275: Stand up.

**Chapter 274**

The couch had been Valeria’s place to rest after a hard fuck. It wasn’t now.

A man in scarlet and white sat in it as if the leather had been cut for his spine. Older than most of his companions. Heavier in the way authority is heavy. He didn’t sit like he was in someone else’s house. His attention was on Elara, and on the packet open on her desk.

A paper with the church’s seal on it. No doubt the evidence document. Or notification.

Valeria was at Elara’s shoulder, still as a fixture. Elara’s face gave nothing. That was the problem. You couldn’t tell when she was angry, even usually. But right now, the way she was, man, I’d be careful what I’d say.

“Need I say more?” the man on the couch said. “Grand Lady Elara.”

Elara didn’t answer him.

He tapped the packet with one finger.

“King George died in the battle of this house. A heretic fled. This house stood nearest the stain. Yet we are being gracious. We come with a blessing. Not a war.”

He turned a page. The sound was small. It filled the office anyway.

“A Demon under Carlson’s roof.” He smiled without warmth. Nothing else. Apparently that was proof enough.

Still, Elara said nothing.

I could feel what the silence cost. If she spoke first, she accepted the frame. If she denied without proof, she sounded like a woman already named. If she reached for force with his people in her yard, the story wrote itself: the house that kills the goddess’s mouth.

Consequences sat in the air thicker than the bloodlust.

A public reading in the capital. Crowds that liked simple stains. Allies who would remember they had other friends. Ledgers that would suddenly find errors in Carlson affairs. Supply that would take the long road around her gates. A first prince who needed her radioactive so the throne wouldn’t have to look her in the eye. Galliard didn’t have to win a duel. He had to make her a fire other nobles wouldn’t stand near. Not to mention the foes. No doubt Elara had enemies who were waiting for her to die back in the battle between Carlson and her.

“You will surrender the one responsible,” the cardinal went on. “Or you will surrender the house’s standing until the matter is purged. Those are the kindnesses I am permitted to offer. There are less kind ones.”

An open threat.

Valeria’s fingers moved once against her skirt and stopped.

Elara’s gaze stayed on the packet.

“You come into my office,” she said at last, voice level, “and you put a dead king’s name on my desk like a knife. You will show me the proof that is not paper.”

“The proof is the pattern.” He sat deeper into the couch. “Paper is how kingdoms remember patterns. You are asking for a theater. I am offering a record.”

“A record written in a room you never left.”

“A record sealed by men whose seals outrank yours.” He let that land. “Lady Elara. You are strong. Strength is not innocence. Strength is often the reason a stain is kept instead of being burned. The court has watched you take a house. The court has watched a king die in your presence. The court does not need a confession if it has a shape it already likes.”

“You like it because it is useful.”

“I like it because it is tidy.” His rings clicked once against each other, while his eye flicker just a tiny bit towrads me.

That was for me. He still hadn’t used my name. He didn’t need it. They needed a scapegoat. Who better than her own personal attendant? Not only to show they could touch someone close to her, but also far enough that Elara would give me up without much resistance. On the paper, after all, I was only Valeria’s grandson. Would have loved it if Valeria was my grandmother. I would have grown up with my face buried in her ass.

Damn. I was incredibly horny. Four weeks of nothing. That’s a record for me since I came into this world.

Elara’s bloodlust didn’t spill. It held. That was worse. A woman like her holding it meant she had already counted the dead in the yard and decided the count wasn’t enough to spend.

“And if I refuse your kindness?” she said, not asked.

“Then I leave with what I brought, and the capital reads what I brought, and you discover how many friends a house has when a goddess is said to be angry.” He folded his hands. “You can kill me. You are capable. You would win the afternoon and lose the year. I think you know that. I think that is why we are still talking instead of cleaning my blood off the rug.”

The office ticked.

A fly would have been loud. Valeria didn’t breathe like a person. Elara didn’t blink like one.

“You named three holdings,” Elara said. “You will name the Demon.”

“In time. After the house is opened. After the responsible party is bound. I am not here to give you a hunt you can stage.”

Which means he wanted to let the others see the church could lay the ducal house bare. Probably something they wanted more than just that. After all, no other ducal house on the continent had the power to stand against the church. Carlson House’s power against the church’s divine power was a stain they so wished to wash away.

“You are here to give Galliard a clean path,” Elara said with the usual straight and sharp tone.

The cardinal’s mouth tightened by a hair. Not a denial. A man hearing his own work spoken without the courtesy of a veil.

“I am here because the goddess requires cleanliness.”

And that was how the old Vatican erased countless lives.

I had run a week to put a sentence on this desk. I had almost been too late to put anything. If I stayed a pair of hands against the wall, the packet would walk out of here and become a season, and Elara would spend that season killing rumors with a sword that rumors do not fear.

I stepped forward.

Nobody invited me. The cardinal’s eyes flicked, annoyed that furniture had decided it had a mouth. Maybe he was already being merciful, letting me in here when my presence was known and Elara summoned for me.

“This does not concern a steward.”

“It concerns the route,” I said. “I was on it.”

Elara didn’t stop me. That was permission enough.

I turned to her and said, “I have carried out the task you bestowed upon me, my lady.”

I set the glass orb on the table. The cardinal was confused, and so was Valeria, regardless of her stoicism, but Elara remained as she was. Sharp and still. As if all this were part of her plan. I had made sure it looked like it.

[Item: Echo Vessel]

[Grade: B+]

[Description: An alchemical recorder invented by an alchemist who wanted proof of her wife’s infidelity

For some reason, he didn’t expose her, but made sure to replace it with a new one every time]

[Effect: Captures sight and speech within a fixed field and plays them back on command]

[Cost: 10,000 gold coins]

[Limitation: Two uses.

Current uses remaining: 1]

Ignoring the strange description the shop usually sticks to some of the items, I said, “I have captured something very interesting with this artifact you bestowed upon me, my lady.”

The priest almost smiled. He was confident.

“And what would your word prove?”

“I expect a room to watch before it decides what a court will take.”

He started to speak again. I didn’t give the sentence a home. I let the vessel play.

The cave came up in the curve of the glass. Stone. His junior’s face. The prayer I had cut short. The questions. The denials. The same cheap line twice. Torture. A lot, and a lot of trture he wasn’t trained to bear. Then the words that mattered, in the man’s own mouth, with the spit still on it.

Galliard wants the house gone.

The route. The forged charge. Appearances. The plan.

The office went quiet in a different way.

It didn’t matter what I had done to get the words. The man on the couch couldn’t climb onto that and shout about methods, not with his own junior naming a prince on a lady’s desk. On Elara’s desk. Methods were a private embarrassment. A first prince’s order spoken aloud was a public one.

Elara still didn’t move. Her anger didn’t rise. It settled. Unreadable. The kind of calm that makes other people check the doors.

The priest’s mouth opened. I saw the shape of the next lie forming, trick glass, staged voice, a house playing theater with a toy, and a terrified reader.

After all, he could simply claim it was a trick drafted by House Carlson to besmirch the church.

I spoke before he finished drawing breath.

“I also have the bodies of the paladin and the priest, as ordered by my lady as proof. They would prove they were the church’s people, and this is not a scheme from our house.”

That ended it.

Not because he agreed. Because the room had run out of angles that didn’t put a corpse and a voice on the same side of the ledger. Paper against uniform that still wore their marks and a junior who had named Galliard loud and clear. He could still ride to the capital and scream. He couldn’t do it from this couch without looking like a man who had brought a story and been handed the story’s author.

If it were any other house, probably even if it were the royal house, he might have denied it, still saying it was staged. But not with Elara. I was sure of that one.

He stared at the glass as if staring would make the mouth in it take the words back.

Elara looked at me once. Then at him.

“Stand up,” she said.