Blood Shaper

Book 4: Chapter 22

At the end of the performance, where only half of the participants knew that there was a script, a troop of guards marched through the entrance doors to the throne room and began arresting the people Kay had separated from the rest of the group. Of the collection of fools and annoyances, only a small minority had actually committed true crimes. The woman from the Bannerthrust Empire, with the convoluted scheme involving her family, her two husbands’ families, and a skilled adventurer they’d hired to come to challenge Kay for his titles that they planned to assassinate afterward, struggled against the guards while screaming obscenities. The edges of her plans that Isla’s people had caught had prompted this entire smokescreen of a display, and Kay had authorized some in-depth snooping in response. In the end, calling her plans “a takeover attempt” or “a coup in progress” was generous since all the woman had laid out were outlandish ideas combined with end goals, all driven by her apparent desperate drive for power. According to her personal journals, she was destined to rule, and nothing would stop her from reaching the apex of this world!

Except her own mediocrity. Kay distantly remembered a quote from somewhere about how someone with a lot of ambition but who lacked skill in plotting should make sure they had a good adviser. Sadly for her, she didn’t have any, and Kay had several.

At the end of it, her plotting had gone nowhere successful, but it had helped Kay in more than one way. The first and least important way was Kay getting to blow off steam by yelling at the annoying people. So many of them had been demanding to meet him in one way or another for various stupid reasons. Some just wanted to be perceived as powerful because the lord came to meet them. Others wanted something more tangible and expected him to give it to them, whether it was money, training in his Skills, items, permission to build their own military forces, only as guards, of course, or other nonsense. And in each and every conversation, which only occurred once they’d successfully made an appointment and arrived in Kay’s palace to be seen because none of them were important enough for Kay to go to them, they either slipped in a mention or just outright said how wonderful things would be once Kay could start appointing nobles, and he finally gave one to them.

Getting to yell at all of them about how privileges came only with corresponding responsibilities and that he couldn’t trust any of them to actually get any work done since they were a bunch of useless freeloaders that hadn’t contributed a single thing to Avalon since their arrival was quite the stress reliever. The shock on some of their faces when he told them that any titles of nobility that he granted once Avalon became a nation needed to be earned and that their family names and vague, distant connections to supposed powerful people in other nations didn’t earn them a single point in that direction almost set him off again, but Amanda’s prompting to stay on track had kept things within the bounds of their planning for the event.

Hopefully, there were a few of them that could be useful once they got over their internalized view of the world and how it should cater to them, but Kay was doubtful. The main benefit of the entire performance was the subterfuge and espionage that it would fuel. A few of the people being arrested were spies, but they were terrible ones who’d been too obvious about it to let go. The ones Isla was truly focusing on were the halfway decent ones. There were a handful that were less entitled and annoying than they seemed and actually supported themselves by sending information back to wherever their home was and perhaps selling information on the side. There were even a couple that were truly spies, with their identities being entirely fake.

With the public arrest of several “high status” individuals and the public scolding of many more, Isla and her team of spies were now going to seemingly take a step back, confident at the problems they’d uprooted. In reality, the plan was to sit and watch and see what happened. Which of the spies they’d definitively identified would make a move? Which ones could be manipulated into becoming overconfident, and which would stay cautious no matter what? Would they be able to feed false information to anyone? Most importantly, which of the truly skilled spies whose identities they suspected but hadn’t confirmed would make a move, proving who they were to Avalon’s counterintelligence team?

Avalon wasn’t big enough or powerful enough to truly pose a threat to any of the other nations out in the world, not yet. They were building in that direction, though, and all the whispers they could pick up were pointing toward trouble brewing on the horizon, which is what they were preparing for. Having any of the big countries out there try to actually crush them this early in their development was unlikely, but there would be testing and prodding. Some of that was going to be through spies and plots, and knowing who to watch ahead of time would give Avalon an advantage when the time came.

Kay also wanted to catch whoever it was that had sent assassins after his people. The uncoordinated, ill-planned attacks spoke of incompetence, but they also could have been probes to try and learn more. It hadn’t been any of the idiot freeloaders, which pointed at the second option being more likely. Knowing who a spy or plotter was usually ended up being more useful since you could manipulate them into foiling their own plans once you knew who they were, but Kay wouldn’t stand for attempts at his people’s lives. It was an inevitability of being a ruler or in power, but Kay still wanted to make some examples of why it would be a terrible idea to come after his friends and allies.

Kay waited until the guards dragged off everyone who’d been arrested to wait until trial. He expected all of them to be found guilty since the only people they’d targeted for arrest had been the ones they had overwhelming evidence against. He turned to Amanda once everyone who hadn’t been arrested was ushered out, escorted by a remaining contingent of guards. “Is there anything else on my schedule after this?”

“Nothing that can’t be moved around.”

“Good, I need some time to experiment.” He pulled one of the random enchanted items he had in his Inventory and started fusing it with blood. “I feel like I’m on the edge of making a breakthrough with Meld Blood.”

Amanda pulled out a thin leather binder and started flipping through the pages.

“Is that new?”

She smiled softly as she gave the cover an affectionate pat. “Yes, I just got it today. I took advantage of the programs to encourage people to get rare or useful Classes and had an aspiring enchanter work on this for me. It took some time, but now I have a storage item just for paper and paperwork. Everything’s going to be much more efficient.” She stopped and consulted the page. “We can move quite a few things around over the next few days if you’d like to take a significant training break. I can also have someone fetch Eleniah for you.”

“Yes to getting Eleniah, maybe on the longer training. Let’s set aside a few hours and see where I am after that. Could be I’m closer than I think, or it could take longer.”

“Very well,” She made some notations, then snapped the binder shut. “Where should I have her meet you?”

Kay took a moment to think. “I’d rather not travel all the way out to the Academy, and that would mess with people’s schedules since we’d probably end up cordoning off a training field…”

“As a reminder, you do have your own private training hall near your quarters,” Amanda informed him in a flat tone.

Kay grunted. “That still feels like it's too much.”

“I’ll include some time for Eleniah to lecture you on your image as a Lord again.”

“Ha ha. But, yeah, I’ll meet her there.”

“Very good.”

Eleniah found Kay sitting against one of the walls in one of the chambers that made up his private training hall. While there were several rooms with seats, some set up to allow lectures and others just to sit and practice, he’d decided to use one of the sparring rooms.

Kay took half a glance in her direction as she walked in. “Hey. I’ve been messing around with a couple of ideas with Meld Blood, which I figured would be one of the easiest-“ He did a fast double-take and gaped at her. “Whoa.”

“What?” She looked down at herself, then glared at him, “Am I not allowed to look nice?”

Eleniah was wearing an elegant blue dress that was made of a series of bolts of cloth that looked like separate pieces, all wrapping around her frame like the intricate and beautiful evolution of the toga. Two medium-length pieces draped off her sleeves, giving off the faint look of two wings, and thinner pieces wrapped around her neck, stopping just beneath her chin.

“You don’t look nice. You look fantastic.”

Her scowl melted away into an appreciative smile. “Thank you.”

“What’re you all dressed up for?”

She waved her hand dismissively. “One of the potential hires for the academy implied heavily that my going on a date with him would help him ‘be convinced’ to come to teach for us. He’s actually an alright person, and his expertise makes wooing him to come to work for us worth a date or two.” She smoothed down her dress and smiled at it, “It felt like a good excuse to bust out one of my favorite dresses, and looking good didn’t hurt my attempts to convince him to work for us.” She grinned a little wickedly.

Kay wasn’t entirely sure if the feeling he had at that moment was jealousy, annoyance, or what, but it wasn’t a positive one. “You said one or two dates. Are you going out with him again?”

She scoffed. “You think it’d take more than one date to have him falling to my whiles? No, he already signed the contract. He doesn’t meet one of my main criteria in a relationship either, so dating him for real is out.”

“What requirement is that?”

“Being able to keep up! He’s basically a complete non-combatant. There is nothing wrong with that in general, but I refuse to have the kind of relationship where one of us is off somewhere facing danger, and the other is left behind to be safe. At that point, you’re only spending half your time or less with your significant other, so what’s the point? If other people are fine with that, good for them, but it’s not for me.” She moved close enough to lean down and see what he had in his hands. “So what’re you working on specifically? All I know is it's for Meld Blood.”

Kay tried not to stare at her and kept his eyes locked down at the wand and the blood surrounding it in. “I’m trying to take the enchantment out of an item and put it into something else or make something new with it. I can take the magic from someone’s body and make it into an item, the Skill boosting gems, for example, so I feel like I should be able to do this.

“Trust your instincts, especially when it comes to the Classes and Skills under your line; your title gives you a lot of instinctual knowledge there. What have you tried so far?”

Kay listed out everything he’d attempted and the ideas he hadn’t gotten to yet, the entire time trying not to focus on how close she was, how great she looked, or how nice the perfume she was wearing was. Kay wasn’t sure if he was in the right head space to deal with his attraction to anyone, let alone his potential problem creating attraction to Eleniah. She wasn’t the only woman he knew who he had some level of attraction to either, which made things personally fraught since he hadn’t even dealt with anything like that before. Adding in the societal expectations that he eventually had more than one spouse, which he still wasn’t interested in, made the entire idea of dating or anything similar quite the pickle for him.

“Well, if you’re stuck, I know the perfect thing to help you.” Eleniah declared as she stood upright.

“’ We should fight!’”

She grinned down at him. “How did you know I’d say that?”

“Because you say it all the time.” He pushed himself up. Stretching for a moment, he looked at her dress. “Don’t you want to change?”

“What, you think I can’t kick your ass in a dress?”

“No, I’m sure you can, but the dress probably won’t survive. Didn’t you say that’s one of your favorites?”

She frowned at her clothing. “That’s a good point. I’d hate to see what the bill would be like to get it repaired, and buying a new one would be tricky.” She turned and headed for the door. “I’ll scrounge around and find something.”

“There’s, like, a half-dozen pairs of your training outfits in one of the changing rooms.”

She stopped and looked at him over her shoulder, “Why do you have a bunch of my clothes here? Do we need to have a talk about boundaries?”

“What? No! You left them sitting around, so I had them cleaned and left them here for you to train in. You’re the one who randomly leaves her clothes all over whenever you have to change.”

She grinned and kept moving, “Oh, is that what it is? I understand.”

“Stop being weird and go change; I have some other stuff to test out that we can fit into a spar.”

“Oh, is it anything I’ll be excited about?”

“Well, if it goes the way I want it to, you’ll get a chance to punch my arm off.”

She froze for a moment to look at him with surprise on her face before she sprinted off toward the changing room.

“Why is everyone so excited to either snark at me or hurt me?” Kay plaintively asked the empty air.