Crownless Tyrant Chapter 111: Even the Equalizer Lied

Silas worked on him for three evenings.

The first evening was the hair.

Silas cut it shorter on the sides than Alistair had ever worn it, using a small pair of shears Alistair had never seen him carry before. The shape was unfamiliar, sothing Alistair had never worn in his life.

He sat very still while Silas worked. The hair fell in pieces onto the cloth draped across his shoulders, and was swept up afterward without comnt.

Alistair did not look in a mirror until Silas told him he could. The face in the mirror was not entirely his.

Alistair’s eyes widened slightly; however, he kept quiet. Silas watched him watch the mirror, choosing not to comnt.

The second evening was the scar.

Silas drew it with a small brush and a bowl of sothing Alistair had never seen him mix before. It was not paint.

It was set under Silas’s hand the way a healed mark would set into skin, drawing along the left side of the jaw, from beneath the ear to a point not quite at the chin.

After a few monts, Alistair recognized the shape, the kind of cut that ca from a fencing wound poorly treated in adolescence.

"It will hold," Silas said. "Thirty days, and after that it begins to fade on its own."

"I will be ho before then."

"That is the assumption."

"You do not think I will?" asked Alistair, raising a brow.

Silas paused before answering, "I think you will be ho in twenty-two. The thirty is only the margin, in case sothing goes wrong."

Alistair did not argue.

The scar pulled, very slightly, against his face when he spoke. It was the kind of pull a face’s owner adjusts for without thinking. He noticed it only because he had not had a scar there yesterday, however, by morning, he would no longer notice it.

The third evening was the stance.

Silas had Alistair stand in front of the long wall of the base, with the lamp lit at his back so that his shadow fell on the wall in front of him. Silas walked around him in a slow circle, three tis, and stopped behind his right shoulder.

"Your weight is wrong," Silas said.

"My weight has always been on the back foot," Alistair replied.

"Yes, and that is the problem. You trained for combat where the back foot was the foot that survived. Tobian Marrow trained where the front foot was the foot that won. He studied at the Caelmari fencing academies, and the schools in Verissan teach a front-foot stance to every boy who sets foot inside them."

Alistair frowned, listening closely.

"Your back-foot stance is what every noble in Verissan will catch in the first minute," Silas continued, "and what the third son of a Caelmari house cannot have."

Hearing this, Alistair shifted his weight forward.

Silas moved past him and adjusted his shoulders by a small amount, then his left foot, then the angle of his right knee. Following that, he stepped back.

"Walk to the door."

Alistair walked to the door. The walk was not his walk. He felt the difference the way a man feels the difference between his own coat and one he has borrowed.

"Again."

He walked back, then again. Silas had him repeat the length of the room twenty tis. By the fifteenth, the new walk was the walk he was making without effort. By the twentieth, he was correcting small irregularities in it on his own.

Eventually, Silas stopped him.

"You will need to forget the way you stand," said Silas, his arms crossed. "Not now, but for a door. When the door of a room opens, the man walking through it cannot be Alistair Thorne. While you are in the doorway, Alistair is not in the doorway."

"Understood."

"It is not just understood, it is practiced. We work the doorway tomorrow."

"Alright."

Silas set the lamp down on the table and looked at Alistair across the lit space of the room.

"Go look in the mirror."

Alistair went to the mirror.

He had gone the first evening, however, he had not been back since. He stood in front of it now with the lamp on the table behind him, and looked at the man in the glass for a long ti.

The man in the glass was not Alistair Thorne.

Alistair was speechless.

The eyes were the part Silas could not change, they had always been Alistair’s eyes. The rest of him belonged to soone else.

The hair was soone else’s hair. The jawline, with its small drawn scar that already looked like a scar Alistair had carried for years, was soone else’s jaw. The shoulders, in the new stance, belonged to a Caelmari noble who had trained at a fencing school and not done much else with his life.

It was a face Alistair could have walked past on a Verissan street without ever thinking about again.

He held the look in the glass, letting his weight stay on the front foot.

He spoke, very quietly, in the room.

"Tobian Marrow."

The man in the glass said it back to him.

At that mont, the Equalizer ran its scan.

Alistair had not asked it to. He had been holding it at the back of his attention, the way he always held it, and the scan ran on its own in the mont after he said the na. It tracked across his face in the glass, settled, and returned a reading.

The reading was not his.

Alistair’s jaw tightened.

’Even it,’ he thought. ’Even the one thing that has never lied to , even that lies now.’

The reading was that of a Caelmari noble of moderate standing, with a small fencing scar from adolescence, and a na he had been answering to for years longer than Alistair Thorne had been answering to his own.

However, he had spent his entire life understanding the Equalizer was the most honest thing he carried. The Equalizer was lying to him now, because he had asked it to, and the reading had adjusted itself to the face it accepted.

Alistair was honestly unsettled.

He did not move from the mirror for a long minute, and Silas, behind him, did not speak.

Eventually, Alistair turned away from the glass.

"It will hold," said Alistair.

"It will hold," Silas confird.

"I will need to rember that it is not real."

"You will need to rember that very carefully, more than anything else you carry into Verissan."

Silas said nothing else. He picked up the lamp, carried it back across the room, set it into the bracket on the wall, and turned the wick down. The room went dimr.

Alistair walked out, leaving the mirror behind him.

He understood, walking down the corridor, that he was not going to ntion to Due or to Elara what the Equalizer had done. The worry would be the right kind of worry, and there was no one in the room he was walking into in six weeks who would share it with him.

The far door of the corridor opened before he reached it.

Due stepped through into the lamplight, looked directly at Alistair, and his hand went straight to his sword.

"Who in the burning hells–"

Due stopped mid-sentence, his eyes widening as recognition crept in through the bond tying them together. Slowly, his hand fell from the hilt.

"You," Due breathed, his face shifting from alarm to sothing far worse. "Alistair, I almost cut you down in my own corridor."

Alistair did not smile, and instead, he held the front-foot stance Silas had given him.

"Good," said Alistair, very quietly. "That ans it works."

Due opened his mouth to reply, however, the corridor behind him filled with the sound of running boots, and Elara’s voice called Alistair’s na from the dark, sharper than either of them had heard her sound in weeks.