LTSV - Lost & Found 59 (Patreon)

“Well, what else can you offer me?” Mira asked and smiled. “You can ask Andrei how many times I returned that slap to him. I wonder what would twice my suffering look like for you? To say nothing of the setbacks and inconveniences you’ve caused me.” She paused like she was thinking some more and smiled, “Oh, I know!” 

She stood and turned to face Madame. Viola slumped to one side as her eyes rolled back in her head and she hit the ground in a dead faint. Mira let her fall without interference.

“I’ll tell you the cost of my forgiveness,” Mira said as she approached the bars. “Once I leave here, you’re going to wait until the guards come to check on you. Then you’re going to request a confessional with one of the high priests. I noticed during the paternity ritual that some of them can use their divine power to distinguish truth from lies. You’re going to request one of them to hear your confession and you’re going to admit to everything that you’ve done; both to me and in the service of Hurandel’s coup. While we’re at it, you’ll admit to any part you played in what Viola was doing to Cecily at school.”

Madame backed all the way up against the back wall, so Mira called Penny to teleport her into the cell. Madame shrieked as Mira vanished and then reappeared in the cell with her.

“Quiet,” Mira snapped. “Your noise is irritating me.”

“Why would I…?” she shut her mouth so fast her teeth clicked when Mira fired a small lightning bolt into the wall next to her head. It left a black smoking divot in the stone and Madame’s attention seemed to fixate on that mark. At first she looked scared, but then she seemed to get an idea. 

She threw her hand up and Mira could feel her try to pull on the ambient mana in the room to cast a spell, but nothing happened. Adorable. Well, it was what a smart person would have done. What made more sense? Mira being able to cast spells in the prison with ease or the prison wards being disabled. Occam’s razor, and all that. Unfortunately for her, Mira being that powerful really was the truth that remained after the impossible was eliminated.

“Did you think that I’d disabled the Null Field?” Mira asked as she closed in for the kill. “Don’t be silly. I could do this all day. You, on the other hand, have normal limits.” 

“What kind of monster…?” Madame started to ask, but Mira held up a finger to shush her. She and Viola had been calling Adra ‘the Princess’s Monster’ this whole time, but maybe they were rethinking just who the monster in Millica’s inner circle was.

“Don’t be ridiculous, Madame,” she said sweetly. “You already know what kind of monster I am. Haven’t I given you ample opportunity to figure it out, just now? The fact that you’re this scared means you’re ready to understand the reason why you’re going to obey me.”

She stepped closer.

“You’re going to do exactly as I say because now you know, in your heart of hearts, that there is nowhere you can run where you could escape me. There is nowhere you can hide where I can’t find you and there is no one who can protect you if I decide that your debt has come due,” she explained. “If you do not oblige my simple request to confess to your wrong doings and submit to your just punishment, then you will spend the rest of your life in terror of the random afternoon where I decide that I’m bored enough to come after you. Nod to show me you understand.”

Madame didn’t nod. Instead her gaze past Mira’s shoulder and her eyes filled with tears. “Someone! Please!” she wailed. “Stop her! She’s gone mad!”

There, in the corridor behind her, stood just about every witness from Andrei’s ill-fated duel, including Andrei. Adra was in the lead, visibly holding Bertram back, but she could see Cecily, Princess Millica, and a passel of palace guards. 

“Well, shit.” 

She’d taken too long. 

“Mira!” Cecily gasped. 

“How long have you been listening?” Mira asked, putting aside that one problem for later. She addressed her question to Adra, but Princess Millica was the one who answered.

“We could hear your voice from the entrance,” she replied. The good news was that she didn’t look angry, just a bit annoyed. “This building is designed to carry the prisoners’ words to the outside, since the people who end up here are never capable of waiting patiently to be released. I believe we arrived around the time you were explaining your theory about one ‘Reginald Duvall’, which I will be very interested to hear about in more detail at a later date. Now, kindly come out of there.”

Mira decided that she’d pushed her luck far enough and called Penny to teleport her back into the corridor, much to everyone’s shock. She landed in front of the others and endeavored to look contrite.

“What kind of reservoir does that girl have?” one of the guards muttered. “Is it bottomless?”

“Someone send a runner to the Temple of the Veiled Goddess and request the cooperation of a Diviner,” Princess Millica directed one of her guards. “Tell them it concerns a conspiracy that touched the Saintess.”

Cecily paled and reached out to grab Mira’s sleeve. “Mira, what did you mean about the things Viola was doing at school? I told you, that had to have been Fergie. He was the only one who would have wanted to…” she stopped as she realized that, no, Ferdinand Rousseau wasn’t the only one who would have had a motivation to hurt her. 

Viola chose that moment to start waking up again. She slowly pushed her top half up off the ground and blinked at the people surrounding her. “Ah!” she jerked backwards and hit the wall. 

“Tell me it’s not true, Viola,” Cecily said. She sounded hollow, but that emptiness was filling up with something else even as Mira watched an invisible wind start to spring up in the narrow corridor. “Tell me you didn’t listen to me cry about the bullying while laughing at me behind your hand.”

“I…” Viola’s throat worked, but no sound came out. “...why can’t I…?”

The invisible wind picked up and a halo of light appeared behind Cecily. That was a new trick. Mira had heard that divine spells were mostly a matter of intent and instinct, but this was pushing even her bounds of credulity—unless Cecily was so ticked off that she’d flown past the point of self-doubt and was now operating on pure, furious intent.

Forcing someone to tell the truth was the logical progression from detecting lies, so Mira guessed it made sense that Cecily could suddenly do this.

“Nevermind about the Diviner,” Princess Millica told her men in the background. “Our Saintess has decided to conduct the interrogation herself.”

Adra sidled up to Mira and subtly propped her up under her elbow. He must have noticed that she was running out of steam after casting several high level spells and trying to beat a man like a dog in the street. She really had done a lot today, hadn’t she? Maybe too much.

“I wouldn’t have had to if you weren’t such a shameless little opportunist,” Viola spoke like the words were being dragged out of her. Perhaps they were. “You acted so shy and innocent when we first met, but you had the Fourth Prince wrapped around your finger within a day, didn’t you? I had been working on him for years with nothing to show for it! Should I have just let you swipe the future I’d been working towards my whole life right out from under me? Should I have meekly gone to take your place under your stepfather’s boot? Unlike some people, boys don’t line up for the chance to give me whatever I want. I have to work for what I get!”

Cecily’s jaw firmed. The aura of holy light surrounding her intensified as she came to a decision and pointed at Viola. “Confess your wrongdoings,” she commanded and bands of light appeared around Viola’s wrists. 

Viola fought bravely to keep her mouth shut, but the glowing manacles got even brighter and soon she couldn’t stop talking. 

She confessed to everything and not just the bullying. It came out that Madame and, by extension, Viola had been Hurandel’s secret liaisons with the agents from Apricol. Theyhad been passing messages on his behalf for years. Apricol had a long history of fomenting civic unrest in rival nations so they could sweep in and either absorb the territory or install a figurehead government that was subservient to them. They’d been trying to do this to Avenon for centuries and finding little purchase, until Hurandel approached them.

Not only that, but Viola was the one who’d gotten Hurandel and his assassin squad past Millica’s defenders during the assault on Lyonhall. Viola might not have much magic, but she was a talented illusionist and Madame had used her talents as a chameleon to infiltrate places like Bertram’s study. That, at least, explained how she got in there when it was clear that Bertram didn’t trust his wife or her children and never had.

Viola hid Hurandel and his men under an illusion with a few of their activated sleeper agents in Millica’s forces for cover so they’d obscure any noise the hidden infiltrators made while sneaking past the defenders.

The confession went on for so long that one of the guards ended up needing to go fetch stools for Mira and the Princess. In doing so, he found the pistols that Mira had kicked out of Viola’s reach and that set off an entirely new line of inquiry. It turned out that revolvers weren’t common weapons in this world. Everyone already knew about guns and gunpowder, but the single-action revolver was a new development that had yet to be exported from Apricol’s munitions factories. Everyone else was still using flintlock technology.

Once Viola was exhausted, Cecily released her and she collapsed back onto the floor where the guards converged on her to search her person and then throw her into a convenient cell. It was, amusingly, the one right next to Andrei’s. 

Speaking of Andrei, he was huddled in the back corner of his cell and listening to Viola’s exhaustive list of treason and manipulation with wide eyes—and as well he should. His name came up frequently in her compelled confession and never in a flattering context. Someone had used a little healing magic on him, so he wasn’t as damaged as he’d been when Mira last saw him. He still flinched whenever Bertram got too close to his cell.

Cecily turned to Madame next and pointed at her so that the manacles appeared on her wrists. “Confess your sins,” Cecily said quietly. “Start with the valet.”

The story Madame told was more or less accurate to what Mira had guessed. She had been the one who let the valet out, but she’d also been secretly stoking the fires of his obsessive anger towards little Violet for months at that point. She’d made little offhand comments about things Violet had supposedly done or said about Andrei. She hadn’t given him the acid, but she had walked him past the storage depot where it was kept while leading him on a circuitous route back to Andrei’s guest quarters. Then she let him overhear her plans for a family garden outing that afternoon, which would include Violet.

Bertram listened to all of this with his arms crossed over his wide chest. When Madame started to slow down, he dropped his arms and came over to stand by Cecily. “Ask her if Raoul is my son,” he said, ignoring the way everyone stopped to stare at him.

Madame, on the other hand, was pale as a ghost. Oh, Bertram was onto something.

“Our marriage only went forward due to the former Prince Regent’s order and I laid with you twice in all our time together,” Bertram said, addressing her. “Neither time was of my choosing and, no matter how I look at it, he was too large at birth to be the premature child he would have been if I had fathered him.”

Cecily looked at Madame with a frown. “Answer him.”

“He…” she covered her mouth with both hands, which was an answer all on its own. Eventually, the pressure became too much and she dropped her hands with a gasp. “...he is Hurandel’s son. I wanted insurance, in case the fourth prince didn’t make it to adulthood or failed to realize his potential.”

This time, even Princess Millica’s expression cracked. Mira’s jaw dropped. Vesper went still as a statue. Bertram closed his eyes and shook his head. His hand found Vesper and Mira’s shoulders and he gently squeezed.

Madame could have had one child in the position of Lord Warden and another on the throne of Avenon. With those two positions under her control, she could have held the entire country in the palm of her hand. If she’d been just a little less ham-fisted and hadn’t alienated Bertram from the start then she might have pulled it off. 

“Highness, I think that Violet and I have heard enough,” Bertram rasped. “May we be excused to return to Rosepark?”

Princess Millica nodded and there was something a little soft about her expression for once. This was the first time Mira had seen her be gentle with anyone, but Bertram had just admitted to being essentially date-raped and then being forced to marry the one who assaulted him in front of God and everybody. “Vesper will need to stay. We will continue the interrogation and give you a summary later. Take Adelram with you.”

“Thank you,” Bertram said, with a respectful bow. 

Mira followed him out of the prison, mostly because she did not want to leave him alone. There was an invisible weight bowing those shoulders and she was still a little in the grip of that feeling she’d gotten when he’d interposed himself between her and Andrei.

She wanted to blame that feeling on the ghost of Violet’s memories, but really Mira was the one struggling.

She’d never been all that angry with Bertram’s failures as a parent, even before she had full memories of the clusterfuck that was Violet’s family life, mostly because she’d had no expectations of him. Fathers weren’t a source of security in Mira’s experience. They were usually more like an obstacle or an environmental hazard. If Bertram didn’t get in her way, then he was already a cut above the rest. Half the time, she barely thought of her hosts’ fathers as people. They were either background noise or dangerous animals that needed to be put down, with very little in between and she’d just been waiting to see which one of those he was. She hadn’t needed an excuse to pardon or vilify him—not until they actually met and the usual narrative of Mira’s home lives started to unravel.

Now, she hardly knew what to think except a very bad thing had happened to this man once (twice, apparently) and she didn’t want to leave him alone now that he’d admitted it.

Alan and William were lurking around the entrance when they emerged from the prison and the looks on their faces told Mira they’d overhead everything. Wow, the sound from inside really did carry to the entrance.

“Come away from here,” she told them. “We’re returning to Rosepark. You can wait for Cecily there.”