A Time of Tigers - From Peasant to Emperor
Chapter 1703 - 1703: To Poke a Bear - Part 5

"Another winter," Oliver said. "With the whiteness of the world, I imagine it looks quite the same. For the rest of the Stormfront, the country is in upheaval, but will it matter to you who sits the throne of the High King?"

"Can they take more from us than they already do?" The Elder said. "If the taxes were any higher, we would have no food to sustain ourselves with. The only future that we'd care about, is that of a King that would honour the peasantry. But as far as we are concerned, this is our own country – as far as the nobles are concerned, that is the case too. We fend for ourselves."

"That be right! Now you back off out of Heath's Edge land, Lord Patrick, and you go back to where you came from!"

"Careful," the Elder warned to that man, who had dared to shout. "Careful in your disrespect, when a man above us has chosen to speak to us honestly."

He didn't shout, his voice was rasping, and it was weak, with hardly the strength of a quiet breeze. But it commanded enough respect that the young man – with spear bristling in hand – was still rather quickly brought to silence.

"We might refuse you," the Elder said to Oliver. "But we do not wish to make enemies of you."

"Despite the masters that have turned their swords against us?" Oliver asked.

"You pointed out quite rightly that they care not for us," the Elder said. "The only loyalty we owe them is the loyalty that prevents them from outright attacking us."

Oliver dipped his head. "And I have no wish to make enemies of you either," Oliver said honestly. "If there comes more freedom than I currently have, I will do what I can to send you aid, to see you through the winter."

The Elder shook his head. "Those sound like empty promises, Lord Patrick, given the nature of your situation."

"Indeed, they might well be," Oliver said. "They sound hollow even saying them myself. But I know your place on the map, and I know your situation. If the means are available to me, I shall not forget you."

"The day that happens will be the day that my old ideas of the world come tumbling down," the Elder said. "If you were to make that gift, you'd kill me with it."

"I shall make it regardless, and pray that it isn't the dagger that you fear it to be," Oliver said. "Very well, gentlemen. We have said all that we wished to say. People of Heath's Edge – you have your warning, and you know of my intentions. Know to of what people of your station have achieved, a short few days marching from you. Know your station weighs not within the limits that you have been told. You fight your battle with winter, as many peasants do, and I wish you luck in it. But if you have even a tenth of the courage that those peasants I fought alongside did, you will turn winter on its head, with the same ease that you do in summer. You shall survive, with the hardiness that you always do."

"Farewell, Oliver Patrick," the Elder said. "Part your encirclement. Allow him to go. You do not wish to be known as the fools that dared to harm him."

The peasants hastily got out of Oliver's way, as he wheeled his horse back around, directing its nose along the trail that had brought him into the village. He could feel the unease of the Yoreholder men once again, as they seemingly found themselves brought upon yet another mission that had ended in the utmost of pointlessness, with them failing to achieve what they had set out to.

"Don't you think you gave in a little too easily back there?" Blackthorn asked, when they had ridden a short while away.

"Perhaps," Oliver said.

"You could have spoken more eloquently, with the aim of convincing them," Blackthorn said. "I've seen you do it before. You could have stirred them into action if you had wanted to."

"Perhaps that is again true," Oliver said. "But a village like that, and its governance, it has a good deal of problems that they need to solve. The winter itself is one. What can we offer them, with Tavar's army on the march, and so close behind? There's nothing. If we took what fighting men we could, how would the rest of the village fair for the winter?"

"…I don't know," Blackthorn frowned. "But wasn't that always a problem? Wouldn't we have always have had to worry about that from the start? What was even the point in going there?"

Oliver held up a finger from the saddle, and smiled at her. Blackthorn pulled a face even more strongly, finally showing enough emotion that even the likes of strangers could understand her irritation.

"I don't understand at all what you mean," Blackthorn said. "I don't understand what we are doing either."

Oliver shrugged. "I suppose not," he said. "It would be difficult to understand that which is no true plan at all. I am not sure as to my own intentions yet. I am simply feeling out the situation. To that end, I would visit another village."

And indeed they did, leaving Heath Edge's behind, they picked up the speed of their mounts, and went to visit another one of the peasant villages scattered across the plains. This one, at least, had a tiny little woodland of its own. But it wasn't large enough that they could cut down all the trees that they wanted. They had to carefully steward it. As such, when Oliver and his men arrived, they were even more mistrustful than the likes of Heath's Edge had been.

They hardly let him into the village before they raised up their arms and their spears, like mother birds protecting their nest, seeing him as some sort of egg eating serpent, out only to gobble up their supply of wood.

"You can't have any of it!" They told him. "Be on your way now!"