Primordial Villain with a Slave Harem

Chapter 1889: Terrible Father

She had not moved through any of it. She stood at the dais’s right in her white armor with the seal hanging on her chest, and her face had been through six kinds of weather in a quarter hour. The whole assembled realm turned to look at her at once.

"I..." Her voice came out tiny. She cleared it. It came out tiny again. "Father, I don’t..."

Her eyes went, helpless, over the floor, past the duke, up to the western gallery. To Feng Jiai, who was gripping the rail with both hands.

"Stop shaking, dummy!" the young jade beauty of Zhenwu called down, into the silence of the entire peerage. "I’ll give you a few headpats afterward."

A wet little laugh broke out of Felicity. "Who wants your headpats?"

Her eyes found Quinlan next. The Primordial Villain had not moved from the rail, hands still on his girls’ shoulders, and he did nothing at all except look back at her.

Then he nodded.

That was enough.

Princess Felicity Valorian crossed her father’s hall with her shoulders back, and if her gauntlets rattled faintly the whole way, the hall generously failed to notice.

She stopped in front of the king. "...Yes, Father."

Alexios looked down at her for a long moment.

Then he took her face in both hands, bent, and kissed her on the forehead in front of the assembled peerage of Vraven. He held her steady after it, because she had begun, much more visibly now, to tremble.

"I am sorry," the king said. "You have a terrible father."

"Wh..."

"I sold your future for a gamble of mine."

His thumbs moved once across her cheekbones. "My advisors would all tell you it was one of the greatest trades in the history of the kingdom. But that doesn’t make your father any less terrible."

Felicity stared up at him.

Her mouth opened, closed, opened. The tears arrived all at once, and with them, out of nowhere at all, fury.

"But... but the concoction!" She grabbed his wrists with both gauntlets. "You just said it! You never planned to die, you never planned to leave me to him, you were going to..." The realization built as she said it, word over word, faster.

"You were going to live until it was safe. You were always going to live until it was safe to pass the crown!"

"Yes," said Alexios.

"Then it was never real!" She stamped her feet on the marble, armor ringing, tears running freely now, fourteen years old in front of six hundred nobles and completely done caring.

"The bad part was never going to happen! You were going to fix everything first, that was the whole point, so don’t stand there and call yourself terrible when the entire scheme was you refusing to leave me a broken kingdom, you, you absolute..."

"Felicity."

"Don’t ’Felicity’ me!" Another stomp. "Take it back! If it’s like that, then don’t call yourself terrible!"

The old king looked down at the crying, furious, shining girl gripping his wrists, and the frost in his face gave way by degrees to old, tired warmth.

He freed one hand and stroked her hair, tenderly, ruinously, in front of everyone.

"I still bet you on my gamble," he said quietly. "Had the Fujimori medicine stopped working. Had they stopped supplying. Had Ravenshade outmaneuvered me. Had I misjudged the continent’s geopolitics. I could go and on. Had any of it gone wrong, you would have paid for my choice, and you’d have had no say in the wager. A father who plays his daughter as a card deserves the title. I’ll keep it."

"You... that’s..." She swiped her arm across her eyes, furious. "That’s NOT..."

"However."

The word came out with a different weight, and the whole hall felt the ground shift under it.

"When I swore that oath, naming you heir was strategy. A coin I paid a schemer, nothing more."

His voice climbed, dry, iron, and absolutely clear, to fill the seat of the nation to its rafters. "Since then, I have watched you walk alone into a war camp to stop a war. I have watched you hold ground at fourteen that broke soldiers of five hundred."

"I have watched you fight and valiantly save the people you cherished. I have watched you choose conscience over your comfort. You made me proud with every single choice when one was offered."

He took a breath.

"I made that call for strategy. By now, I stand by it wholeheartedly. There is nobody in this realm, of any age, of any house, better fit to bring Vraven into the next era than Felicity Valorian. And so..."

The king of Vraven reached up with both hands and lifted the great crown off his own head.

Six hundred people inhaled at once, and the sound was too big to be a gasp.

"Father..." Felicity’s eyes had gone perfectly round. "Father, what, wait..."

"Tharion of Ravenshade." Alexios did not look at the duke. He looked at his daughter, and the corner of his mouth had already curved. "You invoked the oath before the peerage. The oath never had a time limit attached to it, but very well. You may witness its fulfillment."

"That is not..." The duke had gone grey. "You cannot... a coronation requires the conclave, the temple, the writ..."

"The law requires the sovereign’s word, the heir’s blood, and the realm as witness," said a clear voice from the eastern gallery, and Arch Priestess Elisabeth, Dawn Breaker, chosen of the Goddess, stepped to the gallery rail with her white and gold vestments falling straight as scripture.

"The temple has read the same statutes the duke has. The temple finds the hall sufficient."

Alexios glanced up at her, one look, wordless.

His third child looked back at him for a moment, and whatever passed between them had no words in it either. Then Elisabeth descended the gallery stair to stand at the dais and raised her right hand, and dawn-colored light gathered on it like the first sun of the year.

"Kneel not, Felicity Valorian," the Arch Priestess said, warm and enormous, "for a queen kneels to no one in her own hall."

"I don’t... sister, I can’t..." Felicity was crying again, or still, looking from her father to Elisabeth to the crown in her father’s hands. "It’s too... I’m fourteen..."

"I was seven when the Goddess chose me," Elisabeth said. "Fate does not check your age, little star. It only checks whether you’ll carry it."

"By my word," said Alexios Valorian, "before this realm assembled."

He raised the great crown of Vraven.

"I name Felicity Valorian queen of Vraven, sovereign of its crown lands, keeper of its law, and shield of its commons. My reign ends where hers begins, and it begins now."

He lowered the crown.

It was made for a warrior-king in his prime, that crown, forged for a man who had carried a longsword at his hip for a milennia. It went past her ears. It came to rest on the bridge of her nose and the tops of both eyebrows.

The newly crowned queen of Vraven stood before her entire peerage holding it up off her face with both gauntlets, eyes enormous underneath the rim, looking exactly like a fawn that had wandered onto a tourney field.

"Um," said the queen.

The Goddess’s light came down on her anyway.

It fell from Elisabeth’s raised hand in a golden veil, and where it touched the too-big crown the old gold woke and shone.

The Arch Priestess spoke the blessing of the faith over her baby sister in the voice that had broken undead hosts.

"The Goddess lights the reign of Queen Felicity Primrose Amabelle Valorian. May it be long, just, and kind."

The light hung there, gold and patient, while the peerage of Vraven watched, and then it faded.

What had just happened landed on Duke Tharion Ravenshade without mercy. The hall watched him understand, in full view, that the greatest coin in his treasury had just been paid out to the last copper.

This was what he wanted. What he’d been salivating about since Morgana’s womb held its first resident.

A child of Ravenshade blood held the throne now. His niece, extremely young and malleable, ready to be shaped into the puppet he needed to rule the realm from the shadows.

Or so it should’ve been.

The crown he had bought for his puppet sat on the head of a crying girl who belonged, body, soul, and choice, to everyone in the world except him.

The peers of Vraven began to kneel to their new queen, rank by rank, house by house, a tide of velvet going down across the great hall.

Duke Zaren of Duskmere knelt to her beaming, with Calienne sinking beside him in a reverence of vicious elegance, her mad grin hidden in the folds of her bow.

Prince Caelum knelt to his sister. Prince Elias stood one heartbeat longer than everyone around him, looking at the girl under her ridiculous crown.

Then the first prince of Vraven knelt too, to his queen, and if his bow was stiff, it was also, unmistakably, real.

"Long live Queen Felicity Primrose Amabelle Valorian!" someone shouted, the hall took it up, and the roar of it shook dust off banners that had not moved in a century.

In the western gallery, Quinlan sat. The look on the Primordial Villain’s face had nothing villainous in it at all.

Instead, he tenderly smiled, looking like a proud uncle who was invited to his niece’s graduation ceremony.

"Long live Queen Felicity Primrose Amabelle Valorian."