Chapter 641: Kaede’s Gift

Lia puffed her cheeks out into two perfectly round and furious little dumplings, crossing her arms over her sweater.

"You left me alone for more than twelve whole days!" she declared fiercely. "You went to a burning desert, didn’t call once, and probably took a two-hour luxury bath before you even said hello... Exploiting your fame is the bare minimum restitution required by the sibling code!"

Silas stared at her furious pouting face for three seconds before a low helpless laugh broke through his chest.

"The sibling code, huh?" he muttered, shaking his head. "Unbelievable."

He uncapped the marker with a quiet click.

Resting the heavy cardboard against the edge of the oak table, his hand moved with fluid unhesitating grace.

He didn’t sign "Silas Graves." though... In clean sharp strokes that mimicked the handwriting that he used to sign the original boxes, he signed it Vespera with an aggressive sharp flourish at the tail.

Cap!

"There," Silas said, tossing the marker onto the table.

He reached out, planting his broad palm firmly on top of her dark head, ruffling her hair until her neat ponytail tilted sideways. "Take your spoils of war, you little monster... You’re cute, but you’re a menace."

Lia let out a triumphant squeak, clutching the signed box to her ribs like a stolen jewel, completely ignoring her disheveled hair as Penelope and Kaede giggled softly behind their hands.

The swinging kitchen door groaned open with a soft oiled whisper.

"Now, now," Martha’s warm, chiding voice drifted over the steam rising from the ceramic trays. "The master has only just returned from war, and you are already demanding tributes before the soup has cooled... Sit down, Lia. Eat your greens before I clear the rice."

"Yes, Miss Martha," Lia chimed, sliding back into her seat with an angelic unrepentant smile.

Silas watched the older woman move smoothly around the table, setting down a heavy stoneware pitcher of chilled barley tea and small dishes of pickled ginger.

Her hair was pinned into that same immaculate graying knot with her black dress and white apron were ironed to razor-sharp perfection.

’Thank you, Martha,’ Silas thought, picking up a tender strip of glazed short rib with his chopsticks.

It was a simple quiet thought.

If she hadn’t been here, if this house had been an empty concrete shell where kids were left to heat up canned beans while he went to the Sovereign Realm, coming back through that front door would have felt like returning to an armory.

She made the air smell like toasted sesame oil and clean starch... Honestly she made the world feel like something that had a right to exist.

Swipe!

A soft cool linen napkin brushed gently against the corner of his lip, dabbing away a stray fleck of sweet soy sauce.

Silas blinked, startled, his eyes tracking up the starched cuff to Martha’s face.

The head housekeeper was leaning down slightly with her expression looking serene and her eyes crinkling at the corners with a quiet pride that seemed to smooth away the last lingering static in his head.

"Eat slowly, Master Silas," she whispered, her voice low enough that the girls didn’t catch it over their bickering. "There is plenty more in the kitchen... You have carried enough iron for one season."

Across the table, Penelope lowered her voice until only Silas could hear it.

"My sister has not slept properly since Iunu," she said, pushing a radish around her plate with unusual care. "She says it is paperwork but it’s is not paperwork so I hope she’s happy when she sees you."

Then she took a composed sip of barley tea, as though she hadn’t said anything at all.

Silas felt a strange warm sheepishness touch his ears as he gave her a small lopsided smile, letting out a breath.

’You know what?’ he mused inwardly, chewing the beef as she pulled back to pour the tea. ’Martha really is quite beautiful... She’s elegant. She’s gentle... Is it just me, or am I completely surrounded by incredible women?’

Before he could follow that train of thought down its naturally ridiculous path, a small choked throat-clearing sounded from his immediate right.

"U-Um..."

Silas turned his head.

Kaede was half-out of her chair, sitting up very straight with her dark eyes fixed on the linen placemat.

Her fingers were knotted tightly around a small flat box wrapped in deep indigo mulberry paper and tied with a braided crimson cord.

"Big Brother Silas," she said, her voice stiff and careful like the way a shy child recites a speech she has rehearsed. "This is for you... A token from my place."

Penelope leaned back in her chair, resting her chin on her hands, watching with the cold gaze of an empress at the theater.

Silas set his chopsticks down.

"For me?"

"Yes," Kaede said, stepping forward and extending both arms straight out, offering the box with the rigid ninety-degree posture of a samurai delivering a dispatch. "Please accept it... It is standard protocol, to repay the debt of preservation..."

"Preservation, huh?"

Silas took the box from her hands.

The paper was textured, smelling of dried pine needle as he untied the red silk knot, peeling the paper back to reveal a shallow tray of polished black lacquer and resting inside was a bracelet.

Steel and gold had no part in it.

A single seamless strand of tightly braided midnight-black silk cord formed the band, woven through with five small, irregularly shaped beads of dark unpolished river-jade.

The stone possessed a calm damp coolness that seemed to settle against the skin like mountain rain.

"It is an old craft from the northern province of my clan," Kaede mumbled with her hands retreating to clutch the hem of her school skirt. "The river-jade is gathered from the sacred streams below the frost-line... It is said to anchor the spirit and keep the breath steady when the sky shakes, I searched seven different merchant houses before we left the capital to find one that hadn’t been tainted by modern alchemy."

Silas slipped the silk loop over his right hand and tightened it with a tug of his teeth and thumb.

The dark stone rested comfortably against his pulse point, completely unbothered by the monstrous, dormant heat of the Gold Core churning three inches beneath his ribs.

"It’s nice, Kaede," Silas said, turning his wrist under the dining room chandelier, admiring the clean, minimalist work. "Really... It fits well... Thank you."

Kaede let out a long shuddering breath, as though she had just spent three minutes submerged under ten feet of ice water.

"It is my honor!" she said, bowing so low and so fast from the waist that her forehead nearly clipped the rim of Silas’s water goblet. "I am glad that it pleases you!"

Lia rested her cheek on her fist from across the table, watching with deadpan merciless judgment.

"You’re bowing again, Kaede," Lia said. "He’s not a Shogun... You don’t have to break your back."

"Quiet, idiot!" Kaede hissed, snapping upright with her ears smoking with humiliation as she scurried back to her chair. "You have zero appreciation for the sacred aesthetic of martial reciprocation!"

"I have an appreciation for not getting hit in the nose with your skull," Penelope murmured smoothly, taking a dainty bite of her chicken.

Silas chuckled softly, resting his hand against his chin as the table dissolved back into comfortable bickering noise.

Two hours later, the afternoon light had deepened into long amber bars that stretched across the dark cedar floorboards of the living room.

The large dining table had been cleared of plates, transformed into an orderly battlefield of lined notebook paper, brass protractors, and leather-bound geography atlases.

Martha sat at the center with a pair of delicate wire-rimmed reading glasses perched on the bridge of her nose and her finger tapping rhythmically against the edge of Lia’s algebra workbook.

"Carry the third integer, little mistress," Martha murmured gently. "Do not rush the denominator... If the foundation is crooked, the spire falls."

"The denominator is stupid," Lia muttered under her breath, her pencil scratching aggressively against the paper.

Martha only smiled and turned the page.

Over the rim of her glasses she caught Silas’s eye across the room and gave him the smallest nod.

Ten feet away, sprawled horizontally across the massive L-shaped sectional couch in the center of the room, Silas was useless to the world.

’Finally, a break in my own house...’

He had kicked off his leather slippers, his bare feet hooked over the armrest and his head propped up by three oversized down pillows.

He was still wearing the fluffy white VIP bathrobe, the terrycloth belt tied loosely around his waist with one arm draped lazily behind his head while his right hand held his phone six inches from his nose.

"Haah..."

His face was a picture of pure satisfaction as his dark eyes flicked across the digital catalogs of the high-end Europa trade exchanges, his thumb scrolling with rapid efficiency.

Scroll!

[IMPERIAL SEABED ESSENCE: COLD-PRESSED MARITIME LAVENDER EXTRACT. 4,200 SC.]

[Add to Cart]

Scroll!

[RHYX COASTAL ALABASTER SALTS: INFUSED WITH SUN-DRIED CITRUS BLOSSOM. 6,800 SC.]

[Add to Cart]

Scroll!

[DIVINE SAPONIN BARS: TRIPLE-MILLED CELESTIAL MINT AND CRUSHED PEARL. 12,000 SC.]

[Add To Cart.]

’Ehehehe~’ Silas snickered silently, his lips curving into a wide shameless grin that would have terrified anybody within forty leagues. ’This is perfection... I have the exact names from Aki’s private bath. Every single bottle, every single mineral scrub, every single ridiculous luxury soap she had lined up along those marble basins... I memorized every damn label while I was scrubbing the desert off my skin.’

He had forty billion credits sitting in his major account from the Julian Vanderbilt bypass glove transaction, not to mention the gross twenty-five percent royalty stream currently flooding his commercial accounts from the Apex figurine sales... But that wasn’t the money he planned to use, he still hadn’t made any headway with the seventy five million from Ev.

He really needed to spend some money...

’I am buying thirty cases of each,’ Silas decided firmly, tapping the purchase confirmation repeatedly. ’I will never use that cheap two-credit pine-tar soap in this house ever again... Martha can take the cruiser down to the customs hub tomorrow and clear the crates.’

Somewhere beyond the veil, he reflected, Aki was standing on her first scrap of soil, staring at an empty plain and a blinking blue tab.

The thought tugged at the corner of his mouth.

’She’s fine.’

She had a Purple Core, an inventory full of cards, and the stubbornness of a woman who had spent a lifetime proving she belonged at tables that didn’t want her.

Still, he made a note to check on her the moment he could slip away, and went back to the soap.

At the dining table, Lia’s pencil paused mid-equation as she tilted her head, her dark eyes narrowing through the gap between her geography folio and the salt shaker, glaring across the room at the couch.

Silas was still grinning at his screen with his shoulders twitching with quiet muffled chuckles as he swiped through another luxury listing.

’Why is he smiling like that?’ Lia’s thoughts churned with dark suspicion. ’That’s the face people make in the cinema when they’re hiding something scandalous.’

Her mind flashed back to the ruined skyscraper in Iunu.

To the beautiful, green-haired goddess who had knelt beside her in the grass, smiling with that divine radiance.

’I belong to Lord Silas. In the sovereign realm, our souls are bound beneath the branches. In your mortal terms... you might consider us husband and wife.’

Lia’s eyes widened slightly.

’Is he... is he cheating on Miss Eluned?!’

The staggering scandal of the thought made her grip her pencil so hard the graphite snapped with a sharp crack.

Who was on that phone? Was it that wealthy, scary woman with the gold carriages who had visited the school? Or—

WHACK!

A heavy leather-bound volume of Classical Shogunate Prose and Grammar descended from above, smacking squarely against the top of Lia’s skull.

"Ow!" Lia yelped, clutching her head and glaring to her left.

Kaede was standing over her, holding the textbook like a club as her dark eyes burned with no-nonsense discipline.

"Focus, Lia," Kaede hissed in a fierce whisper, pointing a sharp finger at the half-finished quadratic formula on the notebook page. "If you don’t finish the third module before four o’clock, Miss Martha will not allow us to clear the carpet... The box has eleven figurines, Lia! Eleven! If we don’t start the setup now, we won’t finish anything before the sun goes down!"