Steel and Sorrow: Rise of the Mercenary king

”I truly do not believe the Prince of Yarzat has given Kakunia any cause for alarm,” the Great Bull murmured, his voice as smooth and steady as a deep river. He fixed the envoy with a gaze of profound serenity, the kind of look a mountain might give to a passing cloud for one was destined to last the other was fleeting.

The envoy of Habadia, inclined his head, his fingers twitching toward his left eye in a nervous, rhythmic tick. ”Your Grace, if our two peoples might be contrived to work in concert, to acknowledge our similarities with the same approbation as we do our differences, I believe we would find ourselves in receipt of immense mutual benefit. You will find my liege to be extraordinarily welcoming to his allies and truly storied in the generosity of his bearing. That is the core of my mission: to see friendship bloom between our two houses.”

”And are we to believe this bloom is unburdened by thorns?” Latio asked. He tilted his head back, eyeing the scrawny man as one might examine a snake discovered at the bottom of a boot. ”Does this friendship arrive unlaced with darker intentions?”

”Do you believe it comes accompanied by such things, young lord?” Zayneth asked, his voice thin but precise.

”Well, by my count, you have invited the Prince of Yarzat into this conversation twice,” Latio noted, tapping a finger against his chair. ”Both times, the terms were... less than savory.”

”That was never my intention,” Zayneth replied, though the bags under his eyes seemed to darken.

”No, of course not,” the Great Bull rumbled, casting a brief, warning glance toward his son before turning back to the envoy. His tone shifted, becoming fatherly, almost affectionate. ”You came bearing the gift of friendship. It is only natural for a mind to wander into the political thickets when one is at ease among those he hopes to call friends. We are always well-met when such offers are extended, though we are not so blind as to forget that the friendship of one often necessitates the displeasure of another.”

”We are social creatures, Your Grace,” Zayneth countered smoothly. ”It is a noble but improbable wish to seek friendship with everyone. Indeed, to have no enemies is often the mark of a man who stands for nothing at all. Conflict is the price of conviction.”

”And you would argue that Yarzat is the source of that conflict?” Lavus asked.

Zayneth cleared his throat, his posture stiffening. ”They have raised a staggering ruckus in one mere decade. I would hardly call a state built on the bones of its neighbors a ’peaceful’ entity.” He took a breath, his eyes darting between father and son. ”I believe the intent of my presence here has been slightly misconstrued. My liege does not seek a theater of war, nor does he intend to provoke one. The words you interpreted as barbs against a certain man were merely observations of the weather. But I ask you, Your Grace: does it hurt a man to prepare his roof when he sees a storm gathering on the horizon?”

He leaned forward, his voice gaining a sudden, unwanted edge. ”The only way to define the Prince of Yarzat is as a warmonger. In ten years, he has annexed a princedom to which he had no claim and devoured a quarter of another. His philosophy is transparent: might makes right. Does that sound like the creed of a man who holds peace in his heart?He is a an ambitious and violent mean, which unfortunately for us is doted with a brain to make up with it.”

He paused, hanging on the silence, waiting for the Kakunians to concede the point.

”We wouldn’t presume to judge a man’s heart,” Lavus replied, his voice a low, heavy thrum. ”We only know that he has publicly sworn, before the collective gaze of the South, his absolute intention to uphold the peace. So long as that oath remains unbroken, we find no fault with the man.”

Latio watched Zayneth closely. At his father’s mention of the oath, the envoy’s eyebrow twitched upward, a tiny, sharp movement that vanished as quickly as it appeared. It wasn’t a look of disagreement; it was the look of a man who knew a secret that rendered that word , ’oath’, irrelevant.

”Indeed, that is a comfort, Your Grace. But what then if he decides his oath has reached its expiration?” Zayneth’s voice was as thin as a razor’s edge. ”What then if he chooses his own ambition over what he signed?”

”What to do, indeed...” Lavus gave the man a leveled, unblinking look, the jovial smile never quite leaving his face, though it had begun to look like it was carved from stone. ”What would you have us do, Master Zayneth?That’d be the case.”

”Well, naturally, find solace in friends. You in us, and us in you. Strength is the only thing a man like Alpheo may respect.”

”It appears to me that such solace would be remarkably one-sided,” Latio cut in ”We have no hostility with the Prince of Yarzat, many of the merchants that reach us pass through their land. Why should we court the enmity of a tiger when we are currently sitting quite comfortably outside their cage?”

”For now, it would appear so,” Zayneth conceded, his hands folding neatly into his sleeves. ”But who can speak for the world ten years hence? Barely six years ago, the Kaispan Mountains separated your borders from Herculia. Now, in Herculia’s place stands Yarzat. How long before it is the Zuarn River that separates you from him instead of those peaks? How long before the distance between your throat and his blade is measured in a day’s march intead of a month’s?”

”You mean to suggest that Yarzat intends to swallow Oizen whole?” Latio asked, a chill creeping up his spine at the thought of princedoms being devoured like common morsels.

”I wouldn’t put it so far from the mind. Do we not have precedence?” Zayneth leaned in, his tired eyes suddenly burning with an intense, sickly light. ”Is Herculia not now a secondary title, usurped and worn by the lady of the Fox of Yarzat? I would ask Your Grace and the young lord to consider the geography of power: if the occasion came for Yarzat to absorb Oizen, and you found the combined might of three princedoms breathing down upon your borders... would you truly sit idle? Would you wait for the river to run red before you intervened?”

Latio suddenly felt the suffocating weight of the room’s attention. Both the envoy and his father were watching him, waiting for the heir of Kakunia to show his hand. If he were honest, he knew the answer, he would fight. No one could allow a neighbor to become a giant. But to admit it was to step into the HighSpire’s trap. He could feel it.And once he was in, there would be no way out.

”If that were the case,” Latio said, choosing his words with the care of a man walking a tightrope, ”then who can say what the world will look like in ten years? We merely reply to the weather as it comes.”

Zayneth nodded, seemingly satisfied with the crack he had found in the boy’s armor. ”Of course, of course. I do not come here to demand a declaration of war, nor to pursue any path of aggression. My liege merely wishes to ensure that if such a catastrophe were to occur, the other princedoms would promptly act as one, just as we did when we brokered the Peace of the Princes. We believe in collective security. After all,” he added, his smile widening into something truly predatory, ”the beauty of a true friendship is that it simplifies the world. It ensures that the possible enemy of one is, by necessity, the enemy of the other. We only wish to know that in the coming storm, our clothes are of the same silk.”

”It would appear we would only gain an enemy by pursuing this friendship,” Latio countered, his voice hard. ”We currently have no foe to speak of; why should we inherit yours?”

Zayneth paused, a dry, rattling cough escaping his throat as he straightened his collar. ”My lord,” he began, his voice dropping into a register of chilling intimacy. ”Simply because everyone can see the snake coiled in the middle of our path does not mean there isn’t one hiding in the long grass of yours. If you provide the heel to crush the snake we can all see, then I shall provide the same for the ones that haunt your borders, whether they are visible now or are yet to crawl out from the shadows.”

He let the words hang in the air, a dark promise of mutual protection that sounded dangerously like a pact of mutual ruin.

”In the end,” Zayneth continued, ”I believe the best course is the one where we are both safe upon our respective roads, knowing we do not walk them alone.”

He fell silent then, sinking back into the plush upholstery of his chair. A smile hanging on his lips somehow making him appear more disgusting than if he had none.

Perhaps we do need friends....