Reborn as the Psycho Villainess Who Ate Her Slave Beasts' Contracts

Chapter 357 --357

Elara looked at him.

She thought about Fen’s notes in the margin of the tactical assessment document. Fen, who had spent three years watching problems accumulate from a position that couldn’t address them, and who had just been given a different kind of position.

"Add Lord Castin’s road complaint to the northeast regional administrator review file," she said. "And find out what else is in that file. Everything that has passed through that administrative chain in the past fourteen years and not been resolved."

Demerti wrote this down with the practiced efficiency of a man who had learned that when Elara said find out everything, she meant everything.

"The new staff members—" he started.

"Teva and Dorin report to the guard integration office tomorrow morning. Fen reports to me."

He wrote this down also.

She started walking again.

The palace closed around her — the familiar weight of it, the smell of it, the specific quality of a large and complicated building that was always in motion even when it appeared still, the continuous hum of several hundred people going about the business of maintaining the machinery that made everything else possible.

She walked through it and she thought about the outer districts visible from the upper road, about the Solt chain and where it ended, about Tarven’s forty-three people and the supply allocation that should be arriving within the week, about Samuel’s grey eyes and the curriculum she needed to review, about Mahir and Ken in whatever they were doing now that the dungeon door had opened, about Fen’s margin notes and the problems that had been accumulating in Lord Castin’s district for three years.

She reached her study.

She sat down.

She picked up the auditors’ preliminary report from the Verdan garrison.

She began to read.

The report could wait.

Elara sat at her desk, looked at the auditors’ preliminary report from the Verdan garrison, and made a decision that did not come naturally to her. She put it down. Not permanently — it would be there in the morning, and the morning would be soon enough, because nothing in that report was going to change overnight and she had been traveling for two days and before the traveling she had been working without meaningful pause for fifteen days and her body was presenting its bill again with the specific insistence of a creditor who has been patient long enough.

She put the report down.

She went to find Samuel.

---

He was not in his room.

This was new. Three weeks ago he would have been in his room, or in the corridor directly outside it, in the limited geography of a person whose world had contracted to whatever felt safe. She stood in the doorway of his empty room for a moment, noting the signs of genuine habitation — the desk covered in organized papers, the maps pinned to the wall with small careful notations, a book left open face-down on the window seat in the way that people leave books when they intend to return to them.

She found him eventually in the east library.

It was not a room she would have predicted him choosing — the east library was not the comfortable library, the one with the good chairs and the south-facing windows where the afternoon light came in warm and horizontal. The east library was the working library, the one with the administrative and historical records, the tall shelves and the narrow reading tables and the specific smell of paper that had been accumulating for a long time. It was the room she used when she needed to find something specific.

Samuel was at one of the narrow tables with three books open around him and a sheet of paper in front of him that was covered in his small precise handwriting. He was so absorbed that he did not hear her come in, which told her something about the quality of his concentration — he had the kind of focus that closed out peripheral information, which was both an asset and occasionally a liability, and she filed a note to herself to address the liability component in his training at some point.

She pulled out the chair across from him and sat down.

He looked up. A flicker of surprise — genuine, unmanaged, the kind that happened before composure could be applied. Then the composure arrived, but not all the way, and what remained was something that sat between his default careful neutrality and something more open.

"Elder sister," he said.

"What are you reading?"

He looked at the books around him with the slightly self-conscious expression of someone who has been caught doing something they were not certain was appropriate. "The administrative history of the eastern territories," he said. "And the census records from thirty years ago. And the flood management reports from the eighth year of my father’s reign."

She looked at the books. Then at the paper in front of him. "Why those three together?"

He turned the paper so she could see it. He had drawn a diagram — not a map exactly, more of a relationship chart, showing the connections between administrative decisions in the eastern territories and the population changes recorded in the census records and the infrastructure failures documented in the flood management reports. The lines between elements were annotated in his small handwriting, each one noting the specific nature of the connection.

She looked at it for a long moment.

"You found the pattern," she said.

"The flood management failures weren’t engineering failures," he said. There was a quality in his voice she hadn’t heard before — not excitement exactly, but the specific animation of someone who has discovered something that confirmed a suspicion they had been developing privately and hadn’t been certain about. "The engineering was adequate. The problem was the maintenance allocation, which was reduced four times in six years, and each reduction was approved by the same administrative office, and when I looked at what else that office was approving during the same period—" He pointed to a section of the diagram. "They were approving construction contracts. Consistently, to the same three contractors. And the contracts were for projects in districts that don’t show population growth or infrastructure need in the census data."

"Ghost contracts," Elara said.

He looked at her. "Is that what they’re called?"

"It’s what I call them." She looked at the diagram again. "How long did it take you to find this?"

"Four days." A pause. "The tutor didn’t assign this. I found the flood report in the reading list you gave me and it seemed — the numbers seemed wrong, and once I started pulling the thread—" He stopped. "I should have asked before spending four days on something that wasn’t assigned."

"No," she said. "You shouldn’t have." She tapped the diagram. "This is exactly the kind of thing that should be pulled when you find the thread. The assigned work is the foundation. What you do with the foundation is the part that matters."

He looked at the diagram. Something settled in him — the specific quality of a person receiving confirmation that the instinct they followed was the right instinct.

"The contractors," she said. "Did you find names?"

He found the relevant page in the census records, turned it to face her, and pointed to three entries he had marked with small careful notations in the margin.

She looked at the names.