The bandit fiasco had turned Castle Blackfyre into a beehive.
Servants whispered in corners as they polished armor and scrubbed blood out of gambesons. Pages lingered too long in the barracks, pretending to fold cloaks while actually eavesdropping on veterans retelling the battle in increasingly ridiculous detail.
"—I tell you, there were a hundred of 'em," one recruit said, eyes wide, miming an explosion with his hands. "All mages. The Lord just walked into their spells. Armor of fire, sword of light—"
"Idiot," a scarred spearman snorted. "There were forty. That's what the Captain said."
"Forty Barons," another soldier added, lowering his voice reverently. "Not hedge-mages. Baron-rank. All trained. And Lord Reitz still turned half of 'em into glass."
"Aye," the spearman muttered, rubbing at a fresh bandage on his arm. "And nearly died for it. You lot forget that part too easy."
Up in the kitchens, the story warped further.
"It was seventy," a kitchen maid insisted, stirring a pot of broth so aggressively it sloshed over the sides. "And they say the canyon is still burning where he fought."
In the laundry, someone swore the Ashbringer had wrestled the earth itself with bare hands.
By the time the rumors reached the outer walls, Lord Reitz Blackfyre had apparently taken on an army of a thousand mages alone, shouted at the mountains till they cracked, and only survived because the Rex Imperia himself sneezed in his direction.
Reitz lay in his bed, staring at the carved wooden beams of the canopy as if the grain held answers.
It didn't.
The bed was large enough for three grown men to sleep without touching, a concession to his size and status. Right now it made him feel small. The mattress had been stuffed with fresh straw and covered with thick quilts, but every time he shifted, a sharp jab lanced through his side.
The artifact dagger had done its work well.
The wound itself—a crescent of blackened flesh just under his right rib—had been sealed with a combination of high-level restoration magic and mundane stitching.
The blood stopped pouring freely. The worst of the external damage had knitted. The fever stayed just below the point where he started seeing double.
But the leak…
That remained for now.
Every time he closed his eyes and reached inward, he could feel it: mana slipping away in a slow, steady seep from the damaged channels near the wound. His core still roared compared to a normal man's, but compared to what it should be, it felt like someone had drilled a pinhole into the side of his reservoir and walked off.
"Residual curse," Maester Grimfire had said, voice dry and gravelly. "Subtle, clever. Not the sort of thing one puts on a common bandit's blade, my lord."
"Can you fix it?" Reitz had asked.
"Not quickly," Grimfire had admitted. "And not entirely, I wager. It will heal—your constitution is too strong for it not to—but it will leave a scar."
Reitz had grunted and told him to do what he could.
Now, with the Maester gone and the light from the high windows slanting across the chamber, he had nothing left to distract him but his thoughts.
They didn't act like bandits, he thought, for the twentieth time.
He replayed the canyon in his mind: the way the earth had moved in concert, the timing of the traps, the comfort with which they'd targeted his blind spots. The sandstorm, the cannonball to the wound, the triangulated boulders, the follow-up shots aimed not at his head, but at the exact place his channels had been damaged.
Their strike tactics were military.
Not conscript-military. Not "farmer with a spear" military.
This was the work of men who'd drilled together for years, who'd fought trueborns before, who'd been taught to ignore panic and read aura fluctuations.
Their coordination was flawless—too flawless. Not lordling rabble; this was Imperial doctrine written all over their movements.
Whoever was behind them had deep pockets and the right kind of connections. They'd hired Baron-level combatants—likely bastard sons of nobles conscripted into private armies, or washed-out heirs with enough talent to be dangerous and enough bitterness to be bought.
The recent policies had changed the shape of the Empire. By allowing bastards and gifted commoners to rise through military service, the throne had gained talent… but so had everyone who could afford to poach those same men once their term was done.
He grimaced.
Anyone with enough coin could scrape together a handful of third-circle or Baron-capacity mages. But they wouldn't move like this. They wouldn't think in layers, set traps on traps. And on top of that bribe a Sworn Knight?
His chest tightened slightly—not from the wound this time.
Sir Allister's face flashed unbidden in his mind. Not the sneer he'd worn in the canyon, but the calm, earnest expression he'd worn the day he'd knelt and offered his blade.
"I will stand between you and all blades, my lord. This I swear upon my House and my life."
Reitz had believed him.
He always tried to believe the men who swore to him.
How did they get to you? Reitz wondered, staring at the ceiling. Coin? Threats? Your family…?
Allister's wife and children had vanished a week before the campaign.
Reitz had heard about it—someone had mentioned something in passing—and he'd assumed the Knight had quietly relocated them because of the growing bandit activity. Sensible. Loyal. Responsible.
He'd been too distracted with Ezra to push.
It was a failure of intelligence.
His failure.
He snorted softly to himself. The sound hurt.
"Are you sulking?" he asked the ceiling.
It declined to answer.
He shifted again, trying to find a position that didn't hurt. The motion tugged at the stitches and sent a spike of pain through his side. He hissed between his teeth.
As the sting ebbed, his thoughts drifted to the larger board.
His title was Earl, on paper.
In practice, his domain was the size of a Dukedom, and his power rivaled a Primarch seat holder. As one of the Augmenti—the Rex Imperia's reserve force, called when the Empire needed a hammer rather than a scalpel—he lived in a strange limbo. Too useful to strip. Too dangerous to ignore.
His situation was precarious to say the least. His direct superior was the Primarch himself. Technically he should be safe from the downward pressure of the Aufstiegrecht. The Rex himself would not sponsor a hit squad. The power disparity was too high anyway and for Aufstiegrecht to be invoked, plus Aufstiegfrieden for the Rex himself could only be excercised by the Primarchs. While he was a seat contender, he wasn't in any position to directly challenge them, at least not yet.
He had many enemies who envied his position.
Ambitious Dukes chafing under the Edicts. Primarch-aligned Houses who resented the land carved out of their spheres and given to a "nobody Fire brute." Magistrates whose schemes he'd smashed by accident or design.
But he couldn't quite pin down who would go this far.
Primarchs had their own personal arsenals. Magistrates had coin and shadows. Both had reasons to keep a man like him off the board's next cycle, when every vassal with a grudge and enough mana could theoretically come knocking with a legal challenge.
"Kill the piece before the game starts," he muttered. "That it?"
He was still chewing on that thought when the door creaked open.
"You bloody bastard, Reitz," a familiar voice drawled from the doorway. "Did you want to die so bad that you attacked forty mages alone? Are you wrong in the head? You large piece of shite?"
Reitz turned his head, and for the first time since waking up, he smiled without forcing it.
Aaron Bedross lounged in one of the chairs by the window as if he'd always been there. He hadn't bothered with formality. No banner, no squire, no armor. Just a simple tunic of dark green, the Bedross crest stitched small at the collar, and trousers tucked into scuffed riding boots.
He looked… annoyingly whole.
brown hair, slightly mussed from the ride. High-bridged nose, lips curled into a lazy smirk. His eyes—sharp, calculating, and entirely too amused—took in Reitz's bandages with unabashed relish.
To the outside world, Aaron Bedross was a pious, scholarly Viscount of Fulmen—a man of the soil, devoted to his people, known for his donations to temples and his "regrettably charming" presence at court.
Reitz knew better.
The man was a shamelessly effective womanizer and a lethal earth mage who treated decorum as something to weaponize, not obey.
"Shut up, you little fucker," Reitz grunted, shifting painfully in the bed. "Can't you give it a rest?"
He called him "little" out of habit.
Aaron was taller than him now.
When they were children, Aaron had been the runt—a runny-nosed lordling with perpetually dirt-stained cheeks, trailing after Reitz and insisting on joining every stupid stunt. He'd been the one Reitz had dragged out of rivers and off collapsing tree branches.
Somewhere along the line, he'd grown into himself.
Now he was all long lines and composed smiles, the sort of man noblewomen believed they could "fix."
Reitz knew he didn't need fixing.
"I rode two days without sleep to keep you from dying like a dramatic idiot in a hole," Aaron said, hand over his heart in mock-affront. "This is the thanks I get? Insults?"
"You dropped one wall," Reitz shot back. "And you were late."
Aaron clucked his tongue.
"Forgive me for not foreseeing that you would leap into a canyon full of trained Noble-rank mages after being stabbed by your own Knight," he said. "I must add 'clairvoyance' to my studies."
"I could have easily killed all those bastards if I wasn't backstabbed by that two-faced rat of a Knight," Reitz continued grumpily, ignoring the way his side chose that moment to throb in agreement.
"Oh, of course," Aaron said solemnly. "You simply chose to bleed all over the canyon floor. A strategic decision."
Reitz glared.
Aaron's smirk widened.
"Well, look what happened to the Great Ashbringer now, eh?" the Viscount went on, inspecting his fingernails as if they were more interesting than Reitz's existence. "Stuck in bed with bandages like a lowborn idiot. You should have thought of the consequences when you fought them. I imagine you would not want to leave your beautiful wife with my handsome self? Oh, I would enjoy her thoroughly as she services my man—"
CLANG.
His hand shot out, grabbed the heavy brass washbasin from the bedside table, and hurled it with the kind of casual, reflexive force that would have shattered stone.
Aaron didn't even flinch.
A small wall of earth rose from the floorboards, catching the basin with a dull thud.
"Hey, hey! I was just jesting!" Aaron laughed, dissolving the wall back into the floor as if it had never been.
"You better watch that tongue of yours," Reitz bellowed, his face flushing red—not entirely from the exertion. "Or would you rather have no tongue at all?"
"Relax, you ape," Aaron grinned, dropping the mock-pious act. "I'm just saying you shouldn't jump in and pick fights like that. You are a smart fellow… well, of course, not as smart as I am."
Reitz huffed and let himself sink back into the pillows, careful not to pull on the stitches.
"Smart enough to know you're full of shit," he muttered.
Aaron chuckled.
For a moment, the room felt like it had when they were fifteen, cramped together in a tent on some muddy border campaign, trading insults by candlelight while trying not to think about whether they would live or die.
"We were at a disadvantage," Reitz admitted after a pause, his voice losing some of its heat. The words came slowly, grudging but honest. "I didn't think there were that many mages present. Or at least, not that many. I didn't expect two whole platoons. They were killing my men left and right. I couldn't stand by."
His fingers flexed unconsciously, remembering the feel of his Flame Sabre cutting through stone and bone alike.
"Plus…" he scowled. "That bastard Allister thoroughly angered me."
He looked at his hands—the hands that had turned a sworn Knight into dust without a second thought.
"I could kill a hundred Barons all day if it wasn't for this wound," he said.
"Listen to him," Aaron sighed dramatically, looking up at the ceiling as if appealing to the gods. "The arrogance. 'A hundred Barons all day.'"
He dropped his gaze back to Reitz and shook his head.
"You always had a soft spot for commoners," he said, tone shifting from teasing to something more thoughtful. "I know you could scrub the floor with a hundred Barons in a duel, Reitz. But that wasn't a duel. That was a kill box. They were well trained. You saw how they moved, didn't you?"
Reitz's jaw tightened.
"Yeah," he said grimly. "Those knaves predicted my movements. They aimed at my weaknesses. They knew where to strike and how to strike. It was a trained army."
"Not a lord's half-drilled levy," Aaron agreed. "Not some ambitious Baron's private thugs, either. Too disciplined. Too… expensive."
"It could be one of the Primarchs," Reitz said, staring at the far wall.
"It could," Aaron conceded, perching on the edge of the chair and steepling his fingers. "But it could be the Magistrates as well. Only they can expend a force like that without drawing attention. The Primarchs at least have the decency to pretend they're not undermining the Rex's own Augmenti."
Reitz grunted.
"The Magistrates," he repeated. "Those robed rats would rather choke on gold than let the Edicts weaken their grip."
"They're already nervous," Aaron pointed out. "The Sixty-Year cycle draws nearer. House after House is looking upwards, weighing their chances. The Law of Ascent was meant to keep the strongest on top, but…"
"But it also gives every ambitious dog a legal pretext to rip out their master's throat," Reitz finished. "And someone like me in the middle? Too strong for comfort. Too independent for anyone's taste."
"Exactly," Aaron said. "If you die now, before the cycle, then the balance shifts. Some Houses get to breathe easier. Some see an opening."
"None of them are stupid enough to try me head-on," Reitz said with a humorless chuckle. "So they send bastards and traitors instead."
Silence settled between them for a moment, thick and heavy.
Outside, somewhere in the courtyard below, a training bell rang—three short chimes, calling the afternoon drills. The faint sound of wooden practice weapons clacking against each other filtered up through the stone.
"You were lucky," Aaron said finally.
Reitz snorted.
"Lucky," he repeated. "I turned the canyon into a crater and burned half of them to dust. Then I blew up the rest. That's not luck. That's—"
"That's you being you," Aaron cut in smoothly. "And nearly dying anyway."
Reitz's mouth snapped shut.
"You realize," Aaron went on, leaning back again, "that if I'd arrived an hour earlier, I would be drinking your wine and mocking you for overreacting to a bandit raid."
"And if you'd arrived an hour later?" Reitz asked.
Aaron's eyes flicked to him. The amusement in them cooled for a heartbeat.
"Then I'd be attending your funeral," he said simply. "And your son's betrothal would become… complicated."
Reitz grimaced.
"That's the second time you've mentioned Ezra," he said. "You trying to make me feel guilty?"
"To be clear," Aaron said lightly, "I am always trying to make you feel something. Otherwise you just turn everything into bravado and flames."
He rapped his knuckles against his own chest.
"But yes," he added more seriously. "Think of him. Think of Aerwyna. Next time you feel like proving a point against forty mages, maybe remember you're not some lone, nameless conscript with nothing to lose."
Reitz looked away.
The image of Ezra's face—small, serious, annoyingly adult for an infant—flickered at the edge of his mind. Then Aerwyna, eyes hard as ice, hands soft when she thought no one was looking.
"I thought I was going to die," he admitted quietly. "After the last spell. Couldn't move. Couldn't even lift a finger. All I could do was lie there and wait for the boulder."
He huffed a faint laugh.
"Then your ugly mug showed up."
"You're welcome," Aaron said, bowing in his seat.
Reitz stared at his hands again.
"How did they get to Allister?" he asked, the question slipping out before he could stop it. "Do you know?"
Aaron's expression shifted subtly. The humor didn't vanish, but it stepped aside, making room.
"Allister's wife and children vanished a week before the campaign," Aaron said. "You know that much."
"I heard," Reitz said, jaw tight. "I thought he'd sent them away for safety. I didn't pry."
"Of course you didn't," Aaron said. "You respect privacy like an idiot."
Reitz glared.
Aaron ignored it.
"My riders traced what they could," he went on. "There were no bodies. No ransom notes. No rumors of a carriage attacked on the road. They simply… stopped being seen."
Reitz's stomach—already unsettled from potions—knotted.
"Hostages, then," he said.
"Likely," Aaron replied. "Or leverage of another kind. Secrets, debts… You know how Magistrates and certain Primarch courts operate. The coin doesn't have to be gold."
Reitz closed his eyes briefly.
"I can't imagine the sum used to buy him out," he muttered. "Or the threat."
"Don't waste too much pity on him," Aaron said, his voice sharpening. "He made a choice. Plenty of men have lost families and not stabbed their lords in the kidney for it."
"He was a good Knight," Reitz said stubbornly. "Until he wasn't."
Aaron shrugged.
"People break," he said. "Sometimes they break in your favor. Sometimes they don't. You of all people should know that."
Reitz thought of the canyon in the West. Of being fifteen and watching boys melt.
He grimaced.
"Yeah," he said. "I know."
The silence that followed was less heavy this time. More… resigned.
"Thank you for having my back, Aaron," Reitz said quietly.
Aaron waved a hand dismissively, as if batting away an insect.
"The pleasure's mine, Lord Blackfyre," he said in an exaggeratedly formal tone. "Indeed, I am your humble vassal."
"Stop saying that, you arse," Reitz laughed, the sound rough but genuine. "You're going to make someone believe it."
"They should," Aaron replied. "It makes for excellent cover while I seduce their wives."
Reitz snorted, then winced as the motion pulled at his side.
"You will stay for dinner, won't you?" he asked. "I'll have the servants cook a banquet. Though I cannot participate, of course. Aerwyna has me on a strict diet of broth and healing potions."
"And keeps a ledger of how many times you sneak salted pork past her," Aaron added dryly. "I've seen it."
"Traitor," Reitz grumbled.
"You shouldn't go through the trouble, Reitz," Aaron said, though his eyes lit up at the word 'banquet'. "You need rest. And I'm not exactly starving in Fulmen."
"Nah," Reitz said, shaking his head. "Consider it my gift of gratitude to you."
Aaron paused at that, hand resting on the armrest of the chair.
"Well," he smirked as he pushed himself up and straightened his tunic, "you are a cheap bastard then. Is your life just equivalent to one banquet?"
"Depends on the wine," Reitz shot back.
They both laughed, the sound echoing pleasantly off the stone walls and out into the corridor beyond.
A maid walking by with a basket of linens jumped at the sudden burst of coarse cackling from the "sickroom," then smiled despite herself. The rumor that Lord Blackfyre was laughing again spread almost as quickly as the news of the battle had.
Aaron left afterward to prepare, tossing a lazy salute over his shoulder as he stepped through the doorway.
"I'll see you at dinner, you suicidal ape," he said. "Try not to die of boredom before then."
"Try not to seduce my cooks," Reitz shot back. "I like my food unpoisoned."
"No promises," Aaron called, and then he was gone, his footsteps fading down the corridor.
Reitz was left alone with the quiet.
The smile lingered for a few breaths, then faded as the weight settled back onto his chest.
Someone out there was after him.
Not in the petty, local way of envious neighbors and simmering border disputes. Not with assassins in the night or poison in the cup. That was simple, crude, expected.
This was different.
They'd studied his habits. His strengths. His weaknesses. They'd assembled a team specifically trained to take down a high-ranked Noble. They'd lured him away from his seat, from his warded castle and paranoid wife, to a place where the earth itself could be turned against him.
They had failed.
But only barely.
The next attempt would be worse.
He let his gaze drift to the side table, where someone had set his signet ring and a small stack of reports from Captain Ashen. Casualty figures. Requisition requests. Sketches of the canyon post-battle, the glassed earth still faintly warm when the ink had been laid down.
He didn't reach for them.
Not yet.
Instead, he lifted his hand.
A small, controlled flame flickered to life in his palm. No grand pillar. No armor. Just a candle's worth of fire, dancing quietly over his skin without burning it.
He watched the way it swayed with his breathing. The way it leaned as he tilted his fingers. The way it stubbornly refused to go out even when he closed his fist around it.
"Whatever happens," he murmured—"I am stronger now."
Not in raw firepower.
In clarity.
He knew, now, that there were people willing to field armies in the dark just to see him fall. That there were Magistrates or Primarchs or other powers ready to turn the Law of Ascent into an excuse for butchery long before the Edict's clock chimed.
He also knew something else.
Even though there had been betrayals, at least he knew in his heart that there were still people—like Aaron—he could trust with his life.
People who would ride two days without sleep to throw up a wall between him and a boulder.
People who would sit in his room and call him a suicidal ape until he remembered how to laugh.
He closed his fingers around the little flame.
It did not go out.
"I am vigilant," he said softly, more to himself than anyone listening. "And I am not alone."
Outside, in a nursery on the other side of the keep, a small boy with too-serious eyes tugged at the bars of his crib, glancing toward the direction of his father's chamber as if he could feel something shift.
In the sickroom, Lord Reitz Blackfyre lay back against his pillows, a faint smile touching his mouth as the warmth in his hand sank into his chest.
Whatever storms the Edict brought, whatever shadows the Magistrates or Primarchs sent next, one thing was certain.
He would meet them laughing.
And if he fell, he would make damn sure they burned with him.