Chapter 14: The Hawk Knights

They questioned the commoners in the old dining hall, one at a time, behind closed doors.

The Hawk Knights took the room over as if it had always belonged to them. They shoved the long tables against the walls, set a single chair in the middle of the floor, and put 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 and waited to be called. Every few minutes the door opened, someone came out pale and visibly shaking, and a knight read the next name.

Mira went in before him. She came out twenty minutes later with her jaw set and her hands balled into fists.

"They asked about you." She murmured it quickly as she passed his bench. "Over and over. Where you were on Saturday. Whether you ever talked about Holt. Whether 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, and Aren went in.

The captain of the Hawk Knights was a lean man with a short grey beard and calm, quiet hands. He didn’t stand. He pointed at the chair, waited patiently until Aren sat, and then simply looked at him without a word.

Aren let him look. He kept his shoulders a little hunched and his eyes a little low, like a servant in front of a lord, and he let his hands tremble in his lap. That part wasn’t hard. In his old life he had sat across from tax investigators, furious partners, and once a very calm man from a very large bank who 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 spoke at last. "No family name. Servant class. Rank F." He checked 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. That he called you Zero, made you kneel in the training yard, and once broke a practice sword across your back."

"Yes, sir."

"That’s a great deal of reason to hate a man."

Aren lifted his eyes briefly, 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. "Where were you on Saturday night?"

"In my bed, sir. In the scholarship dormitory."

"Can anyone confirm that?"

"Fenwick Gale sleeps in the room next to mine, sir. The walls are very thin, so if I had left, he would have heard my door." Aren hesitated. "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 really did snore, and Aren’s door really did creak. He had simply climbed out of the window.

The captain studied him a little longer. Then his gaze dropped to Aren’s folded hands, and to the scabs across the knuckles.

"What happened to your hands, boy?"

Aren had known this was coming. He had considered wearing gloves and decided they would look far 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."

Before the captain could answer, the door behind Aren opened. Heavy, uneven footsteps crossed the stone floor slowly, the steps of a big man in armor who had walked a long way in his life, and the captain shot instantly to his feet.

"Your Grace."

The Duke of Holt came around the chair and looked down at Aren. Up close, he was enormous, grey-bearded, with a face like weathered stone and eyes red at the rims. He smelled of horses and old wine and something else 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 studied him in silence. Aren kept his head down and let his hands shake.

"Look at him." The Duke’s voice was thick with contempt. "A servant with a combat aptitude of zero. He couldn’t kill a chicken." He turned away. "You’re 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 quickly.

He didn’t sleep that night either. He lay on his mattress and listened to the Academy whisper.

He heard the Hawk Knights change guard at the gates. He heard rumors passing from room to room. By midnight he knew most of what had happened in the Headmaster’s tower that day. The Duke of Holt had demanded Vivienne Ashgrave’s arrest. Corwin, the Ashgrave steward, had been forced to admit that she had gone alone into the Old Quarry on the very night Darius disappeared. The Duke of Ashgrave had arrived from his estate 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 hear on the stairs.

Vivienne had been confined to her rooms until the matter was settled.

Aren stared at the ceiling and worked it through.

If the Holts could prove anything, or even make enough people believe it, Vivienne was finished. Probably not hanged, since the Ashgraves were too powerful for that, but expelled, disgraced, and shipped home to her father’s estate for good. And with her went every investment he could ever make. His Primary Anchor would stop growing, and his only real source of returns would be gone.

’Good, sensible reasons. Hold on to those. Those are the reasons!’

At one in the morning, he got up, slit the side of his mattress, and took out the little glass vial he had hidden there two weeks before. It still smelled faintly bitter, and its label still said Ashgrave, Vivienne in the alchemist’s neat hand. The real one. The one Darius had paid Pell to poison.

He wrote a note on a scrap of paper in large plain capitals, 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.

Four Holt knights guarded the bottom door of the Headmaster’s tower. Aren didn’t 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 the maids used to carry firewood to the Headmaster’s office. He had hauled wood up them once, in his first week as porter. They came out behind a little door in the wall beside the fireplace.

The office was empty. The fire had burned down to red coals, and moonlight from the tall windows lay across the desk, across the letters from two furious dukes.

He set the vial right in the middle of the desk, on top of everything, with the note folded underneath. Then he went back down the stairs, out through the kitchens, up to his room, lay down, and waited.

[Investment recorded.][Type: Hidden aid. Anchor unaware.]

After that, things moved very fast.

In the morning, the Headmaster summoned both dukes to her office along with the Holt captain and the Ashgrave steward. Aren heard about it at breakfast from a Class C girl whose cousin worked in the kitchens. By lunch, the alchemist had been called up the tower. By the afternoon, everyone knew that he had tested the liquid in a mysterious vial, found dullroot in it, and confirmed 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 Darius died.

They came back after dark, very quiet. They carried three crossbows, and three long shapes wrapped in cloaks were tied across the backs of their horses. On each cloak, stitched in silver, was a hawk with its wings spread.

Nobody needed it explained after that. The whole Academy pieced 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, as things always did 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 courtyard two by two, just as they had come, but much more slowly. Students lined the steps to watch them go, and nobody cheered and nobody laughed.

At the very back rode the Duke of Holt. He looked ten years older than he had two days before, his face 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 didn’t dare 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’s voice was rough and very low. "The week before he died. A long letter, all about the Academy. His classes. The Ashgrave girl." A pause. "And you."

Aren’s heart was beating so hard that he could actually hear it.

"He said you were the strangest commoner he had ever met. 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 restlessly, and the Duke looked down at him in silence. Then he rode on through the great gate, and the gate swung shut 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 the blue window opened very quietly 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, slowed, and 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 stared numbly at that last line.

The Duke didn’t hate him yet. But the System had seen something in that long look, and it had started counting.