"Wait! That can"t be it," Aella exclaimed, scrunching her brow in confusion.He turned back to her, with the door behind him still closed. "Did you want more than a key to the treasury?"
"Do you mean to tell me, that no one has been in here in over a century, if this is all they get?" she asked, motioning towards her breast.
He looked up at the ceiling and she wondered if he had a neck injury. Why did he keep looking up?
"What would you want to know? My knowledge is limited because I have been trapped away for a very long time."
She thought carefully, as her eyes wandered over the furniture that dotted the room. "I"m about to be king, what should I know? I"ve only learned how to fight and kill others here. My dad taught me to use my head, so what would you teach me?"
"Alright," he conceded, heading back over to the chair and sitting down, motioning for her to sit as well, on a couch against the wall. "Why are you about to be king?"
"What?" she asked, settling onto the couch in a comfortable crouch that would allow her to respond quickly to any threat that appeared.
"Why are you willing to become king?" he asked her.
She opened her mouth to answer, then paused. Could this be a trick question? Thinking about her answer for a moment, she finally responded. "I was given the option of dying or becoming king. Those options don"t really give me any other choice."
"Yet surely you had options later in the fighting, to escape? Death couldn"t have been your only motivator."
She nodded carefully. "I don"t like the idea of kids having to fight each other to survive. My dad taught me to fight, because it was my only option of surviving after he left, but we still had moments of fun. The other kids I had to fight were scared, but determined to survive, just as I was, and I had to kill them. The counselors don"t care about them. I will, as king, be able to change that. If I stay king, and don"t die to these heroes they keep talking about, then they won"t grab kids to start fighting again."
His face darkened with a frown but he nodded in understanding. "What do you think a king does?"
"Run the kingdom? Doesn"t the king make the rules?"
"But if the king rules the kingdom, and makes the rules, then who has been doing that when there hasn"t been a king?"
Her eyes widened in sudden understanding. If there hasn"t been a king for the past six years, then there must be someone, or several people, who have been running the kingdom. The reason she was able to defeat some of the opponents in the compet.i.tion so easily, she knew, was because they had rigged it against her. Whoever held the power, wanted to keep it. But the counselors had spent so much time overseeing the fights, there was no way they were the ones in charge. Surely, running a kingdom took a lot of time and effort? When she was crowned, they were probably going to try and keep her busy, so she couldn"t actually change anything.
"Now you"re starting to see what is ahead of you," he mused, crossing his arms and leaning back comfortably.
"So, do I just need to kill everyone?" she wondered.
"If you kill them all, then how will you know what is going on, and what needs to be done? They have a lot of time doing what should be your job."
"They see me as a threat. I need them to see me as a solution or an ally."
"They will probably see you as a puppet. Did the crowds watching the fights have anything to say?" he questioned.
"They were angry at the obvious cheating by the judges," she recalled.
"Only because it was obvious?" he raised an eyebrow.
"They were used to them cheating," she realized with a whisper. Aella had a.s.sumed the crowds had just loved her. It hadn"t occurred to her that they were upset because the cheating was so glaringly obvious. They hadn"t cared if she won or not! It made sense to her, now that she understood it. Those demons had never seen her before, to have had a chance to like her. They were only there to see a series of fights. The position of king was nothing to them.
"Okay, so being king isn"t what I thought. What should a king be in charge of?" she asked, looking him in the eyes.
He nodded, as if she had only then begun to listen. "A king"s primary duty should be to protect the kingdom. The demon lands need to gain wealth and increase in trade. The king should be seen as the one who takes care of the poor, administers justice to those who break the laws, upholds those laws in whichever ways need done, raises armies to fight off invaders and keep the n.o.bles from fighting each other. Being a king is no light job. It will take a lot of time and effort to gain back what has been taken from that position."
"I don"t know about any of those things, other than we are at war with the humans who send over heroes that kill our kings. My father had to leave me to fight in the same war, so it"s still going on. Do wars ever end?"
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"If we don"t have a primary person to represent our kingdom, there is no one to discuss an end to any fighting that may be going on. You mention the humans, but what of the elves, dwarves, gnomes, halflings? Are there still orcs and goblins in the mountains? What of the outposts in the mountains, that were placed there to prevent monsters from bothering the kingdom? I have so many questions I would love to get answered, but asking you will do nothing for me, as I shall never see you again."
He hung his head down, momentarily overwhelmed with rage. Then he sighed and looked back up at her with a hard look.
"You were a king once," she whispered. The realization had just hit her.
"I was the first. Cursed to give advice to future kings, until I realized they didn"t intend for me to do that. I"ve used my magic to get back at them, the best I could, but it backfired. Now they don"t even bother to have the new kings sent to me, despite the fact I know every time a new king is crowned, and the old ones die." His words were soft, as if too painful to voice out loud.
"Why can"t I see you again?" she asked. "I would love to be able to bounce ideas off of you! Who else to learn from then an actual king!"
He shook his head. "When I closed off the royal library, they reciprocated by closing the door off to these chambers. When the library is opened back up, then you may return, but that would take a Great Sage the likes that have not been seen in centuries. A love for reading is hard to foster in a population that barely reads. The fact that you know to read means your father was a very powerful demon in the army. I am sorry you lost him so young. I would have enjoyed meeting him."
"Then tell me of what dangers you had to worry about when you were king," she pleaded. "Even if those dangers no longer apply, they will give me an idea of what to look out for."
"I was the one who forced the humans to separate the two nations. We used to be one joined nation, intermingling peacefully, until I stumbled upon a scheme by the church, at that time, to sacrifice all of the demons and hunt down any who tried to flee. I raised an army very quickly. We were refugees from a war-torn country, so we understood fighting very well. It didn"t take long to form the new kingdom, with me as the leader.
"I set up outposts in the mountains to the north to fight off the larger monsters that would attack occasionally, and to the south, to keep the pa.s.ses clear for trade with the other kingdoms to be maintained. I was in the process of having some kind of barrier built, to keep the human armies from causing us grief and raiding our fields, when I was approached by one of my most trusted advisors. He convinced me to set up a very powerful spell circle to ensure that all future kings had the opportunity to learn from me," he paused, lost in thought.
She knew that monsters still attacked from the north, but also from the south. Could the trade pa.s.ses have failed since he was king? It had been thousands of years since the first king, she couldn"t even imagine what all had happened in that time. Surely the war that was ongoing with the humans wasn"t the same war?
"He tricked me. Convinced me to let him double check my circle before I cast the spell. He must have changed some of the runes, but I"m not sure what. Without access to my spell books in the library, I don"t have a prayer of ever escaping. Of course, at this point, should I manage to escape, I would be so old I would probably die within moments, but it would be so nice to feel the wind on my face one last time."
Aella knew without a doubt, that she would free him. She understood his longing very well, and the thought of how long he had been waiting made her very, very p.i.s.sed off.