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Gustave Eddie Dominic had been very, very busy of late.
This wasn’t terribly unusual. Even after he officially retired from the knighthood, he was a common sight around the palace, from the barracks to the training grounds to the royal quarters.
“Steady,” his fellow knights said. “That Gustave, he’s a steady fellow. Keeps busy. Always does his part, never complains.” Or maybe “Very upright. Honorable.”
On one notable occasion, a lieutenant had gotten very, very drunk after a skirmish with some bandits. The lieutenant hugged Gustave and yelled to the entire tavern, “you’re a good man, Gustave. Always looking out for everyone. Like a, what’s it, duck! A mama duck with all your little ducklings. You’ve got a stick so far up your arse the Goddess herself couldn’t find it, but you’re a good man.”
Which was blasphemy, of course, and very inappropriate for a knight of the Kingdom. But then again, soldiers were soldiers. If you started going after soldiers for blasphemy, you would find yourself without an army. So Gustave had just half-dragged the lieutenant up to his room and dumped him on the bed.
In any case, everyone knew that Gustave liked to fill his time. So no one really noticed when he started running more errands or holding more training sessions. That was just Gustave being Gustave, after all.
Gustave always had a good head for sums. He could calculate the cost of moving an army down to the last gold piece. He knew how many loaves of bread you needed on a campaign, how many horseshoes, how many vulneraries. He understood, to his bones, the price they would pay in blood to take the next ridge. His saddlebags were always full of notes and ledgers.
There was one ledger, though, which he kept only in his head. It had been running since 1176. On one side, there was every good thing he had ever done. Every life saved, every soldier comforted, every battle won. In the other column, there was Lambert, Patricia, and Glenn.
The accounts were impossible to balance.
How could he ever calculate the cost of the day when he failed? How much of what followed was on his head as well? What fraction of every casualty of the Great War did he need to carry in his soul?
It was beyond his skills as a mathematician. Annette could have calculated it. His shining girl could have sat in the plush, comfortable chair in her office at the Royal School of Sorcery with a pen and a cup of hot chocolate and worked it out to the last decimal. But Gustave never would have asked. He knew that her pain was part of his debt.
He would do everything he could to pay down the balance before the end.
This was the truth. Three weeks before, he followed a healer through the gleaming halls of the brand new Royal Soldier's Hospital, listening to his footsteps echo. The hospital was one of King Dimitri’s many improvement projects. It was all clean, white marble floors and neat rows of beds. It looked nothing like the muddy, chaotic field hospitals where Gustave had spent so many of his days. It still smelled the same, though. As the healer directed him into a small room off the main hall, he took a deep, steadying breath. His nose caught the woody scent of camphor, the bitter taste of feverfew, and the sharp ozone tang of healing magic. The iron smell of blood was probably just memory, he thought, as he sat down in a small chair across from the healer’s desk.
This was not the room where patients went to get good news.
The healer’s voice was full of sympathy when she said “I’m very sorry to tell you that you have an advanced cancer in your lungs. That is what has been causing your shortness of breath.”
“Can you heal it?” he asked.
“I wish that we could. Unfortunately, faith magic is not well suited to the task. The magic works by encouraging growth. It works, well, miracles when it comes to healing wounds. But it also makes the cancer grow.”
She paused for a second, expectant, but Gustave remained silent. She continued, “we see this a lot in former soldiers, especially those who relied heavily on vulneraries. Undirected healing magic is a sword with two ends. It can make the wrong things flourish.”
The healer twisted her hands together and looked down. She was a compact woman, plump and blond, with a kind face. She looked too bright for this tiny dim room. She turned her head, and a sunbeam from the small window lit her hair, turning it golden. It reminded Gustave of Lambert, sharp and hard as a kick to the gut.
“How long do I have?” he finally managed to choke out. The tremor in his voice surprised him.
“Six months, maybe more, maybe less. You can keep up your normal activities for as long as you feel able. We have medications that can help with some of the symptoms…”
The healer continued on, but Gustave was beyond hearing. He had known, in some way, that every moment of his life since Duscur was borrowed time. It was a gift from the Goddess he surely hadn’t earned. But somehow, he thought he would have more moments than this.
The guards at the entrance to the royal wing of the palace nodded as Gustave walked by, not even bothering to question him.
“Good day to you, Sir Dominic!” one of the maids called. “Are you looking for the prince this morning?”
“Good morning to you too, Senna,” he replied. “Yes, where might I find him?”
“His Highness and His Majesty are taking breakfast together in the Blue Room. I’m sure they won’t mind if you pop in.” Senna glanced around quickly and lowered her voice. “Emma let me know that His Majesty had a bit of a bad night, but he seems better this morning.”
It was an open secret among the palace staff that the king saw ghosts. Most everyone simply accepted it, though a few of the more superstitious chambermaids refused to clean the royal quarters. With the way the previous king had died, what else could you expect? By and large, people of Faerghus treated ghosts like snowstorms and rockslides–unfortunate, perhaps, but just a thing that happened.
Lambert, Gustave thought to himself, why did you never haunt me? I’ve spent my whole life carrying the regrets of the dead. I could carry a few more. He shook his head and continued down the hall, glancing through the door of the Blue Room.
His Majesty was bent over the table with his son, studying some sort of map. Breakfast dishes were scattered across the entire surface. It looked like several spoons had been conscripted as battalions, with the sugar pot serving as some kind of giant beast. The prince said something, too low for Gustave to hear, and the king threw his head back and laughed. That laugh–it had none of that bitter, desperate edge that Gustave remembered all too well from those terrible days of the war, when Dimitri had come back to them, half-mad and drunk on rage. This laugh was pure and simple joy.
Gustave had the sudden urge to throw himself to his knees, right there on the stones of the hallway, and thank the Goddess that he had lived long enough to see this. Dimitri, king, alive and hale and happy. Dimitri, laughing like he had when he was a little boy, before everything went so bad. This. This is what Gustave had fought for, what he had made Dimitri live for.
Gustave’s days of theatrics were long behind him, though. If he knelt in the hallway, he might not be able to get back up, and wouldn’t that be a sight? So he just cleared his throat and said “Your Majesty, it’s time for the prince’s morning lessons.”
The king smiled. “Ah, Gustave, good to see you.” He turned to his son, “It is time for my meetings as well. But I leave you in good hands–Sir Gustave here was also at this battle. I believe he was over near the eggs?”
“Closer to the toast, your Majesty.”
“Ah yes, you did ride over that ridge, didn’t you? I leave the rest of the tale to you. I’m sure you can find a way to incorporate it into the lesson.” The king clapped Gustave on the shoulder and smiled.
Gustave felt a few more of those numbers slide off his invisible ledger.
The Church of Serios had many things to say on the topic of debt.
“Foolish is the man who lets his debts multiply, for they will soon become his master,” was one of the most popular verses for children’s lessons and primers. Gustave himself had copied it out hundreds of times while practicing his penmanship. He found it curious that most primers seemed to leave out the companion verse: “Wicked is the man who drives others into debt, through deception or through lending at high interest, for he will lose his soul to avarice.” Gustave supposed that quite a few rich men wanted to forget that verse.
Annette had many, many things to say as well. The laws of Faerghus allowed some people to inherit debt, so that grandchildren might work land in part to pay a debt incurred by their grandfather. Annette found the practice abhorrent, and had given several speeches on the topic in front of the Council. She was pressing for reform.
(Annette could also give a rousing lecture about how the translators who originally copied the holy texts from High Adrestian had taken everything in the neuter gender and made it masculine, and thus changed the meaning of the texts. She was usually drunk for that speech.)
Gustave didn’t know how he felt about the reform effort. It seemed wrong, somehow, that someone could cheat an innocent tavern owner out of 100 gold just by falling dead at exactly the right moment. Debts needed to be paid. He had known that from when he was a child. When one dies with regrets, the burden lasts after death and the living carry its mantle. That was just the way of things.
Gustave didn’t want to die with regrets. Annette, Dimitri-–they had more than enough to carry already.
Gustave paused at the entrance to his daughter's office. It was bright and cheery as ever. Every wall was lined with mismatched bookshelves, full to bursting with books, knick knacks from her students, brightly-painted animal figurines, and one very determined plant that had managed to survive years of neglect and sporadic watering. There was a tray of pastries–Mercedes’s work, likely–balanced precariously on the edge of the desk. Annette was sprawled in the overstuffed armchair in the corner, dwarfed by the giant tome in her lap. A trail of discarded books spread around her like the train of a ballgown.
“Father!” Annette said with a smile, looking up from her book. “What brings you here?”
“Just brought a message from the palace to the headmaster,” Gustave replied.
“Father,” she chided gently, “you are retired. Let the messengers carry things.”
“I was heading this way anyway. Might as well make myself useful."
“Father, you’ve done plenty to be useful to the Kingdom. Sit yourself down and be useless for a few minutes.” She waved a pastry menacingly in his direction. “You are absolutely forbidden to leave until you have eaten this and had a cup of tea.”
He took the plate obediently. “What are you working on?”
As usual, that was all it took to start his daughter on a long explanation of her latest project, complete with several scribbled diagrams, one half-cast spell, and a very long tangent about and invasive variety of creeping vine from Daphnel that made somehow managed to establish a foothold in Charon territory. Gustave did his part, nodding in all the right places and sinking into his comfortable chair.
It reminded him of long-ago nights spent with Lambert as he paced the floor and talked politics or strategy. Lambert had never really needed Gustave’s advice, just a friendly face to talk at until he had solved his own problem. He wore a hole in the rug in his study, walking back and forth, waving his arms. Thinking back on those days always felt like poking a sore tooth–no matter how many times he reminded himself that it would hurt, he couldn’t stop. Here, though, in the golden glow from Annette’s spell lights with a pastry in his hand, the pain felt less sharp. It still ached, but it was tolerable.
Gustave smiled, fondly, and Annette looked up from the model she was assembling from sticks and twine. “What?” she asked.
“It’s nothing. Just…” Gustave trailed off for a moment, then found his courage. “I’m so proud of you, Annette.”
“Oh.” The silence spread through the room, thick and awkward.
“You’ve grown into such a remarkable woman. I just thought you should know that.”
“Thanks. I mean–-well, it’s good to hear you say it.”
“Anyway,” Gustave said, gesturing towards the model, “you were saying something about weight distribution?”
Annette gratefully resumed her lecture. “Yes, right. Balance–it’s the most critical part!”
Gustave certainly didn’t deserve any of the credit for the person his girl had become. She did it on her own. Perhaps he could let go of some of that blame too.
Gustave carried a ledger in his head, the record of a burden he no longer knew how to set down. But maybe, just maybe, he could let it be buried with him.