Primordial Villain with a Slave Harem

Chapter 1834: Twink Garbs

The half-circle of maids lit up like a festival, a joy wildly disproportionate to the task, the joy of people who had won something.

They closed around the two women in a warm tide of guiding hands and reverent chatter, and they were already halfway to the archway when Quinlan pushed off the bench he had eventually been herded onto and followed.

The tide stalled.

A dozen sets of ears swiveled toward him. The maids looked at the Holy Son, then at each other, and a silent crisis moved down the line like weather. Protocol said nothing about this. Scripture said nothing about this. Nobody breathed until the eldest maid turned, bowed to him carefully, and ventured, with the courage of her office:

"Holy Son. Do you... require something?"

Quinlan raised an eyebrow, honestly confused.

"What, I don’t get scrubbed?"

A tray hit the terrace somewhere to the left. Nobody went to pick it up.

For three full seconds the royal household of Luminareth stood in perfect, ringing silence, processing the blessing that had just been dropped on it without warning, and then a maid in the second rank sat down.

Just sat, right there on the terrace boards, one hand pressed to her sternum, while her neighbor made a sound that had last been heard from Isveth in the presence of relics.

"The Holy Son," the eldest maid said slowly, like handling live runes, "wishes for us... to prepare him. Ourselves."

"Is it a problem?" Quinlan asked with a straight face. He was not, whatever that face claimed, a dense man. He was having fun with these turbo loyal and expressive maids.

"A problem." She said the word from very far away. Then her spine straightened, her chin rose, and she accepted the field promotion with the gravity of a general being handed a war. "Ladies. Second shift to the honored consorts. First shift, with me."

The wing of the palace they took him to smelled of warm cedar and blossom oil, and what followed was less a bath than a coronation with soap.

He let them have all of it.

Synchra came off first, at his word, "Take the evening off, let them work," and the living garment rippled once with unmistakable sulk before pouring off his shoulders and coiling herself into a black torc around his wrist, radiating the air of a cat relocated from the one chair she wanted.

The maids inhaled as one. Then there were two meters of half-bare primordial standing in the steam, scarred and monumental in the lamplight, and the first shift of the royal household briefly forgot every procedure it had ever drilled.

They recovered like professionals, working in rotation by some unspoken schedule enforced with elbows in ribs, so that every maid in the wing would be able to say, for the rest of her long life, that she had once attended the Son of the Progenitor, and no sister could say she hadn’t.

One maid combed his wet hair back with the focus of a scholar restoring a manuscript.

Another, evidently the shift’s self-appointed dignity, worked oil into his shoulders with brisk professional strokes that told the entire wing someone here was above all of this. Quinlan rolled the shoulder under her hands, and she went to check on the towels.

A third found the pale old seams scattered across his back, hesitated, and then traced one with a fingertip so light and so reverent that it tickled.

"You can press harder," Quinlan said lazily, eyes closed, arms draped along the rim of the bath, treating being worshipped as a perfectly reasonable use of an evening.

"Yes, Holy Son," she whispered, and did not press harder, because the scar was scripture and you do not lean on scripture.

The drying very nearly caused a schism. The maid who won the right started at his shoulders with a warmed towel and total composure, made it as far as the ridges of his stomach, and had to be relieved of duty by a colleague when her hands simply stopped moving, ears pinned flat, eyes gone somewhere her training couldn’t follow.

Her replacement lasted two ridges longer.

Down the hall, behind screens and steam, a parallel operation announced its own progress. Sera’s laughter rolled through the wall at intervals, bright and scandalized. Kaelira’s voice arrived only once, a flat, carrying "that stays where it is," followed by giggling that suggested it had not stayed where it was.

It was somewhere in the middle of the drying and the combing that Kaelira’s head appeared around the edge of the connecting screen, hair pinned up off her neck, expression puzzled by something other than the four maids currently orbiting her.

"Quin. Didn’t we have an escort?" she said. "Royal. Armored. Hissed a lot."

A pause with genuine thought in it.

"Elowen!" Sera’s face appeared above Kaelira’s, lit with delight.

Both elves looked at Quinlan, ears twitching in wait.

Quinlan, horizontal under three sets of devoted hands, shrugged with the shoulder no one was currently oiling.

"She could use some time in the smithy," he said. "Builds character. I’ll pick her up when I feel like it."

Far away under a mountain, at that exact moment, the royal guard Elowen was being taught her third dwarven drinking song against her will.

The heads withdrew, somehow deciding his response was acceptable.

The operation continued. And then, with the sun’s last direct light going bronze on the windowsills, the operation hit the wall that everyone with functioning eyes should have seen coming.

The clothes.

They brought him the finest ceremonial menswear the palace held, and the palace held wonders: robes of leaf-silk that shimmered like standing water, high-collared court coats embroidered past all reason, garments that would have made any elven lord weep with vanity.

Every one of them had been cut for elven men, which was to say, for willowy creatures whose shoulders had never argued with anything heavier than a harp.

A seam gave first: the finest robe made it over one arm before the shoulder surrendered with a sound like a snapped bowstring, and the maid holding the other sleeve flinched as if wounded herself.

Next came the largest formal coat in the royal wardrobe, which refused to close across his chest by a handspan. The sash reached. Technically.

"He’s bulging," a maid reported from behind him, in a tone unsuitable for tailoring.

"Out of it, or in it?"

"Yes."

The wing descended into beautiful, blasphemous chaos.

Runners were dispatched to farther wardrobes and returned defeated.

Someone proposed summoning the tailors’ hall, and someone else pointed out the ceremony was in under an hour. Someone proposed, very quietly, that the Holy Son could attend as he was, a suggestion that was scandalous, heretical, and seconded twice before the eldest maid killed it with one look.

Quinlan stood in the middle of the storm, arms out, thoroughly enjoying himself while elven maids swarmed him with pins and measuring cord and despair.

"I’ve conquered dwarven forts with less resistance," he told the ceiling.

"Please don’t move, Holy Son."

"No need to fret so much. If you don’t have apparel that fits, I’ll just have Synchra take on a form you’ll find fitting."

"Please don’t say such a thing, Holy Son."

His proposal was shut down instantly, all maids being far too invested in getting him into actual elven garb by now.

It was the oldest of them, a silver-haired maid who had said almost nothing all evening, who suddenly went still in the middle of the panic. Her eyes lost focus, tracking something down a corridor of years, and when they came back they were wide.

"...The weavers’ vault," she said.