Steel and Sorrow: Rise of the Mercenary king

His arse fell heavily into the soft, yielding embrace of the sofa’s goose-feather cushions. His eyelids threatened to close entirely, heavy as iron gate-hatches, so Mesha raised his knuckles and kneaded his eyes hard and well until stars danced in the darkness. He had been working like a madman these past few days. Keval was fond of telling him he was doing a magnificent job, but Mesha felt the hollow rot of a boy playing at being a giant.

He did not feel like an emperor at all.Or at least not a good one, it always felt as if he didn’t do enough and for that reason alone, little were the reward he was yielding.

He lazily waved a hand to a passing servant.

”Your Imperial Majesty?” she asked in a soft, silk-wrapped tone, her eyes dropping politely to the floor, perhaps mistaking his gesture.

”Ginger,” Mesha mumbled, his throat dry. ”Go tell Lorell to brew me that infusion. The one with the crushed ginger roots and chunks of pond-ice. A double portion. And do not go light on the ice” He needed to freeze the exhaustion out of his blood.

The servant nodded, offering a crisp courtly curtsy before departing for the imperial physician’s chambers. If she was disappointed that the young sovereign merely wanted a cold drink rather than a tumble in the silk sheets, she did not let it show.

A servant could get far in life with the emperor’s favor after all.

The Emperor found his eyes wandering nonetheless, tracking her retreat across the marble floor. His gaze lingered entirely too long on the rhythmic, inviting wiggle of her tams as she walked away.

I could have her if I desired it, the dark whisper of the throne reminded him. A single word, and she would be pinned beneath me.

Mesha shook his head fiercely, banishing the thought. He was a married man now; he ought not dishonor Pelonea, nor her brother Vilinus. He already owed that family a father. He owed many families their brothers and fathers. The empire may have emerged technically victorious from that bloody civil campaign, but the victory had come with its own putrid rot.

The prince of Yarzat would never have such cheap, wandering thoughts, Mesha chastised himself, a sharp pang of shame twisting his stomach. Shame on me.

”Do you suffer from some hidden malady, nephew?”

The Emperor blinked, turning his head toward the threshold. His uncle Keval was already stepping into the solar, his crimson robes rustling against the stone. The new Spymaster took a seat on the opposite sofa, throwing his nephew a complicated, heavily layered gaze.

He was much better at numbers than he was with the spymaster business, but he was the only one he could trust with the position.

”Just tired to the bone, uncle. Do you require something of me?”

”No,” Keval said, adjusting his ring. ”But there is a fresh line of petitioners stretching down the outer gallery. They have waited since the mid-morning bells.”

”Then they can probably wait for a few more rings,” Mesha groaned, sinking deeper into the feathers. ”I trust the Empress can regard any of their petty provincial squabbles just as well as I. What use is an empress if she cannot shoulder some of my administrative weight? She seems entirely smart enough for it.”

”Aye, no man alive could say she lacks wits,” Keval countered, his voice dropping into that low, dangerous register he used for state security. ”But you are the Emperor, Mesha, while she is merely the consort. Do you truly fail to recall what transpired the last time a woman held the reins of power in this capital?”

”I do not need a lecture to remind me of my mother’s failings, uncle,” Mesha snapped, throwing him a weary, defensive glare before instantly relenting. How could he show this man anything resembling true anger? He was far too fond of him; Keval was one of the few anchor he had left. ”And besides, Pelonea is not Valeria. She has a genuinely kind heart and is not half as mad as my mother was.” A tiny, ironic smile tugged at the corner of his lips. ”Moreover, she possesses the single most perfect skill a sovereign ought to have.”

Keval raised a sharp, reddish eyebrow. ”And what magnificent skill might that be, nephew?”

”Iron-cheeks. She can sit on that stone throne for six hours without a single complaint.”

Just like in bed...

”Very hilarious,” Keval murmured, though his lips remained a straight, unamused line.

Mesha let out a heavy sigh, running a hand through his chest-nut brown hair. ”Fine. I shall be suitably wary of my wife then, uncle. I will make certain she harbors no dangerous, midnight ambitions. Perhaps I should even sleep with a dagger tucked neatly beneath my pillow, gods know when she might try something wicked in the dark.”

His uncle opened his mouth to offer another grave warning, but Mesha raised a hand to cut him off. ”Enough of that. I will pay closer attention to Pelonea, I promise you, but there is a strict limit to what my mind can endure. We are already dealing with a literal sea of troubles across the provinces; I do not need to breed ghosts and paranoia in the few hours I am permitted to sleep.”

”You have been doing good work, Mesha. Always remember that,” Keval said softly, his voice taking on a rare, paternal warmth.

Apparently, that was precisely the wrong thing to say.

Mesha’s eyes snapped open, a bitter laugh barking from his chest. ”Good work? What grand achievements do I actually have to show the court, uncle? Name one.”

”Well, for one, the bandit problem has been successfully—”

”Your grand congratulations ought to be delivered straight to my mother’s former whore.Or still the current one perhaps.” Mesha spat, the bitterness poisoning his tongue. ”He was the one who marched his men into the muck and put the Mad Dog down like the beast he was. The crown merely watched.”

”I meant your governance as a whole,” Keval insisted, his tone unyielding. ”The imperial lands below the Fingers were absolutely riddled with lawlessness after the war, do you not recall? At least the plague has been brought down to acceptable levels, the quarantine lines held, and the autumn food production has been restored to the granaries. We even managed to carve a nice, lucrative cut of territory away from the turncoat lords under the scrutiny of the crown....”

”I would have vastly preferred their heads on spikes, not their pastures,” Mesha muttered darkly, staring up at the gilded ceiling rafters. ”We have been entirely too soft with the turncloaks. And it isn’t as if we spared them out of the kindness of our hearts either; we paid quite a price to secure those largess of land.”

”The security of their land is now our security,” Keval reminded him, his eyes gleaming with the long-term vision of an old statesman. ”One day, when the peace is fully restored, the Fingers will once again become the main trading artery of the entire empire. When that day comes, we will need the southern roads to be clear of blood and steel, not filled to the brim with bandits and desperate outlaws.’’

Mesha didn’t know the exact administrative metrics of that particular arterial route, but he knew the macroeconomics well enough to taste the copper in his throat. It seemed the Principality of Yarzat had systematically swallowed their entire merchant fleet whole. More than sixty-five percent of all trade flowing into or out of Romelia’s southern ports now traveled beneath to or from Yarzat. Even with the entire empire finally reunited under his crown, the economic gravity of the South would still belong to that single, ambitious principality.

”And besides,” Keval continued, his voice adopting the smooth, unctuous tone he used when delivering rare tidings of arithmetic comfort, ”the imperial coffers are finally resting at a satisfactory level, nephew. We have even begun to systematically relieve some of our oldest, most stubborn outstanding debts with the iron-lenders.”

”We ought to drop to our knees and thank the Prince of Yarzat for that,” Mesha muttered, rubbing his temples. The empire had a terrifying amount of things to thank Alpheo for these days. ”They paid twice the standard market price for every single bushel of grain we could shove into a merchant wagon. This little southern war of theirs has been an absolute godsend for our treasury, even if it bought them a prince’s worth of territory.”

Well half a prince more likely.

Romelia hadn’t exactly possessed a grand surplus of grain to export after the winter famines,blame to the war and its stomach of course, but where there was imperial necessity, there was administrative creativity.

A legion of Romelian merchants had been more than willing to take the easy southern coin, and a healthy sequence of heavy bribes slipping into the right ministerial pockets had ensured the grain contracts were signed with all due haste.

”They secured half the fertile plains of Oizen as their bloody prize, while we merely pocketed a few sacks of silverii,” Keval countered, his youthful features hardening. ”I cannot help but feel the plates of the scales are fundamentally mismatched”

”Well, to be perfectly fair to the Fox, his legions did every single scrap of the bleeding and dying,” he remarked dryly.

There had been dozens of high-born strategic geniuses in the capital who had confidently predicted this campaign would be the absolute end of the upstart Prince of Yarzat. Mesha himself had quietly shared that exact expectation; he had even drawn up a preliminary, somewhat pitying diplomatic offer of mediation to send south before Alpheo’s lines could be entirely overrun.

After all, the young Emperor owed a great deal of his current financial stability to the trade monopolies forged with Yarzat. He harbored absolutely no desire to see the unique secrets of Yarzat manufacturing, the techniques that filled his own coffers, spread among the rival southern lords if the principality fell. If he did the price would plummet and so would Romelian local monopoly be destroyed.

And besides he owed the Prince of yarzat quite a lot.

Yet, all those exquisite imperial worries had come to absolute naught.

The proud princes of the South had marched down in their gilded armor, entirely eager to skin the Fox of Yarzat and divide his pelt among their dynasties. In the end, all those great houses had to show for their grand ambition were the deep, bloody claw marks they had been left with in the mud of the Bastion and then the Ford.

The comfortable silence of the imperial solar was suddenly broken by a sharp, rhythmic rapping against the thick oak door. The heavy timber creaked open just enough for the polished steel helm of an imperial guardsman to peer inside.

”Your Imperial Majesty,” the guard stammered, his eyes darting nervously between the young Emperor and the Spymaster. ”I... I beg your forgiveness for the intrusion, but another petitioning party has just bypassed the outer courtyard. They are asking for an audience.”

Mesha let out a short, thoroughly tickled bark of laughter, though there was no humor in his eyes. He leaned his head back against the goose-feather cushions, staring at the rafters. ”Tell them they ought to practice the holy virtue of patience and wait for tomorrow’s bells.”

The guardsman swallowed audibly, his helmet shifting as he muttered a frantic, deeply submissive apology.

”I would gladly send them packing, your Imperial Majesty,” the soldier whispered, his voice dropping into a tense, hurried rush. ”Except... the heralds inspected from their livery. The petitioning party... they are envoys from Yarzat.We presumed you’d wish to know...”

And indeed, they presumed right.