace.
He had carried wood up them once, during his first week as porter.
The office was empty.
The fire had burned down to red coals.
Moonlight came through the tall windows and lay across the desk, across the letters and papers from two angry dukes.
He set the vial in the middle of the desk, on top of everything else, with the note folded beneath it.
Then he went back down the service stairs and out through the kitchens and up to his room, and lay down on his mattress, and waited.
[Investment recorded.]
[Type: Hidden aid.
Anchor unaware.]
It happened very fast after that.
In the morning, the Headmaster called both dukes to her office, along with the Holt captain and the Ashgrave steward.
Aren heard about it at breakfast, from a girl in Class C whose cousin worked in the kitchens.
By lunch, the alchemist had been called up the tower.
By the afternoon, everyone knew that the alchemist had tested the liquid in a strange vial and found a root called dullroot mixed into it, and that the vial had been made for Lady Ashgrave’s Awakening.
By evening, the Holt captain had ridden out to the Old Quarry with ten knights, to search the place where Lady Ashgrave had been on the night of Darius’s death.
They came back after dark.
They were very quiet.
They carried three crossbows with them, and three long shapes wrapped in cloaks and tied across the backs of their horses.
On each cloak, sewn in silver, there was a hawk with its wings spread.
Nobody had to explain it to anyone after that.
The whole Academy put the story together in one night, and it was a simple story.
Lord Darius had paid an alchemist to poison Lady Ashgrave’s tonic before her Awakening.
When that failed, he had followed her into the Old Quarry with three men and crossbows.
Something had gone wrong in the dark, the way things went wrong in Rifts, and the Rift had taken all four of them.
The next morning, the Headmaster announced that Lady Vivienne Ashgrave was free to return to classes, and that the Academy considered the matter closed.
The Hawk Knights left at noon.
They rode out through the main courtyard the same way they had come in, two by two, but much more slowly.
The students lined the steps to watch them go.
Nobody cheered.
Nobody laughed either.
It was very quiet.
At the very end of the column rode the Duke of Holt.
He looked ten years older than he had two days ago.
His face was grey under the beard.
Aren was standing at the edge of the courtyard with a crate of laundry in his arms, because Crane had sent him to the washhouse that morning.
He kept his head down as the horses passed.
The Duke’s horse stopped beside him.
Aren did not look up.
He stood with the crate in his arms and stared at the stones between the horse’s hooves.
“My son wrote me a letter, boy,” the Duke said.
His voice was rough and very low.
“The week before he died.
A long letter, all about the Academy.
His classes.
The Ashgrave girl.” He paused.
“And you.”
Aren said nothing.
His heart was beating so hard he could hear it.
“He said you were the strangest commoner he had ever met,” the Duke went on.
“He said you never looked afraid.
Not once.
Not even on the floor.” Another pause.
“He said it made him want to hit you harder.”
The horse shifted its weight.
The Duke looked down at him for a long, long moment.
Then he rode on, out through the great gate, and the gate swung closed behind the last of the Hawk Knights.
Aren stood in the empty courtyard with the laundry in his arms until his hands stopped shaking.
Then, very quietly, the blue window opened in front of him.
[Primary Anchor progressed: The Duke of Ashgrave has granted his heir the family technique, Moonlit Step.]
[Source: Investment recorded.
Hidden aid.]
[Mirror Return triggered.]
The small wheel spun in the empty courtyard.
It slowed.
It stopped.
[Result: x100.]
[Skill acquired: Moonlit Step (Grade A).]
[Investment Board updated.]
[New hostile individual within range: Aldric Holt, Duke of Holt.
0% → 17%.]
He read the last line twice.
The Duke did not hate him yet.
But the System had seen something in that long look, and it had started counting.