Rated MA26+ | Horror Fantasy | Graphic Violence
The Garudore historical file is not large.
This is the first thing Mildern notices when Sera puts it on the table in front of him the morning after the corridor visit. For a kingdom that existed for thirty years, for a royal family that built something from nothing and made it genuinely beloved, for a king whose death the Council should have looked at harder than they did — the file is not large. It is two inches of paper. It is the institutional thickness of something that was processed and filed and not returned to because there was nothing left to return to.
Sera sits across from him and puts her hands on the table. She looks like she has not slept, which she probably hasn't, which is the state she has been in for most of the past three weeks.
"The invasion records are in the front section," she says. "The pre-invasion diplomatic correspondence is in the middle. I flagged the pages I think you need to read first."
"What did you flag."
"The letters," she says. "The real ones. The ones between your father and Gamatose Hazuki before the forged letter arrived." She looks at him. "Read them before you read anything else."
He reads them.
There are fourteen of them across three years. Written in the formal diplomatic style of two heads of state who have met enough times to have dispensed with the formal diplomatic style in practice while maintaining it in form, which produces a specific kind of letter — the structure of official correspondence with the texture of two people who actually like each other underneath it. His father's handwriting is familiar in the specific painful way of things that belong to people who are no longer alive to own them. Careful. Precise. With the small leftward lean that Mildern has, which he didn't know until this moment that he inherited.
The fourteenth letter is dated seven months before the invasion. His father thanks Gamatose for the gift sent for the Yazukaze midsummer celebration. He mentions that the kingdom's western harvests have been strong. He mentions, in a postscript that is three lines long and clearly added after the main letter was complete, that he is looking forward to the summit in the autumn and that he hopes the negotiations on the eastern trade routes will go better than last year's, which stalled on a technicality that both parties knew was a technicality and chose to let stall anyway because neither of them was in a hurry.
The postscript ends: Give my regards to your son on his upcoming ceremony. A crown prince deserves better celebration than a postscript, but here we are. Mildern sets the letter down.
He picks it up again. He reads the postscript again. He sets it down again. "He knew Raito," Mildern says.
"They all knew each other," Sera says quietly. "Four summits over six years. The families attended two of them. Your father and Gamatose Hazuki considered each other friends in the way that kings consider each other friends, which is genuinely but carefully." She pauses. "The forged letter arrived three months after that last letter. Your father received it and believed it because he had no reason not to. Because nothing in six years of correspondence gave him a framework for questioning a letter with the right seal and the right handwriting asking for tribute under threat of war."
Mildern looks at the stack of fourteen letters.
"Hanuto Yama studied those letters," he says. "To forge the last one. He had access to the correspondence style, the handwriting, the seal. He spent months on it."
"At least six," Sera says. "Based on when the falsified trade documents start appearing in the archive. He built the entire false record first and then delivered the letter last, so when your father received it the paper trail supporting it was already in place." She looks at her hands. "He was seventeen when he started building it. He was patient enough at seventeen to spend eight months constructing a lie before he told it."
Mildern thinks about the corridor last night. About grey eyes going amber and the fracture lines spreading across pale hands without the rest of the body moving at all.
"He's been like that ever since," Mildern says. "Patient. Invisible. Building things. Letting other people stand in front of them." "Yes," Sera says.
"And the king he built that weapon around has spent over a decade carrying a grief that was never aimed at the right target," Mildern says. "Because the right target was a seventeen-year-old who was careful enough to never be in the same room as the consequences."
Sera doesn't say anything to that. There isn't anything to say to it. Rin Hazuki lives on the fourth street of the eastern residential quarter under a name that is not Hazuki and has not been Hazuki for twenty-two years.
She is twenty-four. She opens the door herself when Mildern knocks and looks at him with her father's eyes, which is something he doesn't know yet and won't know until he has read enough of the file to recognize them — dark amber, steady, the eyes of a person who has been waiting for something for a long time and has gotten very good at waiting.
"Prince Yazukaze," she says. "I'd prefer Mildern," he says. "If that's all right." She looks at him for a moment. "Rin," she says. "Come in."
The apartment is small and organized with the specific economy of someone who has been careful with everything for a long time. Books on three walls. A worktable with papers that she moves to one side when they sit down. A single window that looks out at the eastern quarter's rooftops and the slice of sky above them.
She pours two cups of tea without asking. He takes his and holds it and doesn't drink it immediately, which is a habit that Saku has commented on before, that he holds things before he uses them, like he's checking they're real.
"You've been investigating the merchant deaths," she says. "Sera Holt sent word that the Council had identified a connection to my father's case. She said you'd want to speak with me."
"Yes," he says. "She also said you've been reading the pre-invasion correspondence." "This morning," he says.
Rin looks at her tea. "Your father's letters are in the Garudore historical record," she says. "I asked the Council to include them when they compiled the file. I wanted them in the official record somewhere. I wanted—" She stops. "I wanted there to be a document somewhere that showed they were friends. That it wasn't what it looked like. Even if I didn't know yet why it looked the way it did."
"You already believed the invasion wasn't what it looked like," Mildern says.
"I was twelve," she says. "I was twelve years old in a passage behind a wall listening to my father give orders to the last guards he had left and the person he was describing as the enemy had sent a gift to my brother three months before and written a postscript about it." She looks at him directly. "People who send gifts and write friendly postscripts don't give orders to burn your home. Something was wrong with the story. I didn't have the vocabulary for it at twelve. I've spent twenty-two years looking for the vocabulary."
"The vocabulary is Hanuto Yama," Mildern says.
He tells her everything. He does it in the order Sera assembled it, which is the order that builds the understanding correctly — the forged documents first, the manufactured border incident, the letter last. He tells her about the cipher. He tells her about the younger sibling who disappeared from records at seventeen and built an infrastructure nobody noticed for over a decade. He tells her what the forged letter said and how it was constructed and how long the false paper trail had been in place before it arrived.
Rin listens without interrupting. She holds her tea in both hands and looks at the table and listens. When he finishes she is quiet for a long time. "He didn't order it," she says.
"No." "He received a letter." "Yes." "And believed it because he had no reason not to."
"Yes," Mildern says. "He believed it the same way your father believed the invasion was real. Because both of them were working with the information they had and the information they had was a lie."
Rin puts her tea down on the table. She puts it down carefully, exactly in the center of the small cloth under it, and then she puts her hands flat on the table on either side of it and looks at them.
"My father died thinking his friend had betrayed him," she says. "Yes." "He died not knowing the truth of it." "Yes."
She is quiet for a long time. Outside the window the eastern quarter goes about the morning and the slice of sky above the rooftops is pale and ordinary and indifferent. "What my father has become," she says finally. "What Hanuto Yama built from what my father became." She looks up. "It's carrying twenty-two years of the wrong grief. Aimed at the wrong target."
"Yes," Mildern says. "And the target it's been given is you," she says. "A nineteen-year-old who was eight years old when Garudore fell." "Yes."
Rin looks at him. The amber eyes. Her father's eyes in a twenty-four-year-old's face. "He needs to know," she says. "Whatever my father is now, whatever is left of him inside that — he needs to know the truth. Before you fight it. Before anything else. Because fighting it without telling it is just — it's just adding to the wrong." She stops. "He deserves the truth. He deserved it twenty-two years ago and he never got it and he's been carrying the wrong version of what happened ever since."
"I know," Mildern says. "That's why I'm here." She looks at him for a moment.
"I want to write something," she says. "A testimony. In my own words, with my own account of what I witnessed and what I've understood since. I want it sealed with the family seal." She reaches into the drawer of the worktable and puts a small brass seal on the table between them. It is worn with handling. The kind of worn that comes from being picked up and put down regularly for twenty-two years. "I've been carrying this since I was twelve. I want it to mean something."
"It will," Mildern says. She looks at him for a moment longer. Then she looks at the seal.
"You have his eyes," she says. "Your father. I've seen portraits. The same shape. The same—" She stops. "I don't know if that makes this harder or easier."
"I don't know either," Mildern says honestly.
She writes for forty minutes while he waits. He sits across from her and holds his tea and eventually drinks it and watches the slice of sky through the window go from pale morning to the cleaner light of midday. She writes in the careful specific way of someone who has been composing this in their head for a long time and is now only doing the mechanical work of getting it onto paper.
When she finishes she reads it once, seals it, and puts it on the table in front of him. "Tell him," she says. "Whatever it takes to reach him through what he's become. Tell him."
The fourth name on the list is a person named Culver who runs documentation services out of a converted building on the north canal and who received Tane's message and did what Bretto did not do — he ran. He closed his business and packed what he could carry and left the Noble City on the morning of the sixteenth on a supply wagon heading east.
He made it fourteen miles.
The investigating team from the Council finds the wagon on the seventeenth. The driver is alive, unhurt, sitting on the road beside the wagon with his hands on his knees and the specific expression of someone who has decided to answer every question asked of him as fully and quickly as possible because the alternative to answering questions is being alone with the memory of what he saw.
He describes a figure stepping out of the treeline at the side of the road in human form, in a white coat, with grey eyes. He describes the conversation that followed as brief and one-sided. He describes what happened after that in the careful flat language of someone pushing the description through a very small opening between what he witnessed and what his mind is willing to fully reconstruct.
Culver is not in the wagon. Culver is in the treeline at the side of the road, twenty meters from where the wagon stopped, in a condition that the investigator's report handles in one sentence using words that are accurate and completely insufficient.
The driver describes one other thing. He describes it last, unprompted, when the investigator has already closed his notebook and is standing to leave. The driver says: when it was finished, the figure stood at the edge of the road and looked east for a while. Just stood there. Not moving. And then it said something quietly that the driver couldn't fully hear from the distance.
The investigator asks what he thinks he heard. The driver says he thinks he heard a name. The investigator writes it in the margin of the closed notebook.
Raito.
Mildern reads the report at the ninth bell of the evening with Saku across the table doing Academy work and the sealed testimony from Rin Hazuki sitting beside the report like two documents that belong to the same answer approached from different directions.
He reads the final line of the report. He puts it down. "It said the name again," Saku says, without looking up from his work. "Raito." "How did you—" "Your face," Saku says.
Mildern looks at the two documents side by side. The report with its inventory of what was found in the treeline off the east road. The sealed testimony with Rin's handwriting and the worn brass seal of a family that burned down before she was old enough to keep it from burning.
"Fourteen miles," he says. "Culver ran fourteen miles and it found him in fourteen miles."
"It's not going to stop," Saku says. He puts his pen down. "Not because of distance. Not because of barriers. It found Bretto through four hired guards and a locked building. It found Culver on a road fourteen miles east. It found you in your corridor at the second bell." He looks at Mildern. "The only thing that stops it is the truth."
"We don't know that the truth stops it," Mildern says.
"We know the truth changes it," Saku says. "You said Raito's name in the corridor and the fractures started on their own. Without it deciding to change. The grief is still in there and the grief responds to the truth even when the rest of it has decided not to." He picks up his pen. "That means the truth reaches something. Whether reaching it is enough — we don't know. But it reaches something."
Mildern looks at him for a moment. At this eleven-year-old who reasons like someone who has been paying very close attention to the world for a very long time because the world gave him no choice but to pay close attention.
"When did you get this specific," Mildern says. "I've always been this specific," Saku says. "You just started listening." Mildern doesn't answer that because it is entirely accurate and he has no useful response to accurate things said about him directly.
He looks at Rin's sealed testimony. He thinks about what she said — that her father deserved the truth twenty-two years ago and never got it. He thinks about the corridor and the grey eyes going amber. He thinks about a name said once in a voice that used to be a person's and then sealed back up behind flat grey eyes that give nothing back.
He thinks about what it means to carry the wrong grief for twenty-two years in a heart built to carry it forever. He picks up the testimony and holds it.
"Tomorrow," he says. "I'm going to the Council with all of it. The file. Rin's testimony. The cipher confirmation. All thirty-seven pieces plus the new ones." He looks at Saku. "And then we go to find him."
"To fight him," Saku says. "To tell him," Mildern says. Saku looks at him for a long moment. Then he looks at the testimony in Mildern's hand. "Okay," he says.
He picks up his pen and goes back to his Academy work and the lamp burns between them and the city is dark outside and the east road is fourteen miles away and somewhere on it or past it or already back in the Noble City something with a dead king's name and an immortal engine in its heart is carrying a grief that was never aimed correctly and has been burning for twenty-two years and has been owed the truth for exactly as long.
TO BE CONTINUED — EPISODE SEVEN: "The Truth Gamatose Was Owed" - NATION OF GAMATOSE ARC | Volume II | Rated MA26+