It wouldn't be long before the breezes from...
It wouldn't be long before the breezes from Khardhun gentled the air and the seas around her
Alberico of Barbadior lay down at night thinking about them, and rose up in the morning doing the same, after intense, agitated nights of little rest, shot through with lurid, disturbing dreams
If the winter had been unsettling, rife with small incidents and rumors, the events of early spring were something else entirelyAnd there was nothing small, nothing only marginally provocative about them
Everything seemed to be happening at onceComing down from his bedchamber to his offices of state, Alberico would find his mood darkening with every step in the apprehensive anticipation of what might next be reported to him
The windows of the palace were open now to let the mild breezes sweep throughIt had been some time since it had been warm enough to do that and for much of the autumn and winter there had been bodies rotting on death-wheels in the squareSandreni bodies, Nievolene, ScalvaianeA dozen poets wheeled at randomNot conducive to opening windows, thatNecessary though, and lucrative, after his confiscation of the conspirators' landsHe liked when necessity and gain tiffany co earrings came together; it didn't happen often but when it did the marriage seemed to Alberico of Barbadior to represent almost the purest pleasure to be found in power
This spring however his pleasures had been few and trivial in scope, and the burgeoning of new troubles made those of the winter seem like minor, ephemeral afflictions, brief flurries of snow in a nightWhat he was dealing with now were rivers in flood, everywhere he looked
At the very beginning of spring a wizard was detected using his magic in the southern highlands, but the Tracker and the twenty-five men Siferval had immediately sent after him had been slaughtered in a pass by outlaws, to the last manAn act of arrogance and revolt almost impossible to believe
And he couldn't even properly exact retribution: the villages and farms scattered through the highlands hated the outlaws as much or more than the Barbadians didAnd it had been an Ember Night, with no decent man abroad to see who might have done this unprecedented deedSiferval sent a hundred men from Fort Ortiz to hunt the brigands downOnly long dead campfires in the hillsIt was as if the twenty-five men had been slain by ghosts: which, gucci knockoff handbags predictably, is what the people of the highlands were already sayingIt had been an Ember Night after all, and everyone knew the dead were abroad on such nightsThe dead, hungry for retribution
"How clever of the dead to use new-fletched arrows," Siferval's written report had offered sardonically, when he sent two captains to carry the tidings northHis men had retreated quickly in whey-faced terror at the expression on Alberico's faceIt was, after all, the Third Company which had allowed twenty-five of its men to be killed, and had then sent out another hundred incompetents to do no more than elicit laughter, wandering about in the hillsAlberico had been forced to fight back an urge to torch the Certandan hamlet nearest to those hills, but he knew how destructive that would be in the longer runIt would undermine all the benefits of the focused restraint he'd used in the affair of the Sandreni plotThat night his eyelid began to droop again, the way it had in the early autumn
Then, very shortly after, came the news from Quileia
He had nourished such hopes there after the shocking fall of the MatriarchyIt was such an enormous, ripe new market for trade, an absolute fendi black leather spy bag harvest for the EmpireAnd one, most importantly, that would be brought into Barbadior's aegis by that ever vigilant guardian of the western borders of the Empire, Alberico of the Eastern PalmSo much rich hope and promise there, and so little actual prospect of difficultyEven if this Marius, this crippled priestess-killer on his precarious throne, chose to trade west with Ygrath as well as east that was all rightQuileia was more than large enough to offer bounty both waysSoon enough it should be possible to make the uncouth fellow see the many-faceted advantages of focusing his dealings towards Barbadior
In the evolution of the Barbadian Empire there had emerged a number of ways, a great many time-honored ways, some subtle, some rather less so, of causing men to see things in a particular lightAlberico had a few thoughts of his own about even newer means of persuading petty monarchs to view matters usefullyHe fully intended to explore them, once he was homeFor that, after all, was the point, the point of absolutely everythingExcept that the events of the spring utterly refused to cooperate
Marius of Quileia sent a gratifyingly swift reply to Alberico's latest chanel mens watches j12 benevolent offer to tradeAn emissary delivered it directly into the hands of Siferval in Fort Ortiz
Unfortunately, that brief gratification had been smashed and annihilated when the letter reached Astibar, carried north this time, in recognition of its importance, by Siferval himselfCouched in unexpectedly sophisticated language it contained a message that, however politely and circuitously phrased, was flat and clear: the Quileian regretfully judged that Brandin of Ygrath was the greater, firmer power in the Palm, and as such, and being but green in his own power, he could not risk incurring the anger of the King of Ygrath by trading with Alberico, a minor lord of the Empire, much as he might want to
It was a letter that could easily drive a man into a killing rage
Fighting for self-control, Alberico had seen cringing apprehension in his clerks and advisors, and even a quickly veiled fear in the eyes of the captain of the Third CompanyThen, when Siferval handed over the second letter, the one, he explained, that he had so cleverly arranged to extract and copy from the saddle pouch of the overly garrulous Quileian emissary, Alberico felt all control deserting gucci ladies watch hi