Harem System novel · Chapter 21 of 24

Chapter 21: Green Coats Down

The forty-three green coats came up the steps in a line.

Ruenna drew her sword.

"Not one of you touches him," she said.

"Put it away, Cask," the tired, mean-faced guild woman said. "You're one A-rank against forty-three."

"Then come find out which of you I take first."

Liriel stepped in front of Nils with her satchel in her hand.

"I healed half of you," she said. "I will know which."

Nobody moved.

Then someone in the second rank said, quietly, "Bed nine."

The woman at the end of the front row looked down at her feet.

She was thin, and she still wore a Ward shift under her armor.

"He sat with me three nights," she said, so softly it carried down the steps. "I can't take him."

"You'll do as you're told," the tired woman said.

"I'm not going to carry a man who sat up with me." The bed-nine woman unbuckled her green coat and let it drop on the stone.

"Pick that up!"

She stepped over it and went to stand behind Liriel.

A second woman followed her.

Then a third, who had been spooned broth by Nils on his first night in the Ward.

Then six more at once, and a dozen after them, all dropping their coats on the steps in a green-and-black heap.

The line broke.

The tired woman stood alone with perhaps ten loyal guards behind her.

"This is mutiny," Ardith said, and for the first time her voice was not soft.

"Take him!"

The ten came forward.

Ruenna met the first two on the top step, took one by the wrist and put her over the rail.

Liriel's satchel hit a third in the jaw.

The fourth had her hand on Nils's collar when the Ward women closed around her, eleven of them, in gray shifts, and pulled her off.

It was over in less than a minute.

Nils stood in the center of it with the core warm in his chest and a split lip, and nobody had managed to lay a finger on him.

Keep reading free with an account. Start Harem System from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.