Primordial Villain with a Slave Harem

The heat bit through both palms in one breath, deep and total. She took all of it in without a sound, one more payment into a very old account.

*KRRUNK.*

The hinges gave before the door did. This one she threw, and it went tolling across the bailey like a dropped bell, and the commission got its first look inside.

The count’s men had built a pyre in the center aisle out of the archive’s own racks and were feeding it by the armful.

A dozen of them, stripped to shirtsleeves, black to the elbow, faces cooked red by a night of it.

At the far end, two more hauled crates out of the deep racks, where a night of burning had not reached yet.

For the space of one breath, everything stopped: the burners with their arms full, the commission in the doorway, the fire eating in the middle.

Then Corvane wrenched one arm free and screamed past his own guards with his voice tearing in half.

"BURN IT! BURN THE REST! If you love your children, BURN IT ALL!"

And his men chose the fire.

The initials squared away in those books were their own, and whatever waited above Corvane for men who let his paper be read frightened them worse than anything standing in that doorway. Armfuls went up. Torches came around toward the untouched racks.

None of it landed.

Ayame crossed the hall in one straight line, and the nearest torch hit the floor still gripped by a hand that no longer had an owner.

Her second cut went through the neck of the man mid-throw beside him, so quickly that his armful of ledgers was still climbing when he died.

"Feed it! FEED IT, you cowards!" The foreman got that much out before he saw what was walking up the aisle at him, and the rest of it turned into a noise with no shape to it.

"Quin!" Ayame shouted.

The ledgers never landed.

Gusts of wind materialized from nothing, under every thrown volume, beside every burning armful, plucking the count’s history out of the air and out of the flames themselves.

Down in the deep racks, the two men with the crates found a shadow standing between them, and neither finished turning toward it.

Black Fang flicked her blade clean and stepped over what fell without looking down.

Iris took the last pair herself, the two who lunged for the pyre with the final crate between them.

She caught the first by the wrist and broke it, then took him off his feet with it and put the second face-down into the stones hard enough to crack them. She stood on him and looked around for more.

There were no more.

The rest were already on their knees with their arms up, and the hall went down to fire-noise and one man being sick against a rack.

Quinlan finally got around to the pyre on his way past it. The air over the center aisle folded in on itself, the flames went flat, and the hall dropped into a smoking quiet with nothing left to eat.

He squared his tower of rescued ledgers on a scorched reading table and gave the stack one satisfied pat.

"Walk the surrenders out to the yard, captain, and keep the wounded under guard until I say otherwise." Stormlord said it without stopping, already stepping through the wreckage. "The crown will want every one of their testimonies."

Corvane made a sound in his chains that had no words left in it.

Hands folded into his sleeves, the Mediator came up to the reading table and looked over the stack still warm from the fire.

"This is the part that interests me, Your Highness. A man with one night to work in burns the dangerous paper first, and these are the ones that remained."

He sounded amused, as if staring down an intriguing philosophical question. "Or perhaps they were in such a hurry that there was no order to the chaos at all?"

Felicity ignored his ramblings.

The stack ran to forty-odd volumes, scorched along the edges, spines marked by year, every one of them taken out of the air on its way to the fire.

Felicity worked them in silence, the newest book open under the sergeant’s lantern, then one volume from each decade, then the oldest down at the bottom of the pile, checking a single thing in every one of them.

"What he took. What he kept. What he sent up." Her gauntleted finger rested beside the cipher at the head of a page written before her grandfather’s grandfather was born.

"Thirty years is what we accused him of." Her voice was small in the hush. "This column’s been climbing out of these lands for hundreds of years. It’s older than even Mom."

"Well, yes, this syndicate we’re dealing with is older than even the king. By quite a bit." The Mediator worked down the stack from the other side of the table, grey eyes going down the columns with unmistakable professional attention.

"Immaculate. Better kept, I confess, than several of my own branch offices. And in all those accounts, this house wrote down everything except who it was paying, year after year, in a hand this careful. Excellence is a dangerous habit."

He closed a cover softly. "That is what I would call testimony, Your Highness."

"And stupidity." Felicity closed the book on her thumb. "They were so brazen, keeping such records..."

The Mediator’s beard did not move. Behind it, his professional composure fought for its life.

’The princess royal of Vraven,’ he thought, with great serenity, ’has just spoken to me as if we were on the same side...’

"Caution costs money, Your Highness, and the crown never bothered to sniff properly before today..." he mused aloud.

"...Yeah..." Felicity sighed, dejected.

She pressed the book flat against her chest. "We audited an entire duchy and its administrating families on suspicion. After tonight it’s evidence."

Black Fang had taken one of the scorched volumes off the far end of the table and was reading it with a perfect poker face.

Iris had stopped hearing any of them somewhere around the vellum.

She went through the stack from the bottom, pulling volumes and dropping them, not gently, until the year she wanted landed in both hands.

Ravenclaw.

The page blurred, steadied, and held.

The word stood at the head of a fresh section in that same tidy hand, and under it, entry by entry, her whole world had been bought: the lands, the mills, the river tolls, the granaries.

Every piece of it had gone into the Corvane holdings at salvage prices, sold against debts a ruined barony could never argue with. Each entry carried its initials, and each column had been squared.

’Where...’

There was no entry for the people.

She had spent her whole life hunting a face.

What waited at the end of the hunt was a set of initials and a price, entered by the man in chains out in the hall.

’They didn’t bother writing down the names...? Of what they’d done to us...? They wrote down so much, and yet...’

Everything she had been carrying since she was a child had arrived, and there was nowhere left to put it down.

Her hands shook hard enough to buzz the page.

’Was that too inconsequential? Not worth the ink?’

Killing intent rolled off her in slow waves then, filling the burned hall wall to wall, and the two soldiers nearest the door discovered urgent duties in the bailey.

A short laugh got out of her, one wrong little sound with nothing funny in it. She read the section again. Then she read it again.

Ayame arrived at her elbow, read the heading, and for once in her life said nothing sharp at all, which from her was a shout. "Breathe, Iris."

"Don’t tell me what to do..." the Child of Reckoning scoffed, voice trembling.

Quinlan came up behind her and looked at the page over her arm for a long moment. Whatever he thought of it stayed off his face.

His hand landed on her shoulder and patted it twice.

"Maybe they burned the files with victim names first," he said, quietly, just for her, with none of the dressing-up she would have hated.

Iris’s eyes came off the page for the first time since she had found it. "Then I’ll go get those too," she said, and it came out steady.

"There’s no need, Iris."

Quinlan straightened. "Let me help you."

The warmth went out of his voice as if it had never existed, replaced by a tone of dread that made royal soldiers tremble from head to toe.

"I promised Alexios I would investigate this properly." He walked away from the table unhurried as he said it, past the kneeling surrenders, between the gutted racks.

"I did. The evidence is gathered, the forms are observed, the law is honored." One short gesture took in the table, the ledgers, the whole ruined night.

"The old bastard must be satisfied by now."

He stopped in front of Count Corvane.

"So now it’s time to finish this investigation my way."

Corvane got as far as opening his mouth.

The boot took him in the teeth.

Dozens of teeth skittered away across the stones, and the count went out cold before his back met them, chains and all.

The two soldiers who had been holding him were left holding air. "Wah?!" One of them made a very small sound.

Back at the table, Iris scrubbed her eyes once with the heel of her hand.

’You just can’t help but make a scene, can you?...’

A gorgeous, soft smile settled on her face.

"Quinlan..."

The Primordial Villain set his boot on the unconscious count’s chest and said one more word.

"[Subjugation]."

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