Chapter 69 - Millions of Crowns

Chapter 69: 69 - Millions of Crowns

"Alright. Alright, I’ll talk." Gaspard was pulling at the restraints without seeming to notice he was doing it. "Please. Don’t do anything to my wives or my daughter. I’ll tell you everything I know, so please..."

The rest of it came out of him as something that stopped being words halfway through. He had reached the end of what a man can carry and there was nothing on the other side of it.

Aurelian lifted two fingers, and the door opened, and somebody took his wife out by the arm, and she went without saying anything else to either of them. The sound of her footsteps went a long way down the passage before it stopped.

That left the two of them alone again, and Aurelian pulled the chair back around and dropped into it.

"Then I’m listening, Gaspard. I want to be clear about the terms first, because I’d rather there was no confusion later." He rested his forearms on his knees. "If you leave out a single detail, both your wives and your daughter die in front of you. You’ll watch the three of them die, slowly... And then it’ll be your turn—dying a slow death while you look at their bodies. Understood? That would be the last thing you ever saw."

Gaspard’s head came up.

"I think you understand your position. You have nothing left. No house, no lands, no name that means anything by tomorrow morning, and nobody in this kingdom who will speak for you." Aurelian’s voice did not change at any point. "The only thing you have left is them. So do one useful thing before you die."

Gaspard let out a long breath and started talking.

"They offered me money."

"Go on."

"A great deal of money. More than I could refuse." His voice had gone somewhere flat and far away. "I want you to understand the amount, Your Highness, because I don’t think you will otherwise. It was not a bribe or a bad season’s profit made good. It was more than House Arquenay had moved in my lifetime, and more than we were ever going to move."

"How many crowns?"

"Millions."

Aurelian’s expression did not move.

"Millions of crowns, delivered in cases." Gaspard’s one working eye came up. "That’s why your men never found it in the accounts. It never went into any account. I hid the cases and I moved them myself, and there is not a single line of it anywhere in my books, because there was never a transaction to write down."

"And in return?"

"Instructions."

"Be specific."

"At the beginning they were small." Gaspard swallowed. "Route a shipment a certain way. Delay a report. Look the other way while somebody crossed a stretch of the north. Nothing that felt like anything at the time, and I took the money for it and told myself I was being paid for doing very little."

"And afterward?"

"Afterward it changed."

Gaspard was quiet for a moment, and Aurelian did not fill the space.

"They wanted a network. Men, wagons, routes through country the Crown had stopped watching, buyers who paid without asking. And they wanted it aimed at one place in particular." He looked at the floor between them. "Elves. Taken out of the border forest, moved south, sold where the wrong people would hear about it eventually."

"To start a war."

"That was the objective. That was always the objective, and I understood that some way into it, and I kept going anyway." Gaspard’s mouth worked. "That is the part I cannot dress up for you."

Aurelian leaned back in the chair.

"Who offered it to you?"

"I don’t know."

"Gaspard."

"I swear to you, I don’t." He got as far forward as the chains allowed. "Everything came through a messenger. Always the same arrangement, never the same man twice, no seal on anything and nothing written down that could be traced back anywhere. I never met whoever was behind it. I never wanted to. I was following orders and taking the money and that is the entire truth of it."

Aurelian looked at him for a while.

"Then let me ask a better question. Are there other houses in this?"

"I don’t know."

"Was this coordinated? A group of the Great Houses moving together to remove the Crown while it was weak?"

"I don’t know, Your Highness."

"Which of the houses loyal to my father is running it?"

"I don’t know that either." Gaspard’s voice cracked on it. "I know how much they paid me. I know what they asked me to build. I don’t know their names, I don’t know how many of them there are, and I don’t know whether there is anybody else in this kingdom doing what I was doing. I have told you everything I have."

He sagged against the wall as far as the chains allowed.

"That’s all I know. Please. Don’t touch my family. They had nothing to do with any of it."

Aurelian stood up, and a sword began manifesting in his hand as he did it, dark silver forming out from the hilt with the thin pale-gold line running down the centre of the blade, the guard curving forward like folded wings.

Gaspard saw it and stopped moving entirely.

"Nothing is going to happen to your family."

Gaspard’s eye came up.

"You will die as a traitor to the Crown, and your crimes will be read out in public, and your wives and your daughter will carry that name for the rest of their lives." Aurelian turned the blade once in his hand. "House Arquenay will never come back to what it was. Your children’s children will be introduced as somebody’s relation and will watch faces change when the name is said. That is what you have left them."

"But they will live."

"I am a man of my word."

Gaspard closed his eye.

"Thank you."

Aurelian brought the point of the sword up under his chin and set it against his throat.

He did not do it quickly. He pressed the blade in and kept pressing, at the pace of a man closing a door he did not want to slam, and Gaspard’s hands opened and closed twice against the chains behind him.

The blood came in a rush and went down the front of him and into the water on the floor, and it took a while.

When it finished, what was left of Gaspard Arquenay hung forward from the restraints with his knees off the ground and his chin against his own chest, and the room went back to being a room with one candle in it.

Aurelian dismissed the sword, and it came apart from the tip down until there was nothing in his hand. He went to the door and opened it.

"Get all of this out of here. I don’t want anybody looking at it."

The guard outside straightened. "Your Highness."

"And send word to whoever is holding his wives and the girl. They live. Nothing will happen to them, and nobody so much as raises their voice." Aurelian stepped out into the passage. "Gaspard Arquenay is dead as a traitor to the Crown. His crimes will be made public in full."

"Understood."

Aurelian started up the stairs and did not look back at the room behind him.

’Millions of crowns, moved in cases, by people who never once put a name on paper.’

’And a man that far into it who genuinely could not tell me who was paying him.’

He came up out of the dark into the corridors of his father’s castle.

’They’re further into this than I thought.’