Chapter 28: What the duke sent
The morning they left the Riverside Rest, Marla pressed a cloth bundle of smoked trout and black bread into Gus’s arms and told Jin, in a voice that allowed no argument.
"The rooms in this small inn would be waiting for you whenever the road brings you back, young master."
Jin inclined his head. "Thanks for your hospitality, Marla!"
Senna stood in the doorway and waved until the bend in the road took the inn out of sight.
Jin found, to his mild embarrassment, that he was in a good mood.
The road ran along the ridge’s shoulder now, pine forest rising dark on the left, the land falling away toward the grey ribbon of the river on the right. The knights had changed their formation without being asked - Sir Gareth ahead, Harun behind, Berrick and Yohan flanking - and every one of them was riding differently than they had a week ago. Looser in the shoulders. Eyes working the treeline in slow, regular passes.
’They’re expecting it too,’ Jin thought. ’Good.’
Since there was nothing to do but ride and wait, Jin decided to finally ask the question he’d been circling for days.
"Sir Gareth. May I ask you something rude?"
"You’ve never asked permission before, young master."
"That’s fair. How strong are you? Precisely, I mean. Stars and realm."
Jin could use the Appraisal, but it was useless against the knight except for seeing their names, so he thought he would just ask them directly.
The old knight glanced back at him. Whatever he had expected, it wasn’t that - directness about a man’s cultivation sat somewhere between asking his age and asking his savings. But he answered.
"Four stars, young master. Peak of the Master realm. I have been stuck in this realm for ten years trying to advance further, but it seems I am getting old."
Jin nearly pulled his horse up short.
’Four stars and peak of Master level.’
The old monster had opened four stars!
The cultivation of stars started at the Initiate realm and proceeded to Ascendent, Apex, Master, Grandmaster, and so on.
Jin and the novel’s measuring stick over that number. Knight-captains of great houses - men who commanded hundreds - were typically three-star Apex cultivators. Four stars at the peak of master, one step from Grand-Master, was the level of men who had songs. In the novel, characters like that held city gates alone during the calamities.
And this man had spent a week saying again to a hungover beginner in a frozen yard.
"Harun," Jin said, a little faintly. "You as well. Stars and realm."
"Three stars, young master. Middle Master." Harun grinned from behind. "Sir Gareth was already famous when I was learning which end of the lance to hold. Nine years ago the Crimson Fang company came over the ridge with two hundred men, and the duke sent Sir Gareth and forty. Ask the ridge villages what happened. They still hang griffin feathers over the doors in autumn."
"Harun," Sir Gareth said mildly, "you talk too much."
"Berrick? Yohan?"
"Three stars, Apex, young master," said Berrick, the quiet one with the crossbow.
"Three, early Apex," said Yohan, cheerful about coming last. "The baby of the family."
Jin rode for a while in silence, thinking about something repeatedly and each time coming to the same conclusion.
Then, because he had a broken five-star skill and no self-control, he looked at Sir Gareth’s back and thought, ’Appraise.’
[ Name: Gareth Varus ]
[ Age: ??? ]
[ Realm: ??? ]
[ Star Level: ??? ]
[ Note: He is being modest. ]
Jin choked on nothing.
The question marks were expected - the old knight stood so far above Jin’s ceiling that the skill wouldn’t even hazard his age. It was the last line. The corrupted thing had reached past its own rules, past its own wall of refusals, specifically to leave a comment.
’Note? Since when is this being shown? And modest about what? The man just told me four-star Master peak, one step from Grandmaster - if that’s the modest version, then what’s the honest one-’
He tried again.
But it was the same and got nothing back.
He filed Sir Gareth’s note next to the list of questions the system owed him, and rode on.
’Any one of these four could walk into any house in the north and be made knight-captain by dinner. Any two of them are a small army. And my father sent all four of them - to escort one disgraced son to a posting meant to be a punishment.’
He remembered Corvan’s face in the entrance hall. The Duke felt it appropriate that a son of this house travel with a proper escort, he had said.
’A proper escort. This isn’t an escort, it’s a fortress with hooves.’
"Young master." Sir Gareth’s voice was quiet, and it had a different weight in it now. "You are wondering why the four of us are here."
Jin looked at him.
"I am."
"His Grace summoned me personally the night before we left. Do you know what he said?" The old knight kept his eyes on the treeline as he spoke. "He said- my son goes north into a region I have no hold over, to the Wall I cannot see. Take him there safely. That was all. But young master - I have served your father for thirty years, and in thirty years, he has never once repeated an order." He paused. "He repeated that one."
Jin looked at the road ahead and said nothing, because his throat had done the tightening thing again, and he was starting to genuinely resent this body’s plumbing.
’He was a pitiful child. I should have paid him more attention.’
Jin once again remembered a single line, from the book, spoken years from now by a man the novel described as being made of ice.
’You could have just said something, old man,’ Jin thought, warm and aching and reassured all at once. ’You could have just once said something out loud-’
Which was, naturally, the exact moment the forest stood up.
A horn was sounded - short, ugly, and very close.
Immediately, a tree came down across the road ahead with a crash that sent the horses screaming, and the treeline on the left grew men the way a corpse grows flies - dropping from branches, rising out of the bracken, boiling up over the ridge lip, ragged and armed and confident, in front, behind and also on both sides.
Jin counted with an odd, detached calmness.
’Twenty. Twenty-five. Ah,’ he thought. ’Just when I thought no one would be dumb enough to face these knights.’
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