The Fire Queen

Chapter 47

Financing these projects wasn't going to be a problem, in addition to the nobles' confiscated wealth our reserves were being further increased by the Volstaff coins that we were taking out of circulation and using to mint new Aseron coins. These new coins, Alfred informed me, would need to be kept out of circulation as much as possible; if they were all put into circulation immediately their value would drop and we would get no benefit from the increase in our reserves aside from crippling inflation.

Putting together this new plan for water management across the kingdom was going to take time, time which I could use to address the diplomatic issues that Boris and Ferland had been advising me on. We had made all the progress that we could make through diplomatic talks with the ambassadors; to formalize our relationships with the other kingdoms, Dranii in particular, I needed to meet with those leaders in person. We agreed that Dranii would be the first kingdom I visited. This being my first foreign diplomatic trip as the official ruler of Aseron, Boris was excited to get to work on the preparations for the trip.

"You're going to need to be accompanied by a large security force and a large cadre of diplomatic and economic advisers. We'll need many horses, maybe one hundred, several carriages for transporting people and provisions, and we'll need to send advanced word to all of the towns through which we'll be traveling to prepare themselves for the arrival of a royal traveling party," Boris said with great enthusiasm.

"How long is this trip going to take?" I asked him.

"My estimation is that it should take us about three months to get there."

"And if I fly over there with Myra?"

"That would maybe take a day," he answered despondently.

"Excellent, that's what I'll do then."

"Your majesty, please, such things are simply not done, as queen you must respect the traditions of royalty and that means traveling with all of the personnel and pageantry that a royal is expected to travel with."

"Boris, I don't care about any of that, I just want to go there and get this over with."

"What about your security? You can't go to a foreign kingdom all on your own, the risk involved is too great!"

"I'll have Myra with me, and I'll ask Uraia to accompany me with Igor, and I trust her with my safety more than I do any army."

Now that she was the Okwari representative on the Governing Council Uraia wasn't supposed to participate in palace affairs but the fact of the matter was that her role on the Governing Council left her with nothing to do and she was bored. When I told her about my trip to Dranii and I asked her to join me she happily agreed, mostly because ever since Igor had gotten big enough for her to fly with him she had been looking forward to going on a long distance trip with me and Myra.

As I always did when I left the palace I put Ferland in charge until my return and Uraia and I took off for Dranii. We traveled to Galand first so Uraia could get a look at the work that the dwarves were doing and from there we traveled to Bandor's village so Uraia could pay her father a visit. Bandor was now the chief, and Kendor was spending nearly all of his time resting in his hut, waiting for his time to come. We spent some time with Kendor in his hut where he was resting and then we sat down with Bandor to discuss his resistance to the ideas that I'd put forward for improving the lives of the Okwari.

"It's not that we don't appreciate what you want to do for us, it's just that to many what you are proposing sounds similar what we went through when the white settlers that drove us off our land decided to try and civilize us by taking our children away and raising them in their culture," Bandor said.

"But that was over five hundred years ago," I responded.

"Yes, but that episode was very traumatic for us and it hasn't been forgotten."

"Bandor, we have a seat on the Governing Council, I'm there to make sure that when it comes to issues that affect us it is our needs that comes first."

"Uraia, you should know by now that ever since you left us to join the bandits you have been viewed as an outsider."

Uraia was hurt by this, I could see it in her face. The best thing for us to do was to leave before something truly terrible was said. Flying over the Northlands and looking down at the land below that was dotted with Okwari villages spread far apart, I realized that I had been naive in believing that I could act as a bridge between the Okwari and the rest of the kingdom when there was so much distrust and enmity on the part of the Okwari because of everything that they had suffered at the hands of my ancestors. I was still resolved to making the Okwari feel like the kingdom was as much theirs as it was any other Aseronian's, I just had to find another way to do it.