In the tents, a doctor was trying to make sense of how exactly the aide of the Feitus family had come by a head injury during a hunt.
Talin had told him that he had been struck by a falling rock while chasing a beast. Even though the story sounded ridiculous, the doctor decided to accept it and moved on.
Agoni asked how long it would take for him to recover.
The doctor said that the injury was quite serious, even though it looked like nothing at all on the outside, and that Talin would need at least a week of strict bed rest.
That idea did not sit right with Talin in the slightest, because it meant missing the entire competition. He argued that his duty as an aide was to stay beside his master at all times.
Agoni stopped him from making a fuss and told him plainly that his recovery was the priority.
"Sleep until the closing ceremony," he said. "I'll manage the hunt with another servant."
Talin tried to protest. Agoni put his foot down, and there was nothing left for Talin to do but comply.
Then, because the man looked so miserable, Agoni teased him for having come all the way to the hunting ground just to take a vacation.
Talin brightened and reminded him happily that he had not had a single day off since the day he started working. Besides, his dream in life was to spend it eating and doing absolutely nothing at all, and since he did not have the money to make that dream a reality, he might as well take this opportunity to enjoy a little of it.
"Then I'll win the competition," Agoni said, with complete confidence, "and use my wish to claim the development rights to a gold mine."
Shortly afterwards Talin fell asleep, and Agoni left a letter behind on the table beside him.
Once he was outside, the words came back to him. The loyal imperial dog of the empire. They circled and circled and would not let him rest, and when he found he could not sleep either, he went out for some fresh air. Not, however, before picking up the seventh prince's bag of stones, as ordered.
Walking through the pale early dark with the bag over his shoulder, Agoni thought back to the day he had taken his son to the temple, and told him the story of the one for whom the temple was built.
A long time ago, the world had been in chaos, until a being of salvation descended from the heavens. His son had read that story countless times, the story of Sierra the Great, an incarnation of the gods who wielded mysterious powers and subjugated those who waged endless wars upon one another. Over a thousand years ago, Sierra had named the unified empire Airen.
Sierra, Agoni had told his son, was the very founder of the imperial family they served.
Now he could not stop thinking about the boy. Flynn. He had urged Flynn to follow in his footsteps and become a proud sword of the imperial family, and standing here in the cold he found that he was questioning that decision for the first time in his life.
He stopped to watch the sun come up, and wondered why he was carrying a bag full of stones around a forest simply because a member of the royal family had told him to.
Was that loyalty? Or was it only habit?
Just then a horn went off in the distance, signalling the end of the hunt.
As everyone gathered at the tower, the crowd marvelled at what the first prince had done. Rasia had hunted all night and racked up such a haul that his victory was already secured without anyone needing to count.
The competition had been scheduled to run for four days. They ended it early, because the first prince had nearly drained the forest of beasts in a single night.
After declaring Rasia the winner of the royal hunting competition, the emperor asked him to state his wish.
The crowd held its breath. The fourth prince, who had won the last competition, had used his wish to ask for the right to purge the nomads of the border regions, and people remembered how that had gone.
Rasia asked the emperor for the rights to purge the vagrants who had infested the area around the temple of Sierra, and who now posed a threat to the dignity and the security of that holy place.
Hearing those words, Agoni went cold. He could already see the bloodshed such a decree would bring, street by street, in the shadow of the temple.
Memories of the corpse he had seen lying on the road that day came back to him, and with them came his son's face, and the phrase that had followed him all night.
The loyal dog.
Something in him snapped. He apologized quietly to Flynn for what he was about to do.
Then Agoni unsheathed his sword, and a stir went through the entire crowd.
Back in the tent, Ran shook Talin awake.
Talin got to his feet too quickly to greet him properly and stumbled to the ground.
"Move slowly," Ran advised, "or you'll collapse from the blood going to your head. And ask the doctor for antibiotics—" He stopped, remembering, a beat too late, that antibiotics might not be a thing in this era.
Talin, still on the floor, wondered aloud why the seventh prince had come to his tent at all.
"Your master may be in a difficult situation," Ran said vaguely. "At the closing ceremony."
Talin was out of the tent moments later, shoving his way through the crowd to find his master. When he finally reached the front, he saw Agoni kneeling before the imperial family, surrounded by armed guards.
Rasia was demanding to know why he had dared interrupt the ceremony.
Agoni humbly asked the emperor to assign the task of clearing the vagrants to the Feitus family instead. They had served Sierra the Great from the very beginning, he said. His house had protected the imperial family for over a thousand years. Surely a lowly task like cleaning up the ground around the temple should be left to his family.
The emperor considered the man's years of loyal service to the imperial house, and granted the request.
Rasia was left stunned.
But the emperor was not finished. He scolded Agoni for using that very loyalty as a lever to stand against the will of royalty, and as punishment for his insolence he handed the old knight over to the first prince.
Rasia gladly accepted him.
"You know the price for what you did," Rasia told him, stepping forward. "Immediate execution."
Agoni accepted his punishment willingly, while Talin watched from the audience, unable to do a single thing.
Ran was in that crowd too, watching everything go exactly according to his plan. All he could do now was hope that his second pawn was watching as well, from wherever he was.
Just as he had predicted, the protagonist was in place at a nearby stream, where the water had begun, very quietly, to flow in the direction of the tower grounds.