"To think that you would be unable to ride," Verdant said, as they shared tea in the Advice House. "I would have thought… Well, it is of no matter. I can lend you my mount in the stables, of have it arranged for another more suitable one to be delivered should it prove too large for you."
"You know I'm not keen on borrowing coin from you, Verdant," Oliver said.
Verdant tilted his head. "You are not borrowing coin from me, my Lord. Only a horse. I would never presume to buy one in your stead, knowing how uncomfortable it would likely make you."
"Ah, I suppose. Thank you, then. How much am I likely to spend on buying one of these beasts anyway?" Oliver asked.
"I imagine around thirty golds for a satisfactory mount," Verdant said, "though I have not bought horses in many years. When the war intensifies, their prices always seem to go up. Of course, if you wanted a particularly rare breed, you'd be looking at over a hundred golds."
"No thanks, I'll stick to the entry-level stuff," Oliver said. "Thirty golds? Damn it. You could feed a whole village for a year on that gold, but good luck feeding a whole village for more than a few weeks on a horse."
"Well, I am merely glad to see that the trial has done nothing to quash your spirit, my Lord," Verdant said. "I am sure it would have embittered worse men, had they learned a little more about the darkness of this world that we govern."
"Quite the contrary, Verdant," Oliver declared, downing his drink. "I feel fine. Good, even. It's cleared the floor for me. The world makes considerably more sense than it did before, and I'm more aware of my place in it."
Oliver wasn't lying. Though it was more the presence of new goals that gave him such a foundation. The sense of division that he'd felt in himself hadn't come back, even after the time spent in a cell, doing nothing and even after the dramas of the trial. His ascension to the Third Boundary – as impossible and as rule-breaking as it was – seemed to be stabilizing, at least to some degree.
It was as though Oliver needed an enemy as large as a King merely to balance out the weight of his new strength, as his body tried desperately to catch up to what had happened to it, as they bypassed the proper procedures of progress.
"You seem determined," Verdant noted. "It is good to see, as your retainer. It makes me feel similarly eager."
"Have you spoken to your father since?" Oliver asked.
"Indeed. That is what I feel the eagerness about. For years, the weight of that inheritance has weighed me down without reason. I did not want it. I felt the weight of all those lives that a Lord resides over. I would have given anything for my father to merely move on and hand that title of heir to one of my brothers," Verdant said.
"And now I see the worth in it. I see my father differently, too. I can respect him more than I did in the past, perhaps even understand him. I see that he places our Idris House above all else, as a Lord is expected to, but hearing that and understanding it are two things entirely.
It is through my service to you, my Lord, that I have been able to free myself of this icy chamber that has kept my life frozen in place for so many years," Verdant said.
"I can't see that I've done anything, but I'm glad to see you looking optimistic," Oliver said. "I thought you'd dislike the whole Lordship thing."
"Not now that I am doing it with a worthy cause," Verdant said. "I will prepare myself appropriately, as an inheritor should, and one day you shall have the full force of House Idris behind you, just as it now stands behind Princess Asabel."
Putting it like that, Oliver felt a tingle in his fingers. A whole House, under his command? It hardly bore thinking about. A House was an entity comprising thousands and thousands of people – a Lord, their servants and all the lands that they ruled over. All the trade connections that they'd established. A Lord didn't seem much different at all from a King, apart from the scale.
To have an entity of that magnitude belonging just to him… It finally set in the significance of having a Lord as a retaining. Or having a noble as a retainer at all. For even the minor nobility commanded estates, connections and sometimes even hundreds of people.
"House Patrick will need to rebuild itself appropriately to be worthy of that honour," Oliver said gravely. "I need coin, and I need to do something about my poor political position. Skullic advised such a thing too."
Verdant placed a leather pouch on the table at the mention of coin, having withdrawn it from the folds of his robe. The priest – or ex-priest – was still wearing his priestly attire. Apparently, the Academy were in the middle of finding him a different position, one that would allow him to stay at the Academy for a while longer, but one that would also allow him to act as the Lordling that he was.
"What's this?" Oliver asked.
"I'd forgotten about it," Verdant said, "but these are the sum of our profits from our recent dealings with the Nebular boy. There are forty golds of profit there. Apparently, he wishes to renegotiate how the profits are split, now that he is confident in his ability to produce the recipe consistently."
"Forty?" Oliver said up with a start, pulling the coin pouch open. Indeed, those were golden coins, and at a ballpark guess, he would have assumed forty. "That is… oh, that's right, I suppose."
"Indeed," Verdant agreed. "As good a price as one might expect. I know that you are nervous about your affairs with coin, but given your strength with the sword and the access to the Grand Forest that you have at your disposal, such things can be remedied faster than one might expect. Especially given your connection to a competent alchemist."