Absolute Mana Dominion: All My Talents Are SSS

Chapter 21: 21 - Broken Homecoming

They walked out of the trees together and neither of them said much about it.

The road came back under Adrien’s boots after an hour, and by the time the ground opened into the long slopes he had grown up looking at from a window, he had built a list of about forty questions and understood that he would be getting answers to two of them.

”The body,” he said. ”What will happen to it?”

”It’ll be gone by tonight.”

”Gone how?”

”Gone.” Tess kept walking. ”Young ones will come for it before dark. They’ll take what can be carried and put the rest into the ground, and by the time some farmer wanders in there it’ll be a burned clearing and a story about lightning.”

”Why not move it?”

”Because nobody drags a body that size across a human kingdom without the entire continent hearing where it went.” She looked at him as though he had asked why fire was hot. ”That is exactly the kind of attention nothing in my life needs at the moment.”

Adrien decided to spend one of his two answers.

”The heart. Whose was it?”

”Someone’s.”

”That isn’t an answer.”

”It’s the answer you’re getting, for now.”

He tried it from another direction.

”Fine then. Not who. How rare is it? Has this been done before, or am I the first idiot walking around with one in his chest?”

Tess considered him for three or four steps before she answered.

”You are the first that I’ve heard of.”

”Damn...”

Adrien put that away with everything else he was carrying and did not ask the fourth question, because her face had shut somewhere around the second one and he had enough sense left to notice.

She stopped walking where the road bent away north.

”This is far enough.”

”You’re not coming down?”

”I have nothing left to fly on and a great deal left to be careful about.” Tess looked at the valley without much interest in it. ”Your house is full of people who would remember my face, and I would rather be somewhere with fewer of those while I get my strength back.”

”So that’s it.”

”That’s it.”

Adrien did not know what he had expected. She had put something into his chest, told him he was carrying a target, and now she was walking off up a road with the tone of a woman ending a conversation about the weather.

”Will I see you again?”

”Almost certainly.” She was already moving. ”Try not to die in the meantime, Adrien Clairmont. I have gone to some trouble over you.”

He watched her until the bend took her, and she never looked back once, and after that he was on an empty road on his own.

’Right.’

He started walking, because standing on a road feeling sorry for himself was not going to get anybody fed.

’So, in the last days. I killed a dragon, which I still do not fully believe. I woke a physique nobody in my house has ever mentioned out loud. And I found out I have been carrying a dragon’s heart in my chest since before I could talk.’

’And the one person who could explain any of it just walked away.’

His hand went up to the front of his coat without asking him first, flat over the scar, and he made himself put it back down.

’That cut was made on purpose. It was made carefully, by somebody who knew how to close it afterward, on a child.’

’Nobody does that to a baby in a noble house without the head of that house knowing.’

He walked another hundred paces carrying that.

’So Alaric knew. There is no version of this where Alaric did not know.’

That was where it stopped being an interesting mystery and started being something else entirely, because the memories in his head had eighteen years of a man in them. Alaric Clairmont at the far end of a table. Alaric Clairmont away for months at a time doing whatever the Crown asked. Alaric Clairmont standing in a doorway looking at a sick boy in a bed and saying nothing at all.

’A weak heart, they said.’

Adrien stopped in the middle of the road, because there was one more piece and he had been avoiding it since the clearing.

’And then there’s the other thing.’

He turned it over carefully, because it was the kind of thought that would not go back in the box once he had let it out.

Alaric Clairmont had been arrested, tried, and executed for selling secrets to a foreign kingdom, and House Clairmont had not resisted any of it. A man with generations of land and soldiers behind him had gone to the block quietly, and Adrien had been asking himself why since the day he woke up in this body.

’Everybody says treason. Nobody has ever explained what he actually sold.’

’What if he didn’t sell anything.’

’What if somebody found out what was in my chest.’

The whole shape of it arrived at once and it was considerably worse than not knowing. A man who had put a dragon’s heart into his own son, and a Crown that had killed him for something nobody would say out loud, and six great houses lining up to swear to it in a courtroom.

’She said dragons would kill me for it. So, could it be related in some way, then? That’s the only explanation I can come up with for now...’

He got moving again, faster now, because his own house was in that valley and there was one person alive who had been standing in the room when whatever happened to him happened.

The valley opened out below him. Adrien came up the last of the rise, and Greymoor lay in the bottom of it the way it had for six generations, and he stopped so hard he nearly went over.

The east barn was a black square. The fence along the lower pasture had gone entirely on one side, and the field below the wall had been churned to mud from end to end and was darker in places than mud had any right to be. Carts stood on the flat by the gate with people moving between them in ones and twos, slowly, the way people move when the emergency finished hours ago and the work did not.

Up on the high side of the pasture something was burning, and it was too small and too tidy to be a building.

Adrien was already running.

...

AN: Add the novel to collections and send (power stones and golden tickets) support if like it ;)