The Prince's Mark

Chapter Thirty Five

Mentioning the gifts seemed to please Yash. He leaned back on his hands. "Did you enjoy them?"

"The food was delicious." He punctuated his sentence with a stray yawn he tried to downplay.

"Did I call on you too early in the morning?" Yash asked, amused.

"Ah... no." Tracou closed his eyes for a moment. If this continued for multiple days, he needed some kind of explanation for why he would get increasingly sleepy. "Dezmek are nocturnal."

"Is that so!" Yash leaned forward like a child about to hear an expert's tips on how to win their favorite game. "Nocturnal! What time do you usually go to sleep?"

"Just before sunrise," he said, fighting off another yawn. This talk about sleep only made things worse.

"And you sleep until sunset?"

"Mm, generally."

"Very interesting. I suppose that's another point against those Aodehsh."

"You really don't like them..."

"Naturally. Not only were they rude, but they treat others, like you, poorly. I find myself rather astounded that they would be so brazen about it. Winlea doesn't treat people like that."

Those words made Tracou's face twist in disbelief. Thusfar a dezmek had made it through Winlea okay, but elves received terrible treatment.

"Hm? You disagree?" Yash asked with a lopsided grin.

"I heard that, ah... that there are two people in the dungeon here."

"And for good reason! They attacked our king. We can't allow people like that to go free and hurt others. One of them worked here for years... but she had always been difficult. When I replaced her, well, she vowed revenge. It's unfortunate that she took it out on the king instead of me."

"What about the other one?"

"An elf, if you can believe it. As if they didn't give us enough trouble by hassling us about the border."

The border. He had heard something about that before, but he barely had a grasp on relations between Dezmer and Winlea, let alone relations between Winlea and any other country.

"What do they do, exactly?"

"Every twenty years they come to us saying that we have somehow moved the border between us into their territory—even when they approved of the border last time. But what can we do? The Elven Kingdom dwarfs Aodehn, let alone Winlea." Yash glared at some imagined enemy in front of him, his eyes far away. His expression, so open and jovial before, made the atmosphere in the room drop ten degrees. "We can't retaliate and they know it. So, every few decades, they take a bit more of our land. It will be hundreds of years before they make it deep into Winlea, but they have time. They're elves. We can't call on Aodehn for military aid over a few haths every twenty years."

All at once, Yash came back to himself. He turned a critical eye towards Tracou. "And then there's the pressure from the dezmek to keep away from the ocean. The elves erode us to the west, the mountains block the north, our only ally holds the south, and the dezmek patrol the waters to the east. A single nation can't own the seas, Dezmek Tracou... Don't you agree?"

Tracou, sunk deep into his chair, nodded.

Yash eyed him as if he could see Tracou's sins tallied up on his forehead.

"Dezmek think they are as untouchable as elves, don't they? They put great pride in their magic."

"...We are very proud."