I Audited the Demon King's Castle, and He Won't Let Me Leave novel · Chapter 3 of 24
Chapter 3: The Widow's Pension
A pension of 400 crowns a month goes to a woman the king won't name. Nanami covers him with her coat in the night, and he catches her hand: 'I'll keep you.'
Nanami spent the afternoon in the oldest books in the castle.
They were stacked in a back room behind the counting room, bound in cracked green leather and tied with string.
She read ten years of them in one sitting, with a pencil in her teeth.
The old books had the same neat hand as page forty.
Every total in them carried a small double tick in the margin, two short strokes slanting the same way.
She stared at the tick for a long time.
Her father made that mark.
He made it in the tiny notebooks he kept in his coat pocket, and he had never been able to say why.
"My mother's habit," he would say. "Old family habit."
Nanami shook her head and went on reading.
On the first of every month in the old king's books, one line repeated.
"Four hundred crowns. To the Widow of the Ninth Stair."
It appeared a hundred and twenty times without a single change.
She carried the book into the counting room, where the king sat across the desk from her signing wage slips he could not pay.
"Who is the Widow of the Ninth Stair?"
His pen stopped.
"A pension," he said. "For one of my father's old servants."
"That's four hundred crowns a month for ten years."
"Yes."
"It's the biggest regular expense in the castle, and your father's seal draws it."
"Yes."
"Is she alive?"
He set down the pen.
"She is old," he said. "She taught me my sums when I was small. That's all I'm going to tell you."
"You can't keep a payee out of an audit."
"I can keep a woman out of it who has done nothing wrong."
He said it quietly, and without any heat, and it had the sound of a door being shut.
Nanami looked at him over her glasses.
"I'll find the name anyway."
"I know," he said. "I'd think less of you if you didn't."
It was an odd thing to say to someone who was threatening him with a ledger.
She went back to her page.
Gorund brought a single gold crown on a saucer at dusk.
"Your advance," he said. "It was the first coin in the box."
Nanami wrote a receipt for it on the back of a wage slip and made him sign for delivery.
He wept a little, from pride.
By midnight the castle was quiet.
The counting room had two lamps, and one of them had begun to smoke.
The king was still across the desk.
He had said he would stay for one more column, and then he had stayed for four.
Sometime after the last one, his head went down onto his arm, and his glasses slid crooked, and he was asleep.
Nanami stopped writing.
He looked younger, with the hard line gone from his mouth.
His coat had patched elbows, and the room was cold.
She looked at him for a moment.
Then she stood, took the grey wool shawl Gorund had lent her and laid it over his shoulder.
It was too small, and it only covered the top half of his back.
She straightened the broken horn out of the way of the wool with one fingertip.
His hand came up and caught her wrist.
He had not opened his eyes.
"Don't be kind to me, Auditor," he said, hoarse with sleep.
"It's a shawl," said Nanami.
"I know what it is."
His thumb moved once across the inside of her wrist, slowly, where the pulse was.
Her breath stopped.
"I'm not used to it," he said. "And if I get used to it, I'll keep you."
She did not take her hand back.
"You can't keep a person," she said, a little unsteadily. "I have a signed letter that says I leave at the full moon."
His eyes opened, pale green and fully awake.
"Then I had better read the letter again," said the king.
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