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Isekai Terry AHS: Chapter 14 – Amends
🕑 Added 2025-01-08 07:36:05 +0000 UTCKelima glanced at the man beside her for what felt like the hundredth time as they approached the gates of the city. She simply did not understand him. Sometimes, he was playful if a bit mean about it. Other times, he was like a force of nature. She’d watched him casually dispatching monsters that she wouldn’t have fought without a lot of thought and a carefully laid plan of attack in hand. At still other times, like right now, he exuded a sense of hesitant anxiety that seemed wholly irrational given that he was a rank two adventurer. Rank Two! What could possibly be bad enough to cause a rank two adventurer to be anxious?
It wasn’t quite a mythical rank among adventurers, but it was exceedingly rare. Rare enough to make a person wealthy beyond comprehension if they were willing to sell their services. And not even in some dirty way that needed to be hidden from the Adventurer’s Guild. They could formally enter into a noble’s service or a royal family’s service for a period of time. As long as they were open about it and didn’t act contrary to the Guild’s interests, nobody cared. It wasn’t even just wealth. That kind of raw, personal power could let a person secure a hereditary noble title of their own, along with vast estates and control over an even vaster territory.
It was like this Terry didn’t realize that he could, almost on a whim, eclipse her and her parents in terms of wealth, holdings, and political power. Hers was a minor family in terms of nobility, which was part of why she’d become an adventurer in the first place. There were financial rewards to being an adventurer that helped to ensure that her parents didn’t fall into the trap of debt that had toppled too many other houses. They were also in a precarious position. If another noble family decided to simply take their land, there was precious little her parents could do to stop it. Her status as an adventurer might cool some of those ambitions.
It also helped to ensure that she didn’t find herself “engaged” to someone without anyone bothering to ask her if she cared to be engaged to a given person. Not that she thought her parents would do that to her, but they’d be hard-pressed to deny some duke’s son. She was no beauty to steal the hearts of princes, but marrying her would be a nonviolent way for some larger, more powerful house to eventually add her parents’ lands to their own. How she wished she had a brother to be heir to the house, but it wasn’t likely to happen at this point. She was stuck with the position, which meant she had to worry about these things. There had been disgustingly few ways to shield herself, but the Guild was one of the most reliable.
She knew as well as anyone that the Adventurer’s Guild could be unwieldy, impractical, and even a little corrupt, but it was fiercely protective of its own. If you were a member in good standing being backed into a bad corner, the Guild could and would bring a terrifying amount of direct and indirect pressure down on someone’s head. After all, the guild was composed almost completely of people with magical power, poorly developed risk aversion skills, and a practiced ease with violence. That alone was enough to discourage most people.
If some noble, general, or someone else with good connections dug in their heels, that was when the Guild would dispatch someone like… Kelima had to sigh at the thought. They’d dispatch someone like Terry to “explain” to the poor doomed bastard that they just weren’t going to get their way. Those conversations usually ended with a sudden inheritance and massive reconstruction of an estate, but the problem almost always went away. The rank two or rank one adventurer sent to have the conversation was always rewarded handsomely for taking on the disagreeable task.
That’s what made the man so infuriating. He could set himself up like a king if he’d just pick a side. Any side. People would line up to throw money, land, power, women, or men at him if he’d just let them do it. She hadn’t known exactly how powerful he was when she’d first approached him, only that he was stronger than he was playing himself off to be. It had been selfish, but it would have been insane to let him slip out of reach without trying. If he could have been convinced to stay, his mere presence would have helped to solidify her parents’ position. That was before the mind-boggling revelation that he was actually a rank two. If they could have secured even his half-hearted support, no other noble house would have dared march on her parents.
Of course, any and all of that assumed that he could stop being so… so… so erratic! It was like his mind had been damaged in some fundamental way that made it impossible for him to be pragmatic. Instead, he went clomping around the kingdom, blithely infuriating the Church, every noble he stumbled across, and, if his behavior was consistent, probably a fistful of deities. After his performance at her home and the things she’d learned about him after that, she’d realized the full depth of her mistake. She wanted to help her parents, but some cures were worse than the disease. He had struck her as exactly that kind of cure. Something that one might use in an act of pure and utter desperation but not before reaching that abysmal state.
Her mother had reached the same conclusion first if for different reasons.
“That man is lost,” said Heletina Silventar after watching Terry leave. “Best if we steer clear of him. Lost men are unpredictable men.”
Kelima was relieved to hear those words. Her mother was fond of the school of thought that preferred learning through hard experience after bad decisions. Dragging that man into her home against his will had been a terrible idea. She was still horrified that she’d gotten into a fistfight with him. It might not be possible to ever live down that shame. Kelima honestly didn’t know exactly what had gotten into her. Well, no, she did. He’d scared her. Looking back on it, she didn’t think he’d meant to scare her. Yell at her, without a doubt, but not scare her. There’d just been something about him, maybe something in his eyes, that had come across as raw, wild, and even a little unhinged.
She just wash her hands of the whole business and start the long, arduous process of repairing the damage she’d done to her and her parents’ reputations. Since her mother didn’t mean to turn the entire debacle into a painful learning experience, they’d all be able to move past it. They might even be able to look back on the whole thing and laugh about it. Maybe that would happen after two or three or possibly thirty years had passed. Maybe forty. She’d look forward to that distant day. Then, the unthinkable had happened.
“No,” said her father.
She and Mother had stared at him in utter incomprehension. What did he mean by no? It was so rare for him to utterly reject his wife’s advice like that that Kelima could count the times on one hand. Some people thought that Heletina Silventar was the real power in the family. She had that presence about her. Her mother was social. She was charming. She was so sharp one could cut themselves and not know it. In other words, she was perfect for being the face of the family.
Kelima knew that her parents had agreed to let her mother act in that role. Her father was reserved. He preferred to speak less and listen more when in public. Behind closed doors, though, her parents discussed everything and came to decisions together. Part of her burned with envy that they enjoyed that kind of relationship. She wanted someone she could talk to like that, trust like that, but the would-be suitors who had come her way were less than impressive. Oh, they came from the right kinds of families, but it was hard to act impressed about their brave deeds when she’d fought scarier things. It was even harder to act interested when she realized that she was so much smarter than they were.
The suitors had dried up in the last year or two when it became apparent that she wasn’t going to take dimwits or braggarts. That had been a relief and a worry. It meant she got to stop entertaining people she didn’t like, but it also increased the chances of some noble house trying to assign her a husband to claim her parents’ lands. She didn’t need anyone to tell her what that would be like if it happened. Whoever ended up as her husband would resent her, knowing that they’d gotten stuck with her. The worst part was that she wanted to get married. She wanted to have a family. She might not want that immediately, but she definitely wanted those things someday.
A small part of her had started to resign herself to the thought that it wasn’t going to happen. She supposed that she could just quietly take on lovers. It was common knowledge that unmarried noble women often did that. Then, they’d go into seclusion for a time and, about nine months later, they abruptly reappear with a newly adopted heir for their house. That wasn’t the fate she wanted for herself, but she suspected that she’d been deemed unsuitable by the rest of noble society. If she was going to get the kind of life she wanted, she had the feeling it would only happen if she went out and got it for herself.
Adventurers travel a lot, she thought. Perhaps it was time for her to visit another country and see if she could find someone suitable there. As long as she didn’t go too far away, she could probably get back to help if her parents found themselves in trouble. Then, her father had spoken that word. No. His face had been so stern. He’d looked almost angry.
“No,” he’d said again. “Kelima, you wronged that man. You knew full well that he didn’t want anything to do with us, and you ordered my men to drag him here anyway. I don’t know how dangerous he is, but I suspect that you do. So, tell me, what would have happened if he’d chosen to be less polite?”
“He wasn’t that polite,” said Heletina in a clear bid to redirect her husband’s attention.
It didn’t work, much to Kelima’s dismay. Her father’s piercing gaze never left her.
“Well, Kelima?”
“It would have been—” she trailed off.
“Well?” snapped her father, making her flinch.
“It would have been bad. It might have been very bad,” she said.
The way her father was looking at her made Kelima want to crawl away and die so she wouldn’t have to see it anymore.
“Very bad,” repeated her father. “This can’t be allowed to stand.”
Kelima realized that, during that last part, it wasn’t her father talking. That was the baronet speaking. He stared at Kelima and spoke in a very clear, very precise voice. He issued his decree.
“You will go. You will find this man. You will help to guide him in the ways of this kingdom that he so clearly does not know. You will make amends until you earn his forgiveness.”
“No,” said Mother. “That’s too much.”
“And what if he decides that he’s still offended? What if he returns in anger? Who will stop him? How many might die to quench that anger?”
“And what if he decides to kill our daughter!” Mother shouted.
That fight had gone on for weeks. Terrible, awful weeks during which Kelima had felt constantly nauseated. She’d brought this disharmony down on their heads with her rash behavior. In the end, a compromise had been reached. She would go and assist this Terry for six months. Her father had conceded that if she hadn’t earned forgiveness by then, she likely never would. Part of her loathed the idea. Terry was dangerous and unpredictable. He might decide to kill her on sight. It might also be an opportunity. She’d failed to win him to their side with her heavy-handed tactics, but maybe she could still convince him to help her parents. He’d seemed to actually like them, at least a little bit.
Looking at the nervous, fidgeting man next to her now, it was hard to know if his help was worth getting. He was powerful, but that unpredictability still scared her. She also didn’t like the way Terry’s behavior was drawing the eyes of the guards at the gates. He was acting like a criminal.
“What in the world is wrong with you?” she demanded. “Why are you acting like you’ve got stolen gold in your pocket?”
He gave her a slightly wild-eyed look, and she could see a thin sheen of sweat on his brow.
“What are you talking about?” he asked in a mildly hysterical tone. “I’m fine.”
Comments
Angela Roberts
Her father made good points but having the instigator of wrong try to help Terry seems like throwing more fire on fire. How does that help?
BelligerentGnu
This has done so much to rehabilitate Kelima it's unreal. Her dad is a bit of a twit, though. Also, really quite funny to see MC from the outside.
