Sylus looked up at Valessia with a cool confident smile and smoothly detached himself from the startled knights and stepped forward and dropped down onto one knee with his hand pressed firmly over his chest, Bowing his head.
"Lady Valessia," he said,
"As promised I haven’t just cleared my name within two days. I’ve brought you the real culprit in a single night. The man lying in that mud right now is the one who forged the treasonous letter and the same man who’s been poisoning our farmlands and strangling the estate’s harvest and draining the tax revenue down to nothing."
The sheer weight of it hung in the cold night air.
Valessia’s violet eyes widened for just a second before her expression hardened.
She turned her gaze from Sylus to the bleeding mud-soaked figure groaning on the ground.
"Corvus, you are the Head Administrator. You hold the keys to every ledger and overseer report in this estate. If our soil is dying and our revenue is bleeding out from the inside then you are either criminally incompetent or guilty of treason." She let that land. "Speak. How do you answer for this?"
Before Corvus could pull together a single sob story Sylus casually raised one finger and pointed toward the edge of the crop line. "Before he crafts another lie My Lady ask the men who work these fields every single dawn. Two witnesses standing right there watched him pour poison into the soil with his own hands."
Corvus spat a mouthful of mud onto the grass and let out a rasping bitter laugh and slowly pushed himself up to his elbows.
"Nonsense!" He glared at Sylus with everything he had. "A desperate rat backed into a corner will buy off anyone! A couple of coin-hungry peasants repeating your words is not evidence My Lady this is a pathetic show staged by a condemned man!" He gestured wildly at his battered face and the boot print still stamped across his cheek. "Look at what he did to me! He attacked a senior official of this estate! He’s a wild dog! Lock him in the deepest dungeon and let him rot!"
Valessia’s chest rose and fell slowly as she processed it.
’Corvus is right about one thing,’ she thought. ’Without undeniable proof I cannot execute a head administrator on the word of a butler and two terrified farmers. The other noble houses would tear me apart for it.’
She looked down at Sylus and something desperate crept into her thoughts before she could stop it. ’Please tell me you have more than accusations.’
Sylus let out a long sigh and shook his head.
"I figured you’d pull the where’s-the-evidence card," he said. He raised two fingers and snapped them once in the air.
From the shadows near the crop line a young apprentice farmer scrambled forward nervously carrying a heavy leather-bound metal briefcase, setting it down in the dirt between Sylus and Valessia before bowing fast and scurrying straight back into the crowd.
The moment Corvus laid eyes on that case the smug satisfaction fell completely off his face.
He scrambled forward in the mud wincing hard. "Wait—! where the hell did you get that?!"
"From under the floorboards in your room," Sylus said pleasantly.
"You broke into my private quarters?!" Corvus’s voice cracked somewhere in the middle of that sentence. "That’s a violation of estate law! My Lady he had absolutely no authority to search my room!" You are reading on g.com, the official source.
Sylus didn’t even look at him. He stayed kneeling with calm steady eyes on Valessia.
"My Lady, this is Corvus’s private stash. I haven’t opened it yet because I felt it was only right to open it in front of you so you could witness whatever he’s been hiding from this house yourself."
Corvus let out a raspy relieved laugh. "Ha! Fool! You think you can just crack into my personal belongings? That lock is imported dwarf-forged iron! The key is hidden somewhere you will never find in a hundred years! You cannot open it without—"
CRACK.
Sylus picked up a heavy jagged rock from the soil and brought it down onto the iron latch with one clean fast swing.
The reinforced lock shattered and popped open with a sharp metallic snap and the lid sat there waiting.
Corvus’s jaw hit the mud.
Every drop of color drained out of his face so fast he looked like he’d already died and just hadn’t fallen over yet.
"Oh my," Sylus murmured in total mock surprise, lifting the heavy leather lid. "Look at all these little treasures."
Valessia stepped closer and pulled her silk robe tighter as she knelt beside Sylus and looked inside and the moment her eyes scanned the contents her breath hitched and her hand flew to her mouth.
"Is that... Nightshade Dust?" she whispered and her voice was barely anything.
The case was stuffed full of velvet pouches packed with banned highly addictive narcotics, the exact black-market drugs that had been quietly eating through the lower quarters of the Astria estate for the past six months while every investigation hit a dead end.
Sylus reached into the side compartment and pulled out a small glass tube with dark green viscous liquid inside and held it up to the torchlight between two fingers.
"Lady Valessia. Take a look at this one."
She leaned in and her violet eyes went wide with something that went past shock and straight into horror as the pieces started connecting themselves in her head.
"That’s... that’s the blight concentrate," she said and her voice came out unsteady. "The royal alchemists told us a rare agricultural bacteria was destroying the crops naturally. This is the exact pathogen sample we have been trying to identify for five months."
She turned her head slowly and looked at Corvus like she was seeing a completely different person standing there in that man’s body.
’Five months of starvation and of lost tax revenue... Thousands of gold coins drained from the vaults trying to fix a natural disaster that he was manually pouring into our soil every single night?’ This chapter was taken from novelping.com without permission.
"Don’t tell me..." Her voice cracked right down the middle. "You were killing our own people?"
Corvus was sweating through his clothes.
Then Sylus reached back into the case one more time and pulled out a heavy brass wax stamp and held it directly in front of her eyes.
"And finally My Lady. Remember the treasonous letter you showed me yesterday? The one claiming I was selling military secrets, stamped with the seal?"
He held the stamp up against the moonlight.
The unique custom coat of arms carved into the base matched the red wax on the forged letter down to the smallest detail. Every curve and line.
"It seems the man who accused me was the author all along."
It hit Valessia like something physical.
Her mind went completely blank.
When her parents died she had been so hopelessly lost, drowning in financial ledgers and political maneuvering she was never prepared to handle alone at twenty-two years old.
Corvus was the one person who had stepped forward and placed a steady hand on her shoulder and promised to guide her through all of it. She had trusted him without question. Leaned on him when she had absolutely nobody else to turn to.
’He didn’t just betray the estate.’
The tears that burned behind her eyes were not the sad kind.
They were the kind that come after you realize you were fooled completely by someone you handed your trust to without even thinking twice and the anger and the humiliation arrive at the exact same moment and you can’t separate them.
’He took advantage of my grief. The entire time he was the one bleeding this estate dry. He made me feel weak and stupid and helpless on purpose so that I’d keep leaning on him while he burned everything down...’
She stood up slowly.
The night breeze caught the edge of her silk dress and moved it and she didn’t notice.
The soft uncertain girl who had been sitting alone on a bed two hours ago crying into her parents’ photograph was simply gone. What replaced her looked at the shivering mud-covered man on the ground with violet eyes that had not a single drop of mercy left anywhere in them.