AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Hmmm?” he said. The rest of the crowd was nowhere to be seen.
“I said, what can I get you?”
His forlorn mug was wrapped in a grip so tight the clay had carved grooves into his hand. “Can you get the old me back?”
“’Fraid that ain’t on the menu, friend.”
He wrestled with his tunic and pulled out his coin purse. Alongside it fell a folded parchment page, which fluttered onto the bar.
It had come to the embassy yesterday morning, addressed to him. It was closed with a fat wax seal. The deep valleys of glistening teal formed a “F”.
On his third attempt, he scrunched the letter back into the crevasses of his clothing.
She can wait, he thought, dropping the purse with a golden clatter. “Keep the drinks coming until either the purse runs dry, or the cellar does.”
61
TEIGRA
The petals did indeed fall like rain, fluttering across her shoulders in warm-toned droplets.
The Floret Tholos was the most beautiful building she’d ever seen, with rose thickets climbing all up the walls and the slatted ceiling, forming a garden of blooms overhead, just as the finest frescos might be painted back home.
To the sound of lively music and the kiss of warm breezes, five-hundred couples drank and danced the night away. It was a joyful, disorganized display, kicking up the ankle-thick carpet, with not a single structured dance to be seen.
And all Teigra could think about was the children in the mid and lower polities of Greater Mestibes, without the benefit of the thick walls of the city proper.
The monastery at Zateniza.
The marble quarries at Katharo.
The parchment-making town of Apaderma.
The forested village of Plasios, famed for its musical instruments.
The clay works at Camena!
They would all be burned alive by the coming invasion, as swords cut and spears thrust and blood poured down the streets.
In some ways, they might be lucky to have it end so quickly. Unlike the citizens of Mestibes proper, who would face the drawn-out death of a siege.
She’d read about sieges. It seemed a horrible way to die. Starvation and thirst. Filth and infection. Families doing everything they could to survive, betraying every moral, one after the other, until even the best turned bad, murdering best friends over the last crusts of rotten bread.
And it could all be prevented...
She’d been fighting that thought for days now.
The senate believed it was the will of Mesti to not take up arms. They believed the goddess abhorred violence in any form. That she respected reason and peace and treaties instead.
And after all, those same senators were so much smarter than her. And they were so much wiser than her. And they were so much older and more respected and better than her!
And yet, didn’t they know? The belief that Mesti demanded passivism... that had only existed for a few decades! Only since the signing of the Compact of the Grove at the end of the Third Dynosian War!
The Lapiso Library was full of stories of the brave champions throughout Mestibes’s long history who’d invented brilliant military strategies to save their homeland. Her grandfather had been one of them—a proud ruler who’d given worship to Mesti not through inaction, not through standing around and hoping for divine intervention, but by finding the smart way to win. By using the tactics so clever and inventive that no other polity would even think of them.
But to just stay back and do nothing? To know that war was coming and not make military preparations? To not buy arms? To not make alliances? To not train the sculptors to fight? To not have the poets write inspirational battle verses? To not have the glaziers turn their strange and volatile powders into weapons that could scald and injure, poison and obscure?
It just didn’t make sense!
