Book 4 Chapter 50: Familial Connections

++If that Vornholt girl thinks she’s one of us now just on account of her husband, she has another thing coming.++

- A comment that gives voice to a pervasive sentiment among the Voret family as of the mid 1890s.

Backry was not used to feeling nervous. He had, of course. A few times. Every now and then. When grandmother called on him, or when he made the mistake of calling her ‘great grandmother’ and drawing her ire even more than whatever he’d done to receive a summons had. That one time he’d gotten drunk and accidentally blown up his sister’s horse—but always infrequently, and never like this.

Backry had never been this nervous, because he’d never been given this much cause to be nervous.

Or, no, that wasn’t right. He’d been given cause like this once before, when he met his sister-in-law Isabel for the first time. Back then he’d been stupid and ignorant, not known the little monster he was dealing with. He’d even gone so far as to flirt with her, which he now realised, with all his retrospective insight, had been somewhat akin to sticking his cock in a blast furnace.

Backry had been obsessed with marrying Isabel, once. She’d been the ultimate prize—a bauble that nobody else in Garamon could equal. Showing her off on his arm would’ve made Backry the pride of his family.

But that, he knew now, had never been an option. If one tenth of the stories people told about her were true, Backry would’ve died the first night he tried to teach her how a proper Voret wife ought to behave.

Now he had full knowledge of how lethal his sister in law was, of what sort of things tended to happen to the people who defied her. Now he could remember their interactions with full recollection of all the little ways he’d fucked up, and the especially big ones.

And now, more than a year since they first met, Backry was being called on to meet with Isabel again.

He’d flown to Poloira by cloudscraper, and his teeth had rattled for every yard of the journey. He’d set foot on the dusty lands just a mile from Isabel’s primary refinery, and made his way to the grounds of her new mansion.

Looking at it from the outside, you’d never have guessed the place had finished construction only a day ago. Already it covered a plurality of acres, all encased in a tall fence that looked like a giant would’ve struggled to climb it. The building itself was a four-story affair with the curved edges turning to pointed tips that were more popular among cathedrals than domiciles.

It looked angry with him, as ridiculous as that thought was. Hostile and waiting for Backry, egging him on into setting foot inside so it could chew him up and spit him out.

The walls were long and curved, turning into so many buttresses and balconies. The windows were all high and angled in such a way as to look like they were glaring down at him, like Backry was a child receiving the frosty stare of an angered parent. The grounds were by far the least developed, gardens and lawns still growing and reminding him how new this whole place was. The half-formed grassy coverage itself contributed to the grand atmosphere. It seemed to him like even the plants were scared to be in Isabel’s domain.

If Backry kept staring at his sister’s mansion, he was never going to enter it. That was just how it was. The damned place had clearly been built with intimidation in mind, and it was working. Maybe he was a coward. Maybe he was just sensible.

He sighed and made himself step forwards, walking first along the grounds, then up the steps to its great set of front doors before using the silver knocker to announce himself. They yawned open after a moment, revealing by far the most deranged man Backry had ever seen in his entire life.

“ARE YOU HERE TO STEAL MY LEGS!?” he screamed into Backry’s face.

Backry didn’t really know how to respond to that, just taking a step back on sheer instinct, staring and blurting out the first words that popped into his head.

“No?”

The man calmed down instantly, frighteningly quick. “Alright then. You’re the Voret twat, follow me.” He turned and started through the mansion, and Backry, after only a few moments spent deciding whether or not he was about to be killed, dismembered and possibly eaten, decided to follow after.

The walk was a surprisingly long one, even for someone who grew up in the Voret estate.

Clearly, whatever Isabel had spent on commissioning and designing this place, she’d had competition in mind. There was simply no other reason for it to be this big, this massive. It was more palace than mansion, like it was built with the intent to house…what, a family? A big one? No, not even that. There wasn’t a noble family in Garamon that was big enough to need this much space. Maybe she planned to fortify the damned place and have a whole brigade of men staying in it, any less than that and the scale of it was just excessive.

No, this was pure vanity and pure showmanship. And Backry had to admit it was working on him. Any noble girl could afford well-made clothes and expensive carriages, but the wealth that’d gone into this place…

She really was one of Garamon’s foremost fortunes. Almost as rich as the Vorets, perhaps richer.

That didn’t mean she was the most powerful woman around necessarily, but it definitely meant something. There was a reason the Vorets were rich after all. Magical talent was their most stable currency, connections among the other magicians of Garamon definitely took second place, but after that…well, Backry looked around and was reminded that a bit of raw cash could go a long way.

His ruminations were interrupted when the madman finally brought him to a large, expertly carved door that Backry could only imagine corresponded to Isabel’s office. He turned to face Backry, his expression twitching and convulsing like one of those experiments where you prodded a brain with electrodes.

There was not electricity here though, only molten insanity oozing out of every pore.

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“Miss Vornholt doesn’t like you,” the bodyguard said. “That means I don’t like you.”

Backry said nothing, and the man continued.

“I don’t like you. But it isn’t my job to take a disliking, that’s just something I’m doing for fun. No, my job is to protect her. To stop people from trying to kill her.”

“I…I’m not going to do that,” Backry croaked. The man took a step forward, now just inches away. Backry felt like he had a bloody lion’s teeth around his neck, just waiting for it to apply pressure.

“Oh, I know you’re not. Because if you twitch a finger—a finger—I’ll plug you faster than you can move it up to the second joint. Do you think your magic’s faster than a bullet?”

“...No.”

The madman smiled. “No. You’re on Miss Vornholt’s shitlist, so be polite.”

Backry knew, in some distant part of himself, that this man couldn’t really have orders to just execute a Voret on the spot if it came to that. He also knew that the man was visibly deranged enough that orders probably wouldn’t come into it. A third knowing made itself apparent to him, that the man had been calling Isabel Vornholt rather than Voret.

Backry decided not to comment on that, just stepped into the office.

It was bigger than grandmother’s. Bigger than grandfather’s, too, and more richly decorated both. Isabel must’ve forked over…what, a hundred thousand crowns furnishing the damned place? Backry wondered for a moment just how inexhaustible her fortune was, then his eyes fell on her and he found his capacity for wondering suddenly reduced.

She was seated in a big chair opposite a vast desk, and her face was as still and cool as ever. It would’ve been more reassuring if she’d been glaring at him, at least that would’ve conveyed something vaguely human in her features.

“Sit,” she told him.

Backry stiffened. “I’d, uh, I’d rather not.” It was generally wise to remain on your feet and able to run instantly and quickly when one was being asked to speak with a vastly more powerful magician. Particularly if she hated you.

“I was not asking,” Isabel said.

Backry sat. The chair was comfortable at least, but then if the richest woman in the world didn’t have comfortable chairs there was probably something deeply wrong with the Empire.

“Do you know why I brought you here?” she asked him.

“I do, and I just want to say right away that I’m sorry for how we met last time,” Backry mustered the strongest, most charming Voret Smile he could produce. He had seen this particular expression affect young ladies at a rate of approximately three swoons per second, and yet before his new sister-in-law it seemed to bounce off like pistol fire hitting a steel plate. He pushed on regardless. “I was downright beastly, and you most certainly didn’t deserve it. You must understand that at the time we had no idea who you really were, who we were dealing with. You know, I’m sure, how many dull-eyed harlots there are strutting around, and I mistook you for one of them. I know now of course that you’re nothing like them, no. You’re Voret by nature if not by blood. Intelligent, fiercely independent, masterful over everything—a magician born!”

Normally people responded well to his flattery. Backry wasn’t sure why Isabel wasn’t.

“So I looked like a harlot,” she said.

Backry felt the bottom fall out of his guts, and he was left staring and blinking for a few moments.

“I…uh…I…I…uh…”

“Well?” she asked.

“No,” he said quickly. “Not at all.”

“Ah. So I was acting like a harlot, then? Is that what caused your mistake? What was it about me that was especially harlot-adjacent to have left you so confident in your previous judgement? You were certainly unwavering at the time, after all.”

Backry got the feeling she was enjoying this. If so, she was proving his flattery about her being a born magician true. Pulling the wings off flies was generally considered to be a promising sign of academic potential among their circles.

“I…please may I start again?” he asked her.

Isabel smiled. “You may.”

“I was…rude to you, and I should not have been, and I apologize for that.” There. Backry would keep it all damned simple, knowing that anything he added beyond this, each and every detail, was just another weak point in his apology for Isabel to grab and twist around to stab him with.

Gods, it was like dealing with Grandmother. Except Grandmother always had some level of actual affection for her family, Isabel seemed to like cutting away until she hit fat. And then going deeper.

She thought in silence for a few moments, perhaps weighing whether to forgive him or whether she could find new and exciting excuses to make him squirm. Eventually she shrugged.

“Words are cheap.”

Backry waited for her to say more, but she didn’t. Great. Coaxing him into speaking again, and after he’d already received such a lovely demonstration about just how much he was putting his own damned skin on the line each time he opened his mouth.

She wasn’t like grandmother at all, she was a hundred times worse. A thousand. She was grandmother squared.

“I understand that there’s little I can say to make amends, but believe me that I don’t intend to just leave it at that,” he managed a queasy smile, even while doing all he could to hide his fear and loathing.

Isabel Voret—Isabel Vornholt. The bitch. She thought she was better than him. She thought that just because she had some mindless, ditzy way of intuiting magic that she had any right to be speaking down to men who’d studied it their whole damned lives.

And she wasn’t far from the mark either, because, however old and proud they were, the Voret family cared for nothing as much as they did talent. Isabel was removed by every other genius in Garamon’s history by an amount too vast to calculate. Statisticians were still giving themselves hernias trying to work out the expected level of talent her and Ilgryn’s brats would end up inheriting. Might they be a whole litter of Backrys?

He put that thought aside before it made him even angrier. He was here, debasing himself, and he had no choice because his new sister in law was simply too powerful in the family. As Bagran had once been the golden goose, now she was the platinum one.

And she seemed far more active, and infinitely more cruel, in wielding that influence. If Backry didn’t appease her, he feared that his pull in the family would wither away by the generation. He swallowed his disgust and awaited an answer.

“You say that you understand there is little value in your words, and yet you keep giving me nothing but words,” Isabel sighed. She wasn’t looking at him anymore, and Backry felt the twinned feelings of relief, at being spared more of her gaze, and a crushing fear that this was the harbinger of some final moment in the conversation.

“I’ll do more, naturally,” Backry added. He hated this bitch, but he needed her damned favour. He had no choice.

When he looked up again and forced himself not to shy away from Isabel, he realised she was smiling at him.

“I am very glad to hear you say that, Backry,” she purred.