A Time of Tigers - From Peasant to Emperor
Chapter 1334 - 1334: Duties to be Done - Part 4

"Gods boy, you've got a mighty opinion on this, don't you?" Greeves said, taken aback. "I've never heard you talk such sophistry. Are you reckoning yourself to be an idealist, then? I wouldn't have thought… Naw, fuck it, aye, I know what you are. You've always preached morality at me. But that's borderline religious talk, that is.

You know men aren't made of those kinds of ingredients. You can't write pretty words down on the page of some ancient scripture and expect a man to be capable of conforming to them. Men ain't that simple. King or not."

"A King shouldn't be simple. He isn't allowed to be a man," Oliver said. "A King's power extends to the entire nation, he is treated as an individual above the rest. If he is so different from the rest of us, then he should be made to act differently from the rest of us. He should at least cling to an ideal that the rest of us couldn't hope to embody with our normal lives.

If he can't do it, what hope do the rest of us have?"

"Is that the sort of King you want? I'm fine with a normal man. As long as he's competent, I can admire that," Greeves said. "I don't care if he has more women than he's married, or if he breaks a few oaths and drinks more than he should. As long as he gets the job done, when the moment counts, and he makes the country better for it, ain't that a good king?"

Oliver considered it. "Maybe. But then, competence is an ideal, isn't it?"

"Yer twisting things again, I don't even know what you're arguing about now. You wanted some sort of pure ideal of a man, some sort of priest in a King's flesh. Dunno how competence ties into that," Greeves said.

"Competence requires a man to become more than other men to achieve," Oliver said. "Don't you think it's of the same line? The same thing of spirit that would require a King to become separate from more human desires, and at least banish corruption from what is near him, and try to make the foundations of our nation something that we can rely on."

"Think it's a wasted effort," Greeves said. "The bits of history that are tossed down, it's competence, not purity, that rules the masses. The crown is always seized with blood and an iron fist, not with ideals. If ideals were the be all and end all, then we'd be calling a Pendragon, in the form of Arthur, our King."

"He died for his people," Oliver said. "He's more a King than this current one… This current one… He's… Bound by fear."

When Oliver said that, his teeth showed their white, as he pulled his lips back, and his eyes flickered towards gold. "He'll pay the price, in the end. I know that he will. But what does it take to crush a man like that, no matter how corrupt? More than I have currently, at the very least."

"At the very least, we can agree on that," Greeves said. "But now you've got a Blackthorn swearing loyalty to you. There's two major Houses there, and just little old you, the peasant Beam, is who they call their Lord. If you want to talk about an ideal, something separate from men, that's something right there."

"I'm trying not to think about it," Oliver said dryly. "It's sure to cause a few headaches. You've met the father. You know how he'll react when next we meet."

Greeves laughed at that. "Aye, I pissing do. It must be worse for him than seeing his daughter married. And to a Patrick at that… Well, at least you've got the name of a General slayer name. I suppose they can't knock you too much anymore… Hah.

When you go to this Capital, and that King is forced to twist those thick lips of his, and give you praise in front of the entire nation, ain't that a good bit of revenge?"

When put like that, Oliver had to admit, he did agree. "Still, I'm after a revenge a degree more potent than that."

"Aye, I know you are," Greeves said, his voice quieting for a second, as he looked behind him, as if suspecting someone might be listening in on them.

For as suspicious as Greeves was, and as certain and ambitious as Oliver at times felt himself to be, there was little to be accomplished in that living room of Oliver's, with its by now well used sofas, holding host to a variety of different strategy meetings. What really would be the determiner, Oliver knew, in the end, had to be time.

For as much as he might have spoken his ideals, he knew that time was the great changer of all things. Until its waves brought him towards the future, and the very moment into which the revenge would pass, he could not say for certain how things would turn out.

There was, however, a person that was capable of speaking with almost as certainty as Oliver, and at the very least, far more than Greeves. When she spoke, she tended not to speak overly about the future, however. A huntress needed to focus on the prey in front of her, for as the old proverb went, the hunter that tried to catch two rabbits at once was the very huntress that caught neither.

"You're an idiot," Nila admonished him.

Oliver had to grin. It was just the two of them, in the of the night, outside Nila Felder's old home. She'd stirred when she heard a knock at the door, and after her mother had taken the time to greet Oliver, she'd made sure to chase her back inside so that they could talk more privately elsewhere.

He knew that when he delivered the news, Nila's reaction would be as it was. She practically glowed with confidence in the entranceway to that house of hers. The fear that she'd spoken of – and the two of them had danced around – seemed none existent. She glowed with all the fire that Nila Felder was meant to glow with, and despite her size, she seemed to have quite the giant presence indeed.

'I suppose the little fox prefers to be in her home territory,' Oliver noted, but he did not say that aloud. He instead gave a little shrug, and deflected her admonishment.