Primordial Villain with a Slave Harem

Chapter 1835: The Big Surprise

The room stopped.

"The old measure," she said, louder, already moving. "Send a runner to the weavers’ hall. Run."

Nobody asked what she meant. Two maids simply detonated out of the room, and the wing waited out the longest quarter hour of its collective life until the hall answered, in the form of a cedar chest carried in by two silver-robed elders of the weavers’ guild, borne on their arms with the pace and posture reserved for the bones of saints.

The chest was old. The wax seals on it were older. The senior weaver broke them with hands gone careful with age, folded back layers of cloth soft as breath, and lifted out the garment inside.

White, and gold. A long ceremonial vestment of heavy leaf-silk, its every hem worked with thread-of-gold in the pattern of leaves and seedpods, the geometry of the deep forest made formal wear. It was beautiful work by masters, and it was enormous, cut for a chest like a gate and shoulders like a lintel, its sleeves sized for arms that could carry a fallen tree, or a war.

The room had gone silent around the comedy’s grave.

"There is a story," the old weaver said into that silence, her voice worn smooth from telling it a thousand times to children, and never once to a man who might make it true. "That our men were not always as they are. That long ago, before something broke in our race, an elven man could stand eye to eye with his wife. Match her strength. Grow old beside her, all ten thousand years of it, instead of leaving her behind before her youth was even spent. That some among them could even sport your physique."

She smoothed the folded silk with one flat palm. "A curious old tale. No scholar credits it, but every generation, our hall weaves one garment to the old measure anyway."

She lifted it before Quinlan with her arms at full stretch, and her eyes were bright.

"Forgive an old woman her presumption. It would mean a great deal to some very patient ghosts."

Quinlan looked at the vestment for a long moment. He knew the story. He knew better than any elf alive that it was no story at all. He knew what had broken, and when. None of it reached his face.

"It’d be my honor," he replied, putting out his arms. With trembling fingers, they dressed him in it. It fit to the seam.

The shoulders sat where shoulders sit, the chest closed without complaint, the hems broke at exactly the height of a man no elf alive had ever seen, and the wing of the palace watched the old tale fit him like tailoring.

The eldest maid let out a shaky breath. The silver-haired one simply nodded, once, like a debt had been paid on schedule.

The screens at the connecting archway folded aside then, and the second shift presented its own work.

Sera came through first in white and pale gold, leaf-silk cut low across her collarbones and gathered at her waist with a cord of braided sunlight-thread, her hair brushed to a molten shine and crowned with a thin circlet of white blossoms.

Kaelira followed in deep forest-green shot with bronze, high-collared and elegant, the silk fitted close over the shoulders the forge had built her, dark hair pinned up off her neck with two long copper needles.

Quinlan’s breath stopped. Both of them saw it happen, and neither of them would ever let him forget it.

They were stunning. This was an older, more formal beauty than the warm, familiar one he woke up beside, two elven ladies in the old style, dressed by a palace that adored them, and Quinlan simply looked, kept looking, and made no attempt at all to be subtle about it.

"We’re taking these home," he said at last.

It wasn’t a question, and it wasn’t addressed to the maids. Sera’s grin came out crooked and pink at the same time. Kaelira reached up and adjusted one of her copper needles, very slowly, as if it required her whole attention. Neither of them asked what for, but they knew he wanted to do more than keep observing them in it.

...

Myrasyn was waiting for them in the antechamber of the great doors, and she had ambushed him with ceremony before he had even cleared the corridor.

The Queen of the Elves stood in regalia no court had seen in living memory, robes of deep evening-green shot through with silver, a crown of living braided wood that must have been grown for the occasion, and a stillness that had been rehearsed all day and was already losing to her ears.

They angled toward him the moment he entered, quivered once, and gave the entire operation away.

At her side waited Isveth, Head Maiden of the Faith, in white and gold that answered his own, hands laced at her waist, serene as deep water.

The serenity lasted until she saw what he was wearing.

Isveth’s breath left her in one long, shaking exhale, both hands rising to her lips, and the Head Maiden of the Faith, who narrated miracles the way clerks read inventory, stood staring at two meters of primordial dressed in the old cut of her people, white and gold and impossible, and forgot every word of her office.

She bowed to him, deeply, and did not entirely manage to straighten all the way, as though the geometry of standing fully upright before that sight had stopped being available to her.

Myrasyn fared no better. She only failed more royally.

"You look..." she started, and then visibly discarded the sentence as understating it.

Her eyes made the journey from his shoulders to the gold-worked hems and back with a thoroughness no throne room would ever hear about, and by the time they arrived, her composure was running on ceremony alone.

The Queen of the Elves cleared her throat and reassembled her opening line. "Quinlan Elysiar. Thank you for coming back to me. To us," she corrected, half a heartbeat too late, and her ears folded back in mortification while her face carried on being royal.

"Myra." He grinned and took her in properly, the evening-green and silver, the living crown, all that majesty scrubbed and braided and nervous. "This dress looks good on you. You should wear it more."

The compliment went through her regalia like an arrow through paper. Myrasyn opened her mouth, closed it, and lost a short, vicious internal war over whether queens were permitted to giggle.

"The old cut suits you, Holy Son," she returned at last, with immense dignity and a voice half a tone too warm, and her eyes betrayed her by making the journey one more time. "Far too well."

"You going to tell me what all this is?"

"No." The word arrived instantly and with immense satisfaction.

She had been guarding this word all day, and delivering it clearly ranked among the finest moments of her reign. "You have been surprising me since the day you crashed into my war. Every plan I ever made, you arrived from some impossible angle and made it a footnote." She lifted her chin, eyes bright. "Tonight I get one. Allow me it."

"What took you so long?!" A small ceremonial whirlwind rounded the queen’s skirts. Rosie, re-dressed in a miniature version of the court’s evening finery with her sash somehow already askew, planted herself between the adults and vibrated. "It’s almost time!"

"The pretty elven ladies bathed me," Quinlan replied nonchalantly.

Rosie’s eyes lit up. "Rosie too! Very talented," the little princess decreed with a nod.

"Very talented," her father nodded back.

A few steps back, two bodies had to be caught before they hit the ground.

Then the group walked.

It was finally time.