Chapter 1432: Crowning feast(3)

Dragged by his scruff into the dancing circle, the King of the South found himself unwilling thrown back into the scuffle he wished to get out.

When he had pleaded that his feet were dead to the world, he had not been jesting. A quarter-league of winter flagstones on naked soles would turn any man’s heels to wood, and while he gladly endured the torment for the sake of his wife’s radiant grin, he held no such charity for the rest of the realm.

Lysandra, having dragged him to slaughter, abandoned him the instant her duty was done and after a few minutes of danging. She skipped away to roust her own husband away from the company she had left him in, leaving her sovereign marooned in a sea of silk, perfume, and predatory fathers.

Every time the music sputtered to a halt and Alpheo made a desperate lurch toward the safety of his chair, another eager hand thrust into his palm. Sometimes it was a giggling maiden acting on her own nerve; far more often, it was a grasping lord using his daughter as a polite battering ram to corner the throne for a few minutes to make his offer.

Figuring that alienating half the nobility over a missed jig was poor statecraft, Alpheo bit the inside of his cheek, painted a genial, royal smile across his face, and offered each lady her allotted three minutes of glory.

He danced with spry maidens and sagging matriarchs; some were breathtakingly comely, others looked like they had been forged in the same smithy as the keep’s iron andirons. A few glided like swans, while others possessed all the delicate rhythm of a lame cart-horse, stomping repeatedly onto his already battered boots until his toes throbbed in rhythm with the drum.

Naturally, every third father tried to turn a simple step-and-turn into an ambush for a royal betrothal.

“My little Lyra is quite taken with the tales of Prince Basil, Your Grace…”

“My brother’s eldest maid has reached her flowering, Sire, and her bloodline is ancient of the princes of old…”

Alpheo parried every thrust with smooth, iron-clad courtesy, shutting down each bid before it could take root. Marrying his heir to some provincial southern house was a luxury he could not afford; the next Queen of Yarzat needed to be above it, preferably outside their own border. An internal match might soothe one ruffled lord, but a foreign alliance bought armies, and influences Yarzat still did not have.

The state might had survived the latest storm, but the next tempest was already brewing over the horizon.

And besides none could say that the captain stirring the ship would be the same.One had to be realistic about these things, Alpheo would not live forever.

Then came the proposals that truly turned his bile sour: the ones sniffing around his sweet Rosalind.

Call him a sentimental old bastard and a foul besides, but while the crown demanded Basil’s marriage be forged in the cold, ruthless ledgers of statecraft, Alpheo refused to auction off his daughter like a prize mare at the autumn fair.

Women in this sun-baked south already drew the short straw in every hand the Five Gods dealt. He had tried to chip away at the misery, quietly opening artisan guilds to widows, pushing to let cast-off wives reclaim their dowries, even toying with civil separations, only to slam headfirst into the wall of the church.

So, like many dangerous reforms, he had tucked the parchment deep into the dark corners of his desk for a later, bloodier year.

Yet if he could not shield the society, he could damn well shield his own flesh and blood.

Basil understood the burden; at thirteen, the lad had merely shrugged when Alpheo laid out the royal matches. But the boy had grinned with fierce, genuine relief when his father swore that little Rosalind would marry only when and whom she pleased. Say what one would of the cub’s wild streak, the lad adored his sister.

Aye, Alpheo thought, stepping over another crushed slipper with a polite nod as the flutes and drums finally wailed their dying notes. The crown is a curse, the lords are a plague, and my feet are bleeding into my boots, but by the Five, the gods were good when they gave me my babes.

Still, not everything beneath the vaulted ceiling was soaked in wine and political ambition. Amidst the swirling silks and glittering jewels, Alpheo caught a sight so rare it felt like sighting the blooming of a rare flower. It was Lucius, actually smiling.

The master of dark birds and brooding silence, was spinning his wife and daughter across the floor. A genuine, disarming grin creaked across the man’s usually severe face. Pity he keeps such a permanent thundercloud at his desk, Alpheo thought with an inward chuckle. The man actually looks human when he smiles.

I wonder why he doesn’t do so more….truly a mistery

Sensing the rare, fragile sanctity of the moment, the King decided against bursting into Lucius’s little bubble with royal business. Instead, he made a mental note to drop a generous reward across the ledger-desk come morning. The Carrion Raven deserved far more than a nod; while Edric was currently nursing a bruised skull and boasting loudly about strangling he Vulture Lord’s neck, it was Laedio and Lucius who had stripped the rebel of his wings in the dark before the storm. A quiet seaside villa with a weekly mandate of unbroken silence and salt air seemed a fitting price for the man.

“May I have the honor of a dance, Your Majesty?”

Alpheo turned to find a woman standing before him. Alone this time. Her auburn hair fell in soft waves past her shoulders, framing striking, deep blue eyes that mirrored the chill of winter.

“Lady Miriah,” the King greeted warmly, taking her outstretched hand while his gaze instinctively swept the perimeter of the hall, hunting for her husband. “It would be my absolute pleasure. Though I must confess, I looked for Lord Arnold…”

“No need to search for him, Your Majesty,” she replied softly, a bittersweet ghost of a smile touching her lips. “In truth, it was my husband’s own idea that I join the floor alone.”

The King dipped his head in solemn deference. For obvious reasons of state and pride, Arnold could no longer stand the press of a crowded ballroom. “My respects to him, and my continued apologies. Men may praise his duty, but none can deny he bled heavily in my service.”

“Please, Your Majesty, spare me the courtly grief,” Miriah murmured, her grip firm and steady as they stepped into the rhythm of the strings. “Even a woman knows how war works . You wield no more authority over the details of the bloodshed than a farmer cursing the clouds when a drought ruins his fields. I am simply thankful he walked home on his own two feet rather than wrapped in a shroud of royal lion-pelt. The gods granted me that much of a mercy.” She looked away, her voice dropping to a wry whisper. “Besides, the wound gives him a permanent excuse to loll about the hearth without the court calling him a coward.”

“It was a brutal war, my lady,” Alpheo said quietly. “Too many families paid a price they could never recoup.”

“Aye,” she agreed, her gaze drifting deep into the glittering crowd. “Compared to those who lost a father… or a brother…what is a leg compared to that?”

Alpheo followed her line of sight across the hall. There, standing near a towering stone pillar, were the two fallen princelings of the old regime. Thalien leaned heavily upon his polished blackwood cane, his face carved into a permanent, bitter scowl, while Arnold, for all his own burdens, patiently attempted to coax a flicker of warmth back into his brother’s dark mood.

Thalien offered only clipped, dismissive monosyllables, his blue eyes drifting enviously toward the whirling couples on the floor. Then, catching the sudden sting of his own withered limb and the phantom ghost of a sword he could no longer buckle on, a flash of pure, impotent rage hardened his features.

Their eyes locked across the distance.

Thalien slowly, stiffly lowered his head in a curt, frosty acknowledgment. Arnold followed suit, offering a weary, polite nod of his own. Alpheo returned the greeting.

“I never wished for it to come to that,” the King murmured, almost to himself.

“I think they both know as much, Your Majesty,” Miriah replied, her gaze steady on his face. “They played the hand they were dealt, and you played yours. You honored them in victory, and you left them their breath. I only pray Your Majesty knows that just because our past was hammered out in blood, the future need not follow the same anvil…”

She trailed off abruptly as the music surged, parting the crowd like a wave.

A pair of young dancers spun into their path with breathless, youthful energy. Leading the charge was Prince Basil, grinning , his hand firmly holding the fingertips of his dancing partner: Misia, two years his junior, heir apparent of Pardunum, and eldest daughter of the patriarch of the late Royal House of Herculia.