The Book of the Black Crown was older than the kingdom.
King Aldric knew that much. Every king of Varenhal was shown it once, at his crowning, and told never to speak of it. He remembered the old High Seraph opening it with gloved hands. He remembered a page of faded red ink and a drawing of a man with no face, wearing a crown made of something that wasn't metal.
He hadn't read the words. He'd been nineteen. He'd been more interested in the feast.
Now Ilvane opened it to the same page and stepped aside so he could see.
The ink had faded to the color of old blood. The script was the old tongue, the one only priests still learned. But under each line, some later hand had written a translation in the common script, small and careful.
In the age before the Accord, the light called heroes from beyond the world.Among them came one whose stone ran black.They named him Hero of Dominion, and he was mightier than all.He knelt to no crown. He became the Demon King.Nine kingdoms fell to him. The Holy Kingdom burned.Three hundred heroes died to end him.Let no stone run black again.
Aldric read it twice. The second time, his hands were cold.
"Three hundred," he said.
"From every kingdom on the continent," said Ilvane. "Summoned over forty years. It is why the old Accord was signed. It is why, for five centuries, no kingdom summoned more than a handful of heroes at once." She closed the book gently. "Until we did."
"We summoned twenty because we're losing." Aldric could hear his own voice rising, and he hated it. "Because the Empire took Fort Calder and Westmarch and they'll take Solenne by winter if..."
"I know, Your Majesty. I advised it."
He turned away from the book. The moon was full and white over the city. Below, the lamps were being lit along the Street of Saints. He'd walked that street every day of his childhood. He thought about it burning.
"The boy says he was framed," Aldric said.
"Perhaps he was."
The king looked at her sharply.
Ilvane only folded her hands. "I do not know what happened in their world, Your Majesty. Neither do you. Perhaps every word he spoke was true. It does not matter." She stepped closer. Her voice dropped. "You watched him in the yard. He did not hesitate. He did not shake. He walked to the most experienced knight in your kingdom and took his sword before Brannoc could move. On his first day."
"A Mythic class," Aldric said slowly. "With a Mythic on our side, the war would be over in a year."
"With a Mythic who will not kneel," Ilvane said, "there will be no side to be on."
The king said nothing.
Outside, the bells rang. Somewhere far below, in the cells beneath the Hall, a boy from another world was sitting in the dark. Aldric tried to picture his face and found he couldn't. He'd only seen it from the chair. Calm. Watching the room like he was measuring it.
Like he was deciding what it was worth.
"What would you have me do?" he asked.
"Nothing that has not been done before," Ilvane said. "The Seal of Grace."
Aldric frowned. "On a hero?"
Something passed over the High Seraph's face, too fast to read. "It binds the will of the one who bears it," she said. "He will not be able to raise a hand against the Church or the crown. He can still fight. He can still serve. He will simply never be able to choose otherwise."
"And if it fails?"
"Then he dies at dawn," said Ilvane, "and we tell the people why. A hero who murdered a hero. The kingdom will understand."
She said it the way she said everything, softly, kindly, like a mother explaining something unpleasant to a child.
Aldric looked out at his city for a long time.
Then he nodded.
Ilvane bowed and lifted the book from the lectern and carried it out of the chapel, and the king stood alone with the moon. Only later, lying awake, would he remember the page after the prophecy. The one he'd glimpsed when she closed the book.
It had been torn out.
***
The Church's cells were nicer than the palace's. That was what bothered Ren about them.
The walls were white stone, smooth and clean. There was a cot with a real blanket. The torch outside the bars burned in a bronze holder shaped like an open hand. Someone had even left a cup of water and a bowl of bread by the door.
And the chains on his wrists were silver, etched all over with tiny lines of script that glowed faintly when he moved. He could feel them. Not as weight. As a kind of pressure, steady and soft, like someone resting a hand on his chest and leaning.
He sat on the cot and looked at the guards.
There were two of them, standing on either side of the corridor in white tabards over silver mail. Church knights. Not Brannoc's men. These ones had a sunburst painted on their breastplates and the kind of stillness that came from years of standing exactly like that.
Ren opened Read the Field.
Radiant Knight · Level 24Radiant Knight · Level 22
That was all he got. Names, classes, levels. He tried to push for more, the same way he'd pushed through his skill list that morning, and felt the skill strain and hold. Not yet. It needed more levels.
He closed it and opened his own screen instead, and read Kneel again.
Kneel (Active): Authority against Will. A weaker target cannot rise.
Authority against Will. His was 25. Takeru's Will at Level 1 had probably been eight or nine, and Kneel had dropped him like a sack. A Level 24 knight would have more. How much more, Ren couldn't tell. A soldier's class wouldn't put much into Will. It might not be enough to stop him.
The author's posting is the proper source for this chapter, but someone copied it here without permission.
Or it might.
He was still thinking about it when he heard footsteps.
They weren't a guard's. Too heavy and too slow. One of the knights stepped aside, and a broad shouldered shape came down the corridor and stopped in front of the bars.
Hasegawa Tetsuo.
He'd changed out of his suit into a gray tunic someone had given him. It didn't fit well. It pulled across his shoulders. He looked like he hadn't slept at all, and Ren supposed that was fair. Neither had he.
They looked at each other through the bars.
In a year of hearings, they'd never been this close. There'd always been a courtroom between them. Lawyers. Railings. Now there was only a few feet of stone and a line of silver bars, and Ren could see the gray in the man's stubble and the red at the edges of his eyes.
"The priests let me come," Tetsuo said. His voice was low and rough. "I told them who I was. They seemed happy about it."
"I'm sure they did."
"You said he was driving."
Ren didn't look away. "He was."
"You've had a year to say that."
"I said it every day for a year," Ren said. "To the police. To my lawyer. To the prosecutor. I said it at every hearing you sat through. Nobody wrote it down."
Tetsuo's jaw tightened. "Six people."
"Six people with reasons."
"What reasons?"
"Ask Daiki what his family's ramen shop is worth now," Ren said. "Ask him who paid off the loan. Ask Yui how she ended up dating the man who took her boyfriend's keys. Ask any of them what Saionji Kenji promised them the morning after."
The torch hissed in its bronze hand.
Tetsuo stood there with his fists at his sides, breathing through his nose. Ren watched him think. He'd watched a lot of people think about him this year. Most of them had already decided before they started.
Tetsuo hadn't. Not yet. Ren could see that, and he didn't know what to do with it.
"You killed him," Tetsuo said finally. "Saionji. If you're telling the truth, he was the only one who could ever have confessed. You killed him before he could."
"He was never going to confess."
"You don't know that."
"I do," said Ren. "I knew him longer than you did."
Tetsuo turned away. He took two steps up the corridor.
Then he stopped, his back to the bars, and spoke without turning around.
"The paramedics said someone was holding her hand when they got there," he said. "Kneeling in the road next to her. They said it in court, at the first hearing. The prosecutor said it was the driver, trying to make himself look better." His voice went very quiet. "Did she say anything?"
Ren thought about the road. The cold. The lanyard with the hospital badge. Her open eyes.
"No," he said. "I talked to her. I don't think she heard me. I stayed with her anyway."
Tetsuo didn't move for a long time.
Then he walked away up the corridor, and the knight stepped back into place, and Ren was alone with the torch again.
***
They came for him an hour before midnight.
Six Radiant Knights this time, not two. They didn't say where they were taking him and Ren didn't ask. They walked him down a spiral stair so long his legs started to burn, past landings with doors he never saw open, until the air went cold and damp and smelled like old wax.
The room at the bottom was round. The ceiling was low. Candles stood everywhere, hundreds of them, on the floor and in niches in the walls, so many the air shimmered with heat. In the middle of the floor, a circle had been carved into the stone. Not the gold circle from the summoning. This one was smaller and tighter and filled with lines of script so dense they looked like woven thread.
Twelve priests stood around it in white robes. Ilvane stood at its head.
"Kneel in the circle, hero," she said.
Ren looked at her. Then he stepped into the circle and stayed standing.
One of the knights kicked the back of his knee. He went down. He didn't make a sound.
Ilvane didn't seem to mind. She lifted her hands, and the twelve priests began to chant.
It was low at first. A hum more than words. Then it rose, and the lines carved into the floor began to glow, white, then gold, crawling inward toward Ren like ink soaking into paper. He felt it reach his knees. His thighs. His chest. It wrapped around his ribs and squeezed.
Ilvane stepped forward with a rod of white metal in her hand. The end of it shone like the sun.
"By the light that called you," she said, "be bound to the light that keeps you."
She pressed it to his chest, right over his heart.
The pain was enormous. It didn't burn like fire. It burned like something trying to get in. He felt it push through his skin and his ribs and keep going, deeper, reaching for the place behind his eyes where he did his thinking. Where he made his choices.
The System opened in front of him on its own.
Seal of Grace applied.Binding will... 12%
The priests chanted louder.
Binding will... 31%
Ren felt it like hands closing around his thoughts. Soft hands. Patient ones. He thought about the knights and suddenly didn't want to hurt them. He thought about Ilvane and felt something close to gratitude. It wasn't his. He knew it wasn't his. It slid into him anyway, warm and easy, like falling asleep in a car.
Binding will... 54%
Like falling asleep in a car.
Something in him went cold.
He'd done that once. He'd closed his eyes and let go, and he'd woken up in a seat he never chose, with keys in his hand that someone else had put there.
He was never doing that again.
He didn't know how he did it. He just pushed. The same way he'd pushed when he said Kneel in the yard, from the same place under his ribs where the System beat like a second heart. Except this time he didn't push outward. He pushed back.
Authority resisting.Binding will... 63%Binding will... 68%Binding will... 71%
The numbers slowed. Then they stopped.
The priests' chanting stumbled. One of them, a young man near the back, had gone pale and was sweating through his robe. Another put a hand on the wall to steady himself. The gold light in the circle flickered.
Seal of Grace: Incomplete (71%).Effect: Pain when raising a hand against the Church of Radiance.
Ilvane pulled the rod away.
For a moment, the room was silent except for the candles. Ren knelt in the circle with his chest smoking and his breath coming hard, and looked up at the High Seraph.
She was still smiling. But it had gone thin at the edges, like paper about to tear.
"Remarkable," she said softly.
She handed the rod to a priest and turned to the knight captain. "Return him to his cell. We begin again at dawn. Every priest in the city. Every one." She paused. "And have the yard prepared."
The captain didn't ask which yard, or for what. He just bowed.
***
Ren lay on the cot with his eyes closed and his hand pressed over the brand on his chest. It still hurt. It hurt in a way that went past skin, like a splinter in his thinking.
He tested it. He pictured the guard outside, and pictured hitting him.
The brand flared, white hot, and his whole body locked up. He bit down on his tongue so hard he tasted blood. It took a full minute before he could breathe right again.
Seventy one percent. Not enough to make him obey. More than enough to make him pay for it.
At dawn they'd finish it. Or they'd take him to whatever yard they were preparing, and finish him instead.
He lay there and thought about that for a long time. He was surprised by how calm he felt. Maybe it was the year. Maybe it was the System. Maybe once you'd lost everything, losing the last part just didn't feel like much.
He was almost asleep when he heard footsteps again.
Light ones this time. Quick and careful. Then a whisper, and the clink of something small changing hands, and the guard's footsteps moving away down the corridor.
Ren opened his eyes.
Ogawa Sumiko stood at the bars. She was wearing a gray cloak too big for her, with the hood pulled up. Her glasses caught the torchlight. Her hands were shaking, and she was gripping the bars to make them stop.
"Kuroda-kun," she said.
He sat up slowly. "Ogawa-sensei."
She opened her mouth. Closed it. He watched her try three times, like someone standing up in court with no notes. Then she let out a long breath and said it.
"I owe you an apology."
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