Death After Death

Chapter 386 - Homecoming

Simon spent as much time the following day trying to decide what he’d done to cause this unlikely wrinkle in causality as he did trying to decide what he should do with the boy. The obvious answer was to take him and the corpses of his family back to Crowvar. In another life, he might have done exactly that; if he played his cards right, he might have even been able to force himself as regent and protector of the boy for a decade until he came of age.

Simon had no such grand ambitions this life, though. He was here to learn all he could from the Unspoken and then go deeper into the Pit.

Having one of the men he hated most in the world delivered into his hands in the form of a defenseless child, though, derailed all of that. “What am I supposed to do now?” he asked himself as the boy slumbered by their fire the following day. “Rehabilitate him?”

Leaving aside that Simon didn’t think rehabilitating the little monster was possible, he was hardly sure that the Unspoken would consider this brat worthy. While he had no idea how young the sight developed, he found it unlikely that a bad apple like Varten would grow into a man with a soul that was clear enough and bright enough to see into the hearts of others.

Still, even as he said that, he studied the sleeping boy’s aura to try to find some disqualifying detail that would let him wash his hands of the whole thing; he found no fatal flaw. In another life, he would certainly grow up to be a monster, but in this one, at least so far, he seemed like any other child, save for the pale glow of weakness and the muddy red tones of recent trauma.

Varten finally woke up a few hours before they entered the village of Karlsford. Simon was leaning toward leaving the boy in their care, but that became harder when he started to ask questions.

“Who are you?” was followed very shortly after by, “Where am I,” and “What happened to my mother?”

He recognized this was the same carriage he’d been in two days before when the battle had started, but he had trouble accepting anything else, and when Simon told him as gently as possible, “You’re the only one I managed to save,” the boy refused to believe him.

Instead, he demanded to see their bodies. Simon would have refused such a traumatizing demand entirely, but when Varten tried to sit up and dismount the moving carriage to see for himself, he very nearly broke his own neck in the process. So Simon relented, but only because he didn’t want the stubborn ten-year-old to hurt himself.

He expected the sight to break the boy. It certainly would have broken Simon to see his father, mother, and younger brother lying there, soaked in blood. He didn’t cry, though. Instead, he clenched his fists in silence and then muttered a couple of curses he probably shouldn’t have known at that age.

“What of the guards? Why didn’t they do their duty and defend my mother!” he demanded, stomping his foot.

Not my family, or their lord, but my mother, Simon noted clinically as he tried to be sympathetic to the boy. He explained that the guards had all died fighting, but they’d been caught by surprise.

“If I were older, this never would have happened,” he swore very seriously. “I would have saved everyone!”

While Varten had been an accomplished dualist in the life he knew him best from, Simon wasn’t aware of any time he’d actually fought to defend anyone except himself. He didn’t comment on that, though. He just let the child have his moment of rage, and when the tears finally came, he ushered him back to the buckboard so they could continue on their way.

At least, he tried to. When Simon lifted him up, the young man clung to him like a drowning victim and sobbed for several minutes before he released Simon again. That melted Simon’s heart, but only a little, and as soon as he could set him down, they got moving.

Simon stayed in Karlsford for 3 days. That was as much to let a proper herbalist treat Varten’s reddening wounds and growing fever as to work with the local carpenter to build coffins for the rest of the family. Simon’s news spread through the community like wildfire, both because of the death of their lord and concern about centaurs in the region, but Simon did his best to calm them on both counts.

It was much the same in every community he passed through between the massacre and Crowvar. Simon still wasn’t sold on taking Varten there, but he really wasn’t sure what else to do with him. While saving his mother might have fixed whatever hole that injury had caused, losing his entire family seemed to have made it worse, and as he gained strength, so too did his anger.

For once, it wasn’t directed at Simon. It was directed at the rest of the world: the guards for being weak, the centaurs for being barbarians, the villages they passed through for being cowards, and, of course, his father, for not anticipating the ambush.

“How could he let our lands grow so weak that monsters could savage us on the main road!?” he demanded at least once a night, blaming his father for what had happened. His tone and vocabulary were always the most high-handed when he was criticizing his own father.

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While Simon happened to agree with both the boy’s complaint and the person who was to blame for it, he thought it was unhealthy for a young boy to blame his own murdered father. So, he sought to dissuade him, telling Varten about the many perils he’d seen on the roads in the last few months.

“The world is a dangerous place,” Simon cautioned him. “Blaming any one person for that simplifies it too much.”

Those explanations did nothing to change the boy’s mind, but Simon’s tales of battle and bravery calmed him. Few things did. So, inevitably, that was what they spent most nights around the campfire talking about. Simon told him stories from a dozen different lifetimes blended into one seamless canvas. He told him about crushing the ogre with an avalanche and rooting out the goblin barrows of Ordenvale. It was stuff that should have given him nightmares, but Varten already had plenty of those.

Rather than shrink away, though, the boy asked probing questions about all of them. “What is the best weapon to fight goblins in their caves?” he asked. “Where should I stab a beastman if one attacks?”

They were specific, practical questions that would have indicated he was going to grow up to be a serial killer if he’d asked them about people. Murdering monsters, though, was a healthy enough topic given the circumstances. The only monsters Simon didn’t tell him about were centaurs, because every time he did, Varten woke up screaming a few hours later.

Monsters he’d never seen calmed him, but those he’d faced firsthand were too much. Simon could sympathize. As he’d been recently reminded when his future self sought to rehabilitate his soul, the skeleton knight had been absolutely terrifying in their first few encounters, and though Simon had long ago outgrown that level for his current ward, Varten. That trauma was still very fresh and would be for years.

Almost two weeks after the Raithewait family was slaughtered and nearly a month after Simon left Crowvar, he returned to the walled town. The guards at the gate blew their horns in celebration when they saw the baron’s carriage returning, but they regretted that decision only a few minutes later, when Simon finally pulled up to the gate.

The announcements were made far and wide within the hour, and Varten was taken immediately to the keep. There, Simon found just enough darkness swirling around various members of the baron’s household that he refused to be separated from the boy while they made him clean and presentable, and had the family’s healer look over him. The servants tried to prevent that, but Varten himself overruled them.

Despite being a child, he shouted down anyone who thought to argue. “And where were you when I was dying?” he demanded on several occasions. “Where were you when your baron needed you? Nowhere! No, go muck out the stables before I have you exiled!”

They seemed like lines he’d overheard his father say. The mimicry was clear in the inflection of his voice, but that didn’t stop anyone from obeying.

There are worse places than Crowvar, Simon admitted to himself silently, even as he wondered how badly this home had already crippled Varten’s ability to be a good person. At ten, I would have still thought him an innocent, more or less, but it's clear he’s his father’s son, or at least his proxy.

Simon didn’t try to chastise or correct the boy. He was too focused on the servants and the way they swam around the young lord like sharks. During his last visit, Simon hadn’t been granted access to the keep; no doubt half the reason they wanted him gone was because the people here didn’t want a Whitecloak sniffing around for too long. It wasn’t hard to see why.

Simon could see the colors of corruption and treachery swirling around half of the staff here, and the more important they were to the barony, the more likely they were to have those muddy greens and browns in their dim souls. The darkest courtiers of all wouldn’t even get close to him, which Simon found more than a little suspicious.

There was no magic here on any of my visits, Simon reminded himself, but that’s decades from now. Who knows what evils the baron let fester during his reign?

There were certainly enough souls that were close enough to black that Simon wouldn’t have been surprised to learn a warlock hidden in the city was the cause of many of its problems. He hadn’t even been looking for something like that in his first few dozen lives.

He stayed diligent, which reassured Varten, but it wasn’t until dinner that night that the boy said anything to him that touched on the subject. “Does that man seem worse to you than the rest?” he asked quietly between bites of steak as one of the late baron’s servants flittered back and forth at the back of the room.

He did seem worse. His soul was nearly black, and he had the blood of multiple people on his hands. That might have marked him as a spymaster, a warlock, or even an assassin in the Raithewait service. Simon studied him discreetly, but answered only noncommittally. “Your father seems to have built himself quite a nest of vipers. What makes that man stand out to you?”

“I don’t know,” the child lied. “Just… different. That’s all.”

Simon spent the rest of the meal trying to pry the truth out of Varten, but if he could see anything supernatural. He didn’t share it with Simon. That night, he slept in Varten’s room, on a cushion on the floor, and was surprised to find that come morning, the boy had crawled out of his soft bed to join him.

He spent the next day helping him get ready for the funeral, which Varten endured bravely enough except when the priest touched on his mother. That was enough to reduce the boy to silent tears. Once that was done, they waited a few days before he was sworn in as the new baron. Simon got the feeling they were delaying to trigger a plan B when he left, but he didn’t give them the chance, no matter how many times he was encouraged to do just that.

“Until that boy is given his title, there’s not an authority in this blasted place that can tell me what to do,” was the answer Simon gave on a regular basis. He usually followed it up with a threat about the sort of people that wouldn’t want a man who wore the white to linger, which was enough for most to give him a wide berth.

Still, Simon was unsatisfied. He owned Varten no more than he’d already given him. Still, he couldn’t help but feel that he was throwing him to the wolves.