Chapter 1315: A boy’s duty(2)
Humans were fundamentally social creatures. They were built by the gods to live in community, to share fires, and to enrich their miserable lives with the constant friction of interaction. There was a very specific reason why chronic loners were looked upon with deep suspicion in all kingdoms, and why hermits living in the high hills always possessed a few screws loose.
Basil knew humans were meant to interact with other humans, to search for friends, to pine for lovers, and to desperately seek something in someone else that they simply could not provide for themselves.
So, when he finally came face-to-face with Mesea, he recognized at once that something was profoundly broken within her. His father the King and his Uncle Laedio had been entirely secretive about the horrors that had befallen the girl before she was brought to the court of Yarzat, but Basil wasn’t so naive as to miss the obvious signs of a shattered soul.
It was always deeply grounding to remember that his absolute "bad days", were the unreachable dreams of someone else. He knew that all that truly separated him from some wretched orphan starving in a muddy alleyway somewhere in the conquered South was mere geography and the blind, unearned luck of being born with royal blood in his veins.
The realization humbled him, more than any preach of a priest.
He knew there was likely a child out there somewhere who was vastly braver than he was, an unnamed bastard with more raw resilience in his fingertips than Basil could ever hope to fathom in his entire body. Someone fighting each day and each night, doing everything within their power just to keep their stomach from eating itself.
That child’s only true sin was being born in a gutter where they could never make use of that inherent greatness. That was the great, cruel divider of the world: luck.
Basil was so phenomenally lucky that he would never have to wonder what real starvation felt like. Rosalind was so lucky she wouldn’t even dream of what it meant to sell her own body to make ends meet, or to commit a capital crime just to avoid the hollow ache of winter hunger.
The Prince had seen people starve. During the late campaigns, he had witnessed the true horror of it. He had seen desperate with their lips stained green from trying to digest common field grass, their faces reduced to tight skin glued directly to the bone, and their stomachs so hideously bloated it looked like a cruel, mocking caricature of the very act of feeding oneself. It made him fiercely proud of his father that such stomach-turning sights were now practically impossible to come across within the borders of Yarzat. To Basil, that peace brought his father more true honor than any glorious vanguard battle he would ever fight in.
So, with all the immense luck he had been handed by fate, the absolute least Basil could do was his duty.
And it was that duty, just as much as genuine care for those that were fighting in his father’s name, that finally made him cross the lawn and take a quiet seat on the green grass right beside her.
Mesea was a small child, eleven winters past her birth if his uncle’s words were true, but she possessed the frail stature of a much younger child. Her long face was punctuated by a blunt potato nose, and her thick, brown hair was so fiercely matted and tangled it looked like it would be a far greater challenge to brush it straight than to teach a stubborn field donkey how to dance a courtly jig.
She remained entirely silent as he sat down, her dull eyes staring blankly out over the sprawling royal gardens, utterly indifferent to the presence of the heir to the kingdom.
Basil said nothing at first, merely following her frozen stare out into the green expanse. Any other child in the realm would be looking at the vibrant, blooming flowers, or perhaps watching the colorful birds grooming themselves and chirping merrily on the fine branches of the orchard trees.
His father the King loved this garden with a strange, fierce passion. Alpheo would spend what little free time he could pry from the grasp of statecraft crawling beneath the bushes, pruning weeds, and breathing in the rich earth. Basil had inherited that exact same love from him. Initially, the boy had only forced himself into the soil in a desperate attempt to please his father, but over the years, he had truly come to see what his father’s sharp eyes saw. This garden was probably the only expanse of the entire royal court that his father did not aggressively begrudge when drawing up the kingdom’s tight budget.
Ser Xoffo the Oat had once proudly claimed over a horn of ale, that he had made and sprawled with salt as was his tradition, that he had seen the garden triple in size and sport four times as many exotic plants than when the family had first taken the castle. Apparently, the King’s obsession with the soil had taken root the very first moon he had made a home here. Basil found Ser Xoffo to be an good man, heavily prone to loud boasting, to be sure, but a reliable soul to have around the household nonetheless.
Honest men were rare to come by.
Still, as beautiful and fragrant as the garden was today, Basil was acutely aware that the blooms were not what Mesea was actually staring at. Her gaze was locked past the rose bushes, aimed dead at the distant, sprawling city below, and more importantly, toward the grand iron-studded gates.
In the first days after Uncle Laedio had departed for the frontier with his blue cloaks fluttering in the wind behind, the heavy guards stationed between the city and the palace would walk up the hill several times a day with a silent, dirty child in tow. Apparently, she was constantly trying to slip past the sentries and leave the court. Whether she intended to march into the wild to find her adoptive father, or simply meant to wait for him at the city gates like a loyal hound, Basil would never truly know.
She would never speak. Not on her own accord, and certainly not when posed a direct question by anyone.It was lucky that the guards recognised her, elsewhise she would have been thrown in the streets.
The servants murmured that she would only speak to Uncle Laedio himself, and even then, it was only ever done in whispers against his ear. The King or the Queen could stand before her, demanding answers with all the weight of the crown, and she would simply stare up at them as if they were nothing but common sheep bleating into the wind.
Basil cleared his throat softly, shifting his weight on the grass to break the heavy silence.
"The purple ones over there are southern lilies," he started, pointing a finger toward a meticulously tended bed near the wall. "My father had them brought up from the valleys. They’re incredibly difficult to keep alive in the winter, but if you put extra straw around the roots, they survive the frost. Do you like them?"
Mesea didn’t even blink. Her eyes remained anchored to where they had been before Basil had come.
"My sister Rosalind can be an absolute terror, I know," Basil continued with a light, self-deprecating chuckle, trying a different path. "She told me you wouldn’t play tag with her. Frankly, you’re the wise one, I believe. If you run with her, she’ll just trip you and claim she won the game anyway."
Nothing. Not a twitch of her lips, nor a single shift in her breathing.
What in the world had he truly been expecting? She refused to speak a single word to his father the King, or to his mother the Queen; there was absolutely no logical reason she would suddenly choose to bare her soul to a green prince.
Speaking to her while expecting an actual answer was clearly the entirely wrong approach. Recognizing the futility of it, Basil finally fell quiet. He leaned back, sprawling out lazily on the rich green grass with his hands tucked behind his head, content to simply stare up at the drifting white clouds and the vast blue sky, losing himself in his one complicated thoughts.
He had long since finished the tedious task his father had assigned him. Drafting a comprehensive list of potential highborn candidates for the civil government positions the King intended to form once martial law was eventually suspended in the south. Right now, of course, the absolute last thing the kingdom needed to worry about was the minutiae of regional administration while the countryside was still half-choked by war. Those bureaucratic structures were delicate tools meant strictly for peacetime; for now, all his father required on the frontier were men capable of wielding heavy iron.
For a brief moment, the Prince wondered how the southern campaign was actually progressing. He knew for a fact that subduing the territories was extracting a much greater toll of effort and time than his father had initially calculated. Still, there was comforting news at least. In his latest letter, Uncle Laedio had revealed that exceptional progress was being made within the conquered provincial capital. The local gangs and violent criminal syndicates were systematically being put down, and some loose resemblance of quiet was finally falling over the cobblestones.
Of course, things were by no means going as flawlessly as they could. Few and far between were the foreign merchants brave enough to risk charting a trade course through those fractured lands, as terrifying rumors of the phantom Vulture Lord were spreading across the taverns as fast as wildfire through dry winter hay.
Still... it had been a considerable length of time since the court had last heard a single word from Laedio , Asag, or Rykio. Under ideal conditions, it took a full week and a half of hard, exhausting riding for a courier’s letter to make the dangerous trek across the realm. That agonizing delay would eventually shorten once his father implemented his grand plan to construct fortified relay stations across the high roads, ensuring fresh, rested horses could be swapped out for the letter-carriers at every league, but for now, that was the reality of the distance. And it had been nearly two full weeks since the last pouch had actually arrived.
That sudden thought gave him pause.
Basil slowly turned his head on the grass, his eyes shifting away from the clouds to lock back onto the profile of the silent child sitting beside him. A letter.
A small, brilliantly wicked idea suddenly bloomed in the Prince’s mind.