province quiet.
You lashed them, then enticed them. You made them fear you, and know that their fortunes could be made if you liked them enough. It was all a matter of balance.
Unfortunately, small things continued to go wrong with the balancing of the Eastern Palm as autumn turned into winter in the unusually cold weeks that followed.
Some cursed poet in Astibar chose that dank and rainy season to begin posting a series of elegies to the dead Duke of Astibar. The Duke had died in exile, the head of a scheming family, most of whom had been executed by then. Verses lauding him were manifestly treasonous.
It was difficult though. Every single writer brought in during the first sweep of the khav rooms denied authorship, and then, with time to prepare, every writer in the second sweep claimed to have written the verses.
Some advisers suggested peremptory wheels for the lot of them, but Alberico had been giving thought to a larger issue. To the marked difference between his court and the Ygrathen's. On Chiara, the poets vied for access to Brandin, quivering like puppies at the slightest word of praise from him. They wrote paeans of exaltation to the Tyrant and obscene, scathing attacks on Alberico at request. Here, every writer in the Eastern Palm seemed to be a potential rabble-rouser. An enemy of the state.
Alberico swallowed his anger, lauded the technical skill of the verses, and let both sets of poets go free. Not before suggesting, however, as benignly as he could manage, that he would enjoy reading verses as well-crafted on one of the many possible themes of rich satiric possibility having to do with Brandin of Ygrath. He had managed a smile. He would be very pleased to read such verses, he'd said, wondering if one of these cursed writers with their lofty airs could take a hint.
None did. Instead, a new poem appeared on walls all over the city two mornings later. It was about Tomasso bar Sandre. A lament about his death, and claiming, unbelievably, that his perverse sexuality had been a deliberately chosen path, a living metaphor for his conquered, subjugated land, for the perverse situation of Astibar under tyranny.
He'd had no choice after that, once he'd understood what the poet was saying. Not bothering with inquiries again, he'd had a dozen writers pulled at random out of the khav rooms that same afternoon, and then broken, wristed, and sky-wheeled among the still-crowded bodies of the families of the conspirators before sundown. He closed all khav rooms for a month. No more verses appeared.
In Astibar. But the same evening his new taxes were proclaimed in the Market Square in Tregea, a black-haired woman elected to leap to her death from one of the seven bridges in protest against the measures. She made a speech before she jumped, and she left behind, the gods alone knew how she'd come into possession of them, a complete sheaf of the "Sandreni Elegies" from Astibar. No one knew who she was. They dragged the icy river for her body but it was never found. Rivers ran swiftly in Tregea, out of the mountains to the eastern sea.
The verses were all over that province within a fortnight, and had crossed to Certando and southern Ferraut before the first heavy snows of the winter began to fall.^o^^o^網^o^文^o^檔^o^下^o^載^o^與^o^在^o^線^o^閱^o^讀^o^
Brandin of Ygrath sent an elegantly fur-clad courier to Astibar with an elegantly phrased note lauding the Elegies as the first decent creative work he'd seen emanating from Barbadian territory. He offered Alberico his sincerest congratulations.
Alberico sent a polite acknowledgment of the sentiments and offered to commission one of his newly competent verse-makers to do a work on the glorious life and deeds in battle of Prince Valentin di Tigana.
Because of the Ygrathen's spell, he knew, only Brandin himself would be able to read that last word, but only Brandin mattered.
He thought he'd won that one, but for some reason the woman's suicide in Tregea left him feeling too edgy to be pleased. It was too intense an action, ha