Absolute Mana Dominion: All My Talents Are SSS

Chapter 30: 30 - Back from the Dead

Evelyne was standing at the west gate when they came down the last of the road, and Adrien would have bet money she had been standing there most of the day.

She got hold of Ariane first, which was correct, and she did it hard enough that his sister made a noise about her ribs.

”You are going to sit in my drawing room,” Evelyne said into her hair. ”You are going to sit in it for a very long time.”

”Mother, the ribs.”

”I know about the ribs. Somebody explained the ribs to me from the gate.” She held her out at arm’s length and looked her over from the boots up, and her hands were not entirely steady. ”You went out my window.”

”I went out the west door.”

”You went out my window, Ariane.”

”Technically the west door was...”

”Do not.” Evelyne pulled her back in. ”Do not stand in front of me and negotiate about which exit you used.”

Adrien stayed where he was and let that happen. His mother got to him about a minute later, and what she did was take his face in both hands the way she had done at the graveside and look at it for considerably longer than was comfortable.

”You have blood on your collar.”

”It isn’t mine.”

”That is not the reassurance you think it is.” She let go of him and put a hand flat against his chest instead. ”Days late from the capital. Then you walk in here, look at your knight, and walk straight back out again without sleeping. Do you have any idea what that week was like from where I was standing?”

”I have some idea now.”

”You do not.”

”No,” Adrien said. ”Probably not.”

Evelyne breathed out and got herself back, which took her about two seconds, because she had been doing that in front of servants for twenty-two years.

And after that she saw the man standing behind him. Vikir had taken his hat off somewhere on the road, which meant there was nothing at all between Evelyne Clairmont and a face she had last seen alive before her husband’s trial.

She did not say anything at all.

”My lady,” Vikir said.

Evelyne looked at him the way people look at something they have already finished grieving for.

”They told me you ran the week before the trial, and my husband never once contradicted it.”

”No, my lady.” Vikir turned the hat over in his hands. ”He wouldn’t have.”

Adrien saw his mother’s face change, and he saw her decide to have that conversation somewhere with a door.

”Inside,” she said. ”All of you. Now.”

They put Adrien and Ariane in the drawing room like two children who had broken a window, and Evelyne got the entire story out of both of them across the better part of three hours, in order, with dates, exactly as she had promised.

Ariane got the worst of it. Adrien got the second half, which was worse in a different way, because his mother stopped him twice to ask questions about the forest that he did not want to answer yet.

He told her about the camp. He told her about the burners and what they had been doing to the mountain, and about the forty men, and about the cages.

He did not tell her about a dragon, because that was a conversation he would be having eventually and he was not having it on three hours of sleep in a room where his sister could hear.

Garrick woke up on the second morning, and Adrien was in the room within a minute of hearing, and by the time he got there the old knight had already worked out what had happened to him, because Garrick was the sort of man who checked his own inventory before he asked anybody anything.

He had his right hand out in front of him, open, palm up, and nothing came of it.

He tried again while Adrien stood in the doorway, and the mana that should have gathered above that palm did not gather, and there was no shine of grey steel and nothing forming out of specks.

”That’s the fourth time I’ve tried it,” Garrick said, without turning his head. ”In case you were about to be encouraging.”

”I wasn’t.”

”Alright, thanks.”

Adrien came in and sat down where the physician had been sitting. ”How bad?”

”The elf girl put me back together and she did a proper job of it. I’ll walk. I’ll get up and down stairs eventually, and I’ll bore people at a table for another thirty years.” Garrick let the hand drop onto the sheet. ”What went through me took something on the way past, my lord, and it took the part that holds a blade together. That’s gone. That doesn’t come back.”

”You’re sure?”

”Yes.”

”Alright. Here’s where we are, then.” He leaned forward with his elbows on his knees. ”This house has been hit twice inside a month, and both times the answer was you standing in a gap, and one girl of fifteen holding whatever ground you couldn’t. That’s not an army. That’s two people and a lot of luck.”

”My lord...”

”Somebody has to turn what we have into something that can hold a line. That isn’t a job I can do, my mother can’t do it, and there isn’t another man inside a hundred miles who has ever trained a soldier from nothing.”

Garrick’s head came round at last.

”You held this place for four hours and you did it while everybody else was running out of mana,” Adrien said. ”The mana isn’t the part I need. The part I need is that you knew where to stand.”

”You’re offering me a job.”

”I’m giving you one. You’ll organise, you’ll drill, you’ll build me something worth calling an army, and you’ll tell me when I’m about to do something stupid.” Adrien stood up. ”Which I imagine is going to keep you extremely busy.”

The old man did not answer for a moment. His jaw worked once and he turned his head a few degrees toward the window, which was the closest thing to privacy available to him in that room.

”I’ll want the lower yard for it.”

”Take it.”

”And I’ll want a proper list of what we’ve actually got, not what the ledgers say we’ve got.”

”You’ll have it.” Adrien pushed the chair back where he had found it. ”Not today. Today you need to sleep, and tomorrow you will rest as well, and the day after that you can start telling me everything I’m doing wrong.”

Garrick let his head go back against the pillow.

”That’s an order, is it.”

”It’s the first one I’ve given you.”

”Then I suppose I’d better get used to them.”

Adrien had got as far as the door when Garrick spoke again.

”My lord. Thank you for not sitting there telling me I’d be back on my feet in a month.”

”I’ve been lied to by professionals,” Adrien said. ”You’d have known.”

He came out into the corridor and found Vikir waiting against the wall opposite, with his hat in his hands and the documents from the camp under one arm.

He had clearly been standing there a while.

”Young master.” He straightened off the wall. ”You said you’d hear it when we were home.”

Adrien looked at the packet under his arm, and at the man’s face, and at how carefully he had picked a stretch of corridor with nobody in it.

”Not here let’s go to my father’s study,” Adrien said. ”Nobody’s opened it since the funeral.”

Vikir went a little grey around the mouth at that, and nodded anyway, and the two of them went down the corridor together.

...

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