Void Lord: My Revenge Is My Harem-Chapter 218 : Opening Shop and Increasing Harem Members I
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(Chapter Ten — Opening Shop and Increasing Harem Members)
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One day later John gave Edda an important task. ’Side story.’
Edda left the city at dawn with two shadows that called themselves her followers and she called "left boot" and "right boot" until they earned better names. The road east wore last night’s dew like a memory, and the gate guards were too busy yawning to ask why a woman with a braid like a whip and a smile like a private joke needed three canteens, a roll of lockpicks, and a satchel that clinked.
"Left boot," she said without looking back. "Inventory."
The taller one —narrow shoulders, soft voice, eyes that watched too much— patted his pack. "Wire, pins, poultices, jerky, six chalks, one bell that does nothing but I keep anyway."
"Right boot."
The shorter one —square, stubborn, a mole on his cheek like an ink blot— said, "Two coils of rope, four knives, three that I will pretend not to have, a bottle of vinegar, a whetstone, a whistle, and courage."
"Trade," Edda said, flicking two fingers. "You: courage. You: the bell. No one keeps the bell I don’t trust."
They swapped with the air of boys who had not yet learned that obedience can be a warm coat. Edda tucked the bell into her inner pocket and let its metal touch the folded letter that carried John’s seal and smell of serious ink. A small tug in her sternum reminded her she could not betray the boy even if she wanted to; the void’s black hook lived there now, quiet as a sleeping cat until treachery woke it.
"Week out, week back," she said. "No heroics without me. We buy what we can’t steal and steal only what we’re willing to pay for later with favors. If anyone asks who we are, we’re the kind of people who laugh politely and change the subject."
Left Boot (he’d been Myr before his name was confiscated) said, "And if bandits ask?"
"Then we teach," Edda said, and her smile grew a new tooth.
They moved with the road the way fish move with a river — accepting its bends, noting its eddies. A day outside the city, the land clenched into low hills freckled with ironwood and white saplings; a day after that, it relaxed into flats as if the world had been exhaling. The sky did the old trick where it was different blues in every direction, and the sun kept peeking through like a spy who wanted to be caught.
Edda walked with her hands behind her back, thumbs twined, eyes doing the work. She liked travel because it put all the useful lies in one long line: milestones that insist they matter; distances that pretend to behave; strangers who wear their stories on their boots.
Bandits tried the second afternoon, as if the calendar had marked it. Two on the road with a wheel "broken," three in the ditch with breath held poorly, one in the tree with a bow that creaked like a guilty door.
"Textbook," Edda said, disappointed. "I hate textbooks."
Right Boot (he’d been Kobb) murmured, "Orders?"
"Don’t die," she said cheerfully. "And don’t make me do it all."
The man with the wheel wore a face like a boiled potato and the confidence of someone who believed he was smarter than he looked. "Ho there," he called, waving. "Mercy on a poor traveler whose cart has eaten its own leg."
Edda admired the phrasing. "We’ll share our vinegar if you share your ditch," she said, and flicked a glance at the tree. "Your man needs to oil his bow. Third leaf, left fork."
The tree archer startled, twig snapped, and the arrow thunked into nothing. The ditch men popped up like mushrooms that regretted the rain.
Left Boot moved first, because he tended to. He took the nearest ditch man at the ankle with a loop of wire and flicked; the fellow kissed the road and donated his breath to the afternoon. Kobb came in close on another, hands neat, knife neater, the kind of economy that promises he will one day be very good or very dead.
Edda walked. The potato-faced man brought up a cudgel and swung as if trying to beat sense into a doorframe. She stepped sideways, let the cudgel miss by the width of a compliment, and tapped his wrist with two fingers. He dropped the stick because wrists tell the truth faster than mouths. She caught it on the bounce and poked him lightly in the sternum.
"Let’s practice honesty," she said. "Who sent you?"
He tried to be brave. Bandits try. It’s their second job. "We’re freelancers," he said.
"Mm," Edda said. She slipped a thin cord around his thumbs, tugged until the knuckles chafed, then gentled it a hair. "Left boot, right boot: count to twelve."
They counted. At nine, she produced a small pouch of dried seeds and blew a pinch into the potato man’s face. He sneezed three times in a key that suggested the seeds were better at music than medicine.
"Pepper," Kobb whispered, impressed.
"Savory pepper with a grudge," Edda said. "It makes your eyes remember their sins." She leaned in, voice courteous. "Shall we try again?"
"North turn," he blurted, blinking tears. "We stand on the north turn, take purses, take wheels, let them walk. Orders from... from Harl. Harl of the Nail."
"Ugh," Edda said. "He still names his boys after things you can step on. Tell Harl of the Nail that Edda of the Bell thinks his tree men creak and his ditch men wheeze. And tell him I’m going to mist for a week and will be back with better appetites."
She took two purses, a roll of too-dry jerky, and a deck of cards with the kings drawn so miserably that she felt charitable. She left the men alive, their thumbs intact, their pride reorganized, their noses peppered.
On the third day, rain remembered the world and insisted on it for hours. The road went from patient dust to unfriendly soup. They hunched into their hoods and became narrower people. At dusk a roadside shrine to a god who obviously preferred bread to prayers offered them a dry step; they slept in turns under its eave while frogs conducted bad opera in the ditch.
Edda dreamed of nothing because nothing was better than the last time she’d had dreams, and woke in a mood good enough to share. She made Myr and Kobb boil water twice, taught them three ways to listen to the horizon with the soles of their feet, and, when they looked properly bored, told them a story about a man who thought torture meant knives.
"Knives are loud," she said. "Also boring. Pain is a blunt instrument. We want sharp ones. Shame. Silence. Surprise. The best confession I ever got was from a man I made eat cake."
"Cake," Myr said, skeptical.
"I told him it was his birthday," Edda said gravely. "Made a hat out of cabbage. Sang. He confessed so I would stop the second verse. Humans are simple instruments. You have to play the right tune."
Kobb stared at her like a student watching a teacher feed the chalk to the blackboard. "You’re... kind of terrifying," he said finally. 𝗳𝚛𝗲𝕖𝚠𝚎𝚋𝗻𝗼𝕧𝗲𝐥.𝚌𝚘𝐦
Edda curtsied without moving her feet. "I prefer ’pedagogical.’"
Bandits again on day five, but cleverer. They came at night, soft-footed and smelling of tobacco. Edda had set bells —a different set than the one in her pocket— on silk threads between the ironwoods, and the tiny hiss it made when a boot just brushed it woke her with a kiss behind the ear.
She did not bother waking the boys with whispers. "Guests," she said, in a normal voice, as she sat up. "Tea?"
The first man through the trees had a knotted club and a scar on his lip shaped like a question mark. He lifted the club and met an empty bedroll because Edda did not sleep where shadows suggested she should. His second step snagged a wire, his third introduced his cheek to bark at an unfriendly speed, and his fourth involved reconsidering his life choices while spitting out a leaf.
Myr cut the next one off at the knee with a trip and a twist. Kobb put his knife in the dark in a way that would have gotten him killed if Edda hadn’t quietly tilted the man’s wrist with two fingers from behind. "Economy," she murmured again. "Go in straight, come out cleaner."
"How many," Kobb breathed.
"Six," Edda said. "Seven if the cautious one in the back decides bravery is flattering."
It did not. The cautious one went away. The scar-lip confessed before anyone even mentioned cake. Edda took a map that looked like a child’s drawing of a river made by a child who had never seen a river, and a brass token she liked because it was indignant about being brass.
"Why don’t you kill them," Myr asked afterward, genuinely curious.
"Because I need them to go home and tell the next set to be tired of this," Edda said. "A dead tale travels slower. A humiliated one runs."
