The Cursed Extra-Chapter 77: [2.25] The Numbers Never Add Up

"Hope is expensive. Despair is free. That’s why poor people can’t afford to give up."

***

Letters from home arrived every week. The academy’s courier system, a luxury that had seemed miraculous to Rhys when he first arrived.

In the borderlands, messages traveled by foot or horse. Subject to weather and bandits and the creatures that lurked in the forests between villages. Here, magical communication meant a letter sent one day arrived the next. Regular as clockwork.

The system was intended for noble families to stay in contact with their precious heirs, of course. That commoners like Rhys could use it too was an afterthought. A side effect of making the system universal rather than any intentional kindness.

But he used it anyway. Sending letters when he could afford the postage. Receiving them with a mixture of joy and dread.

His mother’s neat handwriting filled most pages, occasionally interrupted by his father’s bolder script when he had something to add. His mother wrote about the village, about the neighbors, about the small victories of daily life in a place where daily life was never guaranteed.

His father wrote about the walls. The defenses. The training of the younger guards. The things he couldn’t say in front of his wife.

The alchemical treatments were working. Elara could walk to the well now without needing to rest halfway there. The blue veins had faded slightly from her neck and forearms. She had regained some weight, enough that her cheekbones no longer looked quite so sharp. Last week she had even managed to help with mending clothes for nearly two hours before exhaustion claimed her.

Small victories that felt monumental after months of steady decline. After the terrible summer when they had all feared she wouldn’t see the autumn leaves.

But each dose cost more than his family had seen in a year before his scholarship changed everything. The healer had warned that interrupting the treatment even briefly could erase all the progress they had made. The disease would roar back stronger than before. As if angered by the temporary setback.

The potions required rare ingredients from the southern provinces. Herbs that didn’t grow in their cold northern climate. Specialized mana crystals had to be imported from dwarven mines deep in the mountains. And the fees for the traveling healer who administered the treatments kept rising, because her services were in demand and she could charge whatever the market would bear.

His father never complained in the letters. Never asked for more than Rhys was already sending. But Rhys could read between the carefully chosen words.

"We’re managing," his father wrote. Which meant they were surviving but only just.

"Don’t worry about us," his mother wrote. Which meant she worried constantly about him and knew he worried about them.

The academy stipend helped. But it wasn’t enough.

It was never enough.

He closed the locket with a soft click and tucked it back beneath his shirt. Felt the familiar weight settle against his chest. Then he turned his attention to his spear, examining it in the flickering candlelight.

One of the leather bindings had worked loose during this morning’s training. The edge curled away from the wood beneath. He pressed it back into place, but the adhesive had failed. It simply curled up again when he released it.

He would need to re-glue it at minimum. Probably replace the entire strip if he wanted the repair to last.

And he could see a new crack forming just above the hand grip. Hairline thin for now. Barely visible unless you knew where to look.

But it would spread. Wood under stress always cracked eventually. This wood had been under stress for far too long.

Soon he would need to replace the leather wrapping entirely. New strips. New adhesive. Hours of careful work. Eventually, inevitably, the shaft itself would break beyond any repair he could manage.

The academy wouldn’t issue a replacement. Commoner scholarship students were expected to provide their own equipment or do without. Why would the academy spend money on people who probably wouldn’t amount to anything anyway?

A new spear of comparable quality would cost at least three gold pieces. Three hundred copper. More than four months of meals at his current rate of spending.

Money he didn’t have. Couldn’t earn. Not without sacrificing something else he couldn’t afford to sacrifice.

Ten days at Solamere Royal Academy, and already he felt the walls closing in. Funds dwindling with each meal purchased. Equipment degrading with each training session. His sister’s life hanging on payments he might not be able to make.

The numbers didn’t add up. They never added up.

No matter how many times he ran the calculations. Shifted figures from one column to another. Looked for some angle he might have missed.

The answer was always the same.

He was drowning, slowly but surely. And the surface was getting further away.

Rhys blew out his candle and lay back on his narrow bed. The thin mattress did little to cushion the hard wooden frame beneath.

Through the wall, he heard Thomlin’s breathing settle into the slow rhythm of contented sleep. The sound of someone who had never known true hunger or genuine fear. Someone who could fail every class and still return to a warm manor and a secure future. Parents who would welcome him home with open arms rather than desperate questions about money.

He tried not to think about the calculations that kept him awake most nights. How many meals he could skip without losing too much strength. How long his equipment would last if he was careful. What would happen when the next letter arrived from home with news he couldn’t bear to read.

He tried not to imagine his mother’s handwriting spelling out the words he dreaded most.

"Elara took a turn for the worse."

Or: "The healer says she can’t do anything more."

Or simply: "Come home."

Come home. As if he could. As if home would still be there if he failed.

Tomorrow would bring another day of pretending he belonged in this place. Where even the servants wore clothes finer than his best. Another day of fighting a battle he was losing against opponents who had been given every advantage from birth.

Wealth. Connections. Equipment. Tutors. Time. And the casual assumption that the world would bend to accommodate them because it always had and always would.

But he would fight anyway.

Because surrender meant going home empty-handed. Admitting defeat. Watching Elara’s face fall when she realized her brother had failed her. 𝚏𝕣𝕖𝚎𝚠𝚎𝚋𝚗𝐨𝐯𝕖𝕝.𝕔𝐨𝕞

Not while she needed him. Not while his father’s spear still held together, however precariously, however close to breaking. Not while there was still hope, however slim.

He would keep fighting.

He always did.

It was all he knew how to do.

And somewhere in the darkness of his cramped room, surrounded by the sounds of students who would never understand what he carried, Rhys Blackwood closed his eyes and tried to sleep.

Tomorrow was coming whether he was ready or not.

It always was.

Somewhere across the academy, in a room far nicer than this one, a boy named Kaelen Leone was probably plotting something. Planning moves on a board Rhys couldn’t see.

But Rhys didn’t know that yet.

He didn’t know anything except the weight on his chest and the numbers that wouldn’t balance.

That would change soon enough.