Chapter 43: Villainy*

The thing about being a villain is that it’s a full-time job.

You can’t just do one scary speech at the food stalls and call it a week. Four thousand people need to hate me by Saturday, and four thousand people don’t hate anybody based on hearsay. They need witnesses, ideally a girl in white robes sniffling in the front row who can tell everyone afterward, yes, it’s true, the fox has been tormenting me all week.

So I tormented her all week.

On Tuesday I waited outside the Saint Course lecture hall until she came out with her books, then fell into step beside her and matched her stride exactly.

"How’s his training going?"

"I, um. I don’t-"

"Because I’ve been watching it." I hadn’t. "And I’ve got some notes. He drops his left when he’s tired, he telegraphs everything above the shoulder, and he’s slow. Have you ever seen someone get hit in the ribs by somebody faster than them?"

"N-No?"

"You will." I leaned in a little, so she’d get the full effect. "Saturday. Front row."

Reindl Ashcombe went pink from her collar to her ears and clutched her books against her chest. I walked off feeling extremely good about my career.

---

On Wednesday she was sitting on the rim of the fountain court eating a bun, and she saw me coming from about thirty meters out. She didn’t run, which was interesting.

I put my boot up on the rim next to her, which is a thing villains do.

"Bring bandages," I told her.

"Bandages?"

"For him. You’re a healer, aren’t you? That’s your whole deal. So bring your kit, bring the good salve, bring whatever you’ve got, and be ready to go down onto that sand and scrape him up off it, because nobody else is going to." I let that sit for exactly one beat. "It’s going to take you a while."

She stared at me with her mouth slightly open.

Then she said, quietly:

"I’ll bring enough for you too."

[... Huh?]

"I’m not going to need any."

"You might!" she said, and she sort of half stood up, and the bun fell out of her lap. "You’re a Rank C and he’s a B and he’s got forty pounds on you, and people get hurt in the ring all the time, and I know you don’t like me but I’m not going to just sit there and let somebody bleed just because they were rude to me, that isn’t how it works, that isn’t how any of it works-"

I left.

---

On Thursday I didn’t have anything planned, but she was in the corridor by the noticeboards looking at the bracket, so I improvised. I came up behind her, reached past her shoulder, and put my finger on Perrin’s name on the posted sheet.

"Say goodbye now," I said. "You won’t get a chance after."

Her ears went red again. That’s two for two on the ears.

---

That was the week. I got four separate confrontations out of it, escalating pressure, a consistent villain persona, and one very shaken Saint Course girl who would be sitting in the front row on Saturday in white robes.

[Honestly? I’m kind of a genius.]

Friday afternoon I was lying flat on my back on the grass behind the west training yards with my tail out and the sun on my face.

"Are you listening to me?"

"Every word," I said.

"You’re not." Marisol was sitting beside me with her notebook open on her knee. "I’ll start again. Wilhelmina’s cousin sits on the festival committee, and Wilhelmina tells me things. So, frm the top: the Vosler girl has withdrawn from the round of sixteen with a wrist injury, which is a lie, because I saw her carrying a full tea service on Wednesday with that wrist. It’s political. Her house is negotiating something with the Stellaris-Vane household and they don’t want her in the same half of the bracket as the prince, which means the odds on the whole lower half have moved."

"Mm."

"Also, Odette Yun-Salera has been in the archive every night this week requesting Frostfall family records, and I don’t know what that’s about yet, but I will. Also, the Duchess of Emmerling’s daughter has publicly stopped speaking to the entire Noble Course second-year table, which is the third schism this month."

"Mm-hm."

The sun was out, my plan was working, and for the first time in about four weeks nothing was actively on fire. I had absorbed none of it.

Marisol shut the notebook.

"You’re bored," she said.

"I’m not bored. I’m processing."

"You are bored, and that’s my fault, because a report should hold its audience." She got up onto her knees, put the notebook down on the grass beside my head, and started unbuckling my belt. "Fortunately I’m adaptable."

"... We’re outdoors."

"Mhm. Behind the west yards on a Friday. Nobody comes back here except people doing this." She pulled my cock out, gave it two strokes to get it hard, hiked her skirt up around her hips, and sat down on it in one go, all the way to the base. Then she picked the notebook back up.

[... Okay, sure.]

"Where was I?"

"Uh... Emmerling," I said.

"Emmerling. Right." She started moving, slowly, her weight rocking down each time until she was fully seated. "The daughter has stopped speaking to the second-year table, which puts her mother’s faction one vote short on the festival committee, which is relevant because that committee decides the sand allocation for the semifinal ring, and Wilhelmina says they’ve already argued about it twice."

Her pussy was tight and hot, and she clenched down deliberately at the top of every stroke. She read the whole sentence without once looking up from the page.

"Are you following?"

"Sand allocation," I said. "Semifinals. Two arguments."

"Good." She turned a page. "Fenna Greywild has told at least nine people that you’re ’not officially claimed yet.’ Four wildfolk women were outside your dormitory this morning. One of them brought a chicken."

"That’s courtship. The chicken’s traditional."

"I assumed."

She dropped down hard on the next one. I grabbed her hips, she let me, and she kept reading.

"And your opponent has been booking the closed yard. The one with the doors. Alderltoft has had it three evenings running, an hour each time, locked from the inside with nobody in there but his house’s arms instructor, which is not a thing anyone does at this stage of a tournament unless they’re hiding something. The rumor out of the Knight Course is that he’s drilling a family technique. Something he’s never used in a public match, which he intends to open with against you."

I thrust up into her and she took it, and somewhere in there the word "finisher" caught up with me.

[A family technique.]

Because I wrote that.

Not in this volume, not anywhere near this volume. In the original, Perrin Alderltoft is background furniture for two and a half books, and then in volume five he gets his one good Chapter during the siege, standing in a broken gate, stopping a demon captain by eating a hit on purpose.

That’s the trick. The Alderltoft house technique is a counter. You take the blow fully without guarding or stepping back, and you convert everything the other person just spent into one swing coming back the other way. The bigger the hit, the bigger the answer.

I remembered being fifteen and thinking it was the coolest thing I’d ever come up with.

[My plan is to get in that ring and hit him for four minutes straight while insulting him loudly enough that four thousand people boo me. His plan is to let me.]

She put the notebook down, took my face in both hands, and kissed me. Tongue and everything, hips still working, until I stopped talking.

"Report’s over," she said.