Chapter 1921: Afternoon Activities

"Debt-pens in the cellar," the Vesper man said, tapping his list. "Children in the debt-pens. The buyers rotate through on market days." He glanced up at her face and back down at his list. "You are early."

The Vesper Consortium had been many things down the centuries, and lawful was never one of them. Then they had bled beside the Villain’s armies through the war and been granted legitimacy for it, and these days they audited their own streets with the zeal of the freshly converted. Scum running rackets beside their business offended them professionally.

Iris had made her oath.

Every innocent left in this world, safe from cruel hands.

After each dive, instead of resting, she’d work until it was time to go back down.

"Openings," she said.

"Two doors, one grate."

"Blossom."

"Blossom found all three already!" The dogkin’s ears lay flat with disgust, tail low and still. "Blossom smelled the cellar from the bridge. It smells like chains, scared kids, and bad people." Her voice dropped into the flat register that meant the pup had left the conversation entirely. "Very bad people."

Ayame came off the alley wall behind them with her scabbard already in her hand.

"Let’s knock," Iris said.

She crossed the street and removed the cellar door along with its frame.

"INTRUDERS! GET-"

The first slaver’s warning ended there, because Iris’s fist arrived where the rest of his sentence was going.

The cellar boiled. A knife-man lunged out of the dark at her flank and met Ayame’s scabbard across both wrists, then her palm across his ear, both blows bored and exact.

A crossbow clicked at the top of the stairs, aimed down at Ayame’s back. It never fired.

Golden light took the shooter off his feet and folded him into the ceiling beams, and Seraphiel came down the steps after her handiwork, barefoot on the freezing stone, radiating disapproval.

"Why are there so many of you scum?"

A second crossbowman rose from behind the wine racks. Sera’s spear of light took him through the shoulder and pinned him to the wall like a note on a corkboard.

The cellar’s owner made his choice at the grate exit, where Blossom was sitting. Just sitting, blue eyes gone empty.

"Blossom counted nine kids in the pens." Static crawled up her gauntlets. "Blossom wants to see you suffer."

"Ahh! Mercy! I have a wife and children!" He turned and ran the other way, which was Iris.

Afterward, the chains came off the children with more care than anything in that cellar had been touched in years.

Iris crouched to the smallest girl’s height while Sera’s warm light moved from child to child behind her.

"You’re out. It’s over." She built each word by hand. "Eat first. Cry after. That’s the order that works."

The girl nodded at her, solemn, and Iris nodded back like the two of them had signed something.

By the stairs, the Vesper man was already chalking a mark on his list. "That clears this street, my lady. Two more towns flagged along the river."

Iris rolled her shoulder and stood.

"Next."

...

The townhouse had belonged to a count who had chosen the wrong side of human decency, so it now belonged to the crown. Then the crown’s liege lord’s family came asking, and by the end of that same conversation it belonged to them.

It had forty rooms, a walled courtyard, and a kitchen built for banquets no one would miss.

Lucille walked the main hall with her sleeves already rolled, pointing at things while a small storm of carpenters trailed her. "Dormitories along the upper floor. That parlor becomes a classroom. The ballroom stays a ballroom; children need somewhere to be loud."

Jasmine ticked columns in her ledger without looking up. "Beds, linens, three cooks, winter coal. I priced it out this morning." Her blue eyes flashed coin-gold for one satisfied blink. "We could run a hundred of these before the realm’s books cleared their throat. My love conquers faster than his family can spend."

"That sounded like a challenge."

"Just an acute observation," Jasmine grinned.

Through the tall windows, the courtyard was already loud. The children had arrived that morning, gathered ward by ward across the capital, some orphaned, some not. They had discovered two things in short order: the ballroom floor was perfect for sliding on in socks, and the red-haired lady was climbable.

Serika stood in the middle of the courtyard with one child on each shoulder, a third on her back, and a fourth hanging determinedly off her flexed arm like laundry.

"You’re all brown," the one on her arm marveled.

"Sun-forged," Serika said solemnly.

"Sun? Does the hair burn?"

"Sure it does~" Serika mused and activated her powers, her red locks turning molten orange.

The children screamed with delight.

Many girls found their idol that day, while the boys...

The stock value of confident, tanned, athletic women with red hair would rise exponentially by the time these boys came of age.

Vex went by the hall doors at a trot with a rolled floor plan under one arm and a carpenter jogging to keep up with her.

"No lock and no bolt goes on the outside of any door a child sleeps behind," she decreed, to the corridor at large. "A child in this house can always open her own door and walk out."

"Nobody will ever be locked in anything again. And I will be checking every door myself, so do save us all the trouble~"

She was three rooms away before the carpenter finished writing it down.

"It still needs a name," Jasmine said, arriving at Lucille’s side with the ledger closed. "The crown’s clerks won’t register ’that thing the Villain’s family is doing with the townhouse.’"

"We are not calling it an orphanage," Lucille said. "Kids in orphanages get a bad reputation."

"The Elysiar Youth Program." Jasmine tried it out loud, nodded once, and wrote it down in the same motion.

"Let’s open enrollment to any child, orphan or not," Lucille said. "In the first years they’ll start with letters and numbers. Enough of both that nobody can ever lie to them on paper."

"Love it," Jasmine nodded. "And then?"

"Then we stop with the mandatory lectures. That is where Quin says the rot appears in his old world, and I think he is right about it. A farm girl does not need three years of mathematical theory."

Jasmine was on the same wavelength.

"Right. She needs the ability to read and understand what the dwarves published about drainage this spring, and the ability to calculate whether a second field pays for itself," the Tyrant of Commerce listed. "Give her that and she is the best farmer in her province."

"Sit her in a hall reciting theory she will never touch and she quits at fourteen and rushes into a labyrinth to escape the madness."

"After the basic stuff, we show it all to them," Lucille continued, envisioning it all. "We walk them through the smithies. The farms. The market on market days. The army yards. Any enterprise that will open its doors to a line of children."

"My warehouses will," Jasmine said. "And the Lorien laboratory, on days when nothing inside it is on fire."

"So, never."

"On the quiet days," Jasmine amended.