A Time of Tigers - From Peasant to Emperor

His voice was the groaning of the thunder before the lightning came. His anger was a barely restrained thing, but the vein was already bulging heavily in his forehead. He looked quite set to explode.

The merchants that he had brought with him took the opportunity almost greedily. The smallest amongst them, with his earrings, rose up his hand, as he sucked on his gums ponderously, trying to work up the slightest bit of moisture toward his tongue so that he might speak.

"If I may, my Lord…" he said.

"You may," Ferdinand said dismissively, his gaze not leaving Oliver for a second. It was as if he thought he could pin him in place by keeping an eye on him. Somehow, he thought he might prevent him from any further deviousness, like trapping a spider under a glass.

"…Competition, you call it, Ser Patrick, but this was clearly an act done to spite," the merchant said. "It might be competition, if there were rewards to be had for it – but you paid out the sum of a contract far too weighty for a smith to pay himself. You did that at a loss to yourself, merely to harm."

"Oh? You think this to be an act of self-sabotage, done only to wound you?" Oliver said. "So it would not be stealing, so much as a suicide attempt, is that what you are suggesting, merchant?"

"What else could it be?"

"You heard the man, Patrick, what else could it be?" Ferdinand asked. "Why do you go against your Lord for such pettiness? Do you hold a grudge, is that it?"

"Do you think that stubborn smith would have agreed to our conditions if he didn't see worth in it?" Greeves said, entering the conversation for the first time, though he didn't sound particularly confident as he did it.

"Anyone can be swayed by coin," the smallest of the merchants said confidently.

"Yer wrong in that," Greeves said. "Coin is just part of the picture for them. Coin alone wouldn't have been enough to get him to budge."

Whatever it was that Greeves was trying to say, apparently, Ferdinand did not like the sound of it. "You have said nothing concrete, Greeves. After all our years of dealing together, would you be this quick to stab me in the back? Did I not see you raised up, as a result of your competences?"

"I do not see this as stabbing you in the back, Lord Ferdinand," Greeves said, dipping his head. "As Ser Patrick said – it's just competition. We were able to offer the smith better conditions than you were, in order to get him to work here, and he was interested in."

"Turns out a smith of his calibre getting forced to make the equipment of ordinary men isn't that happy," Oliver commented dryly. "What a hard fought battle it was, getting him to dislike such favourable conditions."

Verdant gave Oliver another jab in the side as a warning. Oliver knew it himself, he was getting too wound up. It felt too much like a battlefield, in how all the various parties radiated hostility.

He was surprised to feel his own heart beating so rapidly, and for his adrenaline to be spiking, as Ingolsol fought to have a look around the room along with him. He saw not men that he was engaged in discussion with, but rivals to be conquered, hearts to be pierced, and plunged into defeated despair.

"…It was his duty, as a smith of Ernest, to assist with matters of the war effort," the tallest of the old merchants said.

"Indeed, it was," Ferdinand said, seizing upon that answer. "Do you not expect your townspeople to come together to support your campaigns, Patrick?"

"I do not force it on them. Men of talent are best served doing things that only they can do. I, for one, do see the crime in taking a man away from his potential for progress, and making him stagnate in tasks that ought to be done by an apprentice a quarter of his age," Oliver said. "And I think your father would be of the same mind."

"Tsch, do not speak of me of my father, Ser Patrick," Ferdinand said. "Not when you have all but risen up against him in this act of pettiness that you've thrust my way. Why? Why even bother with all this? The country could not be busier. I am no exception.

Do you not know the state of Ernest, in the concluding hours of my father's campaign? Victory is no less troublesome than defeat."

"…I think defeat would be a good deal more troublesome, my Lord, on account of the horde of Verna troops that would be descending towards your territories from the east," Oliver said.

Ferdinand shook his head. "This, Patrick, is insolence. You are my subordinate. You have sworn loyalty to my father, and with that loyalty, there comes the expectation of respect. If he knew how you were speaking to me now, there would be hell to pay for it."

"…Perhaps I might have spoken a touch out of turn," Oliver admitted. "But I was simply in a hurry to proceed towards the truth of the matter. It seemed to me that you were labouring under a misconception, and being my superior, as you say, it was in both our benefits for me to enlighten you."

"You ought to watch your tongue, Patrick," one of the knights said, speaking up for the first time. The fringe of his well-gelled black hair covered one of his eyes, but the other one was staring with such an intensity that it might have cut a hole in the wall. His sword was laid in its scabbard across his knee, and his hand played suggestively near its hilt.

There was an action, where the aggression was barely disguised. Oliver met it head on. He saw the man's teeth, and he bared his own back in turn. The golden flecks danced in his eyes as the smallest of lights. He held them there, restraining Ingolsol from going any further, for he had a sense that, to go any further was to blunder. It was not altogether a different sensation from the Battle board.

A man could exert a certain amount of pressure, to squeeze his opponent, and make him show his weaknesses, but to go any further than the perfect amount of pressure, according to the natural flows of the battlefield, and he would be making himself blunder in turn.