Primordial Villain with a Slave Harem

Instead, Quinlan tenderly smiled. "Long live Queen Felicity Primrose Amabelle Valorian."

But he did not bow to her.

Then his whole family was up and cheering with zero royal decorum, a blonde tail wagging madly over the rail, and the noise they made rode clean over six hundred nobles.

"Long live Queen Felicity Primrose Amabelle Valorian!"

Felicity, queen of Vraven, holding her crown off her nose with both hands, went scarlet to the ears and beamed through her tears at all of them, and for one moment the seat of the nation was warm.

Alexios let the roar crest and settle.

Then the old man, bareheaded, turned back to the center of the floor, where the Duke of Ravenshade stood alone in the wreckage of his last card. The hall went quiet behind him like a blade going back to a sheath.

"Now then," said Alexios. "Where were we... ah. Yes."

...

Tharion Ravenshade had been many things across eight hundred years, and every one of them had fought to its last breath.

He rebuilt himself in front of them. The grey left his face by force of will alone, the spine reset itself vertebra by vertebra, and when he spoke again his voice had found its way back to the courtroom.

"My stance stands unchanged." He straightened his rings, one by one. "The crown has shown me a pit and called it proof. Compelled testimony is ash in every court since the founding statutes. That law did not change with the wearer of the crown."

"No," Alexios agreed. "It hasn’t."

The old man gestured. Stormlord came forward, and behind him came the crown’s clerks carrying ledgers in pairs, stacking them on the great floor of the hall between duke and dais, stack after stack after stack.

"Generations of toll schedules came in under seal from nine crossings," Stormlord recited, iron-flat. "The crown’s own schedules sit beside them. The difference between the two columns, year on year, coin for coin, matches the deposits recorded in these." Another stack. "The private ledgers of the granary at Silver Hollow."

"Ledgers written by criminals," Tharion said contemptuously.

"Ledgers written by careful men," said the king. "You taught your inner circle bookkeeping wonderfully. It kept them honest with each other while they robbed everyone else. Every coin that walked north is written down twice by men who never met."

"Nonsense. I don’t know what they are, but not one page of it bears my hand, my seal, or my name given in order," the duke said.

"Because I gave none. A duchy is vast. If clerks and counts built a trough under my roads, then try the clerks and counts. Ambition is not treason, and neither is other men’s coin flowing uphill."

"Forget the coin," Iris spoke and looked at Stormlord.

The commander took up the recital: eleven holdings seized for engineered debts in one county alone, every one escheated up to the duchy on dissolution, every one granted back down to the duke’s circle as a fee for loyal administration, and every grant sealed under the duke’s own signet.

"A long history of stolen land," Stormlord spoke slowly. "Every grant with your seal on it."

"Grants of escheated land are routine!" Tharion began, and for the first time all day his voice reached for volume.

"The motion is heard," said Alexios Valorian, mildly. "And declined."

"On what grounds?!"

"On the grounds that the pit of Iris Ravenclaw is not your evidence of innocence." The mildness dropped out of the old man’s voice on the way through, and what was left was bedrock.

"The paper convicts you on its own. The tolls, the schedules, the deposits, the deeds, the grants under your signet. None of them are proof enough alone, but I have decided that together, they hold."

"Which statute allows you that exactly?!" Tharion screamed.

The hall went very still, awaiting the king’s response.

"Stop hiding behind statutes. They will help you no longer. You’re guilty, I’m sure of it. That’s enough."

"No, it isn’t!" Tharion was going blind with utter rage. "This is RIDICULOUS!"

"For the whole of my reign I have ruled this realm by its own rules, and men like you built your machine inside those rules and called it law. I am done with them."

The king’s eyes moved onto his vassals, observing them slowly.

"With the passage of the crown, the Vraven Kingdom embraces a new future. A great many rules will be changed in the following days. If you’re unwilling to change with the nation, then you have no place inside its borders."

"So let me ask. Who here disputes the legitimacy of the Valorian family’s claim on the crown, and our right to revisit its laws?"

"..."

Six hundred peers stood in their velvet and said nothing at all.

And just like that, the king who spent his entire reign restrained by the rules his ancestors signed, finally behaved like the tyrant he worked to one day be: someone who could dictate how his own nation was to behave, and whose subordinates would have no choice but to bow.

"NO! I REFUSE-" While Tharion was screaming, Alexios turned, and inclined his head to the young queen.

"Your Majesty. The crime is far older than your reign. By your leave, the old reign will sweep its own floor."

Felicity looked at her father. Whatever was still storming in her face, she put it down, all of it, and the nod she gave him was slow, grave, and completely royal.

Alexios Valorian turned to face the Duke of Ravenshade, and the great hall arranged itself into the shape of an ending.

"Tharion of House Ravenshade. On the evidence of your vassals’ records, cross-proven and sealed, the crown finds you guilty of mastering a covert machine of extortion, ruin, and seizure upon the vassals of this realm."

"Guilty of the unwritten toll."

"Guilty of the engineered destruction of houses outside your circle and the enrichment of those within it."

"Guilty of high treason against crown and commons, sustained across a generation."

Each count came down like a course of masonry.

"House Ravenshade ends today. Its lands revert to the crown, entirely. Its armies pass to the crown’s marshals."

"And for the lives," continued Alexios Valorian, quieter, "priced, ruined, carried off in boxes, written out of the books... the crown takes yours."

He let one breath pass.

"The execution belongs to Iris Ravenclaw. She may render it however she wants, for as long as she wants."

The hall exhaled, and the girl with no house began to walk.

She came at him unhurried, boots loud on the marble, a plain figure crossing the last of the crown’s velvet and heraldry. Every banner she passed under belonged to a bloodline with a seat in this hall.

Hers had a grave, and a hell.

Her entire backing on this earth lounged in the western gallery, watching her with open villainous pride. He stayed exactly where he was, because this walk had been hers alone since before he ever met her.

The Duke of Ravenshade watched her come, and the last thing he had left rose up in him.

"Stop," he said, and it came out as an order, because everything always had. She kept walking. "Stop. Before this... whatever this is... ends. I will have one answer."

Iris did not stop.

"[Undying Damnation]."

The air above the marble tore at her feet, wide as a grave. Ember light climbed out of the cut and lit six hundred faces from below, and the heat came with it, carrying the smell of cooked iron.

Below the rim there was no cellar and no earth. Black metal ground ran away in every direction under a sky the color of banked coals, and the whole of it breathed.

"Who are you?!"

The question came out of Tharion with terrible, honest bewilderment, the first fully honest thing the hall had heard him say all day.

"What house sent you?!"

The smile on Iris’s lips arrived slowly.

It was small, it was delighted, and there was nothing sane anywhere in it.

"You actually don’t know." Her voice came out warm.

"Know WHAT?"

"He said my name just now."

Her head tilted.

"Nothing, huh?"

The duke went back for it. His eyes went up and left, the courtroom memory raking through the last ten minutes for a word it had thrown away on arrival.

"...Ravenclaw," he said. "Ravenclaw..."

The name went around his mouth twice and caught on nothing. Then his eyes stopped moving.

"The barony." It came out slow, hauled up from the very bottom of the ducal records. "The little barony. Insignificant border trash. There was..." He stopped, remembering. "...There was a daughter unaccounted for."

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