#Who were these landowners i will fucking murder them!! We will start from the bottom up i will fight all of them

[moonilit]

I met Freminet for a day and a half but if anything happens to him i will kill everyone in Tyvat then myself

[ckret2]

Okay, I’m too exhausted to finish this chapter tonight, so this is all I’m getting out today. The first 2.5 scenes of the last chapter of “Basilisk in the Grass” out of what’s a planned 9 scenes. I’m gonna go ahead and post it just so that I get SOMETHING up today for Pentious Week, even though it doesn’t reach the part that answers the prompt lol. The rest of the fic (including the part where Sir Pentious fucking dies) will be finished tomorrow!!

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Sir Pentious looked down from the airship at the burnt up clearing below.

He and Helena had always maintained two homes. Old habits from England; he'd been too used to the Graces' separate townhouse and country house. His little house in Maine, near the coast and surrounded by trees, was unknown to anyone in the world but the Grace family and a handful of former servants that Sir Pentious had preemptively executed to ensure they never worked out who their former employer was.

He had long ago concluded that if Helena was ever going to try to contact him again, it would be either at their old home in Philadelphia or at this lonely country house. A couple of times a year, he visited this house alone and on foot to search the dusty rooms for any notes that might have been left for him.

When he'd visited a couple of weeks ago, he'd found the house populated by a posse of men waiting with guns and handcuffs.

"So that's that," Chess said, looking down at the pile of burnt lumber. "Now we know."

Sir Pentious nodded grimly. "Now we know." He'd feared for years that Helena might go to law enforcement with her knowledge of Sir Pentious. Sure, there was a slim chance that he'd been followed on a prior visit to the house, or maybe the man who'd sold them the land nearly twenty years ago had suddenly and miraculously realized that the face of the man who'd bought it was the same one he'd seen in the papers... But Sir Pentious was sure that wasn't it. He was sure it was Helena.

And if she wanted to see him stopped so badly that was telling his secrets...

Helena was the only person in the world who knew Sir Pentious's most carefully kept secret. If she ever told that one, it would be over. Many of his lowest laborers were kept in place out of fear, but for many more the narrow-minded resignation of "it's not so bad for me" was all that was keeping them in place. And those who worked for him more directly and held real power in his organization—greedy businessmen, decorated military officers, crooked politicians, sadistic mass murderers, competent middle-managing bandits, wives poached from the powerful—they rallied around him out of a mix of personal ambition and respect. Despite its democratic ideals, America was a true child of the British Empire: full of power-hungry bigots eager to steal from the rest of the world.

There would always be people here willing to follow a megalomaniacal man with his own war machines.

War machines or not, fewer would follow an insane crossdressing woman. That would be what they'd see. It wouldn't completely destroy his empire—not immediately—but it would disgust many into leaving and undermine his authority with a vast majority of the rest. Maybe it could even help rally international furor against him, he didn't know.

How far was Helena willing to go to stop him?

Chess asked, "She wasn't there, was she?"

"No. I made sure." After he'd lured the posse into chasing him into the woods and picked them off one by one (never bring a gunfight to a gunsmith), he'd dragged their bodies back to the house, searched it top to bottom, and called out a warning in every room—and only then had he burned the house to the ground.

Chess nodded. "About ready to give up on them?" He tapped a finger on the ruby brooch pinned to Sir Pentious's ascot. A few months after Helena's disappearance, he'd started wearing her jewelry: her brooch in the center of his chest, her wedding ring beneath his glove, her earrings in his newly-pierced ears.

Sir Pentious slapped Chess's hand away as if the ruby Chess was prodding was a big red self-destruct button. "That's one of the few things I don't have power over," he snapped. Someday he might give up, but he didn't think he could ever move on. Maybe someday he'd love someone else enough to want a life with them, sure, it was possible; but he was never going to love them the same way he would always love Helena.

Chess stepped away from . "Well," he said. "If that ever changes, you know where I am."

As Chess walked away, Sir Pentious wondered what if he'd really meant that the way Sir Pentious thought he had.

There were multiple families of minor British nobility and vaguely wealthy landowners who went by the name "Grace." Most such families could trace their surname back to France, where the surname meant the same thing in French that it does in English.

Tracing Basil Grace's pedigree back, though, one would find that his surname was purely British. A few generations back, the family's surname was instead written "in Grace"—a common enough preposition at the time, back when surnames were place names instead of family names and you'd frequently find people named "in—" or "of—" before the name of the town they hailed from. And so, at one point, it seemed, the family must have come from a place named "Grace."

Or some variation on the word. A few generations before that, their name had used another way to spell Grace in Middle English, "in Gras," before the spelling was standardized.

Except, in this case, it had been standardized the wrong way, because in Middle English gras was a shared way to spell two very different words. Keep following the family tree back, and in Old English the ancestors of what would become the Grace family used "in Græs," and græs does not mean grace. Far enough back, locals of the area were referred to as living "in þæm græse."

Translated directly into modern English, it did not mean "Grace." It meant "in the grass." A reference to the rolling meadow along one side of what was now the Grace estate.

It was also a perfectly fitting name for a man who was indeed turning out to be a snake in the grass.

###

Sir Pentious beamed at the fearful, glowering men filling the rows of desks on front of him. "Gentlemen of the state legislature!" he said, holding out his arms grandly. The young Burmese python draped around his shoulders shifted to keep its balance. "I'm so honored you made time to meet with me on such short notice." Not that they'd had much choice in the matter. Sir Pentious had simply waltzed into the room, and then his gun-wielding followers had filled all the exits.

"What do you think you're doing here?!" A representative in the front row of seats demanded, lunging to his feet.

Ten guns trained on him. He sat back down.

"I'm here to negotiate, of course!" Sir Pentious paced in front of the representatives' seats, enjoying how the sound of his footsteps on the wooden floor echoed in the deathly silent chamber. "I assume you called this secret midnight meeting to discuss the hostage situation I've presented you with? It's not like you're going to get all your little ones back without my participation."

"You're a sick bastard," another of the representatives called from the back of the room—but he had the sense to stay in his seat. "This is beyond the most depraved acts of war! What kind of a man kidnaps thousands of children as a negotiation tactic?!"

"A craven coward, I'm sure," Sir Pentious said, offering a hand to help support his python as it stretched curiously toward one of the representatives. "But a very well-organized one."

A third representative roared, "You'll burn in hell for this!" and pounded on his desk. The thunderous pound set off someone's itchy trigger finger; a bullet hit the representative in the chest. His suit and flaked off in black ashes and greenish vapor rose out of his chest as the chemical compound in the bullet splashed out into his flesh. As the men nearest the dead representative gasped in horror and bolted out of their seats to get away from the corpse, Sir Pentious raised a hand to signal his followers to hold their fire

Wryly, Sir Pentious said, "And when I get there, if the devil's got any common sense, he'll offer me a seat at his court." He laughed wryly. "So about those children?"