Absolute Mana Dominion: All My Talents Are SSS

Chapter 7: 7 - Letter

They had the fences half up again by noon, and once the shouting outside had turned into hammering, Adrien went back into the house. Garrick came after him.

The sitting room was on the ground floor at the front, and it was a large room by any measure that made sense. Three couches around a wide round table, black oak, older than anybody in the building. Curtains in the house colours, yellow and green, and the same on the chair backs and the runner down the middle of the table.

’And according to the memories, this was the room where nobody important was ever received.’

The old Adrien had seen the main house. Adrien had his pictures of it and could bring them up whenever he liked. A hall you could have parked this whole room inside twice, with a staircase that took two men a week to polish.

This place had been where the family went to get away from that one.

Evelyne was already sitting with a cup of tea in both hands, and she had chosen the couch that faced the door.

Adrien took the one beside her. Garrick stopped where they could both see him and stayed standing, because sitting was not his place and there was no version of this room in which he would have.

His mother put the cup down.

”An attack like that, this early in the year, is unusual for Greymoor.” She said it the way an accountant says a figure. ”We take one or two a year and they come in winter, when there’s nothing left to eat up there and they come down looking. It’s the fourth month.”

”That’s what I told the young lord on the way down, my lady.” Garrick had his hands behind his back. ”Something’s happened in the beast territory. That’s the only thing that explains it. That, or somebody’s had a hand in it.”

Evelyne’s head came round.

”Are you suggesting another family has done this to us on purpose? After what we have already had done to us?”

Garrick did not answer straight away, and Adrien could see the man deciding how much of what he thought he was allowed to say out loud.

”He isn’t wrong, Mother.” Adrien picked it up before the pause got any longer. ”He isn’t saying it happened. He’s saying we can’t rule it out, and he’s right, because we know nothing. All we’ve got is a story about wolves that were running away from something. We don’t know what. We don’t know where. We don’t know whether it walked in there on its own.”

”And you want to go and look. Is that what you are implying?”

”I do.”

She had known that was coming. He could see her getting the answer ready while he was still saying it.

”No.”

”Mother.”

”I buried my husband a few days ago.” Evelyne’s voice stayed low and it stayed level, and that was worse than shouting. ”Less than two weeks, Adrien. I am not going to turn round and bury the only son I have left because he woke a mana core last week and decided that made him a soldier.”

”That isn’t what I said.”

”It’s what you’re proposing.” She sat forward. ”You woke your core recently. Your sister would put you on your back in a duel and she’d do it without breaking a sweat, and you want to walk into a forest full of the things that came down that hill this morning.”

”She’d win, yes.”

”Then what exactly is the argument?”

”That I’m the head of this house.”

That struck a chord with his mother; even Garrick didn’t want to say anything after what Adrien had blurted out.

”I’m not saying it to win the point. I’m saying it because it’s the job.” Adrien leaned forward to match her. ”Something is going wrong on Clairmont land. Our people got hurt on Clairmont land this morning, and the man who’s supposed to answer for that is me. If I stay in this house and let other people find out what’s up there, then I’m a name on a register and nothing else, and every family that’s waiting for us to disappear gets to be right.”

”You are just eighteen.”

”And I’m what we have.”

His mother sat back with her mouth in a line.

”And before you say it, I’m not going alone.” He nodded at the standing man. ”Garrick comes with me.”

Evelyne turned to look at him, and the old knight took that as the invitation it was.

”He’ll come to no harm, my lady. Not while I’m on my feet.” Garrick shifted his weight off the bad hip. ”And I’d not take him up there tomorrow either. Give me some days with him first. My Path’s nothing like a mage’s, I’ll not pretend otherwise, but there’s plenty I can teach a man that has nothing to do with what he casts. How to stand. What to watch. When to leave.”

”Days.”

”As many as you’ll give me.”

Evelyne picked her tea back up, drank about half of it, and put it down.

”Fine.”

”Mother...”

”I said fine. Don’t push it.” She smoothed the runner on the table with two fingers, which she did when she wanted her hands occupied. ”And there’s one more thing, Adrien, and it isn’t a request. For now I go on handling the running of this house. The accounts, the tenants, the grain, the wages, the letters. All of it stays with me.”

Adrien had to work not to look pleased about that.

Two things came out of it and both were good. He got his days back, which meant training and the grimoire and finding out what he actually was. And the house stayed with the person who had been holding it up for years, because his mother had run this estate every single time Alaric was away, and Alaric had been away constantly, off doing whatever the Crown asked of him or on some expedition nobody explained afterward.

She had not been standing in for anybody. She had been doing the work.

”I thought you already were,” Adrien said.

Something moved in his mother’s face that had not been there since the graveside.

She looked at him for a moment like she was checking the sum a second time, and whatever she found, she seemed to approve of it. Her son had woken a core, been handed a house, and worked out inside a week that the useful thing he could do was get stronger and stay out of the way of the woman who knew where the money was.

’Because she’s right. And because the house being on the floor hasn’t changed a thing about who’s waiting for us.’

The same families. All of them sitting on Clairmont land and all of them waiting for the last piece of House Clairmont to go quietly out of the register and out of the books and out of the kingdom’s memory.

’Which isn’t happening, since I’d honestly rather not die twice.’

The door came open hard enough to hit the wall.

Ariane came through it at a speed that was going to end badly for somebody, with her hair half out of its tie and a letter held up in front of her in both hands.

”Mother, it has the royal seal.”

Evelyne stood.

”It’s from the Crown,” Ariane said, still breathing hard from the stairs. ”A black carriage came up the road a minute ago, with two Crown riders escorting it. They handed the letter over at the gate and left.”

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