Crown of Velúndé – Chapter 20: XCV — By Blood (Patreon)

Chapter 20: XCV — By Blood

“Great Nobles, I thank you for coming,” the Lady Kestrel said, bowing her head to Kayode and Lami. 

Behind her stood a small group of men dressed in lamellar of a cheaper grade than Kayode’s Oathguards—armor reminiscent of what the Bannerman in Ohorin wore.

They waved a green and blue flag, with the symbol of a proud bird on its surface.

When she raised her eyes, they were red with hot tears. “I am Lady Ailbhe, of House Kestrel,” she introduced herself. She was a Native Velúndéan of small stature and sharp features. Perhaps not even as old as Kayode himself. And in her hand was a black box. “My f—father, the late Baron Theodore Kestrel once ruled these lands.” She gestured to the hills. “He brought the colonies peace, he brought the colonies stability, he brought them civilization.” She inhaled, gathering her trembling self. “And they repaid him with treachery and blades. They killed our men, chased us out of our homes, killed my father—and they would have killed me too if your Ancestors had not looked down kindly upon me that faithful night. And when I—” her voice cracked. She sobbed.

“It’s okay, take your time,” Lami encouraged, smiling kindly at the noble.

The Lady Kestrel nodded. “And when I asked for my father’s body…so that we may bury him in the proper way. This was what they sent back.” She opened the box and revealed the head of the late Baron—grey, rotten, and bleeding with a putrid stench that left Kayode backstepping as his eyes watered and guts churned. Lady Kestrel seemed to barely notice it—her rage and sorrow too deep. “High Chief Siegfried Sern. Or as they call him, Siegfried Stone-spine. That is the name of the beast which they all rally around. That is the name of the monster who did this. You must slay him, Great nobles, slay him and burn all of those filthy Savagers at the stake!”

“I will make things right,” Kayode assured her. 

And the Lady Kestrel was off, vengeance and anguish still hot in her eyes.

“I’ll make things right,” Lami mimicked, voice deep and face severe, then she was laughing. “Such a nothing promise.”

Kayode frowned. “I have no Idea what you’re talking about, Lady Gimba.”

And that just made her laugh harder.

She wasn’t wrong. It was a nothing promise, the only reasonable kind to give when he only just arrived in a new world.

It did not gain him any immediate supporters. But neither did it alienate him to anyone. And that was what was more important here.

“I’m going to see what Dame Varghelt has learned,” and Kayode was walking towards the Knight.

He found her up on a hill, looking out at the vast land below. 

The town, which they knew now as Bracklocke, loomed in the distance, protected by high walls, and with smoke drifting into the sky. Eyes of the Throne let him see the individuals outside the walls, observing Kayode as he was observing them.

“They have a lot of spirit, but from the reports it's clear they lost much of their fighting force during the rebellion,” Varghelt said. If she had a heightened senses Skill, she could likely see much further than Kayode. Shortly after the Oath, she had volunteered that she was Level 37, wielding a B Tier Class: Sword Singer. Ser Gold was B-Tier as well, Level 33. White Steel—like Lami’s Cryoblade it was one of those newer Classes that came from combining the aspects of the processes of making two other Classes. In hers, it was a Cryomancer and a Blade Master; in his case, an Ice Caller and a Sword Singer.

Varghelt turned to Lami. “Great Lady, will you be joining the effort?” she said, hopeful. “I would be honoured to see a Cryoblade in action.”

Lami smiled. “That depends on your Lord, Dame.”

And both eyes fell on Kayode now.

He turned to Lami. “What Level are you?”

Lami shook her head. “That’s rude to ask a Lady.”

Kayode sighed. “Fine. Awakening.”

Lami nodded approvingly. “Seventh.”

“So you would all but trivialise this entire affair,” Kayode noted.

Lami nodded.

“And all this conquest would be remembered as you reclaiming my Barony for me,” Kayode went on. “That would be the story—even if you loosed but a single Winter’s Teeth and did nothing else our entire stay.”

His eyes narrowed. “And that’s the point, isn’t it? That’s why your mother sent you. So I would lean on your overwhelming power, and every victory here would become yours, not mine. So that if I ever try to raise an army—for any cause, one you deem just or otherwise—despite being the Kingdom Maker, they won’t look to me. They’ll ask where you are.”

He clenched his fists. “Undermining me completely.” Then the full realization came. “Your House never gave up on the throne. This is how you mean to reclaim it—not by contending for it outright. That’s dangerous. That’s foolish. That puts your favored daughter’s head on the chopping block.” His gaze locked onto hers. “But by controlling the head that wears the crown.”

Lami smiled, slow and deliberate, her eyes roaming him with unapologetic hunger. “You have no idea,” she said softly, “how sexy you are when you think.”

Kayode felt the heat rise to his cheeks, his brain turn off for a moment, then he turned to Varghelt and cleared his throat. “So…we…uhm…we need another way to win this.”

The Dame looked eager to get back to business. “We can go in now and take the town. Victory is all but guaranteed, Great Lord.” 

“But at what cost?” Kayode asked, regaining his bearings. “Getting up that hill is going to be a lesson in attrition. We’ll have our men dropping like flies at the start—and they’re not going to go down without a fight either. The moment we make it through those walls, they’ll come at us not just like their lives depend on it, but those of their sons and daughters. And we’ll have no choice but to meet them with just as much ferocity.”

She frowned, perhaps thinking of what to say in a manner that does not earn his ire. “War is a game of death, Great Lord,” the Dame said carefully.

“Only if you’re playing it wrong,” Kayode corrected, biting his nail in thought.

He looked back toward the camp. It was a study in extremes. There were the troops who had served under the late Baron—most of them beaten and battered—and then there were the fresh soldiers who had arrived aboard Lami’s Driftship. Filled with a readiness and focus, the latter were the reason victory here was all but certain.

The Kestrels, from what Kayode could tell, were not an important noble family. Important noble families weren’t sent to the colonies—and when they were, they didn’t struggle to keep those colonies firmly under their thumbs.

If I was this Stone-spine, I’d have been expecting a rescue ship, not reinforcements. For the Kingdom to deem this land unprofitable rather than sink more resources into claiming it. That it hadn’t would terrify me. 

“High Chief Siegfried Sern. What do we know about him?” Kayode asked.

Varghelt paused for only a fraction of a second to gather her thoughts, perhaps compiling what she knew. “Father was the previous High Chief, very popular with the people. Fourth Awakening, C Tier Class—Blood Eater”

Blood Eater? That is certainly a Class name.

“Can I speak with him?” Kayode asked.

Varghelt frowned. “I can try to arrange a parley, but reports say he’s not the most… conversible of fellows."

“Thank you,” Kayode nodded.

Varghelt flushed despite herself. “P-please don’t thank me, Great Lord. It is my honour to serve a descendant of the Ancestors.” She bowed once more and continued on without meeting his eyes.

“Great Lord Baron Kayode Nathaniel Balógun!” came a voice, hollow and artificial. But familiar.

Kayode turned and saw Archibald—the Golem—at the foot of the hill. He wore a winter coat around him, which Kayode found odd, as he was certain the Construct could not experience the cold.

“The high exalted one—the  great, never-wrongness, she who towers atop the pinnacle of intellect upon which all the drooling morons of past and present are doomed to be eternally compared, Magister Thaelwen Hatstopa, has requested the Great Lord’s presence!”

Oh, fuck. “I’m actually quite busy with the Great Lady at the moment!” Kayode yelled back. Done, there, he could put off dealing with the woman until much—

“Oh, we’re actually just finishing up, Archie!” Lami told him. “Tell Thaelwen he’s all yours!”

Lami turned to Kayode with a grin only one who knew exactly how pleasant Hatstopa was could give. “I guess that’s you. I’ll be settling us in if you don’t mind.” And Lami was off.Dooming Kayode.

###

“Again,” Hatstopa all but ordered.

Royal Decree “Jump,” Kayode said, and he felt his will reach out and extend to the young boy. 

There was a moment of resistance and the lad’s feet left the ground, eyes blank with obedience.

He snapped back into himself and seemed for a moment to have forgotten where he was. Then he remembered, and waited for Kayode’s next order.

“You better not be obeying him just because he’s your Baron!” Hatstopa snarled, teeth bared, eyes hot with rage.

“N—no, I promise Magister!” the boy tried. panicking “I—I wasn’t even in control of me’ own body! The Great Lord said jump and up I went!” 

Thaelwyn was instantly calm at that. “Oki! Just checking.” And then she was back to scribbling something on her notepad.

Around the tent Golems moved boxes of machinery about, all seemingly following the lead of Archibald.

All Kayode could do was stand in the center of the flaming circle. Yet hearing the boy explain how Royal Decree worked gnawed him with guilt. “What’s your name?” Kayode asked.

“Ash,” he replied.

“Well, I’m sorry for putting you through this, Ash,” Kayode sighed.

“Oh, it’s fine. Not much use a Level 10 Fighter like me can have for a Baron—much less a Great Lord. Happy to be here.” He smiled.

Kayode smiled back. “Well, I’m happy you’re—” He paused. “Level 10?” His eyes slid to Hatstopa. “I thought you said he was Level 4.”

The woman’s head snapped viciously toward the boy. “Oh, you fucking ingrate! You’re not supposed to tell the subject anything.” She rounded on him. “Get out of my tent before I syringe you!”

The lad did not need a second warning, he was out through the flaps in an instant.

Hatstopa drew in a long breath and sighed.

Kayode frowned. “You’re a horrible person.”

“You’re very observant,” she informed him, eyes already back on her pad as she wrote.

“Royal Decree,” Kayode said, getting back to the point. “How did I do that?”

“‘Your word is law. Those deemed beneath you by a gulf of 10 Levels or more shall find resistance impossible, their will bent to a single simple command without regard for motive or allegiance,’” Hatstopa recited. They had decided to test out a few of his Class Skills. “That was how you said the System described the Skill, yes?” she asked, eyes still on the page.

“Yes—oh.” Kayode’s eyes widened. No wonder he’d faced a hint of resistance when he tried to control Ash.

“Yes. Your Magnitude can be taken into account as well, creating what we like to call Effective Level. A Fighter is E Tier, so at Level 14 you’re essentially a Level 20 E Tier to him,” she said.

“But the System didn’t say that,” Kayode frowned.

Hatstopa glared hotly at the book. “Well, the System doesn’t say a lot of things. Sometimes it tells you the exact percentage increase of a buff. Sometimes it uses vague wording like minor, or significant, or major, because it’s influenced by the psyche of the most populous species on the planet—and your lot are too busy breeding like rabbits to develop solid theories or philosophies about the world around you, and it becomes the jobs of people like me to read between the fucking lines, and to make matters worse I don’t even get to do it in the comfort of my lab, and I’m instead forced to follow you to some backwater—why are you smiling!”

“Because the number of people I can potentially control with my mind has vastly increased.”

Hatstopa paused and tapped her pencil against her lips. “You know, there is a chance that for an S+ Class, Effective Level is greater than we thought. That you could be something even beyond the Sixth Magnitude.”

“Really?”

“Try Royal Decree on me,” Hatstopa told him.

Royal Decree. “Jump.” Kayode felt his Skill shape into will, reach out to Hatstopa, wrap around her mind and—pain shot through his head, searing hot, and a sensation like nails dragging against chalkboard. Kayode fell onto his knees, panting. He felt blood dripping from his nose. “Argh!”

Hatstopa was smirking.

“What did you do?!”

“I didn’t do anything.” she explained, smug. “You tried to push a Skill far beyond what the System allowed. And it pushed back…hard. It’s a good lesson to learn here and not in the middle of a battlefield."

By the Ancestors, she was lucky she was useful.

Just as Kayode got back to his feet, Archibald approached Hatstopa and handed her a bundled stack of blue sheets.

“The sheets are ready, oh High Exalted One,” he said.

“Finally.” She snatched them from his metal hands.

“What’s that for?” Kayode asked.

“Affinity sheets,” Hatstopa said, her voice carrying its usual lack of enthusiasm—as though explaining anything to people who were not already experts in a discipline she’d mastered decades ago was some great personal affliction. “They tell me what kinds of magic you’re inclined toward,” she continued. “Warriors tend to be poor at healing magic, but excel at combat. Everything you’re good at means there’s something you’re bad at. So this’ll let us know what you should and shouldn’t waste your time trying to learn.”

Kayode nodded. Seemed a fair enough base to cover.

And then she was throwing more papers into the fire.

As the fire ate the sheets, the wall of symbols began to morph and twist into new ones—these just as incomprehensible as the last.

“Okay… so I can see a very high affinity for Ice magic,” Hatstopa said, eyes narrowing.

Kayode already knew that much.

She continued feeding the sheet, more symbols blooming across its surface. “Fire, water, earth, lightning,” Hatstopa added.

Ah. So a strong elemental focus.

Why would his Class be built around that specifically? Perhaps to make rulership viable in any climate—

“Combat, Healing, Illusion, Beast-Taming, Summoning, —no, wait—what?”

The wall flooded with symbols. They poured upward from the floor and vanished into the edges, rushing along like river currents. The glyphs packed together so tightly that Kayode could no longer tell where one ended and another began.

“What’s wrong?” Kayode asked, panic striking him.

“You have all of it…You…you have all the Affinities,” Hatstopa whispered, looking pale. “H—how the fuck does a Class have all the Affinities. The Obongjayar model treats Classes as spectra. You cannot drift strongly in one direction without collapsing potential in another.” She stared at the wall as if it had personally betrayed her. “Yet yours hasn’t collapsed. It hasn’t narrowed. It’s… expanded.” Her voice dropped to something between awe and fear. “How does a Class hold everything without tearing itself apart? How does one create such a thing? How—how?!”

Kayode swallowed. That was a lot to be hit with all at once—both the revelation that such a thing was possible, and the implication that the knowledge of how it had been made was forever lost to time.

So he fell back on stark practicality. “So we’re not asking what I can do,” Kayode said carefully. “We’re asking what I can’t?”

Hatstopa shook her head, hollow-eyed. “No,” she said. “No, it’s not even a question.” She looked at him then, really looked at him. “You can do anything—learn any Skill.”

The flap opened and Ser Gold stepped in. “Great Lord,” he called. “Your attention is needed.”

Kayode waited for Hatstopa to throw a tantrum. She didn’t. The flame vanished, and she walked over to a shelf. “My entire life, dedicated to this field… and I hadn’t even scratched the surface.” She pulled open a drawer, took out a bottle of wine, and began drinking straight from the rim.

Well…

Kayode turned his attention to Gold, walking towards his Oathguard. “What’s the problem?” he asked.

“The Blood Eater,” Ser Jorren said. “He’s here.”

###

“Oh, a dark one! That is a sign of strength among you Velúndéans, yes?!” the High Chief asked.

“Something like that,” Kayode replied evenly.

“Good. Good.” He nodded. “Then I will enjoy the battle before I kill you, Night-skin.”

High Chief Siegfried Sern was, in fact, just as Dame Varghelt had said; not the most conversible of fellows. What he was, was a big man, with long red hair, a face that was perhaps a decade older than Kayode’s, and sharp green eyes. He had the nose of a man who’d been punched a lot, and the bruised knuckles of one who’d punched even more.

They had chosen to hold their meeting out in the open, cold winds cutting through the air. Behind him was a small entourage of men, all with hair a similar shade to their leader’s.

The High Chief’s pelt hung proudly from his shoulders as he sat, a set of odd, runed armor underneath it. It wasn’t lamellar he wore. It was something else, made out of interlocking metal rings rather than plate. 

At his feet knelt four Elves—tight metal collars etched with runes clasped around their necks, each holding a gemstone. On his wrist was a bracelet Relic carved in the same style.

Kayode had seen thralls once or twice. Despite the practice being outlawed in Velúndé, during peace talks the emissaries of Northern Kings often arrived accompanied by them.

It was the first time he was speaking to someone who owned one, however. So Kayode took a moment to adjust so as to not let his feelings jeopardize this negotiation. If this went well, the Elves would be free either way.

“I’m not here to battle,” Kayode said—and that wasn’t just because reports placed the High Chief as a C Tier in the early Fourth Awakening. “I’m here to make an arrangement that doesn’t cost more lives than it has to. You’ve seen my force; I’m sure you have some idea of what we can do. If we storm that town, many of your people will die needless deaths. You owe them what is best. And what is best is that you give us the town. I will be your Baron, yes—but you will remain High Chief. Your people do not deserve to lose one they love so dearly, one they know so well.”

Siegfried turned to the men behind him. “Fpricth er im Kernst?”

[Skill - Right of Passage: “Is he serious?”]

Kayode stifled the shock of seeing the Notification appear.

“He almost always is,” Lami replied sweetly. “And though I am fluent in Rechenstong, I believe it would be far more appropriate for this dialogue if we continued in a language fully understood by all.” She was seated to the side of Kayode, with Lady Kestrel on the other. 

And Kestral too had something to say. “Do not speak your vile language here, Savager!” the Lady hissed, hand slapping down on the table, glaring daggers at the man.

Siegfried Sern frowned at both Lami and the Lady Kestrel—not with rage, but with what seemed to be genuine confusion. Then his eyes widened in realization, followed by a mild annoyance—not at them, but at Kayode. “I forgot your people let the women speak. A curiosity, and one I’m not fond of. If you ever have a change of heart, please know that a proper backhand would put an end to it, I tell you.”

“You fucking rodent!” Lady Kestrel hissed.

He seemed to barely hear her.

Lami’s teeth showed in a predatory grin. She caught the High Chief’s gaze, leaned in ever so slightly, and spoke with a voice like a dagger. “Leg Hand an mich, und ich treib dir einen neunzahn-langen Eisstachel so tief hinein, dass dein Atem zu Schnee wird.”

[Skill - Right of Passage: "Lay a finger on me, and I will shove an icicle so far up your ass, you'll breath snow."]

Kayode was reminded, then, that his fiance had more raw power at her fingertips than both his Oathguards did in their weapons. The High Chief swallowed and shifted uncomfortably in his seat. 

This meeting was getting away from Kayode. He cleared his throat. “High Chief Sern,” he called. “What say you? We can end this without bloodshed. No one needs to die.”

The High Chief looked at him and laughed—but the expression never reached his eyes. “Fiendrach,” he said. “This region you call Cloudhave. Hochfeld,” he gestured toward the town, “which you name Bracklocke. Do you know who ruled it before your people came?” His smile thinned. “My father. And before him, my grandfather. And before him, my great-grandfather. And then his Uncle—the one who founded Hochfeld in the first place. Back then it was called Rugherenbruchst.” His gaze hardened. “And then your people arrive. With your flying ships. With your curious Classes. And you declare that this land is now a Ba-ruhn-ni.” The word came out wrong, foreign, like dirt on his tongue. “Fiendrach becomes Cloudhave. Hochfeld becomes Bracklocke. And those of us who resist are called Savagers. And you—”

“You dare speak of morality, beast!? You put my father’s head in a box!” Kestrel snapped.

The High Chief didn’t even look at her.

“And you,” the High Chief continued, “don’t even need to defend yourselves. Because you’ll have the people you already tamed to do it for you.” He got to his feet, leaning in now. The Oathguards were already in motion, blades hanging just inches from the High Chief’s neck. If he noticed, he did not care. He just burned with hate and malice. “Do not tell me how to rule my people, do not claim to care for their lives. For if you cared even half as much as I do for them, then you would get in your ship and leave.”

Kayode held the man’s hate in his eyes, and judged its merit. “You’re right. All I want above anything else, is your land. And all you get to decide is how I take it.”

Something approaching respect flashed in the High Chief’s eyes. He scoffed. “By Blood, night-skin.”

Kayode nodded. “By blood.”