by Ben Wolf
“What do you think of my flowers?” he asked first.
Her mind pivoted. “They’re lovely. Which ones are your favorites?”
“The red roses,” he replied without hesitation. “They are temperamental, but their beauty is unrivaled. They are an exquisite flower beloved by everyday people, and they symbolize love and romance to many, but few appreciate the precision required to foster their growth.”
Having grown up in the Sky Realm, plants and flowers didn’t rank too highly on Lilly’s list of interests. No vegetation grew tall enough to reach their home among the clouds, and thus the majority of her exposure to plants came in the form of what she was served for meals.
Occasionally, Lilly’s father would send away for colorful flowers to be delivered to her mother, in which case Lilly always received a small bouquet as well, but they always wilted far too quickly for her taste. As such, she’d never really given them much consideration.
Here in the King’s garden, however, she couldn’t deny the rampant beauty of everything. It all looked so lush and vivid, perhaps because these plants had continual access to proper care, nutrients, and soil, unlike the dead and quickly fading flowers routinely stuffed into her mother’s finest vase.
She looked to her right, past the gaudy stone fountain and toward the bed of roses in the distance. “They look lovely.”
Lilly cursed herself. She’d used that word already. She hoped the King wouldn’t notice.
Luckily for Lilly, the King’s eyes had wandered over to the roses as well, which meant he was no longer piercing her with his inquisitive stare. Lilly exhaled a relieved breath and reached for her mug of water again.
“The mugs are made from a strong oak tree that finally grew too large to withstand a terrible storm some years back, before the dome above you was in place,” the King said without turning to look at her. “It had too many leaves, and they extended well over the tall walls of this garden. A wild wind caught it and virtually tore the tree asunder.
“As you can imagine, the damage to the rest of the garden was also considerable,” he continued. “My gardeners were picking up broken branches for a week after the storm, but it took nearly a decade for the other trees and bushes to recover. Nearly every single flower had to be replanted, as well as some of the flowering bushes.
“The winds stripped the fruit trees bare, and what wasn’t irreparably damaged was only suitable as feed for the horses and livestock. For several years afterward, the fruit trees yielded only a fraction of what they had before the storm.
“For this reason, we erected the protective dome you now see over the garden. The glass is not glass at all, but panels of diamond, painstakingly cut by my Imperator Gavridel and installed as a means of ultimate protection for this place. Nothing can get through it, and thus nothing will ever harm this garden again.”
Lilly stared up at the dome and then through it at the gray cliff face that rose several thousand feet high above the perimeter walls of the garden. Whoever had designed Valkendell had done so with its defensive capabilities in mind.
The sheer cliff face kept enemies from approaching from behind the city, and it allowed the King’s forces to focus on enemies approaching them head-on. It made for simpler and more effective defensive tactics, especially compared to freestanding cities like Kanarah City.
Yet as with all such strategies, even this structure had one crucial drawback: if the city walls were ever breached, and if Valkendell were ever invaded, there was nowhere for its inhabitants to flee. An effective invasion could reduce both the city and Valkendell to a frothing stew of death and blood.
Lilly didn’t want to consider such things. If they could find common ground and work toward solutions with the King, perhaps such a scenario could be avoided entirely.
The King met Lilly’s eyes again, and said, “I am glad things are finally back to they way they ought to be.”
Lilly considered whether or not there was a double meaning in what he was saying to her. Was it some sort of allegory or an illustration? Or was he just being weird again?
“Forgive our tardiness, Your Majesty,” Valerie’s voice said from the entrance to the garden. She walked in with her arm hooked around Axel’s elbow, and Calum followed the two of them inside. “It seems your other two guests lagged behind, but we are all here now.”
Lilly’s eyes narrowed at the sight of Axel and Valerie walking in, arm-in arm, but she decided just to be happy for him. If he wanted to fall for some enemy woman, that was his business. It wasn’t like it would ever work out for him anyway. They could never be together.
But she was still happy for him—as happy as she could be, anyway.
Calum, by contrast, looked as alone as he’d ever looked. Lilly partly had herself to blame for that, but the other person to blame was definitely Calum himself.
He’d chosen the path he was walking in life, and it was a path that diverged much too far from hers for anything to happen between them. If she were totally honest with herself, their paths had never really aligned all that closely in the first place. They’d been instrumental in helping each other for a time, but that was the furthest extent their relationship could ever go.
Regardless of how she felt about him.
She banished such thoughts from her mind. Now wasn’t the time to muse about what could’ve been. Now was the time to focus on ransoming Kanarah from the man seated across the table from her.
Once Calum and Axel took their seats, Valerie gave them another simple smile and entreated them to enjoy their meal. Axel tried to coax her to stay, but she politely excused herself and left the three of them alone with the King.
A flurry of servants drifted in and laid out a spread of meats, cheeses, bread, fruits, and vegetables fit for royalty. Other servants delivered wooden plates and utensils to them, and Lilly wondered if they had come from the same oak tree as the one that had been repurposed as mugs.
Another servant approached with a decanter of burgundy wine and offered to pour some into a crystalline glass for Lilly, but she declined. Better to keep her mind sharp for the conversation to come.
Calum also passed, but Axel accepted the offer. Lilly shot a glare at him, but he didn’t notice. He was too busy filling his plate with the delectable food before them.
The King, however, hadn’t moved. He simply watched them, his white clothes and crown gleaming in the sunlight like the stones of his palace, twirling his finger through his dark beard.
When Lilly had claimed a modest share of the bounty on the table, she looked to Calum. Axel had already started stuffing his face. They came to a silent agreement, and Calum spoke first.
“So…” he began, “…how are we supposed to talk about this with you?”
The King’s head slowly turned toward Calum, but he didn’t respond otherwise.
Calum glanced at Lilly again, then back to the King. “I mean, where do we start? Kanarah has so many issues.”
“What is it you wish to see changed?” the King asked.
The question was similar to one of the early ones in the sequence of questions the King had asked Axel. Lilly considered speaking up, but she wanted to hear Calum’s response first.
“I want Kanarah’s people to be free,” he replied.
“In what ways are they currently not free?” the King asked.
Calum cast another glance at Lilly again. “I can only share with you my experience.”
The King neither moved nor said anything in response.
“You already know your men killed my parents.” Calum hesitated, as if waiting to see if the King would react to that statement. He didn’t. “Because that happened, I was forced into a life of slavery working in your quarry. Or one of them, anyway. I don’t know how many you have.
“Anyway, I grew up there, doing progressively harder and harder work all my life.” Calum hesitated again. “It’s not the work that made me despise the place. It was the conditions. The treatment of the people. They were slave
conditions. No one should have to live like that.”
Another pause. The King still didn’t respond.
“Later, after I escaped that place, my friends and I ran across Lilly. She’d just escaped from some slave traders who’d captured her and tried to sell her to one of your soldiers for evil purposes,” Calum continued.
The mention of Lilly’s entanglement with the slave traders sent a shudder down her spine, but she resisted it. She’d escaped, and she’d driven a knife deep into Captain Fulton’s neck on her way out. All of that was as much a part of her past as anything else, so she felt no need to dwell on it.
“Another of our friends, Magnus, who is now the Dragon King of Reptilius, was caught by the same slave traders. They sold him as a Saurian to some of your soldiers, who in turn sold him to Burtis, the foreman at the quarry I worked at,” Calum explained. “That’s how I met Magnus, and it’s how we got connected and eventually escaped.”
The King remained silent yet again. At this point, Lilly couldn’t tell if he was listening attentively or if he was actually indifferent to their respective plights.
“Your soldiers really mucked things up at my family farm, too,” Axel said with a mouth half full of food. “They’d always come around and take what was rightfully ours. They’d steal it right in front of us. It’s not like we could do anything about it, either. They had weapons, and if we would’ve tried to fight back, who knows what they would’ve done then?”
The King’s attention fixed on Axel, who blinked at him, still chewing his food.
“Don’t look at me. He’s the one talking.” Axel nodded toward Calum, but the King didn’t look away from him.
“We also encountered slavery on the western side of Kanarah. I am ashamed to admit my own father’s involvement in the trade,” Lilly said. That piece of information had sullied much of her view of her father, but she’d decided to forgive him before he died, so she tried not to dwell on it beyond that.
The King’s quiet focus shifted to her.
“We actually succeeded in breaking up a large operation in the north,” she continued. “Kahn, the last Dragon King, and his nephew Vandorian were running a slave trade operation at the Blood Chasm, where much of Kanarah’s Blood Ore is mined. I don’t even know how many slaves died working there, but it wasn’t a small number.”
Still no response from the King. It was beginning to frustrate Lilly. How were they supposed to have a dialogue if he wasn’t ever going to say anything?
“I think the first thing we can agree on is that slavery needs to come to an end,” Calum summarized, and the King’s attention shifted to him once more. “And the second thing is that your soldiers need to be reined in. They’re responsible for a lot of the hurt people are experiencing in Kanarah.”
The King steepled his fingers over his empty plate, but he didn’t say anything.
“So…” Calum ventured, uncertain. “What do you think?”
“I agree,” the King said. But that was it. Those two words, and nothing else.
It aggravated Lilly more than if he’d remained silent.
“That’s it?” Axel washed down the food in his mouth with a swig of wine. “That’s all you’re gonna say? ‘I agree?’”
“Would you prefer I say something else?” the King asked.
“Yeah.” Axel snatched a slice of bread and some cheese from the platter in front of him. “How about you throw out some ideas on how to make things better instead of just asking us to figure it out for you? You’re the one who has all the power, the coin, the years of being alive. We’re just a bunch of kids compared to you, and we’re doing all the work, here.”
“If I could end slavery with the snap of my fingers, I would do so immediately,” the King said. “But the Overlord has not seen fit to grant me that ability.”
“We know you can’t fix it like that—” Axel snapped his fingers. “—but that’s not what we’re asking. We want you to help us figure out how to get rid of slavery. Pass a law, or issue a decree or something to outlaw it.”
“Slavery is already against the law of Kanarah. It has been since the beginning,” the King said. “Much like the Law of Debt.”
Axel raised his hands over his head. “Well, I don’t know this stuff. I’m just a farmer-turned-adventurer. But I know what I saw, and that’s a lot of slavery and a lot of terrible people wearing black leather armor and doing bad things in your name.”
“We routinely cycle soldiers who patrol the outer lands of Eastern Kanarah back to Solace,” the King explained. “They seem to do better the closer they are to home.”
“I don’t think we’ve met a single soldier outside of Solace who has been a good person…” Calum said, “…ever. And we’ve encountered a lot of them. In fairness, most of them were pursuing us when we were on the run as fugitives, but still. I’ve only ever had bad experiences.”
Now they were getting somewhere. It amazed Lilly that, despite her initial skepticism, the King of all Kanarah was actually sitting there, listening to them. Better still, he’d finally started to engage them in return.
Calum and Axel sat there for another hour, discussing and debating with each other while Lilly interjected as needed to moderate or clarify or share her opinion or experiences across a variety of issues. The King responded when prompted, and very occasionally of his own volition, but they failed to come to any concrete solutions for anything.
Even so, when Valerie showed up to conclude the meeting, Lilly remained optimistic about the entire exchange. It felt as though the two sides had come to somewhat of an understanding, at least, even if they hadn’t figured out how to solve anything yet.
Most importantly, if the King was being honest with them, it turned out that he agreed with the majority of their concerns and also wished to address them. The issue, and the main thrust of discussion going forward, it seemed, was how to do so.
The King remained in his garden, staring into the swaths of green and colors while the three of them arose to depart.
As Lilly headed out, she noticed the King staring at his bed of roses again, and Lilly remembered the story he’d told her.
It preoccupied her mind for the rest of the afternoon.
Chapter Thirty
“Tell me about your parents.”
The voice startled Calum, but he was even more surprised that it came from the window in the common area of his chambers. He set down the book he’d been reading and looked around, thinking maybe he’d imagined it, but he didn’t see anyone.
He tentatively tugged the sheer curtains away from the window, wondering if perhaps a Windgale servant might’ve said the words. Instead, he found none other than Matthios, the King’s Imperator and the Brazen General, floating just outside.
Calum staggered back, startled a second time, and he actually tripped over a small table and landed partway on it. The table held, mercifully, and Calum scrambled back up to his feet.
“May I come in?” Matthios asked.
Calum wondered what might happen if he said “no.” Would Matthios go away? Would he barge in anyway? Would Calum survive the next hour regardless of his answer?
If Matthios had wanted Calum dead, he could’ve reduced him to ash long ago. That much was certain. So he opted to be hospitable.
“Sure.” He swept his hand toward the hearth as if to gesture Matthios inside.
The Imperator drifted through the window, past the curtains, and stood before Calum. As usual, he wore the bronze circlet on his bald head. The mask that covered the lower half of his face matched the rest of his polished bronze armor, and his eyes blazed like molten bronze. He also carried his two-sided bronze spear with him.
Calum supposed that an Imperator had to be ready for battle at any moment, so he didn’t begrudge Matthios for wearing his armor and carrying a powerful weapon around, but the guy had to realize the kind of effect he had on normal people, right? The sight of him was nothing short of terrifying, even when it was clear that he meant no har
m.
Calum motioned toward the sofa. “Would you… uh… would you like to sit down?”
“Thank you.”
Matthios walked over to the sofa and sat down, but rather than reclining in it, his back remained rigid, and his upper body faced toward Calum at all times, as if he were locked in on Calum like a marksman archer taking aim at a target. Wherever Calum went, Matthios’s focus followed, unbroken, unblinking, and unshakeable.
“You asked me something about my… my parents?” Calum said.
Matthios nodded. “Yes. Tell me about them, please.”
Calum wasn’t quite sure why an Imperator wanted to know about his dead parents, but he pulled over a wooden chair from a writing desk near the hearth, sat down, and began to talk.
“It’s been years, and I don’t remember much, but…”
Matthios just stared at him with his molten eyes.
“…I remember that my mother was kind and generous. And beautiful. She had blonde hair like me, only lighter. Kind of like Lilly’s—er, I mean, like the Premieress’s—”
“I know who you mean,” Matthios interjected.
“Alright…” Calum rubbed the back of his neck and continued, “My father had hair like mine, I think. He was tall, but I’m not sure how tall. He was a strong man. I don’t remember what kind of work he did, but he was strong. Smart, too. But then again, I guess everyone is tall, strong, smart, and beautiful when you’re only a kid.”
Matthios gave a small nod. “How did they die?”
Calum hesitated. This was an awful question to ask someone, especially someone who was basically a perfect stranger. Doubly especially given Matthios’s position over the King’s soldiers. Calum really didn’t want to talk about this, but was he just going to refuse to tell Matthios?
Well, why couldn’t he? Why shouldn’t he? This was none of Matthios’s business anyway.
“Please,” Matthios added. Perhaps he’d sensed Calum’s trepidation, or perhaps he’d simply remembered his manners. He repeated the word, this time in a softer voice. “Please.”