27. Aldric
ALDRIC
Clara nearly faints when I show her the treasury.
I unlock the vault door beneath the east tower, hold my candle high, and step aside to let her see. The candlelight illuminates chests of coins, gold bars stacked like firewood, jeweled plates, chains, and a crown I took off a man who no longer needed it because he no longer had a head.
She makes a sound like a kettle left too long over the fire, then grips the doorframe.
“Aldric,” she breathes.
“Yes?” I ask mildly.
“You’re a dragon.” She points a shaking finger at the nearest chest. “You’re an actual dragon with an actual hoard. This whole time, I’ve been rationing candles, and you’ve been sitting on the GDP of Liechtenstein.”
My brow furrows. “I do not know what a GDP is.”
“Never mind. Just know that you could buy a small country.” She wades in, lifts a gold bar, staggers under the weight, and sets it back down with reverence.
“This solves everything. Do you understand? Papers, permits, electricity… money is the universal curse-breaker of my century. Money and lawyers.”
“Then take it.” I gesture at the plunder. “Take all of it. What use has it been to me? I could not spend a single coin.”
Clara turns to me, cheeks flushed, eyes shining, and for a moment I believe she’s going to say something tender.
“I’m going to be the most eccentric rich lady the Black Forest has ever seen,” she breathes. “I’m going to walk into a notary’s office with medieval gold and vibes, and no one is going to say a word.”
She’s right, insofar as I can verify. She takes a single small chest, and three days later she marches through the gate with a leather folder held above her head like a captured banner.
“Blackthorn Keep officially exists!” she announces to the courtyard, to me, to Schmetterling sunning himself on the well cover. “Deed, land registry, the works. You are looking at the legal owner of one castle, contents included.”
I take the folder and study documents in a German so mangled by bureaucracy it might as well be a new language. “This says you are the owner.”
Clara winces. “Well, yes. You’re legally deceased. Extremely deceased. Your birth certificate would be carbon-dated.” She pats my chest, just above the glow. “Don’t sulk. We know you’re the actual owner.”
“I am not sulking. I am befuddled that I have survived seven centuries only to become my own wife’s tenant.”
Clara goes very still. “Wife?”
I reconsider my words and decide I regret nothing. “In time. When I have wooed you properly. I have a list.”
My little intruder raises one pale eyebrow. “You have a list.”
“I am a strategist, Clara. I do not leave campaigns to chance.”
She laughs and kisses me, and Schmetterling yowls at us to take our nonsense elsewhere.
But that night, as she recounts the raised eyebrows, the questions that disappeared at the sight of gold, I get an uncomfortable sensation in my gut.
“I should be doing this,” I say. We’re in bed, her head on my shoulder, her fingers tracing the wolf inked over the mostly intact side of my ribs. “Providing for you. Handling the coin, the men, the negotiations. Instead, I stand at my gate like an old hound while you carry the burden alone.”
“Aldric.” She props herself up on one elbow.
“I bribed a district official with ancient treasure today. I made a lawyer’s eye twitch.
I am having the time of my life. Do you know what my life was before?
Carrying plates. Smiling at men who deserved soup in their laps.
Now I’m the mysterious silver-haired heiress who pays in gold and doesn’t explain herself.
I’m somebody’s local legend already. Do not take this from me. ”
“It is a matter of honor,” I object.
“Oh, for the love of—” She sits up fully, and there’s a glint in her eyes that both scares and arouses me. “Okay. I know how to make you forget about honor.”
I scoff. “I doubt that very—”
“It’s called sixty-nine,” she interrupts.
Sixty-nine? “Is that a year? Something significant happened in—”
“It’s a position.” She’s already pulling the shirt she commandeered to sleep in over her head. “Lie back, my lord. Class is in session.”
I lie back, because I am a strategist, and a strategist knows when the battle is already lost.
Then she turns herself around, straddles my chest facing my feet, and lowers her mouth to my cock at the same moment she settles her hips over my face, and I understand the name, the number, the entire architecture of the arrangement.
“By Saint George’s—”
“Less talking,” she says, and takes me down her throat.
Every thought leaves my skull. Honor, gold, notaries, the district official, the deed, the seven centuries—gone, all of it, scoured away by the heat of her mouth working down my ladder of piercings while her cunt hovers wet and open an inch above my lips.
I grip her thighs and pull her down and feast. She moans around my cock, and the vibration nearly ends the lesson before it has properly begun.
It is warfare. She works me with her mouth and her fist, sloppy and merciless, and I retaliate with my tongue against her clit in the tight circles that make her rhythm stutter, and we drive each other higher in a spiral with no sane end.
When she comes, she comes screaming around my cock, and the sound drags me over with her, and I spill down her throat while she grinds against my mouth, both of us shuddering, graceless, ruined.
She collapses sideways onto the mattress, breathing hard, hair everywhere.
“So,” she pants. “Any remaining concerns about the division of labor?”
“What labor,” I say to the ceiling.
“That’s what I thought.”
The electricity arrives in what Clara calls record time, which apparently means the amount of gold she distributed embarrassed several companies into competence.
Men in orange vests carve a trench through the forest and plant poles like a procession of gallows, and I watch from the turret with a spyglass because Clara has forbidden me from looming over the contractors.
The first night of being connected to the power grid, she positions me in the great hall beneath a bulb dangling from a cable, her hand on a small switch.
“Ready?”
“It is a lamp, Clara. I have seen lamps.”
She flips the switch.
Light floods the hall from one glass bulb no larger than an egg, and I stare up at it with my mouth open like a peasant witnessing his first eclipse.
“It doesn’t flicker,” I say, awed.
“Nope,” Clara replies, popping the P.
“It doesn’t smoke. It requires no oil, no tallow, no…” I turn in a circle, seeing my great hall in a literal new light. “Decades I spent reading in dim candlelight while electricity was available outside these walls. The books I abandoned because my eye ached…”
“Aldric.” Clara’s voice is soft, and she’s watching my face, not the bulb.
“It is only a lamp,” I say roughly.
“Sure it is.” She flips the switch off, then on again. Off. On. “Also, it does this.”
I blink. “Stop that.”
“Can’t. It’s the law. Everyone has to do this with a new light switch. It’s in the Constitution.”
The mobile phone is witchcraft, and I say so.
Clara sniffs. “It’s not witchcraft, it’s a Samsung.”
I hold the black slab at arm’s length, as one holds a serpent. “You said it contains all books. All music. Maps of the entire earth. The accumulated knowledge of mankind.”
“And videos of cats falling off furniture, yes,” she adds.
“And men carry this in their pockets.” I ‘scroll’ too fast, and the glowing page leaps away from my thumb. “And they use it to look at… what did you call them?”
“Memes,” Clara supplies.
“Memes.” I hand the device back before I break it. Or it breaks my mind. “Your civilization was given the Library of Alexandria in a pebble, and you use it to look at cats.” I shake my head. “Schmetterling will be even more insufferable now.”
Clara teaches me to speak to the phone instead of touching it, which suits me.
Commanding things is a skill I have retained.
I ask it questions late at night when Clara sleeps, knowledge my servants couldn’t bring me.
Knowledge from after the last of them were gone.
The phone answers everything tirelessly, and I begin to understand why people in this century cannot look away from it.
The automobile arrives on a truck. It’s the color of arterial blood. Clara calls it a Porsche and circles it in the courtyard, making sounds I have previously only drawn from her in bed.
“Look at her,” she whispers.
I cannot hide my confusion. “It is a carriage.”
Clara gasps. “She is a 911, Aldric, show some respect.”
“It has no horses. It is the size of a rowboat. Where do the supplies go?”
“Supplies.” Clara looks at me with genuine pity. “Sweetie. This car isn’t for supplies. This car is for driving twice the speed of good judgment down a forest road while screaming.”
She demonstrates. I ride beside her down the new gravel track with my hand braced against the ceiling and my soul several hundred meters behind us, and Clara laughs like a valkyrie the entire way, silver hair whipping, alive, alive, alive, and I decide the machine can stay.
It suits her. It’s fast and loud and beautiful and entirely too much, and it does not apologize for any of it.
Then comes the evening she returns from town with paper bags that fill the hall with the smell of grease and salt.
“Tonight,” she announces, “we’re having McDonald’s.”
I scratch my head. “Is that a family? Are we expecting guests?”
“It’s food. Sort of.” She unwraps a flat disc of bread containing meat and a yellow substance that could be cheese, and places it in my hands. “One and a half billion of these are eaten every year. It’s the most successful meal in human history. Prepare yourself.”
I examine it. I have eaten roasted swan at an emperor’s table. I have eaten boot leather in a siege. I bite.
I chew. I stop. I stare at the wall.
“Well?” Clara is vibrating. “Verdict?”
“It is terrible.”
Her face falls.
“It is delicious,” I continue, baffled, turning the thing over in my hands. “It is both. Simultaneously. It tastes of nothing found in nature, and I have already decided to finish it, and I want another. What have you people done? What alchemy is this?”
“That’s the correct reaction. That’s exactly right.” She toasts me with a paper cup of something black and fizzing. “Welcome to the twenty-first century, babe.”
Schmetterling leaps onto the table, sniffs what Clara called nuggets, and looks at her with an expression that unambiguously demands his tax. She pays it. Three hundred years of precedent hold firm.