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2.28 In Which the Dark Lord Enrolls Some Nobles in the School of Hard Knocks
🕑 Added 2021-12-03 01:35:39 +0000 UTC“Ohh, no,” the talkative bandit groaned. “He said the thing.”
Two of his compatriots smacked him quiet this time.
“All right, ladies,” I said. “Everyone crowd around, get a good look. You know the drill: sing out if you have a claim to make.”
“What’s he talking about?” one of the men whispered as my followers shifted position. A couple of them glanced behind, clearly considering trying to bolt since the crossbow-toting women were all moving around to the front where they could see the men’s faces. Any such ideas were dissuaded by a matching movement of the second rank: the gwynnek riders guided their mounts to form an even more terrifying killbox behind them.
“Yes, what are you talking about?” Lady Elidred demanded.
“A moment, please, my lady,” I said politely. “This should not take long. Well, any familiar faces?”
“Him,” said a voice from the crowd, pointing.
“Me?” Squeaked the most vocal of the bandits, pointing at his own face.
“No, to your left.”
“Wh—me?”
“His other left, dumbass!”
The guy to his actual left looked alarmed, as well he should. “What is this? What did I do?”
“Yeah, you’re right.” I recognized the woman who moved forward, despite the cloaks and masks. Thwynit was one of those who still liked to wear her skimpy prostitute’s dress under the black cloak, and she was nearly as well-endowed as Minifrit; I had started actively avoiding looking at her out of fear of triggering a flashback. Now, she hefted her crossbow, drawing a hiss of fear from the man indicated as she prodded his chin, forcing him to raise his face into a more visible position. “I recognize him. This is Freebie Guy.”
“Well, I mean…” Freebie Guy grinned weakly, trying to put on a disarming facade without taking his eyes from the loaded weapon centimeters from his face. “We’re bandits. Aren’t we all Freebie Guys, by definition?”
“What are you all talking about?” Lord Ediver exclaimed in exasperation.
“Hey, it is Freebie Guy!” Keffin exclaimed, incongruously cheerful as was her personal brand. “I totally didn’t recognize him. Never seen him in the daylight before.”
“He’d come into the establishments in Cat Alley to drink with his buddies,” Adelly stated in a much more grim tone. “Paid for his ale and food and left without hiring a girl. He liked to joke about getting ‘freebies.’ Then, some nights, he’d lurk around the rear exits by the canals. Down at the ends of the street where the poorer cathouses were, the ones without bouncers, to see if he could catch somebody outside. Over the last two years he raped Lannin and Miarit and another girl whose name I didn’t learn, and those are just the ones I personally know of.”
“Also Norrie,” said Kastrin, raising her own crossbow to a firing position.
Silence descended, and reigned for a chilling moment as Freebie Guy became the focus of everyone’s direct stares. The movement was subtle but noticeable as every single crossbow shifted from covering the group to aiming at him directly.
“Hey, now, let’s…let’s not blow this out of proportion,” he said with a nervous grin, raising both hands. The men to both sides of him had already begun edging away from the line of fire. “Come on, now, be realistic. We are talking about whores. That’s… Basically, it’s just shoplifting, right?”
It was really amazing how menacing a formerly awkward silence could suddenly become without anybody saying anything.
“I mean, come on,” Freebie Guy stammered, starting to take shuffling little steps backward, apparently having forgotten the bow-wielding gwynnek riders in that direction. “I’m already reduced to living in the forest like an animal. What more do you want?”
I cleared my throat. “Well, then. Anyone have a personal claim?”
“Just a moment,” Highlord Adver interjected. “Personal claim to what?”
He was ignored, which was probably a new experience for him. I looked around at my silent followers for a drawn-out moment during which no one spoke up.
“Very well,” I said at last. “If no one present has dibs—”
Five separate crossbow bolts slammed into Freebie Guy, one (probably Kastrin’s) cleanly through his eye; he was dead by the time he hit the ground. The rest of his gang dived away, huddling into the scant cover of khora outcroppings. Behind me, I heard an abortive scream from Lady Elidred, quickly clamped down upon as she regained control.
“Lord Seiji!” Adver thundered, taking an aggressive step toward me and seeming not even to notice the crossbows which were turned on him in response. “I have granted these men leave to stay on my lands! I don’t know how things are done in your country, but in this part of the world to assault another Clan’s vassals within its own domain is tantamount to an act of war!”
I stared at him steadily for a moment. Then looked pointedly at his two soldiers, who had stepped up protectively alongside Lady Elidred. Then around at my encircling armed followers.
This fucking guy, I swear to god.
“I shall have to throw myself upon your forbearance, Highlord,” I said, bowing to him. “Unless you would care to have a discussion about what these men have been doing, and your responsibility for it.”
That took the wind out of his sails immediately. I let him flounder for two beats before continuing in a gentler tone.
“It’s the inherent dilemma of sponsoring bandits. Believe me, I know. As you and your lady wife have so aptly observed, many of those driven to banditry are victims expelled from normal society because Fflyr Dlemathlys is a preposterous heap of nested injustices clumsily masquerading as a nation. Many, perhaps even most, but not all. There are also those who would have ended up as criminals in any country due to their own predilections.”
“And so you would have them judged by—by whom?” Elidred hissed. “A random coterie of prostitutes?”
I turned to her with a shrug. “Who better?”
The Lady gaped at me, lacking an answer to that.
“After all,” I said with a pleasant smile, “what’s a whore worth? Absolutely no one cares about them. You can do pretty much anything to a whore, and what’s she gonna do about it? Go to a guard? They’d laugh, and if she was lucky that’s all they’d do. The Cat Alley girls all know better than to be caught alone by the Kingsguard if they don’t want to get beaten up and probably raped. A judge? Those guys are the reason most of them were fraudulently indentured and ended up in brothels in the first place. A whore is nothing in this society. And that means they get to learn truth. If you want to know who someone truly is, my lords and lady, you have to watch what they do when their actions have no consequences. Priests, judges, nobles… None of them know the weight of men’s souls. The whores know. They know better than anyone should have to.”
I met the eyes of each of the nobles in turn; Ediver was frowning as if chewing on these ideas, but his parents just looked gobsmacked.
“I’ll tell you something else I’ve learned since coming to your charming country,” I said, turning back to the huddled bandits. “Guys like that can never seem to control themselves for long. You, Master Viarin. Tell me, who else did Freebie Guy here go after?”
Vairin peeked at me over a large khora root, wide-eyed and trembling.
“No one’s going to shoot you,” I said gently. “Come on. There was something, wasn’t there? Probably a whole bunch of somethings. Little…incidents. Right?”
“I…he…” Viarin swallowed heavily, his eyes flicking from one loaded crossbow to another in rapid succession. “Th-there was…once, here in the gang. W-we tried not to let Deckon be alone with…I mean, around women. But, uh…he got to one of the village girls one time. We, um, were more careful about him since that.”
“That would be this village?” I prompted. “On this land?” Viarin nodded, and I turned a pleasant smile upon Lady Elidred, who had gone bone-pale. “That would be one of your own people, then, who looks to Clan Yviredh for protection. That happened to her because you lot were fostering and sponsoring bandits in the nearby forest, with no plan to control them.”
“We…it’s not as if we had any ambition to send them against our enemies,” Highlord Adver said weakly.
“We laid out rules,” Elidred whispered. “They were not to touch our people. They promised us.”
One of the women surrounding us let out a loud, derisive snort. The remaining five bandits were just beginning to creep out from behind the khora again. Now they all hunched and avoided looking at Lady Elidred.
“Compassion is a wonderful thing,” I said quietly. “I wish more highborn had as much as you two. Unfortunately, compassion not tempered with sense and restraint only gets taken advantage of. That’s another thing the lowborn know, because they never have the chance to go through life without learning it the hard way.”
“You don’t know what it’s like out here,” Viaran said, his own voice barely above a whisper. “Even with the Clan’s kindness… You depend on the people around you. None of us could make it on our own. We could chase him out because… I mean. You learn…to tolerate things. You just don’ t know.”
“I do, in fact, know what it’s like,” I answered. “So do all of these ladies. That why you aren’t being shot right now, and won’t be. All of us have had to do things we’re ashamed of just to get by for one more day, and we’ll all undoubtedly have to do more before the end. But together, we can do a little bit better. You work for me now, gentlemen, and that means there are rules, and standards. No more standing side by side with rapists, for one.”
“I see,” Lord Ediver said unexpectedly, nodding and wearing an expression of dawning revelation. “So there is honor amongst thieves.”
Oh, hell no. I could see the direction of the kid’s thoughts and moved immediately to shut that down.
“Do not mistake anything you just saw for justice, Lord Ediver,” I stated. “It wasn’t. Retribution is the inadequate substitute we have to settle for because there is no justice in this damn country. You are a member of the ruling class; you have more influence over things than any of us. If you want to help, grow up to implement actual justice where you can, instead of just killing assholes where they pop up.”
“I understand, Lord Seiji,” he said, nodding again and staring at me with a fervent look that reminded me uncomfortably of… In fact, no, it was the exact same expression I’d seen on Yoshi’s face the first time a goddess told him he could be a Hero. The look of a kid who had not listened to a thing I’d tried to tell him and just found a new way to be chuuni about it.
Fuck it, I tried.
This was the part where ordinarily I’d make one of my famous speeches, but the presence of the Yviredhs complicated matters. They and I were bound together by a tenuous web of mutual self-interest and the awareness that I could easily kill them all; it wasn’t a close or solid relationship, yet, and I had probably just traumatized them as much as I could get away with for a while. I couldn’t afford any grand statements about toppling the highborn when these highborn in particular were already obsessed with clinging to their precarious position. Bringing up the Dark Lord thing was absolutely out of the question.
“All right,” I said more briskly. “Viaran, I’ll need to borrow you for the time being.”
Master Viaran squeaked rather like a dog toy.
“With Highlord Adver’s permission, of course,” I added, turning to the lord himself. “We’ll need to return to the manor to plan the next step, and the input of someone who’s been on the ground out here will be invaluable. Don’t worry, Viaran, you’re not in trouble.”
“I…yes, of course,” Adver said slowly, seeming slightly dazed by the events of the last few minutes. “That is quite sensible, Lord Seiji. I have maps and knowledge of the island’s politics, but I am rather in the dark about the movements of bandit gangs apart from this one. It’s a shame Kandwyd was taken to Gwyllthean. Ah, that was the de facto leader of this gang, Lord Seiji.”
I nodded to him before shifting my attention elsewhere. “Mimi! Take your team and incorporate these new guys. I want you to bring them up to speed on my expectations and how we do things. Remember what it’s like for first-timers and take it easy on them as much as possible. The carrot rather than the stick, when you can. That said, we haven’t the luxury of time to dawdle; if any of them try to attack you or flee, shoot them on the spot.”
My five new recruits hunched their shoulders in frightened unison, but Miraimi just nodded once from astride her gwynnek. “Hai!”
I managed, barely, not to spoil my presentation by outwardly goggling at her. What was that? I didn’t remember doing that in front of… When had she picked that up? I was glad Biribo was hiding in my coat at that moment; when we weren’t in discreet mode, he usually had something snarky to say at my expense at moments like this.
“Job one is to establish a new campsite,” I said, mastering myself. “A more discreet spot, far enough from here that when the Olumnach Clansguard come around to check in on this lot they won’t immediately stumble across it. Our new friends know the terrain and can help you. Take what’s immediately useful and portable from this site, and we’ll retrieve the rest later. I want you to set up a light camp, something that can be pulled up and moved quickly, and once you’ve done that scout around to find more locations to which you can retreat.”
“You want to…hide from Clan Olumnach?” said the chattery bandit whose name I still hadn’t learned. “Uh, m’lord, this ain’t a huge khora patch, and out the other side is Clan Fwyndlich land. Scouts who find this spot abandoned will be able to track us.”
“Yes, but tracking takes time,” I said patiently. “And because you will be keeping a proper watch, you’ll see them coming and be able to evade. I don’t want you throwing down with any Clansguards if it’s at all avoidable, the objective is to deny the Olumnachs a grip on you. Congratulations, you are being liberated.”
All five of them instinctively looked down at the remains of Freebie Guy.
“What do we do about Deckon?” Viaran asked nervously.
“Ah, right, thanks for reminding me. Girls, retrieve your quarrels, there’s no sense in wasting ammo.”
Viaran drew in a deep breath, visibly steeling himself. “I meant his body, Lord Seiji.”
“You mean the bait left out to confuse the Olumnach scouts?” I held his gaze, keeping my face expressionless. “Mimi will catch you up on the rules, but I’ll tell you up front that we do not tolerate any abuse of women or harm to children in my organization. Anyone who pulls that shit gets left for the crawns. Am I clear?”
“…clear, m’lord,” he said. The others nodded.
“Mimi, once you settle on a spot, send someone to the manor to bring Viaran back to it.”
“Hai!” she repeated crisply. “All right, gentlemen, you heard Lord Seiji. Welcome to the team. I want everyone packed and moving—you have five minutes before I start getting motivational.”
“We should…” Everyone had already started separating into groups, so despite Lady Elidred’s lowered voice I clearly heard her since I was just that moment stepping over to rejoin the Yviredhs. They had clustered closer together, Ediver looking puffed up and clearly imagining himself to be his mother’s protector out here in the wilderness. The Lady had to pause and clear her throat before continuing, her dark eyes still fixed on the corpse. “Master Viaran, I must learn who this village girl was. This… What happened to her was our responsibility, the result of the Clan’s actions. She is owed some recompense.”
“I, ah…” Viaran, who overall seemed so nervous in disposition that I both questioned how he’d survived as a bandit and fully understood why he hadn’t been sent to Gwyllthean, now cringed and dry-washed his hands. “My Lady, I don’t…know. We avoid going near the villagers, like you told us. I might recognize her if I saw her again, but…”
“Lady Elidred,” Aster spoke up unexpectedly. “A young woman with a good reputation would not want attention drawn to something like that. Most likely she would prefer to put it fully behind her. The criminal has been punished and the other bandits are properly under control now. The best thing Clan Yviredh can do for her now is continue to provide the best governance possible for all of your people.”
To judge by their expressions, neither of the Yviredhs were accustomed to lowborn talking to them out of turn, let alone offering unsolicited advice on how to administer their fief. After the events of the morning, though, both appeared too rattled by everything they’d just seen to object. Especially the Lady. Despite my generally low opinion of nobility as a concept and Fflyr nobility specifically, I couldn’t help feeling bad for Elidred, who I could tell was badly shaken.
Ediver, though… I turned my attention to the teenager just in time to seethe moment when he registered that Aster was quite pretty and well-built. Poor kid was probably gonna have a thing about women with big swords now. Oh, well, there were worse qualities a boy could go for.
Highlord Adver cleared his throat, rescuing us from the uncomfortable silence. “Well. It seems…we have a great deal to consider. For now, let us repair to the manor, as Lord Seiji suggested, and plan our next steps.”
***
With the front gates of Caer Yviredh in plain sight of the village, we had to take the back entrance again. Clan Yviredh’s alliance with me needed to remain a secret to protect them from our mutual enemies. They were a much easier target. Besides, the highborn appreciated my discretion on the simple grounds that being seen to associate with the likes of my scruffy ass would have been embarrassing, though they were courteous enough not to come out and say it.
Thus, I peeled off from them amid the khora and Aster and I made tracks as quickly as we could back around to the rear of the manor, leaving the rest of my followers who hadn’t gone with Mimi’s group to rejoin our own encampment just below the walls. There, we had to wait for an opening, as there were a lot more potential witnesses about at this time of day than after sunset, but thanks to Biribo it was no trouble to find a window during which nobody was watching. The entry was much easier this time since they’d left the little tower door open for us.
Despite our haste, we definitely had the longer path back, so I was somewhat surprised to arrive at the front doors of the manor itself at the same time as the family. Then again, they probably weren’t very athletic people and didn’t share our sense of urgency. About much of anything, I suspected.
The somewhat uncomfortable greetings were swiftly cut short by what we found in the spacious entry hall of the Yviredh mansion.
“Come on, I’m tired of standing and walking! I already know how to dance. When do we try actually fighting?”
I’d left three of the noblewomen with me at the manor, including Nazralind; it was she who was now standing in the hall with the young Lady Avelit, both of them holding practice rapiers that were little more than akorshil sticks with handguards and rubbery balls stuck on the end. At the moment we all arrived, it appeared Nazralind had been coaching the girl in footwork, but now Avelit began impatiently swishing her stick in wide arcs.
“The fundamentals are how you avoid stabbing yourself in the foot in an actual fight, my young Lady. And don’t ever let me catch you swiping a rapier around like that!”
Naz deftly intercepted Avelit’s weapon with her own, swatting it clear out of her hand and across the hall, to the girl’s astonishment.
“It is not a slashing weapon! You attack with the tip,using small, controlled movements. That is what makes it an effective weapon for women, as opposed to one dependent on the strength of your upper—”
“ABSOLUTELY NOT.”
I was, to my relief, not the only one to jump in startlement at Lady Elidred’s uncharacteristic roar. I decided not to hold it against her because it gave me the opportunity to appreciate the magnificent acoustics of the entry hall. Also, in that moment I was honestly a little scared of her.
She stalked across the tile floor with the powerfully mincing stride of an offended lioness, brandishing one accusing finger at Nazralind while her wide-eyed daughter tried to backpedal out of the danger zone.
“I have endured no end of indignity and imposition from you people, and will continue to do so as necessary, but this is where the line is drawn. There will be no corruption of my family, unless you intend to inflict it across my cooling corpse! Yes, I know very well you are quite capable of taking me literally at my word. Test me if you think I exaggerate!”
“Mother, please,” Avelit began.
“Not one word from you, young lady. And you!” Elidred made a sweeping gesture with one hand which effortlessly gathered Avelit behind her from across the room, almost as if she’d physically grabbed the girl, and with her other brandished a finger directly at Nazralind’s hooded face. “Are you so very hard up for recruits that you seek to induct my children into banditry?”
“Your pardon, my lady,” Nazralind said in a soothing tone, “but nothing of the kind. Fencing is a revered tradition among Fflyr highborn, as I am sure you—”
“Ah, so you merely want my daughter to become a boy? I am sure you think yourself quite liberated, girl, but in this household a young lady shall—”
I was actually surprised anything sort of violence could shut her up, given the head of steam she had going, but Nazralind managed it by simply lowering her hood.
She still had the mask of black cloth obscuring her lower face, but everything from the nose up was suddenly in full view. Her golden hair was even spikier than usual, having been tousled under that hood for the better part of two days; she had a real Cloud Strife thing going on. Even those erratic locks didn’t hide her long, pointed ears, however.
Avelit was the only one who gasped; from everyone else there was absolute silence. I knew the Yviredhs were perceptive enough to have noticed that some of the cloaked women accompanying me had the pale skin and dark eyes of highborn, but they were clearly flabbergasted to find an elf among my followers. Raised to revere elves as the chosen descendants of Sanora herself, this threw every social calculation the poor lady had into inextricable disorder.
“I envy you, Lady Elidred,” Naz said quietly, her soft voice echoing in the stone-silent hall. “For not having had occasion to learn firsthand that the greatest danger to women of our station is not the rough world outside, but the men we trust to protect us from it. And that the source of that danger is the expectation that we must be protected by them. I was certainly much happier before I understood that. Now…” She shrugged slightly, making a minute flicking motion with the tip of her practice rapier. “I cannot say I feel liberated. Merely…better prepared to survive. I earnestly hope Lady Avelit never has to use a blade upon another living being. I would hope that for all of us. But tell me in honesty, Lady Elidred: do you believe we live in so blessed a world? And would you rather she be unable if, Goddess forfend, that day should come?”
Elidred was breathing heavily, air hissing between her teeth, as she clearly struggled with a torrent of different emotions. Most of which, I knew, did not stem from this minor altercation. I found I sympathized with her a lot more than I liked—and also, it would cause me no end of trouble if she and Nazralind came to blows, not least because Naz could tie her in a knot and I suspected that would sink my nascent alliance with this Clan.
So I did what I do best: made myself the center of attention.
“You’re all just so nice,” I said, just loudly enough that my voice cut through the tension, causing Nazralind and even the distraught Elidred to turn toward me. “In your naive, high-handed, aristocratic way. So very…decent. I really cannot express to you how frustrating it all is. I came here expecting—planning, in fact—to bully and intimidate you people into complying with my wishes, but here I find a family of kind, well-meaning people shoulder-deep in this island’s criminal underbelly with no idea the dangers you’re fucking around with, and now I have to finish rescuing you all from the consequences of your good intentions before I can even start actually bullying you into compliance. And that’s going to take no small amount of doing. Worse, I’m starting to be afraid by the time we get there I just won’t have the heart to push you around anymore.”
Lady Elidred stared at me, then closed her eyes and let her head hang for a moment. But she did it with a smile. A defeated little smile of bitter quasi-amusement, but it was better than nothing. At least it prompted Avelit to tiptoe over and gently take her mother’s hand.
The sound Adver made reflected his wife’s expression: a soft huff that might have one day grown up to be a laugh if it weren’t so tired.
“I have the strangest feeling, Lord Seiji,” he said, “that you and I are going to become much better friends than either of us are comfortable with.”
“Well said,” I agreed with a rueful chuckle of my own. “Now I think I’ve distressed your lady wife more than enough for one day. Let’s have a look at those maps.”
Comments
Eric
Which would explain the crossbow bolts that ended him in a somewhat satisfactory manner. Personally, I would have aimed lower.
Russell Todd
Very much enjoyed this chapter :)
Too Much Sanity May Be Madness
I have an impressive lack of tact, but even I am flabbergasted at the notion of calling raping a sex worker "shoplifting," in front of multiple sex workers wielding crossbows. That's a level of stupidity akin to walking a tightrope made of barbed wire, strung over a volcano, barefoot.
