Simon had only been gone from the capital for a couple of months, and yet, walking through the streets of Leipzen once more unleashed a wave of nostalgia through him. Some of his earliest adventures had been here, and each time he came back, layers of memories colored by civil war and the Corwin family drifted by him.

Those memories were so thick this time that they might as well have been curtains as he rode through the city’s main gate. None of the guards tried to stop him as he did so. They didn’t even try to question him; his white cloak was more effective than any armor at fending off such dangers.

While he allowed himself a slightly circuitous route, the first thing he did was get a room at an inn. He didn’t really need one. He could have stayed with the nobles he was visiting. Any of them would have been eager to accommodate him. Simon didn’t want that, though, and not just because he worried that one of them might want to off him in the night.

It was because he wanted to stay somewhere very specific. It took him some time to find it, but after a little trial and error, he found himself in the same room he’d stayed in on the life where he’d assassinated the Duke of Brin so long ago.

That hadn’t happened in this world line, and if it had, it would have been years in the past. Still, he spent several hours that night drinking and looking out the window at the steps, remembering what it was like to cast the word of distant lightning.

Things were so much simpler then, he reflected. They weren’t, of course, but it was nice to remember them that way.

Back then, he hadn’t realized what the Pit was, or how it was he was supposed to surmount it, but now he did. He could see layers of history and events, and all the strange magics woven through them. If he were careful, he could even use all of them at once to his advantage.

“Hard to believe I figured out how to stop this ugly civil war without true sight,” he sighed to himself as he leaned on the windowsill and looked at the dark and empty square beyond.

He waited a couple of days before he approached his first noble, and even then, he didn’t go in order. He started at the bottom of the pecking order, determined to work his way to the top with a better idea of what these important men expected of him before he got to those who mattered.

That meant starting with the viscounts. They mostly lived in city manors that were expensive, but not quite ostentatious. They were like well-decorated clan halls rather than estates.

Lord Jeral lived by the harbor, Lord Kelcin lived off the east square, and Lord Hardmoore not so far from the castle itself. All of them were rich and self-important, but none of their asks were as nefarious as Simon had expected. They were mundane things.

“Has my wife been faithful to me?” Lord Jeral asked one day after the servants had been dismissed. “Is my son mine?”

That was an odd request, and maybe something Simon could have answered with a glance at the baby boy if his vision were clearer. Instead, Simon had to use a pendulum in private to divine the answer. When he found out that the boy was in fact the noble’s son, he chastised the man for ever doubting it, but Lord Jeral endured the verbal beating with gratitude.

Lord Hardmoore wanted to know who the thief stealing from him was. At first, Simon feared that this was a repeat of Mr. Dekarlo, the merchant all over again, but the lord clarified that he suspected ghosts.

As much fun as that would have been, Simon doubted that was the case, and after a night of investigation, he discovered the footman who was responsible for stealing pieces of silver cutlery. The man was whipped and fired, and unlike the previous merchant, Simon made no attempt to defend him because he deserved it.

Those two requests were novel enough, but Lord Kelcin’s request was even stranger. “Am I a good man?” he asked while the two ate dinner. Even after the oddities of his first two errands, Simon hadn’t been expecting that.

“A good man?” From the Viscount’s bright aura, Simon knew instantly that he wasn’t a bad one, and yet still, he fumbled, looking for the right answer. “Are you looking to confess a crime?” Given the reputation the Whitecloaks had for punishing evildoers, that didn’t feel likely to Simon, but this was the first time he’d been put in the role of confessor in a long time.

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“No crime,” the man answered with a shake of his head. “I just… I say my prayers, I follow the law, and yet I don’t know if that’s enough. Surely if I were a good man, I would have noticed what you did with Lord Marhew, wouldn’t I?”

Simon nodded at that and reassured the man. “If I’d noticed him sooner, I wouldn’t have lost my arm,” Simon responded.

They talked for a long time about what it meant to be good, but still, that interaction haunted Simon for a long time after. He thought about it as he worked his way up the food chain and visited Baron Brythold and Lord Ventzon. Neither man asked for much. They both feasted Simon, and seemed far more interested in his stories about the warlock he’d defeated than any particular errands or favors.

Baron Brythold actually asked if he could see Simon’s false arm after he mentioned that he’d lost the limb while fighting the sorcerer. “I’m thinking of painting the climax of your tale, and I want to get the details right, you see?”

Simon could hardly deny the man after he put it like that, and let the noble inspect the wooden prosthesis, even though he feared the noble might trigger one of its many magics by accident. That didn’t happen, though, and after a moment he returned it.

After a little more drinking, the Baron even gave Simon a tour and showed him some of his other paintings. Simon was forced to admit that his host had talent. His anatomy wasn’t perfect, but for a young man, he was better than average.

Simon actually visited several more times in the days that followed. At first, it felt like he was capturing some part of the nostalgia of his lives in Ionia, but after several visits, the experience soured as he compared the bon vivant more and more to Lord Kelcin. One of them tried their hardest to be a good man, and the other wasted his life painting other good men in between lavish parties.

He’s not the only one, Simon scolded himself, even as he tried to remind himself that there were many ways to live a life. Still, he saw some of himself, or at least his former lives, in some of those venal hobbies. Simon would never regret his lifetime as an artist or a teacher, but watching men of means while away their days in such pursuits struck him as incredibly selfish, and afterward he was forced to turn that judgment on himself.

“They have the money to be solving real problems,” he told himself on his walk back to the inn, “but I have more than that, don’t I?”

That resonated with Simon and was on his mind more than all the other trivial interactions. As he went up his list of barons and counts, the tasks didn’t get much more interesting. He was tasked with handling devils and witches on more than one occasion, but they were only ever ghosts.

The first witch, assigned to him by Lord Morris, was said to have cursed well in a village not so far from Leipzen. They’d burned her weeks before Simon’s arrival, which was all the more tragic when it turned out that the well was merely tainted. While it was poisoned with a body, the carcass belonged to an animal, and its curse was lifted with nothing stronger than some lye and a few days tending to the sick. Simon could do nothing for the old woman who had taken the blame, though he did spend a day carving her name into a headstone to shame the villagers for their hasty rush to judgment.

The second witch he arrived in time to save. “She’s been makin’ the animals sick, and gave Gerldine a pox!” the village headman declared when Simon arrived, after he finally managed to tear his gaze from Simon’s replacement arm.

The matter had nothing to do with an old weaver woman, of course. Simon interviewed her at length, but he knew that was a waste of time. There were none of the signs he would have expected. She had a bright aura, and no one in the village had so much as a witchmark on them.

“I don’t know why those goats got sick,” the woman answered in an increasingly exasperated tone when he asked. That was true, of course.

She knew how to spin and weave, and could tell him all about the properties of mohair, but animal health was as much a mystery to her as it was to Simon. Fortunately, with enough concentration and a little bit of wildlife observation, he was able to trace the problem back to little clusters of poisonous red mushrooms.

He destroyed those, but he knew that neither the villagers nor Count Helros was likely to accept Simon’s word for that, so after his investigation was complete and the problem was solved, he told the villagers, “I’m bringing her back to your lord so he can see justice done.” Then he promptly let the old woman go a few days away, when they were back on the main road.

“I didn’t think you’d really let me go,” she admitted as they parted ways. Simon just thanked her for her patience, and then he told the Count that justice had been done. That was all anyone needed to know as far as he was concerned.

Justice had been done, but only in the smallest of ways. He really needed to focus on the bigger picture and save everyone.

That urge was increasingly powerful, and enough to make him want to off himself so he could get back to the large issues of the Pit. However, he resisted those urges, and not just because of Varten.

It’s not one or the other, he reminded himself. As long as you don’t erase your progress, you’re doing both. You’re doing everything, all at once, all the time.