The Hand That Holds the Knife: Rashford Yvrix and the Villain’s Servant

A note before you read: This essay looks more closely at Rashford Yvrix and his aunt, Iverra, through a few scenes from my forthcoming novel, The Veiled Core Chronicles: The Fighting 57th.

In The Fighting 57th, the Matriarch of House Yvrix has a problem. The Oracle has stood in the Chamber of Echoes and told the Emperor that someone in House Yvrix offered silver to the assassin who came for his life. Iverra has seven days to deliver the guilty party. She has no intention of delivering the truth.

So she summons her nephew. Rashford Yvrix arrives, stands before her with his eyes lowered, and she tells him, very calmly, that she requires a traitor. Then she lets him sweat while she describes exactly the kind of person she needs: visible, valuable, close to the House. She watches him begin to wonder if she means him, and she enjoys it. She even tells him so. He’s far too useful to waste, she says, but watching him squirm is a rare delight. Only after she’s had her fun does she explain that she needs a corpse, and that he will be the one to arrange it.

Remember who is doing this to him. Iverra isn’t a distant employer. She’s his aunt. In most families, that’s someone you’d expect to stand between you and danger. In House Yvrix, she’s the danger, and she lets him see her weigh whether he’d make a better sacrifice than either of the councilors she has marked as expendable.

Rashford doesn’t ask why. Iverra notices that too. He’s learning that silence is safer than questioning her. He goes down into the lowest, dirtiest part of the city, finds a man in a back-alley bar who will kill for coin, and comes back up to report that it’s done.

When I wrote that scene, I realized I was writing a character who has existed for as long as people have told stories about power. The villain’s servant. The one who carries out the orders.

The Master and the Servant

Fiction is full of dark lords, mad kings, ruthless generals, crime bosses and scheming matriarchs. We remember them because they’re big. They give the speeches, make the plans, and cast the long shadows. But many of them don’t do their own dirty work. Somewhere nearby, there’s often a smaller figure doing it for them.

What I find interesting is how differently those servants arrive at their posts. Tolkien’s Gríma Wormtongue serves Saruman out of ambition and appetite, wanting reward and wanting what he’s been promised. Stoker’s Renfield serves Dracula out of something closer to dependency, a man whose need for his master has hollowed out everything else. Rowling’s Peter Pettigrew serves Voldemort out of fear, always running toward whoever seems strongest. And George R.R. Martin’s Theon Greyjoy becomes Reek through coercion, broken by Ramsay Bolton until obedience is all that’s left of him.

Ambition, dependency, fear, coercion. The roads are different, and they say different things about the servant. Wormtongue chose his master for gain. Theon had his will taken from him. Most servants in fiction sit somewhere between those two poles, and where an author places them decides how much sympathy we give them and how much blame.

Authors sometimes play these characters for comedy or contempt. The groveling henchman, the bumbling minion. But the good ones can be some of the most honest characters in a story, because they show us how harm actually gets done. Rarely by monsters alone. Usually with the help of people who decided obeying was safer than refusing.

Why the Servant Obeys

The master usually wants something grand. Power, a throne, revenge, immortality. The servant often wants something smaller. He wants to survive. He wants to be spared. Sometimes, in a sad, very human way, he wants to be valued by someone who won’t value him.

That’s what makes these relationships so uncomfortable to read. When the master holds the cards and the servant can’t easily leave, cruelty becomes cheap. For some masters, it becomes useful too, a way of keeping the servant small and frightened and dependable.

Iverra understands this very well. When Rashford comes back from delivering the body to the Emperor, she won’t let him tell her how it went. She sits him down and plays the recording, complete with illegal truth ratings floating over his head, and picks apart every flinch. He delivered the lines like a trained animal. His father would be ashamed. She certainly is. None of this will improve his next performance, and I don’t think it’s meant to. It’s meant to remind him where he stands. And because she’s family, the humiliation lands deeper than it would from a stranger. She knows exactly which name to invoke.

The Slow Slide

The other thing the servant gives a writer is a slow, believable slide into darkness. The master usually arrives already corrupted. The servant gets there one step at a time, and every step seems reasonable to him when he takes it.

Rashford doesn’t make one big decision to become part of a murder. He decides not to ask a question. Then he decides to go down into the city’s underbelly. Then he decides to haggle over the finder’s fee, the one part of hiring a killer he actually knows how to do. Then, when the killer asks who the target is, Rashford thinks for a moment about a laugh. Was it Ana or Peter Jandor who laughed nervously at council meetings? He can’t remember, and he decides it doesn’t matter anymore.

That shrug is a choice. It’s the most frightening one he makes, because it’s the moment he stops seeing Ana as a person. His fear explains him. It doesn’t excuse him. Iverra built the trap, but Rashford walked every step into it on his own feet, and he knew where it led.

Readers recognize that kind of shrug. Most of us will never arrange a killing, but most of us have stayed quiet in a room when we should have spoken, because someone with power over us was watching. The servant shows us where that road goes if you keep walking it.

The Master’s Promise

Many of these relationships share one more thing. The servant believes, or needs to believe, that loyalty buys safety. That if he does what he’s told, the master will be there when things go wrong.

It rarely works out that way. Wormtongue follows Saruman into exile and ends up despised and kicked in the mud, until he finally turns on his master. Pettigrew serves Voldemort and receives a silver hand as his reward, and that gift turns on him the instant he shows a moment of mercy. In these stories, the master's protection is conditional, and the servant doesn’t always understand the conditions until it’s too late.

Which brings me back to Rashford, and the scene I think tells you the most about him and his aunt.

“How Do I Guard What I Know?”

After the preparations are completed, Rashford stands in Iverra’s chamber and asks the question that’s clearly been keeping him awake. When he goes before the Emperor to present the traitor, the Oracle will be there. She can see things. If she turns her gaze on him and tries to read him, how does he guard what he knows?

It’s the most natural question in the world. He’s about to walk into the most dangerous room in the Empire carrying a lie that could destroy his House. He wants to hear that his aunt has a plan to keep him safe.

At first, she gives him exactly that. The Oracle wouldn’t dare intrude on the thoughts of a Yvrix without cause. The other Houses would erupt, and the Emperor has no appetite for that fight. It’s a reasonable, political answer.

Then she studies him for a moment and adds something else. There may be precautions he isn’t aware of, the kind that activate only under certain conditions. She would prefer they not be employed. He is so useful to her.

Think about what that answer actually gives him. Not a plan. Just the knowledge that something has been prepared, something concerning him, that he was never told about and won’t be told about now. She doesn’t say what those precautions do or who they protect. She doesn’t need to. The fact that she would prefer not to use them tells him they exist to be used, and that the decision won’t be his.

And listen to how she closes it. You are so useful to me. It’s the same word she used when she first summoned him, when she told him he was far too useful to waste. It’s an appraisal, made by someone whose affection he should have been able to trust. Rashford’s value to her has never rested on being family. It rests on being useful, and the precautions make clear that his safety depends on conditions he can’t see, set by the one person he can’t refuse. What happens if he stops being useful? She leaves for him to imagine.

Then she pours champagne and offers a toast to survival.

That’s the quiet horror at the center of their relationship. Obedience feels like protection to Rashford because Iverra has made every alternative feel more dangerous. He asks for reassurance and receives a warning instead. He understands, at least in part, that he’s standing on ground his aunt can collapse whenever she likes.

For a moment, he doesn’t lift his glass. She waits, one eyebrow raised.

He raises it anyway.

— J.A. Raithe