Chương 304: 66. Parasites 2

After I dealt with Rosalind, the rot that had soaked into Thornhold's walls, doorframes, old carpets—and the hearts of the people inside—finally thinned by one layer. Not gone. Just downgraded from is this place haunted to this place merely used to house a nest of bastards. That already counted as significant progress.

Expecting a fortress this far rotted to look like a proper household overnight was roughly on par with expecting Jessi to stay quiet for three days straight—theoretically possible, practically indistinguishable from a miracle. The former, at least, could be solved with a blade and a ledger. The latter—never mind. My expectations of this world aren't set that high. In any case, the dead were dealt with. Which meant it was time for the living.

Specifically, the most irritating kind: the ones who burrowed into corners, borrowed authority they never earned, squeaked from behind their masters while those masters were alive, and the instant those masters fell, launched immediately into a performance of actually, I too was forced into this. Plainly put: time to clear out the parasites.

The next morning, I hadn't even properly finished breakfast before I summoned every soul in Thornhold who was still breathing, still upright, and still under the impression they had any business touching the inner keep's keys or ledgers. Not in the main reception hall. That room had just hosted the death of the last Rosa daughter yesterday. Using it today for personnel restructuring would have felt like the setup for a very bad bureaucratic joke about poor feng shui.

So I moved everyone into the small side room next door—the one originally used for counting winter supplies. The table was long enough. The light was bright enough. The windows sat high enough. And, most importantly, it was cold enough. Cold was good. Cold kept heads clear, and it made people considerably less inclined to talk nonsense. Alvira had already stacked last night's ledgers and rosters in neat order on the table.

Ignicia, finding the whole proceeding intolerably dull, dropped an "If someone tries to run, call me" and wandered off somewhere unknown. Jessi, on the other hand, was in excellent spirits, arms crossed, leaning against the doorframe, wearing the exact expression of someone settling in for her favorite show: bureaucrats getting their legs cut out from under them. I sat. Skipped the pleasantries.

"Begin." The first one dragged up was the deputy manager of the inner vaults. Fat. Forehead gleaming. Hems immaculate. His knees, at least, were sensible—they folded the moment he crossed the threshold.

"M-my lord, I'm innocent! I only ever followed the second young lady's orders! I never meant to harm anyone—" I didn't bother looking up. I just turned a page in the ledger.

"Your name is Dursen?"

"Y-yes, my lord!"

"Over three years, the inner vaults reported 'natural spoilage' seven times more than they should have. Winter coal was under-logged by thirty percent. Medicinal herbs meant for the wounded were diverted to the main tower, twice. And once, you simply wrote off a shipment of blankets bound for the eastern wall as 'water-damaged, unusable.'" I looked up at him.

"And you call that not harming anyone?" His face drained white.

"T-that was all the second young lady's—""I know." I nodded.

"She's dead." I closed the ledger, my tone flat.

"So now it's your turn." He burst into tears on the spot. Scenes like this were never pleasant—not because a man shouldn't cry, but because this particular kind of person always cried with a certain cheap, greasy quality, as if trying to use his own snot to bargain for his life. It made your stomach acid want to reverse course. Jessi muttered from the side: "Impressive weight behind that sob. I'd wager two pounds of grease drop out if you shook him." I glanced at her.

"If you're that bored, I can arrange for you to search every storeroom personally."

"... I've just realized observation is a highly specialized profession." I ignored her and raised a hand.

"Take him down. Confiscate every vault key, seal, and access order. Replace him." The Yinglong Guard complied at once. Second was the duty officer of the West Gate. Marginally more presentable than the walking grease-slick before him—at least he knew to straighten his back before speaking.

"My lord, I've served this fortress for sixteen years. I know every inch of the terrain, inside and out. If you remove me now, I fear it may—""Fear what?" I asked.

"Fear it will disrupt the continuity of our defenses."

"You're right." I nodded. A flicker of hope had barely formed in his eyes before I sent the next line after it.

"Which is exactly why I'm not removing you. I'm detaining you." He went blank. I drew out another sheet.

"Three unauthorized swaps of the night watch. Twice, you let Boris's men through the inner gate ahead of protocol. And once, you sealed the West Gate's outer barrier before any request for reinforcement had even arrived. You do know this terrain well—well enough to know exactly which door to leave open for your old masters." He opened his mouth to argue. I was faster.

"Don't try to leverage your years of service with me. The one thing Thornhold has never lacked is people who've lived here a long time and spent every bit of it being in the way." Jessi's shoulders started shaking again. Sometimes I genuinely wondered if this woman's entire sense of joy was structurally dependent on watching other people's public downfall. Then again, given how many people around her seemed determined to queue up for exactly that, I supposed some kind of warped appreciation was only natural.

One by one, I went through them. One by one, I took them apart. Some begged, citing elderly mothers and young children at home. Some pushed back, insisting they'd only followed orders. A few of the truly shameless tried to appeal to sentiment.

"My lord, this humble servant once held you as a babe—""Put that down," I said mildly.

"Pardon?"

"That sentence. Set it down immediately—before it makes me want to remove the hands that held it." He choked on the rest. If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, it's taken without the author's consent. Report it. Another one, more creative still, produced actual tears and declared:"This servant always quietly looked after the third young lady, in the old days—" That, at least, made me genuinely laugh.

"Did you?" I looked at him.

"Then tell me: which side of Fina's old room let in the worst draft in winter? How many nights was her brazier actually kept lit? When her cough was at its worst last year, who brought her the medicine?" His mouth opened and closed—a fish hauled onto dry ground. No answer came. Because he'd never actually done any of it. He'd only just watched Fina take the seat of power and immediately "remembered" a history with her he'd never earned.

"Take him out," I said, no longer bothering to look at him.

"Keeping someone in this fortress whose mouth moves faster than his hands serves no function beyond polluting the air." By midmorning, I'd cleared six household managers, two duty officers, three vault key-holders, and a string of hangers-on who'd been walking sideways through this fortress on nothing but "the eldest young master's seal," "the second young master's favor," or "the second young lady's instructions." Then came the genuinely difficult part. The defenses.

I spread Thornhold's old deployment map flat across the table, pinning one corner down with my sheathed dagger.

"Effective today: outer wall night watch reverts to three rotations, two overlapping. No unit holds the same stretch of wall on consecutive shifts. Inner gate and armory keys are kept separate—no single person holds both. Signal fires at the arrow towers are verified twice nightly. Miss a confirmation, and the officer on duty climbs the tower and serves as the flag himself." Everyone below bowed their heads and murmured assent.

Alvira stood at my right, calmly supplementing which personnel needed reassignment, which rosters carried duplicate names, which supply routes were better rerouted. She didn't speak much, but every word she offered landed like a nail—precise, without mercy. An older steward, formerly responsible for the southern granary, couldn't help but look up.

"My lord, changes on this scale may unsettle the men below…"

"Unsettle?" I looked at him.

"You people hollowed this fortress out for years and nobody was unsettled. Now that I'm pulling the parasites out one by one, suddenly you're worried about morale?" His face went white. I let one corner of my mouth curl.

"Don't worry. The only thing genuinely unsettled right now is the chair certain people have been sitting in." That line landed, and even the managers who'd been trying to project calm stopped lifting their eyes. Good. This was exactly the atmosphere I preferred—everyone quiet enough to hear the sound of their own futures creaking under strain. By the time the first round of personnel and defense restructuring wrapped up, it was already past noon.

I could have pushed straight into the second round of inner-household assignments and finished everything in one sitting. But if I did, Fina would end up looking like a puppet I'd propped into a chair—head of household in name, holding nothing but a freshly painted sign. That wouldn't do. I wasn't there to occupy that seat for her. I was there to make sure she could occupy it herself. So, for the afternoon's full report on the inner keep, I deliberately didn't take the head position. I stood to the side.

I stood by the window, arms crossed, radiating the exact energy of a sadistic examiner watching a student flounder through their thesis defense—the kind who has already calculated the precise angle needed to kick the podium, the desk, and the candidate himself clean off the stage the instant they give a wrong answer. Fina sat in the seat of the Head of the House. She'd dressed more formally today—a proper skirt, her wheelchair cushions freshly arranged—and she held her spine straight through sheer effort.

Her hands, though, couldn't quite hide how tense she was. Charlotte stood half a step behind her, like a steadying pin driven straight into the ground. Lorelei stood at Fina's right rear, a ledger cradled in her arms, her expression calm but her eyes unmistakably bright. Once everyone had gathered, I said exactly one thing.

"Today, the one speaking is the Head of the House. Not me." The room dropped a full layer of noise. Some people visibly froze. A few stole glances my way, no doubt still nursing the fantasy that surely the Third Young Master will step in and take over eventually. I answered that fantasy with silence. No. Not today. Not for anyone. Nobody was riding on my coattails this time. The first to step up and report was the young steward newly placed in charge of the inner stores.

He spoke smoothly enough, rattling off current stocks of grain, medicine, charcoal, and cloth one item at a time. Fina clearly struggled to keep up at first—the terminology, the units, the language of turnover and rationing, all moving too fast for her. She glanced at me on reflex. I didn't move. I just tilted my chin toward her. Handle it yourself. Her lips pressed together. She drew a slow breath, and finally spoke.

"... Slower. And don't lead with the categories. Tell me first whether it's enough." The young steward blinked, then adjusted at once.

"Yes. To report to the Head of the House: at the current rate of distribution, the charcoal will last nine days. If we cut back on the inner residence's usage and prioritize the wounded and the night watch, we can stretch it to fourteen. As for herbs—blood-stopping and fever remedies are running short, but sedatives and restorative tonics remain in surplus." Fina nodded. She hadn't asked, the way the old nobles always did, whether the numbers looked pretty on the ledger. She'd asked whether they were enough.

Good instinct. Because it meant she was thinking about how people were going to live—not how neatly the bookkeeping would read. Then came the second report. The third. The fourth. Slowly, she found her rhythm. Her voice had started out wispy and uncertain, like a candle guttering in a draft. But the more she asked, the steadier it became.

She began pressing for details—which wing got the braziers first, whether the wounded ward needed its bedding replaced immediately, which old servants were worth keeping, and which ones who'd spent years doing nothing but reading the room and eating their share of the rations could be swept out the door without ceremony. What genuinely caught me off guard was this: she wasn't ignorant. She simply wasn't used to anyone actually waiting for her to speak.

Thornhold had left her out to dry for years—but in doing so, it had handed her a vantage point no one at the main table ever earned. Tucked away in the tower, the side rooms, the far end of the corridor—the places easiest to overlook—she'd learned exactly where the drafts crept in, where the medicine ran out first, which floor froze hardest in winter, and which sort of person loved to skim the rations the moment chaos gave them cover. She hadn't learned this household from the head table.

She'd learned it, piece by piece, from every corner this household had thrown her into and forgotten. That was probably why, nervous as she clearly still was, she kept managing to ask exactly the right question. The real crisis hit about halfway through the reports. An old matron from the inner residence and the young female steward newly assigned to the west wing's chores suddenly erupted into an argument right there in the hall. The spark was a key—specifically, the key to the north storeroom.

The old matron insisted the fabric and blankets kept there were reserved strictly for the inner residence and weren't to be touched. The young steward shot back that the wounded ward and the outer wings were critically short on bedding, that two young pages had already come down with fever from the cold overnight, and that if the storeroom stayed locked, someone was going to die.

Back and forth they went, voices climbing, until phrases like "that's the old rule" and "your old rule is going to freeze people to death" were being hurled across the room. Up in the Head of the House's seat, Fina visibly stiffened. This kind of scene is the worst kind to manage. Not because it's loud, but because it's small. Small enough that mishandling it makes a household head look powerless to control her own people; heavy-handed suppression makes her look like a tyrant abusing her seat.

Her fingers tightened on the armrest. Behind her, Charlotte drew breath to intervene—I stopped her with a single look. Don't help her. This hurdle was hers to clear. No one else's. Fina held her silence for two full breaths. Then she lifted her head and looked straight at the old matron.

"The north storeroom... the large cabinet on the third shelf, left side. That's where last autumn's thick blankets were packed away. Correct?" The old woman froze.

"Y-yes..." Fina's voice stayed soft. But it held like iron.

"I saw them." The entire hall went dead still. She lowered her eyes for a moment, as if swallowing something bitter, then continued.

"The winter before last, my room received two thin blankets. When Charlotte went to ask for more, you told her the stores were empty." She raised her eyes again. Her voice didn't rise—it didn't need to. It went in like a needle finding its mark.

"But I saw it clearly from the tower window. That day, you carried four new chests into the north storeroom." The old matron's face drained white on the spot. I stayed where I was by the window, unmoving—but something quietly sank in my chest. Not surprise. The sudden, complete realization that Fina hadn't been oblivious all these years. She'd known everything. She'd simply never had anyone who could take what she knew and turn it into a sentence with enough weight to matter. Today, she finally could.

Fina drew a breath and lifted her chin.

"Open the storeroom."

"Head of the House—""I said, open it." Her voice came clearer now.

"Send the blankets to the wounded ward and the youngest pages first. The inner residence keeps only the basic allotment. And starting today, that storeroom goes under dual-key management—one key with the household office, one with me. If anyone dares to hide behind 'the old rules' again, they can go be buried with the old masters." That last line didn't quite sound like her. It sounded like me. Or rather, it sounded like she'd finally borrowed my shadow, just long enough to lift her own voice a register higher.

The hall held two beats of silence. Then the young steward was the first to lower her head.

"Yes, Head of the House." One after another, the rest followed.

"Yes, Head of the House."

"As you command, Head of the House."

"Understood, Head of the House." The voices weren't loud. But I saw Fina's shoulders give one small, quiet tremor. She wasn't about to cry. It was simply the first time she'd ever truly been addressed that way—not out of pity, not out of politeness, not as some grudging courtesy extended for my sake. But as acknowledgment. I leaned against the window, watching her, and felt something strange settle over me.

It was like watching a seedling that had spent years crushed beneath a stone wedged in rock, finally—on one particular day—pushing that stone up, just a little, entirely on its own. Not tall yet. Not steady yet. But she'd lifted her head. Good. That was enough.