He looked at her then, truly looked, and the hall watched the Duke of Ravenshade take the full measure of his own executioner and find a footnote.
The first sound out of him was a cough. One dry spasm of disbelief, knocked loose rather than spoken, then another, and then Tharion Ravenshade threw back his head and laughed in the great hall of Vraven.
It rolled out of him in waves, enormous, unpracticed, doubling him over his own knees, the composure of a courtroom lifetime coming apart in front of six hundred witnesses.
"A BARONY!" He surfaced strangled, swiped at his eyes with one ringed hand, and went down again. "One dissolved border barony... a rounding error in a county ledger... THAT is what you are?"
His arm swept the wrecked case, the sealed floor, the throne, all of it.
"The audit! The trial! My house, my blood, my seat! All of it... All of it... over THAT?"
Iris had built this moment in the cage, brick by brick, down every year of the dark: the man at the top hearing her name, going white, understanding at last, in his final breath, exactly what was collecting him.
In all those years of building, she had never once laid a brick where he laughed.
’Hear that, Damian? Mom?’ she thought, very quietly, into the place where her brother lived. ’We’re funny.’
The old wound did what it always did.
It came up her spine as fire.
"’That’ was my family."
Her voice had gone soft, and the whole hall leaned away from the soft.
The red of her eyes had begun to turn, red revolving within red.
"And you’re laughing."
The laughter shut off.
"Yes," said the Duke of Ravenshade, and the humor burned out of his voice between one word and the next. "I am laughing. The renowned history of my house, undone over a stain a bailiff would not have crossed the road to collect."
His hands opened at his sides.
"I refuse it. I will not be ended by a NOTHING!"
The rings answered him first.
"[Attainder]."
Every stone on both his hands went from glitter to glare. Light climbed his arms in ropes as everything banked inside them woke together.
Then the rest of him arrived.
Pressure slammed outward across the hall, and the nearest banners tore off their poles. The marble under his boots split in a star. In the front rows, nobles went down without deciding to, and the great chandeliers swung groaning on their chains.
"He’s about to go all out! Protect your children and wives!" somebody screamed in the front rows.
Level seventy-four.
The realm had been given generations to forget it, because the duke did his killing with clerks and seals ever since he reached that level and faced the same restriction all peak existences did on the continent.
The body under the velvet had climbed higher than almost any peer of this realm, and every rung of that climb was awake now, aimed at the girl with no house.
The duke’s eyes went to the burning cut in his king’s floor, and the courtroom in him priced it in one look.
"A hole in the ground," he said. "That is the whole of your office."
Across from the burning duke, Iris rolled her shoulders once, and her back caught fire.
She wasn’t about to enter a verbal showoff with this scumbag when she could beat the fuck out of him instead.
The Bloodfather’s sigil ignited between her shoulder blades, and its light bled straight through the plain cloth, a line of red-gold burning from her nape to the small of her back. The galleries behind her got the full length of it.
The mark drank deep from the Crimson Reservoir, and her class climbed and climbed, yet it was still going to leave her short of him.
But Iris Ravenclaw never cared about such a problem in her entire life.
Then she opened her hand at her side, and a second seam parted the air beside it, this one narrow as a coin slot. The cut in the floor stayed exactly where she had put it.
It was time to collect.
"[Tithe of the Guilty]."
[The Demon of Vengeance levies a special assessment upon all residents of hell.]
[Collection: 38/38.]
Down in the ember light, thirty-eight torments paid without stopping. The pillars kept climbing, the wire kept writing, the crucible kept pouring, and the levy came up out of all of it anyway.
[The sentence is not suspended for payment.]
What poured up out of the slot was coin: dull red metal, each piece stamped with a howling face, and the stamps were still howling. They snapped to her, sank hissing into her skin, and burned in along the line of the sigil.
Her class ate suffering, and thirty-eight of it had just been paid in.
"Coin from a pit," the duke sneered across the hall. "Even your power is stolen revenue."
The hall, the crown, the watching galleries, all of it fell out of her attention, and what was left standing in front of her was the last rung of the only ladder she had ever climbed: her father’s ruin, her mother’s price, Damian’s terror.
They went at each other in the same breath.
The duke came like a bull, mad and overwhelming, a lifetime of amassed power spent in one straight line.
Iris went to meet him square, resolute, with not a single drop of evading intent in her at all, despite everyone knowing how many levels and stats he had on her.
"[Distraint]."
The duke’s whole treasury came down the line of his arm and into one fist.
"Die!"
"[Torment Cycle]."
She said it into his charge, flat and bored, and planted both boots on the king’s marble.
She got both arms up in front of her face, and his fist came through them anyway.
Her right forearm snapped inside the block. The break went up her arm as white heat, and the cycle swallowed every drop of it.
The rest was distance.
Her body crossed half the hall in one flat line, and the crown’s ledger stacks detonated around her into a blizzard of loose paper.
She hit the marble, skidded through the wreckage of the evidence, and came to rest against an overturned stack with blood running from her mouth and her arm bent where arms do not bend.
"Her arm," a woman said in the middle rows, and put her hand over her mouth. "Her arm’s bent the wrong-"
"Quiet," her husband told her, with no air behind it at all.
Tharion turned his back on her, on the sentence, on the throne itself, and walked for the great doors.
The cut in the floor lay next to him even still. He came up to its rim, looked down into the ember light for as long as a man looks at a puddle, and stopped there to call across it.
"Ravenshade! We are leaving."
By the doors, on the far side of the open hell, six men in his colors heard their duke call. Every one of them found the floor with his eyes and stayed exactly where the marshals had put them.
The duke’s shoulders had just registered that silence when the laughter started.
It came low and wet through the blood, from right behind him. Iris Ravenclaw was in the air, lunging at him with her chin slick red, grinning wide enough to show bloody teeth.
"That’s the hardest anyone’s hit me since I was four."
The duke came around at the sound.
"[Cycle’s End]."
She said it through her teeth, and every drop the cycle had swallowed came back up her spine and arrived in her good hand.
She punched.
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