Herald of Steel

Lady Parthia appeared much more optimistic about the future of Galiosos Island than Alexander, thinking they had already passed the hard part.

So with regards to Alexander's worry about finding a good candidate to look after the place, she did not think it should be too hard.

Alexander however had seen how the various forces interacted with each other up close and thought otherwise.

'There is no way the sisters are going to play ball. Linda is too vindictive. And even if … by some miracle that happened, there is still the Heeat family. And I don't even want to think about Metztil!'

From what he had seen, the younger lady would never be satisfied with just taking half of her share. She would always be afraid of her more legitimate elder sister taking her portion back and kicking her out.

Also from what Lord Kite had said to Alexander regarding Lord Parker's death, it was very unlikely the Heeat family would simply let Lady Miranda and he be.

And lastly, from how the natives acted during the battle, Alexander could see there was a burning hunger in them to take much more. He was even beginning to ask himself if he had just invited a tiger to drive out a wolf.

But Alexander did not expand upon his doubts here, feeling Lady Parthia could contribute little to his worries.

'Unfounded concerns of a worrywart!' He could already see her dismissing him with a wave of her hands, unwilling to buy the gravity of the situation.

Alexander would thus have to solve these doubts with other people.

"Okay. Thank you for your advice, my lady. Let me think about it." Thus with an agreeing nod, Alexander attempted to end the meeting for the day here.

"Ummmm, there is one last thing I have been thinking about…" But before Alexander could start on his ruminations, a somewhat meek, whispering voice shot out from Lady Nanazin, "ummm… why don't we kill the Margraves and… why don't we split the island with the Heeat family directly? Cut out the middle man."

Lady Nanazin's face appeared slightly flushed even as she made the comment as if she was ashamed to even say this out loud about their own ally. To the still morally aligned woman, it just felt wrong.

"Because he has a bleeding heart!" Lady Parthia's answer was curt and crisp, dripped in disdain.

"...." While Alexander first produced a helpless smile at such a naked evaluation, before squeezing out this excuse with some difficulty,

"Ahem.., the problem is this is too extreme. First of all, we do not know these lands well enough. Thus killing such an ancient Marquis noble family will not only be easy but also very problematic. We will have to deal with many die hard noble rebels for a long time to come."

"Then there is the fact how this will anger the entire Sybarian nobility in the mainland. So the distance from here to Zanzan will make it hard to hold on to the land."

"Bah! Excuses!"

However despite Alexander's reasonable sounding excuses, Lady Parthia was not buying it, as she quickly went on to point out the flaws with his way of thinking,

"There is no problem that these being unknown lands. Land is land People are people. And the local nobles will always bow their head to the one above them… names don't matter!"

Indeed, if everyone was afraid of conquering new lands just because of the political difficulties involved, there would never be any large scale conquests.

But such conquests did happen… because after the head honcho of the place was knocked down, the local leaders would always pragmatically bow their heads to their new rulers. No class fought itself to the death, they chose to follow the law of the strongest.

Succinctly citing this, Lady Parthia then continued her chiding,

"As for killing a Matbar… a Marquiss family, that is simply sophistry. The Margraves are hardly anything save for a thorn in the sight of the Sybarian noble. They would not have gotten where they are now if they were not… if they had friends in high places.

I do not believe anyone will shed tears for them…. or at least anyone significant. If it really happened, worst case scenario, we can ask the Heeat to smooth things out with the council as part of giving them half of the Margrave's lands. This is not a hard problem to solve."

Alexander was beginning to feel increasingly red at having his excuses torn apart like wet tissue paper and it reached its apex when Lady Parthia finished by pointing out,

"The same goes for defending these lands. The solution is too easy. All we have to do is place a small garrison of our troops from Zanzan here and augment them with local auxiliaries. If we wanted to we could even sign a ten year treaty with the various neighboring forces. No doubt Alexander can easily afford all of this."

True, if Alexander was willing to open up his coffers and bribe his way in, many of the stated problems would become obsolete.

Give money and you could placate the local nobles.

Give money and you could placate the Heeats and the Sybarian Council.

Give money and you could placate the natives.

And give money, and you could hire people to defend the place.

Thus to say Alexander was not tempted by this offer would be disingenuous.

And as if sensing this change in sentiment, the Tibian queen once again nudged Alexander, flashing a devilishly alluring smile,

"So how about it? Changed your mind? I hear you have always liked the Margrave's metallurgy and ship building skills. You can all the men you want…."

Somehow this, frail looking woman was even more greedy and bellicose than Alexander, wanting to annex the land by hook or by crook.

Thus when Alexander ultimately refused this on grounds of mortality and reputation, saying he could not bring himself to harm his ally in such an unscrupulous way, she snapped at him with a click of her tongue, ℝÁNɵᛒËš

"*Tsk*, I can't believe we lost to a spine…. I can't believe our luck was so bad to have been your first target. What did we do to deserve that?"

Lady Parthia had held her tongue at the very last moment, stopping herself from calling Alexander 'spineless' as she feared this would be going too far.

The clever queen was very conscious of how much she could push this good natured man before he snapped. Alexander might respect her opinion greatly, but at the end of the day, he was still far above her, possessing an enviable amount of power.

While Alexander was also glad to see Lady Parthia was self conscious of there being a red line that was not meant to be crossed, and thus did not shoot back with the fact that it was her husband who had attacked him first, even when he had paid him a large amount of war reparations.

Tibias was destroyed, because of their own hubris.

.....

The meeting ended shortly after that, with both parties leaving on amicable terms without having their painful pasts dug up.

Then in the next two days, Alexander got ready to meet with his Heeat counterpart in the manor.

Among this, was first an initial show of goodwill, as Alexander allowed some of the Heeat soldiers to come in small batches.

The majority of the foreign reinforcing fleet was of course not allowed to dock for obvious security reasons.

But every day, up to ten ships, or around a thousand to fifteen hundred men were given access to the city, letting them visit the markets, the famous bathhouses, and much more attractively the pleasure dens.

Alxx knew the Heeat soldiers in those ships must have been bored out of their minds after being cooped up in a basically floating wooden prison for so many days. The food they ate was dry and tasteless, the water was almost state, there was little room to move around and of course, there was little access to bodily relief.

So by giving them access to them, Alexander hoped to show the Heeat higher ups he had no real enmity with them.

And in exchange, Lord Kite did his job quite well too, embellishing Alexander in quite a flattering light to his superior.

According to him, Alexander was simply here to protect his trade for his people and had no real ideological conflict with the Heeat.

He claimed,

"The main troublemakers are Lady Linda and those old coots behind her. Young master had always wanted to negotiate with Lord Alexander and avoid any unnecessary battles… to come to peaceful terms with each other."

"... But that witch bewitched him. The straightforward and honest Lord was too enthralled by his newlywed wife, who pushed him to fight her sister's enemy for her own vindictive pleasure. Then once the battle started…. *sigh*, at some point we had lost too many men to make peace an option."

Needless to say, Alexander had not sent Lord Kite on his way without any preparation, merely hoping and praying that he would say the 'truth'.

No, he needed Lord Kite to say their version of the 'truth'.

And part of that 'truth' was pushing a large part of the blame onto the poor recent widow.

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