Knowledge Is Power: The Last Reader

The messenger arrived at the Carton household at precisely the wrong moment, which was, Yuna reflected later, more or less the only kind of moment messengers ever seemed to choose.

She had flour on both hands, up one forearm, and — inexplicably, though she wouldn’t discover this until she caught her reflection an hour later — a smear of it across one cheekbone, courtesy of a five-year-old who had "helped" with the bread in the specific way five-year-olds helped with anything, which was to say enthusiastically and with almost no measurable benefit to the actual bread.

"Mama, look, I made a dragon," Vox announced, holding up a lump of dough that resembled, at absolute best, a dragon that had been recently and unsuccessfully run over by a cart.

"It’s beautiful, sweetheart," Yuna said, entirely truthfully, because a mother’s love did not require honesty about proportions.

Two-year-old July, wedged into her high chair at the end of the kitchen table, chose that exact moment to fling a fistful of mashed something across the room with a delighted shriek, and it was into precisely this scene — flour, dragon-dough, an airborne projectile, and a mother who had not slept properly in longer than she cared to admit — that the royal messenger stepped, looking deeply, visibly unsettled by the domestic chaos he’d apparently expected to find somewhere more dignified.

"Lady Carton," he said, bowing with the specific formality of a man who had rehearsed this on the ride over and was already regretting it. "I bring word from the Oracle’s own registry. Your husband, Jay Carton, has been formally declared the first-ranked fighter in the known world."

Yuna wiped her hands on her apron, slow and deliberate, and looked at the messenger for a long moment.

"About time," she said.

The messenger blinked. "My lady?"

"About time," Yuna repeated, with considerable feeling, reaching down to catch July’s next projectile before it could find the messenger’s boots. "Do you have any idea how long that useless glowing woman has been sitting on that information? Years. My husband has been the strongest man alive for years, and she’s been floating around handing out rankings like she’s got all the time in the world to get around to it, and meanwhile I’ve had to hear from three separate merchant wives at market that another king rank higher than mine, and smile, and say something polite, while knowing full well it wasn’t true."

"The Oracle’s declarations are notoriously difficult to predict, my lady, she operates on principles that—"

"She operates," Yuna said, "on being annoying. I’ve met her exactly once. Lovely woman, very mysterious, extremely unhelpful with a schedule. Tell her I said congratulations on finally doing her job."

The messenger, wisely, decided this particular assignment had reached a natural stopping point, bowed again, and left with considerably more haste than he’d arrived with.

---

"PAPA’S THE STRONGEST!" Vox shrieked, the instant the news properly registered, abandoning his dragon-dough entirely to launch himself into a lap around the kitchen table with both arms out like wings. "STRONGEST IN THE WHOLE WORLD! I KNEW IT! I ALWAYS KNEW IT!"

"You did not always know it," Yuna said, catching him mid-orbit and hauling him up onto her hip despite the flour, despite the exhaustion, despite everything. "You told me last week you thought the baker down the street could probably beat him because the baker has bigger arms."

"That was last week," Vox said, with the total, unshakeable confidence of a five-year-old revising his own history in real time. "I know better now."

July, catching the general mood of the room without any real understanding of its cause, began clapping both flour-and-mashed-something-covered hands together, shrieking along in delighted, wordless agreement.

Yuna set Vox down, wiped a fresh smear of dough off his cheek, and felt something complicated settle into her chest underneath the genuine pride.

Strongest in the world, she thought, glancing toward the window, toward the road that led, eventually, however many days away, toward wherever her husband currently was. Which means, unless I have badly misjudged that man’s priorities, he’s currently somewhere doing something reckless and heroic, and hasn’t sent word home in four days. how dare he!

"When’s Papa coming home?" Vox asked, already climbing back onto his chair, apparently satisfied that the strongest-man-in-the-world business had been settled to his complete satisfaction.

"Soon, I hope," Yuna said, and meant it with rather more feeling than she let show in her voice.

---

He was, by any reasonable measure, an excellent husband. Yuna would say so to anyone who asked, and had, more than once, said so unprompted to people who very much hadn’t asked, because she was proud of him in the specific, fierce way that didn’t require an invitation to express itself.

He was also, infuriatingly, the kind of man who considered "I’ll be a few days" to mean anywhere from three days to three weeks, depending entirely on how interesting whatever he’d wandered into turned out to be, and who had never once, in the entire span of their marriage, successfully sent word home before doing something that would have genuinely terrified her had she known about it in advance.

She loved him enormously. She was also, currently, extremely annoyed with him, and had been building toward a truly excellent lecture for approximately four days now, refining it in the quiet moments between feeding children and kneading bread, the way some women embroidered or gardened as a hobby.

"I don’t care," she rehearsed, under her breath, scraping dough off the counter, "that you’re the strongest man in the world. I care that you told me you’d be back in three days and it has been considerably more than three days, and your son has started telling people the baker could beat you, and I have had to defend your honor at market with nothing but pure spite, and—"

"Mama, is Papa fighting the bad king?" Vox asked, entirely too perceptive for five, tilting his head with the specific, unnerving directness only small children ever managed.

Yuna’s rehearsed lecture died somewhere in her throat.

She hadn’t told him that, not directly — had kept the details carefully vague, the way she always did when Jay’s work took him somewhere genuinely dangerous, some old instinct insisting that her children deserved to be children a little longer before the wider, harder shape of the world came looking for them. But children, she was learning with increasing frequency, picked up considerably more than anyone gave them credit for.

"Where did you hear that," she asked, careful.

"The baker said it," Vox said, matter-of-fact, already climbing back down to retrieve his abandoned dragon-dough. "He said everyone’s talking about it. He said your Papa and a bunch of other really strong people are trying to stop the mean King from being mean anymore."

Yuna knelt down to his level, brushing flour gently off his small shoulder, and found, despite the fear that had lived quiet and constant in her chest for four days now, something warm underneath it too.

"That’s true," she said. "Your Papa’s very brave. And he’s very strong, which we already knew, because the Oracle finally got around to telling everyone else too." She tapped the tip of his nose, gentle. "But brave doesn’t mean I’m not going to have words with him the second he walks through that door. Being the strongest man alive does not excuse being four days late without so much as a letter."

"Are you gonna yell at him?"

"I am going to yell at him," Yuna confirmed, with total, cheerful certainty, "extensively. And then I’m going to hug him so hard he can’t breathe, because I missed him considerably more than I’m currently willing to admit out loud."

Vox considered this with the grave, careful seriousness only small children ever brought to adult contradictions, and nodded slowly, as though it made perfect, obvious sense.

"Can I yell at him too?"

"Absolutely," Yuna said. "You can go first, actually. I’ll even let you practice on me."

Vox drew himself up to his full, unimpressive height, planted both hands on his hips in an exact, unconscious imitation of his mother’s own current posture, and declared, with enormous solemnity, "Papa, you are the strongest man in the whole world, and you are STILL in trouble!"

Yuna laughed — real, unguarded, the first proper laugh she’d managed in four worried days — and pulled him into a hug that smelled like flour and dough and everything good about the life she’d built with a man currently, somewhere very far away, apparently proving to an entire kingdom exactly how strong he actually was.

"Perfect," she told him, meaning it completely. "That’s exactly how we’ll say it."

The laughter died first.

Not gradually. All at once.

Yuna was still holding Vox when something outside the kitchen window caught her eye — a figure standing at the far end of the road, perfectly still beneath the evening sky. At first she thought it was another messenger. Then she noticed the black horse behind him, the royal crest burned into its saddle, and the way the rider hadn’t bothered to dismount. He simply stared toward the Carton household as though he had been waiting for someone to notice him. Yuna’s smile disappeared.

"Vox."

The boy looked up.

"Go get July."

"But—"

"Now."

Something in her voice made him obey.

Yuna slowly stepped toward the window.

The rider finally raised one hand.

He was holding a letter.

Not a royal summons.

Not a message from Jay.

A death notice.

And beneath the royal seal, written in a hurried hand she recognized immediately, were four words that made the blood drain from her face.

JAY CARTON HAS FALLEN.

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