Chapter 1
Everyone wants to pull the glowing sword out of the rock.
The rock was located in a swamp outside of Tarnstead, and the wizard who led me there, a guy named Balthas whose beard always smelled like stale beer, told me the prophecy said I was ‘the only one who could do it.’ He said I was destined to take the Sun Blade, march north to the Ashlands, and kill the Shadow King Vordak.
I looked at the sword. It was wedged deep in a chunk of black granite. Then I looked at the heavy purse of gold Balthas had given me to buy a warhorse and supplies for the quest.
I didn’t try to pull the sword. Instead, I used the gold to hire three stonemasons from my village. We dug the whole rock out of the mud, loaded it onto a reinforced wagon, and hauled it back to my barn. It took two days of hitting the granite with heavy sledgehammers to finally break it apart. The sword didn’t have any magic in it. It was just highly polished steel catching the light.
But the gold Balthas gave me was very real.
King Otho expected me to march north. The whole kingdom expected it. For twenty years, King Otho had been collecting a massive Shadow Tax from the peasants, claiming it was the only way to fund the border walls keeping Vordak’s monsters at bay.
But I had cousins up near the Ashlands. Vordak mostly just sat in his tower reading books. He hadn’t invaded anyone in a decade. The only people burning barns and breaking legs in Tarnstead were King Otho’s tax collectors.
So I didn’t go north. I took Balthas’s gold and walked into the local garrison in the capital. The guards there were playing dice in armor that was rusting at the joints. They hadn’t been paid in three months. Otho was spending the treasury on a new summer palace made of imported white marble.
I dumped the wizard’s gold on the wooden table. I told them I was the guy with the Sun Blade, which technically I was, and that I was going to the palace to have a talk with the king. I asked if they wanted to come with me and finally get their back pay.
There was no epic battle. Some tales make you think that taking a castle involves catapults and speeches. Taking a castle actually just involves knowing the guys who hold the keys to the side door.
We walked right into Otho’s private dining room while he was eating a roasted pheasant. He didn’t even have time to reach for his dagger before the guards I’d just bought pinned him to the table.
Princess Lyssandra was sitting across from him, wearing a dress that looked like it was made out of spun sugar. She froze, dropping her silver fork. She looked at the blood on the floor, then at the shiny sword in my hand, and then at me.
“Are you taking me away to the Ashlands?” she asked. Her voice was very quiet.
“I’m not going to the Ashlands,” I said, pulling a chair out and sitting down next to her. “Vordak exports cheap iron ore to our blacksmiths. It would be terrible for the economy to kill him. We’re staying right here.”
I needed to clean house. Otho had a lot of cousins and loyal dukes who were going to be very upset that he was currently locked in his own dungeon. But if I went around chopping off heads on my first day, the people would riot. They like their heroes clean.
So I promoted a guy named Rennick. Rennick was the captain of the guard who had let me in the side door. He was a brute who liked hurting people a little too much, the kind of guy who smiled when a dog yelped. I gave Rennick the title of High Inquisitor and told him to secure the city against Otho’s loyalists.
Rennick went to work. For a month, he kicked in doors in the middle of the night. He burned three noble manors to the ground and hung twenty of Otho’s cousins from the bridge. The city was absolutely terrified. Nobody dared whisper my name, but they hated Rennick with a passion that made the air feel thick.
When the last of Otho’s bloodline was gone, I invited Rennick to a massive public feast in the city square to honor his service.
He was sitting at my right hand, tearing into a leg of mutton and getting drunk, when I stood up. I looked out at the silent, terrified crowd. I announced that I had just discovered the horrific, unsanctioned crimes my High Inquisitor had committed against the good people of the city.
Before Rennick could even swallow his food, my farm boys grabbed him. We took his head right there on the cobblestones.
The crowd went absolutely crazy. They screamed my name. They cried. They loved me. They felt completely safe, completely avenged, and without even realizing it, they had just watched me wipe out every single political rival I had, using a guy I then killed to make them cheer for me.
Later that night, I was sitting in Otho’s old study. The chair was velvet and much too soft, but the desk was solid mahogany. Lyssandra walked in. She wasn’t wearing the spun sugar dress anymore. She was wearing a simple wool riding habit, and she was carrying a stack of trade reports from the western ports.
She set the papers on the desk. She looked at me for a long time.
“You aren’t the hero Balthas prophesied, are you?” she said.
“No,” I said. “I’m just a guy from Tarnstead.”
“Rennick didn’t do anything you didn’t tell him to do,” she said. It wasn’t a question. She was smart. She had spent her whole life watching her father make stupid mistakes because he wanted people to think he was grand.
“Rennick had a bad temper,” I said, opening the first trade report. “The city is much safer without him.”
Lyssandra pulled up a chair. She didn’t look scared. Actually, for the first time since I’d met her, she looked completely relaxed. The anxiety of living under a father who almost bankrupted the kingdom, and the dread of waiting for a magical hero who was probably going to get them all killed by a Dark Lord, was just gone.
“The western ports are complaining about the tariffs,” she said, tapping the parchment. “If we lower them by two percent, they’ll stop smuggling grain past the blockade.”
“Lower it by three,” I said. “And tell them the extra percent is a wedding gift from their new king.”
She smiled. It was a small, sharp thing, and it was perfect. There were no dragons to fight. There were no glowing swords. Just a quiet city, a full treasury, and the entire world waiting to see what we did next.
