With black fragments of olives still caught in his teeth, Merelao let out a laugh.

"Its father?" He wheezed, the sound bubbling up as if he had just heard the punchline to the world’s most absurd joke. "You think it’s a father that keeps the peace? It’s the cold weight of the sword. Men obey you because you’re apt at cutting down those who don’t.’’ He waved a hand around the room’’How many of them would follow you were it not for that?’’

Very few, Alpheo knew.

’’If you want your son to rule after you, you’ll have to teach him how to be a killer, not a patriarch." He washed the remnants of the meal down with a heavy gulp of wine, his eyes never leaving the Prince’s face.

"Aye, it was the sword that made my rule and maintained it, that I’ll grant you," Alpheo replied, his voice steady even as the chaos of the feast swirled around them. "But a state built on steel alone is a castle built on sand. True rulership is the art of knowing when to offer the blade and when to offer the flower. A man who makes his will known only through blood is destined to be gutted the moment his steel starts to rust for that is all how people have made to bow. The man who wields both may instead maintain power even when he forgoes the steel.It is harder I guarantee, but the chance is there."

Alpheo looked out at the dancing, his gaze momentarily softening. "In my time, the sword is all my people will know. It will be my son’s task to use both. But for that, he must be shaped. He has a sweetness and a softness that we all love." He sighed, a heavy, dragging sound as if the words he was about to utter were physical weights pressing on his chest. The words hurt to even think, let alone say. But a man who fears pain for its own sake is no man at all, and he certainly cannot be a sovereign.

"But it is the boy that we love," Alpheo continued, the firelight catching the weary rings beneath his eyes. "And we do not need the boy to rule above them all. We need the man. You told me yourself he was both unbloodied and untested, if your lordship recalls."

"Aye," Merelao replied, the mirth finally draining from his features. "I did."

"It is my intention to see him as both," Alpheo said, his voice hardening into a decree. "Bloodied. And tested."

Merelao leaned in, a spark of genuine interest flickering in his gaze. He watched Basil dance with yet another girl, perhaps a younger sister or a niece of the lords gathered here, as if trying to glimpse the type of man the boy might become. "You mean to scurry him onto the field? To the front lines?"

"That would see him bloodied," Alpheo admitted. "But I mean to have him tested long before he smells the smoke of a battle."

"How?" Merelao asked, his brow furrowing.

Why, the only way anyone truly is, Alpheo thought, staring at his son’s innocent smile across the hall.

"By killing the boy within him," Alpheo said aloud, "and yet hoping that he will not die.If he goes as he is with a crown, the lords and my enemy will chew him and spit him out, he’ll need to learn how to be hard if he means to rule after me."

I desperately want that for him, to survive the transition, but wishes do not make the man.

Merelao studied him for a long moment, the silence filled only by the wailing flutes. "Seems like you have very clear ideas about his upbringing, then..."

Since the first time I laid eyes on him, my lord, Alpheo thought, his heart heavy with the memory of the infant he had first held.He would never know how much he loved him, because he never remembered the first time he was brought to him wailing and wet and dirty, and yet loveable all the same.

"And it also seems it’ll be quite hard," Merelao noted, his voice dropping. "I rue the thought of his dear mother accepting such a plan. She seemed the protective type with her brood."

"She has not," Alpheo said flatly.’’Yet.’’

"Do you think she’ll take it well? It is her boy we are speaking about, after all. Women are emotional by blood and nature; they don’t take kindly to their sons being turned into whetstones."

I know I’ll need to sleep with both eyes open for a few nights,he reflected, or I’ll wake myself with more holes than nature intended for men.

"Yes," the Prince said aloud, his eyes fixed on the distant dancers. "She will understand."

Hopefully.

One of the harpist made wrong with one of the string, making a shrilling note that rose above the other.

Merelao leaned back, balancing his chair on two precarious legs while anchoring himself with a single hand on the edge of the table when that sound came. His blonde locks, damp with the sweat of his earlier exertion, clung to his forehead as he cut a sidelong glance toward the Prince.

"Most men look at the future with a desperate sort of hope," he noted, his voice dropping into a low, rumbling register. "I am happy to see that, yet again, you are not like most. Though I certainly do not envy your disposition. Yours seems a weary life, don’t you think, friend?"

Alpheo didn’t blink at the term. He wasn’t entirely sure when they had crossed the threshold into friendship, or if such a thing was even possible for men like them.

"I am a man of simpler pleasures," Merelao continued as he explained, gesturing vaguely with a half-empty cup. "A thousand of them, perhaps, but simple all the same. I like testing the limits of my own skin, and I like to swallow every drop of pleasure life can squeeze between one trial and the next. I welcome all pain unto me as I welcome all pleasure. And I find myself having won against the greatest of them yet."

He leaned forward, the front legs of his chair snapping back onto the marble with a sharp crack. "I stood there in that hell-made-man. I would have wept had I been a mere witness, deprived of the beauty of standing upon such a canvas. We were on the back foot. Surrounded. Outnumbered. Out-horsed. But by the gods, Alpheo, we were not out-souled."

The Kakunian’s eyes took on a feverish, haunted brilliance as he relived the slaughter. "Each of our men was worth five of theirs! I saw soldiers, both yours and mine, rend their own precious flesh just to reach the throat of an enemy, uncaring if the next breath sent them to the realm beyond mortal pain. I saw a man missing a hand, wailing down with a bloody stump of a fist upon the helmet of a fallen knight.’’Joy came out at the man’s eyes at that memory ’’ I saw madness spurring peasants to tackle armored men-at-arms just to give the man behind them a clean strike at the visor. Biting, spitting blood for every inch of ground we reclaimed amidst the mounds of corpses."

He took a shuddering breath, his chest heaving under the torn silk. "At our word, the noble sons of the South threw themselves into the grave with a smile. Surely the sight of so many men willing to embrace an early death has not been seen since the days of the Red. You do not know how much I craved a glimpse of those legendary days, and how thankful I am to have walked that impossible field of an impossible war that we by all rights should have lost."

Merelao closed his eyes and let out a long, contented hum, his head lolling back as if he were receiving a delicate massage rather than discussing a massacre. For a heartbeat, Alpheo was tempted to look beneath the table to see if the man was physically aroused by the memory of the carnage. Before he could, Merelao snapped his eyes open and exhaled a heavy, wine-scented sigh.

"But the great pleasure has met its end," Merelao said, his tone turning pragmatic. "The war of yours is over, the meat is eaten, and the wine is nearly gone. So, what happens when the sun rises tomorrow for us? Is solitude to be our only coin, or is it time to face the storm together?"

My war is not over, Alpheo thought, his fingers tracing the rim of his goblet of water. For your war is now mine. But even a prince knew that one must not seem too eager when bartering for a man’s soul.

"What would you have the sun deliver us?" Alpheo asked quietly. "It is only you and I who can decide what lies between our houses, not your uncle, not Sorza, and certainly not Nibadur. I have a debt of gratitude to pay you, Merelao. I would have died twice over without your intervention. First, when you rose against the treachery in your own house, and second, when you dragged me from that pit of demons at the Ford. I should like to return the favor."

"Oh? Is it gratitude that spurs you now?" Merelao asked, his eyebrows arching in mock surprise.

"Is that so hard to believe?"

"I would presume to know what to believe when it comes to you, oh Fox. Oh, Man of War."

Alpheo felt the irony of those words wearily upon him.

"Truly, you are a mystery to me," Merelao said, his voice losing its drunken edge. "One moment you are a craven weaver of schemes, and the next, a noble hero of the line. If I am to lash my ship to another during a gale, I wish to hold onto a stiff mast, not a maggoty piece of rotted wood. So now, I ask you. I ask you as the Lord of Epietoli. I ask you as a commander of men who bled for your cause. I ask you as an ally who rode to glory and death at your side."

The stare he leveled at Alpheo was suddenly, terrifyingly sober, a gaze as cold and unforgiving as the mountain peaks of the Fingers.

’’Did you do it?’’