Devyne lived in Eoryg, which was very convenient for me and just a shade uncommon. I mentioned it was a merchant city? Well, nobles don’t tend to set up residence there. They tend to avoid merchants, actually, in any significant numbers.

  The way they see it, we were nothing but up-jumped commoners. Which was not entirely wrong either. With no official titles to our names and rarely any land, the separation between us and them—especially those ancient, high families who interbred with the royals—was night and day.

  So long as you went only by names, titles and lands, that was. It was true enough we didn’t have the ancient prestige or social standing of nobility, but in recent years the merchants had exploded in wealth as trade across the world’s oceans meant that more and more of Anglyn’s money was drawn from foreign lands and the exchange of goods. A mere few hundred years ago, it’d been our ancestors who took part in most of those exchanges, and generations later it had yielded fruit.

  We weren’t able to match the average wealth gotten from ties to royalty of course, but there were so many more of us that, for a while now, the total wealth of merchants had exceeded that of the nobility and, according to some, even that of the crown itself.

  All this to say, the nobility did not like us very much for many reasons. I didn’t like them either, for many reasons, and these days I still don’t—though I actually have good reasons now at least. Nobles and merchants are the same kind of people in the end, which is why they don’t like each other. In the real world, all the shit flows upwards and eventually becomes king.

  Or a Hero.

  Anyway, that tirade aside, you should understand why the actual nobility around Eoryg was fairly slim, not counting the Earl who obviously owned the city’s land. If nothing else it highlighted how lucky I’d been to meet Devyne under the circumstances I did.

  This luck did not last. Devyne lived far out of the city, and though we had the money to hire a carriage it still took us the better part of half an hour to reach his home. I was well used to such distances by now of course, but the current situation meant that I keenly felt every minute slipping us by. Time waiting for the journey to end just left me tenser and twitchier. I barely noticed the estate as we approached it, and only soaked up the bare minimum of detail.

  A larger house than my father’s, no surprise there, squatting on a round hill and overlooking a field big enough to host a small battle. It was surrounded by a mix of hedges and stone walls, with the area immediately around the building being inconsistently warded with iron fencing. That wasn’t something I’d seen before at the time, and it seemed like nothing more than a waste of expensive metal to me.

  But then that was the point. Steel was rarer and harder to make in those days, and wasting it just showed how much you had to waste.

  “Your family seems…” Vainglorious, I was thinking, but knew better than to say it, “well-off.”

  “Oh yes,” Devyne grinned, “we’ve had ties to Rogrid since before its mines were half so deep. Most of its Overseers are connected to my family one way or the other.”

  That was news to me, but thinking back to how insular the group had seemed, even for a bunch of money-grubbing old bastards, it actually explained a lot.

  We were stopped at the gate of course, several grumpy looking guards moving around the carriage in a way that was neither actively threatening, nor welcoming. One look at Devyne saw us through, though, and a few minutes more left me waiting inside the house.

  Nice place. Well decorated, I thought. Given that the decoration was probably ten times what my father could afford, that was no surprise. Old wealth had not yet been surpassed by the individual merchant, it seemed, but people like my old man were certainly working on that.

  Perhaps if they’d been working a bit less hard I would’ve received a warmer welcome, because when Devyne’s uncle walked in the man took one look at me and then curled his lip like he was inhaling gaseous shit. I could tell in an instant that this was one of those nobles, the ones who’d somehow lived through a lifetime of endless luxury without deriving one scrap of happiness from it and didn’t see why anybody else ought to be cheerier than them.

  That I was thinking this being who I was, from the background I had, is another piece of irony that you can laugh away at while I continue.

  “What do you want this time?” the noble, one Baron Gethriq, demanded. I could see by the trajectory of his glare that I was not its recipient, which was not a bad realisation given that its intensity was enough to punch through a steel breastplate.

  This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.

  Devyne squirmed as it hit him of course, and looked at once five years younger where he shifted uncomfortably in his seat. I just kept silent, didn’t interject, didn’t draw the noble’s attention.

  “My friend here is having a problem,” Devyne replied. Instantly the noble’s attention was drawn to me, because it was just that sort of day.

  “Oh yes, and who might you be?” he grunted.

  I actually stammered at that, like some grunting commoner struggling to even speak proper Anglysh. Or rather, like how I interpreted those commoners upon hearing them have a slightly different verbiage than me.

  “Kyvaine, sir,” I hastily forced out. I corrected myself near-instantly. “My lord, I mean.”

  “Can’t even talk properly and you expect…” the noble’s face went rigid at once, and I saw an actual thought occurring behind his eyes. Perhaps I ought to have prepared a champagne bottle to mark the occasion, because it was surely a novelty. “Kyvaine,” he repeated in that slow, languid way the truly stupid have of saying anything,”you’re not…that boy who did all the work in Rogrid are you?”

  That, of course, was how a true noble sees Heroics, a boy doing work. It’s a sour irony that he was far closer to the truth of what had happened there than most of my enthusiasts.

  “That’s me, yes, my lord.” I got the title right that time, at least. Months on the road had apparently left me a shade out of practice when it came to nobility, and I realised only now that I’d never bothered to refer to Devyne by his actual title—or even find out what it was—in the first place. Fortunately, and as was becoming increasingly common, my reputation was doing a lot of the heavy lifting.

  “I heard about that,” Lord Gethriq said quickly as he took a seat and made some gesture I couldn’t parse to a servant hovering near the door. “You and your pet Grynkori, though the stories conflict. What was it, twenty vampires? Fifty?”

  Fifty bloody vampires? I’d never met even one, and would have run a hundred miles to avoid fighting it if I did. Now that I’m more knowledgeable, I can say in retrospect that any other attitude would’ve gotten me killed.

  “I believe that’s exaggerated my lord,” was all I said. As usual the lie, by omission as I preferred, went unchallenged and the Earl just nodded away as if I’d somehow contributed to the conversation.

  “Yes, well, in any case, I’m surprised to see a man of your calibre here with my nephew,” he sent a contemptuous glance at Devyne that had the boy lowering his eyes and hit a nerve even in my own gut. Devyne said nothing of course, as silent as I always was when my father did the same thing with me.

  It was one thing to experience it in private, quite another for it to happen in front of others. The humiliation stung worse than the contempt. Always did.

  “Your nephew has been quite valuable to me,” I said abruptly, “he’s gotten me through a scrape or two since we met, and has sworn to aid me in my future endeavours.”

  I can’t remember why I said it, probably I just thought it’d help get me what I wanted, but it seemed not to endear me to Earl Gethriq at all.

  “Are you the one who put this ridiculous adventuring idea into his head?” he asked me, a great deal less approving and friendly all of a sudden. That was about typical of course, everything was good for a noble—so long as it helped the mines they owned stakes in.

  There was no good answer to that question either, of course, and I was just left floundering for one that didn’t exist until Devyne cut in again.

  “You know I’ve wanted to do that for months now, uncle. I chanced upon Kyvaine in the tourney—”

  —”the tourney!” Lord Gethriq cut in, “oh tell me you got into the semi-finals at least if you insisted on parading yourself before a gaggle of commoners!”

  Devyne dropped his gaze, and I just kept my silence and squirmed where I sat. Somehow this conversation was less comfortable than watching Gruin threaten someone with a fucking hammer.

  Eventually the Lord Gethriq seemed to grow tired of bullying his nephew, or perhaps simply realised that he had more concerning matters to attend, for some actual progress was made in the discussion as he asked Devyne why he’d come home. Devyne, apparently as eager to move past the petty torments as me, answered quickly.

  “My associate here has been having some issue with a Thaumaturge,” he explained, “Wyrickai if you know him.”

  “I know of him,” the Earl replied, “one of the nastier ones in the region but quite talented. What sort of trouble is this?” he addressed the new question to me.

  For a stupid moment I considered lying, but knew better. For one thing I needed this Earl to actually know what the situation was just so he could properly help, and for another Devyne was watching. If he saw be brazenly deceive his uncle, it might get him wondering what else I didn’t mind dishonesty about. Best way to not be caught in a lie is to not have people suspect you as a liar.

  So I told Earl Gethriq, told him everything. By the time I’d finished another half-hour had passed and I was most assuredly dealing with one very pissed off Thaumaturge waiting for me back in Eoryg.

  “Well this is something of a pickle you’ve gotten yourself into,” he sighed, “you haven’t signed anything yet?”

  “No,” I hurriedly answered. He nodded, got to his feet and started pacing.

  “Good, good. That’s something. Bah, Thaumaturges. Barely better than merchants they are, upjumped commoners who think arcane power is a substitute for true nobility! And here they are now trying to snatch away a modern-day hero just to make him one of them.”

  I kept quiet, sensing that Earl Gethriq was doing more to convince himself already than I could possibly have achieved by opening my own mouth. He kept going.

  “Yes, yes I think I will intervene. About time these little pricks learned their proper place, eh? Very well then Kyvaine, you have a sponsor in me.”

  I was halfway through a relieved grin at that when the noble continued.

  “In exchange, of course, I’ll need you to sign on for my household guard.”

  Frozen water wouldn’t have had such a chilling effect on me, nor, I thought, would having a chunk of ice shoved right up my arsehole.

  “I…Assumed this would be—”

  —”free?” Gethriq suggested, grinning nastily now, “oh no, nothing is free in this world boy, we nobles learn that early. Now let’s find you a tutor so your latent Thaumaturgical talent can go to use.”

  Explore more of our books — begin your journey here: