Getting Stronger By Marrying And Investing In Abandoned Villainesses

The first thing the trial did was take everything.

[CLASS TRIAL — COMMENCING]

[Acquired combat capability suspended for the duration]

[Shadow Sword — suspended]

[Shadow Movement — suspended]

[Long Shadow — suspended]

[Shadow Shield Technique — suspended]

[Limitless Body - Adaptive Evolution — suspended]

Theo stood in the dark and read that list twice, and by the second reading his hand had already gone to his hip out of habit and found nothing there.

’What?!’

Everything... was gone.

He waited for the rest of it, the part where the panel explained itself or offered terms or told him what was coming. Alderkeep had at least done him that courtesy.

[Retained: Genesis Eyes] [Retained: Directive] [Retained: Domestic Manager] [Retained: Attendant’s Hands]

’...’

’...uhm, thanks I guess?’

[There is no failure condition] [There is only what you are]

Then the dark thinned, and it was cold.

There was no city.

That was what he understood first, standing knee-deep in fresh snow on the side of a mountain with his breath going out white in front of him.

There was no tide, no wall, no burning quarter. Just a road that cut into a slope, and pine going up the mountain on one side and down it on the other, and about nine hundred yards below him a low stone building with smoke coming out of two chimneys.

Theo turned all the way round.

Nothing came out of the trees or moved on the road. The only sound was snow settling off a branch somewhere behind him, and it made him jump, which he was not proud of.

’Where’s the monster.’

He let Genesis Eyes open and swept the whole slope with them, and the ache came up behind his sockets the way it always did, and the panel gave him back a mountainside.

Trees. Rock. A frozen watercourse. Forty-one human signatures in the building below and nothing else within his range at all.

’There’s no monster.’

’It didn’t give me a monster.’

He stood on that road for a long moment with his hands going numb, and then he started walking down, because the snow was over his boots and there was nowhere else on that mountain to go.

The road took the slope in long slack turns, and by the third of them he had stopped being able to feel the tops of his ears. Nothing had come along it in days. There was one set of ruts under the new fall, softened to a suggestion, and then not even that. Woodsmoke reached him before the door did.

The building was a waystation, and the woman who opened the door to him had a ladle in one hand and no intention of using it as a weapon.

She looked him over, from his sleeve to the bare hip where a sword should have been, and stepped back to let him in without asking a single question. That, more than the cold, was what told Theo something was wrong with this place.

Inside, forty people were sitting in a room built for twelve.

The heat came at him with wet wool and old smoke in it, and every coat in the room was steaming. They were on benches, on the floor, along the walls, in coats, under blankets, with children asleep across laps. There was a fire going at one end and a long table with nothing on it, and the whole room turned to look at him and then, almost at once, stopped looking, which is what a room does when it has already worked out that nothing coming through the door is going to help.

The woman with the ladle put a cup of hot water in his hands.

Ordis, keeper of the Harrowgate post, thirty-eight years on that road. He would learn all of that later. What he got in the first minute was the water, and a chair, and the shape of the problem in one sentence.

Crouching to bank the fire, she told him without turning round:

”Road’s shut. Pass went four days ago and it does not open before the thaw.”

”How much food?”

Ordis took him into the store behind the kitchen and let him look, and he stood in the doorway and did the arithmetic in his head the way he did a bill, and the answer arrived before he wanted it.

Grain in two sacks and part of a third. Salt pork, most of a barrel. Dried apple. Four wheels of hard cheese. Turnips, and a great many of them, and turnips were the reason anyone in that building was going to see a second week at all.

’Forty-one people.’

’Eleven days. Twelve if nobody works.’

He stepped back out of the doorway.

”When does the pass open?”

Ordis had been waiting for him to get there.

”Thirty days. Thirty-two if the wind stays north.”

He went back out onto the step afterwards and stood in the cold with his cup and let himself have one minute of being furious about it.

’Eleven days of food and thirty days of mountain.’

’That’s it. That’s the whole trial. There is nothing out there to fight, there is nothing in here to fight, and I could be Elite Realm with a Mythic sword in each hand and it would not move that number by a single day.’

[There is only what you are]

’Yes. Thank you. I heard you the first time.’

He drank the water. It had gone cold in the cup while he was busy being angry, which was, he decided, entirely his own fault.

Then he went back inside and started counting people.

Forty-one, and he had them all by name inside three hours, because that was the one thing he had always been able to do and it had never once cost him anything.

Ordis, and her son Berrin, who was nineteen and angry and had not spoken to his mother in two days. A carter called Yesh with a broken collarbone strapped up wrong, the arm slung so low the shoulder had begun to travel with it. Nine children under ten. A pair of very old sisters who had been travelling to a funeral and now would not get there.

A tinker whose name nobody had bothered to ask and who turned out to be called Wick and to have been sitting in the corner for four days with a full toolroll on his belt that nobody had thought to look at either.

And a girl of about sixteen at the end of the second bench, who had not eaten anything Theo saw anybody give her, and who was putting her share into the hands of the child asleep against her side.

Theo sat down on the floor near the fire with his back to the wall, where he could see all of them, and let the eyes open one more time.

He did not want to. He knew exactly what it was going to show him and he did it anyway.

[Rank Potential: E]

[Rank Potential: D]

[Rank Potential: F]

[Rank Potential: D]

[Rank Potential: E]

Down the whole room, they were all ordinary people.

Then the girl at the end of the second bench.

[Rank Potential: A]

[Current Rank: Mundane Realm - Lower Stage]

[Note: Never tested. There is nobody within two hundred miles authorised to test her.]

Theo shut the eyes and put his head back against the stone. Above him the beams were black with old smoke.

’Of course.’

’Of course there is.’

Berrin found him there an hour later, and stood over him with his arms folded and his jaw set, in the way of a nineteen-year-old who has decided to be the one who says it.

”You’re a Climber.”

”I am.”

”Then do something.”

Theo looked up at him from the floor.

He thought about the honest answer, which was that four days ago he had put nine Legatees and a champion into the ground in one night and that none of it was worth a single turnip on this mountain.

Setting the empty cup down beside him, he answered plainly:

”I can’t open the pass.”

”Then what use are you?”

’Good question.’

’Genuinely. That is the exact question, and the thing that is watching me right now would like to know the answer as well.’

Theo got up off the floor, and took his coat off, and rolled his sleeves back.

”Where’s your kitchen?”