Primordial Villain with a Slave Harem

Chapter 1843: I Claim Her

Beyond the arch, Silverwind learned. Rin heard it happen from her post: a crier’s voice failing halfway through the name, cart wheels stopping, doors slamming, lanterns vanishing down the length of the gate street one after another, and beneath all of it a low human murmur spreading away into the city, thousands of doors and mouths passing the same impossible sentence inward, block by block.

But when Lady Kaede passed, slight and gray with the bundle in her arms, Captain Rin bowed to her lady, low, and held it.

...

The Fujimori buried their dead on a pine hill inside the walls, above the clan estate, where the wind blew off the river and moved through the trees at every hour. Paper lanterns burned at intervals along the path, casting warm pools across the snow as Ayame led them up beneath the pines.

The graves rose in ranks, oldest at the crown of the hill, their names worn soft by weather. Raijin Fujimori’s stone sat in the newest row, black granite, the carving still holding its edges.

Kaede stopped at the shoulder of the hill, three steps short of the family rows, and planted her feet to hold there.

Black Fang left the path without a word and settled against a pine at the edge of the trees, inside earshot and outside everything else. Chizuru remained at the path head, fingers interlaced, and became her own memorial.

Quinlan walked the last stretch at Ayame’s side.

He read the rows once, the way he read any ground he stood on, and his reading snagged. Beside Raijin’s stone, where every other lord in these ranks had a wife’s marker at his shoulder, there was only unbroken snow, bare of any stone or second name.

He hadn’t asked Ayame about her mother. She’d offered nothing, and he’d shelved that silence as old grief best left where she kept it. Graves he understood. The absence of one, here, in a clan that carved its dead into ranked and ordered stone, was a different kind of quiet.

He said nothing. Ayame had reached her father.

She knelt on both knees, spine straight, palms flat on her thighs, in the report posture her father himself had drilled into her, and for a while the pines had the hill to themselves.

"Father. It’s Ayame." She spoke parade-even. "I’ve come to report."

The wind moved through the needles overhead. She let it pass.

"The men and women who arranged your death have answered for it. The blade the ancestors carried across the sea has been disarmed, and it can no longer speak into another Fujimori ear. I helped end it."

Her chin lifted a degree.

"The old status quo as you knew it is over. The equilibrium of the three nations has been broken, for the continent belongs to one man now. The man who saved me, the man I love, the man who accepted me as his second in command. Quinlan Elysiar."

The evenness held through all of it, and it cost her. The grief had waited for this hill, through a slave block and a war and the rebuilding of her entire world, and now it rose up out of the ground. Her fingers dug into her thighs and stayed there.

She was six years old in the dawn dojo, pine smoke off the brazier, and his big scarred hands were closing hers around a practice grip two sizes too large, and he was telling her the sword was honest, that it would always tell her the truth about what she was.

The memory arrived without asking, went through her, and left. She closed her eyes, opened them, and finished the report anyway, because he had taught her that too.

"Father..."

Her voice changed, and what came next was the one she used across a drawn blade.

"You had a daughter before me. You threw her into a forest to die when she had barely learned to walk, and I grew up in a house that refused to speak her name."

The wind leaned the pines and righted them.

"I grieve for you." The words emerged steady. "But I will never forgive you."

At the trees, nothing moved.

Ayame drew a folded cloth from her sleeve and tended the stone in silence, brushing pine needles from its shoulders and working the dust out of the carved name with unhurried care.

"If you were still alive, I’d be speaking to you in a vastly different tone. But you are dead. So..."

She shook her head. "May the Goddess recycle your soul into a pure one."

Quinlan withdrew a few paces down the row and let her work. Somewhere below, a crow made its single comment on the proceedings and was done.

"Where is their mother buried?" he asked Black Fang in a hushed tone, ensuring his samurai wasn’t disturbed.

Black Fang’s attention stayed on the valley. "Nowhere."

"She’s alive?"

"Unknown." A pause with nothing in it. "She disappeared, as far as I know."

"Disappeared."

"Yes."

’That’d explain why she never talked to me about her, and why she doesn’t grieve for her now.’

He reached for the link, and at the path head, Elder Chizuru’s spine, already vertical, achieved a new and previously theoretical degree of uprightness.

arrived down the link in flawless courtly order, "> <You gag a woman’s mouth,> arrived down the link in flawless courtly order, <and then let yourself into her skull. Foul creature.>

"> <The wife of Raijin Fujimori. Where is she?>

The answer came the way all her answers came now, whether she willed them or not, dragged out.

A pause with teeth in it. "> <No one knows.> A pause with teeth in it. <Lady Kasumi retired to her chambers on the evening after Lady Kaede was born, with the child at her breast and the household at her door. By morning she was gone, without a note or a trail or a body, and nothing missing from her rooms but the clothes she slept in.>

"> <That’s it?>

The word was bitten off. "> <We searched.> The word was bitten off. <For six years. Roads, ports, the mountain passes, the river barges, every favor this clan was owed from three thrones and a hundred lesser houses.>

At the path head, the Elder’s clasped hands had tightened on each other.

"> <Afterward, the council forbade the subject inside the estate, for the household’s order, and Lord Raijin never spoke of her again where others could hear. Whether he spoke of her where they could not, I am no longer able to ask him.>

"> <Was she part of the blade’s business?>

"> <No. The council paid her no mind at all. A quiet woman. Unremarkable in every regard. She bore the clan two heirs, kept her household, and made no trouble.>

Quinlan looked a moment longer at the blank snow beside Raijin’s stone, where a wife’s name wasn’t. A woman walks out of a full estate the night after a birth, and the clan’s whole reach fails to turn up so much as a boot print.

He set the question down, carefully, the way he set down anything he intended to pick back up.

"> <That will be all for now. You may return to looking constipated.>

The link closed on whatever the Elder had begun to compose next.

By the stone, Ayame finished her work and tucked the cloth back into her sleeve.

She rose but did not leave. Turning half a step, she kept the grave before her and the pines at the edge of her sight. When she spoke again, the words carried exactly that far.

"One more thing, Father. Look up."

The pines moved.

"The woman by the trees is your first daughter. My elder sister. Black Fang."

She squared herself toward the pines.

"But you don’t get to claim her, for I claim her. I only thought you should see, once, exactly what you threw away."

Black Fang stayed against her pine through all of it, gaze fixed on the middle distance, and gave the hill nothing at all.

Then she pushed off the tree, turned, and walked down through the pines, unhurried, and was gone.

Ayame looked at the empty place where her sister had stood, bowed her head once to her father’s stone, and was done.

She walked back down the row to Quinlan and took his arm, and they started for the path. Where Kaede stood, three steps short of the family rows, Ayame slowed. Her attention stayed on the path ahead.

"Set them."

Kaede’s breath left her.

"Yes, s..." She folded the word in half before it finished, and bowed her head over the bundle, to her sister’s back. "...Thank you."

They left her there. Chizuru fell in behind them at her precise and doctrinal distance, and the path took them down through the pines.

Kaede remained alone at the edge of her family’s dead for a long moment, holding the bundle.

Then she crossed the three steps.

At the foot of her father’s stone she unwrapped the cloth and laid out its contents with both hands, one by one, the way the rites prescribed: the wine flask, the incense, the folded white ash-paper. Her hands shook through the whole of it, and she lit the incense on the second strike of the flint.

The smoke rose thin and leaned with the wind, silver where the moon caught it. Below, Silverwind’s bells rang the ordinary hour, the same as every night.

At the foot of the hill, Ayame stopped walking.

She paused a moment with her back to the graves, and when she faced Quinlan again the grief had been packed away somewhere it would keep. What looked out of her eyes instead had a shine he knew very well.

"The mourning is done." Her thumb pushed the katana a finger’s width out of its sheath.

She grinned.

"Time to collect on your promise, Quin~"