A Time of Tigers - From Peasant to Emperor
Chapter 1728 - 1728: The Pieces - Part 6

Lord Idris turned to her with a frown. "My Queen, what—" He started to ask, but then he saw the fierce look that she pierced him with, and he had no more questions for her.

He had been standing in the centre of lengthy tables that had been arranged in a square. It looked more like a colosseum, or a self-imposed trap, than it did a room set for discussion. Those merchants, and all their fine dress, with their dyed fur coats, and their feathered hats, and velvet slippers – they were intimidating enough, and they were far from friendly. Their arriving, it seemed, had been with the promise of blood. Animosity hung in the air. Queen Asabel did not doubt that Lord Idris had been on the receiving end of more than a few rather vicious verbal attacks.

How could he not be? When their political position was so tentative. They were invaders and tyrants. The merchants had every right to leverage their supposed disgust, and to berate the man that stood before them, to weaken his position and secure better benefits for themselves. That is, if they were to come to any agreement at all?

That was another question – why would they? Why would they serve the throne of rebels that seemed certain to lose the war? Merchants like that had already made their wealth. They needed take no risks. They had only need protect what they already had.

It was a room that loved her not. It was both icy, and filled with a corrupt kind of fire that wished to see Asabel Pendragon burned. When she met their eyes, she felt her heart flutter with a strange kind of fear. When she dwelled on it, she knew very much the importance of the occasion, and that came with an anxiety all on its own.

The different emotions that swam about in her chest were the subject of the utmost discomfort. To stand still in them was hardly bearable. Ordinarily, as of late, they would have been things that Asabel fled from. The burdens of a heavy heart. But now to flee was worse. To return to her bed, and her room, confined with her thoughts. She feared that more than anything. And now she had something else too – a hand in the back, delivered from afar. Someone else's fire that she could borrow, so that she might remember her own.

"Allow me, Lord Idris, to see speak to these men," she said formally, though Lord Idris had already ceded the floor to her.

"By all means, Queen Asabel," the Pillar of Coin said, giving in so easily, when in the past he might have counselled against it. Asabel had heard Oliver remark a good deal of times about the keenness of Verdant's eyes, his ability to see beyond even what Oliver was currently thinking, and towards his future wants. She had to wonder if that was a keenness that Verdant's father shared. She wondered if he saw properly the resoluteness that she had arrived with, and her determination. She wondered if that was what he bowed to.

She did not arrive with friendliness, as she stared those men down. They glared at her fiercely, and so indeed, did Asabel Pendragon glare back. She was a fierce little lioness in her own right – or so she had been told, until the pressures of her position had begun to make her feel weaker than a butterfly.

With her golden hair, and her green eyes, she was at least the very image of one. They seemed, temporarily at least, caught off guard by her, in the same way that Lord Idris momentarily had been. For even if she was a woman that they called a tyrant, she still bore the silver crown of a Queen on her head. They couldn't very well insult her as openly as they had dared to insult Lord Idris.

"You are making our position very difficult," she accused them. "In your greed, you are making the lives of my Pillars far harder than they need to be."

She struck out harshly, throwing her claws at them, saying what it was that she honestly felt. It was a childish little interpretation of the situation, but she didn't care anymore. Perhaps she might be childish at heart. But so was Oliver, wasn't he? They both had romantic ideals, and ways of seeing the world that many did not agree with. Wasn't that why they had begun on their path in the first place? Why ought they to shy away from such things now, so firmly entrenched down the route as they were?

A merchant could not resist biting back. His beard was quite clearly dyed gold. The colour looked strange on him, when it contrasted with the grey of his old eyebrows, and the wrinkle of his head.

"Greed, Queen Asabel?" He said, not bothering to hide the outrage in his voice, even if he managed to keep his words civil. "That seems a rather harsh accusation, given the position that you have put in. You have arrived to burn our cities, plunder our stores, and make obsolete our trade routes."

"I have arrived, merchant, to snatch my birthright," she told him shamelessly. "And indeed I have taken it, have I not? When you received your guild license, you swore yourselves to this land, and those that would inherit and govern it. Am I not its inheritor?"

"You took it by force," the man protested. "That is not how an inheritance works."

"I took it early, because the situation demanded that I did," Asabel said. "I took a position earlier than I was ready to take it. I have no regrets on that matter. Do you think an oath to be a timely thing? Five years from now, I would have been your Queen regardless. Would you have acted like this then, when our lands did need you most?"

"You are who inflicted the ruin, Queen Asabel," another merchant interrupted. A far younger man. He seemed dangerous for his youth at that table. He was cleanly dressed, but not richly. His deep black hair shone like ink from the oil that ran through it. "Had you waited to peacefully inherit, we would have had no qualms. It's your rushing, Queen Asabel, that has inflicted this destruction. You have gone against the natural course of things."