Mehmet finished reading out the letter to his audience consisting of the king and the royal advisers with a raise of his eyebrows. Fingers started to fold the parchment back up, making no comment but the lack of one. Thus, silence was the only response for a moment, allowing the only sounds come from Mehmet that almost took on an echo within the king’s atrium. Sick, again. He was always sick. They now spent far more time within Markus’ estate rather than the throne room itself.
“A charmer, isn’t he?” Vestalus was the first to speak, sparking a quiet laugh to come from Rodomonte and a smile from Mehmet. “There is no question he is presenting himself as he has always: a man of action. No sense in continuing this act of posturing further.”
“Should we really continue this? He certainly seems more taken with the idea of war with Nevarra than any kind of peace, or respect, if this letter has anything to say about it,” Mehmet commented, tossing the letter back onto the desk lightly which was feebly grabbed by the king to unfold and read it himself. The milky white of his once brown eyes spoke of his inability to do so, but a man of pride never lets that get in his way even when given an ornate spyglass by Rodomonte to better see the words.
Vestalus spread his hands out, conceding the point but knowing they had no other way around it. Best to see this through and wonder if any good could come from such an accord. They were the first to extend the figurative olive branch after all; best not retract it due to one letter of a knowingly stubborn men. Were they not all as such? Surely it can be dealt with well enough.
to Emperor Gaspard de Chalons of the Orlesian Empire
A Renewed Greetings to you.
As I am sure you are awfully busy putting right an Empire that was once rife with a civil war, the Kingdom of Nevarra can only thank you for your time in humoring an old man’s desire for some peace and stability in Thedas. We have all been through enough over these trying years, it is about time some good change is to occur no matter how small it is at the start. I find that peace talks are a habit many within our positions should start to become well acquainted with. Not everything can be sown together neatly with an assassination or a war, especially in our case.
War should be the last thought to any decision made, I do hope you will start to agree.
Thus, trust is a starting point, but I do know quite well that it is never quick to come into fruition. What I suggest is a meeting upon equal grounds in a neutral position betwixt both of our thrones. The area right in the middle of Perendale and Ghislain, upon the border that is guarded by your honorable Chevaliers, there is a town that is quaint in nature but serves a grand purpose. I purpose that the talks be had there in two weeks time. Should you hold any suggestions, you hold a willing listener in me.
In time we might just see the rise of a new era not categorized by violence and upheaval, but find the return of yet another Glory Age.
King Markus Pentaghast of the Kingdom of Nevarra
In the end, it was rather longer than two weeks. Such a thing as the moving, wholesale and entire, of a royal court was not something which could be effected easily, quickly, or without endless petty nobles’ complaints and inconveniences and disasters both minor and less so.
Peace, after all, was not war. And a royal court was not an army. Had Gaspard marched into battle at the head of his well-disciplined and well-trained troops, the transit would have been much smoother, each piece of the army moving together with every other piece, as smoothly as the interlocking gears and oiled joints of fine dwarven clockworks.
But peace talks required weapons rather different from siege engines and cavalry. In place of those, Gaspard had diplomats and clerks, amanuenses and scribes, historians and legal experts and a phalanx of royal advisors and councillors. He had the Council of Heralds itself, he had representatives of every high house of Orlesian nobility -- and many of the lower houses as well -- and he had fops, dandies, toadies, and bootlickers enough to load into the trébuchets he did not have and use in place of the stones, and still have some to spare.
Mobilizing such a motley patchwork of nearsighted scholars and hunch-necked paper-pushers, most of whom had never gone further from Val Royeaux than Val Chevin in their lives, was not like mobilizing an army, unless it was an army entirely composed of pampered and contrary housecats. To say that Gaspard was frustrated was to undersell the situation by several orders of magnitude.
And even that mobilization could not occur, of course, until several more letters had been exchanged between Gaspard and Markus, or whichever of the King’s advisors was writing his letters these days, to hammer out details and logistics and to set conditions and make compromises and all the little petty business of diplomacy.
The village they had chosen, in the Fields of Ghislain, was more accustomed to hosting regiments than royals; it was a squalid, muddy little place on a frontier which had been long and bloodily contested. The inhabitants spoke Nevarran as easily as Orlesian, and their Common was oddly accented, somewhere between the two. There were no luxuries at all for the legions of nobles who had insisted upon accompanying Gaspard; he took some bittersweet comfort in the fact that no doubt, King Markus -- and his advisors -- were as plagued by the complaints of his courtiers as was Gaspard himself.
An ancient Tevinter ruin some distance from the village proper had been chosen as the site for the talks. It was not a palace, nor yet a fortress; perhaps it had been a temple, or had housed some other manner of arcane heathenry in the days of the Imperium’s ascendency. But it had a roof only slightly holed through by time, and sturdy walls, and a faded grandeur, despite its age, which seemed suitable to the dignity of the proceedings.
In and the village, the two armies -- of bureaucrats and scholars, though there were proper soldiers counted among both, Gaspard had not been slow to notice -- squatted on opposite sides of some invisible line which bisected the town, the national border writ small and made all but literal. He’d not be surprised, of course, if there were a number of brawls, minor and otherwise, between members of the opposing groups over the course of the next few days or weeks. He’d also not be surprised if there were a number of love affairs, brief or otherwise. Such things were to be expected.
But as he sat back in his chair in the canvas-scented dimness of the large tent serving as his headquarters -- he might be Emperor now and not only a general, he might be leading his court and not only his army, but Gaspard would not stand on luxury when his command tent was perfectly serviceable to needs, however much his nobles fussed and swooned -- and went over the last piles of reports and documentation his legions of advisors had prepared, one thing Gaspard could not anticipate was precisely what sort of situation he’d walk into on the morrow. Would Markus be there at all? If so, would he be little more than an animated skeleton?
Gaspard’s spies had provided him what information they could about Markus’s advisors; but he was prepared, as a good general always was, to improvise at need.
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