I had never stolen a name before.

  It wasn’t a required skill for the role I’d been meant to fill, so I’d never had the opportunity to try. This was why I decided to use the regular soldiers as practice before moving on to the officers.

  I expected the process to be difficult. There would be a battle of wills, perhaps, or some unforeseen complication would occur.

  Instead, it was remarkably simple. I asked a question. They answered. My mana then ensnared their very essence, marking it as mine.

  That was it. Suddenly, I held the lives of seven people in my grasp. And they didn’t even notice, because I willed them not to.

  The depth of what I’d just done to them was staggering. This wasn’t like Kiri’s connection to her familiars, deep as that was. These soldiers weren’t people tethered to my will.

  They were objects, and I owned them.

  I realized I could know them better than they knew themselves. If I willed it, every thought, desire, fear, and hope would be bared before me.

  Of course, if I tried to twist them in the way Penelope’s people had been twisted, they could try to push back against my influence. Yet, try as they might, they would fail. From the moment they gave me their name, I might as well have become their god.

  This was power. The kind of absolute power that sent shivers down the spine of even the most stoic person. I had always scoffed at the obsession of Spring fae with collecting names, but I understood it now.

  It was almost too tempting not to use. That was probably why I gave in a little and prodded the soldiers’ minds, trying to learn more about what had sent them our way to begin with.

  I saw it, almost like I was using a scrying mirror to spy on their past: the day they had been pulled aside by the heir of the Hergeiros family, sworn to secrecy, promised rewards and riches, and then sent off.

  The bid to take over Swiftband was a bit of a gamble. If there was a chance of discovery before they entrenched themselves and set up some form of subtle control over the town, they were to cover their tracks and flee immediately, with me in tow.

  And by ‘cover their tracks’, their commander had made it very clear that they were to take what they could carry, slaughter the townsfolk, and dispose of any evidence linking them to the town. The buildings and such could stay. The Hergeiros family would step in and take over the spot later, positioning themselves perfectly to exploit the local resources with me under their ‘employ.’

  It was the commander who had relayed everything to the soldiers, going over it repeatedly until they understood the importance of this assignment. Apparently, he was some distant relation to the main Hergeiros line, so he hoped his leadership in the expedition would catapult him through the family ranks. He didn’t want these soldiers ruining things for him by engaging in the rowdy nonsense that usually ensued whenever they were sent out by the Hergeiros family.

  And I was planning to mess up their heads and send them back, allowing them to get up to their old tricks once more, so we could continue living in peace.

  The thought enraged me. The anger that coursed through me was so violent that it turned cold. Paradoxically, this made it easier for me to think.

  The problem was simple. I didn’t want these soldiers to be free to continue indulging in their vices. I also didn’t want them to live good lives, not after everything they had done to others and tried to do to people I cared about.

  The same applied to the four elves detained in Kiri’s storage room upstairs. Whether I needed them or not, my mind and heart both demanded some kind of retaliation. Of reckoning.

  I took a deep breath, cataloguing all their injuries and current agony in an attempt to calm myself. Really, they could only be suffering more if they were horribly diseased…

  My lips curled into a smile that made the mortals in front of me cower and tremble. Only my will kept them from trying to crawl away.

  Disease… Yes, that will do nicely.

  “Let’s wake up your fellows, shall we?” I announced, letting my smile graduate into a full grin. “I need to get acquainted with them, and then I need to test out a few things. Don’t worry. I promise it will be excruciating for you!”

  Oddly, my words seemed to bring them no relief.

  —

  The officers proved far more difficult to subvert than the regular soldiers. This wasn’t because they played word games with me or exercised any particular caution. It was simply a struggle to get the three from Nasha’s group, the ones who had been covered by the poison paste, functional enough even to answer my question.

  The officer who had been mauled by Penelope was as easy as the regular soldiers, but that wasn’t much help. Rifling through his mind didn’t provide me with any details beyond what I’d already learned downstairs.

  Phaendar, as the lead elf was called, had shared a surprising amount of information with his subordinates. Beyond that, however, he was exceedingly private and standoffish, nominally because of his superior standing as a distant relative of the Hergeiros family’s main branch.

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  At least I had time to finalize my plan a bit better.

  The plague I intended to brew up would be an amazing surprise for the Hergeiros family, but it felt a little… lacking. I needed chaos. Struggle. For the family to feel vulnerable and distracted.

  Two of the soldiers currently being terrorized by Kiri’s animals beneath my feet would be perfect for that.

  The woman who’d still been asleep during my first round of name-stealing held a serious grudge against the Hergeiros family. So did a man who’d been awake. One of the female scions of the house had snatched away the woman’s brother to use as a toy, until she got bored and he ‘mysteriously’ disappeared. The man’s house had once been noble in standing itself, before the Hergeiros happened to it.

  Normally, their resentment would never amount to much. They were cowards who liked to terrorize those weaker than themselves, not do something reckless that could endanger their own pathetic lives.

  With a little help from me, though, they could make themselves real nuisances to the Hergeiros household.

  All it would take was lowering their inhibitions while stoking their anger. I could also make sure the blame for this disastrous mission was aimed squarely at the Hergeiros family. I would simply modify the soldiers’ memory to convince them they had run into a monster on their way to the frontier, and that they had slain it, but not before it inflicted all this damage.

  Add a bit of envy for the privileged Hergeiros lifestyle, plus a few extra compulsions, and I believed I could get this pair of soldiers to attack specific members of the family they especially resented.

  Whether they succeeded or not wouldn’t even matter. The simple attempt would whip the Hergeiros family into a paranoid frenzy, which would give my plague time to do its work. Hopefully, it would then be impossible for the Hergeiros household to worry about our corner of the world for a long, long while. Perhaps even permanently.

  To be clear, I wasn’t planning to unleash some lethal plague. As much as I would love to devastate the Hergeiros territories, I couldn’t risk such destruction spreading further.

  What I wanted to do would be much more difficult. I wasn’t even entirely sure I could pull it off. The only thing that encouraged me was the fact that I could feel the bodies of the mortals I now owned. They were wholly susceptible to my manipulation, even without alchemy getting involved. I could probably mutate them into horrid monstrosities, if I so desired.

  The opposite was also true, of course. I could heal them from practically any damage with a bit of assistance from potions. I could boost their health in ways that would place them above most mortals. I could even anchor them to myself, granting them a form of immortality dependent on my own survival.

  I didn’t think that last option would work out well for a mortal. As much as they regularly raged against death, mortals just weren’t meant to live exceedingly long lives. Their minds would likely start to snap after a couple thousand years, if not earlier, or get twisted into something completely alien.

  Ironically, it was this rumination on mortal minds that finally gave me an idea of what to do with the insensate officers.

  Plenty of poisons could cause significant alterations to the minds of their victims. I simply got out all the antidotes and poisons in my possession and started experimenting.

  It was a poison that caused its victims to experience absolute bliss and calm, no matter what was happening to them, that finally made the officers chatty enough to turn over their names. I then used my new power over them to sober them instantly, letting the horror of their memories reassert itself.

  I couldn’t let them go catatonic again, unfortunately. So, against my own desires, I eliminated some of their suffering. The memories would be hidden away, locked so deeply that not even a mind mage could get to them.

  But the memories would resurface every time the officers slept. Their nightmares would torment them in my stead. The fact that they would never sleep well again, for as long as they lived, brought a smile to my face.

  The experimentation also increased my hope that my new addition to the plan would work, having demonstrated how easily I could isolate the effects of my poison from the victims’ psyche.

  I needed to create a disease that would target a person’s connection to their mana. I didn’t want the plague to cripple someone’s ability completely. I wasn’t that much of a monster, especially considering there were civilians living in the Hergeiros territories.

  But they didn’t really need much skill with mana, now did they? Regular mortals rarely used their mana beyond working with household artefacts for cooking, keeping things cool or frozen, or producing water and fire. Such tasks required the bare minimum of control.

  Even the hunters living in such places didn’t have the same responsibilities required on the frontier. Back in civilization, monsters had been culled into nonexistence. Hostile spirits had been subjugated or pacified. All threats beyond war had been minimized as far as possible.

  So, my plan to create a plague that targeted mana-users would not impact these civilians’ lives too much.

  I couldn’t help grinning as I imagined the look on the faces of the Hergeiros family. Oh, to be there when they realized their personal power was reduced to nothing, their troops were suddenly useless, and their rivals could simply roll over them at the first provocation!

  The idea was sweet as honey. Putting it into practice, though, was about as palatable as Alys’ torture juice.

  The base of the disease was easy enough to craft. I still had some kappa bits and pieces left over. The difficulty lay in merging that base with poisons. There were plenty that did what I wanted, but I needed them to do it in the manner I wanted.

  I needed a plague that would strike, cause some short-term suffering like a high fever, cripple its victims, and then burn itself out before it could spread too far. Hitting all of those notes was not easy, skilled as I was in the use of poisons.

  A further complication was my need to be careful with the thing myself. My mana was so poisonous that I had significant resistance to diseases, but this was a plague I suspected could affect me at least a little. And any damage to my ability to use mana, which technically stemmed from physical damage being reflected on one’s soul, was difficult to heal at the best of times.

  It took me four days to craft the plague properly without crippling half of Swiftband. It took me another two to figure out how to implant the plague within the soldiers and time its release properly, which wouldn’t have been possible at all without my absolute control over them.

  Still, I did it.

  I had crafted something that, should my deeds become known, would get me hunted down and praised in equal measure. It was a horrific feat of alchemical prowess. I had run away from my family because I didn’t want to perform precisely this kind of work.

  Yet as we finally sent the soldiers off, back to the Hergeiros lands, I felt nothing but bubbling glee.

  They had tried to ruin this new life of mine, and I was learning exactly how vicious I was willing to be to protect it.

  It wasn’t even midmorning yet, but that didn’t stop me from immediately going to find Alys. She was putting the finishing touches onto the new half of our home. Though she grumbled a little, she still let me drag her away from her work. We spent the rest of that day together, doing nothing of note and simply enjoying each other’s presence. I reveled in every moment.

  Anything I did to protect such peace would be well worth it.

  Anything at all.