Chapter 44: A Real Family
Aldric Paydragon read the same line of figures for the fifth time without managing to draw a different result from it.
The total, for its part, didn’t change. It stayed just as red, just as heavy, just as impossible to close as the day before, and the day before that, and every day since he’d inherited these ledgers he’d never asked to keep.
He set down his pen, rubbed his eyes, and let his gaze wander a moment over the cluttered desk, over the stacked debts, over the letters from nobles demanding their due with that glacial politeness that was nothing but a poorly disguised threat.
Father. What exactly did you leave us.
He pushed the thought away at once, because it led nowhere and he had neither the time nor the luxury of resentment. What was done was done. His father had dipped into the funds of the family office, covered the hole with another, then another still, until the whole structure collapsed at once, and he had died before the scandal even broke completely, leaving his eighteen-year-old son a tarnished name, dizzying debts, and two little sisters to raise.
Aldric didn’t hold it against him, not anymore. He was just tired.
"You should sleep, sir."
The voice came from the doorway. Gauvin, the steward, stood there with a tray, as stooped and grizzled as the day Aldric’s grandfather had hired him, and faithful to the house when everyone else had fled it at the first whiff of disgrace.
"One more hour," Aldric replied. "I need to find a way to pay the Verlaines before the month is out, otherwise—"
"Otherwise nothing at all, sir. The Verlaines will wait, like the others, because they know perfectly well you’ll pay them back one day." Gauvin set the tray down beside him, a tisane gently steaming. "One doesn’t extend patience to a man without a future. If they wait, it’s because they believe in yours."
Aldric smiled despite himself, a little.
"You always know what to say to make me feel less alone in all this."
"I say what’s true, sir."
He was about to answer when the study door flew open without the slightest warning, and two whirlwinds burst into the room.
"Big brotherrr!"
Ophélie was on him first, all of her six years, scaling his chair and then his knees the way one storms a hill, and Aldric had no choice but to catch her before she toppled headfirst into his ledgers.
"Careful, careful, you’ll break your neck one of these days."
"Amelia said you were still working and I shouldn’t bother you, but I wanted to say goodnight so I came anyway!"
"So I see."
Behind her, Amelia had stopped on the threshold, more composed, her eleven years already giving her that overly serious air Aldric would have preferred never to see on so young a face. She held the door, hesitant, as though unsure she had the right to come in.
"Sorry, big brother, I told her to wait until tomorrow, but she wouldn’t hear of it."
"It’s fine." He waved her over. "You come here too."
She crossed the room and came to lean against the armrest, and he noticed, as always, that she cast a glance at the papers spread across the desk, at those red figures she was far too young to have to understand and yet already understood far too well.
"You don’t have to worry about that, you know," he said gently.
"I know," she answered, which meant exactly the opposite.
Ophélie, for her part, had already forgotten the entire world and was playing with the pen he’d just set down, tracing scribbles on a corner of scrap paper with her tongue poking out in concentration.
"Big brother, what’s this word?"
"That one is ’deadline.’ A very boring grown-up word."
"Yuck."
"You said it."
He stayed there a while, a sister against each side, the little one babbling and the elder silent, and he felt the day’s weariness lift a notch, as it did every evening, for exactly this reason.
It’s for them. All of this is for them.
He eventually sent them off to bed, not without Ophélie having negotiated a story for the next day and Amelia having wished him goodnight with that small, grave smile that squeezed his heart. When the door closed, silence settled back over the desk, and the red figures were still there, waiting for him.
Gauvin, who had stayed in the shadows, watched a moment as the young master plunged back into his accounts.
You are the light of this house, sir, whatever you may think. Your father brought it to the edge of the abyss, and you’ve been holding it up with your bare hands ever since, without ever complaining. You’ll raise it back up, I swear it on my old bones, and you’ll give those two young ladies a fate worthy of them. It must be so. The heavens cannot be that unjust.
He bowed in silence and withdrew.
The missive arrived three days later.
Aldric received it in the morning, and he knew before even opening it that it was out of the ordinary, just from the grain of the paper, thick and costly, and the wax seal pressed into it, that of a house well above his own.
The Baron Frarken’s crest.
He broke the seal, read through the few lines, then read them again, his heart beating a little faster despite himself.
An invitation to dinner. Worded with warmth, almost with kindness. The baron had caught wind of the trials the noble house of Paydragon was going through, he wrote, and he felt grieved that a young man of such merit should carry so heavy a burden alone. Perhaps an opportunity might present itself, over a good table, to discuss it among men of good standing.
"Big brother?"
Amelia stood in the doorway, a book clutched against her, and she had that way of looking at him that always saw too much.
"You’re making a strange face."
"A good one or a bad one?"
She thought for a second.
"I don’t know."
Aldric folded the letter and slipped it into his jacket with a smile he meant to be reassuring.
"Nothing serious. Baron Frarken is inviting me to dinner, that’s all. These things happen between houses."
"Baron Frarken has never spoken a word to us," Amelia pointed out, with that implacable logic of children who observe more than one thinks. "Not once since Father died. Why now?"
Because maybe things are finally changing, he wanted to answer. But he couldn’t lie, ever, and he didn’t yet know whether it was true.
"I’ll tell you when I get back," he said simply, which was no lie, only a promise. "Look after Ophélie tonight, all right?"
She nodded, not entirely convinced, and watched him pull on his finest coat, the one that was no longer quite in fashion but that he kept for the rare occasions when one still had to look like a Paydragon.
Baron Frarken’s manor was of the kind that crushes a visitor before he’s even crossed the threshold.
Aldric walked through corridors hung with tapestries that were worth, on their own, more than everything he had left, was led to a dining hall where dozens of candles burned, and felt, for all his dignity, like a beggar dressed up for the evening.
The baron welcomed him standing, warm, arms almost open.
"Young Paydragon in person. Sit, sit, I beg you. You do me great honor."
Frarken was a corpulent man, his fifties well-kept, his smile easy and his gaze never quite smiling along with the rest of his face. He had the wines served, inquired after the young man’s health, after his sisters, after the house, with a solicitude so perfect that Aldric was almost disarmed by it.
Maybe I was wrong about him. Maybe there are still good men left in this nobility.
Across the table, Baron Frarken watched the boy sip his wine with that touching gratitude of the desperate, and held back a smile of an altogether different nature.
Perfect. Exactly as I was told.
He had him right there, this famous Aldric Paydragon. The god-blessed son, the one they whispered was incapable of uttering the slightest lie, anointed by an oracle before he even came of age, destined to become a hero. An instrument of rare purity, and therefore, of rare usefulness.
A boy who cannot lie. Who therefore believes the whole world works the same way. One couldn’t dream of anyone more pliable.
For the baron had a problem, a very concrete problem, lurking in a forest at the edge of his lands. Something had settled there, something that had already devoured an expedition of men-at-arms without letting a single one return, twice over, and he needed to know what he was dealing with before breathing a word of it to the proper party. Now, one doesn’t send one’s own soldiers to die for nothing, not when one can send someone else.
Least of all when the one who had charged him with this matter, the one whose name he spoke only in a low voice and whose instructions he awaited like a verdict, demanded results and not excuses.
He let the main course pass, then the cheese, and struck at dessert, when the wine had done its work and the young man had relaxed.
"Aldric." He set down his glass, took a grave tone, almost paternal. "I did not invite you merely to share a good meal, I’ll be honest with you. It happens that I can do something for you, and you, perhaps, something for this kingdom."
Aldric straightened at once.
"I’m listening, my lord baron."
"The oracles have spoken," Frarken said, looking him dead in the eye, with the tranquil assurance of one who knows his listener will never call his word into question. "An invader lurks in the woods bordering the village of Veille, a creature escaped from the depths, of the kind that threaten the realms of men. The gods, it seems, have designated the one who ought to face it."
He let the phrase hang a moment.
"And that name, my boy, was yours."
It was obviously untrue. No oracle had said any such thing, and the baron knew it better than anyone, since he had just invented every word of that sentence with the care of a man setting out his pawns. But the reputation of the invaders was real, known to all, terrifying enough, and it served admirably as truth.
Aldric, for his part, heard none of that. He heard the gods. He heard justice. He heard, for the first time since his father’s death, someone telling him he was called to something other than drowning under red figures.
An invader. A true threat. And it’s me the oracle designated.
"I understand the magnitude of what you are entrusting to me," he said, his voice firm.
"Are you certain?" The baron feigned hesitation to perfection. "It is a considerable peril, Aldric. I would not hold it against you to refuse. You have two sisters, a house to keep. No one would judge you."
"That’s precisely it," Aldric replied, and something had lit up in his gaze. "I have two sisters. And for now, all I can offer them is a name our father dragged through the mud and creditors knocking at our door."
He clenched his fist on the tablecloth.
"If the gods judge me worthy of protecting this kingdom, then I will do it. And I will restore to our house the honor it has lost, so that Amelia and Ophélie never have to lower their eyes as they speak their own name. So that they aren’t married off to the first wealthy old man to come along, for lack of anything better."
The baron nodded slowly, the very image of a man moved by such nobility of soul.
He’ll go. He’ll go, and he’ll likely die, and the house of Paydragon will die with him, or he’ll return bringing me everything I need to know. Either way, I come out ahead, and not one of my men will have lost his skin over it.
"You are a young man of rare worth, Aldric Paydragon," he said, raising his glass. "The gods themselves have singled you out, and I readily understand why."
Aldric lowered his eyes, touched to the core, without knowing that this was precisely the only lie the baron had told all evening while half believing it.
"Thank you, my lord baron," he said. "I will not disappoint you."
"I never doubted it."
He returned home late that night, his heart lighter than it had been in months.
Amelia was waiting for him, as he’d suspected, curled up in a chair in the entrance hall with her book, fighting off sleep to be sure of seeing him come back.
"Well?" she asked, bolting upright. "What was it?"
Aldric knelt in front of her, laid his hands on her shoulders, and gave her the first true smile of hope he’d worn in a very long time.
"It was the beginning of something good, Amelia. I think our luck is turning."
"Really?"
"Really." And it was no lie, because he believed it with all his soul. "Soon, everything will be better. I promise you, both you and Ophélie."
She studied him a long moment, searching his face for the trace of the worry that usually dwelled there, and didn’t find it. Then, and only then, did she allow herself to believe it too, and threw her arms around his neck.
Aldric held her against him, a hand in her hair, and stayed like that a long moment without saying anything.
For the first time since their father’s death, he had the feeling once more of holding the future in his own hands. Tomorrow, he would go and accomplish what the gods had chosen him for, he would clear their name, and he would give his two sisters the life they deserved.
He believed it with all his soul.
"Soon," he murmured into Amelia’s hair, "everything will be better."