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By Root 705 0

stop smiling. His father was a great man, just like he had always insisted to the bullies who worked him over. His father was a great man and, better still, a living man. His mother was going on now, doing her little sniffling act she always did when he was “being difficult,” but Ashton had heard enough to know what really happened. His mother, well-meaning and kind and thoughtful though she might have been, was a slut, and Ashton had seen her bring home enough men when his grandfather was away to know she must have seduced Inquisitor Kramer, then been put out when he denied any responsibility for the child. She was his mother and he loved her, but he could hardly blame his father for not wanting some low slattern for a wife.

“Father?” The Inquisitor looked the boy up and down, Ashton feeling his hard eyes running over the yawning seam where his shoes needed cobbling, the patches on his trousers that were only a little off-color, the sweat stains on his linen shirt, the slightly too big hat he had taken from his grandfather. “Impossible. Do you know what it is that you do, boy? You accuse me before God of being an adulterer. Me.”

“I didn’t … I don’t …” The years Ashton had spent preparing for this moment had dragged by so slowly that he had thought the day would never come at all, yet now that it had arrived it was flying by far too quickly, and the angry expression on the man’s face told him just how naïve he had been. Of course his mother had made it up to make herself sound more important, to say that for one night at least she was found desirable by a great man. This was all her fault, and as the Inquisitor reached for the small brass bell on his desk Ashton felt the tears come, and rather than be cast out with this great man thinking he had invented the story himself for his own gain he fell to his knees and quickly blurted out an apology. “This wasn’t— it wasn’t my idea. My mother told me you were, you were with her when she worked at a bakery. In Tyrol. She was lying to me, I see that now, she’s a lying slut and I’m sorry, I’m so sorry I came, I meant no, I meant no malfeasance, I—”

“Malfeasance.” Kramer smiled, his hand hovering over his bell. “A fine word, a topical word, but not the word you meant, I don’t think. Are you sure you’re not trying to blackmail me, to get a little something from your malfeasant papa?”

“No!” Ashton said, trying to calm his breathing, to stop his tears, to remember the words he had rehearsed. His father was supposed to have acknowledged him, to offer him a place and opportunities, and he was supposed to nobly turn them down, to say, as he was saying now, despite how inappropriate the words had become, “I just, I just wanted you to know I’m going to be better than any other son my mother would have bore, because you are a great man. I am going to be a great man, because you are—”

One of Kramer’s black-gloved hands had slipped in front of his square jaw, and a long finger shot up before the man’s smiling lips. Ashton trailed off as the Inquisitor slowly got to his feet and walked around the table, the coils of his hair bobbing around his ear as he peered closer at the boy. His smile grew wider, and he tousled Ashton’s hair. The boy nearly wet himself.

“Innsbruck,” Kramer said in a low murmur. “The little witch of Innsbruck. You’re fifteen, lad?”

“I think, sir,” said Ashton, not quite sure.

“Your mother seduced me,” said Kramer, ever smiling at his son. “She baked some of her hair and blood into a cake, and gave it to me. By the time her witchcraft had worn off I had already put you in her belly.”

Ashton tried to speak, to tell his father the lies his mother had told, but only a happy little sob came out.

“I let her live, and escape trial, because I knew I had put some good into her,” said Kramer, leaning back against his desk and pointing at Ashton. “You. I made her recant her ways, of course, and swear that when you were of age she would tell you who your father was, so you could come to me and receive my blessing. I see that here she was as good as her word.”

“She lied!” Ashton