Extra's Survival: Raising SSS-Rank Characters Is My Only Option

The Maren castle keep crouched on the eastern ridge like something that had crawled up from the river to die there.

It had been a proud fostress once, or at least a solid one. Now the outer wall was patched with mismatched stone, the banners were sun-bled to the color of old blood, and the men on the gate had the sullen, unpolished look of soldiers who hadn’t been paid in full for a season.

In the great hall, beneath a moth-eaten hunting tapestry, Rodric Maren was drinking his father’s last good vintage and listening to a man ruin his evening.

”Say it again,” Rodric said. ”Slowly.”

Dagg stood before the dais, helmetless, his face still carrying the imprint of the Riverside Rest’s floorboards.

”Encrid Gannon, my lord. The duke’s fourth son. He’s traveling the north road with an escort of four White Griffin knights, and he - he claimed the river inn as under his protection. And he sent a message. For the household.”

”A message.” Rodric turned the cup in his hand. He was twenty-two, fine-boned in a way that had curdled into softness, with his family’s rust-red hair and eyes that never stayed still. ”From the Scoundrel of the North. The drunk. The disgrace. The man whose own father shipped him to the Wall like spoiled cargo - that Encrid Gannon sent a message to House Maren. Well. Deliver it.”

Dagg swallowed and delivered everything Encrid had sais word to word including the three items in correct order.

The hall was silent as Dagg studied the ceiling.

Then Rodric laughed - a high, delighted, unpleasant sound - and threw the cup at Dagg’s head. It missed, rang off a pillar, and rolled.

”He threatened me. In my own lands. A man so worthless his family threw him away - threatened me.” He was up now, pacing the dais, and the laughter had gone out of him as fast as it came, leaving something jagged.

”Do you know what my year has been, Dagg? My father dying by inches upstairs. The mine houses sneering at us. The harvest failing, again, because this frozen graveyard grows nothing but fish and insolence. And now the north’s most famous piece of garbage wanders through and pisses on my name in a common room full of boatmen.”

”My lord, his knights - I saw one of them move, my lord. Just one of them, and I’ve never-”

”Then we won’t use house soldiers, will we?” Rodric stopped pacing. His voice had gone reasonable, which the household had learned was his most dangerous register. ”Send word to Volk.”

Dagg went very still.

Rodric smiled thinly. ”Tell Volk I have work worth triple the usual rate. Six travelers on the north road - four knights, a fat lordling, and a servant boy. I want none of them to reach the Wall.”

”My lord.” Dagg’s voice had dropped to nearly nothing. ”It’s the duke’s son. If the duke-”

”The duke,” Rodric said, ”disowned him in everything but ink. The whole north knows it. Aegis Von Gannon has three heirs he loves and one embarrassment he exiled, and when the embarrassment dies to bandits on a dangerous road - a road everyone knows has been eating caravans all year - do you imagine that iron-blooded old man will spend one soldier avenging him? He’ll be relieved. He’ll send a stiff letter and consider the ledger balanced.” He picked up the wine jug itself, abandoning the pretense of cups. ”Are you sure its only six in his party?”

”Yes, my lord.”

”Then tell Volk to bring twenty-five. Send the message tonight.”

Dagg bowed and retreated down the long cold hall, and if he had private thoughts about the memory of a knight’s hand plucking his fist out of the air like a slow fly - about what four of those might do to twenty-five road thieves - he had learned long ago that the young lord paid for obedience, not arithmetic.

Behind him, Rodric Maren drank from the jug and stared at the faded tapestry, at woven hounds pulling down a woven stag, and felt, for the first time in a bad year, that something was finally going to go his way.

✧ ✧ ✧

Later that night, as he did every night, Rodric climbed the tower stair to his father’s sickroom.

The old baron lay in the great bed like something the bed was slowly digesting - a big man once, wasted now to a framework of himself, his breath a wet, laborious ledger of sounds. The physician dozed in the corner chair. A single candle burned.

Rodric stood at the foot of the bed and looked at his father for a long time.

”They laugh at us,” he told the sleeping man, conversationally, the way he had learned to talk in this room where nobody answered. ”Cavel, with their mine and their coin. The river villages, behind their doors. Even the duke - especially the duke, who takes our oaths and our levies and has not once, not once in ten years, invited a Maren to his table.” He drank.

”You knelt to Gannon your whole life, and what did kneeling buy us? A ridge of rocks, a river of fish, and a keep full of debts.”

The old man breathed in. The old man breathed out.

”I’m fixing it,” Rodric said. ”You’d hate how. But you’re not here anymore, are you? Not really. So it’s my house. My roads.” His hand tightened on the jug. ”My rules.”

The candle guttered. Down in the yard, a rider was already mounting, a sealed message in his satchel, the ink barely dry on a name that would, within a fortnight, appear on a commission of inquiry sealed with a white griffin.

But Rodric Maren didn’t know that yet. He stood in the sickroom, drinking his father’s wine, feeling like a lord for the first time in his life.

It would also be the last.

✧ ✧ ✧

Far to the north, in a fortress on a ridge above a bend in the Serpentine, a man received the letter sent by the young lord Maren.

He smiled thinly as a bird left the tower window and beat east into the dark.

At this time, neither the man who sent it nor the man who would receive it knew that they had just done Encrid Gannon the two greatest favors of his new life.

✦ ✦ ✦