My flying messenger beasts surprised me with their movement speed and the distance they could cover, and soon I had received back a response to my message to Golchev.
“I can hardly believe that what you say has come to pass,” the letter read. “But the details you included were only known to those of us who fought for our freedom. Pilus, if this really is from you, thank you for freeing my people. We will arrange to retrieve them in the pass from your Kingdom.”
The letter included limited additional information about the north, only enough to give me a general understanding of the state of things. I supposed that sharing more details was still risky for him, but I hoped we could eventually move on to a larger discussion about peace between us.
Between the letter and some scrying, I learned that despite not doing any steel manufacturing, the formerly abandoned small village of Freigel, which was situated closest to where the mountain pass opened into the north, had grown dramatically in the years since I had left. It had been the staging area for the Velgein freedom fighters’ last attempt to stop the Horuthian invasion, and once the pass was won, the Velgein fighters had needed to hold it, which required personnel.
Personnel required places to live, food to eat, and the structures of civilization in place in order to succeed in the long-term, and so Freigel experienced a rapid period of growth, growing into a full town and was acting like a de facto capital for the formerly disparate villages that made up the territory of the Velgein people before their suppression by the south. A simple form of elected government had grown out of this chaos, and Golchev, as leader of the freedom fighters, currently continued to lead his people through this period of growth and pursuit of stability while holding their defensive control of their territory.
Some villagers from further out had even moved towards Friegel, seeking safety or comforts that were lacking on the fringes, as most of the small villages had been set back badly by Horuthian forces.
I knew that the north could not easily sustain a large concentrated population center given the food supplies they had. They had commandeered much from the Horuthian army, and that had probably helped them get established, but they would certainly be hurting to supply the people with calories in due time. Hunting still made up the bulk of what Velgeins ate, and too many people in one location scared game away. Their hunters would need to range farther to bring back less, and they had limited land which was fertile enough to grow their root vegetables that made up the bulk of their carbohydrate intake.
Naturally, I wanted to help, and as leader of this Kingdom, it was hard to ignore the fact that if they needed food they would be more receptive to trade for steel. Grain for metal should be a lasting system of trade which would create peace between the two sides of the mountain range, each providing what the other was incapable of producing and required for growth and prosperity.
There were other things I hoped to be able to trade for. I wanted to get a large herd of quadhorns brought to the capital and set up a new farm that dealt in dairy, and breeding that herd out and bringing them from Freehold in the east would be a slow and arduous process. If the Velgeins could trap and capture quadhorns to supply us, that would be a huge boon to getting started. It was something I would need to bring up before they were hunted back so far as to be rendered endangered in the local area, which was actually a risk if Freigel faced starvation.
Being the beginning of winter, it was actually a good time to bring that up. The quadhorns would have migrated and be with young. I began penning a response to Golchev, discussing these opportunities for both of our peoples.
The real octophant in the room was the fact that we had Velgein people, with and without children, who wanted to stay in the Kingdom. I felt positive about a future where children born here could claim citizenship, and hoped that in a generation or two we could have open borders, but in the short term I wanted the Velgein immigrants to have representation. I mentioned this development in my letter as well, suggesting a form of official representative from his budding government who could stay in the capital and be a go-between for us; an ambassador, effectively, though we would need to come up with a title for them in our native tongues.
I took my time with the important letter, making sure I was careful with my words while coming across as someone Golchev could continue to trust. These early exchanges between us were important.
Procrastinating reading the second letter I had received from Checkpoint was only part of why I focused so intently on this task.
When my letter to Golchev was done, I made a copy as a backup and I sent off another messenger beast with the original letter. It was always possible the bird would get intercepted by a predator and I would need to send a second, and in the worst case I would send the letter with the Velgeins returning north.
With that job completed, I finally sat down with the other letter.
* * *
I let out a sigh of relief, and then immediately felt guilty for it. The letter was short, but to the point, and I reread it in order to reexamine my feelings.
> Pilus,
>
> Your tale is nearly unbelievable, and if it were anyone else, I would call them a liar. But you, somehow, I can see pulling it off. My family and I always knew you were special. If only we had any idea how much so, I may never have let you out of my sight.
>
> Did you know this story is from Royal Road? Read the official version for free and support the author.
>
> Unfortunately, I will not be accepting your invitation to visit you in the capital. It pains me to think that I will likely never see you again, but I suspect that if I did, especially now, I would be powerless against you, unable to leave, trapped by my feelings and the circumstances.
>
> While I am sure you will be the greatest king this Kingdom could ask for, you already know my family’s feelings when it comes to living under the rule and restriction of the walled cities. Being with you may make me happy, but living in the capital would be my undoing.
>
> I will always keep our night together in my heart, but our futures lie on different paths. Your future queen must put the benefit of the Kingdom over her own desires, and I cannot be that person for you. I know that you will find her and lead the Kingdom onto greater things.
>
> With hope and love,
>
> Lamora
I did like Lamora a great deal and did truly care for her, so I would never have just ignored her and tried to forget about what we had shared. Even now, I knew that had I returned to a simpler life as just the Tamers Guild leader, she would likely have been a large part of my future.
So much had changed in the capital, so quickly, and that future had been closed to me. Included in that changing of my destiny was the end of any possible path forward with Lamora, and it seemed that we both knew it. Better to have proper closure, I thought.
Yet, while I mourned the rapidly receding options and opportunities of the life I had led before coming to the capital, a large part of me was instead looking towards something else. I already saw different things when I closed my eyes at night, my new path leading me to new outcomes and a different future.
* * *
Seranedra’s grandfather and some other priests had given us some food for thought, and I eventually found the time to sit down with her and start working up our ideas for the message we would ultimately send out through the Church to ensure the safety of all children born in the Kingdom in the future.
“Oh, here’s something that’s been bothering me for a while,” I said suddenly, grabbing a slate. I jotted down five characters in chalk and connected them with diacritics. “How would you read this?”
“Um… guhandaho,” Seranedra read.
“Right. This is a style of polearm from the south, but it’s pronounced guandao. And this?” I asked after scribbling down another set of characters and diacritics.
“Hatlessoha. Oh, that’s Atlessoa,” she said, recognizing my spymaster’s name and correcting her pronunciation after reading the Horuthian version of it in writing.
“Exactly. You could write this with a leading diacritic, without the H, but it’s not the custom to do so with proper names. The issue is that in all of these cases, the H would be silent, because in native Al’Tiolese you have these sounds which sometimes lead and sometimes pair.”
What the Horithian written language needed, to adapt to these names and loanwords, was a better “silent” consonant. The H character was being leaned on heavily, and it brought to question other places where it was used. Were names like Horuth and Horg once, originally, Oruth and Org, but changed over time? I had concerns about losing any more Al’Tiolese culture, and properly communicating with Velgeins in the north for trade, if we could not account for these differences.
“If we’re going to be recording Al’Tiolese names for identification papers—and, hmm, possibly Velgein too, now that I think about it—this might not cut it. We can manage with half measures like these,” I said, tapping the slate. “But it would be better if we could come up with a set of rules to expand on this.”
I wrote out Al’Tiol on the slate as well. In Horuthian, it was written Haltihol or Hal Tihol, which is what I read on the documents when I discovered the original name of the lands in the south. I had only reverse engineered it, so to speak, from context clues and what I knew about the southern language. Even then, I could be wrong without knowing.
Seranedara read it back to me, and I pronounced it how I understood it to be pronounced. She corrected her pronunciation as best as she could, then started repeating parts of the word slowly back to herself.
“So-wa. Ti-yol. Gu-wa. Da-oh. Most of these create different sounds when you exclude the H,” she said, pronouncing the Horuthian H character as ‘heh.’
“Yeah. ‘Soa’ and ‘Gua’ cause the mouth to use a similar bridge,” I said, thinking of W in English. “Tiol uses a different one, and Dao has basically nothing, like the beginning of Atlessoa’s name.”
“Can a single character express all that?”
I gave it some more thought. Adding a W and a Y seemed excessive, especially if we also needed a silent consonant. Perhaps there was a simple solution. “Perhaps a modifier for the character? I think our H needs that already for Velgein names.” Toch and Golchev both had names with a character that used a voiceless uvular fricative. A replacement character could have been used for that, but a modifier to H worked without disrupting too much else. I frowned slightly. “That might not be all. I need to study that language a bit more.”
Seranedra interrupted my thoughts with a laugh that turned my brain to temporary mush. “You take everything that comes so seriously, with your full attention, even when it’s such a minor thing.”
“Well–” I said, starting to defend myself, but she shook her head.
“No, it’s… it’s a lovely trait,” she said, blushing slightly. “It makes you a good leader. It tells me… that you care, and you’ll look after those who look up to you.”
I felt a heat rising on my cheeks, too, and we sat there in blushing silence for a while before Seranedra looked out the window.
“Oh, it’s grown late. Um, I should take my leave,” she said, standing and taking quick short steps to the door.
I stood, courteously, and watched her quick departure as it happened. My chest clenched slightly as her back grew smaller, until she reached the door. Once she was through, I would be alone in my office, the weight of the Kingdom on my shoulders.
So much of my time had been spent by myself, working in solitude or with just my animal and beast companions. I was comfortable in it, or at least I had been across my two lives. At that moment, I could not imagine a less attractive fate.
“Will you come back to help me with this some more tomorrow?” I blurted out.
Seranedra looked back at me with a small, coy smile. “I would love to,” she said, and slipped through the door.