Tell Him To Wait

She had braced herself for it, and still her heart dropped like a stone. This dread must be something Chloe Grace’s body remembered too. Dong-hui settled herself quietly and answered in a voice she made deliberately breezy.

“Tell him I’ve not finished getting ready, so it looks as though he’ll have to wait a while.”
“Pardon?”

Scrooge thought he must have misheard. Never once had the lord made Viscount Patrasche wait. Any other time she would have been out the door in a fluster the moment word came that the Viscount had crossed the drawbridge.

It cut me to the heart every time I saw it — and to think a day like this would come.

Scrooge was too dumbfounded to do anything but blink, and Dong-hui spoke again, in a bored sort of voice.

“Tell him to wait. As you can see, our Anna is hard at work braiding my hair.”
“But I have braided it all…, my lady.”
“What was that? You have to braid this side too? Ugh, honestly, why are you so fond of braiding hair? Fine. Braid this side as well.”

Pretending she had not heard a word Anna said, Dong-hui offered up the other side of her head, the unbraided one. Faced with Chloe blandly holding out hair that was already finished, Anna had no idea what to do with herself.

Delma had been watching all this blankly, and then, like a woman who had just worked something out, she let out a short Ah! and hurriedly undid one of the finished braids. She made sure to throw Anna a small wink, too.

“Oh my, this bit here does look a little odd. Don’t you think?”
“Ah, yes!”

Only then did Anna catch her lord’s intention, and she pulled a few strands loose from the braid she had put up.

“This part and this part are a little different in thickness. I shall tidy it just a touch more, my lady.”
“Do that. As if you didn’t know how important an even thickness is when you braid hair.”
“Yes!”

Anna set to the braid again, and a hummed tune came drifting from Delma’s lips.

The land Viscount Patrasche had taken for himself ran a long way, from the point where Enol ended to the western edge where it met the sea. Passing through an estate of his own that grew more developed by the day, Patrasche felt a swell of pride.

“Father, thanks to this bridge I think we shall be saving a great deal of time and money now.”

Eileen looked out from inside the carriage with a beaming smile.

Work on the Ballunga Bridge had been finished to coincide with the Viscount’s visit to Grace, and today was its first day in use. He hated to spend money on empty show, so there had been no lavish opening ceremony; before crossing, though, he had given the estate’s residents a speech they would remember, and been met with thunderous applause.

The Ballunga Bridge would be the longest and sturdiest bridge in the whole of the northern region. To see it finished, Patrasche had laid out a fortune to engage a famous architect from the Eastern Continent. The fee had been staggering, but he judged it far better business than failing several times over and throwing the construction money away.

What was more, the shortest route to the several inland countries ran precisely across that bridge. The road would only be complete once he had absorbed the Grace region entirely, and for Patrasche that was no difficult matter.

“This bridge will be a new vein of money for our estate.”

Patrasche looked back at the receding bridge and nodded, satisfaction all over his face. The future, as he understood it, had no room in it for failure; it held nothing but hope.

“I hear there was some resistance from the estate residents put to the hard labor?”

His daughter’s question wiped the smile from his face in an instant.

“Those things always have plenty to complain of. I brought them in when they were starving to death by inches and kept them alive, and the wretches know nothing of the kindness.”

Most of the laborers pressed into this construction had originally been commoners belonging to the Grace estate. The residents who had belonged to Viscount Patrasche from the first were left out of this round of hard labor. The point of it was to plant in them, quietly, the notion that they were of an altogether different stock from the ones out of Grace.

Falcona’s residents grew the more loyal to Viscount Patrasche for it, naturally enough, and the quiet discrimination against anyone out of Grace deepened alongside it. There was friction between the two groups, but as yet it amounted to nothing worth reckoning with. The ones from the Grace estate were content so long as they were given one full meal a day.

Yet for whatever reason, from this construction onward there had been noise from every quarter, and the upshot had been resistance from a paltry handful of them.

“Quite so. Left as they were, they would all be dead and gone by now.”

Eileen too, it seemed, had no liking for their banding together like that, and she drew her lovely brows into a frown.

“And what is your own thought, Eileen? What shall we do with them?”

Viscount Patrasche asked, looking forward to a clever answer from his daughter. Eileen stared straight at her father a moment, then answered with a perfectly untroubled face.

“Cut the heads off the ringleaders where the whole village can watch, and don’t kill their families.”
“You would spare them?”

That was not the answer the Viscount wanted. He hid the disappointment rising in him as best he could and waited for the rest of what she had to say.

“Killing is far too easy. Instead of that, take off an arm and a leg from each. Every last one of the family that’s left. Oh! And it would be better to do the cutting before the ringleaders lose their heads, where they can see it. That way the effect is much greater.”
“The old ones too? The children?”
“Of course. There must be no exceptions. And we do let them keep their lives, so won’t they be grateful?”
“And it makes an example for the rest?”
“Yes. There is no parent alive who wants their own child’s limbs cut off.”
“Then the ones who merely joined in as well, the ones who were not ringleaders?”
“The ones who joined in we leave as they are, and cut the limbs off their families only.”
“So that they will be the ones to regret it?”
“Yes, and they will have their families’ resentment to listen to besides. If they cannot bear it, they may kill themselves or do whatever they please. What matters is that we showed them mercy. We let them live.”

The Viscount heard her out and nodded slowly, as though well pleased. She was his daughter through and through, his own blood running true in her. That Eileen had not been born a son was very nearly a grief to him.

“You do me credit.”

At her father’s praise a bright, radiant smile broke over Eileen’s doll-beautiful face.

At last the drawbridge of Grace Castle came slowly down. Every time he passed this place the Viscount prayed that the day he would be master of it might come quickly.

He had gone to war in place of the eldest son, Karl Grace, and won it; he had watched over the estate night and day. Every scrap of the credit had gone to his elder brother, the eldest and the legitimate son.

“The Falcona region I shall hand down to you.”

So said the previous Marquess, Roisen Grace, conferring the title of viscount on Patrasche, newly home from a great victory over the demon race.

“The place has boundless room to grow, so go and show what you are capable of there.”

Which was to say, a backward, out-of-the-way corner of nowhere.

Marquess Roisen, with his own death close at hand, had been trying to drive Patrasche far off in order to protect Karl, his eldest son.

He had never once wanted the eldest son’s place. All he had hoped for was that even a bastard son might be granted the right to call the man Father in front of the vassals, that he might simply be acknowledged, openly, as a member of the Grace marquessate. But Patrasche came to understand that even that had been asking far too much.

That was the moment Grace stopped being a thing to be protected and became a thing to be pulled down and taken.

Patrasche developed the Falcona estate as though to make a point of it, and piled up wealth without caring by what means. Wresting the marquess’s title away from his foolish niece, entirely and for good, would be no difficulty either.

Nor was that Patrasche’s own notion alone. To the vassals of Grace, Chloe’s legal guardian was already as good as the Marquess himself, and a fair number of them had sworn oaths of loyalty to him already and said openly that Viscount Patrasche was the one fit to succeed to the House of Grace.

Everything was going along neatly according to his plan. Every contract drawn up when he bought land from Chloe for a song was a magic contract, made at an expense to match the price of the land itself. With each signature Chloe added, her judgment would grow cloudier, and she would come to obey his word.

Only five contracts were left now. Five more signatures from Chloe, and the true master of the Grace estate would be Patrasche Grace himself.

Marquess Patrasche Grace.

Every time he called to mind the word that would one day be fixed to his name, a rush of joy welled up in his chest. Patrasche was mightily pleased with himself, proud of having come this far without ever giving up.

“Do we really have to move into a castle as old as this?”

Eileen did not care for Grace Castle. It was of a good size; that much she granted, and no more. The walls, the keep, the village inside the walls were all of them old and shabby, and every time she looked at the place she felt as though she were growing poorer along with it.

“Picture it for yourself. The days when we shall change a place as shabby as this by our own strength. And Grace is the very heart of the north. Falcona lies too far over to the west. From there it is hard to work at drawing the northern region together.”
“I know that, but this place is simply dreadful.”

The complaint pleased him. Patrasche laughed out loud and answered in a benevolent voice.

“Do not fret. I shall have the whole of it torn up and made over however you wish. This Grace is to be yours to inherit, after all.”
“Yes, Father!”

Eileen looked proudly at the father who had never once refused her a request, and smiled a satisfied smile.

“I am to wait?”

It was strange enough that Chloe had not come out to meet them; now, even after hearing they had arrived, she still did not show her face. The Chloe he knew could never have done such a thing.

Eileen too seemed to sense something odd, and she shot a sharp look at the old butler who had come to deliver the message. She could not so much as look at that old man without being put out of temper.

“Chloe really said that?”