A Time of Tigers - From Peasant to Emperor

"Indeed," Asabel said. "It is I that invited him to the Yellow Castle that evening, to share tea with my retainers and I. Something that I have now grown to regret deeply, given the opportunity it allowed for his assailants to plan."

There was a considerable weight to Asabel's mentioning of it. She expressed clearly that she thought it was an assassination attempt. There was no question in her voice, she did not even see that part of the predicament to be something that should be questioned. It was the sort of confidence that had the crowd of nobility – who were so sure they had this case figured out – doubting themselves.

"Might I ask, merely so that we can paint the clearest picture of that evening, just what had caused you to invite Oliver Patrick to tea? You had no dealings with him before then, did you?" Hod pressed.

Now that was a touchy topic. Their meeting had been…. less than flattering for Oliver. They'd made a promise not to disclose it to anyone, but Oliver had a feeling that Asabel wasn't the sort of person to just outright lie about something.

"Oliver Patrick has always been of interest to me," Asabel admitted, "I was very close to my uncle Arthur, as you well know, and he always spoke highly of Dominus. When I heard that Dominus had a son, I admit that I wanted to meet him, though I was too embarrassed to go about it until recently…"

'Ah,' Oliver thought to himself. It was a very Asabel-like answer. Even when pressured, she wasn't about to lie. She instead told a different sort of truth. Hod did not seem to mind, for he merely nodded. Stay updated via My Virtual Library Empire

"So this was a meeting that you had long sought," Hod said. "How did that evening go? You need not go into detail, merely provide us with an overview, if you would like to."

"Well, it went rather well. Oliver was far more interesting than I was led to believe he would be. It seems to me that much of the rumours surrounding him are not well founded, though I could not speak to those in regard to his strength. He struck me as considerably more clever than I had expected.

I posed him a question on Boulder Crabs, and he surprised me in being able to quickly deduce an answer," Asabel said.

It seemed unrelated, a mere tangent in the grand scheme of things, but Hod did not rush to cut her off. He seemed to think that it was important somehow. It was not difficult to deduce why. Here was a royal, highly respected and oft admired, the very pinnacle of the Academy's elite, and she was the very person praising Oliver so highly, not for his strength, but for his character.

"Oh?" Hod asked, as though genuinely interested, rather than merely asking for the sake of the trial. "And what question was that, exactly?"

"Well I pointed out to him that Boulder Crabs are said to be parasitic, though that is a rather lesser-known fact, so I was quite sure he hadn't heard such a thing before. I wondered if he could come up with an answer to what exactly they were parasitic towards. He easily put together the information that he had on them, and reasoned toward an answer – that is, plants," Asabel said.

"Even Lancelot didn't manage to get that when I quizzed him on it a few weeks ago."

"I confess, such a thing proved to be a struggle," Lancelot said, corroborating her answer, not that anyone could ever possibly doubt someone as forward-facing as Asabel Pendragon.

"Ah," Hod smiled. A genuine smile. He cast Oliver a glance. "Now it does indeed seem to me like you had quite an enjoyable evening. And you left on such good terms?"

"Indeed we did," Asabel said. "We made an agreement to meet again in the future, and I had every intention of doing it the following week, but…"

"How long after Oliver Patrick left your residence were you informed of what had happened?" Hod asked.

"Hm… It could not have been more than ten minutes, if I had to guess. Would you agree with that, Lancelot?" Asabel asked.

"Eight," Lancelot said firmly, provoking an odd glance from both his lady and the Minister of Logic. He quickly explained. "I recall glancing at my pocket watch after they left – the very second the door closed, even. Such is a habit of mine. And I'd just checked it again before the boy – their retainer – knocked. I had prior engagements, you see.

I wanted to keep good time for them."

"Eight minutes," Hod declared firmly, to both the crowd, and the Ministers. "In the short period of eight minutes between leaving Her Highness' residence, Oliver Patrick supposedly sought out a group of twenty guards, and slaughtered them, all of his own violation. A sudden spring of madness, perhaps?

Lancelot, Your Highness, how long would you say it takes to go from the scene of your crime to your chamber?"

"Mm, perhaps two minutes, at a leisurely pace?" Asabel guessed. "And a minute, if one was in a rush."

"So, that narrows our time down further. Their retainer must have taken at least a minute to reach your chambers again, from the crime scene. Seven minutes – that is the true time that the incident happened in. Assuming that Oliver Patrick took two minutes to descend the stairs, he sought out and killed twenty men in a mere five minutes," Hod declared.

"You might think me to be dwelling on the time a little too much, ladies and gentlemen, but with the slightest amount of logic, you would see what an impossibility this seems to be. Five minutes to slay twenty armed and resisting men – that is already quite a feat. Incredibly quick, a testament to young Oliver's strength.

To assume that he had the time to seek these men out on top of that, no, that should be an impossibility. So, twenty men – since when have our guards patrolled in twenty? – just so happened to be passing through the lower corridors of the Yellow Castle at the exact same instance that Oliver Patrick was leaving?

There's a string of coincidences here, that simply do not add up," Hod said, enunciating each point, slowly and carefully as if he were explaining it to a child.