Quinlan let the word ’ruler’ lie where the old king had dropped it, and for a while the only sound in the basement was thaw-water ticking off the casks as the last of his frost let go of the stone.
Then his grin shifted into a lighter gear.
"So. The rest of your life," he said. "That’s what’s on the table."
"It is." Alexios’s thumb worked over the pommel of his sword, the grave weight of his own offer still sitting on him. "However little of it remains."
"Hmm." Quinlan began a slow, aimless stroll along the cask row. "What if I bee the ruler before you die?"
The king’s brow creased. "...Then I’d die having fulfilled my promise?"
"Sure, sure. But say it happens fast. Like, so fast you’re still in peak form." Quinlan turned, and his voice came out weightless with innocence. "Would you help me take on the outside world as well?"
"The outside world," Alexios repeated.
"The Heavenly Restriction, the so-called ’domain,’ es down, and we gain access to all that uncharted horizon out there." Quinlan shrugged. "It’d be a shame to stop at only taking the domain down, no?"
The confusion drained off the old king’s face, and suspicion pooled in its place.
He had spent his whole reign across negotiation tables from the finest liars aristocracy could breed, and every instinct trained at those tables was ringing at once.
Worse, much worse, those instincts had been calibrated for mere human nobles.
The thing smiling at him right now was Quinlan Elysiar, the man who took a mile the moment you offered him an inch and felt zero shame about any of it afterward.
"What are you scheming?"
"Nothing at all." Quinlan placed a hand over his heart. "No ill intentions. I swear it on all that is holy."
"I have heard bullshit from every duke in this kingdom," Alexios said flatly. "But never bigger than the utter nonsense you’re spouting right now."
"You wound me, old friend."
"And yet." The king exhaled through his nose, and the suspicion folded itself away, filed under problems too vague to fight. "Fine. Whatever game this is, humoring it costs a dead man nothing. I’ll spend the rest of my life helping you, shameless bastard. Outside world included, if I’m still strong enough to fight."
From her cask in the corner, Iris’s boot swung in a slow arc. She said nothing, but the look she was aiming at Alexios held open pity.
"Excellent." Quinlan clapped once. "Speaking of which, how long is ’the rest of your life’ these days?"
"...A few weeks of useful strength. A season, perhaps." He reported his own death the way he reported supply lines.
"Mm. Then here’s what I don’t get." Quinlan leaned his shoulder against a support beam. "The Fujimori are, for all intents and purposes, subjugated. Their estates, their cauldrons, their alchemists are ours. Why don’t we simply have them keep brewing your youth soup? Problem solved, countdown cancelled."
"You believe I didn’t think of that?" The laugh came out of Alexios dry as old paper. "One alchemist alive is said to be good enough to brew it, and the elders wrote a pact into her blood: should they be defeated, she dies on the spot. And if that’s not enough of a lock, should any power try to pel the recipe... force, contract, hostage, anything... she dies before the first herb touches water."
The old king shook his head. "Or so I’ve been told. I’ll confirm whether their threats were truthful, but I fully expect them to be."
"Ah." Quinlan waved the entire Fujimori clan out of the air with one hand. "Forget it, then. Them and their contingencies. I’m done with that."
Alexios stared at him.
"That thread is the only thing between me and a grave," he said. "You just waved it off like a fly at dinner. What a magnificent creature you are."
But then Quinlan clicked his tongue. "Old friend, why would I waste my breath on their soup..."
The innocence came off his face whole, dropped like a prop he was done holding, and what surfaced underneath was utter, demonic cruelty, the kind of expression the world had coined his title for.
The grin stretched a few teeth too wide, his eyes lit with an enjoyment that had nothing warm in it, and both lantern flames leaned gently away from him, as though they’d been asked to leave the room.
"...when I have something so much better?"
Every battlefield instinct Alexios owned fired at once, and his boot found a step backward before his pride could veto it.
Quinlan took a step forward.
Iris pulled one knee up onto the cask, settled her chin on it, and did absolutely nothing to warn anybody.
A pocket ring flashed. Between Quinlan’s raised fingers, catching the lantern light, sat a single pearl-white pill.
"This little thing right here... stops your aging."
"What?!" Alexios’s eyes flew wide, and his second step back was entirely voluntary. Quinlan’s second step forward was faster.
Behind Alexios’s eyes, the architecture of the last few seconds assembled itself one door at a time.
What if I bee a ruler before you die.
Would you help me take on the outside world.
The rest of my life, outside world included, if I’m still strong enough to fight.
He had meant weeks.
He had built his entire surrender on the arithmetic of a dying man.
And the wretched scumbag in front of him was holding the arithmetic’s repeal between two fingers.
Cold sweat broke across the King of Vraven’s back.
"You fished for it," he breathed. "You made me swear the oath before you showed me the hook. You bottomless, black-hearted, primordial son of a..." His voice climbed with every word, and so did his retreat, one step, then another, boots scraping over old stone. "I take it back. I take all of it back!"
"A king’s sworn word? In front of a witness?" Quinlan kept ing, unhurried, rolling the pearl across his knuckles. "Iris. Did he or did he not swear?"
Iris raised one lazy hand without lifting her chin off her knee. "...He did."
"You stay out of this!"
"Don’t tell me what to do."
"Where are you even running, old friend?" Quinlan’s head tilted as he advanced. "To your grave? Truly? And Felicity... you’d leave her behind, would you? With me as her guardian?" The grin sharpened another degree. "Is that the master plan?"
"She could do far worse than..."
"Did you know," Quinlan said pleasantly, "that I once let her go off on an adventure with zero surveillance? Her, her best friend Feng, Lyra, and Iris. Gone. The strongest of them wasn’t even level fifty at the time."
Alexios stopped moving. His shoulders locked. "You did what."
"You royals pamper your children, and pampered brats grow soft." Quinlan pressed a hand to his own chest. "I follow Black Fang’s school of child-rearing. Throw them into a monster-infested forest, and whoever crawls back out es out amazing."
A fond nod. "Just take a look at my Vex. Literal perfection."
The memory arrived in Alexios’s skull uninvited: white hair, red pentagram eyes bright with delight, and underneath it all that giggle, the one that never quite obeyed the rest of her face.
A psychotic, obsessed, murderous witch.
A shudder rolled through the strongest living human on the continent, crown to boots.
"That woman is supposed to be your success story?!"
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