This meat is unusually lean. The fat cap is thin, almost translucent, and the muscle fiber is long and tightly wound in a way that suggests an animal that ran hard and often. Wild boar is typically marbled. This is not. This looks more like the meat of something that was built for endurance rather than foraging. Something bipedal.
The thought arrives like a stone dropped into still water. It does not splash. It simply sinks, and the ripples spread slowly outward, touching everything.
Jellema puts his knife down.
He looks at Víl?. She is sitting across the table, next to Kenric. She is eating a lemon tart with the precise, unhurried movements of a woman at a garden party. Her charcoal silks shimmer in the firelight. Her face is calm, pleasant, faintly amused by the revelry around her. She looks like a Princess.
And then Jellema sees her eyes.
They are not the pale, courtly blue she normally wears. They are a deep, bruised violet, the color of a wound just before it turns black. And they are fixed on the King’s plate with a stillness that has nothing to do with boredom and everything to do with a terrifying, silent satisfaction.. It is the look of an artist watching a gallery full of people admire her work without knowing what it cost.
Jellema’s stomach turns. Not from the smell. From the arithmetic.
The math is simple. The math is horrific. The math is what unsettles his stomach.
He was there when Víl? spoke with Eamon. He peeked through the gap in the door, the way all competent Dukes peek at things they are not supposed to see, because information is the only currency that never devalues. He saw her drop the glamour. He saw the teeth. He heard her promise: no burial.
At the time, he assumed it was a figure of speech. A Fey flourish. A dramatic way of saying that Stephen would be exiled, stripped, forgotten. He assumed so, because the alternative did not fit into the orderly, rational world that Hedde Jellema had spent his entire career constructing.
Now the alternative is sitting on his plate, dressed in juniper and brown gravy.
He looks at the empty chair again. He looks at the platter. He looks at the King, who is reaching for seconds. The connections assemble themselves in his mind with the terrible, quiet precision of a clockwork mechanism, each gear clicking into place, each spring tightening, until the whole machine is humming and there is no way to make it stop as it spins to its terrible, final conclusion.
Stephen rode into the bluffs. Víl? followed. Stephen did not return. Víl? returned with a boar. The boar came from the Ravine of Mists, the same ravine where Stephen was last seen. The meat is lean and long-fibered. Víl? is not eating it. Kenric is not eating it. The children are not eating it. The only ones eating it are those who do not know.
No burial.
She meant it literally. She meant every syllable. She promised Eamon there would be no burial, and she has kept that promise with a thoroughness that makes Jellema want to open a window and scream into the night until his lungs give out.
Because there will be no burial. There will be no body. There will be no evidence. There will be nothing left of Stephen Padma except a pile of stripped bones that the kitchen staff will boil for stock and feed to the hounds by morning.
The King of Centis is the evidence. He is eating it.
“Hedde!” Oskar’s voice cuts through the fog.
He is pointing a greasy bone at Jellema, his face flushed with wine and the delight of a man who thinks the world is simple. “You’re not eating! This is the finest tusker the East Bluffs have produced in a decade! Try the loin!”
Jellema looks at the bone in the King’s hand. It is thick, slightly curved, and stripped almost clean. His physician’s eye, the one he cultivated during two years of study at the University of Saltside before his father pulled him out to learn politics, notes, with a detachment that will haunt him for years, that the curvature is wrong for a boar’s rib. Too flat. Too long.
“I fear I would not do it justice, Your Majesty,” Jellema says. His voice is steady. It is the steadiest thing about him. Everything else, his hands, his stomach, the ground beneath his chair, has turned to water. “My physician insists on a light diet after a long hunt. But the aroma alone is a triumph.”
Oskar grunts, satisfied with the compliment, and turns back to his plate.
Jellema lets his gaze slide across the table to Kenric. The Earl of Padma is sitting very still. His plate holds bread and a wedge of hard cheese. His knife rests untouched beside a slice of the roast that he has not so much as prodded. His face is the face of a fortress wall, blank, vertical, and built to keep things out. Or in.
Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.
He knows. The realization lands in Jellema’s chest like a fist. Kenric knows what his wife has done. He knows what the King is eating. And he is sitting there, breaking bread, his hand occasionally resting on Víl?’s wrist with the quiet tenderness of a man who has made his peace with what he married.
He’s the mortar in her wall, and he knows exactly what the bricks are made of. Duke Jellema sweats a bit more. Duke Jellema knew she'd keep her promise to Eamon. Duke Jellema just didn't know she'd offer Stephen up as… dinner. With an au jus and brown gravy.
Jellema watches as Víl? leans over to little Rho. The child is reaching for the platter of sliced meat, her small hand hovering over a piece of crackling skin. Víl? intercepts her with a silver tong, gently steering a lemon tart onto Rho’s plate instead, her voice a murmur of silk and authority.
She will not let the child eat it.
She will not let any of them eat it. Not Kenric. Not the girls. Not herself. The only mouths consuming Stephen Padma belong to the people who failed to stop him, the King who let him flourish, the Dukes who looked the other way, the court that treated cruelty as a spectator sport. Víl? has not just killed Stephen. She has made his destruction communal. She has fed the crime to the very system that produced it and called it a feast.
The political implications settle over Jellema like a shroud.
If he speaks, he destroys Kenric and the Fey Trade agreement. Kenric is the only competent Earl Centis has produced in a generation, the only man capable of making the Silver Peak venture work, the only bulwark between Oskar’s stupidity and the complete collapse of the northern economy. Without Kenric, the silver stays in the ground, the mercenaries go unpaid, and the kingdom fractures along lines that were already cracking before Víl? arrived.
If he speaks, he destroys himself. He was there when Víl? made the promise. He did not intervene. He did not warn Stephen. He did not tell the King. By any measure of law, his silence was complicity, and complicity in the murder of a peer of the realm is a hanging offense, Duke or not.
If he speaks, he tells the King of Centis that the meat currently dissolving in the royal stomach is the body of a man Oskar knighted with his own sword. The scandal alone would shatter the Crown. The church would demand an inquest. The Dukes would turn on each other like dogs in a sack, each one scrambling to prove he had no knowledge, no involvement, no plate at the table.
And Víl?? Víl? would survive. She always survives. She is seven hundred years old and backed by the Fey Bank and the kind of magic that turns men into meat. If Centis tried to prosecute her, it would be declaring war on a court that could buy the kingdom three times over and burn the change.
Every path leads to ruin. Except one. The one Víl? has already chosen for him.
Silence.
Jellema picks up his goblet and drinks. The wine tastes like ash. Across the table, Víl?’s violet eyes meet his for the briefest of moments, a flicker, a glance, nothing that anyone else in the pavilion would notice. But in that glance, Jellema reads everything he needs to know.
She knows that he knows. She has always known that he would know. She left the realization for him like a gift on a doorstep, unwrapped, undeniable, and impossible to return.
And in her eyes, there is no threat. No warning. Just a calm, ancient patience, the patience of a creature that has been playing this game since before Jellema’s great-great-grandfather learned to walk. She is not afraid of him. She is not even watching him the way one watches an adversary. She is watching him the way a shepherd watches a gate, checking to see if it will hold.
It will hold. Jellema makes sure of that with a small, careful nod that could mean anything to anyone who isn’t Fey.
To Víl?, it means: I understand. I will be quiet. Please do not feed me to the King.
She turns back to her lemon tart, and the moment passes like a cloud over the moon.
Jellema pushes the slice of meat to the edge of his plate with the tip of his knife. He will not eat it. He will never eat it. He will carry the knowledge of what it is for the rest of his life, a stone in his chest that he cannot cough up and cannot swallow. He will go to his grave knowing that he sat at a table where a man was served as supper and said nothing, because saying something was worse.
He has spent his life positioning people like chess pieces. He thought he was one of the players.
But as he watches the King of Centis reach for a third helping of the man who dared to threaten the Fey Princess’s children, Jellema understands that he was never a player at all. He is a piece. A useful one, a rook, perhaps, or a bishop, but a piece nonetheless, moved by a hand that is older and colder and more patient than anything he has ever encountered in forty years of politics.
The hand picks up a lemon tart and takes a delicate bite.
Jellema finishes his wine and signals for more. It is going to be a very long night. And tomorrow, he will tell his clerks to finalize the Padma deeds with such enthusiasm that even Víl? will be impressed. He will support every motion Kenric brings before the council. He will praise the silver shipment as a miracle of logistics. It's not even a lie. They were at the mine for a few days, at most. They came back with silver from that mine for the first time in fifty years. He will do everything in his power to ensure that Kenric is happy, prosperous, and, above all else, undisturbed.
He will be the most cooperative Duke in the history of Centis, because he has seen what happens to the people who are not.
They don’t get a grave. They get a gravy.
I sit by the window in our suite, watching the mist roll off the Dobile river. I feel light. My promise to Eamon has been kept. Stephen isn't buried.
"The King is still in bed," Kenric says, stepping up behind me and resting his hands on my shoulders. "The Physician says his stomach is... rebellious."
"Wild boar is hard to stomach for those used to soft court food," I say, leaning my head back against him. "Especially the older ones. They have so much... history... in their marrow."
Kenric doesn't ask. He knows I am a Lawful creature. He knows I promised Eamon there wouldn't be a grave. He also knows I don't leave witnesses, only "brethren" like the rats or the guests at a feast.
"Jellema is downstairs," Kenric observes. "He looks like he’s aged ten years overnight."
"Hedde is a smart man," I murmur. "Smart enough to know that a forest boar is a dangerous thing to poke.
The morning after the feast in Dobile is thick with a heavy, greasy fog that matches the atmosphere inside the palace. King Oskar is indeed suffering, though he attributes his "pulmonary congestion" to the wine rather than the "ambitious" meat he consumed with such gusto.
Today's notes brought to you by the infamous Fey bard, Ashenleaf Brightnote, Chronicler of Courtly Catastrophes.
Well WELL, dear reader ... Chapter 146 was an event.
A moment.
A spiritual experience, assuming your spirit enjoys righteous vengeance, political carnivory, and nobles learning what consequences feel like.
And they got it.
Spectacularly.
Almost artistically.
- Subtlety is for people with patience
- Mercy is for people who don’t keep track of debts
- And when she smiles politely, someone is about to regret 100% of their life choices
His role this chapter likely included:
- Sweating
- Panicking
- Making demands he cannot back up
- Asking questions whose answers he will immediately forget
At least he’s consistent.
Still the only human in this kingdom with:
- A functioning brain
- A moral compass
- And the correct reaction to having married a beautiful, elegant, sanctioned weapon of divine violence
Chapter 146?
Delicious.
Dangerous.
Divinely Fey.
Topped with gravy.
the Discord via this invite link.