Knowledge Is Power: The Last Reader

The investigation began the next morning, in a study that no longer had much of a ceiling.

Aria crouched by a scorch mark on the floor, turning the shape of the blast over in her mind the way Milo had once taught her to read a fight before it finished happening. The blackened stone told a story—a story of heat and pressure, of something that had been placed deliberately and detonated with precision. She traced the edges of the burn with her fingertip, feeling the rough texture of the stone where it had been flash-baked into something brittle.

"This came from inside the room," she said, half to herself. "Not a projectile. Someone carried it in and set it off by hand." She paused, frowning. "It had a timer too. See these marks here?" She pointed to a pattern of small indentations in the stone. "Something was sitting here. Heavy enough to leave a mark, but not heavy enough to crack the floor. An explosive device, probably wrapped in cloth to muffle the sound of it being placed."

Payro Mance stood silent in the doorway, pale eyes tracking her with the patient attention of a man who never looked like he was watching anything and somehow missed nothing at all. Since he’d taken over the King’s protection, His Majesty had slept properly for the first time in months—three uninterrupted nights, no whispered threats keeping him awake, no reason to flinch at every creak of the hallway. It was, Aria thought, the single most impressive thing about him, and he’d never once explained how he managed it.

"The timing," she went on, straightening and brushing dust from her hands. "It went off while I was in here too. That’s not random, probably. Someone knew the King’s schedule. Knew when he’d be in his study. Knew—" She stopped, cold understanding settling low in her stomach. "Knew about me helping you."

She stood, facing him fully. "Someone in this castle’s feeding them information. Someone close enough to know all of that."

Payro Mance inclined his head, once, in perfect agreement. His expression didn’t change, but something in his posture shifted—a slight tension in his shoulders that spoke of readiness.

"How do we find them?"

He produced a small leather notebook from his coat and handed it over without a word. The cover was worn smooth from use, the pages filled with neat, precise handwriting. Aria flipped through it slowly, her eyes widening as she took in the details. Names. Dates. Times. Precise, patient observations of who’d been seen where, and with whom, from the day he was hired.

"You’ve been watching them," she said, looking up. "This whole time. While you were supposedly just hired muscle."

A single nod. His pale gray eyes met hers, and in them she saw something she hadn’t expected—not just patience, but purpose. This man had been building this case long before she’d ever arrived.

"Why?"

He reached into his coat again and produced a small card, holding it out with the same unhurried precision he brought to everything else.

"Detective," Aria read aloud, then squinted at the smaller print beneath it. "And explosion expert." She looked up at him, eyebrows raised. "Okay, that second part I probably could have guessed from the fact you didn’t even flinch when the room came apart. and your name"

He inclined his head, satisfied, and lifted a hand—smoke curling from his fingers in careful, deliberate script, spelling out a single name.

Vincent. The Boom Guy.

Aria stared at the smoke letters, then at his face, then back at the smoke. "You can do that? You can just—" She gestured vaguely at the air. "Write things in smoke?"

He shrugged, a slight roll of his shoulders that managed to convey both obviously and it’s not that impressive in a single gesture.

"Let’s go rough him up," the King said, already halfway to standing.

NO, the smoke spelled, sharp and immediate, before hovering into a stern little exclamation point for emphasis.

The King sighed, sinking back into his chair with the exhausted resignation of a man who’d been told no far too many times in his life. "Fine. I’ll use my talent, then."

Aria caught the particular reluctance in his voice—the same small hesitation she’d noticed every single time the Claim came up. It was barely there, a microsecond of pause before he spoke, but it was always there. Like a man flinching away from a flame he’d been burned by before.

"You always sound like you’d rather do anything else than use that skill," she observed. "Even when it’d make everything faster."

The King was quiet for a moment, his gaze fixed on some middle distance she couldn’t see. When he spoke, his voice was softer than she’d expected.

"Morals," he said, and the word came out dry, almost wry. "And the fact that my brother used the exact same ability on me my entire childhood, before he ever got around to using his fists." He paused, and something flickered across his face—old pain, carefully buried. "He wasn’t always cruel with it, when I was small. Mostly it was pranks. Force me to compliment his hair in front of guests, that sort of thing. Annoying, not vicious."

He rubbed a hand over his tired eyes, and Aria saw the shadows beneath them, the lines of exhaustion that no amount of sleep seemed to erase.

"But it got worse, slowly, the way these things always do, until it wasn’t pranks anymore at all. He’d make me sit still while he took things from me—toys, letters, anything he wanted. He’d make me watch while he told people I’d said things I hadn’t said, done things I hadn’t done. And I couldn’t argue. I couldn’t defend myself. Because the Claim wasn’t something you could argue against. It just... was."

Aria sat very still, letting the weight of his words settle. She’d never had a brother in the real world. She’d never had anyone who could do something like that to her—anyone who had the power to take her voice and make her watch while they used it. But she understood the shape of it, the particular horror of being made to witness your own violation.

He turned to meet her gaze, and in his eyes she saw something raw and unguarded. "Having to actually convince someone of something, having to trade fairly for what you want—that keeps you decent, whether you notice it happening or not. The moment you realize you don’t have to convince anyone of anything ever again, being kind stops being a habit and starts being optional. I’d rather stay someone who has to try. Call it keeping what’s left of my humanity, if that’s not too dramatic a way to put it."

Aria smiled, small and real. "Fine. We do this the hard way, then. Find who bought the explosive, then find who set it."

---

They gathered every suspect from Payro’s notebook into the mended remains of the great hall, and Aria stood in front of all of them, arms crossed, and didn’t bother softening the delivery.

The room was filled with servants and guards and the various functionaries who kept the castle running. They stood in clusters, their faces a mixture of fear and curiosity and the particular blankness of people who’d learned not to hope for anything better.

"Listen up," Aria called out, her voice carrying across the wrecked space. "Easy option one—the King can just make you tell us who set the bomb, and he’ll deal with the person who paid for it personally." She paused, letting that sink in. "Easy option two, considerably nicer for everyone in this room—you tell us yourselves, and you get his protection instead."

One man near the back went pale and bolted before she’d finished the sentence—straight for the King, dropping to his knees, begging, all in one breathless rush, to spare his family. His words tumbled out in a desperate flood, his hands clasped together like he was praying.

The King crouched to his level, his face unreadable. He listened to every word, not interrupting, not judging, just listening with the patient attention of a man who understood what it meant to be afraid.

When the man finished, the King straightened and turned to address the whole hall. His voice was steady, carrying easily across the wrecked room.

"The correct move," he said, plain and clear, "when someone threatens your family to make you betray your King, is to come to your King. Not to bend to the ones doing the threatening." He looked around the hall, meeting as many eyes as he could. "I understand fear. I’ve lived with it my whole life. But I need you to understand something—if you come to me, I will protect you. If you go to them, I can’t protect anyone. Not you, not your families, not the kingdom I’ve sworn to serve."

"He’s right," Aria added, sharper. "Open your eyes. People threatening to kill your children are not your friends, no matter how convincing the fear feels. They’re using you. They don’t care about you. They care about what you can do for them."

She watched their faces, looking for the tell—the flicker of recognition, the guilty glance, the small giveaway that someone in this room knew more than they were saying.

They were nearly to the door when another servant’s voice stopped them cold.

"Wait—they said they’d kill my family too."

Then another voice. And another. And another, until half the hall had admitted, in halting, terrified pieces, to the exact same threat.

Aria listened to them, her heart sinking with each new confession. These weren’t traitors. These were victims—people who’d been backed into a corner and given an impossible choice.

The King went very still, something raw moving behind his tired eyes. He stood at the front of the hall, surrounded by people who’d been afraid to trust him, and for a long moment, he said nothing at all.

Then he squared his shoulders and put on the steadiest face Aria had seen him wear yet.

"Don’t be afraid," he told them, and his voice carried the weight of genuine promise. "You’ve spent years taking care of me. Feeding me. Mending my clothes. Making my bed while I was too busy failing to save this kingdom properly to notice how much you were in the same boat as me." He paused, and something in his expression shifted—a crack in the armor, a glimpse of the exhausted man beneath the crown. "And if I drown, we all drown. And if you drown, I drown. We’re in this together, whether we’ve admitted it or not."

He looked around the hall, meeting as many eyes as he could.

"It’s my turn now. I’ll protect every single one of you. That’s not a threat." His voice dropped, becoming almost gentle. "That’s a promise."

---

Back in the King’s new, still-undamaged office, he sank into the chair behind the desk and exhaled long and slow. The air left his lungs in a rush, and for a moment, he looked every year of his age and then some.

"Now what?" he asked, his voice thin with exhaustion.

Aria leaned back in her own seat, arms crossed, chin lifted, something fierce and entirely certain settling into her expression.

"Let’s start a war."

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