CHAPTER 1094: LEGACIES (PART TWO)

"There should still be wine and cups near the fire," Bors said as he heard Owain adding logs to the fire and working the bellows to stoke the embers back to life. "I had Gilander fetch a few bottles from the reserve in the cellars. No reason to save them any more," he said, fighting back the cough that wracked his body and grimacing at the icy, stabbing pain from the old wound in his side that flared up every time he coughed.

"No, I suppose there isn’t," Owain agreed, turning away from the rekindled fire to find an expensive bottle that had come all the way from the Emerald Kingdom across the sea. That bottle, along with several others, still had wax around the cork, waiting for the day it would finally be opened, but more than a dozen bottles stood empty or nearly so, and one or two lay on their sides, having spilled half their contents across the floor when they were knocked over before coming to a rest wherever they rolled to.

Taking a seat in one of the two plush, overstuffed chairs that sat before the hearth, Owain broke the seal on the bottle and poured two cups of the strong, red wine. The fire in the hearth crackled and popped as the fresh logs caught fire, adding the scent of burning pine to the room and helping to cover the stench of sickness that permeated Bors’ office while the flickering golden light of the flames helped to push back the gloom.

"So you want to build an Academy of Trades," Owain said as he settled into the chair, sipping the heady wine as he tried to understand his father’s confused thoughts. "Why not an academy to train our own noblemen? Like the one that Liam Dunn attended in Keating?"

Owain himself had never attended any of the academies that could be found in the duchies of the Kingdom of Gaal, much less the prestigious Royal Academy in the capital. His father had insisted on hiring capable tutors, many of them experts in swordsmanship, horsemanship, and even scholars who had studied every war ever fought between the demons and the Kingdom of Gaal. Bors had raised Owain to be a weapon, forging him into one of the greatest swordsmen of the current era, rather than sending him to be educated in some other lord’s territory.

"Small steps, my son, small steps," Bors said as he crossed the room with a handful of documents, setting them on the small table beside his chair before collapsing heavily into the plush cushions and sighing in relief.

"There are only ten barons in the march, and we have less than a hundred knights beneath them," Bors said, shaking his head as he thought about how little things had changed in the march from the day he ascended the throne to now. "Keating has close to thirty baronies, three counties, and nearly five hundred knights under his banner, and all of them sitting on enough wealth to make their peers in the march look like paupers."

"We could build an academy for noblemen," the aging marquis acknowledged. "But who would attend it? We’d struggle to summon more than a dozen school aged students in any given year. But tradesmen," he said as he took the cup of wine that Owain offered him. "Tradesmen, we can plant and grow like crops, and given time, we’ll reap the rewards of our efforts."

Of all the things that he would be remembered for, Bors wondered if the academy that would bear his name would be the one that did the most to bring prosperity to the march. The War of Inches certainly hadn’t, and the name that had become attached to his years of attempted and failed conquest proved how little it had mattered in the end.

What wealth they’d plundered from Airgead Mountain had been invested across the march, but looking back, Bors realized that he’d squandered much of it. Each of his barons had fortified their domains and replenished themselves after years of war, but none of them, save for the ambitious Dunns, had been able to use that wealth to truly transform themselves, and Lothian City was no different.

The most tangible benefit the gold and jewels they’d taken from the demons was the support of the Church for a Holy War that would allow them to finally drive the demons from the source of so much wealth, but even then, it had taken more than a decade of negotiations and bribes to secure that support, and it wouldn’t be arriving until next year.

By the time anything came of it, Bors was afraid that his contributions to reshaping the March would be forgotten, lost in the shuffle of missives between rulers, failed negotiations, and long running plans that only bore fruit after he had fallen.

But perhaps, he could still do one or two things that would bring a different kind of prosperity to Lothian March. A prosperity that didn’t depend on men like his eldest son turning themselves into weapons to satisfy an ambition they inherited from a father who had failed to accomplish what their own father had also failed to achieve.

"So long as the tradesmen we train don’t become the kind of self-important, entitled merchants I met in Blackwell," Owain said with a snort. "I suppose it really is better this way. If we have to keep importing people like Master Isabell, before we know it, our knights will be more afraid of displeasing a wealthy merchant than they are about the real threat of demons. The frontier isn’t a place for weak men who only care about chasing money," he said as he sipped his wine.

"No, I suppose it isn’t," Bors agreed reluctantly as his eyes lingered on the formal decree, stamped with the Lothian crest in dark blue wax that affixed a yellow silk ribbon to the document.

Most of the decrees he’d penned in the past few days were simple things, marked only with his signet ring in yellow wax, but a few, like this one, had the power to change a man’s life in profound ways and Bors had agonized for an entire day about whether or not he should present it to Owain.

In the end, he’d decided that he had to... He’d promised Isla that he’d take care of both their sons, after all, and Owain deserved at least this much for everything he’d done in Lothian March. Bors just hoped that Owain would understand that this... this would be for the best.

"Owain," Bors said after taking a sip of the strong, fragrant wine as though he were fortifying himself before doing something deeply unpleasant. "We need to talk about Ashlynn’s death. Now that the Summer Villa has fallen and the imposter has been carried away, it’s time to do away with old plans."

"I’ve already dealt with the witch’s scheming sister," Bors said as his face contorted in disgust. Percivus had yet to learn how far Jocelynn’s web of conspiracy extended, or how a witch like Eleanor Blackwell had managed to pose as a sacred Confessor, but it didn’t matter. The Inquisitor had those matters well in hand. Bors just needed to focus on the other things that must be done before it was too late.

"We’re free of our entanglement with the Blackwells, but we aren’t free of the stain it left on us," Bors said as his brows lowered and his gaze grew intense. "I’ve seen the fiendishness of Jocelynn’s witchcraft, son... the beast that lurks beneath the beauty. You did the right thing when you killed her sister," he said, admitting for the first time that Owain had been right to murder his wife for bearing a mark of the witch.

"But the Church," Bors said, clutching his wine cup tightly enough that it trembled in his hand. "They determined that she was innocent, and they want to use your guilt to force your hand," he said. "This is why you have to be careful with the schemers in the Church," he continued as his voice grew even more intense. "They’re always trying to decide what a man’s fate should be, as if their Holy Lord of Light wrote it in the heavens long ago."

"But I’ve prepared a way out for you, son," he said as he tapped the decree on the table. "A way that won’t require you to become one of their Templar puppets just to avoid the headsman’s axe. I promised your mother, you know," he added as he glanced briefly toward the empty embroidery chair near his desk. "And I can’t disappoint her after she came back from the Heavenly Shores to help me put things right..."