Chapter 1752: The Truth |
Quinlan was happy to hear she was broken enough to comply.
A free-willed confession in front of so many witnesses landed very differently than a puppet repeating her master’s script, and every court on the continent would hear about what the Fujimori elder said today not because Quinlan ordered his slave to speak but because she chose to reveal it herself.
"What was Ayame’s crime?"
Chizuru looked at him, and something that used to be hatred surfaced behind those dead eyes for a moment before settling back into the grey.
"You," she said. "You are her crime. You are fate’s cruel prank on everything my clan spent generations building toward."
"Flattering, but that’s not an answer. She hadn’t met me when she was enslaved."
"..." Chizuru’s gaze fell to the relic scraping across the stone, and the hatred thinned into loss.
"That blade predates the Fujimori name," she said, her voice carrying across the hushed arena despite its exhaustion.
"When our ancestors were driven from their homeland, they swore to reclaim what was taken, and the blade was to be the instrument of that return. A relic from an age none of us remember, forged for a wielder it hadn’t yet chosen."
She drew a ragged breath.
"Every child of the main line was secretly presented to it at fifteen, during the ceremony when they received their first real blade. We told the children it was tradition, a blessing from the ancestors, a mark of their bloodline."
Her voice carried despite its emptiness, each word reaching the upper tiers because the arena had been built to carry them.
"The truth was simpler. The relic sat beside every gifted blade for hundreds of thousands of years waiting for the one descendant whose presence would wake it. At every ceremony it did nothing, and anyone not chosen who tried to wield it was consumed by it."
On the duel ground, Ayame’s eyes widened. "It was there...?"
She had knelt before that blade at fifteen.
The same ceremony every child of the main bloodline walked through, the same words from the same elders, and until this moment she had never known what it was really for.
"You don’t remember because it had a different look back then... It was inert, slumbering..." Chizuru sighed. "It did not react to you, child."
Chizuru’s shoulders shifted in the ice, turning as far as the frost allowed toward the bleeding girl on the stone. "But Kaede... For the first time in the clan’s recorded history, the blade responded."
The arena went quiet enough that the relic’s scraping rang clear to the upper tiers.
"We had finally found the descendant our ancestors waited for." Chizuru’s voice cracked on the last word, an involuntary thing, her body mourning what the rest of her had already written off.
"But the blade came with its conditions, demands to be fulfilled or it refused to awaken. The wielder had to be the sole heir with no rival claim and no competing lineage, and it required the blood of the clan leader to awaken fully."
"What...?" Kaede whispered into the ground.
"That’s an awfully specific pair of demands," Quinlan said, while he watched the color drain from Ayame’s cheeks.
A hundred thousand people arrived at the same conclusion in the same breath.
"Yes..." Chizuru nodded, as much as her position in the ice allowed. "The blade demanded an undisputed ruler, and when the council weighed two lives against every generation the Fujimori had spent in exile, there was no debate to be had."
"You murdered Raijin Fujimori, Duke of Silverwind," Alexios said, and there was nothing questioning about it.
"Yes," Chizuru said, "and if the blade had demanded a hundred more I would have provided them without losing a night’s sleep."
Ayame’s eyes went to the relic scraping across the frost.
"We submerged the blade in his blood for seven days, and I oversaw every hour of it personally, because that is the kind of conviction our exile demands of the people tasked with ending it," Chizuru said.
"Is his soul in that thing?!" It left Ayame barely above a whisper.
Chizuru said nothing, and the relic kept scraping.
"No!" Kaede’s scream tore across the duel ground, raw and cracking.
She tried to push herself up on her remaining arm, slipped in her own blood, and slammed back against the stone. "You’re lying! You said..."
Chizuru didn’t look at her. "I said what I had to say, child."
"And Ayame?" Quinlan continued.
Chizuru needed no further prompting. It looked as if the old woman was glad to finally get all of this off her chest.
"After Raijin’s death, the blade still required its host to be the sole ruler of the clan without competing claimants, and when the choice came down to one girl’s freedom or an exile that had outlasted every generation before us, the council did not deliberate long." Chizuru’s voice carried the same dead flatness she’d been speaking in since the ice cracked, a report delivered to a room she no longer cared about.
"We told her that Ayame had colluded with the Phantom League to have their father killed so she could inherit at the age of eighteen and become the youngest leader in the clan’s history, that the investigation had uncovered evidence too damning to ignore."
The dead eyes found Kaede for the first time. "She believed it within the hour."
"NO!" Kaede screamed from the stone, her voice tearing apart. "Stop talking nonsense! You said-"
"I said a lot of things in my life..." Chizuru looked away from her, tired.
"With Kaede convinced her sister was a syndicate’s puppet and having committed patricide, the council arranged a formal inheritance duel. The clan needed Kaede to defeat Ayame so no one could question the transfer of power."
She sighed. "But Kaede was the weaker fighter by far."
On the ground, Kaede’s screaming faltered.
"So we prepared a poison that could be activated remotely. Both sisters drank the ceremonial tea the day before the duel as tradition demanded, but only Ayame’s cup carried the compound." Chizuru recited the method the way a clerk reads a shipping manifest.
"Even then, Kaede almost managed to lose. What a terrible joke that one was. I remember Hozumi having to crank the activated dosage up until she nearly suffered a heart attack on the spot."
Ayame’s hand went white on her katana.
She had always known that poison was the reason she’d lost, but hearing it laid out like a logistics report forced her back into the memory of her body failing mid-swing, her legs buckling when they shouldn’t have, the ground rushing up to meet her while Kaede’s blade finished what the poison had started.
The anger that rushed through her at that moment had her trembling from head to toe.
"You see..." One more weary exhale left the old woman.
"The blade’s demand required Ayame’s removal from the bloodline. Merely losing the duel for succession wasn’t enough to fulfill its demands. She needed to properly be disposed of. After all, she was still a claimant, even if a dishonored one. The council’s preference was execution, because the dead do not come back and they do not find new masters."
Her attention moved to Kaede, dejected. "But that hopeless girl threw herself across the council table and screamed at a room full of elders until they backed down, because she couldn’t stomach watching her sister die no matter how thoroughly we’d convinced her to hate her. She proposed eternal slavery as an alternative, where Ayame would be legally dead to the clan, stripped of name and claim."
"If we had refused her, she would have understood that the council she believed she led was the one leading her. The blade accepted the terms, and we did as well, despite understanding perfectly well that only death is ever truly final."
Her tired gaze found Ayame on the duel ground. "Even an eternal slave can exact her vengeance, given enough luck."
"..." Ayame returned the old woman’s stare before she looked at Kaede.
The sister who had believed she murdered their father within the hour.
Who had never questioned it, never looked for the truth, never once asked why it was so easy to believe. And the same girl had screamed at a room full of elders until they let her sister live.
Everything Ayame felt about the bleeding girl on the stone hit her at once, and none of it agreed with the rest.
<
1 / 1
Home Info Add Library
Comments 7