Chapter 1

Bakers, in a general sense, were not insane people. Certainly those outside the baking world considered them magicians, sorcerers with their fire pits who enchanted mixtures of the blandest ingredients and somehow procured delicate pastries full of flavor and texture out of said mixture. In truth, there was no sorcery about their ways. They were not insane. Bakers led simple lives. Lives full of hard work, customer service, and warm rewards. They made the world a better place one roll at a time.

Here in Orszli were some of the finest bakers, generations of non-insane, completely sensible people who had perfected the art of delicacies such as the cinnamon roll and the strawberry tart. Their existence made Orszli the least bland, most well-reasoned place in the world.

Laszlo had never been anywhere else in the world. As a mentally balanced individual, he had remained within the stone walls of his city, never setting foot beyond the mountain that protected the palace. His knowledge of the rest of the world was limited, but when he took a deep breath and the smells from the kitchen behind him wafted into his nostrils, when he considered how this business had been passed down from generations in his family, he just knew. This was the best bakery in the world, and when his father handed it to him, he would carry on its glory. It took commitment, not insanity, to rise before the sun and have so much dough mixed, kneaded, and ready for the oven so it could be delivered piping hot to his loyal customers.

A glance over the edge of the balcony showed those customers, fellow citizens of the nation’s capital, trudging up and down the broad streets of Orszli, getting their day started. They were as normal as he was. He would soon be down there with them, his little donkey pulling the family’s cart through those same winding streets that took a traveler from one level of the city to another.

A bakery on the secondary level was not so difficult to manage now that Laszlo had a donkey. Pushing his delivery cart by hand had been quite the task not too long ago, and in his younger years, he had spilled more goods than he had delivered.

The cart animal came as a surprise. His father was a traditionalist and avoided changing with the times until the last minute. He was a practical man in that aspect, and certainly not insane, though they were the last house on the secondary level to hook up to the city spark system and install ener-lights. Laszlo and his little sister were counting down the years until they upgraded to an industrial stove. His mother continued to drop hints, but to no avail. Their practical father preferred a natural heat source for his baking.

“If only we could afford an industrial cart,” he wished quietly. Having a donkey was more efficient than pushing the cart by hand, but when it came to the attitude of the animal, Laszlo sometimes wondered if it was worth the hassle. The animal worked hard when she set her mind to it, but if something got under her hide—and it could be one of any number of things—all the soldiers in the kingdom could not make the creature go where she was told.

Chuckling to himself, Laszlo took a moment to breathe in the fresh air before he had to return to the kitchen and retrieve his last batch of bread from the oven. He had work to get back to. Sensible, practical work, for he was a sensible and practical person, certainly not insane.

The air felt good today. Above him, the higher levels of the city reached to the sky, the white plaster of their walls and gray tiled roofs reflecting the light of the sun. Covered walkways of brick and mortar stretched over the busy street, connecting one building to its annex on the same level. Support boards criss-crossed each other on the plaster walls, and along these beams were blue ener-lights, ready to light the city when night fell. All the ener-lights in Orszli were blue, as was the color of the spark that ran through the underground veins of the whole city, and the color of the bright flag that flew above the palace up against the mountain.

Leaning as far as he could beyond the balcony, Laszlo tried to get a glimpse of the palace and its proud flag. A distance apart from the rest of the city, the palace was the only building that stood on its own with no other levels or street bridges connected to it. Laszlo had always marveled at the architecture of the palace, its gray, formidable appearance, daring its enemies to attempt destroying it. The peaks of its towers rose high in the sky, and the only color that broke up the monotonous gray was the color of the guards that surrounded it, their bold blue emblems marking them royal soldiers. Such sanity in their stance. Such practicality in their positioning. Laszlo admired and aspired to be included among the standings of balanced, rational people, and as a baker, he surely was. There were fewer people as sane as bakers.

Neighbor to the palace, with nearly as many royal soldiers standing guard at all the entrances, were a few other buildings that did not quite stand alone, but were still separated from the rest of the city. They were the homes of the Knights of the Moonstone League, guardians of the kingdom under direct order of the king. Of the ten clans that took up residence throughout the kingdom, two clans from the Moonstone League lived in Orszli: the Golden Clan and the Silver Clan. But Laszlo had only ever seen family members of the Golden Clan. The Golden Clan family went into the village more often than the Silver Clan did, taking part in festivities and even buying from local merchants. They did not behave as nobles, but as people who lived in the city as everyone else. Many times, Laszlo had seen the eldest daughter, Kriszten. She had a friendly smile and the fairest hair he had ever seen. A few times her family had bought bread from him while he was out on his deliveries. His nerves had gotten the better of him during those times with her standing so near, and he had sold them bread that was meant for another customer.

Shaking that embarrassing moment out of his head, Laszlo let out a sigh and wondered what Kriszten was up to now, or if she would be out while he was delivering today. He had prepared a sentence to say to her next time he saw her. He would compliment her on her hair, no matter what style she had it in. Being a noble and of marrying age, she was privileged to wear her hair completely out, rather than the braided style most girls in the city wore. Her long tresses were the color of the cleanest hay in the world and probably softer than any sheep Laszlo had ever handled.

“Wake up in there, Laz~!”

Laszlo jumped, gave a startled cry, and nearly tumbled head first off the balcony all at once. He sent his best friend a sharp glare when he recognized the amused laughter. “Will you quit doing that!”

Endre leaned against the railing from whence he had climbed to get up to the bakery. “Maybe if you quit daydreaming this wouldn’t happen.” His smile was innocent and his ever-present straw hat that hung from the back of his neck was swishing softly in the breeze. The handmade farmer’s hat clashed painfully with the pristine appearance of Endre’s garments, which had seen no wear and tear despite his climb up to the bakery. Using the streets and bridges to get from one level to the other like normal people was a foreign concept to him. Among the sane and rational, Endre certainly was not, but Laszlo could admire his friend’s impracticality from a safe distance. Endre was a prince, after all.

“I wasn’t daydreaming.” Laszlo adjusted his leather apron and shoved his hands into the wide pocket, looking out over the city. In the pocket, he discovered the half eaten cinnamon roll that had been his breakfast. He pulled it out and took a bite, chewing so he would not have to answer any questions.

“Oh, certainly.” Endre climbed over the balcony, holding on to the railing as he walked along the outside, giving Laszlo a near heart attack to see his friend dangling above the cobblestone streets below. Should he fall, it would do more damage than Laszlo’s stomach could handle seeing. “You weren’t daydreaming of Lady Kriszten and her lovely blonde hair… You know I keep asking myself, what does she have that I don’t?”

Laszlo darted his eyes away and ignored the burn in his cheeks at the mention of Kriszten. “Will you quit that, too?” he mumbled. He could only handle so much insanity at once, and his friend surpassed that level on an hourly basis.

Endre grabbed the wide supporting column and swung to the other side, hopping over the railing to land on the balcony floor beside his friend. “Quit what?”

“Climbing around like it’s not a fifteen meter drop to your death!” Laszlo straightened his apron again and looked out over the city. “And also comparing yourself to Kriszten. It’s… weird.”

“But we’re so similar! She is blonde, as am I, she has blue eyes, I have blue eyes, she’s nobility, I’m royalty…”

Laszlo shoved the rest of his cinnamon roll into his friend’s mouth to silence him.

Endre’s triumph as he bit down on the pastry was too obvious to Laszlo. His friend spoke with his mouth full, laughing delightedly. “You’re so gullible! I can play you like a fiddle!” He spun around Laszlo a few times, happily eating his cinnamon roll while Laszlo pretended he did not know this mentally unbalanced person. He had a sensible job to do, like getting bread out of the oven.

Stepping back inside the homey bakery with a cheerful Endre on his heels, Laszlo was greeted by his little sister, Gabi, who was eating her breakfast porridge.

“Morning, Laszlo, morning, Prince Endre.” Her voice was soft and shy as always.

Endre gave the ten year old girl a dramatic bow and a traditional Borslic greeting. “Jo szia, Lady Gabi. You are looking lovely this morning.” Normally such a greeting was reserved for royalty and other nobles, but Endre could not resist treating Gabi like a princess, considering her hardly subtle infatuation with him.

Gabi giggled and blushed, ducking down behind her bowl of porridge so just the two braided knots on top of her head were visible. “Jo szia, Prince Endre…” she returned, stumbling over the pronunciation of the old words.

Bouncing around at Endre’s feet, Kutya the speckled sheepdog demanded a greeting as well. Endre knelt down and scratched the dog’s ears while Laszlo pulled the loaves of bread from the sweltering heat of the brick oven. Smoke from the oven traveled up the chimney and warmed the houses above them on its journey through the complex duct system that took it up through the levels and eventually released the billowing smoke into the sky.

Laszlo heard his mother come in the kitchen and Endre’s enthusiastic greeting spread to her. “And such a rosy complexion even at this early hour, Ürnő Zsofia.”

“It’s just the heat of the oven, Endre,” his mother insisted, though Laszlo could hear the delight in her voice. She was always concerned with how she would look as the years passed her by, and the title of ürnő referred to an elderly woman whose wisdom had allowed her to age gracefully.

Laszlo ignored the pang of jealousy that liked rearing its head whenever Endre interacted with other people in front of him. The cheerful young man, though he could display moments that were not quite rational, always knew exactly what to say to everyone. His royal upbringing might have had something to do with it, as he often said, but Laszlo believed his friend had been born with something he himself lacked: a sense of self-confidence. Laszlo enjoyed talking to people and meeting others and making friends, but trying to speak what was in his head was difficult if he did not have an established subject to talk about. The fear of being seen as anything but the sane, sensible baker he longed to appear as was crippling. His mind tended to close up on itself if he was caught unprepared.

“Glad to see you’re making a decent amount of bread today, despite the setbacks,” Endre commented.

Laszlo’s mother chuckled hesitantly. “…Yes, well, it hasn’t hit us so bad…”

Laszlo looked away from her. She did not speak entirely the truth. With all the monitoring of people leaving and entering the city, their bakery had been forced to discontinue some of the pastries they usually made, as their ingredients could not get to them in time.

Heavy footsteps into the kitchen told Laszlo his father had entered the room. The head of the household was not a big man, but he did have a demanding presence. Endre catered to that presence and stood straight, giving a modern greeting rather than his dramatic traditional one. “Good morning, Ür Horvath, sir.”

To end with ‘sir’ was respectful without being pretentious or dramatic. It was a word in the continental tongue, Sazon, which was the secondary language for most surrounding countries. Endre was fluent in Sazon, Borslic, Old Borslic, and three other foreign languages. If anything was insane, it was that. Laszlo just barely managed to fluently speak the continental tongue of Sazon, despite it having simpler pronunciation than that of their complexly worded native tongue, Borslic.

“Morning, prince,” his father greeted, even more casual in his speech. “Know anything about when all this monitoring will stop?”

“I cannot be certain. But my father believes that some of the Knight clans are close to finding the leader of the ring of thieves. These incidents are so organized, they must be connected.”

Laszlo shivered at the mention of the thieves and focused on wrapping his loaves for delivery. Members of a ring of thieves had entered the city and tried to sell stolen goods to vendors and businesses. If anyone was caught with an object that was later learned to be stolen, their entire business was shut down and investigated by the Moonstone League. Already two businesses had been shut down and had yet to be allowed to reopen. It was a dangerous operation that these thieves ran, as the stolen objects came from all over the surrounding countries. If one was found in Borsala, another country might accuse the entire country of stealing from them and find some reason to start a war.

“We have things under control,” Endre continued, “and at the moment, we are certain to say there is no threat of stolen goods among the city. Our monitoring has been thorough.”

That amount of confidence soothed Laszlo’s mind as he wrapped the last loaf of bread and placed it into one of the delivery baskets.

“That’s good to hear, prince.”

“Indeed, it is. We’ll be certain to keep you updated. Now, if you will all be good enough to excuse me, I have training practice I’ve been putting off, I’m certain my captain is looking for me.”

Laszlo turned around as Endre was giving another dramatic bow. “Be careful out there,” he told his friend. He felt silly as soon as the words came out of his mouth, but with all this talk of thieves, the world outside the four walls of his home seemed dangerous and risky.

Endre let his hand come to rest on his dagger and he winked. “I know how to take care of myself. Save your heartwarming care for someone else.”

Laszlo knew exactly the ‘someone else’ Endre was referring to. “Just go,” he mumbled, pushing Endre out the door to the balcony so no one would see his burning ears and know he was thinking of Lady Kriszten.

Endre laughed and saluted as he was unceremoniously removed from the premises. “Jo szia, everyone!” After his farewell, he flipped off the balcony and began his climb to the ground level of the city.

With a deep sigh, Laszlo watched his friend don the straw hat and blend in with the other commoners in the city. He was soon out of sight, slipping through the crowds and back to the castle before he was spotted.

“Mami?” Gabi was saying when Laszlo walked back into the house, “what kind of training does Prince Endre have to do?”

The woman picked up Gabi’s nearly empty bowl and adjusted her daughter’s braid knots. “Well, he’s not the crown prince like his older brother, but he has duties and things he has to do as a son of the king. He has to know how to fight and how to lead and how to handle royal affairs.”

“Being a prince is his job?”

“Yes, it is. His duty is to the people and to the king.”

“It’s a job that has a future, that’s for sure,” his father said gruffly and Laszlo let out a small sigh. He knew what was coming. “You should think about the future more, son.”

“I have thought about it, Papi!”

Laszlo had not meant for his tone to sound so exasperated, but this conversation had dominated the home twice a day for the past week, ever since their sales had gone down. Taking a breath, he dropped to a more conversational tone. “I’m perfectly fine doing this―” he held up a loaf of bread, “―for the rest of my life.” Why could his father not understand that he liked the idea of a stubborn donkey being his biggest problem in the day? It would be insane to do something other than what he had grown up doing. Bakers were not insane people.

His father cut open a bag of flour. “We won’t have this bakery forever. You can’t put so much of your life into something that won’t even last, especially while you are still young.”

Laszlo wiped the sweat from his face that had come from the heat of the oven. “Maybe not… but I don’t want to do anything else. I like baking. I love baking. Is there something else you would have me do?”

His parents exchanged glances and Laszlo shrunk back. They had an idea and he was not going to like it.

“With everything going on…” his father said slowly, standing straight and stroking his beard, “these thieves in the city and other villages… they need more soldiers.”

“What?!” Of all the things they could have suggested, that was the least rational and a far cry from sane.

“As a soldier, you’d have a future,” his mother tried to gently assure him.

“A future?! You must mean a funeral, I could die at any point in time. You want me to go charging at an enemy trying to kill me and possibly never come back? Is that what you want?” The fear of confrontation with the two people he loved most clamped a heavy hand onto his throat. He needed to stop before he said something he regretted.

Swallowing the lump that chose to rise and fighting the way his throat closed up, he picked up one of the baskets full of bread, eager to escape from the sudden tense atmosphere. “I… I need to get my deliveries started.” He walked to the back of the house, headed for the donkey pen. Kutya the sheepdog, sensing he was not in a good mood, followed after him.

The door that led to the open area at the back of the house flung open as he pushed it with his foot. Balancing two full baskets of bread, Laszlo hit the ener-light flow switch with his elbow and the room flooded with blue light. The donkey in her pen brayed at him and he let out a sigh, placing the bread onto the cart. It irritated him whenever he snapped at someone, especially his parents. He felt so guilty afterwards. He was not a contradictory person by nature. His preferred method of handling situations was to remain calm and rational. It took a lot to get him to argue. But suggesting something outside of what he expected in life, especially something as insane as that, always threw him for a loop. “I don’t… I don’t want to be a soldier, Kutya.”

The dog sat down by the cart and looked up at him, one white ear down and the other black ear cocked up like the good listener he was.

“Not… not that I don’t want to fight for my country or anything…” He pushed the baskets to the back of the cart. “But… I don’t think I’d be very good at it.”

Hands in the pockets of his apron, he headed back to the kitchen to get the rest of the bread. Only Gabi was there. His parents must have gone to the storeroom where they always had their private discussions. Laszlo picked up the next basket and headed for the back again.

“I mean… I’ve cut myself with a butter knife multiple times, what good would I be with a sword?” He muttered all these excuses under his breath while Kutya trotted along beside him.

He retrieved the last basket and tied it down. “They have enough soldiers, anyway. Every other boy is insane enough to want to fight.”

The donkey sniffed at him as he opened her pen and led her to the cart to hook her up. “Baking is fun and useful and far safer. I like baking. What’s wrong with just wanting to bake?”

With the donkey attached to the cart, he opened the double doors that led out to the road. It was a downhill path spiraling toward the ground level and he let out a sigh. “We’ll manage. We won’t lose the bakery. I mean, Endre said they would find the thieves, then the monitoring and inspections will stop and we’ll be able to get our other ingredients again.” He looked down at Kutya. “Right? It’ll all work out, won’t it?”

Kutya was standing, tail wagging as he looked outside. He wanted to go for a ride. With another sigh, Laszlo picked up his dog and walked to the cart, putting him inside before going to the wall and cutting the flow for the ener-lights. As he climbed into the driver’s seat, he hoped that by the time he returned, his parents would not have thought up some other way to try convincing him to do something more insane than baking.

Chapter 2

Handing a warm loaf of bread to the family who ordered it was a rewarding job, especially when he received trade tips. A fresh apple here, a bit of jerky there, he spread happiness with his baked goods and everyone loved him for it. Everyone also loved when Kutya picked up one of the parcels by the strings and brought it over to them. Upon learning he was rewarded with a treat, the speckled sheepdog was more than happy to do it again.

The contents of the cart diminished as Laszlo traveled through the city, waving to the people who recognized him. On his journey, he saw the same sights he always passed. The difference today was the abundance of emblemed soldiers who patrolled the streets or stood at random corners. They wore full face helmets with glowing angled eye sockets to see out of, giving every soldier the appearance of a constant scowl. This made most people believe they were heartless, that training to become a royal soldier required such discipline, they were ripped of emotions. People spoke to them, and they answered only in clipped sentences, voices distorted by the helmet.

Laszlo shivered when he passed them. He could not be a soldier like that, he could not be that terrifying figure clutching a weapon. Who ever heard of a soldier who was so easily startled that he squealed like a mouse when someone snuck up on him? Being a soldier and choosing to go through all that was an insane position if he ever heard of one.

But at least the presence of those soldiers made him feel safe. He had no plans of starting up a conversation with any of them, but he knew that if a thief or some other enemy of the Crown tried to get in, they would meet with a prepared and armed man who was ready to skewer them in a moment’s notice. Some soldiers had swords, others held spears. Both were terrifying weapons, sharp and able to kill, the hilts and handles embedded with the same blue energy that flowed through the spark system below the city. Not only could the sharp point of the weapons skewer a human body with ease, the spark in the handle could be charged and sent through a person, rendering them temporarily paralyzed. Laszlo had never seen victims of the shock-daze, and he never wanted to.

He had heard talk before, rumors of weapons even more terrifying than the spark swords and spears. They were used by those beyond the mountain, weapons that caught fire and sent tiny bits of metal shrapnel flying across great distances. He had heard it described as a crossbow loaded with fireworks rather than arrows. The idea of such a weapon in the wrong hands made him shiver. He urged the donkey to continue on past the soldiers.

The second basket was empty when he looked up and saw her. She was with her ladies, of course, admiring a produce stand. Such a stand was manned by a farmer, one of those who set up a booth near the homes of the Clans to capture the attention of the nobles with his impressive display of fruits and vegetables. Just as Laszlo had predicted, Lady Kriszten’s hair looked lovely. The top was braided across the crown of her head and the rest fell and draped her shoulders. A delicate gold headpiece symbolizing her rank nested in her waves of honeysuckle sunshine and when she moved, her white and green skirts swished delicately with her.

“Such a wonder to have so many lovely ürnőnis come see me,” the farmer was saying to the ladies, attempting to charm his way into a sale. “Lovelier than my fine selection of fruits! These all passed the inspection, of course. I’m a little later than normal getting in, everything had to go through all those soldiers. Not that I know why. What does it look like I’m doing, smuggling diamonds in the grape crates?”

The ladies all laughed and Laszlo wished he had the ability to make Kriszten laugh like that when he spoke to her. She had a lovely laugh and her eyes glistened with delight like the ener-lights in the evening.

Kutya began barking. One of the ladies was holding a tiny dog in her arms and it had drawn Kutya’s attention. All the ladies looked his way and Laszlo felt his face flush when he realized he had been sitting in an intersection, staring like an idiot. Before Laszlo could stop him, Kutya hopped out of the cart and ran straight for Kriszten and her ladies.

“Kutya, wait!” He released the reins and put the brake on before scrambling out of the cart. Kutya was thankfully not running circles around the women, but standing still, barking curiously at the lady with the dog.

Laszlo grabbed his dog by the collar and picked him up. “I’m so sorry about that! He must’ve seen your dog…”

“Oh, it’s fine!” the lady said with a friendly smile. Her hair was light colored, but more brown than Kriszten’s fair strands. “He’s adorable, what’s his name?”

“Laszlo. I mean, Kutya! He’s Kutya, I’m… Laszlo…” The back of his neck grew hot and he took a few steps back, unprepared to interact with all of them at once. So much for keeping the appearance of a rational, sane baker. But he supposed dog owners could not be entirely classified as sane.

Kriszten stepped out from among the group and smiled at him. “You’re the baker’s son,” she observed.

At the same time that his legs became weak, Laszlo felt his stomach drop with disappointment. He had told her his name the first time they talked… or at least, he thought he had. He may have been so nervous he did not introduce himself. Or he was so uninteresting, she forgot his name. “Yes, I’m Kutya. I mean, Laszlo! I’m Laszlo and this is Kutya. I apologize for his behavior, Lady Kriszten.” He found something in the cobblestone streets to focus on so he could bring to mind his planned compliment without being distracted by her sunny smile.

“Oh, nevermind, he’s fine,” she said, as gracious as she always was. Laszlo felt silly, dressed in his flour dusted baker’s clothes while she was standing in front of him with her neat gowns and a headpiece and her blonde hair getting tugged by the wind…

It took him a moment to realize she had asked him something. He dared look up at her again.

“Uh… sorry, what was that?”

“May I pet him? Will he bite?” She had one slender hand partially extended.

“Him? Oh, no he won’t bite. He’s protective of the family, but as long as you’re friendly, he’s fine.” The sentence came out so smoothly, he was proud of himself. It was a prepared sentence he had to say a lot. Everyone was always asking to pet his dog.

Kriszten smiled and it reached her blue eyes, the same color as the sky. She rested a hand on Kutya’s head and scratched his mismatched ears. “Hello, there, sweetie…”

Laszlo forgot about his compliment. His gaze softened whenever he watched her. The admiration he had for her grew in leaps and bounds upon each of their interactions. He was a commoner and she was a noble, yet she spoke to him as an equal.

“He’s a sheep dog, right?”

“Yes,” he confirmed. “My uncle lives up on the mountain. He keeps sheep and his dog had puppies. He let me pick out one to take home last time I visited him.” Another sentence without stumbling. He managed to contain the excitement over such a simple accomplishment.

Kriszten smiled fondly at Kutya, who was enjoying the attention. “I’ve always liked sheepdogs, but Mother doesn’t want anything bigger than a rat dog at the house.”

Rat dogs were kept for just that, catching mice. Even in a luxurious house as the one Kriszten lived in, she had the same problems the commoners experienced. She was so sensible. And she smelled like flowers.

Now that was something he could tell Endre. They might be similar, but Endre did not smell like flowers. Endre smelled like sweat and oil from greasing and repairing Knight’s armor, a punishment he was forced to endure for skipping lessons.

She had spoken again and he had missed it. “What was that?”

“I said your donkey is trying to walk away.”

Laszlo turned quickly and saw his cart ready to tip over. The brake was on so the wheels would not move, but the donkey was moving toward a produce cart to her right to get a bite of the lettuce leaves arranged in a neat display, and in doing so she was causing the cart to lean.

“Ack! Uh, excuse me, Lady Kriszten!” He put Kutya down and ran for the cart to stop the oblivious animal from spilling a whole day’s worth of deliveries. Kutya ran in front of the donkey, barking to get her to back up. Laszlo reached the cart and gave it a yank to put it back down on both wheels, just in time to keep everything from spilling out into the street.

He let out a sigh of relief over the avoided catastrophe, then marched in front of the donkey, hands on his hips. “Are you insane?! I fed you before we left, you don’t need to eat everything!”

Ignoring his berating, the donkey licked at his head and made the strands of brown stick straight up. Laszlo heard the giggles from the ladies behind him and blood rushed his face. Mumbling to himself, he grabbed the reins and climbed back into the seat. Kutya hopped back into the cart and Laszlo flicked the donkey into moving, pulling away from Lady Kriszten and her ladies with the bitter realization that he had once again failed to give her his carefully prepared compliment.

---

There were only a few loaves left and it was past noon, close to the time he would head home and start working on the batches they would bake the next morning. Laszlo looked ahead of him toward the castle. It was easier to see the fortress now that he was on the higher levels. Endre was up there somewhere, either in the middle of sparring with the battlemaster or mastering the fine art of diplomacy with the scribes. If Laszlo knew anything about his friend, Endre would much prefer to be doing combat training. He was good with diplomacy, but he hated the practice of it, only wished to use it in real situations.

Laszlo sighed, thinking of his friend’s confidence. He did not know why a prince would want to hang out with a commoner like him, the rational to his irrational. He had always wondered about that, but never had the courage to bring it up.

The sound of hurried footsteps and the clinking of metal plated armor pulled Laszlo from his thoughts. Several soldiers were coming up behind him and he internally panicked for a brief second, fearing what he had done wrong, but they were not after him. They passed him in the streets and split up at the intersection up ahead.

“He’s climbing down the steeple, cut him off at the blacksmiths!”

Laszlo’s heart caught in his throat. Someone had infiltrated the city. Whoever they were, they were insane if they thought they stood a chance against the Borsalian soldiers. Those men had such discipline, knew the city inside and out, and acted as one.

Deciding to take a different route to avoid the chaos, Laszlo urged his donkey to the right. Kutya was watching the soldiers, ears up and staring hard. His herding instincts were telling him to run with the pack and help them catch their target. Laszlo chuckled at the look on his dog’s face. “You think you’d make a good soldier, Kutya?” he asked.

Hearing his name, the dog looked up at him, tail wagging, but his black ear still cocked to listen for the soldiers.

“You’re rather small. I don’t think they have armor that would fit you.”

When his last few deliveries were completed, Laszlo headed back the way he had come. He pulled the cart to a stop at an intersection and saw the soldiers that had passed him before. They walked in a grouped formation, the person they caught in the middle with no chance of escape. Laszlo could not get a clear look at who they had caught, the soldiers walked so close to one another, creating a tightly knit human cage. It was not only the emblem on their body armor glowed blue, but all the lines following the places where the armor separated to allow for movement as well.

The glow of blue was from the embedded spark that resided in tiny wires beneath the thick armor plating. When anything attempted to pierce the armor, be it sword or spear, the spark would ignite and shock the oncoming weapon. It would create a small repulsive action that managed to deflect most attacks. Armor and weaponry that was powered by the spark had to be fueled overnight, plugged up to the city’s spark system for hours in order to last for several days of constant battle. Laszlo only knew of how the armor worked because of Endre. His punishment for speaking out or avoiding his training would often be to grease and oil plate after plate of armor and hook them up to the spark system for the night. Given how many royal soldiers the city of Orszli had, it was a tedious job that took hours. But Endre received a vast amount of knowledge about the armor that he often shared with Laszlo when speaking of the royal soldiers.

Most of the soldiers had their spears out, handles radiating blue, but some had their weapons holstered, attached to the mechanism that grabbed the weapon like a claw and held it in place at their hip or on their back. The glowing blue angled eye sockets of their helmets faced straight ahead as they marched through the town. Heads turned and watched them but did not dare attempt getting close.

Shivers crawled down Laszlo’s spine. Shaking them off, he pointed the donkey toward home and away from the soldiers.