After marking the sealed letter in a special way, rolling it up, and carefully sealing it with wax, Viscount Andrew let out a quiet breath and reviewed whether he had missed anything or made any errors.
He didn't think so. Everything they had agreed upon was written in the letter, and written convincingly. Viscount Andrew had considerable confidence in his ability to fabricate stories, he believed anyone who read the letter would be convinced he had truly witnessed "that incident" firsthand.
What remained to be seen was whether the old king, far away in the royal capital of Sunspear, would be willing to believe the matter itself.
Or rather, whether he wanted to acknowledge its authenticity.
It was a somewhat risky move, but Viscount Andrew was not a man who shied away from risk. Without risk, he never could have risen above his six brothers and sisters to become the heir of House Royce.
He just hadn't expected his newest gamble to be bound up with House Seawright.
That family, long past its prime, having withdrawn from the kingdom's political center a hundred years ago, and in recent decades so thin in numbers it was on the verge of natural extinction.
Viscount Andrew had always paid close attention to his "neighbors." This was not only because their territories were adjacent with frequent trade between them, but also because House Seawright's decline had grown noticeably worse over the past two years. At the rate things were going, Andrew could reasonably expect to see Royce lands double in size within his own lifetime, that girl who had hastily inherited the family estate was simply not a competent lord. She worked hard, certainly, but she was never going to hold onto what little she had.
Fate, however, had played a joke on everyone, and in the most unimaginable way possible.
When Andrew heard that Seawright's domain had been devastated by monsters, he was dumbfounded.
When he heard that those monsters bore a strong resemblance to the Others described in historical records of the Dark Tide, he was still dumbfounded. When merchants entering the city mentioned that a dragon had appeared, he was dumbfounded once more. And when Rebecca Seawright and Hettie Seawright arrived at the castle accompanied by a man who claimed to be their ancient ancestor... Viscount Andrew displayed an extraordinary degree of composure and acceptance.
That was because he had simply grown accustomed to being dumbfounded.
But after concluding his conversation with that Ancestral Lord and returning to his own chambers, Viscount Andrew felt he had made the right decision.
A noble lineage on the verge of extinction and a domain burned to bare earth had no real value, you couldn't wring any profit from them no matter how hard you squeezed. If he wanted a return on his investment, he was far better off transforming from a greedy exploiter into a generous good neighbor. And the very existence of that Ancestral Lord was the key consideration, Viscount Andrew was now ninety percent convinced of the man's authenticity. Whether House Seawright had that ancient forebear or not made all the difference in the world.
He sealed the letter into a silver tube, wound a strand of enchanted thread around it, and handed it to the old steward standing beside him. "Give this to the finest ranger-courier available, depart by griffon, and have the courier deliver it to Silverkeep after the first courier arrives but before House Seawright does."
The steward took the silver tube and was about to turn away when Viscount Andrew called after him. "Wait, also, go to the treasury and return the gold and silver belonging to House Seawright, exactly as it was."
"Yes, my lord. But is simply returning it as-is sufficient?"
"Returning it as-is will do for now. When they set out, I'll prepare a little something extra under the guise of travel expenses."
Things had changed. The "fee" he had collected out of petty greed now felt like a hot potato. Returning it in full was only the first step, but he couldn't move too boldly all at once.
Viscount Andrew carefully weighed his options in his mind, hoping that this man from seven hundred years ago would understand the sincerity of his gesture.
The night was deep.
Wearing his sleeping robe, Wayne pushed open the balcony door of his room and stepped out onto the second-floor terrace of the viscount's castle.
In this world, there was no moon at night. The vast, dark canopy of sky was filled only with stars, far more densely packed than those he had seen on Earth, their cold, brilliant light washing over the land below. Every one of those stars felt utterly unfamiliar to Wayne.
Since arriving in this world, he had developed a habit of gazing skyward, day or night, without exception. During the day, he would look up at that enormous, not-quite-blinding "sun." At night, he would stare into the moonless sky.
His eyes wandered among the stars, searching for something, some celestial body that was perfectly still, distinctly different from the rest.
But this was always a futile endeavor. There were so many stars, and he had neither the reference data nor the calculations necessary to find the position from which he had once looked down upon the land below. Even if he could, he would have no way to pick it out from the sea of light surrounding it.
And yet he couldn't help himself. Because he, more than anyone, knew that the sky of this world held secrets. Something was up there, perhaps a monitoring device, a satellite, a space station, or a ship. The odds were high that it had long since gone dark, but he couldn't rule out the possibility that something else still orbited above, still functioning.
He had once been part of that monitoring device, this was the closest theory Wayne had arrived at after many days of reflection.
Had he never experienced those moments of looking down upon the earth from above, had he simply awakened in Gwayne Seawright's body from the very beginning, he would have had no awareness of any of this, and no corresponding sense of unease. But he did know these things. And so, as a soul from Earth shaped by a modern way of thinking, he could not suppress his curiosity about the sky, nor his apprehension.
What exactly is hanging up there? What influence might it, or they, have over the world below? Will it, or they, remain this quietly in place forever? What purpose might their makers have had, if there were makers at all?
All of it gave Wayne a sense of urgency he could share with no one, like an earthling who suddenly discovers that an alien spacecraft has been parked in orbit directly overhead. Even if that ship had sat motionless for tens or hundreds of thousands of years, no one living beneath it could truly rest easy.
He needed to understand the origin and nature of whatever was up there before he could sleep soundly.
And even setting aside the anxiety, sheer curiosity alone was enough to make him unable to look away from the sky.
"You know, you look up at the sky every single day," came a girl's voice from behind him.
Wayne turned to find the half-elven thief perched on the terrace railing, her back to the open air, watching him with a grin. Her legs dangled freely on the other side of the railing without the slightest concern about falling.
Wayne glanced at her. "Sneaking onto someone else's balcony in the dead of night to startle them is rather rude, you know."
"Night is my domain, there are shadows everywhere, and I go wherever I please," Amber said, swaying lightly on the railing. Her body melted into the shadows, and in the next instant she reappeared on the opposite side of the terrace. "Besides, you're a great hero from seven hundred years ago. Surely you're not frightened by someone suddenly speaking to you in the dark?"
Wayne wasn't about to admit he had, in fact, just broken out in goosebumps.
"So what are you actually looking at every day?" When Wayne didn't respond, Amber changed the subject. "I get watching the sun in the daytime to get your bearings, but looking at stars at night? Are you doing astrology? Can you do astrology?"
"What do you think is up there?" Wayne asked, turning the question back on her.
"Up there? Just stars and the sun and things like that, isn't it?" Amber said casually. "Oh, wait, you're not about to tell me the gods' palaces are up in the sky and then try to convert me, are you? Because I'm not interested. I follow the Goddess of Shadow and Night, Lady Night, and Lady Night's divine realm lies in the deepest part of a starless night. That's a completely different place from the actual sky. All I have to do is close my eyes and say a quick prayer every day and I've done my religious duty!"
"You're actually a devotee of the Night Goddess?" Wayne looked at Amber with mild surprise. He wasn't a believer himself, but from Gwayne Seawright's memories he had a fair amount of knowledge about this world's religions. The bewildering variety of deities and great and small faiths had been an eye-opener, though he kept a respectful distance from all of it. He just hadn't expected this thief, who seemed about as far from pious as possible, to actually have a faith.
"Eh, just a casual believer," Amber said breezily, in terms any true devotee would find outrageously sacrilegious. "Lady Night doesn't demand offerings, doesn't issue divine decrees, doesn't require showing up to worship at set times, not a single copper coin out of my pocket. Why wouldn't I believe in her on the side? Besides, the Way of Shadows is vaguely connected to Lady Night's domain, so sometimes when I pray I feel like I genuinely get a little stronger, though it always turns out later to have been a drunken hallucination."
Wayne pursed his lips and decided to stop engaging with this hopeless half-elf.
An absolute disgrace to elves, and whatever made up her other half was a disgrace to that bloodline too.
"Hey, hey, why'd you go quiet again?" Amber was not about to let him off the hook. "You still haven't told me, what are you actually looking at?"
Wayne glanced sideways at her. "Have you ever heard the saying that when people die, their souls return to the heavens and wander among the stars, that each star is actually the soul of an ancestor?"
"Never heard that one. What I've heard is that people with faith have their souls collected by whichever deity they followed, to enjoy themselves in that god's realm, while people with no faith have their souls collected by the God of Death, and then the Death God's wife combs away all their memories with an iron comb and sends them back to the world of the living." Amber rattled on without pause. "Some people say that regardless of what anyone believes, everyone is essentially a follower of the God of Death by default. But your version is interesting too, people go up to the sky when they die? Is that some religion from seven hundred years ago?"
Wayne felt slightly awkward. "No, it's..."
"Oh, right! You've actually died before!" Amber's eyes went wide, as if she'd discovered a whole new continent. She slid over to him in an instant and pestered him eagerly. "Does that mean when you died you went straight up to the sky? What's it actually like to be dead? Come on, tell me!"
"Get away from me!" Wayne pressed his palm against Amber's face and shoved her back. "When you die, you don't know anything, understand? I was just babbling nonsense a moment ago!"
"Hmph..." Amber stared at him for a long moment, and once she was satisfied he genuinely wasn't going to tell her anything, she looked away. "Old people are so boring."
"What did you just say?!"
In a flash, Amber was gone.