Knowledge Is Power: The Last Reader

Milo didn’t sleep the night after the courtyard.

He sat instead at the edge of the estate’s ruined garden, listening to the low, grieving murmur of what remained of Hollow Tide’s crew somewhere below the terrace, and felt something in his chest that had nothing to do with grief settle into a shape he didn’t entirely recognize. Not the cold, calculating patience he’d built his whole strategy around. Not the plain, weary love that had carried him through a classroom and a family’s dinner table and a Vault’s endless trials.

Revenge, he thought, turning the word over the way he turned over every fact that mattered too much to trust on the first pass. I don’t just want to go home anymore. I want him to answer for her.

Osmund found him there near dawn, and said nothing for a long while, simply sitting beside him in the cold grass with the specific, wordless companionship of a man who understood grief far too intimately to insult it with speeches.

"I have something for you," he said eventually, and produced a single sheet of parchment, entirely blank, edges worn soft as though it had traveled a long way to reach this exact morning.

"There’s nothing on it."

"Not yet," Osmund said. "The words will show themselves when a certain condition is met. I won’t tell you what the condition is." He pressed it into Milo’s hand, folding his fingers over it with a firmness that felt, in retrospect, rather more deliberate than the moment strictly called for. "Keep it close. Trust that I have my reasons."

Milo studied him for a long moment — something faintly wrong in the older man’s posture, a stillness that didn’t quite match his usual restless, merchant’s energy — and filed the observation away with the rest of his grief, too tired and too consumed to properly interrogate it. "You’ve been odd since yesterday."

"I’ve watched a young woman I barely knew die defending a cause I helped talk her into," Osmund said, mild, deflecting with practiced ease. "I’d think oddness was rather the appropriate response."

Milo let it go. He had, he would understand only much later, considerably more reason not to.

---

The coalition gathered that afternoon in the same battered tent, grief hanging heavy over every face in the room, and it was Osmund who stood first, unfolding the plan with the same brisk, patient confidence he’d used to build the alliance itself.

"We draw him out," he said, tapping a rough sketch of the palace grounds. "The courtyard favors him — open ground, room to move, nothing to slow him down. We need him somewhere narrower. The old processional corridor, here, collapses easily under the right pressure, and it’s tight enough that even his speed has to work through a bottleneck." He looked around the room, meeting eyes one at a time, the same deliberate rhythm he’d used the very first night he’d built this alliance out of nothing but words. "Someone needs to bait him there. Someone he’ll actually follow."

"You," the fifth-ranked fighter said, slow, understanding arriving with visible reluctance.

"Me," Osmund agreed, and something in his easy tone didn’t fully match the words. "He knows my face. He knows my hatred is old and personal enough to be believable. A stranger baiting him reads as a trap. A man he’s already humiliated once, goading him out of pure, foolish spite — that reads as exactly what he’d expect from me."

"That’s a death sentence," Milo said, flat, cold dread already rising in him.

"It’s a plan," Osmund said, "which is considerably more than we had yesterday."

---

Milo found him alone that evening, checking over gear that didn’t strictly need checking, and understood, watching him, that some decision had already been made and simply hadn’t been spoken aloud yet.

"There’s no version of this where you walk back out of that corridor," Milo said.

Osmund didn’t deny it. He didn’t need to; something in his stillness confirmed it more completely than any words could have.

"You act strong," he said instead, not quite looking up, voice dropping into something quieter, rhythmic, almost gentle, "but I’ve watched you long enough now to see the part underneath it. The part that worries, constantly, that nothing you do is ever quite enough to save the people you love in time." He reached out, and his hand closed briefly around Milo’s wrist — warm, steady, the specific, deliberate pressure of a man anchoring something in place. "That’s not a flaw, Loof. That’s simply what it costs to care as much as you do."

Milo felt the words land somewhere he hadn’t braced for, personal and total in a way that startled him — and some old, careful, scholarly part of him, even through the grief, even through the exhaustion, recognized the shape of what had just happened. Vague. Universal. True of nearly anyone who’s ever loved someone badly enough to be afraid for them. He’d have caught it from a stranger in a heartbeat. From Osmund, tonight, grieving and exhausted himself, it simply felt like being seen.

"You’re doing something," Milo said, slower now, some old instinct finally, belatedly waking up. "Talking to me a certain way. I’ve felt this before, watching you build that alliance out of nothing but words."

"I’m talking to you the only way I know how," Osmund said, easy, deflecting again, and this time Milo let the deflection stand, too tired to chase it properly.

"There has to be another way," Milo tried instead. "Let someone else bait him. Someone we can afford to lose—"

"There is no one," Osmund said, "we can afford to lose, Loof. That was rather the whole tragedy of yesterday, if you’ll recall." He said it without cruelty, simply, and let the silence after it do the rest of the work.

Framing, Milo thought, distant, cataloguing even now, even grieving. He’s making this sound like the only reasonable choice available. Maybe it is. I can’t tell anymore where the truth ends and the persuasion starts.

"Let me go instead," Milo said. "I have Assassination. I have Levitation, I could—"

"No," Osmund said, and something sharp and immediate cracked through his careful calm for the first time all evening — not persuasion this time, Milo understood instantly, watching it. Just plain, unguarded fear. "Absolutely not. You are the only person left in this entire war who actually has a path forward that doesn’t end in a grave, Loof. I’ve watched you build one, piece by careful piece, out of a hundred broken books and a lonely house full of unopened letters. I am not going to be the reason it stops here."

"Osmund—"

"Do you know," Osmund said, and his voice had shifted again, warmer now, almost fond, the specific tone he used telling a story he’d already decided the ending of, "what I actually want, walking into that corridor tomorrow? Not glory. Not even, really, revenge, though I won’t pretend that isn’t sitting somewhere in the mix." He smiled, small and tired and entirely genuine. "I want to finally finish the trade Elenna started, all those years ago, between two flower stalls. I’ve spent two decades being a very well-maintained tool for a man who murdered my family. Tomorrow, for the first time since that night, I get to spend myself on something I actually chose."

Milo felt his own resolve crack, quietly, against that.

"Don’t trip and fall when you goad him into the corridor," Osmund added, lighter now, deliberately lighter, the old, familiar mischief surfacing one last time. "That would be terribly embarrassing. Historians would never let either of us live it down."

Milo didn’t laugh.

He crossed the space between them instead and pulled Osmund into a hug fierce enough to hurt, and held on, for a long moment, without saying anything at all, because there was nothing left to say that wouldn’t simply be asking the man to change a decision he’d clearly already, fully made.

"I’m sorry," Osmund murmured, into his shoulder, quiet enough that Milo almost missed it entirely. "For all of it. For the parts I haven’t told you yet."

Milo pulled back, frowning, some old, careful instinct sharpening again despite the grief. "What parts."

But Osmund had already stepped back, already smoothing his coat with two deliberate hands, already rebuilding the composed, unbothered merchant’s mask over whatever had briefly slipped loose beneath it.

"Nothing that matters tonight," he said, and turned, and walked toward the corridor that would, by every honest measure available to either of them, be the last place he ever stood.

---

The taunting itself, when it happened the following morning, was almost gentle to watch — Osmund standing alone in the palace’s outer approach, voice raised just enough to carry, old grief and old fury woven together into something that sounded, to every observer watching, entirely, devastatingly sincere.

"You took everything from me," he called out, and the King, drawn by curiosity or contempt or simply the specific, magnetic pull of an old grudge finally voicing itself in daylight, stepped out to answer it. "Twenty years, and you never once thought me worth the effort of a proper response. I’m rather hoping today changes that."

The King’s eyes narrowed, faintly amused, faintly curious — and, exactly as the plan required, exactly as two decades of patient, practiced persuasion had guaranteed he would, he will make him follow him into the bait into the narrow processional corridor without a single moment’s hesitation.

Milo, watching from a hidden vantage point above, felt the blank parchment in his own pocket, and understood, with a cold, dawning dread he couldn’t yet fully name, that whatever condition Osmund had built into it, he suspected, with sick and growing certainty, exactly what that condition was going to turn out to be.

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