Joveric always counted his men at every meal. He treated them like family despite their rough edges, so he noticed at once when not one but three were missing.
Dani. Len. Gul.
These were not fresh hires he might forget in the dark. They had ridden with him for two years.
Len in particular served as his pigeon messenger. Of course Joveric remembered him.
He moved through the camp with a growing knot in his chest.
On the way, he passed Alaric, Lena, and Daisy and gave them the sort of cordial greeting habit demanded. A few paces behind them stood the tent.
Alaric felt his heart pounding so hard he thought it might betray him before his face did. Lena kept her expression steady, though fear pressed cold against her spine.
Joveric was a large man, and there was something deeply unsettling about the way he carried his size. Only Daisy remained calm. She sat there eating her soup as if the night held nothing worth fearing.
Then it began. Joveric pulled open the tent and touched the skin of the first man he saw.
Cold. He checked the next. Then the third. Dead. All dead.
For a moment, he said nothing. His eyes swept the interior. There was no obvious struggle. No overturned bedding. No signs of panic.
Only three peaceful corpses and, just outside, Alaric, Daisy, and Lena seated far too near for coincidence.
His eyes reddened. Red aura surged out of him in a sudden, violent swell.
"What is this?" Joveric roared.
He did not turn on them at once. Not fully. He hid the worst of his intent for a breath, as if still asking the world whether there might be another answer.
Alaric, Daisy, and Lena rose to their feet.
"What's the matter?" Alaric asked.
The words almost caught in his throat.
"My men," Joveric hissed. "My men are dead."
Then a sneer pulled across his face, ugly and sharp.
"I wonder who did this."
Alaric managed to recover some of himself then. He gave a small shrug, the kind a man wore when he wanted to look bored rather than cornered.
Joveric saw it. He also saw more than that.
He knew perfectly well he could not afford to fight the knights.
Perhaps he could kill one. Perhaps more if madness took hold and fortune bent his way.
But afterward, he would be a hunted man, his face nailed to walls beneath dead or alive notices until some eager fool claimed his head.
Then Clarisse arrived.
She came in on horseback with her great folding bow already opened in her hand.
A meter long arrow rested against the string, its serrated head humming with aura. The sight of it changed the air at once.
This was precisely why Joji had kept her out of the planning. Clarisse acted too naturally to fake. Her outrage, her alarm, her willingness to draw steel or bow at the first sign of danger, all of it came too honestly to doubt.
Joveric saw the arrow and felt his rage cool in an instant.
Fear took its place.
His inheritance manual as a berserker was no match for the Everhart Arts. He knew it at a glance. Once that arrow flew, he would not dodge it. He might not even finish the thought of trying.
So he let the bastard sword fall from his hand.
It struck the ground with a dull, heavy sound.
Joveric raised both hands.
"I... I'm not here to fight, great archer," he said.
The words came out thick with grievance and humiliation.
His hands trembled as he pointed toward the tent and the men inside, their faces still strangely peaceful in death.
"Please, great archer," Joveric said, voice tightening. "Enlighten me. What am I supposed to do?"
Clarisse saw that Alaric, Daisy, and Lena were not moving. They were acting, of course, but to her eyes they looked frightened enough to soil themselves.
Still, Clarisse was a woman who trusted method over mood.
Investigations, battlefields, small skirmish plans, those she understood.
Reading a room and weighing the hearts of people was never her strongest gift.
So she turned to the dead.
Her conclusion was simple. Someone had borne these men a private enmity.
She searched their bags first and found nothing beyond the usual supplies. Whetstones. Ink. Paper.
Then she crouched beside the bodies and searched them one by one.
She already knew the habits of men like these. Secrets were often tucked into the crotch, the waistband, the lining of the trousers. Rather than fuss with dead limbs and knotted cloth, she used the tip of her meter long arrow to rip their clothes open.
Two small papers fell free.
Clarisse pointed at them, then looked toward Joveric.
"Would you be a gentleman and tell us what these notes say?" Clarisse asked, trying, in her own stiff way, to calm him.
Joveric was already quieter than before, and being allowed into the search seemed to loosen some of the tension in his shoulders.
He took the papers and read the first. Then the second.
Then he read them again. And again.
His body folded inward until he had nearly sunk to the ground.
He trembled, but this time it was not rage shaking him. Nor frustration.
It was shame. A deep and ruinous shame.
The sort of shame that made a man feel it might be easier to die than keep breathing beneath it.
Daisy nudged Lena with an elbow, plainly wanting her to step in.
Lena hated that part of Daisy almost as much as she admired it. The woman always knew when to shove someone else into the center of the stage.
Still, Lena walked forward until she stood near enough for Joveric to hear her clearly.
"What was written there, Honorable Joveric?" Lena said. Her voice sharpened when he did not answer. "What, has the cat taken your tongue? Or did it fly off while you were cursing us in your head? Say something, you stupid orc."
Joveric said nothing. He only lowered his head further.
His men had never seen him wear such a face, but the posture told its own story. He looked like a man who had struck himself clean across the cheek and found that the blow had wiped his very face away with it.
His right hand man, Bennie, saw the danger at once.
He knew Joveric well enough to understand that too much shame could drive him straight into madness or self slaughter. He had seen that darkness in him once before, back when they were children.
So Bennie dropped to his knees before Lena.
"Madam," he said, "I am not a man of letters, but I know how a man carries himself. My friend Joveric is far from perfect, yet I would wager a fate worse than death and cut off my dominant hand, leaving myself without any proper livelihood, to prove that he is a man of integrity."
Bennie did not hesitate. He drew the blade from his waist and swung with full commitment.
Everyone heard the cut of wind as he moved to sever his right arm clean off.
Alaric, however, raised his foot, and the blade rang against the steel of his heel.
Joveric saw his man stake his very arm on the last scraps of his honor, and the shame of it struck him clean through.
He knew he had been in the wrong. He had let his temper carry him and had treated these nobles and knights like fools.
In his disgrace, he dropped low before Lena, so desperate for forgiveness that he looked ready to kiss her boot.
Alaric did not let him. With a pulse of aura, he hauled the larger man upright and forced him to look at Bennie.
"You should be saying your apologies to him," Alaric said, pointing at Bennie. "You are already a blind fool. Must you also be a worthless friend? He carries this burden for you, and you do not even know who deserves your apology."
Alaric shook his head after the tirade and spat on Joveric's boot, making plain the disgust he felt for the kind of man Joveric had just shown himself to be.
Lena had told him beforehand to press hard if the moment came.
They did not merely want Joveric quiet. They wanted him broken down enough to see clearly.
And Joveric did break.
He began to cry, then lurched toward Bennie and wrapped him in a crushing embrace.
"I am sorry, Bennie," Joveric wailed. "I was carried away."
Bennie was not as talented as Joveric in battle and had long served more as the group's accountant than its blade, yet in matters of the heart he was the steadier man.
"As long as life remains, regrets can still be mended," Bennie said, patting the larger man on the arm.
When Joveric had calmed enough to breathe without shaking, he took the two notes and handed them to Clarisse.
"My apologies. These were found on the dead men," Joveric said.
Clarisse read them and felt a jolt of surprise. She was not witless, and sooner or later she would have uncovered the truth herself, but it still stung to realize the others had already been moving several steps ahead of her.
Her eyes flicked toward Lena. With those fine boots and polished clothes, Lena looked every inch the sort meant to draw heat away from Daisy without anyone quite noticing.
