B3Ch69-A meeting with Winter and Lords (Patreon)

Sorry this took so long. My youngest daughter got her tonsils out and has been rooooogh. Enjoy the chapter, though. This book has already exceeded the length I thought book 3 would be. I think, for the sake of actual book length, it has to be after the goblins, and the velthari will be book 4. ________________________

Harold held the door and let her go in ahead of him.

It was the small room, the one dug in under the big hall where he held court, low-ceilinged and close, a single table and four chairs and a lamp that didn't quite reach the corners. Not the best place to have a conversation with a Winter representative, but it would have to do.

"Quaint," she said.

Harold laughed, short. "Yeah. It is. We didn’t exactly plan on hosting someone like you, but perhaps it will be something we do in the future."

He pulled a chair for her and took the one across. She settled into it without a sound, and the cold came with her — a fine thread of it off her skin, riming the edge of the table nearest her hand, breathing off the water in the air. The lamp flame leaned away from her and steadied.

The door opened again. One of the kitchen girls Adeline had brought on came in with a tray and set it down between them: a pot of tea and a cup for the lady, coffee for Harold, and a small plate of the almond cookies the cooks made in batches too small to go around. She poured, bobbed her head, and left.

Iris lifted the tea. Steam curled up off it into the chill she carried and vanished. She drank, considered, and set it down. Then she took one of the cookies and ate it, and she looked pleased for half a breath before the poise came back over it.

"Long trip to get here?" Harold said. "Or a short one. I don't actually know where you keep your seat."

"Near enough to walk. Far enough that you have never seen it." She turned the cup a quarter on its saucer. "You have a great many people up there, Lord Harold. It is loud up there. I do not know how you think. Most of them are, so." She tilted her head as if considering. “Small.”

"I don't, mostly. I delegate the thinking and take the credit." He drank his coffee. "So. What does the Winter Court want with me?"

She watched him a moment before she answered. 

She was too beautiful. A painting that had gotten up off its frame and decided to move. Her chest rose and fell with the breath she didn't strictly need to take, and it was built to pull a man's eyes down and hold them there, and it nearly worked.

Harold kept his eyes on hers.

She noticed. A small line touched down between her brows and smoothed away. It was hard to trust the Fae. They made politics an art. Every reaction was calculated and every movement designed to gain an advantage. They were a beautiful and deadly species. Magical in almost every way.

"Winter has taken note of you," she said plainly. "You kept clear of our old places in the Basin. Where you knew them, you left what was owed, and you told your people to steer clear of it. A mortal minding fae ground is new this cycle." She inclined her head, unhurried. "Winter does not forget a courtesy shown to its ground. I was sent to say as much."

“Of course,” he replied. “Courtesy cost me nothing, and I would stand to lose a lot by insulting the fae courts.”

"The Basin is special to us." She said it more quietly than the rest. "It was a stronghold of ours, many years ago. A beautiful land. Do you know why?"

He cocked his head, interested. This was a piece of lore he didnt know. "Tell me."

"Because it is both." She lifted one hand, the frost trailing it, and turned it over. "Up in the mountains the winters are terrible, and they are beautiful — the kind of cold that kills a man and leaves him lovelier for it. And down in the bowl of it the summers come gentle and easy, green and slow, a land of wild flowers. One land that holds both aspects at once. Winter loved it. Summer loved it. That is rarer than you can know, a place both of us could love, and neither had to give up. It was beloved of the Fae. It is still. I can still remember the seas in the frozen winter there. It was a beautiful sight." She sighed and took a sip of her tea.

He turned the coffee cup a slow half-turn on the table and didn't drink from it. It made sense what she said.

He'd always known his knowledge of the fae was thin. Not many lords had ever managed to work with them at all — but the ones who did tended to come out of it rather well off.  He'd taken the care on instinct. He knew he would have enemies and didn’t want to make more. The Basin having been theirs, though— a fae stronghold. That was new. "Then you must know about the Verdant Mushroom," he said.

Iris smiled. It was a cold thing now, edges of frost in it. "Indeed we do. It is a fae relic, after all."

Harold's cup stopped halfway to his mouth.

He put it back down, and the ice from that smile ran down his spine. 

"Is that why you're here?" he said. "To take it back."

"You can relax, Lord Harold." She looked, briefly, like she was enjoying herself. "We are not after the relic. It offers us nothing we need. And allowing you to keep it indebts you to us." A small tilt of the head. "Does it not?"

And there it was.

There's the play.  Politics had never been the part of this he was good at. He was better with a retort than a bargain, and he knew it. But the rules of the fae he did know. He smiled, leaned back in the chair, and took a slow sip of the coffee.

"Really," he said. "I thought our scales were balanced. I've paid the proper respects to your sites."

"Respect is freely given and freely returned. It does not balance the scales." She daintily reached down for one of the cookies and nibbled around it. She was so proper about it. 

"I see." He set the cup down. "Well. Then I can't let you walk out of here without balancing them. A trade, Lady Iris. Winter permits me to keep the Verdant Mushroom relic." He let a beat sit. "And in return — I'll tell Winter where to find the Mantle of the Hird."

Something moved behind the pale blue eyes. Or maybe he imagined it. It was impossible to know with one of the Sidhe.

She leaned back in her chair. It was a small motion, but not an idle one — the lean exaggerated the line of her body long against the lamplight; the shape of her was unveiled a little.

Harold looked at her face.

"And why," she said, "would Winter want the Mantle of the Hird? It is a human relic. Not one of the Fae."

"Come now, Lady Iris. We both know the answer to that." He turned his hand over on the table, an easy thing. "I can even explain the guardian for you — I’m sure your own standing the in the Court would rise if you were to return with the information. There's a great deal I know that both Winter and Summer would give a good deal to hear." He let the name land softly. "Which is the other thing. The Verdant Mushroom is a Summer relic, isn't it? Not merely a fae one." He watched her not answer. "So it isn't Winter's to permit me at all — which makes it a generous gift to allow me to hold it. Maybe I ought to be having this conversation with them."

The room went quiet. The lamp hissed.

Then Iris laughed. It came out of her like ice — a bright, thin, cutting sound, twinkling and violent and, God help him, lovely, and her chest rose and fell with it. Harold thought Renna would have stood in the doorway and stared, gone helpless over the sheer artistry of the woman.

"Oh," she said, when it settled. "Oh, I do enjoy the banter, my lord. I agree to your terms." She let a small pause open, and leaned into it, and her eyes came up warm and hungry. "This could be a… fruitful partnership. For us both." Her hand trailed down her neck down through the plunging neckline of her dress.

His brain went haywire for a second before he recollected himself. "I've got a woman I'm seeing," Harold said. "Happily. She scratches the fucked-up part of my brain."

Iris looked at him curiously.

She didn't recoil, and she didn't laugh it off. She looked at him a long moment, and then she nodded, and her interest didn't fall — if anything, it sharpened and came back keener than before. She drew herself up, let her display cover up. 

"I was interested before," she said. "But now I find I actually am. Not many mortals turn me down, Lord Harold."

"You've been seeing the wrong kind of mortals." Harold gasped out. Trying to cover the awkwardness with the coffee.

That earned him the ghost of a real smile.

"I agree to the trade, on behalf of Winter." She said the words, settling with a small weight. "And I would like to build on it. Let me loan you a few of my own guards — as good faith, in answer to yours. And let us open trade between our houses. Your crafters make things I would very much like to acquire, including some of your own crafts."

"So you can put your people in my camp and watch me," Harold said, dry. "I'm sure. But I agree. A couple of fae warriors would be much appreciated — call it a trial run."

She dipped her head, pleased, and took another sip of the tea. This time she closed her eyes over it for just a moment.

"It has been a long while since I enjoyed human tea," she said. "Might I have a few samples of this? Whatever leaf it is."

"I'll have a box sent up with your guards."

They talked a little longer — nothing that cost either of them anything, which he suspected was the point of it for her; he could feel the genuine curiosity she felt. He wasn’t sure what aspect she carried, but the feeling he got from her aura had something to do with Winter and being a collector? Curious for a Sidhe Lord. Then Harold stood, and she rose with him, and he walked her to the door and out into the hall, where two of his knights fell in around her without being told, and she went up and out into the snow she'd walk across without leaving a print.

---

The door had barely shut behind her when Adeline came through the other one.

"That —" She had the ledger clamped to her chest and a color high in her cheeks that had nothing to do with the cold. "That. Hussy!"

Harold laughed. He couldn't help it. He crossed the room and got an arm around her and pulled her in before she could get the ledger up between them like a shield.

"Adeline. I have eyes only for you."

She poked him in the chest with one stiff finger, hard, over the ledger.

"If you had answered her any other way than you did," she said, mock-severe, chin up, "we would be having words, Lord Harold. A great many of them."

He laughed again, and got both arms under her, and picked her up off her feet and spun her once in the little room, the lamp flame ducking and the ledger tipping loose in her grip, and set her down.

"Did I make you jealous, my Lord Lady?" he said.

"You'll drop me. You brute." She caught her breath, got her feet under her, pushed the hair out of her face, her face flushed. "The lords are getting antsy upstairs. They've been up there an hour listening to each other, and it's turning ugly. You need to go up before Caswell drops another one."

"Ok ok, I’m going."

He kissed her. He took his time with it, and by the end of it her free hand had found the front of his shirt, and when he pulled back, she was the one who looked a little unbalanced for once.

"Go," she managed. “Then come back down here.”

Harold went up the stairs smiling broadly.

The hall had been the TOC a few hours ago. The tables and slate boards were gone now, the runners cleared out, and the room was full of lords instead — a few hundred of them, packed down its length, and every head turned toward the ramp when Harold came up it.

A herald stood at the top of the ramp and filled his lungs.

"His lordship Count Harold Calder — Lord of the Landing, Potion Lord, Master of the Basin!"

Harold crossed the hall to the front, to his seat, and the guard peeled off him one at a time to take their posts along the wall. Ren went wide and quiet to the far side. Garrick was already up top, off to the right, a bow held loose at his side that nobody in that crowd had thought to wonder about. Cess stood at Harold's shoulder with her notebook.

He reached the front and turned to face them.

He looked at the faces in the crowd and tried to sort them into their factions.  Off to the left, clustered tight and dressed like coin, the Argent Circle — the coastal trade lords. They were going to be an issue no matter what. Above all, profit drove them, and they traded in anything. Center, a hard knot of western horse lords with their heads bent together around Corran Vayle, who'd wanted this command and believed he'd earned it. If he proved loyal, he would have a position for the man. Up to the right, the northerners, gaunt Oksana Reeve at the head of them, their holdings bled white along the Velthari line; they had no patience for goblins and wanted to focus on the Velthari. And salted through the rest, the smaller alliances of only a few lords, and the unaligned and the frightened. His own people were in there too, seeded where he'd wanted them.

"My lords." He let his eyes go down the room, unhurried. "Thank you for waiting so patiently while I dealt with some business. I know it's been a long morning."

That went over about as well as he'd expected. The grumble ran the length of the hall and doubled back, a few hundred men who'd stood an hour in a locked room deciding all at once to be heard.

"Why did you murder so many lords and people last night?!"

The shout cut over the rest. A big lord near the front, red-faced, Renfeld — Harold knew the name and face.

Harold smiled. It was not a warm thing, and the men close enough to see it knew it.

"That brings us to why I summoned you all here." He let the smile sit. "Since so many of you seem willing to overlook the sins of your fellows, I decided to fix that for you. A new world does not give you free rein to do as you please." His voice stayed level and carried all the same. "I've posted a comprehensive list on the forum. Every name that was killed, and why. You're free to look it over and verify it yourselves." A waited a beat. "As if most of you didn't already know exactly what they did."

That set the Lords off again.

"The ones killed unintentionally, I'll pay a wergild to their families." He spread one hand. "Like a Lannister. I pay my debts."

A few laughs broke out of the crowd — startled, mostly from the back where the younger ones stood. Plenty of the room didn't laugh at all.

"You are not judge, jury, and executioner!"

This one came from the left, a lean lord in good grey wool, working himself up to it. Harold turned on him.

"Wrong, Lord Athren." The man's eyes bugged out when he said his name. Remembering names and faces was child's play with his new mental perk.  "That is exactly what I am. I will not ignore wrongdoing when I witness it." He let his eyes travel off Athren and out across the rest of them, slowly. "Let that be a warning to any here who intend exactly that."

The hall filled with talk again, low and moving, lords leaning to lords, and Harold let it run a moment before he cut through it.

"Now. To why this summit was actually called." He put his knuckles on the table. "We stamp out the goblin city in the mountains. Now — before they march on us in the spring."

"How do we know what you're saying is even true?!" Somewhere in the middle of the press. "You show us a list and a story—"

"Have I been wrong yet?" Harold didn't raise his voice. "Is that a risk you're willing to take? A hundred thousand goblins pouring down out of the mountains and swarming these lands — at the same time the Velthari come at us in earnest from the north?" He found the man in the crowd and laid his eyes on him. "You're a brave man. Braver than me. I don't think I could fight that off."

Nobody answered him.

"You will gather your armies and meet me at the staging grounds my people have prepared. We march on the goblins, then we proceed to the Velthari. I will be overall commander of the alliance." He didn't leave a gap in it. "Does anyone object? No? Good."

Men came in along both walls of the hall then, carrying stacks of bound books, and started handing them out down the rows, handing one to each lord. Harold kept talking over the shuffle of it.

"I've been planning this campaign a long time. I will not allow it to fail. I have prepared these information packets for everyone. And to be sure everyone—" he paused while a lord in the front row took a book without looking at the man who gave it to him "—is fully committed to it."

"There will be consequences for anyone playing politics back here. If I catch one whisper. One rumor. One fucking thought — that one of you is looking to capitalize on your neighbor, one underhanded move being made — my eagles will visit your steles and raze them."

They all remembered the screams that tore through the air last night. Walked by the wreckage of the camps this morning. The threat was real.

"These campaigns must succeed to secure the peninsula for humanity." He turned a hand out toward the whole of the crowd. "Look at humanity across the rest of the sphere. Two regions are struggling to contain a nest — one of them about to consolidate into a city. Another has an alliance of lords enslaving and kidnapping everyone around them. The monsters are getting stronger. You've all seen it. And they will keep getting stronger."

His voice dropped, not softer, just heavier.

"If any of you still think this is not the apocalypse, let me set you straight. It is. Over a billion humans are already dead." He let it land. "How many more before we start working together?"

Something stirred the hall at that — not agreement from all of it, but from more of it than had been with him a minute ago. A few voices rose from the crowd in something like support, low, and the men around them nodded.

A dagger came flying from the crowd faster than an eye could follow. Covered with an immense amount of mana, it left an afterglow in people's eyes as it traveled.

It came out of the press on the right, no shout before it. Just a bright short line of steel turning end over end toward the front of the hall. Ren was already moving. He came off the far wall in a blur no man in that room could track, shield swinging up and around, and took the knife on the boss of his shield a foot from Harold's chest. In the same instant an arrow crossed the hall from where Garrick stood and took the thrower high in the chest, and the man folded and went down into the lords behind him and did not get up. Blood spilled onto the ground as people edged away. One even spit on the corpse.

The hall exploded in noise. Harold didn't move from where he stood.

"Fool," he said. Then, without turning his head: "Colonel Hale. Find out where he was from. Scoop up his people, if they'll have us. We always need the manpower."

"Already on it," Hale said, and pushed off the wall.

The noise was still settling when a man came forward out of it. He came up the center of the hall alone, unhurried, and the lords let him through — a hard, plain-built man who wore command like a second coat.

"I am Lord-Captain Halloran, of the Iron Order." His voice filled the hall without effort. "I understand you're the most powerful man here. That doesn't actually make you the best on a battlefield." He stopped a few paces off and looked Harold over, level. "Why you? Are your soldiers the best? Are your commanders the best? What makes you qualified to lead this gathering?"

Harold nodded slowly. Something in his face eased, close to pleased.

"Now that," he said, "is a sensible question. One I'd hoped one of you would ask."

He reached into his pocket, drew out a small stone, and held it up between two fingers so the room could see it.

"Why don't we test it out?" He turned the stone once. "Your people against mine."