Simon dressed the boy in his worst clothes and smuggled him to the stables of the closest inn, where he’d already stashed his horse and his armor. That brought a barrage of angry questions from the young Baron, who clearly didn't want to be left alone, but Simon didn't have the time to answer all of them.

"First, I must investigate your fake death," he said, trying not to scold the boy. "Then we will escape before someone can make it a real one. You'll have the answers to all of your questions after that."

Then, after ordering him not to wander off, he returned to the keep and had the gate guard shut and bar the main door, ordering them, “Someone assassinated your young Baron. A warlock, and this door does not open until we have found everyone involved. Do you understand?”

Ashen-faced, they agreed, swearing they had nothing to do with it. Simon knew that already, though, even before they verified it with words that rang of truth. There were still a few decent men on the Baron’s payroll, but they were badly outnumbered by scum.

Fortunately, most of the scum did battle with words and quills, and not with weapons, which was a real advantage for Simon once he sounded the alarm and woke the keep. There was chaos and fear at first, and Simon did nothing to calm it. Instead, he had everyone exit the keep into the small courtyard, penning them in away from whatever preparations any other mages might have made. Then he delivered a short, sharp speech from a balcony on the second floor, shouting, to make sure everyone could hear him.

“This evening I have done battle with a man wielding lightning and consorting with demons,” he announced, letting a gasp ripple through the crowd before he continued. “He is dead, but so too is your Baron, and no one is leaving this place until I have found and hung all of his co-conspirators. Come forward, tell me what you know, and claim a quick death. That will be the extent of my mercy.”

No one clamored for that sort of reward, but then, no one tried to argue that he didn’t have the right, either. He studied the swirling fear that rippled through the crowd, and then he went back into the keep to sweep the place, floor by floor. As he went, he found a few people. There was a maid and a footman making out on the third floor, an old butler cowering in fear on the second, and a fat cook gorging herself on a leftover pie in the larder that hadn’t chosen to respond to his call.

He kicked all of those people out, and then, after poking at the remains of what might have been a summoning circle in the wine cellar, he selected a guard with a bright aura and had him identify the body and lead Simon to the warlock’s room. “That’s Jorgen Belhin,” the young guard confirmed. “One of the Baron’s… the previous Baron’s most important advisors.”

The young man couldn’t tell Simon much about him, but then it was obvious that even for a small town like Crowvar, the two moved in different circles. Simon searched his room, annoyed for the hundredth time that he couldn’t simply detect evil from an object in most cases. Places where demons had been summoned contained a whiff of pure evil, but beyond that, it bordered on the impossible. Even the most heinous murder weapons didn’t turn evil when they were soaked in enough blood.

So, Simon slogged through the man’s bookshelf, one tome at a time. “Aren’t you going to interview the killer’s coconspirators?” the guard hesitantly asked Simon after nearly an hour had passed.

“Letting them stew will make them more likely to turn on each other,” he lied, not bothering to meet the man’s eyes. While he was sure there were people out there who stood to benefit from the crime, Simon was fairly sure that the warlock had acted alone. They tended to do that when the alternative was being burned at the stake.

Now that Varten was safe, Simon was more interested in hints about where this man had gotten his powers and what words of power he knew than anything. While it took a while, his search finally paid off when he found a tome labeled, “Heraldry and Patents for Wellborn Families of Southern Brin.”

While he might have expected such a dull tome to have illustrations of crests and banners, the drawings in this book were considerably more profane and contained the names and drawings of several demons. Simon knew immediately that he’d found the man’s grimoire, and after leafing through it, he closed the evil tome.

He didn’t see anything particularly advanced in it, and he could always study the thing at his leisure when they were out of the city. It would make a nice trophy to bring home to the Unspoken, too; they’d probably ask him if he’d read it, but he’d of course find a way to weasel out of that without outright lying.

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When that was done, he went to the Baron’s entrance hall and had the guards start sending him the men and women from the courtyard one at a time. For those who struck him as genuinely good people, he didn’t even bother to ask any questions. For everyone else, he had the same set of questions.

“How do you feel about the death of the Raithewait family?”

“Were you in league with Jorgen?”

“Who do you think will become the new Baron now that Varten is dead?”

They were simple enough questions, and direct enough that he’d see a lie immediately. Only a few tripped up his first question, even fewer his second, and almost no one agreed on the third, which was fine, because he was mostly making a list of people that shouldn’t get power next in his head.

It was sunrise before he finished interviewing all seventy-eight people who had been in the keep that night. Only one of the guards, and a retainer for a man by the name of Belquat, was implicated in the crime, but Simon also had three more with the worst souls sent to the gallows as well. They hadn’t done anything wrong tonight, but between them, they’d done plenty worth dying for.

He might have condemned a few more, but he was running out of time. Crowvar would be waking up soon, and the faster he absconded with their still living lord, the better. Simon sent the city watch to round up Belquat as well. The man’s servant gave him up almost as soon as Simon had him arrested. “I didn’t hurt anyone,” the man said, pleading for his life. “I just delivered a message.”

“And if you hadn’t, then no one would have been trying to murder my charge, now would they?” Simon asked as the other man was dragged away.

The plan seemed pretty straightforward; one powerful man had sensed weakness after the demise of another and sought to increase his station. If he’d waited a week instead of a day, then he would have been successful, too. Simon would have come back years from now to find Baron Belquat ruling over this shithole instead of Baron Raithwaite.

“What an awful name,” he sighed to himself as he made his way back to the inn.

The guard captain had all but begged Simon to stay, but Simon shook his head, sure they could handle justice on their own. Once he’d decided the guilty, and the cock had started to crow, the only thing important enough for him to linger was to choose a protector for the barony to hold it in trust until such time as the King of Brin selected a replacement.

For that duty, Simon chose Marken, the city’s magistrate. The man was a milquetoast background character of no importance, which was obviously the reason that Lord Raithewait had appointed him in the first place, but no one had thought him likely to be involved, didn’t seem to have any obvious enemies, and he had a good soul. These days, that was really all Simon looked for. A good, capable person was enough to fix most problems.

After that, he left the town with Varten in tow before anyone thought to ask where the Baron’s body had ended up. It was a gap in his story, but Simon wasn’t about to go and murder a stableboy to solve it.

Still, when the town disappeared over the horizon, and no one came riding after them, Simon breathed easier. Then, he had both of them dismount from the horse they’d been sharing to give the poor thing a break. The complaints started almost immediately, but they were not enough to make Simon regret his decision.

“Where are we going?”

“When will we stop for lunch?”

“My feet are tired.”

“Why can’t we ride again?”

The boy’s whining was a steady metronome that kept the pace of their slow journey almost as well as a marching song might have for the first hour. Truthfully, Simon had planned to let the boy ride after letting the horse rest for twenty minutes; he was more than happy to walk alongside, and the boy was still injured. Unfortunately, the more the boy complained, the more Simon knew he couldn’t reward bad behavior.

He hadn’t been a teacher in lifetimes, but he knew that much. “Walking will make you strong,” Simon answered when the boy complained one too many times, but that earned only a defiant look from Varten.

“How will walking for mile after mile help me kill my enemies?” the boy asked, a few seconds later, still uncowed. “It has nothing to do with swordplay!”

“In battle, endurance is everything,” Simon answered, letting the boy’s antagonistic nature drift by him. “When you feel better, I will make you run beside the horse for mile after mile so you can build endurance that much faster.”

“I… What?!” Varten cried out in shock. “I’ll do no such thing!”

“And when that is easy, you can do so while carrying a backpack full of stones,” Simon continued. “Maybe I’ll add one stone for each time you tell me no.”

“But? Why?” Varten demanded, obviously too afraid to tell Simon no so quickly after a threat like that. “What, uhmm… what purpose would that serve, besides cruelty? Walking, I suppose I understand, but stones?”

Simon suppressed the smile that sprang to his lips as he watched young Varten backpedal hard. What had been pointless drudgery a minute before was now reasonable; that would have been enough to make him laugh out loud if it wouldn’t have ruined the moment. Instead, he very blandly stated, “How else will you learn to walk and fight under the weight of armor?”