OvidLemma
It would seem that the dowager duchess, Hyacinth Eatherfine (below) is becoming a major thorn in Val's side. The dowager duchess (who is Duchess Aleida Eatherfine's mother) ordered Earl Gunthald (also below), the ruler of Port Rumm and its surrounding territories, to detain Val under suspicion of sedition. When Eatherfine finally ordered that Val be imprisoned rather than merely detained, Gunthald thought he might get more leverage or a better offer out of Val. However, our stubborn heroine does not respond well to coercion, even when it's attached to a pretty good deal. As a result, Val finds herself imprisoned and with both the earl and the dowager duchess aligned against her. In this chapter, these treacherous and high-ranking conspirators finally show their true colors.
44. Orphan Prisoner Valkyrie
When Val woke up, her head hurt and even turning from side to side brought on vertigo and nausea. She felt bad for all the people she'd help Ette incapacitate with sleep-cloth… but only a little bad, because all of them were bad people…
Or were they? She pondered it as she recovered. Some people had been violent criminals convicted of assaulting private citizens. Val knew for a fact that everybody that Ginn and Ette went after they'd deemed to be bad. Wayfair had its share of political criminals, for whom it would probably be easy to collect an easy bounty, and Ginn had never gone for those. But even the other criminals had been deemed so by the Wayfair City Council, which was subservient to the Regency Council, which was even worse than Mrs. Eatherfine and Aurilicht's aristocracy. Though, to be frank, Val was starting to think that they were all rotten. Or maybe that was just the sleep-cloth talking.
Eventually, the headache waned and Val explored her new suite - a six-by-eight cell, all stone and solid except for a sturdy steel door with an access slat, two ventilation pipes that Val would be lucky to fit her arms through, and a stinking pipe sticking out of the floor that must have been the cell's poor excuse for a privy. There was a ratty old mattress that stank like it hadn't been cleaned in a year, and Val suspected it was a bigger louse hazard than it was a comfort. She'd be sleeping on the stone floor. She'd slept on cool stone before. She'd slept in smellier, nastier places before. However, she'd never been trapped in any of those places before.
She knocked on the door three times and, when there was no answer, she considered her options. She could break the door, probably. And then, if there was no guard sitting in silent wait, she could creep through the prison and… what? There would surely be more guards and more locks. And, if she tried anything 'stupid' - and Val assumed that included escape attempts, Gunthald would hurt her family.
Ah. There was the drawback of having family. They were there for you, but they could also be hurt in your stead. Val was effectively defanged and shut off from the world.
Meow, Violet said, which meant, You still have my fangs. And that was true - Violet never seemed to have trouble coming or going anywhere, even a seemingly-secure jail cell. Val could get a message out through her - Niko could sort of understand Violet. She was a fellow witch and, even if Violet wasn't her familiar, the familiar's almost-speech was almost-intelligible.
Meow, Violet said, which meant, Should I go get Niko to come rescue you?
Val shook her head. "No. Tell her I've been arrested and that they should get somewhere safe. Tell her the earl is our enemy."
Violet made a slow blink, which meant she understood, and hopped onto nothing and then into nothing, which was her way of going out of the cell. Familiars were like animals, but they were actually natural spirits, which didn't quite follow normal rules of reality. They followed some sort of rules, to be sure, but they were different from what people went by.
So Val waited. She counted the days by the meals the prison provided her and by the changing of the guard, which happened every six hours by her guess. Violet was gone for most of a day and, when she came back, she was concerned. She leapt into Val's lap and waited to be consoled - which helped Val relax, as well, so it was doubly beneficial. After enough head scritches and belly rubs had been had, Violet meowed out several sentences…
She'd had trouble finding Niko, but she, Izzy, and Galvan were staying with the Uddys. However, Ette and Ginn had both been detained, and they'd been properly detained, not put under lazy house arrest and given access to the whole city. Niko wanted to come and rescue Val, but promised she wouldn't try anything stupid.
So Val waited. Seven days passed. She tried to meditate, but she'd never been very good at it. As a general rule, Val couldn't pay attention to anything longer than twenty minutes, which meant she couldn't meditate for longer than that, which was barely breaking into the good stuff. But she did sit and think. They hadn't given her any light beyond dim glimmers from the hallway, so she made her own, and as she did Val practiced her magic. Since Violet was there with her most of the time, she had broader pipeline into natural magic, even if it still wasn't particularly strong, which she exerted over several hours to grow a proper toilet, a proper bed (insofar as interwoven twigs could be bedding), fresh fruit, and some exercise bars for herself. And she spoke with ghosts.
Perhaps it wasn't surprising that there were ghosts in a prison. People died in there on a regular basis - the medical care wasn't that great and the worst criminals were kept in isolation for decades. Val had only ever vaguely felt spirits before, but as she lingered in the Port Rumm prison, they became increasingly comfortable with her company. Some were even gregarious.
"If that's meant to be rapier practice, you're favoring your lead foot too much," one of them said. Tovin been an expert duelist who'd lingered in jail for a decade and a half after killing a man in a duel - a man who turned out to be a baron's brother, hence his stiff sentence. "Look… girl, do as I do…"
"You're a ghost, Mr. Tovin, so you haven't got a body. And my name is Val," Val said.
"Ah… right-o. Well… the point is this, Val. If you're going to thrust…" Val imagined Tovin thought himself to be thrusting a sword at that moment - the vaguely-luminous cloud he occupied shifted. "Do so starting with most weight on your back leg and springing forward. Foot perpendicular to the thrust. Good. Now try crouching down, off-hand near your lead foot, as if ducking beneath an opponent's attack. See? Your range is fully two body lengths to stab, far further than most opponents think."
"That's helpful," Val agreed. "Though I can't practice two body lengths in this cell…"
"A fact I know all too well… so simply imagine the blade and fashion yourself a handle of whatever's handy…"
Val had found that she could grow the plants she'd summoned into her cell into whatever shape she liked. "I think I've got handles covered…"
Tovin was friendly despite his decades as a ghost - in fact, he seemed to forget he was a ghost most of the time. Most of the other ghosts, though, were bitter and angry and Val did her best to shut them out. Which, fortunately, helped her a lot with her meditation practice - shutting out ghosts was something that she could do for more than twenty minutes at a time.
And, obviously, Val thought a lot about how she'd been betrayed by the earl and by Mrs. Eatherfine, and she thought a lot about their machinations. They weren't brave people - they were cowards who liked to plot. They treated politics a lot like a game of castles, attacking and feinting and putting their pieces into strategic locations. Only, instead of battlefield tactics, it was simply using the levers of power in ingenious ways to get their work done. As Gunthald had observed, he'd been at it far longer than Val had been alive and was quite good at it. But Val was a quick study. She hoped she'd get the chance to put theory to practice.
Val spent eight days in the cell - and, truth be told, it wasn't such an unpleasant stay if you didn't include the fact that she was worried sick about her family whenever she hadn't managed to distract herself with other pursuits. And, of course, she wondered what punishment the dowager duchess had in mind for Val's so-called 'sedition'.
She heard them coming - more guards than the usual complement trundling down the narrow prison corridor. Violet hopped twice into nowhere in-particular, and Val was alone in her cell with a bunch of plants. The guards opened the door… or at least tried to. There was quite a bit of plant material in the way. It took Val a minute to coax it away from the door, at which point they'd summoned a security man to remove the door from its external hinges. Val didn't bother to tell them the door would open now, as she didn't care to make their jobs easier. She just waited, cross-legged and glaring at the door. Eventually, there was a loud click and the door swung fell off its hinges, three fairly burly guards carrying its reinforced metal mass off.
"Bloody hell, we're running late. Take her to the interrogation room," the warden said.
"Why am I being taken?" Val asked.
The jailor sneered at her. "The dowager duchess wants to have a word with you," he said.
"Good. I'd like to speak with her, as well," Val said.
Noting the vegetation inside her cell, he gasped. "What in the bloody hell have you done with the place?"
"It needed work," Val said. "I thought you said we were running late?"
He sneered again - Val figured that was his signature move. "Don't get lippy, girl. Take her."
+++++
"I've been nothing but loyal to your family," Val told the dowager duchess.
She'd been brought into a dim, mid-sized room that smelled of rust, blood, and old urine. She imagined the unpleasant environ was to assure whomever sought to speak with a prisoner that their charges weren't enjoying their stay. The warden had led Val in through one door, shackled her to a heavy oak table, and stood back. Mrs. Eatherfine entered from the other door a moment later, holding a sachet of aromatics to her nose to mask the room's scent.
"What does it smell like in here?" she asked.
"Fear," the warden said. He seemed to think himself more intimidating than he actually was. At the moment, the most intimidating person in the room was the mid-forties woman in extravagant garb holding a sachet to her nose.
"Hmm," Mrs. Eatherfine said. "And you, child, have most certainly not been loyal. A loyalist does not put herself above her duchess, claiming to be queen. If you'd simply been unwell, I'd have you committed and left you to the doctors. But you've spread your nonsense to others like a disease, and half the people who've met you claim you're the return of the living Friyja… but I am not merciless. Recant and I'll have you exiled to the St. Benthia's Abbey in the Hansurdas Mountains. It will be a hard and isolated existence, but at least you won't spend your years festering in a little cell."
Val spat at Mrs. Eatherfine. To her disappointment, no more than a fleck or two made it to the dowager duchess's fine purple gown. "I'll take my chances in prison over granting you any sliver of satisfaction. I won't recant what I know is true and I'm not going to trust the promises of a liar who stabs her friends in the back!"
The dowager duchess huffed. "I thought you said she'd be more pliable after a week on subsistence rations…"
"Um…" the warden said. "Your grace… she grew her own food…"
"She grew her own food? Explain."
"Yes, your grace. As per his excellency's instructions, nobody interacted with the girl nor gave anything to her beyond two cups of water and two rolls a day. But when we tried to open her cell, it was wedged shut with vegetation. Fruits, nuts, berries… a privy… climbing ladders up to a loft with a hammock… a shrine… a drinking gourd… I think there was a kitty tower…"
"Enough! What is this, a joke? How is such a thing even possible?"
"Because you don't even know what magic can do, Hyacinth," Val said. "You've imprisoned me because you're afraid of me… but I'm not afraid of you…" That latter part was a lie - Val was very much afraid, but running rampant over that fear, she just wanted to make Mrs. Eatherfine mad. To hurt the terrible woman's feelings since she was shackled to the table and couldn't hurt her physically.
Mrs. Eatherfine scowled at Val - the first scowl she'd ever seen the woman make, and it was full of venom and rage cracking beneath her practiced veneer of civility. She turned to the warden. "If we imprison her, she'll break out in time. I want her dealt with."
"Your grace?" the warden said. He didn't seem so frightening at all. "She's… she's a child."
"Have. Her. Killed."
"I… I need the earl's go-ahead for that…"
Mrs. Eatherfine turned on her heels. "Then you'll get it. And when you receive it, you will comply. Promptly."
"Of course, your grace."
After the warden unshackled Val, he led her back to her cell. The door had already been re-attached, and nobody had touched her plants. He had no snide remarks, only a quiet sadness about him, as he locked the door and left a stunned Val in the dark to deal with the news that she'd been handed a death sentence.
OvidLemma
An Obligatory Message from the Author
Thanks for reading, and make sure you follow me here to catch my latest releases! I know these pleas for support are annoying to read, but the only thing keeping me from making daily chapter updates of the stories you love is the fact that I need a regular job. Please consider helping me realize my goal of writing full-time if you can. And if you can't, no worries! I don't want anybody breaking the bank on my behalf. Regardless of whether or not you can chip in, I hope you continue to read and enjoy my stories!
I plan on releasing chapters of this story 2-3 times a week, but I haven't decided on what days yet. Advance chapters are available on my Patreon. If you liked this story, don't forget to check out my many other stories Scribble Hub, Patreon, or Amazon (free with Kindle Unlimited)!
https://www.patreon.com/OvidLemma
https://www.amazon.com/s?i=digital-text&rh=p_27:Ovid+Lemma
-Ovid
OvidLemma
It would seem that the dowager duchess, Hyacinth Eatherfine (below) is becoming a major thorn in Val's side. The dowager duchess (who is Duchess Aleida Eatherfine's mother) ordered Earl Gunthald (also below), the ruler of Port Rumm and its surrounding territories, to detain Val under suspicion of sedition. When Eatherfine finally ordered that Val be imprisoned rather than merely detained, Gunthald thought he might get more leverage or a better offer out of Val. However, our stubborn heroine does not respond well to coercion, even when it's attached to a pretty good deal. As a result, Val finds herself imprisoned and with both the earl and the dowager duchess aligned against her. In this chapter, these treacherous and high-ranking conspirators finally show their true colors.
44. Orphan Prisoner Valkyrie
When Val woke up, her head hurt and even turning from side to side brought on vertigo and nausea. She felt bad for all the people she'd help Ette incapacitate with sleep-cloth… but only a little bad, because all of them were bad people…
Or were they? She pondered it as she recovered. Some people had been violent criminals convicted of assaulting private citizens. Val knew for a fact that everybody that Ginn and Ette went after they'd deemed to be bad. Wayfair had its share of political criminals, for whom it would probably be easy to collect an easy bounty, and Ginn had never gone for those. But even the other criminals had been deemed so by the Wayfair City Council, which was subservient to the Regency Council, which was even worse than Mrs. Eatherfine and Aurilicht's aristocracy. Though, to be frank, Val was starting to think that they were all rotten. Or maybe that was just the sleep-cloth talking.
Eventually, the headache waned and Val explored her new suite - a six-by-eight cell, all stone and solid except for a sturdy steel door with an access slat, two ventilation pipes that Val would be lucky to fit her arms through, and a stinking pipe sticking out of the floor that must have been the cell's poor excuse for a privy. There was a ratty old mattress that stank like it hadn't been cleaned in a year, and Val suspected it was a bigger louse hazard than it was a comfort. She'd be sleeping on the stone floor. She'd slept on cool stone before. She'd slept in smellier, nastier places before. However, she'd never been trapped in any of those places before.
She knocked on the door three times and, when there was no answer, she considered her options. She could break the door, probably. And then, if there was no guard sitting in silent wait, she could creep through the prison and… what? There would surely be more guards and more locks. And, if she tried anything 'stupid' - and Val assumed that included escape attempts, Gunthald would hurt her family.
Ah. There was the drawback of having family. They were there for you, but they could also be hurt in your stead. Val was effectively defanged and shut off from the world.
Meow, Violet said, which meant, You still have my fangs. And that was true - Violet never seemed to have trouble coming or going anywhere, even a seemingly-secure jail cell. Val could get a message out through her - Niko could sort of understand Violet. She was a fellow witch and, even if Violet wasn't her familiar, the familiar's almost-speech was almost-intelligible.
Meow, Violet said, which meant, Should I go get Niko to come rescue you?
Val shook her head. "No. Tell her I've been arrested and that they should get somewhere safe. Tell her the earl is our enemy."
Violet made a slow blink, which meant she understood, and hopped onto nothing and then into nothing, which was her way of going out of the cell. Familiars were like animals, but they were actually natural spirits, which didn't quite follow normal rules of reality. They followed some sort of rules, to be sure, but they were different from what people went by.
So Val waited. She counted the days by the meals the prison provided her and by the changing of the guard, which happened every six hours by her guess. Violet was gone for most of a day and, when she came back, she was concerned. She leapt into Val's lap and waited to be consoled - which helped Val relax, as well, so it was doubly beneficial. After enough head scritches and belly rubs had been had, Violet meowed out several sentences…
She'd had trouble finding Niko, but she, Izzy, and Galvan were staying with the Uddys. However, Ette and Ginn had both been detained, and they'd been properly detained, not put under lazy house arrest and given access to the whole city. Niko wanted to come and rescue Val, but promised she wouldn't try anything stupid.
So Val waited. Seven days passed. She tried to meditate, but she'd never been very good at it. As a general rule, Val couldn't pay attention to anything longer than twenty minutes, which meant she couldn't meditate for longer than that, which was barely breaking into the good stuff. But she did sit and think. They hadn't given her any light beyond dim glimmers from the hallway, so she made her own, and as she did Val practiced her magic. Since Violet was there with her most of the time, she had broader pipeline into natural magic, even if it still wasn't particularly strong, which she exerted over several hours to grow a proper toilet, a proper bed (insofar as interwoven twigs could be bedding), fresh fruit, and some exercise bars for herself. And she spoke with ghosts.
Perhaps it wasn't surprising that there were ghosts in a prison. People died in there on a regular basis - the medical care wasn't that great and the worst criminals were kept in isolation for decades. Val had only ever vaguely felt spirits before, but as she lingered in the Port Rumm prison, they became increasingly comfortable with her company. Some were even gregarious.
"If that's meant to be rapier practice, you're favoring your lead foot too much," one of them said. Tovin been an expert duelist who'd lingered in jail for a decade and a half after killing a man in a duel - a man who turned out to be a baron's brother, hence his stiff sentence. "Look… girl, do as I do…"
"You're a ghost, Mr. Tovin, so you haven't got a body. And my name is Val," Val said.
"Ah… right-o. Well… the point is this, Val. If you're going to thrust…" Val imagined Tovin thought himself to be thrusting a sword at that moment - the vaguely-luminous cloud he occupied shifted. "Do so starting with most weight on your back leg and springing forward. Foot perpendicular to the thrust. Good. Now try crouching down, off-hand near your lead foot, as if ducking beneath an opponent's attack. See? Your range is fully two body lengths to stab, far further than most opponents think."
"That's helpful," Val agreed. "Though I can't practice two body lengths in this cell…"
"A fact I know all too well… so simply imagine the blade and fashion yourself a handle of whatever's handy…"
Val had found that she could grow the plants she'd summoned into her cell into whatever shape she liked. "I think I've got handles covered…"
Tovin was friendly despite his decades as a ghost - in fact, he seemed to forget he was a ghost most of the time. Most of the other ghosts, though, were bitter and angry and Val did her best to shut them out. Which, fortunately, helped her a lot with her meditation practice - shutting out ghosts was something that she could do for more than twenty minutes at a time.
And, obviously, Val thought a lot about how she'd been betrayed by the earl and by Mrs. Eatherfine, and she thought a lot about their machinations. They weren't brave people - they were cowards who liked to plot. They treated politics a lot like a game of castles, attacking and feinting and putting their pieces into strategic locations. Only, instead of battlefield tactics, it was simply using the levers of power in ingenious ways to get their work done. As Gunthald had observed, he'd been at it far longer than Val had been alive and was quite good at it. But Val was a quick study. She hoped she'd get the chance to put theory to practice.
Val spent eight days in the cell - and, truth be told, it wasn't such an unpleasant stay if you didn't include the fact that she was worried sick about her family whenever she hadn't managed to distract herself with other pursuits. And, of course, she wondered what punishment the dowager duchess had in mind for Val's so-called 'sedition'.
She heard them coming - more guards than the usual complement trundling down the narrow prison corridor. Violet hopped twice into nowhere in-particular, and Val was alone in her cell with a bunch of plants. The guards opened the door… or at least tried to. There was quite a bit of plant material in the way. It took Val a minute to coax it away from the door, at which point they'd summoned a security man to remove the door from its external hinges. Val didn't bother to tell them the door would open now, as she didn't care to make their jobs easier. She just waited, cross-legged and glaring at the door. Eventually, there was a loud click and the door swung fell off its hinges, three fairly burly guards carrying its reinforced metal mass off.
"Bloody hell, we're running late. Take her to the interrogation room," the warden said.
"Why am I being taken?" Val asked.
The jailor sneered at her. "The dowager duchess wants to have a word with you," he said.
"Good. I'd like to speak with her, as well," Val said.
Noting the vegetation inside her cell, he gasped. "What in the bloody hell have you done with the place?"
"It needed work," Val said. "I thought you said we were running late?"
He sneered again - Val figured that was his signature move. "Don't get lippy, girl. Take her."
+++++
"I've been nothing but loyal to your family," Val told the dowager duchess.
She'd been brought into a dim, mid-sized room that smelled of rust, blood, and old urine. She imagined the unpleasant environ was to assure whomever sought to speak with a prisoner that their charges weren't enjoying their stay. The warden had led Val in through one door, shackled her to a heavy oak table, and stood back. Mrs. Eatherfine entered from the other door a moment later, holding a sachet of aromatics to her nose to mask the room's scent.
"What does it smell like in here?" she asked.
"Fear," the warden said. He seemed to think himself more intimidating than he actually was. At the moment, the most intimidating person in the room was the mid-forties woman in extravagant garb holding a sachet to her nose.
"Hmm," Mrs. Eatherfine said. "And you, child, have most certainly not been loyal. A loyalist does not put herself above her duchess, claiming to be queen. If you'd simply been unwell, I'd have you committed and left you to the doctors. But you've spread your nonsense to others like a disease, and half the people who've met you claim you're the return of the living Friyja… but I am not merciless. Recant and I'll have you exiled to the St. Benthia's Abbey in the Hansurdas Mountains. It will be a hard and isolated existence, but at least you won't spend your years festering in a little cell."
Val spat at Mrs. Eatherfine. To her disappointment, no more than a fleck or two made it to the dowager duchess's fine purple gown. "I'll take my chances in prison over granting you any sliver of satisfaction. I won't recant what I know is true and I'm not going to trust the promises of a liar who stabs her friends in the back!"
The dowager duchess huffed. "I thought you said she'd be more pliable after a week on subsistence rations…"
"Um…" the warden said. "Your grace… she grew her own food…"
"She grew her own food? Explain."
"Yes, your grace. As per his excellency's instructions, nobody interacted with the girl nor gave anything to her beyond two cups of water and two rolls a day. But when we tried to open her cell, it was wedged shut with vegetation. Fruits, nuts, berries… a privy… climbing ladders up to a loft with a hammock… a shrine… a drinking gourd… I think there was a kitty tower…"
"Enough! What is this, a joke? How is such a thing even possible?"
"Because you don't even know what magic can do, Hyacinth," Val said. "You've imprisoned me because you're afraid of me… but I'm not afraid of you…" That latter part was a lie - Val was very much afraid, but running rampant over that fear, she just wanted to make Mrs. Eatherfine mad. To hurt the terrible woman's feelings since she was shackled to the table and couldn't hurt her physically.
Mrs. Eatherfine scowled at Val - the first scowl she'd ever seen the woman make, and it was full of venom and rage cracking beneath her practiced veneer of civility. She turned to the warden. "If we imprison her, she'll break out in time. I want her dealt with."
"Your grace?" the warden said. He didn't seem so frightening at all. "She's… she's a child."
"Have. Her. Killed."
"I… I need the earl's go-ahead for that…"
Mrs. Eatherfine turned on her heels. "Then you'll get it. And when you receive it, you will comply. Promptly."
"Of course, your grace."
After the warden unshackled Val, he led her back to her cell. The door had already been re-attached, and nobody had touched her plants. He had no snide remarks, only a quiet sadness about him, as he locked the door and left a stunned Val in the dark to deal with the news that she'd been handed a death sentence.
OvidLemma
An Obligatory Message from the Author
Thanks for reading, and make sure you follow me here to catch my latest releases! I know these pleas for support are annoying to read, but the only thing keeping me from making daily chapter updates of the stories you love is the fact that I need a regular job. Please consider helping me realize my goal of writing full-time if you can. And if you can't, no worries! I don't want anybody breaking the bank on my behalf. Regardless of whether or not you can chip in, I hope you continue to read and enjoy my stories!
I plan on releasing chapters of this story 2-3 times a week, but I haven't decided on what days yet. Advance chapters are available on my Patreon. If you liked this story, don't forget to check out my many other stories Scribble Hub, Patreon, or Amazon (free with Kindle Unlimited)!
https://www.patreon.com/OvidLemma
https://www.amazon.com/s?i=digital-text&rh=p_27:Ovid+Lemma
-Ovid
