Primordial Villain with a Slave Harem

Chapter 1877: The Real Motives

Every rung of the ladder she had climbed since she was a girl had sworn the next one up was the Covenant, and the last Covenant lord alive had told her, laughing, that no such agent ever existed.

Here, at last, was the reason the trail had always dead-ended in skeletons.

And it was such a simple, dumb explanation.

At the table, slowly, her hand came off the ledgers.

"The collection of Ravenclaw’s debt," she said. "Explain how you did it."

"It’s simple. He had debt, we bought his debt, then made certain the money he borrowed could never turn a single coin. So the debt was called, and he paid it."

The wet laugh got out of him again.

"He paid it. Begged it off every neighbour who would still open a door to him, and it broke his back doing it. After that we did nothing at all. He spent eleven years finishing what we started for him."

His collar was black with sweat now.

"When the line died there was nobody left standing on the ground. So the ground went up to the duchy, the way paper always does, and it came back down to me in writing, a fee for tidy administration. Nobody in this kingdom ever asked why."

"The family..." For the first time, the compulsion had to drag against real weight, and the count’s whole face shone with the effort of holding it, and lost. "...the family was priced."

The temperature dropped to freezing. "Priced," Iris said.

"Assets," his voice said. "The mother had a face, and her husband found the buyers himself. Every one of them out of my city, spending my coin. The father had nothing worth taking, so we gave him grief, a bottle, and a decade to dig his own grave. We only stopped filling it in. And the children..."

At Felicity’s shoulder, Stormlord’s gauntlet closed on the haft until the leather spoke, the same sound it had made in the courtyard, and this time it had nothing to do with the Villain.

The count stopped.

He was looking at Iris.

He looked at her like a sum that would not come out wrong no matter how many times he ran it: the black hair, the slight build a swordbelt had done nothing to soften, the two red eyes over the stack of his own rescued ledgers.

And all of it standing in the burned hall of his own keep, at the head of the king’s own commission.

"...No," he said, in his own voice, quite softly.

"The crown sends a red-eyed girl with no name to open my house to the sky," he whistled, "and she stands at the head of it, and she asks after Ravenclaw in specific..."

His breath came faster, and faster, whistling through the ruin of his mouth like wind through a fence.

"There was a daughter. The one who was never delivered." His white eyes climbed to her face. "You. You’re the daughter."

And then, sliding back down onto the cracked stones of his own record-house, with the crown’s chains on his wrists and a slave-brand on his soul, the count began to laugh.

It was a horrible sound.

It came up through the wreckage of his mouth wet and broken-edged, hitching on the gaps where his teeth had been. It went on, and on, climbing over the fire-noise, a man laughing from a place that had nothing to do with anything funny.

Corvane was lying in chains at a villain’s feet, laughing at the ceiling, and the tears sliding into the ash on his face had nothing of grief in them.

"You’re alive!" he wheezed. "Oh, that is... after everything, all this, the audit, the princess, the big bad monster standing on my chest, and it comes down to... ahahaha... it comes down to the little Ravenclaw girl, the one loose thread, walking into my own house with the crown at her back..."

"You know me," Iris said.

Her voice stayed flat and conversational while the ground fell out of the world, and the wrongness of that reached every soldier along the walls.

A man like this, who ruined so many lives, who massacred families while pretending to be a normal vassal, remembered a little girl from more than two decades ago.

To say it was odd was putting it lightly.

"Know you." The count turned his head against the stones and looked up at her, and what was in his face now had tipped past fear into somewhere with no floor.

He knew what he was. He knew what was under him, wearing his soul like a signet. He knew there was no version of this night that ended with him keeping anything, and the knowing had burned through the last of his caution. "Girl, I ordered you."

The room went very still.

"The debt was collection. The lands were the writ. But you..." The laugh bubbled up again through the words. "You were never written anywhere. That is the beauty of the thing. I don’t sign for what I want."

"The order that went down was a child, any child, deniable as weather."

"But the men who do that work knew what pleased the top of their ladder, and a baron’s daughter is a soft thing that grows into a softer one, so they reached for the girl on their own, exactly as I liked, to be raised to my standards. Another ten years, and you would have been..."

What was left of his lips pulled back, and his tongue dragged across the broken ruins of his teeth.

"...perfect."

The word crawled across the hall and fouled the air wherever it touched.

Stormlord’s gaze cut to the fourteen-year-old at his side, once, and back to the count, and the iron in his face had gone brittle at the edges.

"Instead," the count said, "they brought me a damned boy."

Iris did not make a sound.

"A boy!" The mania spiked, indignant, a merchant’s grievance still alive in it, as though under the fear he were still filing this complaint with the collectors. "A useless, worthless BOY, planting himself in the mud of that estate with his little chin up, telling the men his sister deserved better!"

He punched the floor in frustration.

"I had wanted a bride! And the fools on the ground took pity on a brave little speech, took the volunteer, and left the girl I wanted sitting in the dirt between two dead guards."

His breath sawed. "I was sad. I was truly, honestly sad, and I remember the evening exactly. And then I thought, well."

The tongue found the broken teeth again.

"Waste not."

Ayame’s katana came out of its sheath one full hand-span, and the sound it made was the only sound in the world.

"They had him one day," Count Corvane told the ceiling of his record-house, dreamily, while his terror poured off him in sweat and his voice reeled on past every attempt his hands made to stop it.

"Not my men. Write that down properly, girl, your clerks are working so hard tonight. I have never in my life owned a man who carries a knife."

He had to stop and pull air through his own wreckage before he could go on.

"I own the man who owns the man who hires them. The word goes down through cousins and ciphers until nobody at the bottom of it could name me if you flayed him where he stood. That is how a thing like me stays a thing like me."

He looked delighted with himself.

"But men at the bottom guess upward. They guess well. So they washed the boy and brought him to my house that evening, like a gift, and I had my hours with him."

Somewhere along the wall, one of the commission’s clerks stopped writing.

"Then I sent him back down where he came from, because I do not keep what I have already used. The fools holding him got into the wine that night and were thorough with him. By morning there was a corpse where my collateral should have been."

The wet syllable of a laugh got out again.

"Four days after that, the father finally scraped my coin together, so we carried what was left of the boy to his own door and put it in his hands. He paid me anyway. Every copper, borrowed off every neighbour who still pitied him. A debt is a debt."

He rolled his head, found her, and smiled at her with everything left of his mouth.

"And do you know what I remember, girl?"

The fire ticked somewhere down the hall, eating what was left of a shelf.

"Nothing came of it. The fool went wailing to his duke, and the duke swore he would look into the matter, and looked into nothing at all, because that is what a duke does with a dead pauper’s boy. No writ, no reckoning, not one hand from that whole wide world ever reached down for me."

The smile stretched, ghastly. "That is what your family was worth. One night, a box carried to the door, and a father no one troubled to hear."

And then he tipped the rest of the way over the edge. The last of the fear burned off into pure shrieking spite, because he had nothing left to lose and one knife left to throw, and he threw it.

"If you had just COME WITH US," he screamed at her, chains ringing against the stones, "both of you would be ALIVE! Fed! Kept! He’d be a grown man now with a life! You killed him, girl, YOU, his sister deserved better, and better was MY BED, and he died in your place FOR NOTHING, for NOTHING AT ALL!"

The words hit Iris Ravenclaw with full force.