Rylan stared at the burning building that had once been Weathers’s…He supposed that the only word for it was mansion. It had been too big, too opulent, to be considered a house. For all of that size, there hadn’t been many people there. Weathers must have brought most of them to the fight, thought Rylan. Or he was too cheap to hire people. There hadn’t been much to it after he arrived. That was partially because he hadn’t tried to make a show of it here. The confrontation back in town had been as much about making a point as killing those people. With this part, he’d had an objective and carried it out. Swift. Efficient. Cold. The way he’d been trained.
He’d also spared the servants, mostly. The majority of maids in the house and the farm hands tending the horses and small herds had barely been more than kids. They hadn’t deserved to die because their boss was a murderous piece of trash. The butler, however, had apparently lacked the sense that the goddess gave to a rock. The man had attacked him and died for his trouble. Although, he had only done that after Rylan had killed Weathers’s wife. So, maybe there’d been something going on between them. The rest he’d shown mercy to, though. Even he believed that vengeance should only stretch so far. It was the same reason he hadn’t burned down the barns or killed the animals.
Plus, those animals were valuable in more ways than one. Minimally, they could be sold off. Some of them could be butchered for food. Others, like the chickens, could produce food or be food. It would have been an unconscionable waste in a place where resources were scarce. It just wasn’t a problem that he wanted to handle personally. The town could decide what to do with those animals. They likely wouldn’t hesitate when they realized there was no one left to object if they seized them for the common good.
It was an easy choice for him, made easier by the fact that he'd already extracted what wealth he wanted from Weathers. It had taken less than a minute of looking to find the safe in the man’s office. Weathers had obviously lived without any fear of someone stealing from him. It had been a matter of seconds to wrench it open. The safe’s contents had met Rylan’s expectations. Gold, silver, and some gems of varying quality. The surprise had been all the papers. There were the expected documents granting Weathers ownership of the land. Then, there were all the less formal loan documents. It seemed that the weathers family had a thriving side business as money lenders.
Most of what had been in the safe found its way into a sack that hung over Rylan’s shoulder. All the loan documents, sadly, had been destroyed in the fire. Best not to leave things like that sitting around in his opinion. For some, what he’d taken would be the fortune of a lifetime. For Rylan, it wasn’t even close to enough to repay him for everything that Evik Weathers had taken from him. It wouldn’t even cover the interest. But it was still money, and money was useful. He had handed some of it out to the terrified, trembling servants and hands. He had no idea what they’d been getting paid, so he just gave them all enough that they shouldn’t starve anytime soon. It only seemed fair. It was his fault that none of them had jobs anymore.
A gentle bump against his shoulder made Rylan turn to look at the horse that was standing behind him. It was watching him with an expression that seemed to say, “Hey, you put this saddle on me. Then, you brought me outside into the stupidly hot sun. Are we actually going somewhere?” He smiled at the beast and rubbed its nose. He’d always like horses. Sure, they could be a little skittish at times, but they were surprisingly reliable when you treated them well. The other two horses moved in a little closer, looking for affection or maybe a treat. He gave each of them a small lump of sugar. There had been some in a small bag in the horse barn, so he’d grabbed it.
Rylan took one last look around, his gaze settling beyond the buildings and on the nearby land. Land that had only barely begun to show signs of recovery after who knew how many generations of effort. It was still dry and dusty, with only modest plant growth to show that the soil wasn’t completely dead. He’d grown up looking at this land, or land exactly like it. It had haunted his dreams every since he first ran away, like the desiccated hand of the past forever reaching out to him. He grimaced a little.
“God, I hate this place,” he muttered, as he tied lead ropes for the other two horses to his own.
He swung into the saddle with a smooth, practiced motion, and nudged the horse into motion with his calves. Once he got the animals pointed in the right direction, the mare moved forward at a steady, sustainable pace. Rylan soon found himself lost in thought again as the drab landscape crept by. With the fight in town so fresh, it was almost inevitable that his thoughts turned to Jennalynn. She had wanted to know why he never came back.
There had been many reasons. Some of them would probably have even qualified as good reasons. In the end, though, the main answer to that question was dirt simple. He hated this land. Genuinely hated it. He despised the lack of moisture in the air. He loathed the way everything was some variation of the color tan. Even peoples’ clothes turned that color after a while. Bleached by the merciless sun, wind, heat, and probably some magic he didn’t know enough about to recognize. This was not a place for civilized people. It wasn’t a place for people at all. It took, and took, and took, and all it ever gave back was heartache, pain, and death.
He’d like to say he didn’t know why anyone would come somewhere so barren, but it would be a lie. He knew exactly why people like Weathers came to places like these, and why they stayed. These towns on the edges of the Great Waste were far from the eyes of the official rule. The king didn’t know what happened here, and he most certainly didn’t care. He occupied a palace in the distant capital. Why would he care what happened on the frontier when court intrigue was immediate and never slept? The nobles who were theoretically responsible for this land didn’t know what happened here, and they didn’t want to know. As long as some tax money trickled in every year, they were happy to pretend that everything was fine.
That meant that, here, strength was law in its purest form. That was still true everywhere else, but people pretended it wasn’t. Nobles were occasionally brought to justice. City guards, lawkeepers, and the like at least made the attempt to protect people. Out on the fringes of the kingdom, where civilization met the evidence of the Sinner’s fall from grace, no one pretended. Here, a person could set themselves up as a petty king or queen with nothing more than the strength of their hands, their magic, and sufficient ruthlessness. Jennalynn had been right about something else. Now that he’d killed Weathers, Rylan could do just that.
He could claim this place for his own. Rule it as he saw fit. Take what he wanted, or who he wanted, and no one could stop him. It wouldn’t even be hard. Hell, compared to what Weathers had been like, the townspeople would likely welcome him as a benevolent savior. A tiny little part of him thought that he should do that. Removing Weathers had freed the people, in one sense, but it had also endangered them. The man had been a petty, vindictive bastard who hurt a lot of people, but he hadn’t been stupid. He’d understood that there was more to be gained by leaving the people alone most of the time. Make the occasional example to keep them in line and paying, but let them run their lives and it would be more profitable.
There was no guarantee that the next person would share that perspective. Everyone here could find themselves as slave labor if the wrong person stepped into Weathers’s shoes. Rylan could prevent all of that, but he wasn’t going to. Without even realizing it, he had become an imperial citizen as much as he’d ever been a citizen of this kingdom. It wasn’t that imperial citizens held their leadership in particularly high regard. They didn’t. Changes in power there were common. What was different was a shared belief that such changes should benefit the empire, not the individual. He’d met imperial generals whose loathing for the empress was monumental. Men and women who could have taken the throne from her with shockingly little effort. Yet, there hadn’t been so much as a whisper of such plans. The consensus, bitter pill that it was for some, was that she was doing what was best for the empire.
Now that Rylan was faced with a similar decision on a more modest scale, he didn’t see it as beneficial for him to take control. He hadn’t come back to effect a change in leadership, after all. He’d come back to take bloody and brutal revenge. With that accomplished, it was time to focus on other things. The change in leadership was happenstance. A side effect. Not a goal. He hadn’t planned for it or even around it. After all, if he were going to take a step like that, it wouldn’t be in a small town on the border of the Great Waste. That would be a squandered effort for negligible gains. He would have seized the throne instead. That was a prospect he’d given far more serious and frequent consideration.
King Serence was the latest in a long line of progressively less competent monarchs. It had been a slow but steady decline over the centuries since King Benice had founded the nation. From what Rylan had gathered, the current monarch’s power wouldn’t prove sufficient to stand off the nobles who opposed him if they took action. The only thing keeping him on the throne was that the dukes, the people best positioned to seize the crown, weren’t certain about overcoming each other. Until that happened, their interests were best served by keeping an incompetent weakling on the throne. If any of them ever developed a clear advantage, there would be a new king in no time. If Rylan had a better opinion of any of the dukes, he might have thrown his support behind one of them. Unfortunately, it was obvious that they were in it for the love of power, not the good of the kingdom.
That brought him back around to the prospect of taking it himself. He knew that to anyone who’d grown up in the kingdom, the prospect of one man taking the throne would have seemed ludicrous. None of them had been brought across the threshold from youth to adulthood beneath the “tender” embrace of the imperial army. For him, the entire thing was a not-particularly-complex tactical problem. Take a quick trip to the capital. Then, storm the palace. He figured it would probably take about an hour from start to finish, once he got to the palace gates. Maybe two hours if he faced some wholly unexpected and fierce resistance. Plus, most of the important nobles would be there. So, it wouldn’t take much effort to compel their compliance.
It was that imperial idea of changes in power being for the good of the empire that had stayed his hand. Could he take the throne? Almost certainly. Should he take it? He was not nearly as confident that his leadership would be an improvement. All he’d have to base it on was the very flawed leadership he’d experienced in this kingdom, or the different but equally flawed leadership in the empire. There were, without question, things that the empire did better. Education and infrastructure were high on that list. It was even arguable that their combat training was better. He was living proof that it worked, but it was merciless. Adopting those training methods meant accepting the deaths of those who simply were not built to withstand it.
That very training had beaten most of the conscience out of him, but not all of it. Rylan wasn’t sure he had it in him to institute such training, but he wasn’t sure it could be avoided entirely. Securing this nation in the long term meant building a military that could, minimally, stand off every other neighboring nation. Ideally, it would be able to crush any nearby military. Of course, that led him down the path of thinking that it might be better if everything on this side of the Great Waste was made into an empire in its own right. That was a dangerous but seductive idea, because the empire could have the right of things. The ancient enemies might well return. If they did, the empire stood a chance of survival survive, but the kingdoms here would not.
That all just led back to the same questions that he always faced. Was he the right person to bring about such changes? Would it actually bring about benefits if he followed that path? Those were questions that he couldn’t answer, which was why he continued to let things stand as they were. He supposed it wasn’t crucial for him to decide right away. He had time. All that progress he’d made had, as the most powerful local adventurers had undoubtedly learned, extended his life substantially. He didn’t know exactly how much, but it would probably buy him an extra century or three. So, he could always give it a couple generations and then decide if this kingdom needed new leadership.
The murmuring he’d been ignoring for a while finally broke his concentration. He glanced over his shoulder. It looked like all the people he’d left alive at Weathers’s place had hurriedly gathered their things, taken horses, and followed him. When they saw him looking, their expressions became a mixture of nervousness and hope. That hope baffled him. What were they expecting him to do for them? Well, they probably had families back in town. Let them sort out what to do with these kids. He was leaving. However, as they approached the town, Rylan saw something he hadn’t expected. What looked to be every person who lived there was gathered at the edge of town. They were staring in the direction of Weathers’s home. Glancing back again, he saw the smoke rising into the air.
“Shit,” muttered Rylan. “They’re going to want to ask me things. I just know it.”