Chapter 16: The Price of Loyalty
The magistrate’s court stank of old paper, mildew, and the sour sweat of anxious men. Dust motes swam in shafts of pallid light cutting through high, narrow windows. Ginny stood at rigid attention between Lira and a fidgeting Ezra, her polished boots planted on the cold marble. She wore her full dress uniform, the silver gorget at her throat feeling like a choke-collar.
Across the well of the court, Sig and Reinar stood, wrists unbound but postured like penned animals. Sig’s white clothes were smudged with grave-dirt and that peculiar grey stain spiderwebbed up his right hand, visible even from a distance. His expression was carved from ice, but his eyes, when they flicked to Ginny, read a live wire of shame.
Magistrate Alarico peered down from his oak bench, a desiccated man whose robes swallowed his frame. His voice was a dry rustle. “Sigfried von Hess and Reinar of Ticino. You are charged with violating the Cornonero Restriction Edict, trespass upon sealed ground, and suspected necromantic disturbance.” He shuffled a parchment. “The guards report you were found within the Weepers’ Sepulcher, a site placarded and sealed by order of this court.”
Reinar opened his mouth, but Sig spoke first, his tone dangerously calm. “We were conducting historical research. The edict prohibits ‘malicious disturbance.’ Our disturbance was purely academic.”
“Your ‘academic’ hand is marked by the sepulcher’s blight,” Alarico stated flatly. “The edict is clear. Intent is secondary. Presence is profanation.”
“Your Honor!” Ezra’s voice, a bright, brassy intrusion, shattered the formal tension. He stepped forward, sweeping off his goat-headed helmet with a theatrical flourish. His red fur seemed absurdly vibrant in the drab room. “If I may? A moment for the less learned, perhaps, but more socially astute?”
Alarico’s weary gaze settled on the demon who's tail giving a cheerful flick. “I am here as a character witness. For these two profoundly sorry, deeply foolish coglioni.” He gestured expansively at Sig and Reinar. “Look at them! One is a cynic who thinks flowers are a botanical conspiracy, the other smiles at stray puppies. They are intellectuals. They have the common sense of a concussed moth. Left unsupervised, they’d indeed probably try to calculate the grief of a haunted stone and end up accidentally hosting a spectral tea party.”
A stifled snort came from Lira, quickly disguised as a cough. Sig’s icy glare did not waver.
Ezra pressed on, his tone shifting to one of conspiratorial reason. “The point, Your Honor, is they clearly need keepers. Responsible parties. To guide their boundless, misdirected curiosity toward, say, paying taxes and not poking cursed architecture.” He gestured grandly to Ginny and Lira. “The Knight-Lieutenant Visconti, a paragon of virtue and martial order! And the lovely Lira, whose aim is true and whose heart is pure! We will vouch for them. Post their bail. Supervise their rehabilitation. Sparing the city the cost of their imprisonment and your good self the tedium of their trial.”
Alarico steepled his fingers, his eyes moving from Ezra’s grinning face to Ginny’s stiff form. “Knight-Lieutenant. You associate with these men?”
Ginny felt every eye in the room. She felt Sig’s gaze most of all, a cold pressure on her temple. “I do, Your Honor,” she said, her voice clear and formal. “They are… companions. Their methods are questionable, but their cores are not malicious. I believe containment and oversight are preferable to incarceration.”
She paused, the institutional lie bitter on her tongue. “For clarity, I am not currently a lieutenant,” Ginny concluded, the correction sharp and necessary. “I am and adventurer, not ad military.”
Magistrate Alarico’s fingers, stained with ink, tapped the oak. He let the silence stretch, absorbing the demotion, the demon’s theatrics, the knight’s stiff honesty. “Bail and oversight are permitted for non-violent profanation,” he conceded, his voice weary. “The fine is eight hundred gold crowns.”
A sharp inhale came from Lira. “Eight hundred?” she whispered, her ears flattening against her blonde hair. “For just going into a room?”
“For destabilizing a warded sepulcher marked by the Silver Scholars,” Alarico corrected, not unkindly. “The amount is non-negotiable.”
The number hung in the dusty air, a tangible weight. Reinar’s shoulders slumped. Sig simply stared at the far wall, his jaw a hard line, the grey stain on his hand looking more like a brand. The sum was catastrophic, the kind that meant years of indenture or the selling of familial assets.
The sum was catastrophic, the kind that meant years of indenture or the selling of familial assets. A heavy silence, broken only by the scratch of the magistrate’s quill, followed them out into the pale afternoon.
The cold air outside the courthouse was a physical shock. It smelled of damp stone and distant hearth-smoke, a mundane world that seemed alien after the tomb’s dry silence and the court’s dusty verdict. They stood in a loose, fractured circle on the worn steps, the weight of eight hundred crowns a tangible void between them.
“You know? I have an idea for where to start,” Ezra said, his cheer now stripped of its courtroom performance, leaving something harder underneath. He leaned against a mossy gargoyle, tail twitching. “Eight hundred crowns is what, eight thousand silver shields? A mountain. But lately, the raids from the Grey Orc in general have tripled. They’re coming down from the crags, bold as brass.”
Lira’s ears pricked forward, her scout’s mind engaging. “They strip mining camps, caravan outliers. They take tools, raw ore, weapons.”
“Exactly,” Ezra said, a sharp grin showing his teeth. “They bring small riches with them. And their own equipment—stonecleaver axes, reinforced hide, those ugly fetishes they carve from glowstone—it all sells to the right buyers in the Low Bazaar.” He pushed off the gargoyle, his light armor clicking. “We don’t need a mountain. We just need a lot of dead orcs.”
“You’re proposing bounty hunting.” Ginny’s voice was flat, tactical, cutting through the bleak financial arithmetic. “Grey Orc scalps fetch maybe five crowns each from the garrison, less if they’re damaged. Their gear is crude. We’d need a slaughter.”
“A focused harvest,” Ezra corrected, his red-furred shoulders shrugging. “A few good, loud ambushes on a raiding party. It’s honest work.”
Lira’s brow furrowed, her practical mind overriding the shock of the fine. “Ezra, the Grey Orcs from the Cinder Crags,” she said, her tone careful. “They’ve been fighting demon mercenary bands for a decade. Their standard gear includes witch-iron shackles and blight-soaked arrows designed to rupture infernal physiology.” She looked at his cheerful, armored form. “They have anti-demon weapons.”
Ezra’s grin didn’t falter, but something behind his eyes tightened, a flicker of old, hot resentment. “Then I’ll have to be quicker, won’t I?” he said, the words too light. “They can have their special arrows. I have a profound vice for not dying.”
Ginny moved then, blocking his path down the steps. Her green eyes were hard, the polished knight overriding the friend. “This is a numerical trap, Ezra. We cannot trade two companions in a cell for one dead on a mountain. The risk profile is insane.”
“The risk profile is eight hundred crowns,” Ezra countered, his cheer finally evaporating. He leaned closer, his voice dropping. “You think sitting in a debtors’ prison is safe? With that mark on his hand?” He jerked his head toward Sig. “They’ll sell him to a labor gang within a week, Ginny. Him and Reinar both. That’s not a rescue; it’s a delayed execution.”
He saw the flinch in her jaw, the tactical certainty crumbling. “We’re good at this,” he pressed, softer now. “We’re violent professionals. Let us be professional.”
The conflict played out across her face—duty, faith, a cold calculus of lives. Her shoulders dropped a fraction. “One coordinated strike,” she conceded, the words tight. “We scout thoroughly. We exit at the first sign of their anti-demon units.”
“A wise and beautiful compromise,” Ezra said, his grin returning. He clapped her on her armored shoulder, the sound a dull ring. He glanced back at the courthouse doors, where Sig and Reinar were being processed for temporary release. “Besides,” he added, his tone sliding into pure, unguarded relief, “it’ll be nice. A little vacation. Just us, the orcs, and the open road without Sig’s running commentary on the structural collapse of everything.”
He sighed, a long, theatrical exhalation. “No lectures on atheism. No cynicism so thick you could chip it off and sell it as mortar.” A genuine, weary smile touched his eyes. “The quiet will be heavenly.”
The city air felt thin and inadequate after the tomb’s profound silence. Ginny watched Sig and Reinar descend the courthouse steps, their movements stiff with a humiliation that money alone couldn’t erase. The grey filigree on Sig’s hand seemed to pulse faintly in the afternoon light, a quiet alarm.
“A forest might be better,” Lira said, her voice soft but cutting through Ezra’s forced optimism. She stepped closer, her elven eyes scanning their faces. “My bond with the roots and stones… it can find places of concentrated wrongness, old pain sunk into the land.”
She looked pointedly at Ezra, “Dungeons in the deep woods, forgotten holds. They often hold wealth left by those who fled, or things the trees have swallowed.” Her suggestion hung there, a safer path offered. “We can search for someone who’s gone missing in such a place. A retrieval. It’s cleaner than hunting warriors built to kill your kind.”
Ezra’s smile tightened at the edges, a flicker of vulnerability beneath the bravado. “So now I need an elf-nanny to keep me from the nasty orcs?”
“You need to not die for a pile of rusty axes,” Ginny stated, her tactical mind latching onto Lira’s idea. “A retrieval job has a fixed endpoint, a defined risk. We can negotiate a fee upfront, maybe enough to cover half the fine, and plunder the rest.”
“Fine,” Ezra sighed, the fight leaving him in a long exhale.