The shouts from the brawl reached Basil’s ears as a muffled, ugly din.

"My father?" Basil finally turned, his brow furrowing as he regarded the knight. "What would my father ever have to do with camp brawls? He has no time for two peasants rolling in the muck."

"I did not say he caused them, princeling, but he played his part in the making of it."

"Had it something to do with him and the Lord of Epietoli?"

Could such ire really stem from some controversy between his father and Merelao? Basil looked back at the crowd. It was finally beginning to unknit as a squad of the Third Aracinea arrived to supervise the camp’s peace under the call of their officer.

Wielding batons and using the butts of their javelins to beat down the troublemakers, and a few bystanders Basil suspected were just in the wrong place.

"I don’t think peasants give much of a smoke whether their princes go arm-to-arm or spit upon one another,they care to wonder if that winter there will be too much rain and sickness, or if the harvest’ll go bad." Rodry said. He blew upon a now-clean fingernail and made his dagger disappear into the sheath at his back. He watched with a keen, ghoulish interest as two legionaries beat a man into submission. When the wretch tried to rise, a hobnailed boot caught him in the stomach, dropping him back into the mud.

"You must go back eight or nine years. I don’t recall the day, but the season was bitter. Most of our trouble stems from that conflict. You were a boy, so it’s no matter if the memories are thin. I am sure you know of the Great Famine, do you not?"

"Of course I do," Basil replied at once.That was one of the reason his father had such an easy time to annex a whole principality. "Herculia was plagued by social disorder and rebellions. The lord were so weakened that they gladly bent the knee to my father, when it was clear their prince would not protect them.’’

Rodry nodded as if Basil had passed a tutor’s exam. "And hunger, of course. So much hunger, and so much death. You see, after your father sent Egil to have his merry way and torch everything under the sun, famine sprouted like mushrooms. It drove men to become bandits just to fill their bellies.To make meal of grass until their lips went green and stomach went bloating with air. They took to the roads and the villages, just as they did in Herculia, and just as many did on the border with Kakunia.Those that could , obviously"

The knight leaned in, the scent of sour wine and old leather clinging to him drifting to Basil’s nose.

"Many of those bands went over to the other side. They found in the Kakunian villages, unburnt by the Hounds and ripe with food, a much better target. So they made a nest there, pillaging, raping, and eating the grain soiled by others.’’ He nodded absentmindedly before making a tsking sound with his tongue. ’’I recall, your father had sent an envoy to the Prince of Kakunia then, proposing a double invasion to share the spoil. But perhaps ’Prince Piggy’ was already in bed with Habadia, so the fruit never ripened.Had it done, what a different world we may have had."

Rodry paused, a wistful look crossing his sharp features.

"Who knows? If they’d accepted, perhaps now we’d be fighting against the rebels instead of alongside them." He caught himself getting sidetracked and cleared his throat. "Still, seeing as the majority of Merelao’s forces hail from the north of Kakunia... I think you can start to see the shape of the ghost. There is bad blood running between those hillmen and our ’dear allies’ from Herculia. Many of them watched their sisters, daughters , wives taken or their barns emptied by Herculeian bandit hands. And it wasn’t just bandits, mind you, common refugees in those numbers are as devastating as an invading army."

Rodry gestured toward the remnants of the brawl, that had been finally put down.Men lying down with arms behind their heads, the way Basil had seen in the immediate aftermath of a raid from the garrison in the capital during the Scouring of the Rats.

"The camp is a tinderbox because your father forgot he rubbed the flint himself long ago. Still... who cares about that?" he shrugged "The Prince got an entire princedom for the trouble. A most willing exchange, if you ask me."

"You would not be so carefree to mention that if you were to say so among the hills of eastern Herculia.’’ Basil shot back.

"That may be. But this is Yarzat, not Herculia. Now Herculia is but an addition to your father’s state. We could go there right now, parade across their hills, their castles, their villages. We could raise a ruckus, wave our banners, and shout to the four winds exactly to whom they have sworn their souls." Rodry leaned in, his eyes gleaming with a dark sort of pride. "I believe not a whimper would come from the winds. Only shouts for your father. And why not? He is twice-blessed and countless-cursed, but all who stood against him came to rue his name."

Basil let the words hang in the air.

He recalled, suddenly and with a sharp pang, the iron crown he often saw in his dreams. His head throbbed just at the thought of it, cold, heavy, and unyielding. But the thought was a foolish one. His father wore no crown but the one forged in the heat of battle atop a black helm. And it was of silver, not iron.

Silver was not iron. One shone, while the other held blood and demise.

And there was no crown of iron.

He set his pace forward once more, the mud sucking at his boots, with Rodry picking up his stride to follow. Unlike the brawl that had just been suppressed by the heavy hands of the Third, most of the camp was drifting into a wary peace. Men raised their heads to watch the last of the troublemakers being hauled away by the legionaries, then turned back to their tasks with the dull indifference of the professional soldier. They tended to their equipment, sharpened their iron, or simply dallied.

There was much of the latter, Basil had to admit. As they reached a crossroads in the camp’s muddy arteries, Basil swerved left. A group of levies were huddled over a flat stone, throwing dice and shouting cheers or curses as the pips rolled.

Basil felt Rodry linger, his shadow stretching toward the gamblers. He reached out and kicked the knight’s shin sharply. Rodry hissed a breath through his teeth but moved on, remembering, for a moment, at least, that he was supposed to be protecting a princeling.

It was Basil who stopped next however.

Near the edge of the horse lines, a strange sight broke through the grim monotony of the camp. A man was standing in the muck, holding the bridle of a brown sorrel. Atop the horse sat a man so thick and broad he seemed to dwarf the beast beneath him. He didn’t look like a knight, nor even a soldier; he sat clumsily, his legs dangling, and he flailed his massive arms with a joy that was entirely out of place among the soldiers and the gallows.

The giant laughed, a high, bubbling sound that belonged in a village, not a war camp.

"Nut! Nut! Nut!" he shouted, his face split by a wide, toothy grin.

The horse below him was old, its coat dull and its head hanging low. It ignored the giant’s shouting entirely, focused only on the patch of emerald grass it was tiredly chewing. It was a stubborn, weary creature, yet it bore the weight of the man with a strange, saint-like patience.

Beside the horse, the man holding the bridle a man in mail that looked a size too big was watching the giant with an expression that was almost tender.

Without any clear reason, the sight brought a small, genuine smile to Basil’s face. In a camp defined by burned bridges, hung deserters, and blood feuds, there was yet something startlingly clean about the laughter.

"A knight, a fool, and a horse seemingly too old even to die," Rodry muttered behind him with a dry, hollow amusement. "The little princeling has an interest in gathering a queer pack for himself, it seems?"

Basil felt the urge to catch the man’s shin once more, his boot already twitching in the muck. He would have done it, too, were it not for the sound that suddenly tore through the light of day, a horn, long and low, echoing like a wolf’s howl beneath the silver light of a full moon.

Aooooooooooo

All at once, the camp stopped.It stopped as if each one had a dagger ready to slit their throats.

It was sharp as a swordthrust, and dangerous like one.

The gamblers froze with their dice mid-air; the legionaries ceased their rhythmic beating of the troublemakers; even the giant on the old horse went still, his laughter dying in his throat. Every head snapped east, toward the horizon beyond the Lampianis.

The silence that followed was heavy, a suffocating blanket that lasted only a heartbeat before it was shattered.

"To arms!" the cry went up, first from a single throat, then a hundred and then a thousand. "To arms!To arms!’’

The stillness was instantly replaced by a frantic mayhem. The shouts of the decurii ripped through the tents, their voices raw as they barked orders to the leggionaires. Small lords, their silken pavilions suddenly looking fragile, began to scream for their squires and their steel.

The quiet was dead. In its place was the clatter of thousand-fold mail, the frantic neighing of startled destriers, and the rhythmic, terrifying thud of boots hitting the earth.

Basil felt his heart hammering against his ribs, a frantic bird in a cage of bone. He looked at Rodry, whose sardonic smile had vanished, replaced by the hard, flat stare of a man who knew exactly what the day was about to witness.

"The wait is over, litte prince" Rodry said, his hand falling instinctively to the hilt of his sword. "The Crownless Prince has seemingly found his gall."