A Time of Tigers - From Peasant to Emperor

That last line had surprised Oliver more than the others. Lombard was not a man to show any sort of affection. To hear him say something that sounded suspiciously like goodwill, rather than an order, it was rather shocking.

"Ah, and this as well. A letter from Solgrim. My man tells me a merchant sent it," Lombard said.

Oliver had taken the scraggly-looking bit of parchment from Lombard's fingers, and doubtfully unfold it, as he climbed into the carriage beside the maid.

Slowly, he'd begun to read it, only to find that the letters – letters that he already had some difficulty grasping, for his reading was somewhat lacking – were nearly impossible to make out.

Seeing him struggle and frown, Marianne had offered to read it for him. She'd be sent, in Lombard's place, to ensure that Oliver arrived safely in the Capital.

With that letter, Oliver was finally allowed tidings of the village that had escaped him during his time away.

It had only taken Marianne five or so minutes to read out the contents of the letter, but Oliver had found him replaying them in his head over and over again, through the duration of the six-hour journey to Garsh – a city to the South East of Ernest, where Lord Blackwell and Lombard recided.

Perhaps it was that letter that allowed Oliver to smile somewhat most honestly now.

The pains of the battle had still not faded. His head ached, and his soul felt foreign. The nights, and the dreams with them, were a discomforting affair. They could not even be accurately described as nightmares. For it was not terror exactly that he felt during them. Or at least, not just terror.

It was complete disconnect, and disorientation. It was a profound sense of loss.

With the letter, Nila was allowed to send her tidings.

From it, she had told Beam that her mother was well. She'd been found unconscious, amongst the remains of the encampment, with a wound on her side from an axe. The wound hadn't been quite enough to kill her. She'd been lucky to avoid any internal organs. With a few days of rest, she'd been on her feet again, tending to the injured.

Stephanie had been a harder case. As with the other children – many of whom the villagers did not know, but had taken in anyway – there had been a lifelessness to her. A refusal to express any true emotion, as though fearing what it would mean to do so.

But after she had been reunited with her little brother, she had slowly softened, until she had begun to speak once more. Nila seemed confident that she would soon be fully herself again, just as the others likely would.

She had then expressed a teasing sentiment. "So, I heard – all along it turns out you were a noble, eh? Or so they say."

His heart had dropped hearing that, surprising even himself. He wondered why he cared so much what she thought about him. If he had been reading it up to there, he might have stopped, and set the letter aside. But as it was, Marianne had continued to read on, and Oliver would later be glad that she did.

"I'm expecting big things from you, Beam," she said. "I won't forget what you did for us. You're in Blackwell, right? I'm going to work my way up with hunting. I'll rebuild what I had before the attack, and then more still. I'm going to be richer than Greeves, richer even than a noble.

Then, I'll come and find you to show off. You better not come back to Solgrim before then, okay?"

Hearing that, it had made Oliver's jaw tight. If Marianne thought there to be anything odd about a noble's relationship with a peasant girl, she did not show it. She didn't even try to glimpse the emotions written on Oliver's face as he looked out his window to hide the tears that threatened to come.

She'd hidden it well with her words, as though suspecting that someone else would have been reading them – but she knew. She hadn't been fooled by the pretence of his sudden ascension to nobility. Whether she had figured it out herself, or whether Greeves had, it did not matter to him. All that mattered was that she knew he had not lied to them.

Within her words, there had been something more important though. A hard shove in the back. Telling him to go forward. It surprised him to realize how much he had needed that. He craved strength, that was true, but with his situation changing so suddenly, and with his surroundings suddenly so strange and foreign, it was taking all he had to remain calm, despite the wounds to his soul.

Her words helped put a salve on that. She had been the first friend that he'd made in many years, since his time as a child, before his family had been slain. It was good to have her, even if she was not there in person. It tied him to something, so that he was not quite the drifting float in a sea of nothingness.

With Dominus gone, that was important.

And then he had read Greeves' section. It began with the telling of Loriel's funeral, and the funeral of the others as well. Again, Oliver found himself looking out the window at the mention of Loriel. He wasn't sure if he could call her a friend. She'd been something else to him, during the time that he had spent alone. She was more like a sudo-mother, at times, or an older sister.

Her loss stung. It would have been a tragedy if it was her alone, and he would not have been able to control the tears.

As it was, hers became a piece of the painful puzzle, of all who had died that day. His master and Loriel stood firmly at the centre, cemented by the deaths of all those villagers, all those soldiers, and those children that had died in the basement. All that Beam had failed to protect. A weight on his shoulders, a sore throbbing wound.