Chapter 1412: Checkers and players(2)

He found his father lounging comfortably atop the broad oak desk of his solar.

The chamber was just as small, cramped, and fiercely guarded as Basil always remembered it to be. It had the air of a monk’s cell rather than a monarch’s retreat, with only a narrow, slit-like casement that barely stood unlatched, letting in the sharp bite of winter air that did very little to kill the dead air in the room.

The King’s polished boots were propped casually upon the timber, the soles clean enough to eat from. In his hands, he turned and overturned a parchment letter between his fingers, flipping it rhythmically like a quail roasting over a fire.

“Father,” Basil greeted, easing the heavy oak door shut until the latch clicked. He knew how much his father treasured his privacy , unless he was waiting for someone , he always wanted the door closed behind him.

At the sound of the latch, his father gathered himself with the fluid grace of a stalking cat. He rose from the desk, his velvet sleeves falling neatly over his forearms, and pulled his heir into a sudden embrace.

The greeting was fierce enough to knock the breath clean out of the boy’s lungs. Basil always appreciated his father’s warmth, yet the sudden display left him blinking in bewilderment.

“How fares my boy?” Alpheo asked, releasing him with a hearty slap on the shoulder.

“As well as I was at noon…” Basil answered cautiously, rubbing his ribs as he scanned the room. Aside from a newly carved wooden falcon perched near the inkwell, nothing in the solar seemed out of place, save for the crumpled missive still clutched in the King’s left hand.

Alpheo caught the boy’s wandering gaze, his dark eyes twinkling with sharp amusement.

“You would do well to cloak your thoughts a little closer to the chest, Basil,” the King remarked, his tone light and jovial, though the teacher’s edge was unmistakable beneath the jape.

“I didn’t utter a word.”

“Not with your tongue, no,” Alpheo replied, unfurling the parchment and thrusting it into his son’s hands. “Your eyes are screaming loud enough to wake the city. Read.”

Basil looked down at the tight, jagged scrawl. It was a remarkably brief dispatch, but the unvarnished triumph bleeding through every line was unmistakable. At the bottom rested the heavy, clumsy wax seal of the Fourth, alongside the signature of Legate Edric. Basil remembered speaking with the commander for the first in the palace gardens winters ago, a man who had looked about as comfortable at court as a landed trout. He might lack a courtier’s silver tongue, but the man plainly understood the butcher’s trade.

A broad grin, mirroring his father’s, spread across Basil’s face.

A sennight prior, Edric had concentrated the bulk of the force assigned to him and cornered the Vulture Lord’s main redoubt deep in the southern pine forests. After weeks of blind hunting through the fog of leaves, the legions had closed the noose, putting the encampment to fire, iron, and rope.

Ratio had slipped into the briars during the confusion, but any hope of a prolonged rebellion had been snuffed out. A vanguard composed of four Hound rangers, a battered wandering hedge knight, and a squire had run the outlaw lord to ground in the canopy, beating his iron visor into pulp.

“A strange pack of hounds to catch a fox,” Basil murmured, re-reading the line about the hedge knight. The legions were a proud, insular brotherhood; while they frequently paid coin to sellswords, it was rare for a common vagabond to share the glory of a named kill with the Black Falcon.

“A strange pack, perhaps, but they brought back the pelt,” Alpheo chuckled, leaning back against the edge of his desk and crossing his arms.

“It is a magnificent victory for the realm, Father,” Basil said, handing the letter back.

“Our first true victory as a kingdom, in fact,” the King noted, a quiet pride settling into his smile.

Basil paused, turning the thought over in his mind.

The first true victory.That it was.

The bloody triumph at the Ford had been fought while Alpheo still bore the mantle of Prince of Yarzat. And though it was the most desperate, legendary struggle the legions had ever survived, the crown had not yet touched his brow. By the laws of the Five and the ancient traditions of the Curia, until the Archon laid the consecrated gold upon his brow in Romelia’s sight, he was merely a prince who had outmaneuvered his neighbors.

“Will Edric and Laedio return to court soon, then?” Basil asked. “With the Vulture dead and salted, their task in the south is surely near its end.”

“They will ride home shortly,” Alpheo replied, his smile dimming slightly as his mind shifted from triumph back to statecraft. “The main hornet’s nest has been burned out, and the survivors are currently nailed to pines along the roads to remind the all what treason pays. Yet the Vulture’s strength lay in how deeply his roots were tangled in the hills. There are still splintered bands and stubborn deserters scattered across the valley.”

The King waved a dismissive hand. “A tedious mopping-up, but it hardly demands the attention of my best commanders. A pack of mongrels could hunt down the stragglers now. I have already drafted the orders to recall both the Fourth and the Primogenia before the month turns. It would be an insult to the realm to hold my coronation without two full legions lining the grand avenue.”

Alpheo pushed himself up from the desk, stepping closer to his son, his gaze sharpening with that predatory, calculating intensity that had carried him from the common dust to a throne.

“It is a pity about the Vulture Lord, all things considered,” Alpheo mused, rubbing his chin. “I would have preferred the bastard breathing.”

“No doubt Edric harbored the very same wish,” Basil remarked with a dry half-smile.

The King gave a grim nod. “Aye, though our reasons would hardly align. Edric wanted to skin him for vengeance; I wanted him whole so my black birds could take his tongue apart piece by piece. The rogue was cunning, but even a blind swine could see he had a deep purse propping up his rebellion. Our whispers out of the south claim it was Sharjaani merchants funneling supplies through smugglers along the Oizen marshes. But truly… even a hedge-peddler with a bag of silver could hire a few greedy factors to look the other way. I wanted Ratio strapped to a chair until he named the grand hand behind the gold.”

“You suspect Habadia?” Basil asked.

“I suspect nothing, my boy,” Alpheo said flatly. “I know it was Habadia. It could hardly be anyone else.”

“We do possess a rather crowded ledger of enemies, Father.

Habadia, Oizen, the nobility that some months ago bent to you after you crippled them…should I go on and look north too?” Basil reminded him gently. ”We’d have enemies even under the trunk of a tree”

The King turned a sharp, reproaching look upon his heir, though his lips quirked with cynical amusement. “Aye, we have enemies aplenty, and every last one of them is limping. The Prince of Not-Oizen has his neck submerged in debt, he could scarcely scrape together enough coin to feed his own hounds, let alone bankroll an insurrection. The Kakunian prince barely shares the border to pull off such an escapade, and with Merelao sharpening daggers at his throat, the fat pig has far larger trout to fry than mine.

Then there is Sharjaan,” Alpheo continued, ticking them off on his fingers. “They possess the gold, certainly, but hardly the appetite. The mere mention of my banners on their border is enough to loosen the bowels of that fat coward faster than a bad bowl of mussels. He only had the courage to march on my lands when we were outnumbered close to four to one. Which leaves Habadia.”

The King took a slow breath, his jaw tightening into iron. “It is hardly a contest of wits. Yet I hold not a scrap of hard parchment or a living witness to prove it. So, for the scribes and the court , the Vulture acted as a lone mad dog, aided only by a few confused merchants chasing easy coin. Hardly satisfying… but statecraft is rarely a feast of neat justice. I shall have to content myself with the rogue’s severed head pickled in a jar.”

Alpheo turned, fixing his dark, piercing eyes directly onto his son.

“And that, Basil,” the King murmured, placing a heavy, firm hand upon the boy’s shoulder, “is precisely where you come in. A victory in the brush is merely dead meat left in the sun if we fail to harvest the crop at court.

There’s yet work to be done.Great work.”

And something in his gaze made the boy understand he would have something to do with it.