Chapter 105 – Are You Happy, Princess? (12)
Day Five: Copper & Honey
(Erynd)
He knew exactly who she was.
He had not lied to Olivia. He had only turned the truth sideways and left some parts in shadow.
The feather-masked noble wasn't just a woman who bought slaves and threw them into pits for entertainment. That was the polite summary. The version you could almost convince yourself was "just" cruelty.
She cheated the fights when boredom set in, spiking one combatant with stimulants or poisons just to see how long a body could last when stacked wrong from inside. She extorted families whose sons and daughters had fallen into debt traps she herself arranged. She used the collared and the desperate for her own urges in ways that didn't even pretend to be consensual.
Rape was too small and plain a word for the layered permission she stole from people who had none to give.
Olivia needed to see that.
Not just hear a label like corrupt noble. Labels softened. What mattered was impact.
He had watched the princess all day. Watched her eyes hollow out at the execution. Watched her sit on his lap in the auction hall, spine rigid, pupils wide and empty as prices climbed over flesh. Watched something inside her crumble when she realized how much of this her father's world called "necessary."
Now he was going to put a knife in her hand and see what she did.
First, though, he needed the truth.
He dipped his fingers into the vial again and let the oil run over his skin. The stuff clung, thick and gleaming, with that faint herbal smell that always reminded him of antiseptic and altars at the same time.
He avoided her head. Avoided her chest where the heart beat under bone.
Neck. Shoulders. Upper arms. Back. Thighs. Places where skin was rich with nerves and poor in exit routes.
She shifted in the chair, leather bonds squeaking, the spell-circles under her bare feet pulsing a dim, anticipatory glow.
"You think this will frighten me?" she sneered. Her voice was only a little hoarse from earlier protests. "I have seen worse in Helios pits."
He believed her.
"Do you know why I'm using oil?" he asked.
He didn't look at Olivia when he said it. His focus stayed on the noble's skin, on the way the oil caught the light when he spread it with clinical fingers.
Behind him, Olivia answered, voice flat.
"No. I don't."
He finished the last long stroke down the woman's spine and flexed his fingers once, shaking off the excess.
"This oil is conductive," he said. "It carries things across skin very efficiently. Magic. Heat. Electricity. Lightning."
He stepped away from the chair just long enough to pick up the copper rod from the table.
Olivia said nothing.
He turned the rod in his hand. It was short, almost elegant, with a focusing ring near the tip. Copper was a poor material for some applications. For this one, it was perfect.
"When you put lightning into a body," he went on, "it looks for the easiest path. The least resistance. Usually that means nerves, blood, certain fluids. It travels quickly. It burns things you don't want to burn, like brains and hearts, if you're not careful."
He touched the ring at the base of the rod, activating the runes carved into it. They woke with a faint blue shimmer.
"With this oil," he said, "the path is different. I tell the lightning to skim the surface. To stay where the oil is thickest. She feels everything. The pain talons through every receptor along her skin. But the vital parts inside stay… mostly untouched."
He glanced at the noble.
She glared at him, breathing a little faster.
"Electricity wants to move a certain way," he said. "I persuade it to care about my preferences instead."
Olivia still didn't speak.
He let himself smile, a thin piece of expression that had nothing to do with enjoyment.
"My queen," he added, deliberately, "it makes magic hurt ten times as much without killing as fast."
The noble spat at his feet.
"Do you think that will scare me?" she snarled. "I've watched men flayed alive and begged for more. I've paid to see worse than this. You think I'm the one who breaks here?"
He didn't answer her.
He turned instead to Olivia.
"This room is scream-proof," he said mildly. "No one will hear her. No servants. No guards. No priests. Just you. And me."
Olivia's fingers tightened on the arms of her chair. Her face seemed carved from something pale and stubborn.
He walked back behind the noble and touched the side of her neck with the copper rod.
The spell he'd woven into [Lightning Hand] for this was not the one he taught academy novices.
That one was simple: summon charge, release in a directed burst, hope you didn't knock yourself unconscious in the process.
This one was tuned.
He held the power just below where it would jump fully, letting it vibrate against the conductive oil, coaxing micro-discharges instead of one big show. Enough to make nerves scream. Not enough to cook.
A faint crackle danced along the woman's skin.
She laughed at first.
Then her laugh hitched and turned into something higher.
The muscles along her shoulders clenched. Her fingers curled against the restraints hard enough that the knuckles went white.
He let it build. Then stopped.
Her breath came in ragged pulls.
"Tell me," he said softly, almost kind. "What did you do to the slaves you bought?"
She glared straight ahead.
Said nothing.
He tapped the ring, added a different current. A subtle spell threaded through the lightning now, stretching sensation instead of just delivering it.
Pain remembered itself.
The oil helped it stay.
She gasped as if the electricity had found its way under her skin and decided to stay there.
"Again," Erynd said. "What did you do?"
He raised the rod, this time dragging it slowly down her oiled back as he pulsed the spell in a jagged rhythm.
Her scream ripped free.
Not theatrical. Not for show.
Raw.
"Fought," she choked between spasms. "I made them… fight. Pits. For us. For my friends. Better fighters got—" Her voice broke.
"Rewards?" he prompted. "Turns? Fancier chains?"
"More time," she hissed. "Before I sent them in again."
He cut the current.
Her shoulders sagged.
The circles under the chair flickered, repairing minor damage. He'd woven auto-healing into the array. No permanent scars. Just cycles.
Olivia was breathing hard too.
He could feel her eyes on him.
"And?" he asked the noble. "Did you only make them fight?"
Her lips pressed together.
He increased the voltage. Not much. Enough that every inch of oiled skin lit up in a map only she could feel.
He added a whisper of sensory amplification to it. Normally that kind of magic chewed mana like a starving beast, but he'd found a way to make it feed on itself. Pain reacting to pain, a loop that magnified itself briefly before he cut it off.
She screamed again. The sound scraped along stone.
"Say it," he said.
She gasped something thick and ugly.
He heard the words.
He made himself not flinch.
"Yes," he said. "You used them for that. For your urges. You forced them to your bed as well as your pits."
He didn't repeat the details. Olivia didn't need to hear them twice.
He cut the spell.
Silence fell, heavy and hot like the desert above.
He wiped the rod with a clean cloth, careful, methodical, then looked at Olivia properly.
Her face had gone a shade paler he hadn't known it could reach. Her eyes burned, hollow and sharp at once.
"Remember her," he said softly. "Remember what she did because she could pay for it. Remember how many times your court called this kind of thing rumor, or necessary indulgence, or 'unproven.'"
He walked to the small table against the wall.
On it lay a knife.
Plain. Functional. Well-balanced. Not ceremonial. Not a gallows tool.
Just a weapon.
He picked it up, then paused to clean his hands thoroughly. No oil. No trace. He took his time, like this mattered as much as everything else.
Then he stepped to Olivia.
Held the knife out to her, hilt first.
Her eyes dropped to it.
Her fingers didn't move.
"Olivia," he said quietly. "Look at me."
She dragged her gaze up.
He leaned in, close enough that his mask touched hers.
"You want to," he whispered. "You know you do. It's not a test of your purity, my queen. It's a test of whether you can carry what ruling actually asks of you."
His breath warmed the air between them.
"This would be your first life," he said. "First death with your hands. Not by decree. Not signed away on polished documents. Direct."
He watched the way her throat worked around a swallow.
"You can do it," he said. "My queen."
He said my with deliberate weight.
He knew exactly what it did to her.
Her pupils widened.
Her fingers lifted. Hesitated. Closed around the hilt.
The knife fit her hand more easily than he liked.
He patted her hair once, almost gently.
"I'll stop you if you go too far," he said. "You are not alone in this room."
He stepped back.
The noble in the chair laughed, broken and wet.
"You think she has the stomach for it?" she panted. "Soft royal flesh. Spoiled little—"
Olivia stood.
The knife looked absurdly small between them.
He watched her take one step, then another, until she stood in front of the chair.
The circles on the floor pulsed faintly, like an evil heartbeat.
"Olivia," he said once, softly. A last chance to step back.
She didn't.
***
(Olivia)
The knife was heavier than she expected.
Not physically. It was well-made, good balance, nothing that would tire her hand.
The weight was elsewhere.
In her chest.
In how easily her fingers curled around the hilt.
She stared down at the woman in the chair.
It was strange, seeing her without the mask. Without the feathers, the dress, the little entertainments of power.
Stripped of those, she looked… ordinary. Like any other noble of her father's court. Little lines around the mouth from smiling in ways that hid teeth. Eyes shaped by wine and entitlement.
Olivia's stomach clenched.
She heard the echoes of what the woman had admitted under lightning:
Pits. Fights. Bodies forced to entertain. Hands that didn't ask. Throats that couldn't say no.
Slaves, used for sex because they could not refuse. Used for pain because no one would punish her.
In the square, a girl had swung from a rope for being born wrong.
In the hall, a boy's body had been priced like a good horse.
All day, Olivia had felt something break.
Standing here, she realized something else:
It wasn't just breaking.
Something new was being built in the cracks.
You want to.
Erynd's voice coiled in her ear, remembered from a hundred lesser provocations. This time it wasn't about kissing him in public or poking at rules. It was about blood.
My queen.
Not princess.
She hated how much that word did inside her.
She lifted the knife.
Her hand trembled.
"Do you know," the woman rasped, "how many times men twice your age have tried to threaten me in my life, girl? How many young rebels have stood in front of me, shaking just like that?"
Olivia didn't answer.
She was busy listening to her own heartbeat hammering in her skull.
"You can't undo this," some small, sane part of her whispered. "Once you do this, you are not who you were."
Her eyes burned.
Who I was had watched executions from balconies and listened to priests preach mercy and never once gone into the alleys where people starved so her bathwater could be hot.
Who she had been had shared hymns and lace with nobles who came down here on holiday.
Who she had been had sat at the end of Erynd's bed and watched, too scared to touch and too fascinated to look away, while he unmade women with care she had never seen in a temple.
Now he was watching her.
She didn't look back.
If she did, she might stop.
She moved.
The first stab was clumsy.
Her arm jerked more than thrust. The blade hit flesh with resistance she wasn't ready for. It went in shallow, angled wrong.
The noble jerked and screamed.
Olivia flinched—
—and then something in her snapped the other way.
Heat blossomed in her chest.
Not like the desert. Not like embarrassment. Something sharp and wild and awful. The sound of the scream lit it up instead of dousing it.
She pulled the knife back.
For a heartbeat, she stared at the red on the blade, horrified.
Then she stabbed again.
Better.
More force. Straighter.
She lost track after the third.
She didn't go for the throat. Didn't go for anything she knew was quick, because some stubborn, furious part of her didn't want quick.
Her world had not fallen quickly.
It had eroded, piece by piece, under words like doctrine and necessary. Under signed papers and quiet compromises. Under people like this woman, who took the gaps and filled them with their appetites.
Her arm rose.
Fell.
Rose.
Fell.
The room narrowed.
The noble's screams blurred into one long torn sound. Then they broke. Then cut off.
Olivia didn't stop immediately.
She felt something inside her rising like laughter, except it wasn't funny. It was like finally breathing after being held under water for too long.
Each motion of the knife carved it deeper.
Tell me, my princess, does this feel morally just to you? Erynd had asked at the square.
She didn't know about "morally just."
She just knew that with every stab, with every jolt of resistance, with every hot splash on her hands, something in her that had felt helpless and useless all day stopped screaming and started… changing.
She was panting when she finally slowed.
Her arm ached.
Her hands were slick.
Her breath tasted like iron.
For a strange, suspended moment, she realized there was a smile on her face.
Not wide.
Not hysterical.
Small. Curved. Quiet.
She felt… light.
Empty and warm at the same time.
Reborn, some insane part of her thought, distantly.
Hadn't priests said rebirth came with water and soft songs? This felt like the opposite. Like being dipped in blood and pulled up under a different sky.
Her legs wobbled.
The knife slipped from her hand and clattered to the floor.
She stared at it.
Then at what she had done.
Her stomach lurched. The room spun.
A hand closed around the back of her neck.
Warm. Firm.
Erynd.
"That's enough," he said quietly.
He pulled her backward, away from the chair, away from the ruin she had made of a woman who'd bought ruin for others.
She stumbled, spine hitting his chest.
His hand stayed on her nape, thumb rubbing a slow, grounding circle into her skin.
"Breathe," he murmured. "In. Out."
She dragged air into her lungs.
It shook on the way in.
"You did well," he said. "You didn't close your eyes. You didn't look away."
There should have been shame. Horror. Something.
Instead, there was a tired, buzzing happiness, like the feeling after the milkshake had soothed her tongue, or after his hand had steadied her on the train.
His approval wrapped around the worst thing she'd ever done and made it bearable.
He patted her head.
Like she was something that belonged to him.
"My queen," he said softly, just loud enough for her to hear in the quiet room. "Are you happy?"
Her throat worked.
She didn't answer.
But he saw her reflection in the polished side of a hanging lamp.
The small, stunned smile.
The blood drying on her fingers.
The hollow in her eyes that had begun to fill with something new.
He patted her head again.
And did not force her to say the word.