Chapter 1441: Future bid(2)

Basil scoffed. "Weren’t you just worried my mother would bury you alive if she caught you at this?"

"That was before I discovered exactly what I was dealing with." Edric let his gaze drift back over the construction, head tilting like a man appraising a horse he wasn’t sure he wanted to buy. "You’re a young man, and lads your age don’t usually have... this as a hobby." He waved a hand vaguely at the trenches, the timber, the whole mess of it. "Hells, your own father doesn’t.. And he is the fucking weirdest man I know."

"What’s wrong with that?"

Edric regarded him a long moment, the way a man might study a stray dog to see if it bit.

"Nothing. Nothing at all... if you’re a bit odd in the head."

"I am not odd!"

"I don’t know. Seems odd to me." He scratched at the scar on his chin, thoughtful. "You need a proper distraction, is what you need. Sure you don’t want me to... arrange something? You’re of an age for it, and a prince ought to know his way around the fairer sex, else what’ll you do on your wedding night, gape at her like a landed trout and try to fit the thing in her rear?Some do like it, but you won’t end up with an heir like that."

Basil had learned, through hard and repeated experience, that the only way to win an argument with Edric was to refuse to have it. Besides, he doubted either his mother or his father would not hear of such an outing, though his father, ever practical, had lectured him more than once on the sorry state of hygiene to be found in most brothels, a warning that had done considerably more to curb his curiosity than any of Jarza’s solemn sermons on the sin of lust ever had.

"You really don’t have anything better to do, do you?"

"Nah." Edric said it plainly, without a shred of shame, folding himself down onto the grass "So. Why were you badmouthing your father?"

"I wasn’t. I said he was mistaken," Basil corrected smoothly, leaning his hip against the cool stone. "There’s a distinction."

"Oh, a distinction! Did you hear that, Weaver?" Edric threw his hands skyward as though the goddess herself might lean down from the clouds to admire the boy’s vocabulary. "The prince has distinction." He let the word roll around his mouth like a poor vintage before spitting the aftertaste out. "That kind of distinction has a way of ripening into treason, given enough sun. Most sons wait until their own arse is warming the throne before they start picking at the cracks in the crown.

Remember Basil you want to weave a plot for the throne?Always gain the military’s backing."

Basil didn’t dignify that with an answer. There was no profit in it , Edric was only teasing, casting his hook out lazily to see what might bite at the worm.

But silence, it turned out, was a blade with two edges, and Basil found that Edric could not hold his tongue for more than a few breaths before it got the better of him.

"So... what was that about? What’s he wrong about?"

"The tournament."

"Ah." Edric nodded slowly, as if a great mystery had just resolved itself. "He did raise quite the ruckus about that one, didn’t he?On what account is he wrong?"

"He thinks the tournament a waste of money. I beg to differ."

"On what regard?" Edric asked, lazily, more invested in the shape of the clouds than the conversation at hand.

"Well , the tournament is still a fortnight off, and already the city’s swarmed with visitors."

"Mm. Well, it’s not every day such a spectacle gets organized. Tournaments tend to go scarce when war talk’s in the air, as you well know, and this is about as grand as they come. I’d wager our dear queen poured no small effort into spreading word of the greatest tournament the South has ever seen." He sighed, long and theatrical, and squinted toward the rising timber stands. "Though I’ll grant , looking at those wooden bones going up, it does have a certain ring to it. How many can it seat? Fifteen thousand?"

"Twenty. I asked about it."

Edric coughed into his fist. Basil couldn’t quite make it out, but buried somewhere in that cough, he was fairly certain he heard the word weird.

He wisely chose to ignore the legate entirely and pressed on. "And it’s not only knights. Merchants have set up stalls all the way past the wall, there’s a whole sea of tents out there now."

"Aye, don’t I know it." Edric’s mouth twisted, half grimace, half grin. "Had to pull two of my cohort off other duties just to keep idle knights from wandering too near the wall and starting trouble, and two more besides to patrol the camps proper. Bored men with swords have a way of finding new and creative uses for their free time , usually the sort that ends with someone’s throat opened and a red smile.

Had to hang two knights and their squires just last week, caught shaking down villagers passing through for toll they’d no right to collect." He reached for his wooden canteen, then thought better of it, setting it back down with visible regret. "Pity we couldn’t nail them to a tree instead, let the crows have a proper feast, teach the rest a lesson worth remembering. Had to settle for the gallows and rope. Quicker. Less memorable."

"I suppose an increase in traffic brings an increase in unrest. It seems inevitable enough." Basil turned his gaze back toward the sprawl of tents beyond the walls, pale canvas scattered like a second, temporary city grown up overnight around the bones of the real one. "But it’s inevitable too that it brings opportunity. Villages have emptied half their stores into the capital, selling at prices they’d never see at home. Tavern keepers can’t stock ale or wine or grain fast enough, and every butcher in the city’s slaughtering double what he did last month. The whole city will be boasting of the coin this brought in for months yet to come. We depend on it, you know."

"On what?" Edric asked, brow furrowing in honest confusion. "The tournament?"

"No, foreign coin." Basil shook his head. "We’ve no silver mines of our own, nor any ally’s either that isn’t Romelia, and they’re far too unruly in their minting to trust. My father’s tried his best to force merchants to trade only in coin struck to a fixed standard, but it’s a losing battle. We need the foreign silver flowing in, and yet every foreign standard that crosses our border risks bleeding our own currency thin behind it."

Edric said nothing for a long moment, only looked at him , that same weighing, appraising look , before deciding, in the end, that the matter called for another pull from his canteen.

"My father’s trying to find a solution to it, you know," Basil offered, offhand, as if it cost him nothing to say.

"Is he now? What’s he planning to do, turn stone to silver with a prayer and a hopeful heart?"

The prince shrugged, small and noncommittal. "He’s planning something. That’s all I know."

"I see." Edric scratched at his scalp, considering. "Closest silver veins I know of are in Habadia, and we won’t be laying hands on those anytime soon, not without another dozens war to pay for. Maybe he’ll strike a bargain with the Romelians instead."

"Maybe. Only my father knows." A beat. "Though he doesn’t know everything."

Edric’s ears all but pricked up at that, a hound catching scent of something worth chasing. "I can smell badmouthing when it’s in the air. Lay it on me, then."

"My father is rather blind on certain matters," the prince began, choosing his words the way a man might choose his footing on ice. "He’s completely overlooked the effect this whole affair has had on our lords."

"Such as?"

"I fear my father believes fear is the only leash strong enough to hold the nobility." He saw Edric’s mouth open, ready to cut in, and pressed on before the legate could land a word. "Of course, I don’t doubt it’s the legions alone keeping them from playing their little games with him the way they’d play them with any other liege.

And fear serves well enough to keep men quiet. But quiet is not the same as peace. There are still those in Herculia who call my father usurper under their breath. He knows it, and he lets it pass, so long as he keeps winning and keeps the legions at his back , he thinks given enough time, they’ll simply come to accept the shape of things as they are. But a nation cannot live on fear alone forever. Unity has to be set on the table too, sooner or later, or the whole thing curdles."

"And what, precisely, are you trying to tell me, that with one little joust, Herculia and Oizen will suddenly start weeping with joy and kissing your father’s boots?"

"I never said that." Basil’s eyes swept the busy sprawl below them, as if already seeing the lords and knights and their idling sons threading between the timber stands like ants who’d found a spilled honeypot. "But it is something. I’ve been walking the court these past weeks, and I’ve noticed it , lords, knights, their sons and cousins, all of them here, all of them excited. Ranging from Oizen to Herculia.

My father can’t see from up there, as he gazed at the corners of the borders, but I am small so I can see these things. And I saw many things in our guests.

They are excited simply to be seen, to preen and joust and drink and be remembered fondly for it after. Plant enough small seeds in the same patch of ground, and eventually a whole forest sprouts up where you least expect it.

My father won’t get what he’s after through decrees alone, sealed and stamped from some pontifex’s golden chair, nor through victories alone either , he needs this. He needs occasions where the crown can be seen as something more than the point of a spear, as something that can provide opportunities and merriment. Right now, everyone can see plainly that it’s my father alone bearing the whole weight of the state on his shoulders. We’re cinders, Edric. Cinders waiting for the wrong wind to catch.And sooner than later, a spark will find its way, it’s not pessimism it’s realism."

Edric went quiet at that, turning the canteen over once in his hands, studying it the way a man studies a puzzle he hadn’t expected a child to hand him. Then, without a word of warning, he held it out.

Basil blinked at it, caught off guard, certain for a moment he’d misunderstood the gesture.

Edric only shook the canteen once, the contents sloshing invitingly inside, an eyebrow raised in a silent: Well? Go on, then.

Basil glanced quickly left, then right, some old instinct in him checking for his mother’s shadow, or Jarza’s disapproving scowl, or any witness at all who might carry tales back to the wrong ears. Finding none, he took the canteen and, before he could think better of it, took a swallow.

It was sweet at first , honeyed, almost pleasant, deceiving him utterly, before the sourness rose up behind it like a second wave chasing the first, and he broke into a fit of coughing that left his eyes stinging.

Edric plucked the canteen back out of his hands with a sort of weary efficiency, as though he’d expected exactly this outcome and merely wanted to minimize the spillage.

"What was that for?" Basil managed, still coughing, his voice half-strangled.

Edric only shook his head slowly and sighed,

’’You’re a fucking little creep, you know that?God you are your father writ small.’’