Primordial Villain with a Slave Harem

Chapter 1844: New Order in the Fujimori Clan

Ayame came down from her family’s graves while holding Quinlan’s arm, unhurried, while the snow filled their footprints behind them, and found the duchy waiting for her at the bottom of the hill in the shape of a single exhausted captain.

Captain Rin stood outside the low gate of the burial hill with her helmet under one arm, planted at an attention so rigid it was clearly holding the last of her composure up.

High behind them, a thread of incense smoke leaned off the hill’s shoulder, marking where Kaede knelt.

Rin bowed to the two of them, low, and held it one breath past protocol.

”My lady... My... Lord...” The words came out level through visible discipline.

She straightened, looked the conquerors of her duchy in the eye, and asked for a chain of command the way drowning people ask for rope.

”What are my orders?”

Quinlan, instead of answering, looked at Ayame.

Ayame tilted her head, and the grin arrived a heartbeat later, small and entertained.

”Why are you asking us?”

Rin’s mouth opened, then made a strategic retreat.

”Your clan leader is right up there.” A tip of Ayame’s chin sent the captain’s gaze up the lantern path, to the incense thread bending in the wind. ”And your elder is standing right behind me.”

”Lady Kaede is...” Rin picked her words the way a courier crosses river ice, and the ice cracked anyway. ”Forgive me, my lady. The city watched her walk in wearing servant’s gray. The honored Elder has not spoken a single word inside these walls. I don’t... I no longer know where my chain of command begins, or whether I still have one.”

Her fist tightened on the helmet’s rim, and the exhaustion she had been holding at attention finally leaked into her voice.

”Every bell, another town writes to a keep that doesn’t answer. My soldiers ask me what happens to the clan now. To the duchy. To them. I have been inventing answers for days, and I have run out.”

”And here you were, hoping the disgraced heir had come home to claim her rightful chair.”

Ayame said it kindly, which was why it took a moment to land.

”I won’t be taking the leader’s role.” She released Quinlan’s arm and faced the captain fully, and the play drained out of her voice. ”I am busy standing second in command to the man who shall rule this continent soon enough.”

Rin’s discipline came off her face all at once just as Ayame finished, ”I intend to be very busy with all of it.”

The guard’s gaze flicked to Quinlan, then back, and what remained of her military bearing sagged around the question. ”Then who rules us? My lady, the towns need someone to answer them, or by spring there won’t be a duchy left worth handing to anyone.”

Ayame sighed at the sky, deeply put upon.

”Fine.”

She turned. ”Elder Chizuru of the Fujimori.”

Parade-even, each word laid down like a document being stamped.

”Restore order to the clan and to the duchy. Answer the petitions, feed the towns, pay the garrisons, keep the roads and the river open. Govern justly in the clan’s name, protect the people of Silverwind as you would the clan’s own honor, and ready its affairs for handover to the new age. You will not act against Quinlan Elysiar, his family, or his interests. Not in letter, not in spirit, not in silence, and not through another’s hands.”

The orders sank into the Elder clause by clause, the bond notarizing each one as it landed. A command from one of the Primordial Villain’s enslaved women bound a lesser slave as absolutely as a command from the Villain himself, and every line of Chizuru’s posture said she felt it.

The Elder inclined her head to Ayame, precisely as deep as doctrine required and not one hair deeper. Then she turned and set off toward the city, and it was the walk of a lifetime: each step arriving separately, as if approved by committee, her hands strangling one another behind her back, a dynasty’s worth of etiquette fighting a full-body revolt and winning by a nose.

Ayame let her get three steps. The smirk that crossed her face as she watched the Elder go was pure, patient sadism, and she took her time enjoying it.

”Oh, and Elder.” She pitched it sweetly across the snow. ”You may speak now.”

The Elder’s stride hitched.

What came out of her, low and venomous and perfectly enunciated, was cursing of the highest doctrinal order. ”Whelp of a disgraced line... clan custom trampled like tavern sawdust... the revered voice of the Fujimori, gagged and ungagged at a girl’s whim, like a, like a house cat...”

”Did you say something, Elder?” Ayame asked pleasantly.

”Captain.” Chizuru’s voice arrived at full ceremonial volume, aimed at Rin, with no acknowledgment that it had been doing anything else whatsoever. ”What are you standing there for? The duchy is drowning in unanswered paper. Follow.”

Rin looked at the Elder’s receding back. Then at Ayame. Then at the Elder again.

She had grown up on that woman. Officers Rin had spent her whole career admiring went quiet when Elder Chizuru’s name entered a room, and counted their fear of her as a badge of service. And that woman had just been unmuted on order.

The new order of the world settled into Captain Rin only then, at the foot of the burial hill, later than the opened gates and the bells and the wanted posters had managed it. Everything she had sworn her life to now answered to the tall man in black and the short woman at his side.

She put her helmet on.

Then Captain Rin of the western wall bowed once more to Ayame and Quinlan, deep and unhurried, the bow of a surrender given honestly, and jogged off through the snow after the Elder, toward a duchy that had orders again.

Quinlan watched her go. ”She looks promising.”

”Mm. She’ll do.” Ayame reclaimed his arm, and her attention had already left the city entirely. When she looked up at him, the shine from the bottom of the hill was back, twice as bright and twice as dangerous.

”Now then~” she hummed. ”About that debt of yours.”

...

The Fujimori estate received its heir in silence.

What staff remained pressed themselves to the walls of the winter courtyards and bowed to Ayame as she passed. She acknowledged none of it. Her evening held only one item, and none of them were on it.

Black Fang came with them, a step off the path and silent.

She had fallen in with her sister somewhere on the way down from the pines, without being asked or invited. Now the estate her father had thrown her out of went by on both sides of her: the winter courtyards, the lantern posts, the bowing staff, the tiled roofs she had been born under and didn’t remember sleeping beneath.

Her gaze crossed all of it at the same even pace it crossed everything else. Then she looked away from the last roof and did not look back, and the house of Fujimori got no more out of her than her father’s grave had.

Ayame met her sister’s eyes and held them for a breath. Nothing crossed between them that a third person could have named, but Black Fang turned toward the dark and disappeared.

Quinlan considered the nothing she left behind. ”So that’s what the poison bath bought.”

”Hehe~ Yes, I asked her for privacy when the time came...”

Quinlan’s grin came out slow, and his hand found the small of her back.

The dawn dojo stood at the head of the estate’s oldest courtyard.

Ayame slid its doors open with both hands, and the hall breathed out at her: brazier warmth, pine smoke, a floor polished dark by generations of bare feet, and racks of training steel and ironwood lining the walls in ordered ranks. On the far side, a second set of doors stood open to the snow garden, where moonlight lay across the veranda like a second floor.

”The dawn dojo.” She said it quietly, without turning. ”Every Fujimori is tested on this floor, and every duel fought here is fought before the ancestors. Their verdicts are truth. This is the most sacred ground my clan owns.”

”From what I remember, your desired dress code doesn’t quite fit such an occasion...” Quinlan mused.

”The leader sets the terms.”

”So we should ask Kaede.”

She sent him a sly look, stepping forward, one pointer finger landing on his stomach. ”Stop playing dumb with me, Quin. I know I said Kaede was the leader, but we all know...”

Her finger raced up and found his heart. ”...that just like with the rest of the continent, we are the real bosses. Or will be soon enough~”