Morning dawned far too early the next day. Matt made a note to research a spell that could blot out the sun.
Almost every part of him ached, especially those parts that had been connected to his saddle for the previous twenty-four hours. Matt groaned as he shifted in his bed, throwing an arm over his face in an attempt to block out the light.
He failed, and decided that if he couldn’t sleep the day away, then the next best thing would be to find out what in the world had happened to Redspire in his absence.
The guards on the walls had tried to give him some details, but his brain simply had been too tired to keep up with it. A few of the servants had made odd comments as well, but he and his lifeguard had been far too tired to make any sense from it all. Understanding anything aside from how long it would take to collapse into his bed was an utter impossibility.
Still, thinking back, he remembered a lot of people mentioning a Maiden of Art. He could practically hear the capital letters in the title, which gave him an extremely unpleasant suspicion that Tanya had been up to something during his absence. Hopefully, he’d be able to track down Gorfeld and find out—
The door to his bedchamber creaked open, and Matt levered himself upright immediately. His armor lay scattered around the room, but his mace was still near to hand. He had it in his hand and was crouched next to his bed in the time it took for the door to finish opening. If the Lady Suluth had decided to finish her job today, she was going to get what was left of her next assassins poured over the wall in a bucket.
It wasn’t an assassin, however. Instead, he was treated to the sight of Tanya trying to creep into his bedchamber. She was dressed in a blue gown of some kind—it wasn’t the formal dress of the court, and it didn’t match the clothes that she had been wearing when the Western Coalition had given her to him—but it fit her well and allowed her enough freedom to move. Her attention was fixed on the bed, and her eyes widened suddenly when she registered he wasn’t in it. The moment of surprise when she turned to see him standing beside it with a weapon in his hand was slightly gratifying.
Less satisfying was the amused smile that spread across her face. She straightened up and folded her arms across her chest. “Well, look what the cat dragged in! You’re awake!”
Matt winced. Her voice wasn’t shrill, but something about it almost immediately started drilling through his skull. The beginnings of a migraine were already gathering between his eyes. “Tanya. What are you doing here?”
“I heard you limped into town last night, so I came to see you. The servants said that you had ridden really hard and might still be asleep. I didn’t wake you, did I? I was trying to be quiet.”
He grunted. “No. I was already up.” Feeling a bit sour, he tossed the mace back onto the bed. “I did think you were an assassin, though. You need to knock next time.”
“And miss this view?” She looked him up and down, and he was suddenly aware that he was basically in his underwear. He looked around in a vague, uncoordinated panic, and she laughed. “Well, at least I know what I’m missing out on in the mornings. You’ll need to show off a bit better than that for me, though.”
Matt gave her a glare. “I’m not showing off anything, Tanya. You barged in here without knocking.” He grabbed the nearest set of pants and started pulling them on. “What happened to my guards, anyway? Are they all down for the count?”
Tanya shrugged, walking a bit further into the room. She seemed a bit preoccupied by the old tapestries that were fastened to the walls. “Oh, there are a couple of them out there. Most of the rest are still sleeping or something, but they insist on keeping at least two in your study at all hours.” Then she gave him a wicked grin. “They let me through, though. I can’t imagine why.”
He struggled into the pants and stood up to find a shirt somewhere. The pitiful span of cloth that he’d worn under his armor the night before smelt so awful he didn’t even attempt it. “Tanya, you know what they think our relationship is. You can’t encourage them to think we’re lovers.”
“Oh, how romantic. The King is concerned about my honor.” She clasped her hands together and batted her eyelashes at him. Then she rolled her eyes and went back to studying the tapestries. “They can think whatever they want. It’s not like we actually are having any fun together, so what does it matter?”
Matt paused long enough in his search to give her an incredulous look. “Because rumors like that hurt the morale of the people and make them trust me less.”
Tanya rolled her eyes again. “Oh please. Wouldn’t it make you look good to have someone like me paying you attention?”
“No, Tanya, it wouldn’t.” He drew in a deep breath and tried to be patient. “The people trust me because they know I am doing things to keep them safe. There’s a prophecy floating around—” He very deliberately didn’t mention how it had gotten there. “—that if I take a Consort, it will leave the people less safe.”
She folded her arms again and sighed, still apparently not listening to him. “Why does that matter?”
“It matters because if the people think I’m selling them out for a frankly mediocre piece of ass, then they might not like me very much!” Matt had a sudden, vivid memory of the taste of soap, and a picture of his mother’s enraged face. She hadn’t gotten angry easily, but when she had…
Tanya finally turned to face him, her expression offended. “Mediocre? I’m high class, thank you very much!”
Was she still not taking this seriously? Matt pinched his nose, trying to breathe calmly. “Tanya, it’s important for a King to be respected. Kings that aren’t respected tend to get stabbed. Like a lot. Along with anyone else who was close to them.”
She was still glaring at him, but she was at least paying attention now. Her jaw worked for a moment as if she was grinding her teeth, and then she looked away. “Fine. I’ll try not to pop in unannounced anymore. Are you going to stand around without a shirt, or are you going to finish getting dressed?”
Matt grunted again and started for his wardrobe. He only made it a handful of steps before he stopped, a few remnants of the conversations from the night before coming back to him. “Tanya, are the people in Redspire calling you the Maiden of Art?”
There was a sudden and suspicious silence from Tanya’s end of the room. He turned away from the wardrobe and found her once again studying the tapestries. This time, she was using a lot more intense scrutiny than they seemed to require. “Tanya?”
She answered a bit vaguely, though she had started to blush a little. “I can’t control what people call me.”
“Tanya.”
He put enough emphasis on her name that she glanced at him for a moment. “I—well—you have all kinds of titles, so I figured it wouldn’t be bad for me to have one. Is it such a bad name to have?”
Matt felt dread about how this conversation was going to turn out. “Titles usually come from doing things impressive enough to earn them, Tanya. What have you been doing since I’ve been gone?”
“Nothing.” She turned away from the tapestry and walked over to the small circular table that held a stack of reports from Gorfeld. Tanya walked around it, tracing the edge of the surface with an idle hand. “Mostly, I’ve just been studying with Melren. Did you know he has a lot of experience teaching people those mantras? I already finished my foundation in Air. It only took me like six days, and I’ve already gotten started on Winter.”
Her attempt at diverting the conversation was all the more infuriating for how much progress she’d made. How in the world had she managed to build up a Source that quickly? Was she just more talented, or was it the fact that she could set aside entire days to practice?
Matt shoved those questions aside and fixed her with a stare. “And what else, Tanya?”
Tanya paused. Then she grimaced. “Well, while you were gone, a messenger arrived from that place that brought me here. The ones from out west?” Matt nodded and gestured for her to continue. He tried not to notice that she had positioned herself with the table between them now. “So they sent a message that said they were ‘unable to secure the information’ that we needed, and that they were willing to give us some money instead. You know, to make up for things.”
He grimaced. His attempt to blackmail the Coalition had failed, apparently; they weren’t going to help him send Tanya home. Still, the money might help in another way. “How much did they send?”
She hesitated again. “They said it was about twenty-five thousand marks?”
Matt’s jaw dropped. That amount would pay for nearly four months of development projects alone. His problems with the budget would basically disappear almost overnight; at the very least, it would give him almost an extra year to find a way to get around his financial problems. It wasn’t ideal that Tanya would have to stick around for another twenty weeks or so, but at least the Kingdom would be more stable in the meantime.
Then he realized that Tanya wasn’t looking like she had announced a good thing. In fact, she seemed to be trying to avoid the subject. Suspicion struck him. “Tanya, what aren’t you telling me?”
She shifted on her feet a little. “Well, since they were giving me so much money, I kind of… asked the Great Council to allow me to use it.”
Matt felt a slight chill. “You what?”
Tanya held up her hands defensively. “The Council agreed! They said it sounded like a good plan.”
“What sounded like a good plan?” She paused again, and Matt felt his headache returning. “Tanya?”
“You let her start building an art museum?”
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Gorfeld winced at the tone of Matt’s voice, but he still met Matt’s eyes. “You instructed me to help her with whatever she needed, sire.”
Matt stopped himself from shouting, but it took a bit more effort than he wanted to admit. “I expected you to help her learn magic and entertain herself. Maybe even teach her how to ride a Warg or something. I did not expect you to help her spend twenty-five thousand marks on a single construction project.”
His steward didn’t seem impressed by the response. “All she asked of me was to go and address the Great Council, sire. Once she was there, she asked permission to speak, and Lord Torth agreed. When she presented her…proposal, the Council agreed to it almost immediately. I did not have any chance to stop it at that point.”
The headache was only getting worse. “Why would they even agree to this? They have to know how fragile our treasury is at this point.”
“Some of them may not believe the problem is as serious as it seems, sire.” Gorfeld shrugged. “There are those who recognize the issue, but they often express confidence in your ability to manage things. Others simply believe that we can just increase taxes on the freeholders if we need additional funds.”
“As if additional taxes wouldn’t lead to starvation and rioting.” Matt squeezed his eyes shut and tried to massage his temples. “How is she even building this thing, anyway? I’ve already hired a thousand workers to work on the sewers. She didn’t drag Parufeth into this, did she?”
“I believe she tried, sire, but Parufeth and his work crews stayed true to their current contracts.” Gorfeld shrugged. “So she offered a contract to bring in more workers and attracted a new company of laborers that way. They have more masons than bricklayers, and she apparently intends to build her museum from stone, not brick. She has already sent for materials from the Small Heights and High Peaks.”
Matt gritted his teeth and tried to look on the bright side. At the very least, they wouldn’t be competing for resources or workers, from the sounds of things. It might even turn out well if she made something that the entire Kingdom could embrace.
Then a new thought occurred to him. “Where is she building this thing?”
Gorfeld winced again.
Matt looked over the construction site. His headache had gotten worse, but he tried to force a smile. “It… could be worse.”
He was standing in the street southwest of the castle, on the road that ran more or less parallel to the River Crimson. It was known as the Royal Street, since it stretched straight across the city from the castle to the southwestern gate; in a city with so many twisting paths and crooked intersections, it was almost something of a miracle. Matt had planned to build most of the new buildings in Redspire around that street, using it as the backbone for the reconstruction of the housing and other building projects once the sewage and water systems were done. The street itself had already been partially remade; rough brick now stretched along nearly five hundred meters of it, and pipes from the Cistern and the sewage system were already dug below it.
The construction site was located on the southeastern side of the street, about four hundred meters past the point where the bricks transitioned to the plain cobblestones he was trying to replace. Buildings were already being torn down in a roughly four hundred by two hundred meter area, and hundreds of workers were pulling away the debris. Carts were waiting to drag it away, pulled by aurochs. He could see some of the passersby occasionally stopping to stare up as yet another wall came down.
Parufeth took a moment to spit on the ground behind him. “If you say so, sire. If you say so.”
The Gnome had not been happy about the prospect of competition. It didn’t matter that he had already built half the foundations of the city; Parufeth was clearly miffed that he hadn’t been chosen for the Maiden of Art’s grand project. Matt could sympathize with him; it was probably harder to be known as the one building the plumbing of the city while someone else got credit for constructing the crown jewel of the capitol.
Gorfeld was standing beside them in the street, still shifting from foot to foot as they watched the work go on. The steward had clearly not been happy with anything that had been happening, but he’d also been just as obviously unable to do anything to stop it. Even the Voices had been enthusiastic about the new construction; the Impish stonemasons had been particularly happy to channel business into their own coffers. Jealousy over the Gnomish bricklayers and Red Moon brickmakers had been building for some time, apparently.
Matt continued to clench his teeth for a moment longer. He idly tapped his mace against his leg, trying to think through the problems and possibilities. “You said there was a riot, Gorfeld?”
The steward looked down at the street. “There was a… disturbance, sire. People were less than happy about needing to relocate on such short notice. Especially in the middle of winter.”
He grimaced as another wall came down. It looked like a wall from a former well-to-do merchant. “Was anyone hurt?”
“Captain Karve deployed the Crown Guard. They were quite… restrained in their response, actually, which might have helped the situation. He attempted to resolve things by offering them temporary housing with the garrison building. The soldiers were also asked to help move their belongings as well, which they are currently keeping in some of the warehouses and granaries. I don’t believe that many arrests were made.”
Parufeth spat again. “It was a disaster, is what it was. My work crews have been getting things thrown at us, and we weren’t even involved! Things are getting ugly now, sire, and they’ll get worse, mark my words.”
Matt gave the Gnome a brief look, and the foreman seemed to get a bit embarrassed. Then he turned his attention back to the unfolding catastrophe.
Pushing a bunch of people out of their homes in the middle of the winter was the absolute least responsible thing that anyone could have done, especially with the city crowded by the refugees from the villages that had been burned in the east. Prices for food were already high, thanks to the incentives he had offered for lords to free their serfs. Now the prices for rent or housing were skyrocketing as well while people tried to crowd into the remaining available spaces, something that the upper classes of the city were directly responsible for. He couldn’t have asked for a better set of ingredients for a peasant uprising.
Still, it had already started, so he had no way to stop it. It wasn’t like he could put the houses back, and he had been planning to replace the old structures with new construction. He just had wanted it to happen when the weather was warmer and the people were not necessarily so crammed together in the city. When they would have been unhappy, but somewhat less likely to burn the castle down.
Matt forced himself to breathe calmly, trying to control his temper. He needed to focus on the positives, not the negatives. “Gorfeld, you did a good job choosing the location. It would have been… worse if she had chosen another spot.”
The steward accepted the compliment without comment, and Matt scrambled for another thing to point out. “Parufeth, will their construction cause any problems for the construction on the street? Or can you continue?”
Parufeth considered it for a moment. He nodded. “We should be fine, sire. Our work on the sewers and the street should be done by spring.”
“If you have any extra time, see if you can create a temporary encampment outside the city. They won’t be able to use it during the winter, but once we start building in the spring, it should at least help us avoid another riot.” Another wall came down with a crash, and fragments of wood and stone sprayed everywhere. “Also, make sure that your materials aren’t interrupted. I know the carts might get… lost a little, but I want everyone to work as hard as they can without getting in each other’s’ way.”
The Gnome nodded again, and Matt looked at Gorfeld again. “If any of the Low Folk bring protests or complaints to you, remind them they have Voices for precisely this reason. Girtun and Wokneth should have spoken up if the proposal was against the interests of the freeholders. Perhaps they could choose new Voices, if they feel it was a big enough mistake.”
Gorfeld nodded solemnly, a feeling that Matt could sympathize with. Both Girtun and Wokneth had been loyal allies, but they had definitely messed up this time, and there wasn’t anything he could do to save them from the consequences. Not at this point. The fact that they had probably agreed to the plan out of a misguided trust in someone tied to Matt directly only made the problem worse.
Ultimately, the people were going to be angry with Matt. They’d only put some of the blame on the Council and the Voices; both institutions were new enough that even the freeholders wouldn’t be used to seeing them as having any authority. The crown was the source of all power, or had been until Matt had started to mess with things. If he wanted to solve things, he’d need to make some kind of personal gesture.
Unfortunately, his options for that kind of gesture weren’t good. He didn’t exactly have the resources to throw a feast or something; he didn’t have a colosseum either, so the ‘circus’ part of bread and circus wasn’t possible either. Matt watched yet another wall come down and tried not to see it as a sign of things to come for his Kingdom.
“I’m sorry, sire, but I’m not sure if we can help with this situation.”
Matt’s headache was in full swing now, so it was already a strain to seem pleasant. Something of the frustration and anger must have shown on his face, because the Gnomes who were sitting in front of him blinked and drew back a little. Their faces became a little pale, and he tried to smooth over his expression again. “May I ask why, Lord Darunmell?”
The Gnome swallowed before he answered. “The members of the Hill Guard are crucial to the defense of the Small Heights. If we removed them, then it would leave us incredibly vulnerable to outside threats.”
He stared at the Gnome for another long pause. Silence was a weapon, and he felt absolutely no shame using it now. “What outside threats, Lord Darunmell?”
Darunmell smiled, an expression that looked strained and patronizing at the same time. “As you know, sire, our land is on the very border of the Kingdom. The Dwarves of the Western Coalition are to our west and north, and the recent rebellion in Winterfast nearly led to our enslavement under the Frost Elves.”
Matt stared at him a moment longer, letting the words hang in the air. “Lord Darunmell, we have recently signed a peace treaty with the Western Coalition. The Dwarves might share your border, but they are unable to attack you in any way without breaking the treaty for the next five years.”
The Gnome blinked, as if he hadn’t anticipated that response. “I—I hadn’t thought of that fact.”
“You were there when the treaty was accepted by the Council, were you not?” Matt didn’t give the man the chance to answer the question. “Furthermore, I believe you were all there when the Frost Elves surrendered after their rebellion. They are no longer a threat to your home now, either.”
Darunmell glanced around at the rest of the Gnomes, as if hoping to see signs of support. “There might remain some groups of bandits, however, which remain loyal to the fallen rebels. We would need the help of the Hill Guard to defend us from such problems.”
“Margrave Grufen is handling the issue personally, Lord Darunmell. He has several banners of Westguard and War Knights to help any Gnomish settlements that are endangered by such bandits, and the Council has sent a Magistrate to root out any other support for the rebels. Summerhall is safe, and your people are being sheltered by the forces of the rest of the Kingdom. Now that same Kingdom requires your assistance elsewhere.”
The Gnome’s expression screwed up into a mixture of distaste and reluctance. “Sire, I do not wish to seem ungrateful—”
“Then don’t.” Matt leaned forward, staring into Darunmell’s eyes. “The choice you have right now is this one—you can either send four banners of Hill Guard to serve under Margrave Morteth, or you can immediately prepare eight banners of Gnomish Irregulars to serve in their stead. I assume you need to present that choice to Lord Nuramesh and the rest of the Gnomish nobility, but I will remind you that Voice Cerufeth in Summerhall will be able to weigh in as well. I doubt she will go along with any plan to send freeholders to die where the Hill Guard could serve much better—and if you make a habit of picking fights with your Voice, you deserve what will happen afterwards.”
The Gnomes were staring back at him in shock; perhaps they had expected him to be a bit more diplomatic, but Matt was just about out of patience for the day. He didn’t give them a chance to respond. “I expect to see that message sent immediately, Lord Darunmell. Either that, or I will hear why. You may go.”
Darunmell and the others exchanged looks and then stood. They made their way out of the room, and Gorfeld stepped in just as the last of them went past. The steward studied him for a moment. “Are you sure you do not need to rest, sire?”
Matt glared at him for a moment. Then he gave up the effort and slumped back in his chair. “It sounds like a great idea, but I don’t have the time. There’s too much to do, and if I take too much time to handle it, then…”
“You need to survive as well, my liege.” Gorfeld looked down at the parchment in his hand and then looked back up. “You still have to meet with the Low Folk today, and the Great Council has also requested your presence as well, but perhaps it would be better to see them tomorrow.”
“And risk insulting either one?” Matt shook his head. “No, better to handle it now. I can rest tomorrow, if that’s possible.”
Gorfeld looked as if he wanted to argue, but he sighed instead. “Very well, sire. The Low Folk are here, if you are ready for them.”
Matt braced himself and nodded. “I am. Go ahead and show them in.”