“No. Which makes this all the more unusual. Bring it over, please.”
As soon as Luka had laid eyes on the royal crest on the envelope, his mood had soured. Only his father or his sister had leave to use the royal crest. The rest of them had to stick to using their family crests on their correspondence.
He ripped the envelope open carelessly, wanting to get it over with. It was from his sister, then. He read the missive inside carefully, then handed it over to his aide.
“The Crown Princess asks that we allow a small contingent of lords from Sunvaara to stay at Kamenev. They will be arriving to talk with the Elves, she says.”
“Couldn’t talk with them on their own soil and had to piggyback onto us, did they?” Luka asked with a scowl. “Do we know how many men will be arriving?”
“The Crown Princess’s aide has informed me that there will be two lords in total, with a retinue of five.”
“Will the Crown Prince of Sunvaara be one among them?”
“No, Crown Prince Sekhar had to return to his own country. A minor issue to look after in his own court, he said.”
“More’s the pity. I had hoped to take the measure of the man my sister is to marry,” Luka said regretfully.
“His aide will be one of the lords arriving in Kamenev, Your Highness.”
“You mean the Crown Prince left for his own country and left his aide here, in Drakazov?”
Stoffel nodded. “If you wish to take the measure of the man, I submit that it would be easy to learn more about him from his aide, Your Highness.”
But Luka was wondering what was so important back in Sunvaara that it required the Crown Prince’s presence, but not that of his aide. Did the royal brat have a secret lover back in his home country? A mistress? What else would pull him from his new fiancée’s side? And what court ‘issues’ could he look after without his aide at his side?
The more he thought about it, the more maddening it was.
“Shall I inform the housekeeper about the added guests, Your Highness?”
“Yes, of course. Thank you, Stoffel.” Luka nodded and waved an irritable hand, and Stoffel left him with a bow.
Now alone with his thoughts, Luka looked into the fire, and brooded.
His thoughts turned first to Ludmilla, and then to the Elves, due to arrive tomorrow. What would the Sunvaarans think of them?
No one had any dealings with the Elves for generations now. After their retreat from the lands they’d once ruled over, the Elves had kept to themselves, staying on their little islands, away from the human kingdoms they’d colonized a thousand years ago.
The Sunvaarans must have been worried that he would negotiate a deal with the Elves. Something that was favorable to Drakazov. The three countries that made up the Middle Kingdoms were locked in a decades-old stalemate; where Sunvaara had the power of numbers and its superior weaponry, Merovia had powerful magic users in its army.
Drakazov itself maintained its position among the Middle Kingdoms by dint of its mages’ ingenuity. Merovia had more powerful magic users among its people to be sure, but the mages of Drakazov were the first to experiment, to test their magic and understand its limitations and its powers. They were the ones who had taken the magic that their Elven heritage had given them and refined it, tamed it to make it work for them, in variations of different spells and mage runes.
Merovia, Sunvaara, and Drakazov had always had contentious relations between them, raiding each other for natural resources, for money, for food.
If the Elves were to join any one of the kingdoms in an alliance, it might unite the other two against it. But then, Sunvaara and Drakazov already had an alliance in place. Merovia had recently undergone a political upheaval, according to what he’d heard. There was a new king on the throne, new to the crown and new to his responsibilities. It would be easy for Drakazov and Sunvaara to swallow up Merovia, especially if the Elves agreed to stand with them.
Could he expect to see a Merovian lord under his roof, soon?
Luka groaned at the thought. After his return from the battlefield, he’d wanted to avoid the court, but it looked like it would come seeking him out, no matter what he wanted for himself.
His fears turned out to be well founded. By the evening, he had another letter, this time from the Tsar.
A Merovian Baron and his men would be joining him at Kamenev the next day. The Kamenev estate, being so far from the seat of actual power at the capital, was apparently considered safe enough for representatives from all three of their neighbors to show up for a meeting.
‘Good, strong diplomatic work, my son,’his father had written.‘You’re doing well.’
Once, those words would have filled him with pride for a little while, before he would’ve ended up overthinking it, sinking into a spiral of questions with no answers, wondering if his father had ever said the same thing to the Crown Princess.
Now, Luka set the letter aside with a sigh. Grasping his walking stick, he got to his feet to pour himself a cup of tea from thesamovar, bracing himself for a sting of pain that never came. He looked down in surprise, before recalling that he was still wearing the leather sock prosthetic that Maya had made for him under his boots.
