“We will relay the message,” the guard said.
Ludger gave no sign of gratitude. Not because he meant insult. Gratitude simply implied the exchange had been a favor instead of an inevitability.
“Good,” he said.
That was somehow enough to make the whole interaction feel even more lopsided.
Behind the irritation, the guards did what capital guards so often did when confronted with someone from beyond their neat social order: they simplified him.
Arrogant. Ill-mannered. Wild. Another northerner. That was the easiest explanation.
It fit nicely into the capital’s preferred little boxes. If Ludger lacked manners, if he treated the castle gates like the entrance to a warehouse and not the seat of imperial dignity, then clearly that was because he had been raised too far north among rough people who built walls out of stone, solved disagreements with violence, and treated etiquette like a disease.
The fact that Ludger had not actually been born that far north did not matter in the slightest. Not here. Not to the capital. To them, there was no useful distinction. North was north. Once a person crossed far enough beyond their polished comfort, everyone from there became the same kind of uncivilized problem with different boots.
Ludger, naturally, did not care.
If anything, the misunderstanding saved time.
He turned away from the gate without waiting for dismissal, as if the matter had already ceased to be worth his attention the moment the message had been spoken.
The three masked figures turned with him. That drew one last look from the guards. Longer this time. Because now that the moment of conversation had ended, they could actually study the group properly.
The masks were strange up close. Not ornamental enough. Not uniform enough to be official military gear. Just odd. Deliberate. The sort of thing that made it difficult to read a person fully and therefore made everyone around them a little more uncomfortable than necessary.
And the eyes behind them…
That was the part the guards would remember later. Not menace exactly. Not active hostility.
Just that same cold expression. The kind of focused, unbothered look worn by people who had already accepted violence as part of ordinary logistics and no longer needed to act dramatic about it.
It was the look of those who had followed Ludger into something terrible and returned intact enough to do it again.
The guards watched them leave in silence. Through the castle approach. Back toward the capital streets. And then, without ceremony, out of the city altogether.
No escort. No grand sendoff.
Just four figures walking away while the capital behind them remained tense, annoyed, and far more unsettled than it wanted to admit.
The guards lingered there a little longer than necessary after they were gone. Then one finally exhaled through his nose and muttered something unkind about northern savages with no manners.
No one disagreed. But none of them looked particularly eager to be the man who carried that complaint to Lionfang in person.
The trip back north stayed quiet for a long time. Not the comfortable kind of quiet either.
Not the kind shared by people who had already said everything that mattered and were now simply too tired to speak.
This one had weight.
The capital was behind them. The smoke, the lies, the castle, the watchful eyes, the rumors, all of it was already starting to settle into memory. But the things they had done, the things they had learned, and the shape of Gustav’s last decision still traveled with them.
Eventually, Eclaire was the one who broke the silence.
She had been walking a little behind Ludger, watching him on and off for a while with that careful expression of hers, the one that only really appeared when she was deciding whether to ask a question she already suspected would annoy him.
In the end, she asked anyway.
“Are you really fine with this?”
Ludger glanced at her once. “With what?”
Eclaire folded her arms as she walked.
“With all of it,” she said. “That reputation. The way people are going to talk about you now. And…” Her gaze sharpened slightly. “Going along with Gustav’s plan.”
Jennifer looked over at that immediately. Rowan didn’t speak, but his attention shifted toward Ludger as well.
Ludger, naturally, did not react much.
“I’m fine with it,” he said.
That answer earned him a flat look from Eclaire. He sighed very faintly and elaborated, which for him was already an act of generosity.
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“I had planned to do something similar anyway.”
That made the silence come back for half a second, but now in a more focused shape.
Eclaire’s brows drew together. “Similar how?”
Ludger kept his pace even as he answered.
“Gustav’s plan was simple,” he said. “There was no version of events where I let him live. He knew that. I knew that. Everyone with a functioning brain in that camp knew that.”
That part, at least, was true enough that nobody argued.
“So he decided to make his death useful,” Ludger continued. “If he was going to die no matter what, then he wanted it to be obvious. Public. Final. Something no one could easily question.”
Jennifer’s eyes narrowed. “The mountain.”
“Yes.”
The word came out dry.
“He wanted it to be clear that I had killed him in broad daylight.”
And that was exactly what had happened.
No hidden execution. No disappearance in the dark. No body lost quietly under suspicious circumstances. No room for the Regent or anyone else to say Gustav had escaped again, been silenced by some third party, or remained a loose thread still worth chasing.
The whole countryside had practically watched the end happen. Or thought they had. Eclaire was quiet now, so Ludger kept going.
“I healed them first,” he said. “Enough to move. Not enough to make them comfortable. The wounded, the exhausted, the ones who would have slowed the escape too much otherwise. They moved that same night. Then they kept moving through the next day while I staged the rest.”
That explained the trail. The explosions. The smoke columns. The search groups being dragged across half the countryside like idiots following a disaster instead of fugitives.
Ludger continued in the same even tone.
“The final area was chosen on purpose. That was where Gaius got ambushed by that underworld guild some time ago. There were still enough bodies in the wider area that once the final attack landed…” He gave a slight shrug. “There would be remains to find.”
Rowan’s eyes narrowed faintly in understanding. So that had been it. Not actual bodies from the Dalmorens and Gustav’s people left behind in the crater. Just enough dead flesh and bone already available to create the illusion of annihilation once Ludger’s attack had done the rest.
Eclaire exhaled slowly through her nose.
“And the search groups saw exactly what they were supposed to see.”
“Yes.”
Crater. Melted stone. scattered remains. nothing identifiable left by the wind. More than enough for frightened men to complete the lie themselves. Jennifer let out a low whistle.
“That’s disgusting.”
Ludger glanced at her. “It worked.”
That was irritatingly hard to argue with. Because it had.
The Dalmoren fugitives were officially dead in all the ways that mattered to the Empire. The pursuit would stop or at least lose its teeth. Gustav’s family and Rufas’s people had time. And Gustav had died in a way that, from his point of view, actually bought something valuable.
Gustav had not merely suggested the plan. He had anchored it with his own death. Ludger’s tone did not soften, but it changed just enough to show he had actually thought about it.
“He accepted his death the moment the Regent sentenced him,” he said. “By the time we found him, he already understood that. He wasn’t bargaining for his own survival. He was bargaining for theirs.”
Rufas. The family. The camp. Whoever remained.
“Dying like that,” Ludger continued, “to save the rest of them was something he was more than willing to do.”
No one answered right away. Because there was nothing easy to say to that.
Gustav had been filth. Useful filth, intelligent filth, regretful filth perhaps—but still a man who had built monsters, fed them, and sent them after innocent people. He had helped create the machinery that killed Ludger’s family and probably countless others besides.
And yet, at the very end, he had made one clear choice. He died to buy his family a future. Ugly. Complicated. Human in the most inconvenient possible way.
Jennifer clicked her tongue. “Still doesn’t make him a good man.”
“No,” Ludger said.
There was not even a second of hesitation there.
“It doesn’t.”
Eclaire studied him carefully.
“But you still went through with it.”
“Yes.”
“Even knowing what people would say.”
Ludger’s expression stayed flat.
“They were going to say something anyway,” he said. “And if I was going to become a problem in their heads regardless, then I might as well get something useful out of it.”
That sounded exactly like him. Dry. Irritating. Efficient. Still, Eclaire did not let it go that easily.
“And the reputation?”
Ludger looked ahead toward the long road back to Lionfang.
The wind shifted lightly across the path. The capital was far enough behind them now that its towers no longer mattered.
Then he answered.
“I was already becoming something people feared,” he said. “This only made it clearer.”
Jennifer frowned. “That doesn’t bother you?”
Ludger thought about it for a second.
“A little,” he admitted.
That got everyone’s attention more than a harder answer would have.
Then he added, “Not enough to care more about it than results.”
There it was. The real answer. Not bravado. Not indifference. Just priorities.
His reputation had become harsher, yes. People would whisper more. Some would see him as a monster now. Others would treat him like a weapon too dangerous to approach casually. The capital, in particular, would probably never look at him normally again.
And compared to what Gustav’s plan had bought them—time, confusion, escaped survivors, a broken hunt, and one less active loose end—it was acceptable. Rowan finally spoke.
“So you were willing to become the face of the massacre because it solved the problem faster.”
Ludger looked at him once.
“Yes.”
Jennifer shook her head. “You really do make horrifying decisions sound like basic accounting.”
“They are basic accounting,” Ludger said. “Just with more fire.”
That got the faintest twitch from Rowan and an exhausted exhale from Eclaire that almost counted as laughter.
Almost. Then the silence returned. But this time, it was easier.
They knew what had happened now. They knew why. And they knew that whether the capital called Ludger a monster, a butcher, or the Terror of the Lionsguard mattered less than the simple fact that Gustav’s family had vanished into a future the Empire no longer believed existed.
And Gustav himself… He had died exactly as he chose.
Not forgiven. Not redeemed. But useful at the end. For a man like him, that was probably the closest thing to peace he was ever going to get.
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