Chapter 14: DD2 Chapter 008 – Patronage

Eliza scanned the words on the page, considering each one in turn as she evaluated their place next to one another. The flow of the music lifted off of the sheet paper and whispered into her ear, her class facilitating the transformation with a hungry eagerness. Like a starving beast she felt it reach out to devour the lyrics, chewing them up along with their accompanying notes as it spat out an inspired melody, filling in the empty spots and pauses with notes from her violin. 

It was a good song, but she knew that with a little work that she could make it something far better.

“With all due respect, I can’t sing this,” Eliza said solemnly, as she carefully placed the sheet music down on the table in front of her.

“Is there something wrong with the cadence? I was assured that this is the tempo that most of your songs are played at,” Barnabas inquired, the manservant doing a good job at pretending to care, his grey brows furrowed close together, heavy with false concern.

“The cadence is fine. The lyrics are actually quite elegant, and I genuinely like this piece. Your songwriter did good work, but I can’t sing this, politically speaking, I mean,” she explained, ignoring how her class growled with frustration as she stifled its creative outpouring.

“If it’s about the money I—”

“It’s not about the money,” Eliza said flatly. “Perhaps you can find someone else; I know half a dozen bards who would jump at this opportunity,” she suggested, hoping that they would take her up on the offer.

“It has to be you,” Lord Traylan announced, the high lord who had been silent up until now tenting his fingers in front of his face as he spoke, his anger barely constrained as his patience had clearly worn thin with her continued refusals.

“Quite. You see, you wrote the first song ‘Typh the Dragons wife’. We can’t have the sequel be sung by anyone other than you. It just wouldn’t have quite the same impact,” Barnabas explained, nervously glancing to the side at his employer.

“I appreciate that, but the song will still do well coming from another bard. It just can’t be me,” Eliza said, knowing all too well what Riyoul would do to her if she took the nobleman’s coin.

“Are you—”

“Barnabas, leave us.” Lord Traylan interrupted, cutting off his manservant mid-sentence.

“Of course, My Lord,” Barnabas said. The old manservant quickly stood up out of his chair, and rushed from the room with remarkable alacrity for someone in his later years, leaving the two of them alone.

As soon as the door to the large meeting room closed, leaving just a wide oaken table separating the bard from the high noble, Eliza felt the tension rise noticeably. She couldn’t tell if it was a skill or just the circumstances, but nonetheless she felt it. Academically, she knew that she was supposed to be afraid of Lord Traylan, but the man before her evoked not an ounce of fright from her; Riyoul had long since monopolised her ability to feel fear.

“I could order you to do it. Rhelea is mine. You pay your taxes to me. There’s nothing to stop me from snapping my fingers and having you clapped in chains, and dragged off to join my growing army as a fucking foot soldier, latrine digger, or whatever I see fit,” The nobleman threatened. The shocking depth of anger in the man’s tone was easily picked up by her skill [Troubadour’s Ear], but she knew that it wasn’t directed at her. She was just a convenient outlet for his rage, which if anything made him more dangerous, as he was right; there was nothing stopping him. 

“Your only value to me is in shaping the commoners opinion, and if you won’t do that despite being offered enough gold to drown yourself in flake, booze, or whatever else you spend your money on, then what use are you?” he continued without pause.

“My Lord, are you going to do any of those things?” Eliza asked calmly, her fingers dancing a frantic tune on the neck of an imagined violin as she ignored the jibe about her recreational habits.

The man looked at her for a long time, and despite the differences between Riyoul and Lord Traylan, Eliza was struck by the familiarity of the moment. Her, alone in a room with yet another powerful man who had complete control over the direction and duration of her life. 

It was tiring.

“No, I will not,” Lord Traylan finally said, the nobleman suddenly sounding so very old and sad. The surprising show of vulnerability almost made Eliza feel pity for him. 

Then she remembered the slums. The recent shortage of funerary linens to wrap the dead in prior to cremation. The smell of burnt flesh that had hovered over Rhelea for days in spite of the continuous snowfall as smoke from the pyres had mingled with the snow and covered the city in a blanket of grey.

“Thank you, my lord,” she said carefully, not skimping on her stamina usage as she kept the disgust out of her voice.

“Don’t thank me, Bard. If the city wasn’t threatening to boil over then we would be having a very different conversation,” he said, leaning forwards in his seat to loom over the table, the elegant silks draped over the man doing little to disguise the violence she knew he was capable of.

Eliza wanted to scream at him, to tell him that his city had already boiled over, just the part nobody cared about. Like she had done so many times before, she plastered a dumb, easy smile on her face and let the powerful man talk.

“Now, what will it take?” Lord Traylan asked softly, clearly trying to play nice, even if he wasn’t used to negotiating with someone so far beneath him in status.

“I’m sorry, Lord Traylan, I’m not sure I follow?”

“Don’t play dumb with me, Bard,” he spat, almost casuing her smile to falter when he threw her class tag at her like an insult. “You said that you can't sing the song, not that you don’t want to. So what will it take to get you to play your part?”

Kill Riyoul, The Smiling Knife.

It was a simple enough demand, one that Lord Traylan was probably capable of delivering upon. But the coin that it would take to bring a mid iron rogue to heel was far more than the payment being offered for her services. Still she almost said it, only the fear that the rogue could be in the room watching and waiting under the cover of his invisibility caused her to bite her tongue. That was the problem with rogues, he could be standing right next to her with a knife hovering over her throat and she would never know it until she felt the steel bite through her neck.

One demonstration of that was enough to silence her for life.

“Propaganda pieces aren’t my brand, My Lord,” she eventually said, the irony of the lie obvious to her. Propaganda pieces were her bread and butter; half her songs she sang about the Shining Swords were to distract attention away from whenever Riyoul wanted to murder someone who might otherwise be missed. The number of songs she had sung for him over the years… it didn’t bear thinking about, better to lose herself in booze and flake as Lord Traylan so rightly put it.

“How disappointing you are,” Lord Traylan sighed, interrupting her self-recriminations. The lord stood up from his seat, and walked across the room towards the large window where he silently stared out at the scenic backdrop. 

The market bazaar was several stories below them, bustling with activity despite the snow, crowds gathered in the town square around the few stalls where enterprising merchants had arranged for runic heaters to provide some degree of warmth. From her seat, Eliza couldn’t see this, but she could look out at the tall buildings that belonged to various guild headquarters, and the very wealthiest of Rhelea’s citizenry. All paying for the privilege of such a central location, who were no doubt overjoyed to suddenly be neighbours with their noble Lord. The man and his extensive retinue of steel and iron knights had come to occupy the former Merchant Council’s offices now that his own private castle was a ruin buried beneath the winter snows.

Eliza knew that the smart thing to do was to take advantage of the lull in conversation and to make a discreet exit—to flee before the powerful man’s attention once again fell her way. It would be rude, but far less so than what she was contemplating doing instead. But, at the end of the day, the one thing that Eliza craved more than anything else was agency. If she couldn’t save herself from Riyoul, then perhaps she could possibly save the people of Rhelea from their lord’s grief.

Eliza prepared herself, sinking deep into her skills as she liberally burned stamina to raise her effective charisma score as high as it would go. She felt the warm embrace of her inflated attribute wrap itself around her like a comfortable blanket, Creation warping her perception as she carefully studied her target. The tense jaw where he ground his back teeth rather than lash out with the words that he wanted to say, the greying beard just a fraction of an inch longer than the fashion for nobles of his stature, a sign of his fatigue if not a desire to spend his time on more important matters. His broad shoulders, impressive for someone his age, but far less so for someone his level, were tightly bunched like he was physically carrying the weight of his son’s loss. 

Eliza looked at him through the lens of her charisma, and didn’t just see a monster whose orders had led to the deaths of hundreds; she also saw a tired old man so very lost in his grief.

Smoother than velvet she purred each syllable, her words thrumming with the power to convince, seduce and compel. A power that had only failed her once in recent memory. The ghost of an ache from Typh’s surprisingly powerful punch suddenly announced itself on her jaw and threatened to disrupt her concentration. She felt herself momentarily waver, but pushed past it, trusting in her stats to guide her through. 

“My Lord Traylan, I understand that you are upset, but you’re moving too fast with the city—”

“Upset...” he whispered, so quietly that she only picked it up with her perception skill. A skill that he had no way of knowing about, so she promptly decided to ignore it. 

“—if you slow down with your plans then I’m sure that they will work, but what you are doing in the slums, the inner walls, and with the Adventurers Guild, it’s too much too fast,” she pleaded, pouring everything she had into her skill-enhanced voice.

“Upset,” he said again, louder this time, so loud that she couldn’t pretend to not have heard it.

“My Lord?” she asked innocently, Creation twisting reality to reinforce her desired illusion.

“You call me ‘upset’, girl. Like I lost a beloved pet or a favoured sword,” he began, his anger shattering her attempt at manipulation that suddenly felt so feeble and fragile.

“My Lord, I’m sorry if my words offended you. I understand that you are grieving but—”

“You understand no such thing, Bard! They killed my son! My fucking son is dead, and now an upjumped bard is trying to tell me how to run my city!” he raged.

“My lord, I meant no disrespect.”

“I don’t give a flying fuck if you meant it or not. You’re not a parent; you can’t possibly understand what it is to lose a child. Galen may have been a contemptuous piece of shit—I’m not blind to what he was—but he was my son! He was not just a piece of me, but also the last connection that I had to his mother, and I loved him all the more for it,” he yelled, furiously pacing the room as he glared at her. “Now I finally have all that I ever wanted to ensure my lineage rises to the heights we were always destined for, but what’s the bloody point of it all when my son is dead? It’s like the gods are watching from above, only so they can rain shit down upon my line. But the joke’s on them, it’s finally over!” he finished, an angry almost manic grin on his face.

“My lord, I know it isn’t my place to say this, but you are aware that Galen had ...indiscretions. The women involved weren’t particularly quiet about it while he was alive, but if you’re looking for a connection to your late wife then surely one of your grandchildren could suffice?” Eliza asked, trying desperately to calm him down, her charisma never having failed her so dramatically before.

“It isn’t your place at all, but a bastard is useless to me, and Galen has left me with more than I can count. No, the Traylan line might as well die with me. The only one with a passing claim to legitimacy is the sprog growing inside his concubine’s belly, and even that child's life will be mired by their half brothers and sisters being raised up as puppets by every interested noble family inside and outside of Terythia.”

“I’m sorry, my lord. I didn’t know.”

“Of course you didn’t know. You’re what, forty and childless?”

“Fifty, My Lord.”

You are reading story Dragon’s Dilemma at novel35.com

“Still young for a classer... You should have children while you can; they are a gift,” he said, in a marked shift of tone, that unbalanced her even further.

“I’m more of a cat person, my lord,” Eliza answered honestly, too confused by his erratic behaviour to try anything else.

“You know, if I were twenty years younger I might have taken that as a challenge,” he said after a brief pause, seemingly calm again, and in good cheer, but Eliza didn’t dare relax, all too aware how easily his temper had been set off.

“In that case I appreciate your maturity,” she said, adding a quick, “My lord,” as an afterthought.

They shared an uneasy smile at that. Lord Traylan for all of his grief and rage occasionally slipped back into the man he had been before. The glimpses of him she had seen weren’t so bad, aloof and out of touch, but a far cry from the vengeful if not tyrannical man he was now. She wondered if there was a way for that halfway-decent person buried deep inside the bitter shell of the man to make a more permanent return. But those same layers of grief and anger made him a poor governor, especially when his city was one that had been outside of noble control for so long. 

Lord Traylan’s actions wouldn’t have caused a batted eyelid anywhere else in Terythia, but here in Rhelea they were pushing people to the edge, and combat-classed or not, Terythians were all dangerous. Eliza had once seen a butcher slice through wyvern hide with a blunt knife to prove a point, a tailor sew steel into cloth, and many more feats of impossibility that made the potential for a city-wide riot terrify her to the bone. Already, Lord Traylan’s construction efforts within the inner city had very nearly sparked those same riots, and if it wasn’t for the physical obstacle of the walls, shielding the horrors inflicted by his soldiers from view, then what he had already done to the slum-dwellers certainly would have.

“I am right. You know that, Lord Traylan,” she intoned, trying again with an appeal to his reason.

“You are overstepping. Again,” he warned, the anger that had left his tone, returning almost immediately.

“I know I am, My Lord, but I couldn’t live with myself if I didn’t try to talk you out of it.” she said, steeling herself with a deep breath. “Rhelea is a tinderbox. It has been for a long time, and I say this as one of the few people who agree with you; Classes shouldn’t be free for everyone to access, but if you don’t slow down the people will riot. I don’t know if your people are too scared to tell you not to do this, but I’m not. I live in fear of terrifying men every day of my life, but if you push through with this, Rhelea will burn.”

“Then let it burn.”

She blinked. 

“I’m sorry, My Lord,” she asked, unsure if her skill-enhanced ears had failed her. She hadn’t misheard a word in all the years since she had first gained [Troubadour’s Ear]. Now that it was ranked up and sitting at her level cap, she could barely comprehend the possibility. Still, it made more sense than what she had just heard.

“You heard me the first time. I know how good your hearing truly is. Rhelea can burn for all I care,” Lord Traylan said, clearly and confidently, the anger in his voice still there, but reined in, cool and controlled. 

“Surely you don’t mean—”

“I do. Fuck this city, fuck it and the people who live in it. They killed my son, those adventurers you like to sing about. Mark my words Eliza, the Dragonrider is one of them, and everyone knows it. This wasn’t some foreign attack or nobleman's quarrel. One of your kind found out how to tame a dragon and rather than share that knowledge with the kingdom, they used it to lead a monstrous army to kill my son over what was almost certainly a personal dispute.”

“System knowledge that could raise our country to untold heights, squandered on a single adventurer's ego. For all I know the Dragonrider is sipping wine in the Adventurers Guild as we speak. And the people, the people are complicit. Rather than demand justice or the Dragonriders head, they sing songs about his heroics, raise toasts in his honour. Ballads of taming dragons are being sung in every tavern, stories of slaying wicked noblemen and stealing their gold.” 

“Don’t think that I don’t know what you and your colleagues sing when you think you’re not being observed,” he said with an accusing glare. “I will rule my city how I please, and if a little unrest is all that it takes to smoke out the Dragonrider, then so be it. If the city burns, then I know that the Dragonrider will be at the centre of the fires, and if it doesn’t, well, then I will have my city, run my way.”

“You’re mad,” Eliza uttered, aghast at what was being said to her.

“Find me a parent who has lost a child who isn’t a little bit mad,” Lord Traylan spat.

“If Rhelea revolts, thousands will die…” she tried again, appealing to his humanity. 

“If they dare revolt, then I will just have to rebuild on top of their corpses. Classes or not, they’re only commoners. Besides, the population is too large anyway; the price of grain has already grown unsustainable,” he said, rationalising the potential loss of life like it was an economics problem.

“You won't though, rebuild that is. Rhelea is exceptional, you can’t just put down the peasants with a handful of knights.”

“You overestimate the calibre of Rhelea’s peasantry. So what if they have classes and levels, it just means I need higher level knights,” he said dismissively.

There was a sharp knock at the door, which promptly opened as Barnabas poked his head into the room through the ajar opening.

“My Lord, Inquisitor Xanthia will not be kept waiting any longer,” Barnabas informed them, initially looking down to the ground, but instead, the man found his gaze swiftly pulled up towards Eliza. Her inflated charisma score literally forced the manservant to stare at her, his mouth relaxed into an easy smile, his lips moving as he began to speak.

“I’ve always wanted to—”

Cursing inwardly, Eliza immediately stopped the flow of stamina to her skills and like that, the spell was broken. Barnabas stopped talking, and Eliza suddenly felt small and vulnerable, no longer the master manipulator, but an isolated woman in the lair of man who had just confessed to contemplating mass murder. Without her skill’s influence, Barnabas snapped back to attention, and Lord Traylan halted, pausing in his frantic pacing to look at her with a mixture of surprise and disdain.

“Barnabas, see Miss Eliza out, and send the Inquisitor in, would you,” Lord Traylan instructed, his dismissal clear, and Eliza saw fit to follow his words to the letter, quickly exiting the room before the consequences of her actions could catch up with her. 

Her mind whirled as Barnabas hurried her through the well-decorated halls while she tried to process what she had just heard. Surprising herself that it was even possible, her heart leapt even further into her throat when she passed a group unlike any other waiting patiently in the Lord’s lobby.

Thanks to Riyoul, Eliza had known for some time that the Inquisition was in Rhelea, and having heard Barnabas announce it should have taken the edge off of her shock, but seeing her in the flesh was another thing entirely.

Inquisitor Xanthia was more of a myth than a person. The stories that had followed in the wake of the steel ranked woman were as outlandish as they were numerous. Eliza considered herself to be a very good bard, and so she was all too aware not just of the songs sung about her, but also the ones that got you at best a warning, and at worst caused you to disappear entirely. 

For a living legend Xanthia was a slight woman. The word ‘willowy’ immediately sprung to mind when Eliza looked directly at her. The Inquisitor was purportedly the closest a Terythian had ever made it to silver rank since the country’s founding over a thousand years ago. Not that anyone could tell. Her level was so high it was displayed only as three question marks to anyone who didn’t already possess their own legend. 

Inquisitor Xanthia was, oddly enough, not a beautiful woman, something that was practically unheard of for anyone with a level as high as hers. Charisma scores gradually altered people’s bodies to better resemble their idealised sense of self. With higher charisma scores simply doing the job a lot faster than low ones, and for a woman who was several centuries old with a charisma score that was almost certainly in the triple digits, the fact that she looked bookish bordering on plain, was an oddity.

The woman was dressed in a simple uniform of red on black linens, that closely resembled parade armour with subtle nods made towards the Terythian church in the form of the eight pointed star emblazoned prominently on her chest. Her severe look was completed with thigh-length cavalry boots in matching black, along with a longsword at her hip with a heavily embellished crossguard, glittering with rubies that hummed at a frequency most humans wouldn’t be able to hear. Xanthia herself had a cold, disinterested gaze that quickly fell on Eliza as she passed. The bard immediately felt herself wilt under the intense pressure of the Inquisitor's almost lazy scrutiny.

Xanthia was flanked by a dozen steel-ranked knights, half of whom were bearing the heraldry of the Inquisition on their steel breastplates and the remaining six that of the Queen's Alchemic Guard. Men and women who had been baptized in alchemical creations so rare and expensive that you could found a small city for what it allegedly cost to make just one of them. Eliza’s first thoughts were how she would love to follow them around, to learn their stories and spin each one into a song, but her second thought was far more reactive.

Run.

There was something profoundly wrong with the Alchemic Guard, the way their hearts beat, the sound of the air moving through their lungs improperly, how she could hear that thing slithering inside of their chests. It was all so aberrant and wrong, in ways she couldn’t quite conceptualise, but she knew that she had to get away from them before it was too late.

She forced her way past Barnabas as he attempted to escort her from the premises, rushing out until she found herself in the snow covered streets where she promptly heaved the contents of her stomach onto the frozen road.

Something was very wrong with those knights. Lord Traylan might be insane, or he might not be, which could easily be far worse, but one thing she knew for sure was that she wanted nothing more than to snuggle up in bed with her cat and pray for someone else to make it all go away. Eliza felt herself begin to spiral into despair, as she hyperventilated outside of Lord Traylan’s residence, passersby in their thick coats giving her a wide berth and dirty looks. 

Surprisingly it was the ghost of her once aching jaw that brought her out of it. The spot that had bruised so badly that she had to spend a good portion of her rent money just to get rid of the mark, a pain that announced itself out of the blue as it was still prone to do. Her favoured healer, prized for his discretion if not his skill, was too costly for her to have the damage fixed properly, instead he left her almost healed as the pain came and went, seemingly whenever it felt like it. 

Eliza’s jaw throbbed with pain, bringing a clarity with it that cleared away the panic choking her mind. She straightened her back. This was real life and not a song. Nobody was coming to save her, or Rhelea for that matter, and as much as she pretended that she didn’t, she did have some control over her actions.

She could bury her head and do nothing, or she could try to stop the tides of blood that she knew in her heart was coming.

The task seemed insurmountable, but she knew where to start. She needed to warn as many people as she could.

Fortunately, Eliza was a bard, and there was one thing that she was truly good at. Her face set with something approaching determination, she began plotting a route in her head to the nearest bard-friendly tavern. 

With her fingers dancing in anticipation of the song she would play, the accompanying words appeared in her head easily while she walked, Eliza’s class more than eager to fill in the gaps where her imagination was lacking. 

She thought she would call it ‘The Mad Lord's Grief’.

If you liked this chapter, do make sure to rate, review, favourite and follow as appropriate. Everything you do really helps get this fiction discovered, which gets it in the faces of new readers and keeps me writing.

If you really liked this chapter and can't wait for the next one. I have a Patreon where you can read up to 15 chapters ahead and contribute towards keeping the lights on.

If you want to chat with me your humble author in real-time, or other fans of the series feel free to join the discord .

If you want to help with my visibility and don't fancy any of the above then give me a .

You can find story with these keywords: Dragon’s Dilemma, Read Dragon’s Dilemma, Dragon’s Dilemma novel, Dragon’s Dilemma book, Dragon’s Dilemma story, Dragon’s Dilemma full, Dragon’s Dilemma Latest Chapter