The room smelled of many beaten Conservatives. In a word? Garlic. The Court was circular, with a ceiling similar in shape and color to a marble fruit bowl, minus the fruits, plus the pesky chandeliers, and had around two hundred sturdy oak chairs arranged in an appropriately circular fashion.
Lord Wyldon, sitting opposite to the Progressives' side of the room, peeled back one eyelid. Alanna, ready to explode with her accumulated excrement, sat squarely in front of him. You'd think, for all her experience, she would have mellowed with time, but as with many more abstract problems, that thought was alien to her.
He squinted a bit; he couldn't open the other eye. He—He just couldn't. It was resting for the Ordeal of the Technicolor Eyes to come. Neal with his emerald green eyes, King Jon with his sapphire blue eyes, Alanna with her amethyst purple eyes (though in Wyldon's opinion, it was more of a tanzanite color), Queen Thayet with her topaz eyes, the Lord Provost with his aquamarine ones, Raoul with his onyx eyes, Myles with his peridot eyes, and the list went on. What? Had their parents somehow pilfered the jewel shop and implanted it in their children's genes?
Wyldon shook his head. Alanna's red hair, phosphorescently pasty skin (not even one freckle; her skin was contrary to showing the sun that it had impacted it, albeit, for the better) should be banned for being capable of provoking an epileptic attack. And the cut of her olive green tunic did nothing for her stocky build.
Sigh. He lowered his eyelid until he could only see a miserable sliver of his miserable surroundings. Alanna, the blasted sun streaming through the blasted bay windows, there was nothing good about these times that they were living in. It was the worst of times. Period.
He shifted on his chair, bumping the heavy desk in front of him with his knee. Pain? What was it? Seeing Alanna's smirk, he slapped his leg for good measure, the sound ricocheting off the walls of the empty room. Nothing. Pain was weakness leaving the body, and the pain refugees from his nervous system had long taken up residence in his opponents.
He watched as Alanna slowly raised a gloved hand; she grinned wildly.
She dropped three fingers, leaving her index and middle finger upright.
Wyldon closed his right eye further. Such vulgarity. He would have immediately (well, he liked to tell himself that) consented to Progressive ways if part of their platform was not on tearing down all conceptions of morality.
Alanna dropped her index finger; just the middle remained. But, Wyldon didn't see it, and so Alanna was incensed. She was just about to hustle to her feet, and stamp her foot, but at that precise moment the north entryway, to Wyldon's left and Alanna's right, burst open, allowing the King and every other person belonging at Court, into... Court.
Progressives, Conservatives and Moderates took their seats, fanning out to wherever their seats were. Expletives were exchanged between opponents, many shoves, as well, and more than a few death glares.
King Jonathan marched between the two sides to his throne on the dais, and, settling himself, began arranging a stack of papers. The silence was charged as everyone waited for him to open the meeting. He really was handsome, but not in the typical way. Ascetic features, but a certain softness in his blue eyes. Dark hair contrasting with pale skin, very firm jaw, high, exotic cheekbones, Wyldon ticked off.
Take that, Twitsaines! Our king, is better than yours.
"Alright." Jon smiled at all of them. His brilliantly white teeth gave Wyldon chills. Did any monarch have a smile so bright? Did any monarch's smile hold the ability to make Wyldon's heart go all fuzzy as only one other, Vivienne, his wife, could? "As you all know, we have gathered together on this day to receive a guideline, of sorts, from the gods."
He stood up, and descended the marble steps, until he was on the same platform as they. "Now, this is a once-in-a-century intervention. We will, judging by all the interventions in past history, completely wreck it, but, here's to trying, eh?" He smiled again, though notably less happy, and much more unhappy. Wyldon frowned. If that were possible.
He strode to the stand in the middle of the room. Just as he was about to start The Summoning, the heavy oak doors banged open, and in came a certain green-eyed individual.
"I sincerely apologize, dearest Uncle's, Aunt's, cousins, not-cousins, friends, and not-dearest not-friends, but I had some urgent business to attend to, and thus," Neal bowed, "I was made late."
Neal waltzed, healer's robes swinging jauntily (Wyldon hated jaunty), to his place, where the Academia and the luke-warmies (Wyldon's term for the Moderates) sat. Mithros will spit you out! Wyldon consoled himself. Like half-cooked bread!
Neal raised a quizzical brow at the bemused King. "Did I interrupt something? Anything important, perchance?" Everyone allowed him one collective groan, and then ignored him. Nealan of Queenscove was legendary for his obnoxiousness, and, Wyldon grudgingly acknowledged, the only reason why he was still here was because he was—he was— he was... rather not stupid. Alright, intelligent and skilled. Accepting that knowledge made Wyldon grumpy.
"And now." King Jonathan rolled up his black sleeves with a flourish. "We shall begin."
After a series of passes, a few shrieks, and one fainting phase, though that was probably on accident rather than on protocol, a scroll burst from thin air, right in front of Jon. He took it and began reading."Oh, dear," he mumbled upon completing the very short scroll.
"The command is, 'The minority is always right. Follow the politics of the minority. Signed, Your Makers.'"
It took a while for that to stick in, partially because it didn't take a whole lot of intelligence to be a politician, Progressive or Conservative, partially because everyone was counting how many Conservatives and Progressives there were.
Lord Wyldon and Alanna both came up with a very undesirable number: they were dead equal at eighty, each. They did not once consider (though Neal did) the Moderates, of which there were only forty.
Neal tipped his head at Sir Gareth, the Younger, his cousin by his mother's family's calculation; how he was related to Gary, the Naxens in general, and the Contes in general, through his father's side, was much too complicated to think of at this early hour.
Neal blocked out the hushed muttering of the people surrounding him. If they played their cards right, they could, assuming they bid seven, win all thirteen tricks (he loved metaphors, especially those alluding to whist). Neal evaluated every Moderate.
They definitely had the intelligence aspect down, so a solid no-trump, but, physically, they were a little short. Just himself, his uncle, Uncle Gary, and his cousin, just Gary, and that didn't help much, since they were all swordsman, except for Gary who was best with the poleax.
Neal tapped his foot. He could probably, with a bit more practice, swing it with a crossbow. He considered the shrewish Duke Turomot (though it should be remembered that shrews are mighty animals, and can take down opponents that would, proportionately, make a wolverine turn tail) and frowned. Everyone else was either frail, disinclined to fight, or just plain incapable of practically applying their intense understanding of warfare and the weapons employed in it.
It was completely silent as these inner debates went on, but a frenzied roar built up until it could no longer be contained.
Alanna's knocked over chair slowly lowered itself to the floor, and only when it hit the floor with a loud thud was the silence broken.
"I've been meaning to tell all of you this for a long time," a voice rang out. The room had nice acoustics, Wyldon noted; he turned his head, looking for the speaker.
The very Conservative, though progressively nicer to the Progressives each day, Sir Paxton of Nond, rose out of his chair and cast a stoic glance to the sea of Conservatives. "But, I'm a Progressive." He skipped over to their side, and squeezed himself in next to Keladry of Mindelan, smiling angelically the whole time.
That hadn't gone as expected, though what would follow was disgustingly predictable.
"And I." Numair extricated herself from the uncomfortable position of sitting in between the very much in love Raoul and Buri. "Though it may seem strange, have always revered the traditional ways of the Conservatives." He mouthed, "One for the team," at Alanna as he passed by.
And so it went back and forth, people coming out of the closet in terms of "secretly held politics" until everyone who was a Progressive was now a Conservative, and everyone who was a Conservative, was now a Progressive. Except for Alanna, and Wyldon, and the luke-warmies. They were still burning holes in their designated chairs.
"Alright." King Jon squinted at the piece of parchment, which rested rather mockingly in his right hand. Ha, ha, ha. Bet you didn't see tha' one comin' now did ya, 'Ighness?"
"It is time," he said for the second time this second day of the week. "To resolve this with the traditional methods for such a stalemate."
Humph. Lord Wyldon looked suspiciously at Neal's placid, composed face.
A dirtier part of history, the kind of part Progressive educators left out, surfaced in Lord Wyldon's brain. One hundred years ago, Kyprioth had sent down a command from the heavens: "Girls rule, boys drool, or is it the other way around? The winning gender inherits full rights to subjugate the losing gender."
How had they resolved it again? Wyldon and Alanna came to the conclusion at the same time: Alanna with contempt, and Wyldon with distaste. Of course, as Kyprioth had instituted that game, everyone had cheated. Sadly, the women had cheated less, and so was the game lost. Despicable. If anyone was going to win, it had to be fair.
They appraised each other. For once, they agreed. It was official; Wyldon had lost it, whatever "it" was.
"A week from now, so that you are allowed adequate preparations, we shall hold a competition ordained by the gods for a situation such as this."
King Jonathan set his jaw determinedly; he distinctly remembered the account of how the last game had turned out. Burning houses, flying, burning barrels of lard, the entire Prettybone district decimated (some honorable, bomb-making merchant thought it better to blow it up than to let the far more numerous Lower City inhabitants take it).
In short, something that absolutely wouldn't do to happen again.
"Capture the Flag. The rules go the playing ground shall be the Lower City, though that's only the starting point, for the game can extend in any direction and to wherever it pleases; each team has one flag that they must hide and protect, though they will have to issue a riddle that can be used to devise their flag's location."
He shifted so that he was staring at the large painting of his father and mother, and himself as a child, though particularly at the Moderates sitting underneath it, and most particularly of all, Neal. "Adjusting for this specific situation, the three teams must have eighty players each, but you are allowed to recruit additional players to that eighty, but the filler must all be commoners. The goal is to capture the flag, as the name goes. All violence is allowed, except for killing, and permanent maiming."
Alanna snorted, drawing his attention, and crossed her arms. "What about gouging? And define permanent. Loss of appendage permanent, or scarring permanent?"
"Yeah." Owen of Jesslaw sat behind Alanna to her right. "And are we, like, allowed to calculate for common medical procedure?" He leaned forward. "Like, if we lop off a hand or anything, could we do it so long as we know that it could, like, be reattached?"
Jon looked mournfully upwards and wished he could for the rest of the meeting; ethereal messengers of the gods and their adventures were depicted on the ceiling. So pretty. "Nothing that's effects last for over a week."
Neal stroked his non-existent beard contemplatively. "Now, it could be debated that a blow to the clavicle would result in a bruise that would last for over a month, depending on the weight of the object, and where exactly it, meaning the clavicle, was hit."
"You seem to be missing the point." Jon clapped his hands together, and stared tightly at everyone.
"This is why I'm rather perturbed in speaking of this game. There, and I hesitate to tell you this." Vivid images of George wielding one of his many knives, a truly manic grin on his face, flashed through Jon's brain. Mithros, and he was half-commoner, and therefore eligible to play... "Are virtually no rules. Or, at least, the ones that are in place have so many loopholes, they're practically fuel for breaking the rules of whatever is yet unbroken."
Everyone over fifty groaned; the walls shook with the sound. Everyone under fifty grinned, and it seemed as if the sun flickered for a moment, shocked at the competition. And, albeit in a rather constipated manner, Wyldon... was grinning, too.
It should be mentioned that Duke Gareth, the Elder, was grinning as well, though he was well advanced in years, yet still spry, and still confirmed to be the best swordsman, bar none, in all the land, in all the universe, in all of history. Despite all snark, usually taken from the illustrious and exceptional, though comparatively inexperienced Alanna the Lioness, Duke Gareth still, most definitely, was the best.
It should also be noted that the previous footnote was added by Duke Gareth, the Elder, himself.
It should be mentioned that an unnamed red-head has difficulty in accepting that she is not the best at everything, and that she, though rather proficient at some things, isn't the absolute best at anything.
…Touche.
And this footnoter taught the previous footnoter how to do just that.
...Touche. Again.
This footnoter perceives sarcasm on the part of the noter of the previous note.
*draws sword* This footnoter says let's end this right here, right now.
*disarms in ten seconds* Ended.