Chương 298: 64. Conviction 1

Thornhold's mornings carried a particular kind of familiarity I found thoroughly unpleasant. Not the ah, I'm home kind. More the kind where you know exactly which flagstone on this corridor will ring hollow under your boot, and you also know that if you keep walking forward, you're going to have to tear this house down with your own hands. Honestly, this hadn't been my original plan. I'd genuinely intended to start with something respectable. Reorganize the inner keep's operations.

Clear out the parasites who'd been eating the estate hollow while waiting to die. Take stock of personnel, restructure the defenses, audit the storerooms, secure Fina's title and living arrangements—and only then, methodically, take the fire I'd been sitting on since yesterday and settle it, line by line, ledger by ledger, name by name. That was what a proper man sent to clean up a disaster was supposed to do. Rational. Efficient. Systematic.

The sort of thing that might even earn a mention in some textbook as a model of successful governance. Unfortunately, I'm not that man. At least, not today. Because the moment I remembered what those bastards said in the second half of yesterday's confrontation, I realized that if I could still calmly go inventory wooden crates in a storeroom this morning, that wouldn't be personal growth. That would be a vow of silence in some monastery, achieved through sheer transcendent rage.

Especially the lines aimed at Jessi and Alvira. I can tolerate people insulting me. I've been insulted my whole life—there's never been a shortage of people who wanted to curse me, or climb higher with my head under their feet. If I'd held a grudge over every single one, I'd have cleared out both sides of the border by the time I was thirteen. But those two are different. Jessi is loud. Annoying.

The type whose presence at a shared table makes you wonder what debt of three hundred gold coins you must have owed him in a past life. But when it's time to bleed, to gamble a life, to charge into the very worst of the front—he's never once flinched. And Alvira goes without saying. She's like an over-polished, razor-thin blade—cold, sparse with words, the kind of gaze that seems to be constantly calculating whether you're worth cutting open just to examine your insides.

But precisely because someone like her chose to stand on my side, that fact alone carries more weight than a hundred sworn oaths. And those creatures—sitting safe inside the walls, eating meat, drinking soup, treating other people's spilled blood as a line item in a ledger—actually had the audacity to degrade them. That wasn't a slip of the tongue. That was a death wish. Only— No rush. Killing is simple. One stroke, blood flows, a head drops, and even the sharpest tongue goes quiet. But that's too cheap for them.

What I want is for Chris, Boris, and Rosalind to understand one thing clearly before they die: I'm not putting you to the sword today because I'm in a bad mood, or because I'm settling a private grudge. You yourselves stretched your own necks out beneath the blade—one entry at a time, one sentence at a time. As for whether there's any personal resentment involved in all this? Heh. When you get to the other side, you can ask Father about that yourselves.

With that thought, I let out a slow breath, threw on my coat, and pushed the door open. The sky outside was still a bruised gray-blue. At the far end of the corridor stood Alvira, looking exactly as though she hadn't slept a wink—black hair bound neatly at her back, a stack of collated records already in hand. Her gaze slid over my face and lingered for half a breath.

"Your expression today looks even more like you're about to kill someone than it did yesterday."

"I'll take that as a compliment."

"It wasn't a compliment. It was an observation."

"Then I'd suggest standing a little closer to me later," I said, taking the papers from her without slowing.

"In case my swing goes wide and the blood ends up on your dress." Alvira didn't so much as blink.

"If you were the sort to swing wide, you wouldn't have survived last night."... This woman's idea of reassurance genuinely felt like it came from some other, far darker place entirely.

"Morning, Commander." A voice as familiar as it was punchable drifted in from the other end of the hall. Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings. Jessi ambled around the corner mid-yawn, collar askew, somehow already clutching half a piece of scavenged dry bread—looking less like a man who'd spent the night in a war fortress and more like someone who'd crashed a distant cousin's country wedding and decided to stay the night.

He took one look at my face, one look at Alvira, and, with commendable self-awareness, swallowed back half the joke that had been sitting on his tongue.

"... Right. Today's not a joke day."

"No," I said.

"You can tell one."

"Really?"

"It'll put me in a better mood for the cutting later." Jessi immediately shoved the bread into his mouth and nodded with great solemnity.

"I've just discovered that silence is a virtue."

"Remarkable," Alvira said, without inflection.

"For once, you've said something that sounds like it crawled out of the dictionary under the entry for human decency." Jessi clutched his chest, wounded.

"The two of you ganging up on me like this—you've got real married-couple energy." I stopped walking. Alvira stopped walking. The next second, Jessi took a full step back, both hands raised.

"My bad. I'll slap myself. Really." I didn't bother answering and kept walking toward the reception hall. Honestly, Jessi's greatest survival skill was never combat, extracting information, or flattery—though he was more than competent at all three. It was his uncanny ability to sense, with perfect precision, the exact instant he was standing on the wrong side of the line. That, arguably, is its own kind of gift. The doors to the main reception hall were already open.

The braziers inside were lit, but they offered no real warmth. Dawn light had only just begun bleeding through the high windows, laying pale gray sheets across the carpet and the long table, making the whole room look like a tribunal someone hadn't quite finished setting up. Above the fireplace, the massive portrait of Akros Rosa, Marquis of the Border, looked down over everything with cold indifference. Still the same old man.

Even in oil paint, he managed to look more like a father capable of scolding you down to the marrow than he ever had in life. Ignicia was already inside when I walked in. She sat near the fire, posture not especially formal, yet radiating the natural pressure of someone who considered everyone else in the room, combined, still not worth a second glance. A small knife in hand, she was elegantly slicing through a plate of smoked meat that had arrived that morning. She looked up.

"You finally showed up."

"You sound like you've been waiting for a show to start."

"I have." She forked a piece into her mouth, tone calm to the point of cruelty.

"I'm curious which one you'll take apart first."... Sometimes I genuinely think this woman should sign a long-term contract with Hell itself.

"Don't worry," I said, taking my place at the head of the table.

"Everyone gets a turn." She seemed satisfied with that and went back to her meat. The prisoners were brought in shortly after. First, Albert Grayson. A head steward remains a head steward to the end—even after a night in custody, his clothes had somehow been straightened, his hair combed into approximate order. Only his color betrayed him: white as a man just levered upright out of his own coffin. Then Marcus Fiedler, whose already unpleasant face now resembled dough someone had thoroughly stepped on.

Last, Jurgen Hart—the captain who'd led the retreat kept his head down from the moment he entered, like a man who'd already dug his own grave in his mind and was simply waiting for the formality. And behind them: Chris. Boris. Rosalind. The three were brought in separately, but positioned with deliberate precision so each could watch the others' reactions.

My eldest brother still tried to hold his chin high on entry—though that elevation wasn't dignity anymore, just the last brittle performance of a man who hadn't fully accepted reality. Boris's eyes swept the room the instant he crossed the threshold—me, Ignicia, Alvira, Jessi—with the same quick, calculating look of a rat searching for an exit hole before it tumbles into the grain silo. As for Rosalind— She'd even done her hair.

Her collar sat immaculate, as though she were attending morning prayer rather than the reading of her own death sentence. There are moments I genuinely admire this type of person. Even with almost nothing left to lose, they still walk in looking perfectly pressed and put together. Fina wasn't there. I hadn't brought her.

This wasn't a scene she needed to witness—at least not her first real look at her so-called siblings, watching them shove each other in front of the blade the moment death got close enough to touch. Once everyone was assembled, the reception hall fell so quiet you could hear the firewood cracking in the grate. I wasn't in a hurry to speak. I just stood there and looked at them. People are strange creatures.

Last night, when they were first taken, they could still comfort themselves with maybe this is temporary, maybe there's still room to negotiate, maybe Cedric is only putting on a show. But drag those same people into a room like this—grandfather's portrait overhead, the long table underfoot, people on either side whose sheathed blades are somehow more frightening than drawn ones—and those little self-deceptions start peeling away, one layer at a time. Boris cracked first.

"Cedric," he forced out, voice dry and hollow, "whatever's happened, we're still family. Last night things got out of hand, everyone was heated—""Shut up." Two words. He actually shut up. Not because he'd turned obedient. Because he'd finally heard, in my voice, that I hadn't come here today to sit through a family reconciliation performance. I sat slowly and laid the stack of records Alvira had handed me on the table.

"Originally, I planned to deal with the household's internal affairs first this morning." I looked at them, my voice flat.

"Personnel counts, rations, defense restructuring, wall repairs, storeroom audits. Thornhold has rotted this badly—there's more than enough real work to do. Frankly, your lives could have waited their turn behind all of that." Chris's brow tightened, just slightly. Boris latched onto it like driftwood.

"Exactly! Right now the most important thing is stability inside the fortress! If you move against us now, it'll only unsettle the men—""I said, shut up." I didn't even look at him. I slid the top sheet from the stack and set it gently on the table.

"I changed my mind." Those four words dropped, and the room went colder still. Rosalind finally spoke, her voice as steady as ever.

"May we ask why?"

"You may." I raised my eyes to hers.

"Because yesterday afternoon, the three of you proved to me that you aren't merely incompetent. You're vile." Jessi let out a small, involuntary sound beside me—something between a laugh and the desperate effort not to laugh out loud. Alvira's expression didn't move. Ignicia bit into another slice of meat, apparently in full agreement with my choice of words. I went on.

"Incompetence, I can still sort into categories. Who's stupid. Who's greedy. Who's afraid to die. Who only knows how to stack other people's corpses beneath their own vanity—there's a grading scale for all of that. But vile is different. Vile is something you all put on full display for me yesterday, entirely of your own accord." My fingers tapped the table once.

"You insulted my people."