A Promise of Iron by Brandon McCoy (the reading list .txt) 📕

“Ruks do not kneel. They must be bent. Sometimes they must be broken,” Vis said.

Vis explained that despite this generosity, I turned on my master, Lord Harlow, and poisoned him in his sleep, forged my release papers, and fled north. This was an outright lie though the truth was far more painful, and the details much harder to discuss. I knew Lord Tithur Harlow well, though he had me call him Tith. He did purchase my writ and took me from the labor camps when I was still a boy. At first, it was remarkable. I had been saved; the gods were real, and Cyllians were noble and just. I was educated, studied in language, reading, writing, astronomy, and even a touch of alchemy. I was well cared for, and for that, I was grateful.

After some time, this kindness no longer came freely, and the hidden reason for my salvation became known to me in ways a boy shouldn’t know an older man. I was a child. Still, I knew little kindness in the world, and despite his demands, I did not go hungry, and I was no longer cold. If there was a price for such comfort, coming from the streets of Forhd and the beatings and hard labor endured in the camps, I found myself willing to pay it. That is the thought that stuck with me years later, the thought that sickens me still—I stayed.

When I grew older, his heart began to fail, and he turned to the word of the Venticle for comfort. He confided in me a remorse, a profound sadness for what he had done, and sought amends. This was as much to save his soul as to heal mine. In truth, he had grown frail, and he could no longer overpower me as he did when I was younger.

He signed my papers of freedom; this was the truth. He died the next day of heart failure, and I was interrogated just as I had been today. There were no signs of struggle, no sign of forced coercion, just a sickly man freeing his pet before dying alone in his bed. They sent me away, according to his wishes, to return to my homeland to find my mother. Suspicion followed, but they never found signs of poison, not the poison that slowly crippled his heart and other organs years before his time. How could they? Filed and ground into his food and tea to mask the taste, it took five and half iron stars to kill him; I should have been more careful with the half that remained.

When Vis finished his story, he painted me as a cruel and calculating man, treasonous to the state, and an active agent of the enemy. I was bent on the destruction of the Empire, which was quite accurate. I was a far cry from the beaten and abused boy found on the streets of Forhd. I was not the hero of Belen Hill or Belen Heights; I was just another murderous Ruk bastard that deserved to die.

When Vis sat, resting his case against me, all I could do was smile. I was impressed. I was doomed, of course, but impressed nonetheless. He had thinly stitched together dozens of disparate threads in less than a day to take me from hero to horror. The question that remained for me was why? Why bother? If I was truly guilty and they believed it, they would have just taken me behind a building and slit my throat. This was purposeful; it would go on record, even if my trial was kept from the public eye.

Was this meant to discredit Monroe? He had enemies, more recently, to be sure, but was I just an appropriate scapegoat, a recently ascended bastard with the wrong color eyes? It didn’t make sense, but I knew enough to know that my words at this point were useless. I offered no defense. I only requested the council of my lord father.

I was sentenced to death on the 14th day of the 9th cycle in the year 1272.

Chapter Fifty and Three

Summer 1272, Cyllian Imperial Count

My cell was roughly ten feet by ten feet, practically a palace in prison terms. It was built of thick granite and worked and mortared with precision; this was not the rundown stockades of wood and stone one might expect in Rukland; this prison was in the bowels of the old fort, carved by true Rukish hands.

Down the center of the stone floor was a channel about three inches wide. A stream of water ran its length. This stream served two purposes, one for drink and the other I will leave to the imagination. The channel emerged from a small hole cut in the wall to my right and disappeared under the opposite wall on the left. It was angled ever so precisely to allow the proper flow. At the front of my cell was a door made of solid oak; no hinges were present, and at the top of the door was a small half-circular window to allow the jailor access to see in without having to open the door. On the back of the wall was a cot stilted on four wooden legs. On the cot, I lay.

In a situation like this, you would think that I would be standing, shouting at the door for my freedom. You might consider that all you know of me, I would be pacing from wall to wall like a wild animal. You might think I would have broken the legs of my cot in some ill-advised effort to tear away at stone or mortar for my freedom. I did none of these things. I slept.

I was brought to the cell sometime before midday. I was processed, and by processed, I mean, I was stripped of my clothes, doused with several buckets of steaming water, and pushed naked into the cell to await my execution.

I incited rebellion, killed an