Read Novel Full Chapter 1786: Sincere Words
Chapter 1786: Sincere Words
"That’s... a tree," she managed.
"Are you sure it’s not a bush...?" Void yawned.
"..."
Lilith said nothing at all. While her comrades gawked upward, her eyes made one slow pass across the courtyard, over the pile of elves and children, over the girls, over the doorway of the mansion, hunting for the silhouette of a certain woman that wasn’t among them. When she didn’t find it, she turned back to the group.
"Do not climb the tree," Scar announced to the four of them, flat as a shipping manifest.
"Why would I climb the..." Bronnya started.
"The little lady dislikes strangers climbing her. You would be shaken out."
"...What? Little lady? Climb?"
Scar, with amused eyes, only nodded. "Yes."
The gate flared one final time, and the evening’s strangest guest arrived.
Iris came through with a chain of dark iron wrapped twice around her fist, and at the other end of it, drifting along on a low sled of packed earth, stood a monolith of layered frost with a skull protruding from the top of it.
Gorthrax the Eternal had been encased in ice from the collarbones down, arranged upright like a museum exhibit, and the ember light in his sockets swept across the compound with unmistakable appreciation.
"Young lord of the dead!" His voice rolled out deep and warm, pitched for a dinner party rather than captivity. "What a magnificent seat you’ve built yourself. Normally it would’ve been better beneath the earth, but the tree alone justifies the decision to keep your domain above ground."
"..." Quinlan said nothing.
That did not bother the undead.
"The architecture shows restraint. Clearly, it was built to satisfy your wives who still breathe and care for aesthetics. But strangely, that does not make it hideous."
"You." Elisabeth’s voice lost all the friendly edge it had gained during the tour and its many revelations. "Shut your mouth, filthy abomination."
The skull rotated a polite few degrees toward her. "Priestess. We meet again. You look well."
Iris yanked the chain, and the sled scraped on as the courtyard settled into the warm chaos of a homecoming.
Two elite souls who came through with the crowd held a woman between them.
Kaede Fujimori walked between her escorts on her own feet, but only just barely.
The healers had done their work, and the work had kept her alive, and nothing about the thin, colorless figure between the two dead soldiers suggested that being alive meant much to her.
Her eyes never left the ground. She looked at no one, asked for nothing, and passed through the middle of another family’s homecoming as if the warmth around her were a language she’d never learned.
Ayame watched her sister for a long time.
Then Rosie’s giggle floated up from the elf pile, high and bright, and the courtyard exhaled and remembered itself.
Felicity and Feng found each other by the food tables the maids had just brought out, exchanged the nod of two professionals, and executed a pincer maneuver on the dryad.
"Rosie," Felicity announced, kneeling to her level. "We’ve been sent to escort you to the kids’ table. There are honey pastries."
"Rosie has servants- friends now," Rosie countered from between two elves. "Royal ones."
"The ’friends’ are needed for grown-up business," Feng said, grinning at the shameless girl’s antics.
Rosie gasped then patted Myrasyn’s head twice with grave ceremony. "Rosie releases you. Attend to your business. Then return to Rosie."
"Yes, my lady," the Queen of All Elves said without waiting for a single moment.
The three children departed for the far table, and the adults began drifting toward the mansion as the night took full hold of the sky.
That was when Alexios spoke up.
"Before we proceed."
The noise died on its own.
Ayame turned to face him, and her spine was already straight.
"There is business waiting in that house, and I find I can’t walk into it carrying what I’m carrying." The King of Vraven stood the way only an old king stands, and the exhaustion sitting openly on his face did not diminish that fact.
He looked Ayame in the eyes. "So I’ll say it here, in front of your family. Delaying any further would be a slap to your face you do not deserve."
"When the Fujimori petition reached my desk, it was clean. Evidence, seals, sworn testimony, every page in order. I signed it between a grain tariff and a border report, and that was it."
His hands stayed at his sides.
"A king has reasons. We always do." He chuckled at that, but there was no amusement in it, only a bone-deep tiredness.
Then, he explained with a voice that carried zero conviction, "The dukes are powerful rulers who govern their ancestral lands while resisting every oversight from the throne. A crown that squeezes them breeds the very rebellion it fears. Distance is policy. Trust is procedure. I could stand here all night listing reasons, and every one of them would be true."
He paused, and for a moment the thousand-year-old king looked every hour of it.
"Yet not one of them matters to what was done to you."
Ayame held his gaze and offered him no help.
He continued anyway, and his voice stayed level through sheer discipline and nothing else.
"You were innocent. The kingdom that owed you its protection sold you at auction under my seal, because looking closer would have cost me."
He let the sentence end there, and the stop was audible. It had a second half, a price with a name, and every person in the courtyard heard it.
"You will learn what that cost was before this night is over, along with everything else the questioning drags into the open. When you do, understand this." He held Ayame’s eyes. "It is only context and not a defense. I offer none."
The words came out measured, each one set down like a stone he’d carried too far.
"I was deceived, not because the plot was cunning, but because I allowed myself to be deceived."
Then Alexios Valorian, King of Vraven, bowed his head to an eternal slave.
"I am sorry."
At the edge of the gathering, Kaede’s eyes lifted from the ground for the first time.
Elisabeth went rigid, the retort dying half-formed.
Around the courtyard, the girls had gone completely still, and Quinlan watched without a word, because this belonged to no one but the two people standing in the lantern light.
"The decree dies tonight," Alexios said, head still lowered. "Every record in Vraven that names you property will be struck and burned. Tonight, you, Ayame Fujimori, will be free and-"
"No."
The word came out gentle, and it stopped a king mid-decree.
At the arena she’d had to talk herself out of the tightness in her fingers when this man approached; now her hand rested easy on the katana’s hilt.
Alexios’s head stayed bowed. "...No?"
"Raise your head."
He did, slowly, and found her smiling.
"Don’t call me Ayame Fujimori."
"But..."
"You stripped me of legally wearing the Fujimori name in your kingdom. My legal name is Ayame. Thus you will call me Ayame."
The king straightened, and the ruler in him reached for the remedy he knew how to give. "Then the crown will reinstate you tonight. You will wear the Fujimori name with full legal standing and-"
Ayame tilted her head. "No. That’s not what I meant."
"..."
"I have no use for a clan’s name that tossed me away, especially now that I have a family of my own. So..."
Her smile widened, content and wholesome. "Until the day I legally wear my lover’s name, just Ayame will do."
Alexios went still, holding her gaze for a long second, and then another, the word turning over behind his eyes.
Lover, not husband.
Then the King of Vraven laughed under his breath.
"So be it." He inclined his head to her once more. "My sin will never be repaid no matter what I do, and I won’t insult you by trying. But if you would accept one small gesture from an old fool... when the day comes, the Valorian crown will fund that wedding, however grand it needs to be, so the name you desire arrives the way you deserve."
For a moment, Ayame simply looked at him.
Then the composed second-in-command gave the King of Vraven a grin with teeth in it, one hundred percent her lover’s brand.
"Ready your coffers, old man. And I want your screeching daughter to grant our union the Goddess’s blessing."
"Eh?" Elisabeth gasped.
"...Deal," Alexios decreed, his mouth crooking. "I’ll do my utmost to gain the church’s approval."
"Eh???" Elisabeth gasped again, stronger.
"Good." Ayame nodded.
She had never forgiven the king, any more than she’d forgiven Kaede, and no such words left the samurai’s delicate lips. She only wanted to move on and live the life she desired; demanding blood from people already repenting served no one.
Numerous grins broke out around the courtyard, and more than one of the girls made a sound suspiciously close to a squeal.
Quinlan said nothing, but no one looked prouder than he did in that moment.
Ayame let the smile settle back into composure and turned for the mansion. "Now come, everyone. Let’s find out what those treacherous sacks of bones have been hiding all these years."
The group funneled out of the lantern light and through the mansion doors, family and guests alike.
High above them, behind the one window left open to the winter night, a silhouette sat motionless against the stars, waiting in the room she had prepared.
