Her hand then came off and she turned around. She looked back over her shoulder at him, and the quiet cracked open into wickedness. "Get ready, Quin. And please bring out a few of my clanswomen first."
"Sure," Quinlan smiled. "[Awaken]."
Pale flame stood up out of the floorboards in five places and cooled into women.
They wore the elite muster’s armor they had died in, and the seniormost of them, a scarred veteran with an old white line through one brow, took in the hall, the brazier, and the heir standing in the middle of it, and understood the assignment before anyone explained a thing.
Whatever the five of them had died believing about the clan’s disgraced daughter, none of it survived the sight of her. They bowed to Ayame as one.
"Lady Ayame."
"e with me, I need your help." She was already walking toward the preparation room off the hall’s east side. "I have to look like a most treasured heirloom."
The door slid shut on the six of them.
Quinlan, left alone in the most sacred hall of the Fujimori, consulted his orders.
He remembered the terms exactly, because she had only ever managed to say them once, almost a year ago, in a small voice that had needed three separate attempts to leave her.
"We’ll be naked... With trainer swords... the loser will submit to the winner..."
He kept his promises.
He undressed all the way down, folded nothing, took a practice blade off the nearest rack, and leaned against a support pillar to wait.
"Hmm." The blade turned against the brazier light, balanced across two of his fingers while he read it.
Black ironwood, dense past all argument, with a core that sang thinly of steel when he flicked a nail against it. He pressed his thumb into the grain, and the grain won.
A proper practice weapon, made for high level duels. It wouldn’t break on him after a few hits.
From the east room came the sounds of ceremony: water being poured, cloth whispering, the small clicks of lacquered bs. One of the dead women laughed at something.
Then the east door slid back a hand’s width, and a clanswoman leaned out to retrieve the lacquer tray she had set down on the hall floor on her way in.
The retrieval did not go well. She got the tray. She also got the whole of her lord, lit brazier-orange from collarbone to thigh and entirely unbothered about it, and her hand missed the door track twice on the way back in.
*Clack.*
"Eyes," the veteran said from inside, without heat.
"...Yes, Captain."
The door shut.
Snow ticked against the doors, the brazier drew long shadows up the weapon racks, and the most feared man on the continent stood naked in the heart of a conquered duchy twirling a wooden sword by its balance point, without a shred of impatience, because the thing at the end of this wait was a sight he’d been looking toward for a very, very long time.
The east door slid open.
Four clanswomen filed out first and formed a rank along the wall, and their scarred veteran came last. Before taking her place she paused and bowed, this time to Quinlan, which she had pointedly not done on arrival.
Then Ayame stepped out and Quinlan’s brain stopped functioning.
They had dressed her in ritual white, layered silk bound at the waist with a pale obi knotted for ceremony. Her black hair was up off her neck, pinned with lacquered bs, and her mouth had been painted a quiet, devastating red. She crossed the floor exactly as ordered: like an heirloom, like the finest thing the clan had ever produced walking on its own two feet.
Not long ago, other hands had prepared this woman to be looked at in a slave house. Tonight every hand had been hers to mand, every choice had been her own, and the audience was one man. She wore the difference more proudly than any crown.
Quinlan looked. He made no secret of it.
Ayame arrived at the middle of the floor. She took in her partner, propped against a pillar with a practice sword resting on one shoulder, and her eyebrow made the long climb.
It made the climb slowly, because it had a great deal of territory to cross on the way: the chest, the ridged stomach, the enormous slab of him standing mere days out of a continental war without a mark on it, and the part of him that had already formed a firm opinion about tonight.
Her ears went pink. Her chin did not move a millimeter.
Along the wall, five dead women were having considerable difficulty locating somewhere neutral to look.
"You’ve outdone yourselves." Quinlan addressed the rank without taking his eyes off their lady. "Thank you. I’ll reunite you with your families in the ing days. Now leave us."
Five bows arrived in one motion, and then the clanswomen came apart into pale flame, their scarred veteran going last and unhurried about it, radiating the unmistakable intent to tell the entire army.
The hall belonged to the two of them.
"Unbelievable." The posure held for precisely as long as it took her to say the word. "The most sacred hall of my clan, and its guest of honor is loitering in it without a stitch on, like this is a tavern brawl."
"You wanted naked."
"I said it a long time ago. Once. While half-dying of embarrassment. You shouldn’t even remember it... For me, only mere months passed, but for you-"
"Naked. Trainer swords. The loser submits to the winner." He recited it like scripture, tapping the ironwood flat against his own collarbone.
Her grin returned in full force. "Of course you would remember... You’d remember it till the end of time."
"Yep."
"..." She stood a moment longer, and the amusement went warm at its edges, because he had stripped bare in her ancestors’ hall on the strength of one flustered sentence she had barely survived saying, and in all the time since, he had never once made her feel foolish for it.
Quinlan pushed off the pillar, and the practice blade spun once around his grip, lazy as a coin trick, before it settled.
"Enough ceremony. Bratty women need to be taught a lesson. And my dearest Ayame, you’ve been one hell of a brat recently."
The taunt landed square where her pride lived, and Ayame’s chin came up.
"Excuse me?" Her eyes had gone bright with it, already sorting through which of her recent crimes he could possibly have in mind.
"Don’t think you got away with your crime. You extracted my seed without me knowing about it."
The brightness came off her face and took several other expressions with it.
"...The hot spring." It arrived a full register above the voice she dueled in. Then she recalculated, landed on the only possible source, and looked briefly murderous about it. "Daddy’s Little Bitch snitched on me..."
"That’s one slight more on your tab, bratty woman of mine," Quinlan sighed, theatrically disappointed. "Don’t badmouth your sister-wives."
Then he smirked. "But yes, Aurora was very proud of you. She said you were professional about it."
"I was professional about it!" The second-in-mand of the most dangerous family on the continent delivered this at a volume her ancestors had never once been subjected to inside that hall. "It was a sample. For research. You were busy staring at my sister’s chest, I saw an opening, and I took it."
"You put it in a vial."
"Where else was I supposed to put it?!"
"Your belly? Where I intended to store it?"
"..."
Her hands went to her obi, and her mouth sharpened into the smile she saved for worthy enemies.
"Alright, let’s settle this."
She untied it without hurry, eyes never leaving his, and let silk and ceremony slide off her together, pooling around her ankles like a surrendered banner.
"I once gave you a beating, draped in nothing but bandages."
Then Ayame stood naked on her ancestors’ floor and let him look his fill.
"Now, draped in nothing but moonlight..."
He took in the small waist, the perky tits rising with a breath she took her sweet time over, the flat stomach with the crimson bloodfather mark riding low on it like a signature, the thighs a lifetime of stances had built.
The brazier turned the whole warm length of her gold down one side, and the moon ing off the snow garden did the other in silver.
Her chin was up, and her mouth was painted for exactly this.
The practice blade rose into both her hands.
"...I’ll teach you the same thing all over again, since you don’t seem very receptive to my teachings, first student of mine. This time I’ll beat some humility into you properly!"
The pride of the Fujimori grinned at her lover across the floor of her ancestors, all teeth and not one scrap of mercy.
"e, my arrogant primordial!"
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