Primordial Villain with a Slave Harem

Chapter 1865: Alexios, You Dare?!

The keep’s outer courtyard had been trampled flat by courier traffic, and the early afternoon light lay thin across it.

Black Fang was already there.

She held the courtyard’s far edge with her arms crossed, on post. Nobody had assigned her anywhere, and nobody mentioned that, either.

Ayame’s grin made it halfway toward a comment, met the violet head-on, and elected to live.

"The capital, then," said Quinlan.

The war of paper waited there, and somewhere behind it, a king holding him to a promise.

He raised his hand, and the [Warp Gate] bloomed in the middle of the courtyard, tall and patient, the air of another city rolling through it.

Black Fang left her post and walked through first, ahead of both of them, offering no explanation to anyone.

Quinlan and Ayame traded a look over the space where she had been. Neither said one word. Some lessons only need learning once a day.

Then Ayame took his arm, the last of Fujimori lands at her back and none of her attention on it, and grinned up at him with the shine he knew best.

"Now then~ Let’s go see how that hopeless workaholic is doing."

They stepped through together.

...

In the Ravenshade ducal seat, the crown’s requisition arrived between the fish course and the wine, and Duke Tharion Ravenshade let it wait through both.

He read it afterward in his study, once, at his own pace, in a room where the maps of the duchy hung in frames worth more than the villages they described. The inkwell at his elbow was dwarven silverwork, older than the dynasty it had been bought to outlast.

Fine paper, heavy seal, correct in every particular. But the hand was no clerk’s, and neither was the voice.

’To His Grace Tharion Ravenshade, Duke of Ravenshade.

Brother.

The crown has undertaken a full accounting of its roads and its tolls. The oldest books in the kingdom sit in your border holdings, and it seemed only proper to honor them first.

The crown therefore requests and requires the complete toll archives of your border holdings, in their original copies, forty years deep, surrendered to the bearers of this letter.

The commission of audit will see to their transport and their keeping. Nothing is asked of your house but what every house owes the crown: the truth of its own records.

I am told the years have been kind to your archives. I look forward to finding them complete.

Alexios Valorian, King of Vraven, by his own hand.’

"Requests," the duke read aloud, to no one. "And requires."

"Alexios..." The name came out of him low, and he kept the rest of it behind his teeth.

His chancellor had carried it in personally, at a dignified walk, because a man seen running through the halls of Ravenshade was making a statement no servant could afford. He stood in front of the desk now and managed his breathing.

"They asked after the missing years, my lord." His voice held level on every word but the last.

"There are no missing years. There are years the river took when the archive flooded. It is a matter of record."

"Yes, my lord. Only..." The chancellor’s thumb found the seam of his sleeve. "They knew which years, my lord. Before a single crate was opened."

The fire ticked in the grate.

It took a moment to reach the bottom of him. When it did, it settled deep.

Audits were for fishmongers and millers, for merchant houses grown too fat too fast.

No king had ever audited a great house, and none had ever dared audit Ravenshade.

His sister had worn a crown. Every royal heir alive carried Ravenshade blood. His house had paid for the realm’s balance marriage by marriage, and now that same realm wanted forty years of his toll books, as if Ravenshade were a cheese merchant suspected of shorting the excise.

"He dares?!" he shouted at last, fists trembling. "He calls me brother and dares?!"

Then the shout finished echoing, and the duke sat back down, because shouting was for the room and thinking was for the house.

He understood the signature well enough. Alexios had spent his entire reign balancing the great houses, because he could afford nothing else. That man did not grow a new spine at his age. Spines like this one were on loan, and the whole continent knew the lender.

The worst of it was that he could not even ask his own blood what was moving in the capital. Morgana belonged to the Villain now, publicly, before half a battlefield of witnesses.

Lilith had sent no word his way in years. The house had spent generations seeding the capital with its own people, and in the hour it finally needed eyes there, every one of them had gone dark or gone over.

Across the desk, the chancellor held his station and made no more sound than the furniture.

What the crown thought it was fishing for, he could not say. Probably nothing. Audits were how a new power shook a tree, to see what fell out and who ran to catch it.

But the border holdings were the wrong tree to shake.

"Cooperate," he said to the chancellor. "Open the crates yourself. Catalog every page, wrap the lot in oilcloth, and deliver it three days early. If the crown wants forty years of tolls, Ravenshade will hand them over in better order than the royal archive has ever kept anything."

The chancellor bowed to him, deep and grateful.

"Two things more. Find me whoever runs this commission. Kings sign what is set in front of them; I want the hand that set it." The duke drew the candle closer. "And have fresh paper brought up. The good stock."

The doors closed. The duke sat alone with the fire and the framed maps, and then he wrote the letter himself.

An invitation, nothing more. The winter hawking in the western woods was at its best while the snow held; Count Corvane’s company had been missed at the lodge since spring; he should come at his earliest leisure, and bring no one, for the lodge staff would see to everything.

Tharion read it over once, blotted it, and sealed it with the raven.

He had written it the way he wrote every letter that truly mattered: in his own hand, and warmly.

The chancellor’s knock came back before the wax had cooled.

"My lord. The commission’s men..." The dignified walk was gone from his voice. "They are not waiting for the crates. Their riders took the north road at dusk, under crown seal, moving fast."

The duke looked down at the invitation in his hand, sealed and still warm.

He had written it three days too late.

Then the stillness broke, and the chair went over behind him.

Fear, when it finally reached the Duke of Ravenshade, came out as orders.

"Call them!" He was on his feet and shouting like a garrison sergeant. "Call every count of the border RIGHT NOW! They must ensure everything is in order!"

The chancellor flattened himself against the map wall as his lord crossed the study at a pace no servant would ever be permitted to describe.

The invitation went into the fire whole.

"And Corvane." The duke stopped at the window, where the dark had already swallowed the north road. "Corvane comes to me. Tonight. My seal and an escort, and if he hesitates, the escort doubles."

The shouting, this time, was for the house.

The last call the duke made himself.

The communication artifact came up from the desk drawer, and the mana he forced into it made the crystal whine. Then it pulsed, and pulsed, and Ravenshade learned what waiting felt like.

"Alexios!" The bare name, at a volume the framed maps had never heard. "Riders on my land in the dark, under your seal! You audit fishmongers, Alexios! You audit millers grown too fat!"

The duke’s fist came down on the desk, and the dwarven inkwell jumped. "You do not audit the house that put a queen on your arm and heirs in your line! You owe this house more than paper, so you will say it to me! What is this?!"

The artifact hummed, patient, while his breathing filled the study.

"The letter says all the crown has to say." The king’s voice came through level, old, and completely unbent.

"What about Felicity?! I’ll-"

The connection died in his hand.

Reckoning was upon the final true bastion of the Vraven Kingdom.

Meanwhile, the other notable factions of the Iskaris Continent were activating themselves as well, making preparations brought by the Primordial Villain’s rise!