Knowledge Is Power: The Last Reader

"Start a—" The King shook his head, visibly struggling to keep pace. "That’s the opposite of everything we’ve been trying to do. We’ve been trying to stop a war, not—"

"We’ve been trying to catch a few people and hope everyone else gets scared enough to stop," Aria said, not unkindly. "That’s not a plan, that’s a prayer with extra steps. You said it yourself—the nobles want a puppet, the generals want a conqueror, the commoners want a miracle. Three groups, three completely different wants, and the only thing uniting them right now is agreeing you’re the problem."

She leaned forward, her elbows on her knees, her eyes bright and sharp. "So we give them a different problem. Bigger. Scarier. Someone they can all point at together instead of you." She paused, letting the weight of it land. "Which is, incidentally, exactly what they did to you."

"Who," the King said, his brow furrowed. He looked like a man who’d been asked to solve a puzzle with half the pieces missing.

Aria’s smile had no warmth in it at all. "The people trying to kill you. We drag every last one of them out into the open, publicly, and we make it absolutely clear that threatening a kitchen maid’s family isn’t treason against a King. It’s treason against everyone who wants to keep living without being terrified all the time."

The King blinked. His mouth opened, closed, opened again. "That’s... actually not a terrible idea."

"Thanks. I learned it from someone in my old life." She tapped her chin, a gesture she’d picked up from Milo without ever realizing it. "He always said it comes down to naming. Whatever you call the enemy sticks harder than any evidence you’ll ever produce against them. That’s how the King in our kingdom did it."

"What did your not-imaginary King call his villains, then?"

Aria considered it, turning the memory over in her mind. "The Vile Fools."

The King repeated it once, testing the weight of it on his tongue. He said it again, slower, letting the syllables settle. "The Vile Fools." A pause. "That’s excellent. I’m stealing it."

"Go ahead. I doubt anyone will mind."

Behind them, Payro was already burning careful letters into a strip of parchment with a fresh little tendril of smoke, apparently fabricating an entirely new business card for the occasion. Aria decided not to ask. Some things were better left unexplained, and Payro Mance’s creative process was definitely one of them.

"We start with the explosion," Aria said, pacing now, the plan sharpening as she spoke it aloud. The room was small and cluttered, filled with the detritus of a King who’d been too busy surviving to bother with interior decorating. "How close it came to killing you. How many servants got threatened into carrying it out. How a child nearly died in that room too—that’s me, I’ll testify to it personally—and how many people standing nearby got hurt who had nothing to do with any of it." She stopped pacing and turned to face him. "We make the court understand this isn’t an attack on one man. It’s an attack on everyone’s safety at once."

The King was quiet a long moment, his face unreadable. Then, slowly, something shifted behind his tired eyes—a flicker of the man he’d been before exhaustion and assassination attempts had worn him down to something threadbare.

"That’s genuinely a good plan," he said.

"I have my moments." Aria grinned, sharp and genuine. "My old teacher taught me a lot of concepts he probably shouldn’t have handed a teenager. Lucky for everyone he was too honest to ever use them badly himself. Unlucky for you, I’m not nearly that honest."

"I’m starting to realize that." There was no accusation in his voice, only a kind of weary amusement. "How do we prove any of it, though? To the whole court, not just to ourselves."

"We use your talent."

His face went still immediately, the flicker of warmth vanishing like a candle snuffed out. "I already told you—"

"I heard you, and I meant what I said about respecting it." She held up a hand before he could argue further, her voice softening. "But using it on people we already know are guilty isn’t the same as using it on everyone. You’re not taking anyone’s will. You’re using their own guilt to drag the truth out."

"You think I haven’t told myself that exact sentence before," he said, sharp, though the anger in it was really just exhaustion wearing a harder voice. "Every single time. This time’s different. This time’s justified. And you know what happened? I stopped feeling guilty about it. It just became normal. Became who I was."

He looked at her, tired and clear-eyed both. His hands were flat on the desk, palms down, like he needed something solid to anchor himself to.

"I’m not walking that road again," he said, and his voice was quiet now, almost gentle. "Not even for the kingdom."

Aria studied him for a long beat. She thought about what he’d said about his brother, about the slow slide from pranks to something darker, about the particular horror of becoming what you’d always feared. She thought about the way he’d thrown himself in front of an explosion for her, a girl he’d barely known, a girl who’d been part of a plot to kill him.

"Fine," she said finally. "We do it without your talent."

"Thank—"

"But you’re in the room. Standing there, watching, so they know you’re not hiding from any of it." She stepped closer, meeting his gaze. "And when we finally break them, you pass the judgment. Not because I want to make you into something you’re not—because your people need to see you look straight at the abyss and not flinch."

Something shifted behind his tired eyes. Not quite understanding, but the beginning of it. The first crack in the armor he’d built around himself.

"You’re something else, Aria."

"So I keep hearing." She grinned, sharp and genuine. "Now come on. We’ve got a war to start."

She got two steps toward the door before turning back around.

"But first," she said, "you need a makeover."

The King stopped dead. His hand, which had been reaching for a stack of papers, froze mid-air. "Absolutely not."

"You didn’t even hear the reasoning yet."

"I don’t need to. I am not a superficial man."

"I know," Aria said, entirely unbothered, already circling behind his chair to inspect the current state of his hair with open, clinical dismay. "You’re a deep, meaningful, tragically self-serious man who looks like he’s been personally rained on for eleven straight months. Both of those things can be true. Both of them are, frankly, exhausting. So sit still—I’m doing your hair before we go start a war, because nobody’s going to take ’the wronged King bravely facing his enemies’ seriously if he also looks like he lost a fight with a hedge."

The King’s mouth opened. Closed. Opened again. "I—this is—you can’t just—"

"Watch me." She was already rummaging through his desk drawers, emerging triumphant with a small comb that had clearly never been used. "Payro, hold him still if he tries to run."

Payro Mance, silent as ever, moved to stand behind the King’s chair. He didn’t touch him. He didn’t need to. His presence alone was enough to convey the message: Don’t even think about it.

"This is assault," the King said, his voice climbing an octave. "This is—I am the sovereign ruler of this kingdom. I have defeated assassination attempts. I have—"

"You have defeated assassination attempts by people who didn’t realize that if you just stood still for five minutes, someone could make you look like an actual King instead of a scarecrow who wandered into a palace by mistake."

"I am the King."

"Exactly. So start acting like one." Aria attacked his hair with the comb, undeterred by his protests. "The nobles don’t respect you because you don’t look like you respect yourself. They see a man who can’t be bothered to maintain basic grooming standards, and they assume that means you can’t be bothered to maintain the kingdom either. It’s stupid, it’s shallow, and it’s also completely true."

The King’s protests had faded into a kind of resigned grumbling, which she took as progress.

"I’m not vain," he muttered.

"You don’t have to be vain. You just have to stop actively repelling the people whose support you need. There’s a difference."

Payro Mance, watching from his position by the door, let out a sound that might have been a cough. It was definitely not a laugh. Absolutely not. Gold-rank adventurers didn’t laugh at their employers’ discomfort.

"I heard that," the King said, his voice muffled by Aria’s enthusiastic combing.

---

The transformation took longer than Aria had anticipated, mostly because the King kept trying to escape.

"This is undignified," he announced, as Aria wrestled a particularly stubborn lock of hair into submission.

"This is necessary," she countered. "And if you stop squirming, I’ll be done faster."

"I am a grown man. A grown man who has faced down assassination attempts and political machinations and—"

"And yet here you are, being defeated by a comb." She stepped back to survey her work. "There. Better. Now the face."

The King’s eyes widened. "The face? What’s wrong with my face? My face is perfectly fine."

"Your face is exhausted. You’ve been carrying the weight of a kingdom on your shoulders for years, and it shows. Not because you’re weak—because you’re human. But the nobles don’t see human. They see tired. They see a man who’s already given up." She reached into her pocket and produced a small pot of salve. "Hold still."

"What is that?"

"Something my mother used to make. She was a cook, but she knew a thing or two about herbs." Aria dabbed a small amount onto her fingertips. "It’ll reduce the shadows under your eyes. Make you look like you’ve actually slept in the past decade."

The King submitted to this with the air of a man who’d already lost the argument and was simply going through the motions of protest. "I will never forgive you for this."

"You will. Next time you look in a mirror and don’t flinch, you’ll thank me."

She worked in silence for a few moments, her touch surprisingly gentle given the brisk efficiency of her earlier efforts. The King’s eyes closed, and something in his face softened—tension he’d been holding for so long he’d forgotten it was there.

"When did you become this," he said, his voice barely above a whisper. "When did you become someone who sees people like this?"

Aria’s hands stilled for just a moment. "I had a teacher," she said. "Someone who saw me when I didn’t know how to see myself. Someone who taught me that everyone’s got armor, but most people’s armor is just a very elaborate way of hiding the fact that they’re scared of the same things everyone else is."

The King opened his eyes. "What happened to him?"

"I don’t know." She resumed her work, her touch steady despite the sudden tightness in her chest. "I don’t know if he’s alive. I don’t know if he’s trapped somewhere. I know that his real." She laughed, a short, hollow sound. "Isn’t that ridiculous? I’m out here giving advice to a King, from wisdom given to me by somebody everybody think is imaginary."

The King was quiet for a long moment. Then, slowly, he reached up and caught her wrist, stopping her work.

"He exists," he said. "I don’t know him. I’ve never met him. But I know he exists, because you exist. Because you’re standing here, right now, covered in dust and determination, trying to save a kingdom that isn’t even yours. That didn’t come from nowhere. That came from someone who believed in you."

Aria stared at him, something hot and unexpected prickling behind her eyes.

"Now finish making me presentable," he said, releasing her wrist and settling back in his chair with what might have been a hint of a smile. "We’ve got a war to start."

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