Chapter 1423: The final decision(1)

The prince of Yarzatthundered into the solar like a battering ram, the heavy oak doors groaning on their iron hinges as they slammed back against the stonework. No knock. No herald. Not a scrap of courtly etiquette to soften the intrusion.

He jolted upright behind his cedar desk, his dark face igniting like dry kindling caught in a furnace blast. The royal temper almost showed, until the King caught sight of the dark hair, flushed cheeks, and heaving chest of his own blood.

The roaring flame guttered out doused by a splash of startled paternal exasperation.

A melting stick of dark red wax hovered in Alpheo’s left hand over a freshly rolled missive, a small silver taper trembling in his right. He was mere seconds from pressing the royal signet into the molten seal, an operation months in the hatching, carrying years of hope in worth.

With a practiced, fluid sweep of his sleeve, Alpheo swept the parchment under a stack of dry grain ledgers.

That was not a show his cub needed to see.

"Basil!" the King barked, the sharp edge of his voice lasting only as long as a summer squall. "Have you traded your manners to the stable-hands, or did a mule kick down my door?"

The Prince had a wild, manic gleam in his eye that suggested he would gladly have set fire to manners and roasted a pig over the ashes.

"Father!" Basil panted, laying both hands onto the edge of the desk. "I have made my choice."

There was an iron certainty in the boy’s voice,so sudden that it that froze the rebuke on Alpheo’s tongue. The King paused, setting the sputtering taper into its pewter dish and extinguishing the flame with a wet pinch of his fingers.

I can drop wax on a secret war at midnight, Alpheo thought, studying the fierce green eyes his son had inherited from his mother. Deny the lad his audience now, and he will carry the sting until my hair turns grey.

How swiftly the sand ran through the glass, the king realised. The boy standing before him was shedding his clumsy skin, growing into the severe lines of almost a man. Alpheo swallowed the brief, aching sorrow that came with the thought, his face smoothing into the impassive mask of a ruler.

He was getting old.

Perhaps that was a pain all men grew to feel.

"Then show me," Alpheo said, leaning over the desk and taking hold of his map while his boy made up the space.

His eyes darted across the inked topography, taking a final, silent inventory of the valleys and ridges, grounding himself in the verdict he had forged.

It was solid. It was absolute.

His eyes seemed to say.

"Here," Basil declared, his finger stabbing down onto the parchment. "They settle here."

The boy’s nail dragged along the narrow neck of land south of Oizen and north of Rileia, tracing a small, fertile triangle of black loam pinned tightly between the roaring currents of the Zauern and the deep, sluggish bends of the Raucus.

A cradle between two waters, the fleeting thought crossed Alpheo’s mind before he buried it. A twin-river valley.

Similar to the Tigre and Eufrate, he thought for one mad moment.

The King knew that territory scarcely. It was crown land, held under the direct writ of Yarzat by barely an year. A handful of shattered hamlets still clung to the shores, remnants that had survived the campaigns, alongside a few crude homesteads cleared by river-folk in recent months.

The expanse remained vast, untamed, and desperately under-tilled. There was rich, dark earth for rye, and running water for fat carp.

Yet there was another, far deadlier feature to the terrain. Alpheo kept his mouth shut, his dark eyes glittering as he let his heir make his case.

"Assuming each warrior brings a wife and a child or two, we are looking at twelve to fifteen hundred souls arriving before the autumn frost," Basil rattled off, his voice crisp, rapid, and devoid of tremor. "They will not starve pass the winter; the soil is too fat for famine. It sits right along the trade road to Oizen, meaning merchant wagons will roll through their villages weekly. The silver coin will domesticate their sons, just as the markets did to Torghan’s tribe outside our own walls. And..."

Basil paused, looking his father dead in the eye.

"And the fact that they are penned between two impassable rivers on three sides..."

Alpheo leaned back into his great chair, as he finished the thought.

"...Means that if the wolves ever decide to bare their fangs, a single legion can plug the neck, boxing them into the bend to be butchered to the last man. No mountains to vanish into. No ancient pine forests to harbor a second Vulture. They either become good farmers, or they feed the river-eels."

The King offered a slow, deeply satisfied nod. "Accetable work," Alpheo murmured.

It was a fine, bloody cage dressed up as a garden.

"And besides, they sit directly above Rileia," Basil added, not quite done, his voice brimming with satisfaction, as if that single name settled the matter once and for all.

In truth, it very nearly did. Rileia, though not held under direct royal writ, remained the sole bastion wedged between Oizen and Sharjaan. And while Oizen was not the capital, and Sharjaan had not yet openly bent the knee to Habadia, both were vital pieces upon the southern board.

If Oizen fell, nearly half the fertile provinces won at the bloody slaughter of the Ford would slip through their fingers like dry silt. And with Sharjaan changing allegiances like a dockside whore swapping cloaks for silver, who was to say the turncoats wouldn’t try their luck a second time?

"They are a martial breed through and through," Basil continued, his finger tapping rhythmically on the border markings. "Torghan swears by their savagery, Jarza respects their iron, and every scout who crossed the lines can attest to the butchery they leave behind. If a hostile host comes rolling across the southern marches to threaten Rileia, they won’t take kindly to strangers trampling their new barley. They become our northern anvil and give them great trouble as we muster our own forces in the field."

"A sound stroke," Alpheo conceded, nodding slowly.

He had turned over several locations in his own mind, planting them in the valleys of Herculia had held some merit, yet the marches below Oizen were in far more desperate need of teeth. It would be half a decade before those war-ravaged valleys recovered from the calamity Yarzat had visited upon them, and more hands to tail the dirt were always welcomed.

"In the years to come, we must anticipate even more clans crossing the straits to seek royal bread," the King mused, his dark eyes sharpening. "The river fork is vast enough to swallow them in turn. Some we shall settle along the shorelines, and others we shall force directly beneath Torghan’s heel to keep the Voghondai swollen with fresh blood, I fear our many wars have been depleting their numbers.

Still, once their tribe grow too fat, we fracture them, raise new chieftains after the last one die, feed their ancient rivalries, and ensure they despise each other twice as much as they fear the Crown."

A unified host of foreign iron was a dagger poised at the throne’s throat. A single warlord was easy enough to flatter with gold, but infinitely deadlier when his ambition turned sour. Far safer to keep the wolves divided, snarling over border ditches and grazing rights, so that if rebellion ever sparked, half the pack would eagerly butcher the other for a pouch of royal silver and favor.

Basil listened, but his attention was already drifting across the vellum map, his mouth curling into a sly, boyish smirk.

"And best of all," the Prince remarked casually, leaning his weight against the heavy cedar desk, "they sit on the absolute, farthest rim of the realm. Which makes them the very last ones."

Alpheo lifted his head from the ledgers and adjusted his heir a look of confusion.

"The last for what?" the King asked.

"To welcome the Crown Prince on his royal progress, of course," Basil grinned, his green eyes flashing with glee. "They sit just below my land father, the river-fork is my domain now.I would do well to visit my own land and to impress upon them their future overlord.They are rowdy people all agreed, but rowdy people with great pride.’’ his smile got a bit wider as if eyes held a plan that only he was aware of. ’’But before the lord of Oizen,father, I am prince of Yarzat and it would do well for me to have a bigger scope on my progress too. In the future I will rule far more than mere Oizen after all.

It is high time I believe the crown announces its first progress across its lands.’’