**Five days ago.**

After the Aurenfall, everyone knew Leon.

Hard not to; he’d dominated the entire hunting festival singlehandedly, humiliated a prince on live broadcast, destroyed half a mountain with one punch..

The continent had opinions about all of this.

The nobles specifically had one opinion in particular.

Threat.

The Silford clan was already a complicated topic in certain circles; descendants of the hero, yes, powerful, yes, but powerful families had a way of making other powerful families nervous, and a Silford that the entire world had written off suddenly turning out to be... that, was the kind of development that made people reach for solutions before the problem got any bigger.

So the file went out.

...

The assassin opened it.

Leonis Silford.

A portrait. White hair, sapphire eyes, young face. He read the details once and then looked up.

"A kid?" he said.

The figure across from him sighed; clearly not the first time they’d had this reaction today.

"The child born to the Silford clan," they confirmed. "The one with the E rank."

"...The E rank," the assassin repeated.

"The total bounty on his head is already over one million gold," the figure continued, sliding the file further across the table. "And this isn’t a personal request. It’s first come first serve."

The assassin looked at the file.

Then back at the file.

He was S rank; had been for years, had taken jobs that made most people in his profession quietly retire out of self preservation. He was not, by any reasonable measure, a cautious man.

But he was a living one.

And according to the attached hidden report at the back of the file, the maid that followed the boy around wasn’t a maid.

She was the Nine Tails.

The calamity fox herself, walking around a noble estate carrying her Master’s orders.

The assassin closed the file.

Pushed it back across the table.

"Pass," he said simply.

"You haven’t even heard the full—"

"I have more things to do with my life than die over assured suicide," he said, already standing. "Find someone else."

He left.

’One million gold,’ he thought, walking away down the corridor.

’that is still not enough for me to go on that kind of suicide mission.

...

Arlott was already moving before the letter had finished being read.

He folded it, tucked it into his coat, and walked out of the study with the particular pace of someone who had somewhere to be and wasn’t interested in being stopped on the way there.

Things had been complicated since the Aurenfall; that was the polite version of it.

The church had made their position clear. The royal family had made their position clear. The Silford clan had made their position equally clear in response, and now all three parties were existing in the particular tension of people who had said things that couldn’t be unsaid and were waiting to see who moved next.

So when the guild letter arrived, Arlott already knew what it was about before he opened it.

The board wanted him in.

Interrogation; dressed up in whatever formal language the guild preferred for these things, but interrogation nonetheless.

He stepped out of the his car and into the guild building without slowing down.

The entrance hall told him everything he needed to know about how serious this was.

Every important figure currently in the capital was here; guild masters, high ranking nobles, officials he recognized from institutions he generally preferred not to deal with.

And the S ranks.

All five of the S ranks currently stationed in the capital were present; standing or seated around the hall with the kind of energy that comes from people who are powerful enough to be unbothered by most things and are currently bothered.

Arlott scanned the room once.

’So it’s like that,’ he thought.

He walked forward.

Arlott stood before them and looked up.

Seven figures seated on an elevated platform; robed, composed, the kind of people who had spent their careers making decisions about other people’s lives and had gotten very comfortable with it. Second only to the king in terms of judicial authority, they held trials, passed judgments, determined outcomes.

They were also, notably, very much in the king’s favor.

’So I already know how this ends,’ he thought.

He kept his face neutral anyway.

The assumed leader, seated at the center, looked down at him with the expression of someone who had already written the conclusion and was simply working through the formalities.

"Arlott Silford," he said; his voice carried easily through the hall. "It has been revealed to us that a son of yours has committed acts of both treason and heresy against the crown and the church."

Normally that would have been the moment his aura detonated.

It didn’t.

He breathed through it; slow and deliberate. His family was at stake here, the entire Silford legacy sitting in this room alongside him, and every important figure in the capital was watching. He couldn’t afford violence. Couldn’t afford to give them anything that looked like guilt or instability.

’Not here. Not now.’

The hall was packed, which was interesting; most of these people had shown up knowing nothing was officially announced. Word had traveled that Arlott Silford was being tried and apparently that alone was enough to fill a room.

Arlott Silford. Being tried.

Of course they came.

He looked up at the leader of the panel and held his gaze without blinking.

"I believe," he said, his voice completely level, "that my son committed no such acts."

Harven.

Blonde hair, sharp eyes, a face that carried enough resemblance to the king that you didn’t need anyone to tell you whose blood he shared. The second son of the royal family, given this role several years ago, and by most accounts he’d handled it well enough.

He delivered judgments. Fairly, usually.

The Silfords had never given him reason to do otherwise; they were one of the few noble families that had no dirt on them, nothing to dig up, nothing to hold over their heads.

Until now apparently.

He frowned, eyes moving across the file in front of him.