Every Fight Turns Him Into a Woman, So the Whole Kingdom Kneels novel · Chapter 3 of 24
Chapter 3: The Seal
Wes turns back into a man in front of the garrison, and Brigid orders the secret kept inside the wall. She tells him she lost three soldiers before he came, and the forty vote to give him the keep. A message from Locke asks for the temple and tells him to keep quiet about what he found, which he told no one.
"Rise," Wes said, because nobody had told him what else to say.
Brigid Oakes did not rise.
"Please," he said. "Get up. I'm not a lady."
Then the heat left him.
It went out of his arms first, and then the braid shrank on his back and went brown.
His shoulders narrowed and his coat hung loose.
He was a man in a courtyard holding a glaive that was too big for his hand.
Forty soldiers stared at him.
One of them said a word under her breath that Wes had not heard since college.
Brigid stood up slowly.
She looked at his face, and then at the glaive, and then at the white-gold hair that was no longer there.
"Nobody speaks of this outside the wall," she said.
Her voice carried to every corner of the yard.
"Inside it, you'll say what you saw."
"A lady came out of the marsh, and a man stood in her place. Both of them saved your lives."
Nobody argued.
"Bring them in," she said. "Everybody to the hall."
The great hall of Ravenmoor was cold, and the long table held three half-empty sacks of grain.
Wes counted them twice.
"Is that everything?" he asked.
"That is everything," Brigid said. "We have eight days of it if we eat a spoon each."
Gravel climbed onto the table and put his nose in a sack.
"Gravel, no."
Gravel looked at him and ate a handful of barley.
Brigid pressed a hand to her shoulder, and her fingers came away red.
Wes took the glaive off his back.
"Hold still."
"I will not be healed by a man I don't know."
"You're bleeding on the floor, captain."
She looked at the blood, then at him.
"Do it, then," she said.
Wes touched the flat of the blade to the wound.
Light poured into her armor.
Brigid's breath caught, and her shoulder went still, and the torn mail closed.
She flexed her arm slowly.
"It doesn't hurt," she said.
"It's not supposed to."
"It has hurt since the morning."
Her jaw tightened.
"Two hours before you came, I lost three of my own at that gate."
"They were mine. I trained them."
Wes said nothing.
"You could have come at dawn," she said.
"I was in the marsh, captain. I didn't know about the keep."
"Then why did you come?"
It was a fair question.
"Because a quest told me to," he said honestly. "And because three of your soldiers were on the ground, and I could fix it."
She held his eyes.
"That is a stranger's answer," she said. "But I'll take it."
She took a heavy iron seal off a chain around her neck and set it on the table in front of him.
"Ravenmoor has no lord. The last one died in the spring. Whoever holds the keep holds this seal. I have held it for him."
"Captain."
"I would like to give it to someone who can feed us."
The soldiers murmured down the length of the hall.
Wes looked at the grain and the cracked walls. He looked at the forty tired faces.
He was a game tester with a hospital invoice and a locked session. He had no business owning a keep.
But the quest said nine days, and the soldiers were looking at him.
"I can't feed you with grain I don't have," he said. "But I can find some. If you'll let me try."
Brigid turned to the hall.
"The keep is offered to the man and the lady both," she said. "Those who say yes, raise a hand."
For one breath nothing moved.
Then a young soldier with a bandaged arm lifted his hand.
The woman beside him raised hers, then the next, and the next.
The hands went up the whole length of the hall, until every one of them was in the air.
Brigid looked at the seal on the table.
"Then it is yours," she said.
Wes picked it up, and it was heavy and warm.
A tone chimed in the air, and a window opened.
[Session lock released. You may now log out.]
He closed the window, and then another one opened in front of it.
[New message from G. LOCKE: Where are you? Logs show nothing. Bring me the temple and the forty thousand is yours. Don't tell anyone what you found.]
Wes read it three times.
He had told no one he'd found anything.
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