A mark meant a name, and a name meant an organization.
'And organizations don't send just three guys.'
Revan pressed his palm against the first corpse and opened the Shadow Storage. The body sank into the dark beneath it and vanished with a wet, sucking sound. Then the second followed, then the third. By the time the last boot disappeared, his stomach was rolling.
Using the storage always cost a little mana. When he was healthy, he never noticed. Tonight, bleeding all over the alley, he felt the cost hit his gut like a fist.
Bile rose in his throat. He swallowed it and slid down the wall until he was sitting in the filth. Cold brick pressed against the gash that ran from his shoulder blade to his spine. His hands shook and wouldn't stop. Whether that was the blood loss or the adrenaline, he couldn't tell anymore.
'Why me?'
Nobody appeared at the mouth of the alley.
'I'm a servant. A butler with a sword. What does a secret organization want with a butler?'
People who bit into poison capsules didn't do it over a servant. Those men had wanted something from him. That scared him more than the wounds did.
If he died here, between the rats and the rotten cabbage, House Vespera wouldn't care. Someone would write a report while someone else complained about the trouble. Within a week they would have a replacement. To them, a broken tool got thrown away. Others had been thrown away before while he stood and watched.
Then he forced himself up. The alley tilted and spun. Black spots filled the edges of his vision, so he grabbed a crate just before his knees gave out.
Stay put in your dorm and do not show your face or do anything without my direct order.
Sylvia had said that a week ago. He had bowed his head and nodded like a good dog. Since then he had snuck out of the academy, walked into the worst slum in the capital, visited an illegal blacksmith, and almost been killed by a squad of assassins.
'If there's an award for breaking direct orders, I'm winning first place. Nobody else even entered.'
Laughter came out of him and turned into a wet cough. Something red hit the cobblestones.
Vargos had stolen from the family, so Sylvia had crushed him into the dirt with her gravity magic. Revan still remembered the Black Rose blooming over the forest. Even the air had gone heavy as lead, while her violet eyes narrowed like she was mildly annoyed.
'Yeah. If she finds out, I'm dead. Completely, totally, pancake-shaped dead.'
'Maybe I should just let the bleeding finish me. At least dying in an alley sounds better than getting flattened into a meat patty.'
Shaking the thought off, he reached into the storage again. His stomach turned over, but his fingers kept searching. Soon they found a small vial with a faint green glow.
Minor Healing Elixir. This potion couldn't fix the damage, but it would stop the bleeding and keep his organs from staging a mutiny.
He pulled the cork and emptied it in one gulp. It tasted like expired medicine mixed with grass.
Moments later, warmth spread through his chest and down his arms. His pain went from actively dying to merely wishing he were dead.
'Good enough.'
Next came a dark cloak from the storage. When he pulled it over his ruined shirt, the fabric stuck to the drying blood and made him wince. With the hood tugged low, he checked his reflection in a puddle.
'Less murder victim, more suspicious homeless guy.'
He tilted his head.
'No. Still a murder victim. Just one who stole a cloak.'
***
Valorheim's streets weren't empty, even past midnight. Drunks were stumbling out of the taverns and singing in the merchant district. Some carts were already rattling toward the bakeries.
Normally, the walk back to the academy took thirty minutes. Wounded like this, he needed much longer, because he had to make sure nobody noticed him.
In this state he couldn't make his body silent, so he hid inside other noises. Each step landed when a cart wheel scraped the stones, each breath when a drunk started singing, each turn when a shutter banged somewhere down the street.
Whenever footsteps sounded behind him, his hand went to the kunai in his sleeve. But nobody attacked.
'Either they only sent three, or the rest are getting ready for round two.'
Neither option made him feel better.
By the time he reached the academy's outer wall, the moon was high and the main gate was already locked. Curfew had started an hour ago.
'Great. Now I get to break into my own school like a delinquent skipping detention.'
At least he knew how. Months of sneaking in and out for Sylvia had taught him which stones on the eastern wall were loose, which guard always stopped to rest at the fountain, and which window in the servants' wing never locked. Once his fingers found the old handholds, he started climbing. Every pull felt like dragging his chest over broken glass.
At the top, he swung his legs over and dropped into the servants' garden, rolling when he landed.
His ribs screamed the moment he hit the ground.
"Ngh—!"
He bit down on his tongue to swallow the rest of the sound. Copper filled his mouth.
'I'm fifteen. Fifteen years old. Why does my body feel like a seventy-year-old veteran who lost a war?'
Through the servant passages he slipped past the night patrol without trouble. Most of the dormitories were dark and silent. Lights still burned in a few windows, probably students studying, or more likely panicking over homework due tomorrow.
'Almost there. A few more corridors, then bed, and I'll pretend tonight was a fever dream—'
"My, my. What do we have here?"
Revan froze.
Behind him, the voice was soft and amused. All the hair on his arms stood up.
Slowly, he turned around, because his body couldn't do it any faster.
A woman was leaning against a pillar at the end of the passage, half in the moonlight, like she had been waiting for a while. She seemed to be in her early twenties. Long black hair fell over her shoulders like spilled ink. Her face had a sharp, aristocratic beauty that reminded him uncomfortably of Sylvia.
Even her eyes were almost the same pale violet. Sylvia's were cold, though. This woman's eyes were bright with amusement, like she had just found a new toy.
Her plain black dress didn't seem to reflect the moonlight at all. No jewelry. Nothing told him who she was.
'A teacher? No, I memorized every instructor's face in my first week. A noble visitor? In the servants' passage, at midnight?'
His fingers moved toward the kunai.
'Or the rest of The Garden.'
The woman saw his hand move and smiled wider, but she didn't try to stop him.
"Relax, little servant. If I wanted you dead, you would have died on that wall."
'She's not bluffing. Wonderful.'
Every part of him wanted to run, but he kept his voice steady.
"Who are you?"
Without any hurry, she pushed off the pillar and walked toward him.
"Straight to the point, no groveling, no stammering. I like that. Scared people usually talk too much."
Close enough to touch, she stopped. Up close he could smell her perfume, flowers with something heavier underneath, like the lilies people put on coffins.
Her head tilted as she looked him over.
"I've been watching you, Revan von Alstaire. The servant who challenged a Master-rank warrior and lived. The shadow of the Vespera princess."
Those violet eyes dropped to his bloody shirt and came back up while her nose wrinkled.
"Those cuts are clean, so someone trained gave them to you. And you smell like coal smoke, rust, and hot iron. The Undergallows, I think."
'Great. A stalker. Did I make another woman angry without noticing?'
Nothing came to him, even after he went through every face from every errand. Plenty of women had been angry at him, but she wasn't one of them.
"The question is, does your precious mistress know where her little dog has been wandering tonight?"
Her smile thinned.
"Because I'm pretty sure she told you to stay in your dorm. Not to show your face. Not to do anything without her direct order."
Revan stopped breathing for a second.
'Those were her exact words. She said them to me alone, in a closed room. How does she know?'
Softly, the woman laughed, like wind chimes in a graveyard.
"Don't look so scared. I'm not here to tell Lady Vespera about your little adventure. Quite the opposite."
From her sleeve she pulled something small and held it up between two fingers. In the moonlight he saw dried petals, pressed flat and carefully preserved.
A black orchid.
Revan felt his chest go tight. The same flower was tattooed on the wrists of the three corpses in his Shadow Storage.
When she spoke again, the smile was gone. Her voice had turned cold.
"The Garden. They took something precious from me, and I'm going to take everything from them in return."
Then she tucked the orchid back into her sleeve.
"You killed three of their people tonight. Impressive, in your condition. But those three were expendable. Scouts, sent to see how you fight and how you bleed."
Revan's face soured.
'Of course they were bait. Who does she think she's talking to? I've finished more games and novels with this exact plot than she's had birthdays. And I'm an assassin. Disposable scouts are page one.'
Still, the rest of it scared him. What did they actually want? Why him?
"The real threat hasn't shown itself yet."
Revan flinched, because she had just answered the question in his head.
"When it does, that broken body of yours won't last three seconds."
One more step brought her close enough that he could have counted her eyelashes. For a second those violet eyes looked much older than the rest of her face. Cold ran down Revan's back.
"So tell me, Revan von Alstaire."
Her voice dropped to a whisper.
"Do you want to know what The Garden is really planning? Or would you rather keep stumbling around in the dark until they get bored of playing with their food?"