“His injuries were worse than expected. I've done emergency treatment, but he'll need several more sessions to heal fully. If it were one or two places it wouldn't take this long. When I looked him over, it would have been quicker to count the parts still intact.”
“...It was that bad?”
“Yes. That bad.”
Edwin studied him, unconvinced. Would a man with nothing intact have gotten to his feet on his own and grabbed at Edwin's collar? Covered in blood or not, he'd taken movement as proof the man wasn't critical.
For Edwin and everyone in the domain army, that condition was routine. That was why he'd privately written the injuries off.
But a healer had used the word critical, and now he couldn't keep writing them off.
“Is he... doing better?”
“Yes. He came around a short while ago. His condition's more stable than I expected, too.”
That Yuan? Edwin had privately expected an uproar the moment he woke. Worked up over the word criminal, cajoling and berating everyone within reach, appealing his situation to Edwin.
Instead he was stable.
Either the injuries were as bad as Laurent said, or the reality of his position hadn't landed yet. Either way, with Yuan awake there was one thing to do.
“...If he is stable, bring Yuan here. I need his account. If he says he cannot walk, relay the order that he submit it in writing.”
“Understood.”
Laurent saluted and hurried out. Hakin, sorting documents beside Edwin, watched him go and asked,
“Not questioning him in person?”
The tone said he was already sure Yuan wouldn't come. Edwin agreed. Yuan wouldn't come.
Edwin poured most of himself into suppressing rifts in the west. Yuan put the household's internal affairs and his standing in political circles first. The family behind him counted for a great deal, and it was his looks and his instinct for people that had made him a darling of society.
He was proud of that face and of his noble dignity, so recovering was where his attention would sit for a while.
And in case he assumed that being unable to walk meant Edwin would come to him, Edwin had cut that expectation off in advance with the mention of paperwork.
“Accommodating Yuan at every turn leaves me short of time. Establishing the circumstances is well enough done on paper.”
“He'll hold out until you come, and then some. That report's going to be very late.”
“A report arriving quickly would hardly reduce the work. More to the point, your hands have stopped. Hakin, have you lost your mind?”
“Whoops.”
Hakin gathered the documents off the desk into his arms in a hurry and moved them into a box. Edwin never let a house head's administrative duties slide on top of rift suppression, so even in the field the paperwork came with him.
Even so, he'd spent the last week watching the rift and let administration drift. Now that the urgent thing was resolved, it was time to go back to being a workhorse.
They dropped back into it. No conversation required, no instructions needed. Edwin wrote his letter, and Hakin arranged documents to suit him and handled whatever fell inside his own authority.
They'd done this a thousand times, and the untidy piles came into order visibly. That was about when it happened. Edwin was halfway through the letter and Hakin had cleared one mountain of paper when Laurent came back.
A follow-up report?
Edwin glanced at him and put his pen back in motion, and then,
“Your Grace, I've brought Lord Yuan as you instructed.”
The pen gliding along the page skidded off in a rough stroke. Edwin looked blankly at the line running across his letter, then snapped his head up.
“What?”
Did he just say Yuan was here? His eyes went to Laurent. No, past him, to the other figure coming into the tent.
Yuan, treated and changed into clean clothes, really was walking in at his leisure. He looked around at the unfamiliar surroundings, and when his eyes found Edwin's he gave a small nod and nothing else.
“I heard you called for me.”
He came on his own two feet? Edwin put the surprise away quickly and looked him over properly. Whatever brought him here, it wouldn't be simply to give the account he'd been ordered to give.
The man was clever. If he'd weighed the gains and losses and come anyway, there was another purpose in it. Either way, having the subject of an interrogation walk in on his own was convenient, so there was no reason to send him back.
Edwin cleared away the ruined letter with distaste and pointed at an empty chair with his chin.
“Once you sit, I will begin.”
Yuan sat without a word while Edwin got the deposition forms out. He'd expected complaints. The man simply did as he was told. Whatever else, he had no intention of making a scene here.
Once he was ready, Edwin addressed him.
“Before the deposition, I will state the customary points.”
He assumed Yuan knew them. Knowing and being formally notified were different things.
“You intervened, at your own discretion, in the suppression of a western rift managed by the Winter house. The defense of the west is a grave matter handed down by imperial decree, and the rift you entered was at the time classified as a great rift exceeding depth 1. The danger level has only now been found to be in error. At the time, the entire west stood to be laid waste.”
“...”
“Do you understand thus far?”
“...Yes.”
“Then report everything you experienced in the rift, without falsehood. I advise you to take care not to worsen your own position.”
Yuan had been looking quietly at one spot on the floor. When he spoke, there was resignation in his face.
“Understood.”
He laid out what happened inside the rift without resistance, starting with how he came to enter it. The reason Edwin suspected was spite.
For six months Edwin had avoided talking to him and used being busy as the reason. He greeted the man and never said a private word to him, and since he lived in his study he skipped meals too.
Cohen, the butler, had passed along reports that Yuan resented it. Resented it enough to travel to the western domain over it, which made a serviceable motive.
Edwin listened and entered the account carefully as it came. The further it went, the more of a spectacle the truth turned out to be.
“You were swept in while assessing the situation?”
Yuan's claim ran like this. He arrived in the western domain, witnessed the rift appear, went toward it to see what was happening, and got pulled in against his intent.
“Yes.”
And there wasn't a trace of a lie in the eyes across from him. Edwin had watched this man operate for years; he could read the truth of a sentence out of him without effort.
“The sky over the west would have turned white that day.”
That startled Edwin.
So he did see it.
The night the rift opened, the western sky had gone bright as midday, exactly as he said. An anomalous sign. Common enough before a rift opens. What wasn't common was seeing it that widely across the whole west, and that had been part of why the rift looked like it might match a great one.
“After that, the manor and the village got restless. You and my father-in-law were away, investigating a rift that had formed nearby. The appeals from frightened residents kept mounting, and I couldn't very well stay shut in the manor. So I set out for the place of concern, and that's how I was pulled into the rift.”
Nonsense. Edwin didn't buy all of it. Take away the anomalous signs and his own absence, and the claim that Yuan had gone searching outside the domain for the sake of its people was an excuse.
He'd moved for something else. Sharp distrust rose in Edwin's eyes, and Yuan didn't stir under it. What he was thinking wasn't easy to read either.
“...I will set this aside for now. With no witness and no evidence, your word is difficult to take as complete testimony.”
“Understood.”
There was plenty left to ask besides why he'd gone, and Edwin couldn't afford to sit on one point. His deposition was only the first anyway; the palace would take another once Yuan arrived.
He looked over what he'd written and asked,
“You said you killed creatures that appeared inside the rift at regular intervals. What was the interval, specifically? And the number of creatures, as far as you recall.”
Pressed for specifics, Yuan sank into thought as though counting the time back. He looked at the backs of his hands, set neatly on his knees, for a while, and then he spoke.
The same eyes, the same voice as a moment ago. What came out of them belonged to another world entirely.
