A Time of Tigers - From Peasant to Emperor

The next unopened letter he had came from another element of trouble in the form of Lady Blackthorn. She'd been one of the few who had openly disputed his sudden proposal to Nila. At least, from among those that he'd count as his soldiers – even if he knew it was a stretch to call Blackthorn a soldier of his, when she only fought under him of her own volition.

"How uncouth," she'd said. "It was embarrassing to watch, and it must have been even more embarrassing for Lady Felder. You are lucky that she saved you from an even more reckless conclusion."

It hadn't been long after that she had expressed her desire to return home. "Hopefully, some time with my family will serve to burn the image from my mind, as disgusting as it was."

"You certainly aren't holding back with your criticism," Oliver had remarked.

"If I did, you wouldn't listen. You're not even listening now," Blackthorn had said. She looked the very image of a pouting little girl, that mask that she always wore well and truly cracked. Her shortened shoulder length hair didn't do anything to dispel that.

He opened her letter, expecting more words of harsh rebuke. That was part of the reason that he'd deferred its opening until a later date.

But if it was rebuke she had saved for him, then she had certainly condensed whatever insults she had down. It was only a single short sentence that was sprawled across the page.

"I'm coming back," she said. She didn't give a time, a date, or even a reason why. It was like talking to Lady Blackthorn in person. Perhaps even worse.

He stared at that page for all of five minutes, before he tossed it into the fire, and snorted his irritation. "What a waste of paper. Why did you use a whole sheet for that, you fool? You could have cut it down…"

He was well aware of the hypocrisy with which that was said, giving that he'd burned the very same sheet of paper, as soon as he'd looked at it. But that only brought a smile to his lips in his knowing it. He had to admit he was glad. He'd half-expected that Blackthorn might not come back at all. She had no reason to.

The only reason that they had joined their forces ought to have been for the campaign. That she felt the need to return despite that… Oliver didn't quite know what that meant, but he was pleased for it. The girl was strong, and reliable, and her perspective at times was a valuable one. He wasn't exactly in a hurry to lose her.

"Is that all of them?" Oliver muttered to himself. He looked through the remaining pile of letters. They'd already been gutted open either by Greeves or Verdant. They weren't messages to him as a person, but rather to the Patrick estate, and it was the administrators of that estate who were best left to respond in his place.

He cast his eyes ideally over the list, and decided that he couldn't summon up the interest for them. Instead, he simply leaned back in his chair, enjoying the creek of the wood against his back.

The highest floor of his house, in the most sparsely decorated of all his rooms. It was the one little indulgence that he'd been afforded. The room that was meant to be belonging to the ruler of Solgrim was on the floor below him. It was at least five times the size.

A wall of one room had been knocked down to make it even larger, and the furnishings in there were only ever so slightly inferior to those of a nobleman at the Academy. The bed was large and canopied, and tapestries tastefully decorated the wall wherever they could find a place.

Oliver had already felt uncomfortable in the room before it had been newly furnished, when it was still absent of most of the household objects needed to make it homely. When it had been redone as it was, he'd only managed half a night in it. The bed had been so soft that he feared closing his eyes upon it would see him absorbed into it. He needed the reassurance of something firmer to relax himself.

But even when he had lowered himself onto the floorboards, and onto one of the broad rugs decorating them, he could find no inch of sleep. The room had yawned around him in its richness, as if pointing at him, and labelling him an intruder. It was far too grand for the likes of him.

One of his maids had caught him, in the dead of night, before even the hour that a wolf might hunt at, marching his way through the second floor of his house, opening one door after the other, and inspecting each room for a place that he might sleep.

The woman had given a yelp, and just barely managed to keep from screaming. She'd thought him a ghost, in his shirtless state, with only the cotton trousers of a sleeping man. The moonlight had made him look paler than a corpse. Then he had asked her, with unusual seriousness, if they had a room in the house without anything in it.

She'd pointed him to the third floor, which ought to have been a loft, and to a room that had yet to be used for storage. And that was where she had found him, when morning came, curled up like a dog in the centre of its cold wood, with only his jacket thrown over himself, and a contented expression on his face.

Since then, that was where he had chosen to remain. But even then, Verdant had been reluctant to have it left as it was. He'd had it improved at least to the level of a poor servant. There was a desk, a chair, and a bedroll, and a single mat in the middle of the floor.

All knew, but no one chose to say that it was only that simple rug that Oliver used for his bed, forsaking even the bedroll, as simple as it was.