Primordial Villain with a Slave Harem

In the heartlands of the Beastman Confederation, Skarn of the wolfkin had not slept a full hour since the four columns came home.

The camps told the story to anyone with eyes. The tribes had returned from the war to their own ground, and they still pitched apart: wolfkin ridges, tigerkin river-lands, the bearkin deep woods, the dogkin vales.

A confederation that won a battle in utter glory, its enemies decimated, had come home carrying itself like it lost.

Their four lords met at the war-lodge fire, as they now did whenever the continent coughed, and the continent had been coughing without pause.

A scout crossed the lodge and bowed low to the four lords together, and her report broke apart in her mouth.

"Word from the human kingdom, great lords. The king has... forgive me. It reads wrong, but it reads the same from three runners."

She steadied herself. "The human king has put his own mightiest remaining house under the knife. A royal audit, lords, against his own blood-tied duke. And the Villain’s gate opens in the royal capital... daily, great lords. The clerks don’t even look up anymore. I don’t know what to make of that."

Silence sat over the lodge for a moment, and then Skarn came up off his haunches and began to pace.

"We walked home." The words scraped out low and raw; this was not the first time the fire had heard them.

"The elves knelt and called it faith. The humans are about to kneel and call it statecraft. The whole continent is going to its knees, and the predators of Iskaris turned around and walked home in our own dust, with our tails up like nothing happened!"

"Aww." Rajah lay along a fallen trunk on the fire’s far side, amber eyes half-closed, tail tip ticking. "This fire has heard that speech more often than it has heard my name." The tail stopped. "Say the true part, wolf. He made you small, and he did it while we watched."

Skarn’s head snapped around, and the snarl climbing out of his throat died there, because the tigerkin lord was not wrong and they both knew it.

"He dangled my own oath in front of my teeth," the wolfkin lord said instead, "and smiled while I nearly bit. In front of the armies!"

His claws flexed once, fully, and retracted. "The pact is a toy to him. He keeps it while it amuses him, and his patience runs like a bleeding bitch’s temper."

"Mm. Awfully accurate words, my friend." Rajah had gone very still along the trunk. The amber eyes opened the rest of the way, and nothing lazy survived in his voice.

"I stood on that field while a human king called me ’little kitten’ in front of my army, wolf. Then I turned around, took my soldiers, and carried the word home with me. I understand your dismay."

The drawl slid back on like a coat. "And so we prepare. When the other lands run out of entertainment for him, he will come for the wilds, and the mountain will not lift a hammer for us when he does. Let him find something with teeth."

"Walking home was correct." Gorruk said it into the fire without lifting his head, and the rumble rose through the ground ahead of the words. "Every lord here knows it. That is why it sits so badly."

None of them called it fear. The preparations screamed it for them.

Drill-fields churned to mud before every dawn. Fletchers and tanners worked torchlit shifts that ended when the torches did, and every trail in the wilds had its watcher.

The lodges filled with cots down the aisles, and the greybeards turned away at the door returned at first light to stand in it.

Through all of it, Vargis Ironfang sat with his giant war axe across his knees and a whetstone making slow circles along its edge.

He had sat through fire after fire in that same silence, until the other lords stopped inviting his counsel and he stopped offering it.

The whetstone stopped.

Three heads turned, because nobody at that fire could remember the last time it had.

"The oath has held," said the dogkin lord.

"Kingdoms fall to that man on a schedule. Whole races kneel to him by choice. And in all of it, he has not moved on one wolf, one tiger, one bear, or one hound. The fox went for his women, and the reckoning stopped at the fox."

He let that sit for a breath. "Skarn handed him the excuse himself, in front of both armies, and he declined to take it."

"Ironfang-" Skarn began.

"We have never asked him for terms. Not once." The war-chief spoke over him without raising his voice. "Every lord at this fire has spent a season preparing to lose a war nobody has declared, and all four of us have walked past the door to do it."

He looked around the flames at the three of them. "I say we send for him."

"And say what?!" Skarn’s laugh had no floor under it. "I had terms, dogkin. I had a blood oath sworn in my own hand, and he lifted it to see whether I would bite." He was pacing again. "You would roof the Confederation with that man’s mood."

"Say that the pact no longer fits the man who swore it." Vargis sighed, and the slow circles started again while he spoke.

"He signed it when he was weak, with our claws forcing his hand, and it has been nothing but a restriction on him since. A pact that only takes is a pact waiting to be dropped."

"So we ask him what the wilds can offer that he would want. We make it fit both sides, and then it is not his patience holding our roof up."

"There’s nothing to ask. He’d take, take, and take. And there is the other matter." Rajah had not moved from his trunk. "He keeps what he kills. The ranks we would march beside are full of dead men carrying their killer’s banner." The tail lay still. "Predators do not run with thralls, dogkin."

"Gorruk." Vargis turned to the bearkin. "You caught the trap he set for Skarn. You saw what he did after."

Gorruk regarded him for a long moment.

"I did."

"And?"

"And I will not put the Confederation’s throat inside a fist I cannot reach." The rumble stayed level. "Ask me again when I can."

Skarn’s pacing had run out a while ago. The dogkin had gone past him to Gorruk, and two lords were deciding the wilds’ future between them while the wolfkin lord stood there and listened.

Skarn came around the fire, and he did not lower his voice for it.

"Your daughter lives in that man’s house, Ironfang. You have not spoken at this fire in a season, and the first time you open your mouth, you open it for him."

He put his weight forward onto the balls of his feet. "Tell this council what your counsel is worth." The wolfkin lord’s voice dropped into the register he saved for prey. "Are you even still on our side at all?"

The whetstone stopped mid-circle.

Vargis Ironfang set the war axe and the stone aside without one wasted motion, stood, and the lodge got smaller.

"My daughter chose that man, and I let her keep the choice." He said it level, and it landed heavier that way. "I weighed him longer than any of you cared to look at him. That is all."

He crossed the ground between them, and Skarn did not give way. Chest met chest, and neither lord yielded a finger’s width.

"Say the word you mean, wolf." The dogkin lord’s voice did not rise. "Say oathbreaker, and say it where the fire can hear you."

Loyalty was the marrow of the dogkin, sworn and kept on more fields than the Confederation had songs for, and Skarn had spat on it across a council fire.

Vargis had walked off every one of those fields with his loyalty taken as given.

He had let his daughter keep the man she chose because he trusted his own eyes, and Skarn had just picked her up and used her as a knife.

The fire snapped. Somewhere along the wall, the scout stopped breathing.

"Take it back," Vargis said, very quietly. "Or say it again with your claws out."

Skarn held where he was, and the whole lodge waited to see whether the word or the claws came first.

Gorruk rose, and his shadow put half the lodge in the dark.

"Enough."

The rumble arrived from somewhere beneath the flames, and it did not ask. He looked from one chest to the other until there was room to breathe between the two lords again.

"Border dens report at each moon, watchers go on the passes, and the stores fill before the cots do, because a den full of warriors and empty of grain is a siege we lose in a week."

"We prepare for the worst, and we rebuild what the march emptied while we do it."

His voice went around the fire and stopped at nobody. "And Ironfang’s door stays open. Whether we walk through it, and how, this fire decides together. Not tonight."

Vargis returned to his log and set the stone to the edge without breaking the look. Skarn lowered himself onto his haunches, and Rajah’s tail took up its tick again, delighted.

"...He told us he would reach out," Rajah said to the flames. "If he does, we will learn what his word is worth."

Quinlan had offered reparations at the end of the war, for their help in bringing about victory.

Dwarven engineers, elven coin and all. He had given Gorruk his word he would raise it again anyway.

"Whatever the future holds, the Confederation prepares as one," Gorruk said.

That night, from den to den and ridge to ridge, the deep drums of the Confederation woke and said the same thing until dawn: sharpen, stockpile, drill.

...

The iron doors of the last record-house had not cooled by a single degree since Iris stopped in front of them, and through the metal, underneath the fire’s voice, came the sounds of men still working.

Racks crashed over somewhere inside. Orders reached them through the iron, muffled, and somebody in there was sobbing while he worked.

Iris listened to every bit of it without moving. Somewhere behind that iron, men were feeding her brother’s answer into a fire, and she could hear them doing it.

"Barred from the inside, Highness," the fire-warden captain reported to Felicity, and kept a full spear-length back from the investigator while he did it.

Behind the commission, chains rattled across the bailey stones.

They had brought the count back in irons, because a man who had screamed an offer of his vaults in front of the whole yard was going to honor it, and Corvane had walked quietly enough until he saw which doors the investigator had stopped at.

Then he began to fight the two soldiers holding him, thrashing on the end of their grip like a hooked fish.

"There is nothing in there! Tax rolls! Duplicates! I swear it on my mother’s memory, do not waste the crown’s time on..."

Iris put her bare hands flat on the iron.

Visit and read more novel to help us update chapter quickly. Thank you so much!