The Heir's Blood

Mika Varen refused evacuation to the end. When Doan held out the pass again, Mika shook his head.

He didn't want to become an heir who ran away, not after everything. Instead, he said he would do something useful.

At the ration station, thrown into disorder by the suspension of holy rites, Mika took on the job of carrying bundles of ration slips. It was a small task, but Mika wanted to prove that he could help.

Mixed into that wish was a fourteen year old's vanity too. The image of the heir helping with rations himself seemed like it would prove his worth.

Doan tried to stop him.

"If you get hurt, everything I held back today will have been for nothing."

he said.

Mika answered, "I won't get hurt. I'm just carrying slips."

The boy's confidence was the kind that couldn't calculate risk. Doan knew that, but he couldn't tie the boy down with a pass either.

Mika was already a boy who had once scratched the "heir" line on his pass blank. Sending him running away again, after he had chosen proof over flight, would have denied that choice.

Doan settled for putting two guards at Mika's side. But in the chaotic square, the crowd soon pushed the two guards away from him.

Two crowds pressed into the square in front of the ration station. Believers demanding the suspension of holy rites be lifted, and citizens wanting to receive their rations first.

Mixed among them were the private soldiers of a collateral noble house. No one had come there meaning to kill anyone, not at the start.

The believers wanted to bury their dead families, the citizens wanted to feed their starving children, and the soldiers wanted to assert their master's authority. Three different desperations collided in one square.

Mika was carrying ration slips right in the middle of it.

One believer cried out, "Let me bury my dead mother."

That cry was a plea, not anger. Another believer pounded on the cathedral doors.

One citizen shot back at them, "Your rites are what's delaying our rations."

Two desperations collided. Those who wanted to bury the dead, and those who wanted to feed the living.

Neither side was wrong, and so neither side backed down. The collateral house's soldiers saw the chaos as their master's opportunity.

They pretended to keep order, but they really meant to show who owned this square. Mika passed between the three groups, ration slips in hand.

To the boy's eyes, all three groups looked like nothing more than "shoving adults." Mika was still too young to read the grain of that desperation.

A guard told Mika to go inside. It was dangerous, he said, so step back.

Mika ignored the order. If he stepped back, he thought, the proof that he could help would collapse.

He pushed further into the crowd, ration slips still in hand. Just then, one of the soldiers raised a crossbow to threaten the crowd.

It was meant as a warning shot. But as people shoved against him, his aim went off.

The bolt went astray and struck Mika, in the middle of the crowd.

That soldier hadn't been aiming at Mika. In truth, he hadn't been aiming precisely at anyone.

The arrow meant to fly over heads and frighten people bent downward along his jostled arm. It was an accident.

But even an accident carried clear responsibility. The one who ordered the warning shot, the one who held the crossbow, the suspension of holy rites that had driven the crowd to that state.

Responsibility didn't gather on one person. It was split among many hands. And the split responsibility flowed together toward the weakest place.

Fourteen year old Mika stood in that place. At first, he didn't know what had struck him.

The bundle of ration slips fell from his hand, and the papers scattered across the square. Over the scattered slips, Mika slowly sank to his knees.

Only then did the crowd stop. The believers, citizens, and soldiers who had been shoving each other a moment before froze for one beat in front of the fallen boy.

The soldier holding the crossbow went whitest of all. He had only meant to threaten, never to hit anyone, let alone the heir.

At first Mika felt no pain. What he saw first was the blood spreading across the gold thread of his blessing robe.

That robe whose heir's blessing had been revoked. The robe the servants had left half unpicked of its gold thread, Mika had taken it out and worn it again today.

Because he wanted to look like the heir. He watched, dazed, as his own blood spread over that gold thread.

He saw the color where the gold thread and blood mixed before he felt the pain.

The blood spread along the gold thread. Following the weave of the thread, the blood branched out like a small river.

Mika thought, with a mind already blurring, that the pattern was strangely beautiful. Then the pain came.

Late, but all at once. He didn't scream.

Instead of screaming, the thought that came first was that he had stained his clothes. What would his mother say if she saw this robe.

In a moment when he might die, the boy worried about his mother's scolding. That small worry was proof that he was still a child.

Adults think of last words in the face of death, but a child thinks of his mother's face.

Ration slips lay scattered where he had fallen. On those papers were written the names of starving people and the amount of grain each was to receive.

Through blurring eyes, Mika looked at one of those papers. Someone's name, someone's bread.

His own blood spread over the paper and covered a name. Mika felt sorry for that.

He worried that person's ration would be delayed because of him. That feeling stayed clear even through the pain.

He reached out to pull the paper from the blood, but his hand couldn't reach it. Leaving his own blood on someone's bread, Mika lay there.

His consciousness began to blur. Mika heard the words of the adults around him only in fragments.

Austin's voice.

"The treatment components are ready. But approval for use and the return of the ledger are required."

Yoan's voice.

"Ordinary treatment... there isn't enough time."

Mika half understood that these were words trading over him. He lay in the middle of a negotiation where his own life was being exchanged for a ledger.

The voices grew distant, then near, then distant again. Mika looked for his mother's voice, but his mother said nothing.

Amid the sound of the adults' bargaining, only his mother's silence carried a different weight. Mika thought he understood what that silence meant.

His mother was calculating, even now. As she always did.

Weighing her son's life against the city's principles on the same scale. Mika felt sorry that his mother had to stand before that scale because of him.

Before the pain, that guilt was what blurred him first. Someone took his hand.

A warm hand. He couldn't tell if it was his mother's or Yoan's.

Mika tried to grip it back, but no strength came.

Austin's voice sounded again. Calm, unhurried.

"Your son's blood is running lower by the moment, Margrave. The decision is yours to make. But do not forget that failing to decide is itself a decision."

Even through his blurred mind, Mika felt how cruel those words were. The man wasn't pressuring his mother directly.

He was only pointing at the time. Letting time kill the son in his mother's place, while pretending only to wait.

Mika saw the way that man cut people down without ever raising a blade. And that blade's edge was now aimed at his own mother.

Mara's voice reached him too, from far away. She was objecting to something.

"If you hand over the ledger to save one child like this, then the next time someone else gets hurt, you'll have to make the same trade again."

That was true. Even through his blurred mind, Mika knew it was true.

He knew his own life was becoming the first precedent for that trade. But he wanted to live.

What was right and what he wanted collided inside his fading consciousness. Mika knew he was both the cost of this trade and someone with no right to refuse being that cost.

A dying person had no power to refuse a trade.

Even as he faded, he searched for his mother. Through his blurred sight, he saw Rea pressing a seal onto something.

Mika hoped it was the public seal. But what his mother held was the Varen family seal.

Not the public one, but the house's own. His mother was breaking her own principle.

The mother who had applied the same rule to everyone had brought out the family seal for her son. Mika wanted to stop her, but his mouth wouldn't move.

As the paper folded shut, Mika's sight closed with it. The last thing he saw was the family seal pressing down onto the treatment approval.

The sound of that seal pressing down was small. The kind of sound wax makes against paper, one that would normally go unheard.

But Mika heard it. In his fading senses, that small sound alone stayed clear.

The sound of his mother breaking, to save him, the very principle she had upheld her whole life. Mika wanted to live.

At the same time, he didn't want to watch his mother break because of him. The two feelings collided in his dimming consciousness.

He wanted to say don't do this, and he wanted to say save me. Neither word made it out of his mouth.

He saw, dimly, the family seal pressed fully into the paper, and his mother pushing that paper toward Austin. And the last thing Mika saw was not his mother's face, but the mark of that seal.

The Varen house crest was stamped in red on the treatment approval. Not a public ledger's mark, but the mark one house had pressed down for its own son.

Mika's eyes closed. The sounds of the square grew distant, and the last thing left was the feeling of his mother's hand touching his forehead.

That hand was trembling. His mother's hand, which had never once wavered, trembled in front of Mika for the first time.