Chương 62: 26-1.Widow, Pact, and Past

After Alvira guided Erina away, the corridor became considerably quieter. Not the reassuring kind of quiet. The kind where, with a few living breaths and footsteps subtracted from the space, the underlying stench of the dungeon—blood, salt, damp stone, and decay layered into the very walls—suddenly had nothing to compete with. As though Castle Wassach was taking the opportunity to remind me: Terribly sorry for the interruption, but that was merely the appetizer.

The genuinely revolting portion of the evening has yet to be served. I looked down at the blood spreading across my chest and concluded I'd probably spent the next several years' worth of my personal blood-loss quota in a single night. Valdorin wasn't looking at me. He stood at the dungeon entrance, staring at the half-open iron door the way you'd stare at a well that had just finished swallowing someone whole. Matthews stood beside him in silence, his nearly-demolished shield dragging at his side.

Two splits in his chain mail. Blood at the corner of his mouth. Not a single complaint. Just that particular expression men develop after surviving too many battlefields—patient, alert, waiting for orders. Valdorin finally spoke.

"Matthews."

"Sir."

"Find me two soldiers. The ones with the tightest mouths and enough spine to use them." His voice was level enough that you'd never guess he'd just identified his own kinsman's severed head.

"Bring burlap, oil, salt, and iron nails. Not one word about tonight leaves this level."

"Understood." Matthews didn't ask questions. He turned and left. I watched him go, then said quietly:"The efficiency with which you Northerners handle family scandals is genuinely impressive." Valdorin finally turned to look at me.

"If you're waiting for me to have a breakdown, you're going to be disappointed."

"No, I'm just taking inventory." I coughed once, forcing the taste of blood back down.

"Looking at you like this, I figure it'd be poor form if I fainted first." He didn't respond to that. Probably because the scene in front of us had rendered my particular brand of ill-timed commentary beneath his notice. When we went back down, the sweet-rot stench had somehow thickened another degree. Fresh torches had been set—brighter than before—which meant the dark pool at the center of the chamber was now illuminated with considerably more clarity than anyone needed. This was not an improvement.

Some scenes, viewed through merciful shadow, allow you to maintain the fiction that they're not quite as horrific as they seem. With proper lighting, the only discovery left is exactly how much worse they actually are. The headless carcass was still kneeling in the blood-mud, the misshapen plating and aberrant limbs along its back no longer moving. I had no particular desire to walk over and confirm its operational status. As for the head—I'd looked at it once already. More than sufficient.

It was covered again now, which was an act of mercy for everyone present. Valdorin stopped at the edge of the blood pool. His gaze settled on the heavy chains overhead.

"She was suspended here?"

"Yes." I leaned against the wall and worked on breathing at a sustainable rate. He crouched and touched the edge of the pool where the blood had dried and half-congealed. His fingertips came away dark. He studied the color for two breaths before asking quietly:"What did he say before the end?" I didn't answer immediately. Not for dramatic effect—I was genuinely trying to determine which part of Conrad's final monologue would make tonight sound least like a third-rate horror anthology. I went with the truth.

"First that the castle was his. The salt flats too." I steadied my breathing against the wall.

"Then he said it wasn't a throne. It was bait." Valdorin's expression shifted, barely perceptibly. I continued:"The last part is the problem. He said there's still something in the lake. Living shadows, was how he put it." A torch crackled. Valdorin said nothing. That silence wasn't incomprehension. It was the silence of someone who had understood perfectly and wasn't yet prepared to acknowledge it. I studied his profile and felt something that might have been dark amusement.

Before tonight, this man had presumably been juggling Northern military logistics, family reputation, and the slow-burning disaster of the capital's succession crisis. Now, as a complimentary addition to that workload: your kinsman became a monster, and he may have been in correspondence with something at the bottom of a lake. If there were gods watching over all this, they were exclusively the kind that watched for entertainment value.

"So," I said, breaking the silence.

"What's your read on all of it?" Valdorin looked up.

"Which part?"

"All of it." I said.

"Conrad. The family. The rebellion. And whatever's living in that lake that I strongly doubt will survive the editing process into any official report. We've come this far—you can't seriously still be planning to give me the family matters, not for outside discussion response." He studied me for several seconds. If you come across this story on Amazon, it's taken without permission from the author. Report it. Cold. Fully alert.

The look of a man recalculating whether the person in front of him—who had just vomited blood twice and was still running his mouth—was worth telling the truth to. Then he spoke.

"Conrad has been expanding his forces for three years."

"I could have guessed that." I said.

"What I couldn't have guessed was that he'd expand until he expanded himself past the point of being human." Valdorin apparently decided that remark didn't merit a response and continued:"Iron Mountain cavalry. The Black Ridge Battalion. Salt flat garrison. Lake perimeter outposts. Officially, border reinforcement. In practice, he was systematically draining every available body and supply line in the surrounding territory.

My father had suspicions, but the Northern Reaches have always been undermanned, and Conrad was skilled at framing every move as for the good of the North."

"Ambition wearing loyalty as a coat," I said.

"Classic noble tradition." This time, Valdorin didn't argue.

"He never wanted just the salt flats," he said quietly.

"Never just Wassach. If the capital descended into chaos over the succession, whoever held Northern military authority would have the standing to decide whether they remained a subject—or became something else." My eyebrow went up.

"That direct about it?"

"Did you think Northern snow only kills people? It doesn't spare their judgment either."

"I assumed it went for the conscience first."

"That particular organ has never been cold-resistant in aristocratic circles."... Good. This man had finally decided to speak like a person. Even if what he was saying was the sort of thing that made comfortable sleep a distant memory. I glanced at the headless remains.

"So Conrad genuinely intended to rebel."

"He did," Valdorin said.

"And came close to being in a position to succeed."

"Close?"

"If he had remained human." Valdorin said it without particular inflection. The temperature in the chamber seemed to drop a few more degrees. I didn't laugh. Because there was genuinely nothing to laugh at.

"You knew something was wrong with him," I said.

"Before tonight." Valdorin was quiet for a moment.

"I knew he had changed," he said finally. A careful answer. A frustratingly careful answer. Knowing someone changed is not the same as knowing what they changed into. It left him a retreat at every angle. I looked at him steadily.

"In plain language." The corner of his eye twitched, fractionally. He clearly had opinions about being given instructions at this particular moment. But he answered.

"He began avoiding light," Valdorin said quietly.

"Not to the degree of being unable to go out during the day—but at certain moments, he would instinctively move away from direct sunlight falling on him. Beyond that, his appetite became abnormal. Not the hunger of a banquet—he needed to eat constantly, at any hour, and the consumption of meat in the household was accelerating at a rate that couldn't be accounted for. And the disappearances along the lake were higher than the official records showed." I narrowed my eyes.

"You investigated?"

"Halfway." He said.

"The other half was suppressed."

"By you?"

"Not by me." He paused.

"By my aunt." Something clicked quietly into place.

"The Duchess?"

"Yes." He looked at the blood pool, his voice flattening toward exhaustion.

"She likely noticed something was wrong with Conrad before I did. Initially she believed it was simply what power, pressure, military campaigning, and the weight of the salt trade do to a person over time. When things began to deteriorate beyond that explanation, she tried containment—pressure, quiet investigation, family physicians, the Church's methods. But if she brought it into the open, the first casualty might not have been Conrad."

"It might have been her," I said.

"It might have been the entire Eberswalde name," Valdorin said, and looked at me.

"You're welcome to find that thinking contemptible. But for a family like ours, admitting you've produced a monster is sometimes more lethal than the monster itself."

"I don't find it contemptible," I said honestly.

"I just think you nobles lead extraordinarily difficult lives, if you have to calculate the reputational impact before you're even allowed to panic."

"That," he said, "is the most coherent thing you've said tonight."

"Thank you. Blood loss apparently activates a more philosophical mode of operation." Valdorin didn't take the bait. I stopped pushing. Because underneath the commentary, I understood what he was telling me. Conrad as a rebel was a political problem. Conrad as whatever he became tonight was something else entirely—not a question of who wanted the throne, who was building an army, who planned to profit from the capital's instability.

This was a question of someone having made a transaction with something that ran considerably deeper than ambition.

"The lake," I said.

"How much do you know?" This time the silence was longer. He looked at the blood-spattered cracks in the stone walls as though reading something written there a long time ago.

"The salt lake outside the walls has old things beneath it," he said at last.

"That's been the belief in the Northern Reaches for as long as anyone can remember. Fishermen. Salt workers. Patrol soldiers. Occasional reports of shadows that watch you back. Everyone assumed it was lake fog, or cold-weather hallucination, or what happens to a man's mind after enough winter nights."

"And now?"

"And now, at minimum, it isn't entirely that." That was worse than I'd expected. Because it wasn't confirmation, and it wasn't denial. It was the most inconvenient category of answer: you've seen enough that you can't dismiss it as rumor, but you haven't seen enough to know where to start being afraid. I raised a hand to rub the bridge of my nose, caught the wound at my temple instead, and nearly swore out loud.

"So Conrad was in the middle of building a rebellion, and something from the lake took a bite out of him along the way?"

"It may have been the other way around," Valdorin said.

"Perhaps because he wanted too much, he gave it an opening." That had the sound of a reckoning. I looked down at the headless remains and thought that this man, in life, had almost certainly never imagined he'd end up serving as a cautionary political allegory for future generations in this particular posture.

"And your aunt?" I asked.

"How much does she know?" Valdorin's gaze finally moved from the blood pool to my face.

"More than I'd prefer," he said.

"Less than would actually be enough to keep her safe." That was precisely worded. The Duchess almost certainly wasn't ignorant. She'd likely seen Conrad's deterioration early, and tried to press the lid back down on behalf of the family. The problem was that she hadn't known enough to seal the right thing. She'd contained the scandal. The catastrophe had continued regardless. A very aristocratic way to be wrong. Maintaining appearances all the way to the end.

"Do you think she's already looking for an exit?" I asked. Valdorin didn't immediately deny it. Which was, in itself, a complete answer. I couldn't quite suppress a short laugh. My chest immediately reminded me that laughing was a privilege I hadn't earned back yet.

"Your family is considerably more eventful than I'd imagined."

"Spare me your schadenfreude."

"I'm not gloating." I spread my hands.

"I'm just suddenly very grateful that I'm currently nothing more than a broke adventurer who carries his own pack. Your aristocratic deluxe package of family infighting topped with parasitic monstrosities—that's frankly too premium an offering for someone with my pedestrian palate." Valdorin closed his eyes briefly, visibly suppressing an impulse to personally kick me back down the dungeon stairs. In the end, he did nothing. He simply said quietly:"Tonight will not be recorded as involving monsters."

"Then what will it be?"

"Duke Conrad died suddenly of acute illness," he said.

"A fire broke out in the dungeon. Several prisoners and servants were killed. I'll handle the rest." I raised an eyebrow.

"You're planning to swallow the entire Northern Reaches' worth of loose ends by yourself?"

"What's the alternative?" Valdorin looked at me.

"Are you offering to write the report?"

"If the compensation were competitive, I might consider it."

"In your current condition, anything you write would probably look worse than a suicide note."

"That's a fair assessment." The words had barely left my mouth when rapid footsteps echoed from outside the dungeon. Not Matthews's measured soldier's pace. Servants. More than one. They stopped at the iron door, and a woman's voice came through—pressed low, but unable to fully contain its urgency.

"Lord Valdorin?" Valdorin turned, his expression sealing itself back into that impenetrable frost.

"What is it?" The maidservant clearly had no intention of looking inside. She kept her head down and spoke through the gap of the half-open door.

"This matter... has already reached the Duchess." Her voice trembled on the last word. I sighed internally. Perfect. Apparently my rest break wasn't on tonight's schedule. The maid drew a breath, as though the next sentence was burning her tongue.

"Her Grace... requests that Lord Cedric attend her for questioning." The torch flickered. Valdorin and I exchanged a look. Then I thought, with the profound resignation of a man who had accepted his role as the universe's punching bag: Fine. Boss fight cleared. Time for the aristocratic interrogation phase.