Chapter 1440: Future bid(1)

The sun beat down hard upon the landscape below, and Basil could still recall , though it seemed already a distant thing , when this had been nothing more than green grass, wildflowers sprouting up erratically here and there, as only nature knew how to arrange them, careless and lovely all at once.

It had been quiet once too. He missed that part also.

More than once Basil had taken himself for a walk through it, back in those days before the garden filled to bursting with the countless guests the crown now hosted for the coming tourney.

That was no longer possible. The great influx of workers and beasts labored about with such constancy that any notion of a peaceful walk withered before it could properly form in his mind.

The ground itself had changed beneath their tread , criss-crossed now with deep trenches, worn by thousands of feet reaching the same stretch of earth thousands upon thousands of times, until a lasting, trodden path had etched itself into what had once been an unbroken plain of grass.

They had grown accustomed to his presence by now. He kept himself nearby, watching them labor ,never so close as to disturb their work, yet never so far that they could fail to take notice of a small boy dressed in silk, lingering with nothing better to do. Their interest in him, too, had proven short-lived.

Some spared him only the briefest glance before returning to their planks and ropes. The overseers regarded him a moment longer, weighing whether he might come to bother them over some trifling matter, likely taking him for the son of some visiting lord or knight, for he was dressed far too finely to be mistaken for a servant’s child.

But when it became plain that he did nothing more than watch, and with barely a few weeks left before their deadline pressed upon them, they wisely shrugged the matter away and turned their attention back to what truly mattered, content to let the lordling be and watch.

The common laborers paid him even less mind, their attention smaller still and quicker to fade, as they passed back and forth through the green grass of the royal grounds reserved for the court. Carts laden with planks and crates sat gathered at the edges of the rising wooden structure, waiting their turn to be used.

If any among them so much as noticed the lordling boy watching from his careful distance, they concluded swiftly enough that it changed nothing for them. Not one dared slacken during his working hours , Basil understood well enough that such a man would never forgive himself, nor would his wife forgive him, should he lose so fine a position over some careless moment.

It was, after all, a sweet enough arrangement: three silverii a month, with three meals included besides, and with the work already stretching into its second month, the three thousand men hired for the tourney’s building would return home, when all was done, with nine silverii earned in total.

His father had been most wroth over the whole ordeal too.

"An unneeded waste of money," he had said, when Basil had dared ask what he thought of the tourney during an akward silence, "paid so that knights might prattle about the yard and break wooden shafts against one another, playing at war as though it were some children’s game."

Had it been left to his design alone, the whole affair would have ended the very moment the archon set the crown atop his head, and not a copper more would have been spent on pageantry. And it would have ended there too, had he not found himself opposed by wife, legates, and old friends all at once .

It was a rare and startling thing, to see them united in a single cause, and rarer still that the cause should triumph over the king’s own temper.

The king had abandoned his effort to smother the tourney in its cradle, though reluctantly, but he had certainly not since let pass a single occasion to proclaim, loudly and to whoever would listen, what a waste of good coin the whole business remained, and how much better that coin might have served elsewhere.

It was pitiful, and funny in a certain way, to see his father throw a tantrum.

But he did not fault him the sentiment.

The war had been long, and bloodier than any song would ever properly capture, and though they had won it and carved half of Oizen for themselves, they had come out of it themselves bloodied and gutted besides, the victory tasting less of triumph than of exhaustion.

Nor was that the whole of the cost.

By his father’s own order, Rykio had swept through Oizen with a heavy hand and little patience for half-measures, at the moment they thought very little of it, it was war and whatever food they burned was food that the enemy could not eat.

Yet what was a success during the war , was now among the king’s greatest regrets come peace , the fortune spent since in feeding the thousands of peasants left disbursed and starving in the wake of it, and in raising villages anew from ash and cinder.

It had gutted his father’s treasury.

Basil hoped that when his own royal procession carried him through those lands a year hence, he would not find himself staring at the same blackened ruin he had once witnessed himself, riding at his uncle Jarza’s side during the war, ruin he had, in his own small way, helped to make upon Oizen’s broken rear.

He did not regret the methods. Not truly. They had been enemies then, and a kingdom staring down twelve thousand spears with scarcely four of its own hardly had the luxury of tender scruples about the weapons it chose to survive. It had been hard enough for his father simply to endure that, without the added burden of doubting his own cruelty in the doing of it.

But the world had turned since.

Those people were his father’s people now, whatever they had once been on the field, and it mattered little that they had stood as enemies not so long ago , their sons and their sons’ sons would live and die as Yarzati now, and there seemed little purpose left in keeping cruelty alive for its own sake, once the need for it had passed.

He had been turning it over deeply these past days ,this notion of cruelty as tool rather than sin, as a blade a man might sharpen and set aside as easily as any other. The war, after all, had been won through it as much as through steel. The singers might boast and roar of the two-horned princes and the glory of the Ford, but the truth of that battle was thinner than the songs allowed: only the Oizenians had stood there in the end, the rest of the League having lost its stomach for the fight somewhere in the long bleeding middle of it.

Had the whole League come pitched and united to that field, even his father , for all his cunning, for all the legions he had drilled to march as one man , could have done little against them but die well.

It had been through wounds dealt to the soul rather than the body that his father had turned what should have been the League’s , or better yet Habadia’s greatest triumph into its own private hell.

Desertion had run through the siege of the Bastion like moss in an house built in a forest, and had the Prince of Habadia caught even the faintest whiff that the war might still be won, he would have spat on his father’s offer of truce and fought on till the last man bled out in the mud.

It had not been one stroke, nor one clever trick, but a hundred small cruelties strung together like beads on a wire and only once strung, only once seen whole, did the shape of his father’s genius reveal itself.

But genius, Basil had come to understand, was not the same as omniscience. There were things his father still erred about, and this tournament, this gaudy, gold-devouring spectacle he so despised, was chief among them.

"You are wrong, father," he muttered under his breath, watching the laborers below move like a hundred small hands at some vast and patient loom, one plank here, one nail there, raising up something his father had not yet troubled himself to see.

Beyond the gold spent on it, beyond the opulence that looked, on its surface, so much like waste , there was something else stitched into the timber and the trodden grass.

Unity. It was unity that Basil saw.

"What was that?" a voice called from behind him.

Basil turned sharply, behind himself where he had hardly heard a sound, to find Edric closing the distance toward him, a smile already spread wide across that square, scarred face, not the warm, sunny grin the man wore for feasts and jests, but the other one, that he usually reserved just for him.

The teasing smile.

He knew it then ,he had heard him. Of course he had heard him, the man may have been drunk half the time, but he still moved like a soldier, all quiet feet and quicker ears.

"Edric," Basil greeted, and hoped his voice came out steadier than he felt.

"My prince." Edric inclined his head, that smile never once dimming, sharp and easy as a knife left lying in the sun. "Did I catch you at a bad moment?"

"Not really. I was watching them work." He tipped his chin toward the construction below, where hammers rose and fell in their endless, patient rhythm.

"I see." Edric considered this for a beat, head tilted like a hound weighing a scent. "Why, though?"

He shrugged. "Seemed interesting."

Edric watched the work a moment too, in companionable silence , and then snorted, loud enough to startle a nearby crow off its perch. "It’s boring. Want to do something fun?"

Basil turned a gaze on him. A careful gaze. "Doing what?"

"Don’t know.You are too young to drink, and likewise for the brothel, not to speak that tomorrow they would need to dig me up, if you mother were to discover it.... I’m bored out of my skull, hoped you’d have something clever brewing. I’ll take anything at this point." He unstoppered his wooden canteen, popped the tap free with his thumb, and took a long pull. "It’s poorly looked upon, drinking before evening." Another swallow, unhurried. "But I need something to distract me. Tried wagering with the others. Lost enough coin to need a walk outside, clear my head before Jarza started offering me some charity."

"Well... I don’t have anything, not as of now. Want to string a bow and make some shot?"

"Nah. That’s Jarza’s trade, not mine , mine’s the sword." He fixed Basil with a look, half amusement, half challenge. "And I hardly think you’re up to it yet, little prince.Too wet behind your ears"

"Well, perhaps we could dance on tables, then!" Basil snapped back, quick as a blade clearing its sheath.

"Oh?! You saw that, did you?" Edric’s grin widened, delighted at the challenge. "Then perhaps we could discuss what you were saying just now, before I so rudely interrupted you."

"I wasn’t saying anything." He said more guarded than before.

"Really?" Edric asked, mummer’s sorrow draped over every word. "A pity. Truly." Another swallow from the canteen, slower this time, savoring it. "It was my favorite thing, you know. Badmouthing the king. Man’s got too many good qualities for his own good, friends need to throw a little dirt on him now and again, else he starts believing his own legend. Keeps a king honest, having someone remind him he still puts his boots on one foot at a time.

You were up to a good start, though you’d need some pointers, you are half as lukewarm as fucking Jarza, too much time with him I think." He thought for a moment ’’You need more passion. More fire.....perhaps a visit to a brothel would not be so bad.’’ He looked him up and down as if reviewing his age.

’’Wanna taste something sweeter than milk?’’