Chương 191: 24. Dead Men Tell No Tales 1

"One moment, Your Highness." Just as Ignicia was about to drag Haerdin out—hauling this particular piece of still-breathing trash—a voice cut in from the side. Cold as winter iron pressed against bare skin. Everyone turned at once. Lei Lian. The tower general who had nearly opened Haerdin's throat minutes ago had, at some point, moved to the table. She picked up a blank wooden placard and began writing in swift, heavy strokes.

Her hand was perfectly steady—not like someone preparing a shaming sign, but like someone countersigning a death warrant. I craned my neck instinctively. Then nearly choked trying not to laugh. Written in clean, uncompromising characters: I AM A CORRUPT BASTARD WHO DESERVES TO DIE. … Brutal. Genuinely, elegantly brutal. If Ignicia's interrogation had been the trial, this was Lei Lian stamping his forehead and peeling off his last shred of dignity with the skin still attached.

Lei Lian carried the placard to Haerdin. She didn't throw it. Didn't hand it over politely. She shoved it directly into his arms, blade-edge eyes bearing down from beneath her visor.

"Hold this," she said, with no inflection whatsoever. Haerdin's hands shook so badly he nearly dropped it immediately. Lei Lian's eyes went colder.

"Drop it," she said, spacing each word, "and I will cut you into pieces." The flatness made it land harder than any scream. Honestly, compared to Ignicia's straightforward I will burn you to ash approach, Lei Lian's I will carefully turn you into a sampling platter aura was terrifying in a completely different direction. Haerdin clutched the placard to his chest like a lifeline. His expression suggested he believed he was holding not I deserve to die, but his last immunity token. Unfortunately for him, it wasn't.

"Good." Ignicia nodded with satisfaction. Then, like hauling a sack, she yanked Haerdin toward the door.

"Let's go." Following them out, I couldn't stop myself from muttering:"You actually enjoy this ceremonial humiliation thing, don't you?" Ignicia didn't look back.

"No," she said.

"I just find it more efficient when the trash labels itself." The moment we stepped outside, harbor wind hit us immediately. Salt, tide, fish, alcohol, and that particular atmospheric quality of a place where money changes hands and fortunes collapse in equal measure, every single day. Today, the fortune collapsing was Haerdin's. Word had traveled faster than the sea breeze. By the time we reached the stone path toward the outer harbor execution ground, people had lined both sides.

Dockworkers, net-menders, fish vendors, barrel carriers, men who'd abandoned half-finished drinks, and the category of person who simply gravitates toward any spectacle—all pressing in. It started as murmurs.

"Isn't that the Governor?"

"Is that really him?"

"What does that sign say?"

"…I am a corrupt bastard who deserves to die?"

"Pfft—" Then somebody with more courage than sense fired the opening shot.

"Governor! Finally decided to be honest with us!" After that, it was beyond recovery.

"You always looked so righteous collecting those fees!"

"Port taxes weren't enough, so you went and sold the whole harbor?"

"Maritime defense levy—I never saw any defense, just your stomach getting bigger!"

"Hold that sign tight! Drop it and the General will slice you up!" Haerdin's face had gone the color of wet ash. He clung to the placard with both arms, feet barely connecting with the ground. Then the first rotten vegetable arrived. Splat. Right on his shoulder. Second one immediately after. Third. Half-decomposed tomatoes, fish heads of indeterminate age, blackened cabbage leaves, small stones, broken shell fragments. None of it large. All of it maximally insulting.

Particularly when a radish—the kind even its original owner's dinner table had rejected—struck Haerdin squarely on the forehead and slid slowly down his face. This tale has been unlawfully lifted without the author's consent. Report any appearances on Amazon. The crew behind me finally broke.

"Ha—hahaha—" "I thought we'd just get an execution. Didn't expect appetizers."

"Is this what they call trial by produce?"

"Shut up," I muttered, turning back.

"You're laughing too loud." Marro ambled along with hands in his coat, that one eye curved in appreciation.

"Kid," he said, "this isn't laughter. This is harbor public opinion." I nearly choked on that. Up ahead, Ignicia hadn't turned once. The way she walked—hauling Haerdin forward—looked exactly like someone dragging a questionable fish to be gutted in front of the whole market. Her cloak snapped in the harbor wind, dark red fabric rolling in the grey light like embers deciding whether to become fire. Despite the shouting, no one actually came close.

Everyone understood instinctively—the one being dragged was condemned. The one doing the dragging was the one you didn't touch. I kept pace at her left rear. At one point a small stone angled toward me. Before I could react, Ignicia glanced sideways. The thrower retracted immediately. I cleared my throat quietly.

"…I appear to be operating on borrowed authority."

"What else would you use?" she said without interest.

"Your face?"

"What's wrong with my face?"

"At an execution site, it reads as possible accomplice."

"That's a personal attack—""No," she said calmly.

"That's an observation." … Fine. I filed that away for later. She was currently consuming a Governor. I had no interest in volunteering as the second course. The execution ground occupied one side of the outer harbor. A raised platform of stone and heavy timber—not ceremonial, carrying the blunt functionality of something built to be used. Thick posts driven into the ground, salt-etched by years of harbor wind.

Below, people had packed in dense, those at the front with the bright eyes of an audience waiting for final curtain. Ignicia threw Haerdin onto the platform. He stumbled and nearly went face-first into the boards, catching himself in something between a kneel and a crouch. He still clutched the placard to his chest—a reflex too pathetic to be funny. I had expected some kind of speech. Something about the Dragon Kingdom, maritime sovereignty, the King's law—at minimum, a few lines worth recording. There were none.

She stepped onto the platform, looked at the crowd, and spoke without preamble.

"Governor Haerdin. Corruption and receipt of enemy bribes. By Dragon Kingdom law—stripped of office. Sentenced to death." That was all. Clean. Final. No space for appeal. The crowd went quiet for one beat, then erupted in braided cheering and cursing. I stood at her side, watching the dense mass below, and felt something strange. She had said almost nothing. Yet those words carried more weight than most speeches I'd heard. Because she wasn't persuading anyone. She was defining the end of a person.

Ignicia looked down at Haerdin and, against all expectation, smiled.

"Congratulations," she said.

"You have the distinction of receiving this princess's dragonfire personally." My eye twitched. Ah. Not beheading. Burning. …In a perverse way, that was almost premium treatment. The moment dragonfire reached Haerdin, something yanked his spine—a full-body flinch like a hook catching deep. Then— He laughed. Not bitter laughter. Not despair. The laugh of someone with something lodged in his throat, forced out anyway—ragged, climbing, unhinged.

"Heh… heh heh… ha ha—" My spine went rigid. Wrong. That sound was wrong. A man shaking so badly he could barely hold a placard thirty seconds ago didn't laugh like a true believer walking into fire. This wasn't resolution. This was— Someone had prepared him for this exact moment. Told him exactly what to do when it came. Haerdin's head snapped up. Eyes red-rimmed, mouth pulling into something that had stopped resembling a smile.

"You'll all die—" His voice pitched into a shriek.

"They'll kill every last one of you—!" My heart dropped hard. I knew this feeling. The mountain pass. That command token. The spy. Those last words before death. That sensation of watching someone already rotten get taken over, at the final moment, by something colder and more deliberate—"Damn it." I moved forward on pure instinct.

"He's going to—" Too slow. Haerdin's jaw snapped shut with violent force. Not clenching. Something different—like a mechanism buried deep in his gums, planted there long ago, triggered now with his last reserves of will.

"Long live Queen Wahlin—" He wrenched his head back, voice tearing itself apart.

"Long live the Yanxia Empire—!!" The final syllable hadn't finished falling before his body seized—violent, total convulsion, as though something had struck him from inside with a club. The next instant, dark red blood poured from his mouth. Not the small seep of someone biting their tongue. It wasn't like he'd bitten his tongue.

It was as if something buried in his throat, in his gums, somewhere deeper still, had detonated all at once—thick, darkening toward black, carrying a sharp bitter stench that hit the back of my sinuses like a fist. I swore on reflex.

"Shit! Not again?!" I lunged forward, reaching to clamp his jaw shut, but the moment my fingers brushed his neck I knew—those spasms weren't struggle anymore. This was the final convulsion of poison completing its work. Just like the Raven. No—worse. The Raven operative we'd encountered in the mountains had at least seemed to choose his death, for one instant. Haerdin... this didn't feel like choice at all.

More like a dead-man's switch planted inside him long ago, finally triggered when he tried to say too much and realized he wasn't walking away from this.

"Cedric!" Ignicia's voice cut in from beside me. I looked up at her and managed to grind out:"Nothing we can do... same as that Raven...!" Haerdin collapsed onto the wooden platform, issuing broken, wet sounds from his throat. His eyes rolled white, both hands still locked around the placard reading I AM A CORRUPT BASTARD WHO DESERVES TO DIE. The image was so grotesque it bordered on absurd. No one laughed. Because this wasn't just an execution anymore.

This was someone, in front of a Dragon Kingdom princess, on the platform where she'd just pronounced sentence— Stealing her kill. Lei Lian's blade was out in an instant, sliding to guard Ignicia's flank as her gaze slashed across the crowd like cold steel. The harbor commander roared orders almost simultaneously, directing his men to seal the area.

The same people who'd been pelting Haerdin with rotten produce seconds ago scattered—screaming, stumbling backward, trying to run and getting shoved back by soldiers at the outer ring. Marro stood at the crowd's edge, that one eye narrowing to a slit. For the first time, there wasn't a trace of lazy amusement on his face.

As for me, half-kneeling beside Haerdin, watching that black-tinged blood seep into the cracks between boards—all I felt in my chest was something that sat between fury and nausea and wouldn't move. The bastard had deserved to die. But not like this. At the very least, not like a receipt torn in half the moment someone finished using it. I pushed myself upright. Then I saw Ignicia's face. I'd seen her smirk. I'd seen her wield that tongue like a surgical blade.

I'd seen the look she wore when grinding someone into the ground and finding them disappointingly fragile. I'd seen her as a dragon—natural disaster given wings and purpose. I had never seen this face. It wasn't simple fury. It was like an entire volcano splitting open in silence deep underground. The lava wasn't out yet. But the mountain around it had already started to shake. She stood in the center of the platform, looking down at Haerdin's corpse.

Her gold-red eyes held no hint of the dark humor from minutes ago—only a cold so intense it felt like it might ignite the air. That expression said exactly one thing— So. Someone actually thought they could turn my judgment into a joke.