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Dragons Candidate Cont’d!

Author’s Note / Credit

Before anything else, full credit for the original story goes to ArcherFromArnor, the author of The Dragon’s Candidate.

This fic is not meant to replace, rewrite, or “fix” the original work in any way. Quite the opposite. The Dragon’s Candidate is one of my favorite Re:Zero fanfictions, and this continuation is only my personal idea of what might happen next after the last updated chapter.

The original fic was written by ArcherFromArnor and published on FanFiction.Net under:

The Dragon’s Candidate
Fandom: Re:Zero
Rating: T
Language: English
Genres: Romance / Drama
Main Characters: Subaru Natsuki, Emilia, Reinhard Astrea
Length: 122k+ words
Published: November 30, 2020
Last Updated: August 12, 2021

Since the story has not been updated in almost five years, I wanted to write a follow-up out of love and appreciation for the original. This is purely a fan continuation and should not be treated as canon to ArcherFromArnor’s work unless the original author says otherwise.

Please read and support the original story first before reading this continuation:

https://m.fanfiction.net/s/13758246/1/The-Dragon-s-Candidate

All credit for the setup, premise, and original version of this AU belongs to ArcherFromArnor. I am only continuing from it as a fan who deeply enjoyed the story.

I also want to give full credit to Tappei Nagatsuki, the original author and creator of Re:Zero − Starting Life in Another World. The world, characters, concepts, and foundation of Re:Zero belong to him and the official rights holders. This fanfiction is made only out of appreciation for Re:Zero and for The Dragon’s Candidate.

Fic summary - So that it all makes sense.

Chapter By Chapter:

Chapter 1 —

A Trick Pulled by Fate

• Subaru survives the loot house incident after Elsa is defeated.
• Emilia heals Subaru, and Reinhard notices Subaru seems to know too much.
• Emilia’s insignia ends up in Subaru’s hand and shines.
• Subaru is revealed as the fifth royal candidate.
• Reinhard takes Subaru to the Astrea estate instead of letting Emilia bring him to Roswaal’s mansion.
• Subaru and Reinhard begin forming a real friendship.
• Subaru learns he has been pulled into Lugnica’s Royal Selection.

Chapter 2 —

The Scent’s Cost

• Subaru tries to accept his new role as a royal candidate.
• Reinhard pledges himself as Subaru’s knight.
• Subaru learns Emilia is also a candidate, making them rivals.
• Subaru and Reinhard visit Roswaal’s mansion.
• Subaru reunites with Emilia and meets Ram, Rem, Puck, Beatrice, and Roswaal.
• Subaru nearly reveals Return by Death to Beatrice, but the Witch’s hand stops him.
• Beatrice senses the Witch’s Scent on Subaru.
• Emilia and Subaru share a moment where he accepts her as a half-elf.
• Later that night, Subaru is attacked and killed by someone using chains.
• Return by Death sends him back to the carriage.

Chapter 3 —

Actions Are By Intentions

• Subaru wakes up before arriving at the mansion and warns Reinhard of danger.
• Reinhard believes him, even without knowing about Return by Death.
• Subaru investigates the mansion more carefully.
• He realizes the killer may already be inside the mansion.
• Subaru bonds somewhat with Ram after telling her the Red Ogre and Blue Ogre story.
• That night, Subaru is attacked again.
• The attacker is revealed to be Rem.
• Rem thinks Subaru is a Witch Cultist because of the Witch’s Scent.
• Reinhard saves Subaru before Rem can kill him.
• Beatrice confirms Subaru has the Witch’s Scent but is not clearly a Cultist.
• Rem could be executed for attacking a royal candidate.
• Subaru chooses mercy and decides to prove himself to Rem instead.

Chapter 4 —

Untitled

• Rem awkwardly wakes Subaru up, leading to an embarrassing bed scene.
• Reinhard nearly attacks Rem, but Subaru calms him down.
• Subaru explains that punishing Rem would cause conflict with Emilia’s camp.
• Subaru and Reinhard help Rem with mansion chores.
• Subaru and Emilia grow closer during a private moment, though Puck interrupts.
• Subaru and Rem go to Arlam Village for supplies.
• Subaru plays with the village children and encourages Petra’s dream.
• The children go missing after crossing the barrier.
• Subaru and Rem find most of them cursed by mabeasts.
• Subaru goes alone to save Meili.
• He fights mabeasts while protecting her until Reinhard, Ram, and Rem arrive.
• The children are saved.
• Rem begins to trust Subaru.
• Rem apologizes, and Subaru forgives her.
• The mansion ends on a warmer, more peaceful note.

Chapter 5 —

The Royal Selection Begins to Take Shape

• Subaru and Reinhard leave Roswaal’s mansion.
• Emilia is sad to see Subaru go, and Rem is also disappointed.
• Subaru starts seriously thinking about the Royal Selection.
• Reinhard explains Lugunica’s class problems, poverty, racism, and political tensions.
• Subaru begins forming ideas for reform, welfare, equality, trade, and peace.
• Reinhard becomes more hopeful about Subaru as a future king.
• Subaru remembers Felt and connects her golden hair and red eyes to the royal family.
• Subaru and Reinhard find Felt and Rom in the slums.
• Felt touches Subaru’s insignia, and it reacts.
• Rom reveals Felt is likely the lost daughter of Prince Ford Lugunica.
• Felt rejects the idea of being royalty.
• Subaru offers Felt and Rom a place in his camp instead of forcing her into the election.
• Felt and Rom agree to join Subaru.

Chapter 6 —

The Weight of a Camp

• Felt and Rom begin living at the Astrea mansion.
• Subaru learns more about slum life and why many people turn to crime.
• Rom faces prejudice as a demi-human living in the Astrea estate.
• Felt adjusts to living with Subaru and Reinhard.
• Subaru begins training with Reinhard to become stronger.
• Subaru explains sports and ideas from his world.
• Felt warns Subaru that good intentions alone will not win over nobles.
• Subaru starts thinking more politically and practically.
• Subaru clashes with Heinkel over Rom and demi-humans.
• Heinkel hints that something has happened to Rom.
• Subaru rushes into the slums alone.
• He finds Rom brutally murdered beneath a tavern.
• Subaru breaks emotionally and kills the barman.
• This becomes the first time Subaru crosses a serious moral line.

Chapter 7 —

Subaru’s First Real Breaking Point

• Subaru loops after Rom’s death.
• In one failed loop, Subaru loses control and kills several people in the tavern.
• A dying man tells Subaru that some of them were innocent.
• Subaru is mentally shattered by the fact that he became a killer.
• His memories become fragmented, and the tavern basement becomes a nightmare image.
• Subaru loops repeatedly, trying to save Rom.
• He fails by being too late, by trusting the barman, and by not having enough time.
• Subaru finally uses the thugs’ fire magic to start a distraction.
• He reaches Rom before the final wound and saves him from the burning tavern.
• Subaru then goes back into the flames to save the barman too.
• Crusch witnesses Subaru’s recklessness and helps organize the rescue.
• Rom survives, Subaru collapses, and the story of the “black swordsman and the Duchess” begins spreading.

Bonus Chapter / Chapter 7.5 —

The Story Spreads

• Ram, Rem, and Petra hear rumors about the black swordsman in Arlam.
• They realize the mysterious hero is Subaru.
• Rem worries about him while pretending to scold him.
• Crusch thinks about Subaru and becomes curious about who he really is.
• Common people begin arguing about Rom, demi-humans, and cruelty in Lugnica.
• Kadomon refuses to justify torture, showing that not everyone accepts the kingdom’s prejudice.
• Felt and Reinhard find Subaru wounded and asleep after the tavern incident.
• Felt breaks down with relief.
• Reinhard blames himself for failing Subaru.
• Rom reminds Reinhard that Subaru sees him as a friend, not just a knight.
• Rom tells Felt and Reinhard the story of Subaru saving him.

Chapter 8 —

Subaru’s Camp Starts Taking Shape

• Subaru wakes up at the Astrea mansion.
• Felt punches him, then hugs him while crying.
• Rom and Reinhard tell Subaru that his candidacy should stay hidden for now.
• Rom says Subaru is brave and kind, but still too reckless to be king.
• Subaru accepts that he needs more knowledge and control.
• Reinhard asks Subaru if he trusts him.
• Subaru says yes without hesitation.
• Subaru asks Reinhard to help him get stronger.
• Subaru confronts Heinkel and warns him not to move against his camp.
• Subaru, Reinhard, Felt, and Rom interrogate the jailed barman.
• Subaru forces him to reveal his accomplices.
• Subaru tricks the barman into becoming a traitor by his own slum rules.
• Subaru helps a young demi-human boy being abused by a merchant.
• Subaru almost loses his temper but stops himself.
• Subaru meets Elsa again.
• Elsa says she is not after him this time.
• Reinhard returns with bad news: Subaru’s candidacy has been discovered.

Chapter 9 —

When Night Falls Over Royalty

• Subaru and Reinhard learn the Royal Guard knows about the fifth candidate.
• The Royal Guard mistakenly believes Felt is the candidate.
• Subaru realizes someone leaked information anonymously.
• Subaru buys flowers to thank Crusch for helping during the tavern fire.
• Emilia and Ram visit the Astrea mansion.
• Emilia meets Felt and Rom there.
• Ram tells the tale of the black swordsman and the Duchess.
• Emilia learns Subaru risked his life in the tavern fire.
• Emilia confronts Subaru about his recklessness.
• Subaru snaps because her words remind him of failed loops.
• Emilia calms Subaru with a gentle touch.
• Subaru apologizes, and their bond grows deeper.
• Subaru explains the emergency about the fifth candidate misunderstanding.
• Felt leaves to deliver Subaru’s flowers to Crusch.
• Felt does not return.
• Subaru, Reinhard, and Rom search for her.
• They find Felt injured and terrified near the Karsten mansion.
• Rom takes Felt back to safety.
• Subaru and Reinhard enter the Karsten estate.
• They find the mansion full of dead servants.
• Elsa appears but claims she did not kill them.
• Reinhard fights Elsa.
• Subaru searches the mansion and finds Crusch dead.
• Subaru is killed by an unseen assassin using thin strings.
• Return by Death sends him back to the moment Felt leaves with the flowers.
• Subaru now knows he must save Felt, Crusch, and stop the assassins.

Again all credit to the original author of this fic ArcherFromArnor. Excellent fanfiction and one of the first I read!

With out further adue I present;

- Chapter 10 -

- Threads Around the Lioness -

The flowers were small. White, pink, the kind of pale blue that only grew east of the capital. Reinhard had picked them himself. He had told Subaru, with the slight embarrassment of a man unused to choosing such things, that they reminded him of the sky above the Karsten estate in autumn.

Subaru had laughed about it that morning. He had made a joke about Reinhard secretly being a florist. He had asked if the bouquet came with a confession letter.

Now he was standing in the same entry hall, watching Felt reach for those same flowers, and his hands would not stop shaking.

He knew what would happen if she took them.

He knew because he had already watched it.

“Boss?” Felt’s voice cut through the ringing in his ears. She had stopped, fingers an inch from the wrapped stems, and was looking up at him with the half-annoyed expression of someone who had felt eyes on the back of her neck.

The bouquet sat on the side table by the door. Past it, through the tall windows, the morning was perfectly ordinary. Servants moved in the far hall. A bell rang somewhere in the kitchens. Heinkel was probably still drunk in his rooms above. The Astrea mansion was its usual quiet weight of stone and old wood, and none of it knew what was about to happen.

“Boss,” Felt said again, sharper. “What.”

Subaru opened his mouth.

He had practiced this. In the carriage, the second time around. In Crusch’s hallway, the third. He had practiced what to say, how to phrase it, how to make the words land without sounding like a man who had watched her die already. He had a script. He had timing.

He looked at the small fang at the corner of her mouth and forgot all of it.

“Don’t touch the flowers.”

Felt’s hand stopped.

“Felt.” His voice came out wrong, thin and high, the way he used to sound when he was small and had broken something he couldn’t replace. “I’m serious. Don’t touch them.”

She stared at him.

For one full breath, he thought she might listen.

Then her face closed the way only a slum kid’s face could close. “Tch. The hell’s wrong with you this morning?”

“I—”

“They’re flowers, Boss. They’re not gonna bite me.”

“Felt, please—”

“Reinhard picked ‘em. They’re for the Karsten lady, right? I’m gonna walk ‘em across the street, I’m not crossing the wastes.” She reached again, slower now, with the deliberate disrespect of a teenager who had decided to make a point. “Stop being weird.”

Behind him, footsteps. Calm, even. The sound he had been waiting for and dreading at once.

“Subaru.”

Reinhard’s voice was gentle. It was always gentle. Subaru had learned, over the last weeks, that Reinhard’s gentleness was a kind of warning system; the more controlled he sounded, the more carefully he was reading a situation.

He sounded very controlled now.

“You are pale,” Reinhard said. He stepped into the hall and Felt’s hand froze again, this time not from Subaru’s words but from the sudden, careful attention of the Sword Saint. “What is wrong?”

Subaru closed his eyes.

Behind that door, in maybe two hours, Crusch Karsten is going to be lying in her own blood on her office floor. There is a woman who walks on ceilings, who threads steel through the air like a seamstress, and she is going to murder a Duchess and frame this house for it. Felt is going to be hung from the upstairs balcony with wires through her wrists. I have seen this. I have seen this, Reinhard, I have seen all of it, and I cannot tell you because every time I try to explain, the Witch puts Her hand around my heart and squeezes until I can taste Her perfume in my mouth—

He opened his eyes.

“The Karsten mansion is dangerous today,” he said.

It was the most he could say.

Reinhard’s gaze did not waver. “You believe Lady Crusch is in danger.”

“Yes.”

“From whom?”

“I—” The Witch’s perfume crawled across the back of his tongue. He forced the words past it. “Assassins. More than one. I think they’re already on the road.”

“How do you know this, Subaru?”

There it was.

There was always that question. There would always be that question. Subaru had thought, on the carriage ride back from the slums weeks ago, that he might one day learn how to answer it. He had been a fool. He would never learn. The Witch would never let him.

“I just do,” he said. The words came out raw. “I just—I just do, Reinhard. I can’t explain it. I know how that sounds. I know exactly how that sounds. I’m telling you anyway because if I don’t, Crusch dies, and Felt might get hurt-, and your whole house ends up holding a knife it didn’t pick up.”

Felt had gone very still beside the side table.

“Oi,” she said quietly. “What.”

Reinhard did not move. He was watching Subaru’s face the way he had watched Elsa in the loot house — not as a knight measures an enemy, but as a man measures a moment.

“You are certain,” Reinhard said.

“I am certain.”

“You will not tell me how you know.”

“I can’t. Reinhard, I cannot. Please.”

A long, quiet beat.

“Very well,” Reinhard said. “Then we will treat it as true.”

That was the moment Subaru should have stopped.

That was the moment a smarter man, a calmer man, a man who had been doing this longer, would have sat down on the floor and breathed and made a real plan.

But Subaru had just watched the Duchess in a puddle of her own blood.

So he moved.

It went wrong before they even left the gates.

Subaru’s plan, such as it was, had two parts. Reinhard would come with them. Reinhard would come with them, and the assassin’s wires could not cut a Sword Saint, and that meant Crusch would live. Simple. Clean. He had said it to himself three times in the carriage to make himself believe it.

“You’re squeezing my hand,” Felt muttered.

“Sorry.”

“You always this sweaty?”

“Felt, please, just—”

“I’m goin’. I’m goin’. You said go. We’re going.” She pulled her hand free with the exaggerated dignity of an alley cat, and rubbed her palm on her dress, and the small motion almost made him cry. “What’s gotten into ya, bro? You’re acting like I’m walking into a noble’s wedding.”

“You’d hate that more.”

“Damn right I’d hate that more.”

Across from them, Reinhard sat with his hands folded over the hilt of his sword. His eyes were on the window. He had not asked another question since the entry hall. He had only said, very quietly, if you tell me to act, I will act.

It should have been comforting.

Subaru’s stomach kept trying to climb up his throat.

The carriage took the long road, the one that curved south past the market square and then up the hill to where the great houses sat in their walled greens. Subaru had ridden this road three times in the last day, and now he was riding it for a fourth. He knew its turns. He knew where the cobblestones thinned. He knew which fountain they passed and which—

The carriage jolted hard.

“Whoa,” the driver called. “Whoa, whoa—”

Reinhard was up before Subaru understood. He had the carriage door open one-handed and his head out, and Subaru could see past him to the road ahead, and his stomach did its trick of climbing again.

A wagon had collapsed in the middle of the street.

Not just collapsed — spilled. Barrels in the road. A horse on its side, screaming. A man pinned under one of the wheels with his face the color of old milk. People running, people shouting. And from somewhere underneath all of it, very high and very thin, the unmistakable sound of a child crying.

“Stay in the carriage,” Reinhard said, already gone.

Subaru watched him move toward the wreck and knew.

He knew the way you know in dreams, when you can feel the walls of the dream closing in on you and you cannot make your legs run any faster. He knew because Yae had built this. Yae had built this exactly. The wagon was not heavy enough to break a wheel on these stones. The horse was screaming wrong. The child was crying from underneath a barrel, where no real child would still be conscious.

It was bait.

It was bait, and the Sword Saint could not look away from a child.

“Reinhard,” Subaru croaked. “Reinhard, wait—”

But Reinhard was already lifting the wagon.

“Bro.” Felt’s voice at his shoulder. “Subaru, why are you—”

“Get back in. Get back in the carriage.”

“What—”

“Felt, get back in the carriage—”

A woman screamed from the other end of the street. A different kind of scream. The kind that knew what was happening. Reinhard’s head turned. He set the wagon down on its other side with the grace of a man placing a teacup, and was moving toward the new screaming, and Subaru could feel time itself splitting around him like cloth around a needle.

He grabbed Felt’s wrist.

“Run,” he said. “Felt, run. Not back. Forward. To Crusch. *Now*.”

“What in the—”

“Run!”

She ran. To her credit, she ran without arguing further; whatever was in his face was enough. Subaru ran after her, and his lungs burned, and the Karsten gates appeared down the slope, and they reached them, and they passed them, and they crossed the courtyard, and the great front doors were open already, and—

The hall inside was very quiet.

Subaru stopped in the doorway.

There was a maid lying just inside, on her front, with her hands folded under her cheek as though she had decided to nap on the marble. The pool around her was still spreading.

Felt made a small sound he had never heard her make before.

“Don’t look,” Subaru said. “Don’t look. Don’t look. Keep walking. Keep walking, Felt—”

He pulled her forward. He did not know the layout of the Karsten mansion well, but he had walked it once, in a different loop, in a different worse version of the morning. He remembered which corridor led to the office. He took it now at a sprint that hurt his knees, and Felt was keeping up, and there were more bodies, two guards together against a wall as though they had died mid-sentence, and—

Crusch’s office door was ajar.

“Stay outside,” Subaru said.

“Boss—”

“Stay outside.”

He pushed the door.

She was alive.

For one tearing second, she was alive. Crusch Karsten was on the floor with her back against her own desk and one hand pressed against the front of her white blouse, where the white was no longer white. Her sword lay near her hip. Her cap was on the carpet. Her dark green hair had come down out of its tie and was sticking to her cheek with sweat. She looked at him with the slow, careful focus of someone trying to remember her own name, and then her eyes sharpened and she said,

“You. How.”

“Crusch—”

“How did you know to come.”

“I—”

A line.

He felt it before he saw it. A line across the back of his fingers, where they were still gripping the doorframe. Very fine. Very cold. He looked down, and the skin had parted along his knuckles in a clean red bracelet, and a single drop hung at the base of his thumb.

Then a line across his throat.

He did not feel it cut. He felt it be there, the way you feel a hair that has fallen across your face and not yet brushed against the skin.

He looked up.

She was standing on the ceiling.

That was the only way to describe it. A woman in red and black and white, in something almost like a maid’s uniform if a maid had been raised by a moonless forest, with long pale-red hair tied up in a way that fell strangely when one was upside down. Her eyes were jet-black and shaped like a cat’s. She was hanging by the soles of her boots from nothing he could see — by threads, he realized, by a hundred threads — and her fingers were moving very slightly, the way a player’s fingers move on a lute they have already learned.

She looked at him with what he could only call mild interest.

“Hm,” she said.

His head came off.

He came back retching.

He came back in the entry hall, with Felt three steps from the side table, and the first thing his body did was bend at the waist and try to vomit onto the polished floor. Nothing came up. There was nothing in him to come up.

“Boss?”

“Don’t—”

He could not finish the sentence. His knees would not lock. He braced one hand on the wall and the wall felt unreal, and he could still feel the line across his neck, still feel the precise moment when one part of him stopped being able to send signals to the other part.

“Boss, are ya sick? Oi. Oi, you look like—”

“Felt.” He breathed through his teeth. He made the breath last. “Felt, don’t touch the flowers.”

“Yer scarin’ me. Cut it out.”

“I will explain. Later. I will explain everything I can. Don’t touch the flowers.”

Footsteps.

Reinhard came around the corner already alert; he had been close enough to hear Subaru’s tone if not his words. He took in the scene with the calm of a man who had grown up in halls where bad news arrived without warning, and his hand was already half on the hilt of his sword.

“Subaru. Explain what you can. I will listen.”

Subaru laughed. It was a bad laugh.

“Okay,” he said. He pushed off the wall. He made his spine straighten. “Okay. Okay, listen, I can’t explain how I know. I can’t. The thing that makes me know is the thing that I can’t talk about. But I know things, Reinhard. I know about the Karsten mansion. I know about the wagon on Ash Street. I know about the woman who hangs from ceilings.”

“…The wagon on Ash Street.”

“In twenty minutes. Or maybe forty. I don’t know exactly. It collapses. There’s a child screaming under it. There isn’t really a child. It’s bait.”

Reinhard’s face did the thing it did when he had decided to believe something he did not yet understand. It became more still.

“What else.”

“Felt can’t go to the Karsten manor. Not today. Not with the flowers. Whoever is doing this — they think she’s the fifth candidate. They’re going to use her as the excuse.” His voice cracked. He hated his voice. “They’re going to make it look like our house attacked theirs. They’re going to kill Crusch and pin it on us in the same hour.”

Felt had gone very quiet at the side table. He glanced at her. Her eyes were very large and very fixed on his face.

“Subaru.” Her voice was low. “How long have you known.”

“Felt, I—”

“How long, Boss.”

He couldn’t answer.

She looked away. Her jaw was working. After a moment she said, with surprising steadiness, “You’re telling me I’m bait. Tch. Should’ve led with that, Boss.”

“I didn’t—”

“Don’t look at me like I’m made of glass. I grew up where people sold glass for bread.” She crossed her arms tight against her chest. “What do you need me to do.”

He could have kissed her.

He did not have time.

He would learn, later, that there is a particular kind of mistake you can only make when you are trying very hard not to make the previous one.

He kept Felt home.

He kept Felt at the Astrea mansion with Rom, with the doors barred and the windows watched, and he carried the flowers himself. He went with Reinhard. He went the short way, not Ash Street. He arrived at the Karsten manor early, while Crusch was still in her office and the servants were still going about their day, and he announced himself with as much loud noise as he could manage, because loud noise was harder to assassinate quietly through.

He thought, briefly, that he had done it.

He did not think this for long.

The runner arrived at the Karsten gate within the hour. A boy, a stable boy, breathing in great heaves. The Astrea mansion is burning. The Astrea mansion is burning, my lords, please come, please—

Reinhard’s face, when he heard it, did something Subaru had never seen it do.

It went blank.

“Subaru.”

“I know.”

“They are at our house.”

“I know.”

“Felt—”

“I know.”

Reinhard picked Subaru up and trailed at a blitz speed back towards the manor. The Astrea estate was not burning. That was the joke of it. There was a thin column of smoke from a stable somewhere — set, Subaru learned later, by a man paid two silver to drop an oil-lamp on hay — but the manor itself was intact, the manor itself was quiet, the manor itself had its front doors standing open like a mouth.

In the entry hall, on the polished floor where Subaru had stood three hours ago telling Felt not to touch the flowers, there was a note.

It was held down by a small stone. A loop of thin white thread connected the stone to the paper, the way a child might tie a tag to a present.

The note said:

The wrong royal blood came to visit.

Subaru did not read it twice. He had already heard the scream.

He took the stairs three at a time. Reinhard was already past him; Reinhard was always faster; Reinhard had cleared the landing and was at the long upper hall by the time Subaru was halfway up, and Subaru saw him stop, saw him stop dead, and that was how Subaru knew.

He came around the corner anyway.

Felt was on the balcony railing. Not standing on it. Not exactly. She was over it, leaned out across the empty air of the entry hall below, and the only things holding her up were the threads — one around each wrist, one across her collarbones, one looped, almost decoratively, around her throat. Her feet were bare. Her dress was torn at the hem where she had kicked something. Her face was turned toward Subaru, and when she saw him her eyes flooded with what he understood, with a slowness that would never leave him, was relief.

“Big bro..” Her voice was wet. She was trying to grin. The grin came out wrong. “Subaru, yer’— you’re makin’ a real ugly face—”

He ran.

He knew it was useless. He knew it would not work. He ran anyway.

Somewhere out of sight, a small professional motion. A finger lifted, perhaps. A wrist turning a fraction of an inch, the way a seamstress finishes a seam.

Felt’s body jerked the way a puppet jerks when a string is tightened too quickly, and her head went one way and the rest of her went another, and the sound—

The sound was the worst part. It was a small, neat sound. A sound like a button popping off a coat.

He did not remember screaming. He must have. What was left of his throat felt, later, as though it had been shouting for hours.

What he remembered was the woman descending.

She came down the wall of the entry hall headfirst, hand-over-hand on threads he could not see, and her cat-like black eyes were on him as she came. She did not hurry. She did not look at Felt, who was no longer Felt. She looked at Subaru, and her head tilted slightly in the air, and when her boots touched the floor she stood up neatly and brushed nothing from her uniform.

He recognized her. The pale-red hair. The red and black and white. The maid’s uniform that was not quite a maid’s uniform. She had been on the ceiling of a hall he had already died in.

He could not move.

The threads had already found him; he had not realized it; there were lines of cold along the insides of both arms and across his stomach, and one neat loop around his left thigh that he understood was there because he could feel his leg becoming colder than the rest of him.

She stopped a polite distance away.

“You moved incorrectly,” she said.

He stared at her.

“Hm.” It was more to herself than to him. She lifted one finger. The thread at his stomach tightened. He felt — distantly — the first parting of skin. “How troublesome. You were supposed to be confused.”

He was, he realized, dying.

He was dying, and he was going to come back, and he was going to have to walk into this entry hall again with Felt reaching for the flowers, and the woman who had killed her — who was killing him — was going to live in his memory for the rest of however many lives he had, and he did not know her name.

He had to know her name.

He did not understand, at first, why this seemed important. Then he understood: it was the only thing he could carry back through the door with him.

“…What’s your name.”

Her finger paused.

Her catlike eyes regarded him with a faint, almost academic curiosity, as though he had spoken in a dialect she had not heard in some years.

“Hm.”

“…Please.”

“That is an unusual last request.”

“…Yeah. I’m an unusual kind of dying man.”

For one moment, he thought he saw the corner of her mouth move. Not a smile. Something stranger. The expression of a woman who had been spoken to as a person, briefly, in the middle of doing her work.

“Yae,” she said. “Tenzen Yae.”

“…Yae.”

“You will not remember it.”

“I will.”

“Hm.”

She tightened the thread.

Reinhard cried out.

It was not violent. It was the small, professional motion of a seamstress finishing a seam. He felt his stomach part along the line she had drawn, and the warm, terrible rush of inside-things becoming outside-things, and he had time, just barely, to think Yae, Yae, Yae, and then the dark of the entry hall closed over him.

Then the entry hall again, and Felt’s hand reaching for the flowers, and Subaru turning to one side and being sick across the marble.

He was sick for a long time.

Rem would have laughed at him. Barusu, the floor is not your enemy. That was Ram, not Rem. He could not keep them straight today. He could not keep anything straight.

Reinhard reached him at some point and put a hand against his back. The hand was steady. Subaru hated how steady it was.

“Subaru.”

“They go after both of us,” Subaru said into the floor. “If we split, they go after both of us. If I take Felt with me, they kill Crusch first. If I leave her here, they kill her here. They want both. They want both at the same time.”

Reinhard was silent for a moment.

Then he said, very softly, “Subaru. You are speaking as though you have seen this.”

Subaru did not answer.

He did not need to. Reinhard, after a long pause, simply lowered his hand and said:

“Then tell me what you need me to do.”

He tried, this time, to be clever.

He tried politics.

He wrote a letter. He had Reinhard’s seal pressed into the wax. He sent it by the fastest rider in the Astrea stables, and he wrote in plain language —

Lady Karsten, your manor will be attacked within the hour. Wires. Steel. Multiple assailants. Please evacuate.

He thought, as the rider left, that he had finally found the right shape.

He had not.

He understood his mistake within twenty minutes of arriving at the Karsten gate, because the gate had four extra guards on it, and the inner courtyard had eight, and the hall behind the doors was thick with armored men, and Crusch Karsten was standing at the end of it in full coat and gloves and cap, with her sword bare in her hand, and her amber eyes were on him the way a hunting cat watches a stranger near her kittens.

“Natsuki Subaru.” Her voice carried. “You will explain yourself.”

“Lady Karsten, please, you have to evacuate—”

“I do not hear deceit in your words.” Crusch took one step forward. Behind her, Felix stood with both hands in the air at hip-height, very still, the way a healer stands when he is deciding whether to fight or to bandage. “That does not mean I hear the whole truth. You knew. You knew that this house would be attacked, on this hour, by this means. You knew, and you wrote it to me in a letter, and now you stand in my hall and ask me to flee.”

“Yes.”

“How did you know.”

“Lady Karsten, I am *begging* you—”

“How did you know.”

He could not say.

The Witch’s hand was already on his heart, soft as a daughter’s, and he could not say.

Crusch’s face did not change. She had read his face the way she read all faces. Subaru did not know exactly how the Wind Reading worked, but he could see it working — could see her weighing what she had seen, and what she could not see, and choosing in front of him.

“Felix.”

“Crusch-sama—”

“Hold the hall. Inform Wilhelm. We do not flee from threats made by boys who will not name their sources.”

“Crusch-sama, please—”

“That is an order, Felix.”

Subaru’s stomach turned over.

He understood, with a clarity that came too late, what he had done. Crusch Karsten was not a woman who could be told to run. Crusch Karsten was a woman who, when warned, dug in. He had told her that someone was coming for her, and she had answered by making her hall *more dense* — more guards, more bodies, more places for Yae’s threads to find purchase.

He had thickened the loom.

The first guard’s throat opened ten seconds later.

It was a quiet opening. He did not see what did it. He saw only the man — a tall, square-jawed knight to Crusch’s left — straighten very slightly, as though startled by a tap on the shoulder, and then a single dark line appeared just above his gorget and a moment after that the line was a great dark fountain, and the knight was on his knees, and the men on either side of him were turning toward the sound their friend had made, and a maid against the wall said *oh* in a small surprised voice and her hand fell from her wrist onto the floor.

“Down,” Crusch barked. “Down. Everyone down. Do not move—”

A guard near the door tried to draw his sword. His arm came off at the elbow before he had cleared the scabbard. The arm landed on the carpet still gripping the hilt. The sword stayed in the hand. The hand stayed on the arm. For a strange moment they made a little statue together.

Yae was not rushing.

Subaru understood that now, in a way he had not understood in the first loop or the second. Yae could have killed everyone in this hall in twenty seconds. She was choosing not to. She was watching. She was killing one person, and then another, and then a third, the way one tests fabric — pulling here, there, looking for where the cloth resists.

She was looking at him.

He could feel it. He could feel her eyes the way you feel sun on the back of your neck. He looked up — at the ceiling, at the chandelier, at the high galleries above — and saw her, finally, perched in the rafters like a cat in a beam.

Yae, his mind supplied, before he could stop it. The name she had given him in a hall he could no longer reach.

She was sitting cross-legged, upside down, with her chin in one hand. Her other hand was moving slightly. Very slightly. The way a child moves a finger over a board, considering a piece.

She tilted her head when his eyes found her.

He thought, very clearly and very stupidly, oh no, she sees that I see her.

Then the door behind him opened.

Elsa.

She stepped into the hall the way someone steps into a familiar parlor. Her smile was small and warm and almost shy. She looked around at the bodies as though admiring a painting in a friend’s house.

“My, my,” she said. “How busy.”

Crusch’s eyes flicked to her once and then back. “Felix. Take everyone who still has both arms. Out the side passage. Now.”

“Crusch-sama, I won’t leave—”

“Felix.”

He went.

Subaru watched him go and thought, with the strange detachment that came near the end of bad loops, this is how Crusch dies in front of me again. Because Crusch was alone now, except for Subaru, who was useless, and Reinhard, who had been pulled away outside by some second false hostage staged at the gates, and Yae in the rafters, and Elsa in the door.

Crusch’s sword came up.

Elsa’s blade slid free of its hidden sheath.

“You have been bothering my colleague,” Elsa said pleasantly to Subaru, without looking at him. “She finds you very confusing.”

“I get that a lot.”

“Yes.” Elsa’s smile widened. “You do. I find that confusing too. You should be much more dead by now.”

She moved.

Crusch met her. They were not evenly matched — Crusch had been bleeding before this hall, Crusch was off her stance, Crusch’s coat was already opening across the ribs — but Crusch was not the kind of woman who needed to be evenly matched to fight. She bought time. She bought enough time for Subaru, on the floor, to crawl forward across the carpet on his elbows. Crusch’s sword had spun out of her hand at some point. It was a few feet from him. He could reach it.

He saw Yae watching him reach.

She let him.

That was the part he would remember later. She let him. She watched him crawl with mild, almost affectionate curiosity, and she did not pull a single thread to stop him, because she wanted to see what a boy with no business in this room would try to do with a Duchess’s sword.

He got his hand around the hilt.

He swung.

He swung badly — he was on his side, he could barely see, his arm did what his arm could do — and the blade went through the air without meeting anything important, except for a single, almost-invisible glint near the ceiling, which it sheared in half.

A thread.

He had cut a thread.

Yae’s head tilted further.

For the first time, her face changed. It was a small change — the corner of her mouth pulling slightly, a single eyebrow rising a hair — but it was interest. Real interest. The look of a craftswoman watching an apprentice produce something unexpectedly clean by accident.

“Hm,” she said again.

Then she threaded a wire through his open mouth.

He could feel it slide across his tongue. He could feel it find the corner of his lips. He could feel the moment when she set her grip.

He could feel her pull.

He came back screaming.

Not loudly. There was no breath in him to scream loudly. He came back making the small wet noise of a man whose throat believed it was still being cut, and Felt jumped back from the side table as though it had struck her, and Reinhard was already moving across the hall.

“Subaru—”

“I’m okay. I’m okay. I’m okay—”

He was not okay.

He sat down on the floor of the entry hall and put his head between his knees and laughed, because the alternative was screaming, and screaming would frighten Felt, and he had used his frightening of Felt budget for the day. He laughed until his ribs hurt. Reinhard knelt beside him, slowly, the way Reinhard did everything, and put a hand on his shoulder, and waited.

Felt, after a long moment, came and sat on the floor too.

“Boss,” she said quietly. “Are ya alright?”

He did not answer.

She nodded as though she had heard the answer anyway. She looked down at her bare feet on the cold marble. The little fang at her lip was caught in her lower mouth. After a while she said, “Yeah. Okay. Okay.”

Reinhard’s hand on Subaru’s shoulder did not move.

“Subaru,” Reinhard said gently. “Tell us what we are doing.”

Subaru breathed.

He breathed for a long time. He breathed until the perfume of the Witch went away from the inside of his mouth. He breathed until he could feel the floor under him as floor. He had three deaths in his teeth. He could feel them. The line across the back of his fingers. The button-pop sound of Felt’s neck. The thread sliding over his tongue. He would carry these for the rest of whatever life this body had left, however long that was, and he had to put them down for one hour and think.

He thought.

He thought about Yae sitting in the rafters with her chin in her hand. He thought about Elsa stepping into a hall like it was her aunt’s parlor. He thought about the wagon on Ash Street with its impossible-not-child screaming underneath. He thought about the note tied with thread to a stone in his own entry hall. He thought about Heinkel, somewhere in this house at this very moment, who had let someone through a side door at some point in some version of this morning.

Four moving parts.

The flowers were the excuse. The flowers made Felt the apparent reason for an Astrea visit to the Karsten estate.

The Karsten attack was the kill.

The Astrea attack was the second kill — the one that activated if Subaru took Felt off the board, because if Felt did not deliver the flowers in person then she had to be killed at home for the frame to hold.

The wagon was the leash. The wagon kept Reinhard busy. Maybe a different bait would have done it, if the wagon failed. There would always be another scream.

Four moving parts.

He could not stop all four.

He had been trying to stop all four.

That was the mistake.

He had to make the four parts fail to make a pattern.

He looked up.

“Felt.”

“Yeah.”

“You’re staying home.”

“…Okay.”

“Not in your room. Not in the safe room. Not anywhere obvious. With Rom, in the servant passages. The ones near the kitchens. If anyone gets in, you go down, not up — never up, never the balconies, never near a balcony. Do you understand me.”

She looked at him. “Yeah, Boss.”

“Reinhard.”

“I am listening.”

“I am going to ask you to do something you are going to hate.”

Reinhard’s blue eyes were calm. “Go on.”

“There is going to be a wagon on Ash Street. It’s going to look like a child is trapped under it. There is going to be a scream after that, somewhere on a side road, that sounds worse. I need you to ignore both of them.”

The hand on Subaru’s shoulder tightened, very slightly, and then released.

“Subaru,” Reinhard said. “You are asking me to ignore someone in danger.”

“I’m asking you to ignore a trap that is shaped like someone in danger.”

“That is not how I see the world.”

“I know.”

“Subaru—”

“I know, Reinhard. I know what I’m asking. I know it’s the worst thing I could ask of you, of all people in this kingdom, you are the worst person I could ask this of, that’s exactly why they built the trap this way. They built it around your shape. They’re using your kindness as a leash.”

Reinhard was very quiet.

“So for today,” Subaru said, “just for today, listen to me before you listen to the leash.”

Reinhard did not answer immediately. He did not look away. Subaru could see something in his face go through a small, deep change, like a tide turning underneath a beach. When he finally spoke, his voice was even softer than before.

“Very well. For today, I will trust your judgment before my instinct.”

“Reinhard—”

“Do not apologize. I see what this costs you. Tell me where to be.”

Subaru looked at him.

There were many things he could have said. He said, hoarsely, “Thank you.”

Then he stood up. He helped Felt up. He turned, finally, to the side hall, where the curtain at the second arch had been very slightly disturbed for the last two minutes.

“Emilia,” he said. “Ram. I know you’re there.”

The curtain twitched.

A silver-haired half-elf stepped out, looking caught and unrepentant, with a pink-haired maid behind her wearing the expression of a woman who had been dragged into something against her better judgment and intended to remember it forever.

“You’re shaking,” Emilia said immediately.

“I’m fine—”

“Subaru, you’re shaking. This is reaaally not nothing, is it.”

“No. It really isn’t.”

Ram folded her arms. Her dark red eyes flicked over Subaru once, top to bottom, the way she might appraise a vegetable. “Barusu looks worse than usual. That is impressive.”

“Ram—”

“Lady Emilia. Trusting Barusu’s face right now is unwise. Trusting his fear may be less foolish.”

Emilia turned to her. “Then we’re staying.”

Subaru shook his head. “Emilia, I need you to—”

“You need me to what.”

He swallowed.

“I need you to protect Felt.”

There was a small silence.

Emilia looked past him, at Felt, who was standing with her arms crossed and her bare feet on the marble and the same fang-tipped frown as always.

“Oi,” Felt said. “Don’t talk about me like I’m a parcel.”

“You’re not a parcel,” Subaru said. “You’re the center of the lie they built today. Someone has decided to use the fact that people think you’re the fifth candidate as the reason this whole thing happened. If they can’t kill Crusch with you as the excuse, they’re going to try to kill you to make a different excuse.” He turned back to Emilia. “I can’t be in two places. Reinhard can’t be in two places. I need someone with you that no assassin in this city wants to make eye contact with.”

Emilia’s hands had come together at her chest. Her shoulders were squared. Her chin had come up very slightly, the way it came up when she had decided about something.

“Felt isn’t a thing to be protected,” she said. “But if someone is using her, then I’ll stand beside her.”

“Lady Emilia—” Ram began.

“Ram, you are coming with me.”

“…Yes, Lady Emilia.”

Emilia took two steps forward, until she was very close to Subaru, and put her hand against the front of his jacket. The flat of her palm. Right over his heart.

“You are such a dunderhead,” she said softly. “You keep acting like being scared means you’re alone.”

His eyes burned.

He could not afford to cry now. He swallowed it down. He nodded, once, and Emilia, after holding his gaze for one more breath, turned to Felt.

“My name is Emilia. Just Emilia. May I help you stay safe today.”

Felt looked at her. Looked at Subaru. Looked back at her. The little fang showed at the corner of her mouth, half scowl, half something else.

“Yeah,” she said. “Yeah, alright, Princess. Try’n keep up.”

The flowers went with him.

The flowers went with him because Yae was expecting flowers, and Yae was expecting Felt, and Yae had to be made to hesitate. Hesitation was the only thing Subaru had to work with. He could not match her speed. He could not match her sight. He could not, in any honest comparison, match a single one of her threads. What he could do was arrive in a shape she had not designed for, and make her, for half a second, check her pattern.

So he dressed as a messenger.

Badly.

The hat sat too low. The cloak was too long. The cloak was, in fact, one of Reinhard’s old ones, taken in clumsily at the shoulders by a Subaru who had  sewn many things in his life. The bouquet was clutched against his chest like a shield. He looked, by the time he was done, like a boy who had stolen a courier’s coat to play pretend.

That was the point.

Reinhard rode beside him in plain dark clothes. No tabard. No insignia. They came up the long road, not Ash Street, and they did not see a wagon collapse, because they were not on the street where the wagon had been planned to collapse, and somewhere in the city a paid driver was probably standing around with a confused horse, wondering why no one was coming to be lured.

Crusch met them at the door.

She had been warned, this time, more carefully. Not by letter. By Grimm. The old swordsman had ridden to her, an hour ahead of them, with a single line of message in Reinhard’s hand that said only:

Trust the boy in the bad hat. He will explain badly. Survive first.

It was the line Subaru had practiced. He had practiced it five times in his head between the Astrea gates and here. It was, he hoped, his best line.

Crusch did not look like she had practiced anything. She stood in the open doorway of her own manor in her full dark coat, with her cap on, with her sword on her hip, and her amber eyes were narrow.

“Natsuki Subaru.”

“Lady Karsten.”

“You are in a bad hat.”

“I’m aware.”

“Explain to me, in twenty words or fewer, why I should permit you to enter my house with that bouquet.”

Subaru breathed.

“Someone,” he said, “is going to use your pride against you. Please hate me later. Survive first.”

Crusch did not move.

He could feel her Wind Reading on him. He did not know what it looked like to be read this way, but he could feel something quiet pass across him like a hand checking for fever. He held still. He let it. He had nothing to hide because everything he had to hide was already buried under the Witch’s perfume where no Divine Protection could reach.

What she found, he knew, was not the truth.

What she found was that he was not lying.

What she found, more importantly, was that he was afraid.

Crusch Karsten was a woman who respected very few things. Honest fear, in a man trying not to show it, was one of them.

“Felix,” she said, without turning her head.

“Yes, Crusch-sama.”

“Move the servants out the side. Quietly. No panic. No questions in the halls. Tell them it is a security inspection. Anyone wounded, anyone old, anyone with a child — out first. Spread the guards in pairs through the upper corridors, not in groups. I do not want a knot of bodies anywhere in this house today.”

“…Ferri-chan thinks you’re hiding something, Subaru-kyun.”

Subaru turned his head.

Felix had been standing just behind Crusch’s shoulder. Subaru had not seen him there, in the shadow of her cap. The young half-cat man was looking at him with yellow eyes that were not in any way playful, and his hands were at his sides, and his tail was perfectly still behind him, and he was smiling.

“I am,” Subaru said quietly. “I’m hiding a lot. I’m sorry.”

“If Crusch-sama bleeds because of you. Ferri will not forgive you. Not once. Not ever.”

“I know.”

“Just so we’re clear. Subaru-kyun.”

“We’re clear.”

Felix’s smile, very slightly, eased. He turned to Crusch. “Crusch-sama. Please be careful. Please.”

“Go, Felix.”

He went.

Crusch turned back to Subaru. “You will stand in my hall.”

“Yes.”

“You will tell me when. To the best of what you can say.”

“Yes.”

“Reinhard van Astrea.”

“Lady Karsten.”

“You will be where, exactly, when this begins.”

Reinhard looked at Subaru.

Subaru took a breath and said, “Above. In the rafters above the main hall. Not in the open. Behind the second beam from the east wall. There’s a woman who walks on ceilings. She will be where you are. She will not expect you to already be where she is.”

Reinhard absorbed this without expression.

“Very well,” he said. “I will wait.”

He walked into the manor and was, between one step and the next, gone — up some unseen stair, into some shadow, with the silence that Sword Saints could produce when they chose. Crusch watched him go with the faint, considering expression of a woman who had just been reminded that the Astreas were not, in fact, an ordinary noble line.

She turned back to Subaru.

“In my hall, then,” she said.

“In your hall.”

“You will stand in the open.”

“Yes.”

“As bait.”

“…Yes.”

“Hm.” She studied him. “You are not what I expected, Natsuki Subaru.”

“I get that a lot too.”

She came down the wall.

That was how he saw her, the first time he caught her in his peripheral vision in this loop — she did not enter the hall, she *descended* it. Down the far corner, head-first, with her hands not quite touching the stone and the soles of her boots moving in some pattern he could not parse. She reached the floor and stood up neatly, brushing nothing off her uniform, and walked into the center of the hall as though she had been invited.

Crusch had her sword drawn already.

Subaru did not move.

Yae stopped a polite distance away and tilted her head at him.

“You were supposed to be confused.”

“Yeah,” Subaru said. “I get that a lot.”

“No.” She did not smile. She did not frown. Her catlike black eyes simply rested on his face. “Confused people move randomly. You moved incorrectly.”

There it was again. The same line. Almost the same words. He felt the cold of it go down his back the way a thread might go down a sleeve. She had said this to him, before, in a hall he had not yet built. The pattern, somewhere, knew itself.

“How troublesome,” Yae said. She sounded, faintly, almost as though she were complaining about a stuck door. “You are not strong. You are not clever enough. You are not fast enough. And yet the pattern keeps losing shape around you. That is irritating.”

“Sorry,” Subaru said.

Yae blinked.

She actually blinked. It was a small, slow motion, and the only thing in her face that moved. Then she said, with what he could only call mild bemusement, “You are apologizing.”

“Yeah.”

“For ruining the pattern.”

“Yeah, kind of.”

“Hm.” Her gaze went, very briefly, past his shoulder to where Crusch was standing very still with her sword level. Then back. “You are also stalling.”

“Yeah, that too.”

Her fingers moved.

He did not see the threads. He had not seen them the last three times, either. What he saw was the air at chest height in front of him tighten — a small, almost-shimmer, as though a heat-haze had decided to organize. He had been waiting for it. He had been holding the knife behind his hip for the last forty seconds. It was a short blade. Reinhard had taken it from a kitchen drawer that morning and pressed it into his palm. It was not balanced for throwing. It was not balanced for fighting. It was balanced for nothing in particular, except being held by a boy who did not know what he was doing.

He swung it underhand, low to high, in a small ugly arc.

He felt the blade catch.

He felt the moment of resistance and then the moment of release as the thread parted. The cut went up the meat of his thumb at the same time; he had grabbed the blade too high in his panic; the blood came warm down his wrist.

He did not look at his hand.

He looked at the ceiling.

For one second — one perfect second — the world above showed her. Not all of her. Just the edge. Just the suggestion. A line of threads going taut from somewhere up in the dark to nothing in particular, and that line jerking, and the source of that line being briefly, accidentally, visible.

Reinhard moved.

Subaru did not see him move. He never saw Reinhard move. He saw only the after — the long pale slash of red hair against the rafters, the soundless arc of the Sword Saint coming down out of his hiding place like an answer to a question Yae had not realized she was asking.

There was a sound.

Not a clash. Not a clang. A small, fast, parted sound, like a piece of silk being cut.

When Subaru looked up, there was a strip of pale red fabric on the floor that had not been there before.

Yae was no longer in the rafters.

She was at the far window. Crouched. Her sleeve had come open at the shoulder; there was blood on her forearm; her cloak was missing a long piece down its back. Her hair, somehow, had come down out of its tie and was hanging in a single loose pale-red sheet down her right side, and the cat-like eyes were wide for the first time.

She looked at Reinhard.

She looked at Subaru.

She looked, last, at the threads still hanging in the hall behind her — the ones she had not had time to gather — and Subaru could feel her doing the calculation. He did not need to see her face to feel it. Cost of staying. Cost of leaving. The shape is wrong. The shape is no longer mine. I cannot fix it from inside this room.

“Hm,” she said.

And she was through the window.

There was no shatter. There was no leap. The window opened and she was through it as cleanly as water passing through a sluice, and the threads that had hung in the hall sagged and fell to the floor in long limp curls of nothing.

Subaru sat down very hard on the marble.

He was bleeding.

He was, he realized distantly, bleeding a lot. The hand he had cut the thread with was sheeted in red from wrist to fingertip. He stared at it for a moment and could not remember what hands were for.

“Subaru.”

Reinhard. Beside him. Already kneeling. Already with a cloth out, already wrapping.

“I’m okay,” Subaru said, because that was what he said.

“You are not okay.”

“No, you’re right, I’m not okay. Where’s Elsa.”

A small, slow voice from the doorway said, “Right here, of course.”

He looked up.

She was leaning against the frame of the side door like a guest who had arrived late to a small party and was not yet sure whether she wanted to come in. Her smile was warm. Her blade was out, but loose in her hand, held the way a woman holds a parasol she has not yet decided to open.

“Elsa,” Reinhard said, very evenly.

“Reinhard, dear.”

“You will leave my friend alone.”

“Oh, I always do.”

She did not move from the door. Her purple eyes drifted, slowly, over the hall — over the bodies that were not there this time, over the carpet that was not red this time, over Crusch standing with her sword down at her side and breathing slowly and watching her. Elsa’s smile was the smile of an artist looking at a canvas someone else had finished badly.

She looked, last, at Subaru.

“You have the eyes of someone,” she said softly, “who has already watched this room die.”

He could not answer.

She smiled wider.

“That face,” she breathed. “Yes. That is the one I wanted.”

Then she was gone too. Not through the window. She simply stepped backward out of the doorframe, and the hallway behind her was empty by the time Reinhard rose, and there was a moment when Subaru thought, with the kind of half-mad clarity that came after blood loss, she did not even bother to run.

The hall was quiet.

Crusch was the first to move. She walked, carefully, across the marble. Her sword went back into its scabbard. She stopped a few feet from where Subaru was sitting in his ridiculous oversized cloak with a bouquet half-crushed under his elbow and his hand wrapped in a kitchen rag.

She looked down at him.

“Natsuki Subaru.”

“Lady Karsten.”

“You did this.”

“Mostly Reinhard.”

“You did this,” she said again. “Reinhard van Astrea is an instrument. You aimed him.”

He started to deny it. He stopped. He looked at his bandaged hand. The cloth was already pinking through.

“I—” he said. “Yeah. I guess I did.”

Crusch’s mouth did not smile. Her eyes did something close to it. She inclined her head — not a bow, but not nothing — and said:

“We will speak. When you can stand.”

“Yeah. Okay.”

“Felix.”

He had reappeared at her elbow without sound. His face was very pale. His yellow eyes were enormous. He looked at Subaru’s bleeding hand and then up at Crusch, and his shoulders began to shake very slightly, and Subaru understood, with a small twist in his chest, that Felix had been holding himself together for the last forty minutes by an enormous and invisible act of will.

“Crusch-sama,” Felix said. His voice was high and very thin.

“I am unhurt, Felix.”

“Crusch-sama, please—”

“I am unhurt.”

Felix made a small wet noise and pressed his forehead, hard, against the side of Crusch’s coat. Crusch did not look down. She put her gloved hand on the back of his head, once, and held it there.

Subaru looked away. There were things that were not his to watch.

He watched, instead, Reinhard. Who was standing a few feet off with his sword sheathed and his hands at his sides and an expression on his face that Subaru had never seen before.

It looked, very nearly, like grief.

“Reinhard.”

“Subaru.”

“You okay.”

“…I followed your orders. I did not chase the first scream.”

“Yeah. You did.”

“There may have been a scream that was not a trap.”

“There may have been.”

Reinhard closed his eyes for a moment. When he opened them, the calm was back. The calm was always back. That was what Subaru was beginning to understand was worst about Reinhard — that he could put grief away the way a man puts a knife away, and the only way you knew he was carrying it was that he became a little quieter.

“I will trust you again,” Reinhard said. “If you ask.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Do not be. Be careful. With what you ask of me. That is all.”

“Yeah.”

“Yes.”

They sat in the hall, the four of them — Subaru on the floor, Crusch standing with Felix folded against her side, Reinhard with his back to the wall — and outside the manor the wind moved over the courtyard, and somewhere far off in the city a wagon on Ash Street did not collapse, and a child who was not really a child did not scream, and at the Astrea mansion Felt sat in the kitchen passage with Emilia at her shoulder and Ram at her back, and no thread came through the door.

In conclusion,

Three of the servants were dead.

Subaru would remember their names. He would learn them later. He would write them down. The maid by the side door. The young footman who had been bringing in water. The old gardener who had been crossing the courtyard at the wrong moment, before Crusch’s quiet evacuation had reached him. Three. Down from twenty-six in the first version of this morning. Down from forty-one in the second. Down from sixty-eight in the third.

Three was not zero.

Three was a number he would carry too.

But Crusch Karsten was alive.

Felt was alive.

Reinhard was alive.

Emilia was alive. Ram was alive. Felix was alive. Rom was alive, in the kitchen passage, with his big hand on the top of Felt’s head saying, you did fine, girl. You did fine. The lad’s a fool and a hero, and you did fine.

Subaru put his face in his good hand and did not cry. He had used up his crying budget too. He sat in his stupid oversized cloak on Crusch Karsten’s marble floor and breathed, and breathed, and breathed, and the Witch’s perfume slowly, slowly, slowly went out of his mouth.

After.

He woke in a bed that was not his.

The ceiling above him was pale stone vaulted with dark beams. The sheets were finer than the ones at the Astrea mansion. There was a glass of water on the table next to him and a small white card propped against it, written in a clean military hand:

Drink this. Do not stand. — C.K.

He drank it.

He stood anyway. His legs were not pleased with this decision. He sat back down. He drank more water. He looked at his bandaged hand, which had been re-bandaged at some point by someone who knew what they were doing — probably Felix, possibly through clenched teeth.

The door opened.

Crusch.

She had changed her coat. The new one was the same cut but without the bloodstains; her hair had been retied; her cap was off. She looked tired in a way she had not looked in the hall, and Subaru realized with a small pang that she had probably not slept yet either.

“You are conscious.”

“Mostly.”

“Felix wishes to murder you for standing. I have asked him not to.”

“Tell him thanks.”

She walked in and closed the door behind her. She sat, after a moment, in the chair by his bedside — sat properly, knees together, hands folded on her thigh, the way she would have sat for a council meeting.

Then she said, “Natsuki Subaru. I am going to ask you a question. You will not answer it now. I will ask it again in three days, in seven, in twenty. You will not answer it then either, I expect. I am asking it because I want you to know that I am asking it.”

“Okay.”

“How did you know.”

He looked at her.

He could not say.

She watched him not say it.

After a long moment she nodded, as though she had heard exactly the answer she had expected to hear, and looked away.

“You are a problem, Natsuki Subaru.”

“I know.”

“You are also alive in my house, and I am alive in this house, because of a thing you did that you cannot explain.”

“…Yeah.”

“That is not friendship.”

“No.”

“It is not friendship,” Crusch said again, “but it is the beginning of an alliance. Tentative. Watched. Documented. Conditional.”

“Yeah. Okay.”

She stood. She had not stayed long. She paused at the door with her hand on the frame, and without turning back to him she said:

“Thank you. For my life. I will be paying for it for some time. So will you.”

Then she was gone.

He lay back on the pillow and stared at the dark beams in the ceiling. Somewhere in the corridor outside he could hear Felix’s voice, in a sing-song he had probably had to deliberately put back on:

Ferri-chaaan thinks our guest needs to sleep, Reinhard-sama. Ferri-chan will be very cross if our guest does not sleep.

And Reinhard’s quiet answer: Of course, Sir Felix.

He smiled a little. He did not know why.

He thought, in the small, last clear part of his mind before sleep came back over him:

She got away.

The Astrea mansion was safe.

Felt was safe.

Crusch was safe.

Yae Tenzen had stepped out a window with blood on her arm and a piece of her cloak missing, and somewhere in the dark of this city she was sitting down at a low table with a tea she would not drink, and she was thinking about him. About the shape that should have been confused, and had not been. About the thread that should not have been cut, and had been. She was thinking — and he could feel the thought as though it were already in the room with him — that Natsuki Subaru was not strong. Was not fast. Was not clever.

But moved as though the room had already happened.

She did not know how.

She would, he thought, want to know.

He closed his eyes.

Outside the window, somewhere very far away, a bell rang the hour. He counted the strikes. He lost count at seven. He slept.

And in the dark behind his eyes, the Witch — gentle, gentle as ever — let go of his heart.