Death After Death

The following morning, Simon was up early and ate a breakfast that was more lavish than he’d been expecting. Serving maids brought him spiced tea, a seared hamsteak, a baked egg, and a variety of sweet rolls. The last ones, especially, were the food of nobility, with cinnamon, raisins, and even sugar. They weren’t something he’d eaten in many lives, so Simon allowed himself to indulge a little.

Only until my host arrives, he told himself. Still, even after he ate more than his fair share, the duke never materialized.

When he finally asked someone about it, the footman apologized and said, “His lordship won’t be joining us this morning. He left early for the capital.”

That annoyed Simon, but apparently his other self had decided that their conversation was complete. That, or he has something urgent to do, Simon considered. He was making up his mind whether or not to leave and try to catch up with the man when the servant volunteered, “He did leave you a note, though. Shall I fetch it?”

The sealed letter was thin and as plain as it could be on a duke’s own stationery. Still, it felt heavy in Simon’s hands, and he waited until he was alone in the entryway, waiting for his horse to be saddled, to read it.

‘There’s nothing more that need be said between us,’ it started, leaving out any unexplainable details about why that might be in case someone else read it. ‘You have your duties to attend to, and I have mine. Trying to complicate each other’s paths would have long-term consequences, so please, don’t even try it. I don’t know how you-know-who manages, and really, I don’t want to. Please give my best to Varten. He can’t replace Seyom, but he’s probably the only son we’ll ever have.’

The note was unsigned, but when it ended, he found he didn’t really agree with the second half. Really, the idea that he’d see Varten as a replacement son rankled him a little. It was a false note that gnawed away at the back of his mind as he left. Was it a coded message? Did he mean for it to be a proof that he really was Simon, since no one else knew that detail?

Simon wasn’t sure, but as the miles vanished beneath the hooves of his horse, he quickly put it behind him. What mattered wasn’t how he saw Varten, but how he planned to live this life, no matter what the convoluted path was that took him from where he was to the duke’s manor.

Varten aside, what exactly is the point of this life? He asked himself several times on the way back to the Broken Tower. There were many answers to that, of course, and he never seemed to reach the same one twice.

He needed to learn everything about witchhunting that he could, of course. He was already doing that. Part of him wanted to take all he’d learned and put it in one book to make the lives of future Whitecloaks easier, but sitting at a desk and scribing away the decades probably wasn’t the best use of his time.

Plus, that’s exactly what the Masters will want me to do, he thought with a surge of resentment. The mere fact that they didn’t want him to fight anymore made him want to fight that much more.

Still, beyond witch hunting or Varten, there was one more important mystery to unravel: the Grandmaster. If this life was eventually coming to an end, that was where he needed to focus. There was a mystery there that was glaring. Why would he have magic in at least one of Simon’s past lives? Why would a mage of any stripe lead an organization bent on eradicating mages of all stripes?

Compared to that, the only activity that even came close would be trying to find a way to help the sisters escape from their situation, before they whispered their lives away. The seer obviously expected him to do just that, and he wanted to, but he couldn’t really see how they’d get away in such a wide-open location.

Regardless of what he did, the first thing he needed to do was help those farmers find a way to earn a living that didn’t involve robbing travelers.

That was easy enough. On Simon’s return trip he reviewed the charters of all the affected villages, and wrote an edict that the locals could use to fend off any future tax collectors, by clarifying the lines of each domain to ensure that each village could only be claimed by a single lord.

Since Simon had no official power of his own, he signed each of those documents with the name of the Duke. He was sure that his future self would back him up if it came to it.

After that, he would focus on cultivating the stillness that he really needed to pursue either objective. Any mystery would be made easier with true sight, and right now, his was blurred halfway to uselessness. He didn’t need to see whether someone was good or evil now; he needed to pick up all the little details about what they might be hiding.

So, after reports were made and good news was given, he didn’t try to pick any fights or force any issues. Instead, he focused on trying to still his inner thoughts so that he could clear up his much-degraded sight.

Master Harrin didn’t try to fight with him on the subject. He barely interrogated him at all as to what the lords and ladies he’d worked with had wanted in the first place. Instead, he seemed quite pleased when Simon told him that he planned to focus on quiet contemplation and the divine for the foreseeable future.

“I’m glad you finally see past your sword,” the man said. “Hopefully, this little round of diplomacy will help someone with your limitations find your true calling.”

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The annoyance that Simon felt at that statement didn’t help him find stillness, but it was the last time he let such chaotic emotions bother him. For the next few weeks, he ate simpler meals and spent time kneeling quietly in silent chapels.

He wasn’t praying, though. He was pondering his life and the purpose of it as he fixed all the little parts of his soul he’d churned up with his wands and his divinatory aids in the recent past.

Week by week, it had an effect. Slowly, he could see more than the surface colors of his brothers’ auras. He could see the guilt and the anger along with the brighter hues of contentment, and eventually, he started to see the why.

Simon wasn’t the only one who saw such things, of course, but he knew from long experience that most of the other knights saw only the most basic surface colors. It took real discipline to move beyond that, and he doubted that anyone who hadn’t spent decades cultivating that mindset would ever glimpse the truth of the world.

There were a few brothers who obviously could, though. One of them was Sir Kulthen. Simon interacted with him rarely, but sometimes, at dinner, he caught the knight studying his swirling soul. Simon abstained from sparring while he focused on attaining clarity, but the way the older knight moved as he trained some of the younger ones left no doubt in Simon’s mind that he was reading his opponents' future intentions a moment or two before they made their attack, giving him an immense advantage.

Simon watched those bouts, noting not just the languid, almost lazy fighting style of the older man, but also the ripples that passed through the area around him. It was the closest he’d ever seen to the vortex that engulfed him when too many versions of him were present in the world.

The effect came and went, depending on the year and how many Simons were running around. He was even pretty sure that it varied with how close other versions of himself were. For a long time, he’d considered it to be a form of paradox, or perhaps a warning that paradox was about to occur. As far as he was concerned, what he was seeing around Sir Kulthen was proof of that.

For most of the fights, the lines of fate were invisible, but every once in a while, they swirled around his sword arm or his feet whenever he positioned or reacted based on something he shouldn’t know. He was literally breaking destiny in small ways on a constant basis as he tapped into his opponent's future.

Well, that’s why they thought I was the chosen one, Simon decided as he processed all of that. If these guys are used to seeing such things around only their best seers, I probably looked like a prodigy.

He wasn’t, though, not all the time. His existence just broke the world in a small but important way. He wasn’t sure if that was going to be a problem. How many Simons could exist in a single moment? He wasn’t sure, but he didn’t want to find out.

He was three months into his efforts, and they were paying real dividends when he saw Varten again. That was an interesting moment. Simon was sitting in the hall with his brothers, having a simple lunch after a long three-day fast to center himself, when he saw the boy.

Even though he’d grown, Simon recognized him immediately, though he frowned at the dull, listless colors of the boy’s aura. He wasn’t having a good time. That made Simon scrutinize it immediately. He was probably supposed to hate Varten on some level, but at that moment, all he felt was an overprotective urge to throttle his new master, should he have mistreated the boy.

Simon found no evidence of that. Instead, while he was searching through the dregs of loneliness and the swirls of worry, the boy’s aura lit up entirely, going green and blue with happiness and relief. He’s noticed me, Simon realized, as he tried to account for the sudden change.

The boy didn’t come over to visit him immediately. In fact, he sat with his knight on the far side of the room, and it wasn’t until they were both finished, and Varten’s master had left, that he approached Simon and his long, empty bowl.

“Hello, Sir Enis,” he said, trying to sound casual, or even indifferent. “It’s nice to see you up and around.”

Simon smiled then, letting his view of the boy’s aura fade so he could view the young man behind it. “You’re growing up fast,” he answered. “Tell me, is your new master treating you well? What have you learned in my absence?”

“Sir Cedrin? He’s okay,” the boy sighed, before laying into a long story about a series of misadventures involving the hunt for a troll lair that never actually materialized.

“In the end, he decided it had to be a wild goose chase, but the villagers wouldn’t lie about people dying, would they?” he asked plaintively.

Varten insisted that Simon would have found the monster, and truthfully, he was probably right, but Simon didn’t say that; instead, he talked the boy through what they had done and what they should have done, one step at a time, which was more valuable.

In the end, Simon decided it probably wasn’t a troll, based on the sketch of the tracks that Varten provided. The boy had little skill with art, so he couldn’t say for sure.

It took Varten until their second meeting the following day to ask about Simon’s wooden hand. “Does it hurt?” he asked when Simon took the prosthetic off and let him study it.

“Not even a little,” Simon assured him.

He could see that the boy was trying to find a reason to feel guilty about the whole thing, but Simon refused to allow that. Instead, he made it clear that he had no regrets. “Better to have a clean soul than a whole body,” he told the boy.

They met regularly for a while. Simon didn’t duel him, but he did offer pointers on the boy’s performance and how it might improve. Eventually, Varten asked him, “So when do I get to be your squire again?”

In response, all Simon could do was shrug. “Soon, I hope,” he answered. It was true. He did hope that it was soon, and it was certainly kinder than the real answer, which was probably never.

It was good to see Varten again, but fortunately, it wasn’t a one-off thing. Over the next few weeks, he saw him almost daily before the knight he served was called off on another quest. Simon enjoyed his company, but every time they parted ways, his other self’s words rang in his ears.

Like the son we never had, he thought whistfully, reminded more than a little of those quiet days in the palace of Ionar.

Simon hated to see Varten go. Technically, that gave him the time to get back on track and focus on important things, but unfortunately, glimpses of the Grandmaster were much rarer. The man was reclusive, and Simon only glimpsed him during important ceremonies or annual rituals and speeches. In each of those, he didn’t see any darkness, but that didn’t mean there weren’t problems with the vision. The more often that Simon studied the man, the more he was convinced that there was something wrong with his soul.