The court always seemed like such a strange, suffocating place for Basil. For all his tutoring and the heavy blood of a conqueror in his veins, he could not fully grasp its everyday function. To have so many people, boasting so many wildly different backgrounds and conflicting interests, shoved together under one sprawling roof of polished stone and gilded wood, it felt less like a seat of government and more like a cage filled with sharks where they were all forced to stand on each other’s backs just to breathe.

Not that he was entirely unaware of the raw reason it existed in the first place. At the bare, unvarnished truth of things, humanity shared a few identical, base tendencies, and the most fiercely hardwired of them all was the instinct to follow power.

Power was a roaring fire, and the court was the hearth. Each man who walked these halls was an insect with his own frantic wishes and desperate hopes, fluttering blindly toward the flame, praying for warmth. And the worst part? The hearth was built right over a nest of snakes. So, in their desperate search for warmth, they constantly risked becoming mere ashes themselves.

He remembered leaning his elbows against the balustrade of the high gallery, looking down at the crowded great hall below. From up here, the aristocrats, the preening poets, the loud minstrels, the ink-stained bureaucrats, and the smooth-tongued diplomats looked like a sea of colorful silk and velvet, shifting and swirling in a mindless, exhausting dance. They smiled, they bowed, they toasted each other with sweet southern vintages of his father’s making, and beneath it all, they were calculating exactly how many inches of steel it would take to slide cleanly between their neighbor’s ribs.

They all look like they are trying too hard, he thought.

It was a horrible thing to behold, entirely irrational, utterly devoid of logic.What was their use in the government?

Every time the Queen forced him to accompany her to these sessions, Basil sat there acutely, agonizingly aware of the dozens of petty plots spider-webbing in the background. One minor lord or another was always plotting to convince his mother to grant a court seat to some dim-witted nephew just to spite a rival.

Some useless post about seeing how green the dirt beneath the royal foot was.Or to see how firm their turds were.

Minstrels screamed themselves hoarse about their new songs while poets practically wept over their latest lyrics. Every single time a performance ended, the entire room clapped, politely and lyingly.

Sometimes a lord or a wealthy courtier would go completely out of his way to beg for some trivial favor, or awkwardly present a blushing daughter or an eligible niece. One particularly bold minstrel had even composed an entire poem about Basil himself.

Of that whole miserable shit-show Basil had been forced to grit his teeth through, one specific, mocking rhyme stuck in his throat like a dry bone:

While noble knights on chargers trod,

And legions marched to paint red the sod,

The princeling hid from princess and court

With humble turnips for companion and support.

At the end of the dreadful performance, the minstrel had bowed low, practically scraping his nose on the rushes, and asked the young prince for his artistic opinion. Basil had forced a polite, courtly smile, his voice smooth as silk as he lied and told the man he thoroughly enjoyed it, even asking for another verse.

A prince was expected to be courteous and charming, the books said that after all, and he knew very well why that poem had been sung ahead of him. The instant the words left his mouth, the entire court erupted into clapping and chuckle, as if the assembly needed his royal permission just to find something funny.

But beneath his placid mask, all Basil wanted was to drive a dagger straight into the singer’s eye for bothering him with such trivial nonsense. His father was working tirelessly day and night for the literal survival of the state, and here Basil was, wasting his precious time he could use helping his father, hearing about turnips, horse shitting, and watching grown men laugh like fools.

He was working on a task his father had given him, so why was he there?

Even that stray dog of Oizen, young Edmund, had found the whole thing absolutely hilarious. The hostage , the useless younger brother to the crownless Sorza, sat there with his chinless face bobbing up and down, his oversized Adam’s apple bouncing frantically like a trapped bird as he desperately looked around the room to see if the other lords approved of his laughter.

He was a pathetic creature, probably starved of a single drop of genuine affection growing up in his brother’s shadow. He was downright disgusting; that was the singular thought Basil had formed the very moment Edmund had first presented himself to the court. For all Basil knew, the Oizenian was as stupid as he was repulsive, constantly nodding his head like a trained hound to whatever nonsense the older lords spouted, occasionally chiming in with the most lackluster, painfully awkward responses that the idiot probably thought were exceptionally clever and appropriate for high society.

For a moment, Basil had genuinely wondered if the chinless fool was entirely unaware of his own role in this grand game. The man smiled and joked, completely oblivious to the fact that the absolute second his dear elder brother Sorza acted up or raised a war banner in the south, Edmund’s would be the very first head to roll off the executioner’s block to be sent to his brother’ with an apple between his lips.

And yet, that weak bastard had the sheer stones to laugh at turnip jokes at Basil’s expense.

It was a nonsense his mother had absolutely insisted on him participating in. He heavily suspected this was her way of punishing him for his past disobedience, as if a little public embarrassment would magically set him straight and teach him the value of courtly decorum.

But what was the idle laughter of a few sycophants compared to what he had feared in that war? What was their mockery compared to the agonizing hours he had spent dying inside during the war, genuinely believing his entire world was about to come crashing down? He had spent nights trapped in a cold sweat thinking his father would die in the mud, that the vanguard legions would perish to the last man, and that Yarzat would be wiped from the maps.

Compared to that terrifying, dark future, what did the laughter of these dressed-up magpies mean? Absolutely nothing.Less than the dirt trod beneath his boot.

He hated them all. Every single one of them was an idle parasite, wasting precious daylight preening themselves instead of doing something, anything, useful for the state. Basil swore a silent, iron oath to himself right then and there: when the day finally came for him to wear the crown, he would purge the palace of all this foolishness. Soldiers and ministers were all that was needed to have the state led.

Soldiers did not lie, that was what he found most pleasing about them, they all knew death enough to hear her gather her breath beneath their necks, so they all had a rated honest approach to life, one that his father and as a consequence , he , admired.

When he would become king, there would be no more poets, no more chinless hostages laughing at court dinners as if they were the host, and no more useless pageantry.

His father would have set the whole court straight himself years ago, if he could only bring himself to care about the palace gossip. But his father left that theater entirely to his wife; the King knew the court was the Queen’s rightful domain, and he refused to attempt anything that would breach her rights and cause a domestic war he did not wish to fight.

Still, Basil reflected bitterly as he watched another courtier bow, while his mother’s endless lessons in courtly charm were the most boring, insufferable torture imaginable, his father’s rare lessons in statecraft were always all the more wise to listen to. Iron meant something. Turnips and laughter did not.

Lately, there had been two major additions to this circus, both of them highly important guests in their own right, occupying seats of honor near the dais.

The first was the Romelian envoy, Doria. It had been years since Basil had last met the man, some six winters, perhaps, back when he was still a boy watching from the shadows. Doria had come down from the imperial north to negotiate a larger share of commercial products to be exported to the Romelian Emperor, a consequence of the half-monopoly trade market that the Romelian crown had set up in his turf. The envoy was elegant, seamlessly courteous, and uniquely capable of holding an actually interesting, intelligent conversation, a rare, refreshing skill that almost no one else in this crowded room possessed.

And then, there was the old man. Archon Vesperian.

Basil did not like the archon from the very first moment he laid eyes on his sagging, liver-spotted skin and judging, cold blue eyes. The Archon was respectful enough of his own high position, to be sure, and his morning had been completely consumed by an endless parade of preening courtiers and minor lords flocking his way just to greet him, with the old priest indifferently giving them a standard blessing or a flick of his fingers in return.

Uncle Jarza had been among the last of to approach the holy man. Strangely, that was the only part of the entire afternoon where Basil thought the Archon actually looked genuinely impressed and content. It was not every day, after all, that one met a towering, scarred Azanian strictly followed the path of the Five Gods instead of the pagan fire god of the deep desert. The two of them had spoken with one another rather animously, sharing deep smiles and sharp nods, before Jarza finally bid him farewell after receiving a remarkably long, personalized blessing that the old man chanted over the legate.

Jarza appeared pretty damn happy about the whole exchange, walking back to his seat with a proud swell to his massive chest.But when Basil decided it was his turn to greet the holy man and dive into those judging eyes, the young prince could not find a single drop of such joy in his heart.