Primordial Villain with a Slave Harem

"[Subjugation]."

The word settled over the gutted record-house.

They had spent the last months hearing what the Primordial Villain did to the people who crossed him.

Every soldier along the walls looked at the unconscious count in his chains and arrived at the same understanding in the same breath: they had just watched a peer of Vraven stop belonging to himself.

Nobody moved.

Until Stormlord’s warhammer rang free of its harness.

The commander of the Aegis Vanguard took one step with the hammer already in his fist, and there was nothing hot in his face at all.

He had watched a detained vassal of his king enslaved in front of a royal commission, and his whole body had turned into the next line of protocol.

But before he could take the next step, the temperature at his throat changed.

Black Fang had not moved from the far end of the reading table, the scorched volume still open against her arm.

Her blade stayed in its sheath and her mouth stayed shut. She was watching the space past him, at angles and distances already measured.

Stormlord stopped.

He was one of the strongest men in Vraven, and every instinct that had kept him alive for centuries was reporting the same thing: a serpent sat coiled at his throat, and it would arrive before he reached the Villain.

He did not step back.

His gauntlet tightened on the grip, and he stayed exactly where his last stride had put him, a king’s commander refusing to yield ground to the most dangerous woman on the continent over a matter of law.

"Release the count," he said, to Quinlan, past her. "He is the crown’s prisoner. What you have done to him is not in any statute I serve."

Quinlan looked back at him with mild interest and said nothing at all.

The hall held its breath around the three of them.

One drawn hammer, one unsheathed nothing, one villain, and a floor of soldiers who had stopped pretending they knew where to point their spears.

"Stormlord."

Felicity’s voice was not loud.

The princess of Vraven stood beside the scorched reading table with her visor up and ash in her hair, and every eye in the record-house went to her.

"You did your duty. Now stand down."

"Your Highness." Stormlord did not move. "The count is under crown protection until the crown’s judgment. What was done here..."

"Was watched by the crown." Her voice stayed simple and clear. "I saw everything. I’ll tell Father everything, and if he’s angry, he can be angry at me."

She tipped her head back, and looked up at the man who had guarded her since before she could walk.

"I’ll take responsibility for what happened here."

The hall watched the commander of the Aegis Vanguard look down at his princess for a long moment.

Then the hammer settled back against his spine, and the serpent at his throat was simply elsewhere.

Stormlord stepped back to Felicity’s shoulder and planted himself there, facing the villain he had just been ordered to permit.

And that was the picture the commission would carry back to the capital, every soldier in the hall a witness: the princess of Vraven, fourteen years old, ordering the king’s own commander to stand his weapon down while the Primordial Villain enslaved a peer of the realm in front of her.

The princess had not blinked while it happened.

"Wake up." Quinlan’s cold voice sobered the whole hall.

Corvane’s eyes opened.

He was awake all at once, whole, aware. The command reached down into wherever the beating had sent him and hauled him out of it by the spine, and the count of the Corvane holdings lay flat on the scorched stones of his own record-house, awake because he had been told to be.

His mouth was a ruin. His rings were gone into some soldier’s custody, his furs soaked with melt-water and ash, and when he tried to speak, what came out through the gaps where his teeth had been was wet, whistling, and shapeless.

"Whh... what..."

Then he felt his own body sitting up, though no one had touched him.

Quinlan had lifted two fingers in a lazy come-up flick, and the count had obeyed it before his mind finished screaming that it wouldn’t.

Corvane looked down at his own obedient hands, and the fright that took him made the arrest look like composure.

"No. No, no, what did you... what is this... what did you do to me?!"

"You’ll answer every question put to you in this hall, truthfully and completely," Quinlan said. "Start with the toll."

"I refuse! I..."

The refusal was still leaving his mouth when the answer started.

"The second toll..." His own voice climbed his throat like a bucket dragged up a well, and his eyes went wide and white around it. "...my grandfather set our share of it. The chain above us was already old by then. The crown’s schedule is written in the state’s official ledgers. Ours was never written in theirs."

He got a hand over his own mouth, trying to suppress the treacherous words.

It changed nothing. The words came through his fingers anyway, wet and whistling. The burned record-house stood in silence and listened to a man testify against himself in a voice he was losing to, inch by inch.

"Collection runs up through the tax farmers. The farmers pay the assessors. The assessors pay a man I was never..." The word fought him on the way up and came out sideways. "...never permitted to know. And the coin goes up. The coin always goes up. Since before the Accord."

"Who is it for?" Felicity asked quietly.

"I don’t know."

"You levy an unlicensed toll on the king’s roads," she said, "and you don’t know who you’re collecting for?"

"That is the design." Sweat stood on his face in beads. "Nobody knows the next name but his own handler. Initials in the ledgers. Ciphers on the orders."

His throat worked against the admission and lost it whole.

"A caught man can sell nothing but himself. I know my handler’s mark. I know the chain is long, and that’s it."

By the reading table, the Mediator’s grey eyes had gone still over the ledgers.

"Every branch blind to the one above it," the old man observed, with great serenity. "We build ours the same way. There’s a reason we still stand-"

"Stop bragging." Ayame shut him up quickly.

"..."

"The tolls buy what?" Stormlord’s voice came iron-flat from Felicity’s shoulder.

"Everything." Corvane laughed, one wet syllable with no humor in it. "You think the coin is the point? The coin is the harvest. The machine is the point."

"Explain," Quinlan said.

And the count’s own voice explained it, one sentence at a time while its owner sweated, fought, and lost, and the commission’s clerks wrote until their hands cramped.

"Debt." His tongue found the gaps in his teeth around the word. "Debt is the plow. A baron falls behind, and we are already there, smiling, with terms. A merchant house grows past its place, and its creditors sell us his paper, because we ask nicely. Twice."

"Nobody but a barbarian takes a man’s lands at sword-point these days. We take them at the signing table, at salvage prices, with the law nodding along beside us."

"What if your target doesn’t play along?" Iris asked.

It was the first question she had asked since Quinlan put his boot through the count’s teeth.

She stood with her hand still resting on the stack of rescued volumes, red eyes level on the count. Her voice came out flat and conversational, and every hair on Felicity’s neck stood up at the sound of it.

"The ones who won’t sign get help," the count’s voice said. "A granary burns. A bridge fails. A caravan meets men on a quiet road. A wife hears what happens to children whose fathers are stubborn. Blackmail where there are letters, extortion where there aren’t." His hand pressed harder over his mouth, and the words came anyway. "...the Ravenclaw solution."

The name landed on the hall like a dropped torch.

Felicity’s hand rose halfway to her mouth and stopped there.

Iris did not move at all.

"Explain," Quinlan repeated, lower this time.

"An example." Sweat ran into the count’s collar. "The old writ says lands held by miscreants and debtors revert to worthier hands. It has said so since our lands existed. The ’how’ is left to the man on the ground. That is the design. That is always the design."

"Were you ordered?"

"No. It’s how we always operate. If the first two solutions don’t work, then go for the third..."

He gulped, then...

"Ravenclaw was MINE." The count stopped fighting, then, and the first crack of mania came through the wet ruin of his voice.

"Do you know what that little barony cost me? Gilbert Ravenclaw, the honest baron, the beloved baron, sitting on his muddy border crossing like a toad on a coin purse."

"He would not sell. He would not sink. He kept current, he kept his nose clean, and then he started saying it out loud, at his own table and at everyone else’s, to any neighbour who would sit still for it: that the levies I set on his roads never once reached my county’s coffers."

The laugh came again, wetter.

"He was right! Of course he was right! And a baron who is right, and loud, and beloved, and is not on our side, is to be burned."

"He went and found his own criminals for his little roads. Men like that are never hard to find once a man is already drowning."

"We bought their paper off them inside the month, cheap, because they wanted coin and we wanted land, and the road he broke himself building ran to a city that was already mine. That was the machine, functioning as designed. And when it came due..." His shoulders heaved, breath whistling through the gaps in his teeth. "...collection."

"You sent the collectors under the Covenant of Eternity’s name," Ayame whispered.

"Everyone sent collectors under the Covenant’s name!" The count’s manic edge climbed. "That is what the name was for! The skeletons never cared. Why would they?"

"They wanted corpses, tunnels, their dark little workings under this duchy’s own dirt. They had no use at all for surface land, for tolls, for barley. They took the underworld and left the surface to us, and no fool ever went looking for a debt behind that name, because who hunted the Covenant?"

He wheezed. "We rented their shadow for the price of never lighting a candle in it."

The Mediator’s beard shifted over the ghost of a smile. "Fascinating. A tenant below ground, a landlord above it, and neither party ever knocking. I confess we never managed anything half so tidy..."

The words reached Iris on a delay.

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