TVisTV Book 4: Chapter 8 (RAW) (Patreon)

Chapter 8 - The Proposal

Be generous in favors but clear in business

- Unknown.

Covering her mouth with one hand, Seraphina laughed. It was a tinkling, melodic sound, and it carried beautifully through the hall. Her eyes never left Enkarn. She measured him, valued him, and then finally decided.

“You would welcome me in your Tribe the Three Bears, would you?” she asked, smiling a vixen’s smile. “You think yourself worthy of me?”

The young girl’s smile widened. “How lovably preposterous.”

Enkarn went rigid, his hands curling into fists at his sides. Beside him, the Windspeaker all but quivered with rage. Seraphina allowed them to stew in it for a moment, just long enough for their anger to climb toward its crest.

“I daresay I wonder how you could possibly hope to pay the bride price of a Dragon Slayer,” she added slowly, her voice almost a languorous drawl as she shook her head and wagged her finger.

“Granddaughter,” Lady Adelaide warned, shooting her a dark look, “save your boasts and flights of fancy for another time.”

“They are not boasts if they are facts,” Seraphina shot back.

Then she stepped closer to Enkarn, close enough that he truly did tower over her, looming over her like a wall of flesh, steel, fur, and old violence. Seraphina just looked up at him with open challenge.

“Do you take me for someone who would lie?” she asked, all sweetness and honey. “Then you not only impugn my honor, but you also have poor taste in women, I think. I killed an Ice Drake, practically by myself, and I say I killed a Dragon. If you cannot hear the truth in my words, then you, my dear, must truly be deaf. And remember, if you insult my honor again, I will be forced to defend it. Personally.”

Her smile turned sharp. “Ask your Windspeaker to read the truth behind my words.”

The Windspeaker shifted, suddenly uncomfortable. The challenge had caught her off guard, and there was no graceful way to refuse it.

Enkarn did not look away from Seraphina. “Does the girl speak the truth?” he asked.

Silence fell, and the tension stretched taut as a drum skin.

“She does,” the woman admitted at last, the words coming with almost visible pain. “Either that, or she is gifted with a very particular kind of madness.”

In Seraphina’s mind, the entire situation had begun to feel strange. Odd. Fated, even. Like something drawn from the old tales, where princesses made demands no sensible man would accept, and fools mistook a beautiful death for high romance. So, just like a princess in a story, the young girl decided to give him an impossible task.

“I will give you an ingot of Mithril for every member of your immediate family,” she said, “and my name to add to your own as my dowry. But my bride price, a bride price worthy of me, is the life of another Dragon.”

Enkarn stared down at her, suddenly very still. “You would have me hunt a Skylord?” he asked suddenly in Aranthian, and there was no jest in his voice.

“So it speaks a civilized tongue?” Seraphina replied with breathtaking condescension. “Yes, I mean what I say. But then again, perhaps a true Dragon is beyond you. Perhaps… this, or ‘we’, were never meant to be.”

She tilted her head, considering him as one might consider an amusingly eager hound.

“So let me give you another Dragon instead. A Dragon without wings, who sits upon a throne of jade. Yes. That would be suitable,” she added with a dazzling smile, running a hand across the big man’s massive forearm. “By all that is true, that would be enough to win a lady’s favor. A real Dragon, or the dragon that sits indolent on a stone chair… And, think on this. What gives you joy, my En? Truly? I give you a quest that will be spoken of long after the mountains have been worn down to nothing. Your name will live on through the ages and beyond even the ice… ”

She looked at his eyes, drank in the wildness, then at his full lips, slightly chapped by winter’s touch, then back to his eyes—calculating and assessing potential profit and loss.

“Seraphina!” a flushed Lady Adelaide cut in. “Stop this nonsense. This is madness. Now, Enkarn, a more suitable gift to smooth things over would be metal, good steel, enough for…”

The blonde girl simply shrugged as if suddenly disinterested at this mundane detail, then one breath later looked at Enkarn again, all mystery and feminine challenge.

She could almost feel her Charisma pressing upon the hidden dice rolls of whatever persuasion and charm checks must have been taking place.

No, that was not quite right.

The young noblewoman could feel it less as influence and more as inevitability, as though the world itself had begun slotting each piece into its proper place.

The tribals muttered behind their leader, low and ugly sounds that seemed one careless breath away from predictable violence. Seraphina looked around and noted the distinct lack of friendly men with sharp blades to aid them. Thinking upon it, she realized that Adelaide had probably not summoned her household guard to meet them as a show of strength. A bluff that was not truly a bluff if there ever was one.

Though the barbarians continued in their complaint, Enkarn’s eyes burned with a new, and feverish light.

“No,” he said, almost to himself. “This will be a tale for the ages. Something to add to my saga. It shall be like the epics and sagas of old. A labor.”

His gaze fixed upon her. “I will hold you to your word, Dragon Slayer.”

Seraphina laughed to herself on the inside and curtsied low. Heaven was truly fair; it gave the Tribal such a fine and strong body, but a weak and easily manipulated mind. Men could be such simpletons when one appealed to their foolish pride, her own voice whispered to her.

“My grandmother would, of course, be willing to provide good steel to aid you in your quest,” she said sweetly. “As a sign of good faith between our peoples.”

It was a long shot, but if she was going to make a stab at her grand ambitions, she might as well do so with a sharpened blade. Not to mention that it would be interesting to see how many warriors this Enkarn could summon to his name.

He was, if Seraphina’s memory served her properly, not part of the original character lineup. That meant he was either a procedurally generated character, or one added after the last update, which she had never been able to test. One quirk of the game’s engine was that it did allow procgen characters to rise to the same heights as named ones, provided the conditions were right.

This promised to be most interesting indeed.

And if he somehow succeeded in his quest, then Seraphina would decide what to do with him afterward. Perhaps she would introduce him to baths, shears, and the civilizing miracle of scented soap. Or perhaps she would introduce him to Cornelia’s stomach. It would all really depend on her mood.

Either way, the young girl had very little to lose. A shot never taken, after all, was a shot that had already missed.

She gave them all another dazzling smile. “Well then, this maiden fair would never dream of keeping you. The sooner your people begin, the sooner you may finish. I confess, I find myself rather eager to see how this story ends.”

Her green eyes settled on Enkarn one final time, bright and merciless. “So I bid you good day, future Lord Enkarn. Future chief of all the tribes, of those who walk the ice and those who dwell in stone tents.”

With that, Seraphina turned and began to ascend the grand staircase. From the corner of her eye, she caught her grandmother making a sharp gesture to one of the senior servants, perhaps her new steward. Orders would be given. Gifts of steel counted. Courtesies observed would be observed, the machinery of consequence had already begun to move.

Six steps up, she heard her darling grandmother coming after her. Seraphina slowed by the smallest possible measure.

“I hope you know what you are doing,” Lady Adelaide hissed into her ear as the older woman drew beside her.

Seraphina nodded slightly, but did not turn. She continued upward, the very picture of grace and poise.

“Oh, he does look rather capable,” she commented lightly. “I would not put him out of the running immediately.”

“It is almost impossible,” Adelaide said, voice low and hard. “But if that boy succeeds at the next tribal Moot, you will have unleashed a storm that cannot simply be caged again.”

“Boy?” Seraphina chuckled. “I suppose from your perspective, Grandmother, we are all children. But the ‘boy’ Enkarn can hardly be called a boy. He just proposed to me in his own clumsy fashion, and with rather more passion than the Crown Prince ever managed.”

“That is not the point, my dear.”

“I do not see why you are so worried. You said it yourself. It is almost impossible for him to succeed. If he fails, the problem is neatly solved. If he succeeds, then we gain a rather interesting advantage,” the young girl replied airily.

Adelaide stopped on the stairs and looked back down toward the entrance hall, where the northern party was beginning to withdraw in a great mass of fur, steel, bone, and wounded pride. 

They had been dismissed, and they knew it.

“To succeed fully, perhaps,” Lady Adelaide insisted. “But even if he rouses only a fraction of the tribes, there will be blood enough to drown sense. The Three Bears alone number in the hundreds of thousands.”

Seraphina glanced back at her as her breath momentarily caught in her throat. “Hundreds of thousands? That sounds like a rather heroic exaggeration. I would not think the frozen tundra and wasteland could support such a number of people.”

“The North is vast,” Adelaide replied sternly. “Vaster than southern maps admit, and far less empty than southern lords prefer to believe. That is why I have spent decades keeping peace with them. Once the tribes are roused, they do not easily return to their tents. ”

The young noblewoman sighed. “Again, Grandmother, I do not quite see the problem.”

Adelaide’s eyes narrowed.

Seraphina turned fully then, resting one hand upon the polished banister. “I like to think of myself as a patriot. With the Kingdom of Aranthia currently fracturing at the seams, through no fault of mine, I might add, it would be useful to have one of our primary rivals and frequent enemies suitably distracted. Would it not?”

“That is a very blithe way to speak of the slaughter of thousands.”

“It is a very practical way to speak of war.” Seraphina’s smile thinned. “We work with the crude tools at hand, and with the hand we are dealt.”

For a moment, Adelaide only looked at her. Then she exhaled through her nose and shook her head.

“You know,” she returned, “that is exactly the sort of thing your mother would say. All confidence and sharpened certainty, with some remark afterward about how she had seen it with her Sight.”

“I will take that as a compliment,” Seraphina said, suppressing a small snigger. “I need every advantage I can get. I understand perfectly well what I am now. I am a prize to be sold to the highest bidder, except the bidders have armies.”

“That is a very sad and vulgar way to describe marriage,” commented Adelaide sadly. 

Her expression sharpened, and for a heartbeat the girl in silk looked far older than her years, the weight of two lives lived falling squarely on her shoulders. “But, it is a truthful one. My value may rise or fall with time, scandal, victory, defeat, rumor, legitimacy, and whatever nonsense fate throws my way. Trust me, Grandmother, I have been considering this from every angle.”

She paused and took a small breath to steady her thoughts.

“As you have said before, I must choose. And, more importantly, I must choose wisely. So, if I must choose, then it is advantageous to have as many options available as possible.”

Adelaide placed a hand upon the young girl’s arm. Her grip was not hard, but it carried the weight of warning. “At least you have something resembling a plan,” she said with a sigh. “But I will repeat myself, since no one in this family seems inclined to listen the first time. I hope you know what you are doing.”

Seraphina smiled up at her. “So do I, dear Grandmother.”