Draka had Olaf count out loud for him while he covered his eyes. He made sure to leave before Valmond forced him into another one of those dreadful outfits. He didn’t have to look like a genie all the time. Instead, he decided to be himself. A simple shirt, a pair of trousers, his boots, and no sword. Why bother with the sword? He had Clerics at his side anyway. And Olaf. No one will do anything with that brute around.

  Olaf finished the count and called out with his gruff Ural accent, “Ready or not, here he comes!”

  Draka uncovered his eyes and trotted around the crowded village square, brimming with a wide smile. The crowd was watching with matching smiles, mostly the children’s parents, some holding each other and laughing while Draka pretended to stumble around them. He could hear the children giggling from behind the vendor stands and stacks of hay that the drums for the Ribbon Dance were set.

  He peered over one that he knew none of them were hiding behind and made an exaggerated show of surprise. Then he pursed his brows and pressed his lips sideways before setting off for a stand to look around the side of it on his knees. The vendor laughed when he purposely didn’t look in front of the woman’s legs where the little girl was crouched. Draka shook his head. He could see the flock of children scatter from their hiding spots through the crowd to new ones with the ruckus of laughter from the crowd.

  Another show of disappointment when he looked at another spot without anyone there. Then he went to one with a little boy and tagged him then bolted to the far end at barely a trot, the boy chasing after him. The crowd was clapping. The boy tagged him when he tripped over his own leg and rolled. He flopped onto the ground as if he was disappointed with himself. The flock leapt on him for tickles.

  Now it was his turn to hide while the boy counted beside the Ribbon Pole. More claps, more laughing. Draka crouched on the wrong side of a haystack and covered his eyes like one of the small ones did early on in their game. He was tagged and threw his head back with another overexaggerated expression of disappointment in himself.

  “If you weren’t the King, your Majesty,” one young woman said from the crowd, “I’d fight with my elbows and knees on the ribbon for you to father my children!”

  Draka did his best courtly bow to her, allowing the children to run off with their next round without him, accompanied by the roar of applause. He would smile forever if he could. He would dance, too, as the woman on the wooden stage nearby danced and played tunes he knew better than any he had heard in this region of the world.

  The Romani sway of her bow made his blood flow. He was surprised to hear the tunes of the north and east at first, but her dark hair and colorful dresses were familiar enough to know that she was none other than a gypsy of the east. There were others around her that must be from her roving tribe. Each had their own instruments. A cello here, an accordion there, even a piano had been set that had much of the paint chipped and sounded in dire need of tuning compared to those Isa forced Adrian to take lessons on, a couple with different types of drums, and Tuck with his guitar. A part of him wondered…He nodded to Olaf with a finger pointed toward her and a shrug.

  “You think she knows the Korobeiniki?” Olaf asked in his native tongue.

  Draka motioned for him to ask. Olaf’s smile couldn’t get wider. He ran to the stage. The violinist crouched in front of him and nodded, beaming, then called out to the others of her group in the same language as Olaf returned.

  The moment the violinist began the ancient tune at a slow pace, common men—migrants who had come not more than a month ago—formed a circle around the Ribbon Pole. Olaf and Draka joined them along with a few of the other nearby Clerics of their Order.

  Their hands were out at first, as they circled around the pole to the slower pace, then back the other way, never breaking the circle. Then the violinist began to quicken her tune. They began to kick every few steps, changing the rotation of their circle, keeping with the tune’s pace.

  She quickened. They crossed their arms. They kicked and threw their arms into the air. The drums beat. The cellos matched the violin. The accordion sang. The crowd was wowed as Draka and his men matched step for step the traditional dance of a people who was as foreign to them as a desert to a forest. They returned to the joined circle, only this time, every other man stepped in then out and did it again, turning and kicking.

  When it was done, when the violinist slowed it to nothing again, they all stopped and laughed with loud cheers from the crowd once again. Draka and Olaf locked arms around their shoulders, brimming with smiles as the men who had danced with them gathered around to embrace them. Who would ever think that he would find himself surrounded by the people he had fought so hard to defend in a place so far away, joining him in this place, in his tiny kingdom, in his home? He felt his heart soar.

  “Thank you,” Olaf said to the gypsies and Tuck, answered by their bows before they began another tune.

  Draka gave Olaf’s shoulder a squeeze before moving on to where barrels of different drinks had been set by villagers from Alcer as well as Talkro. He recognized a few of them. Leta, Alexandra, Charlotte, he all knew. But then there was Annabelle, Balthazar’s wife, who he had never met, and Balian’s wife, Coralin. A few others he couldn’t match to their husbands, likely because they weren’t among the former homesteaders perhaps. Either way, he pointed to the barrel that had floating cherries in front of Leta with a thin-lipped grin.

  She dipped a wooden cup in it by the handle and handed it to him with a bow, “I hope you enjoy, your Majesty.”

  He nodded his thanks before taking a sip. It was strewn with alcohol but was deliciously brazen with the cherries. He’ll be sure to sip it slowly.

  A wafting air met his nose and his stomach growled in answer. There were pigs on spits with apples in their mouths over fires being tended by Morin and his brother Sorin. Gregor was grilling fish not too far from them, his cousin Preston basting a beef quarter no more than a few paces away, and there were many more spaced across the reaped field beyond the village in patches of billowing smoke. Some were tended by women as well, who brought pots to place over fires, or had baskets of assortments of vegetables they carried for the cooks to add to their grills. Seasoned intestines were being stuffed with shredded meats by butchers and twisted into sausages before they were roped over spickets. Plucked pheasants and other game were being made as well.

  This story originates from a different website. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

  It was the boys who had lined up in their finest shirts that made him shake his head and nearly laugh. They would be tied to a pole and blindfolded only to be untied to meet their new wife after, without any idea who it is until that moment. They were standing in a row, flexing their arms, winking at the passing girls their age, and often brushing their hands through their hair with flexing arms.

  A few found themselves being looked over by fathers as one would a slave. How are their teeth? A plump belly? Strong or weak? Confident or shy? Many of them were met with shaking heads or tsks of disappointment from the fathers or lifted noses by the mothers who pulled their daughters away. Mostly from the ones who were displaced by the flood. Draka furrowed his brow at that. They truly were being gauged by their worth as providers and not by the content of their character. Raphael was the only one who consistently had impressed fathers and wanton mothers with intrigued daughters.

  “Wonder what you’d do if I stood by them and let myself be tied to a pole,” Adrian sat next to Draka with his own cup. His had floating bits of apple.

  As he went to take a drink, Draka took it from him with a crooked brow. He knew better than to drink in front of him outside of the confines of the home. Draka set it down on the other side of him with a narrowed gaze toward the boys.

  “Mother would have kittens. Might make it worth it,” Adrian chuckled. Then, he slapped his knees, “Well, I’m going to get myself a drink. I seem to have misplaced mine.” Draka rolled his eyes to him. “Oh, come on! It’s the Harvest Festival! Just one, please? It’s the good kind. Like, really good! I promise I won’t be an embarrassment.”

  Draka raised a brow.

  “Okay,” Adrian gulped. “It won’t be another Rostov, how about that?”

  Narrowed eyes.

  “I learned my lesson,” Adrian was pleading, “I’ll take it slow. Look, if Olaf is with me…”

  Draka scoffed at that idea.

  “It was worth a try,” Adrian shrugged. “One? Pleeeeaaaasssseee?”

  Draka handed the cup back to him with a shake of his head. Might as well.

  “You won’t regret it.”

  Already am.

  “I didn’t think there would be so many from the campaign here,” Adrian took a sip. “I heard the music and couldn’t believe my ears. All the way here.” The tightened rise of his cheeks to his eyes and stiffening of his jaw made Draka worry. “And Olaf. Did Petra make it here? Vasiliy?”

  Draka shook his head. Not yet, anyway.

  “Pity, I’d like to see them again. Dimitriy was fun, too.”

  Draka grinned and pointed toward a group of Clerics, Dimitriy among them. Adrian beamed and leapt to his feet. He set the cup where he was sitting and sprinted across the square to leap at the Cleric who greeted him with open arms. Draka warmed at the sight.

  “I can’t decide,” Maud sat beside him, facing the opposite way.

  Draka leaned to look at her. She was in a green dress that was darker than her eyes.

  She turned to him. “Now that he has his land and all, I don’t think I want to be connected to him. He’ll use it somehow, I know it.”

  Draka shrugged. It’d be his right as your uncle.

  “What if I don’t connect the names, like some do with marriage?” Maud tilted her head at him. “I’d be Maudeline Clevlan Luminis, with three names?”

  Draka nodded. You can.

  “Or would it be better if I were to be just Maudeline Luminis?”

  Draka let out a deep breath, looking deep into her eyes, then motioned for her to wait and think about it longer. She didn’t need to decide on that yet. She’s his princess regardless.

  “Ma told me you made me your official heir, unless you have a son and I don’t,” She grinned warmly. “As if I were your firstborn. I appreciate that, but it isn’t right, you know. Your blood should be on the throne if there is an heir and I will see to it that it does.”

  Draka shrugged at that. A shake of his head and he turned back to the boys. Another bout of parents inspecting their worth. All they needed were auctioneers like the pirates. This tradition has its merits but it also is rife with humiliations.

  Maud pinched him. Hard. “You will change it. I will be regent for your child until they come of age, but your child will rule this kingdom, boy or girl, and uncontested by me. I will fight you through the fields and into the rivers on this, Draka, believe you me.”

  Draka nodded. She grinned with a warmth he had missed. Today was becoming a good day.

  A thought struck Draka and he turned to her. He reached into his shirt for his small pencil and paper. He wrote, ‘In my tribe, we have a way of saying ‘daughter of’ when naming some. Perhaps, we can do that with your father, to honor him without connection to your uncle.’

  “What would it be, then?”

  Draka winced as he wrote, ‘Maudeline Derbalor Luminis.’

  Her nose crinkled at that. “I’ll think about it.”

  Wait until she figures out that I’m about to make her mother Aurelie Clevlan the Dowager Countess Beauvais. That should get a wonderful reception. Draka began to fold the paper to tuck it away.

  “I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings,” Maud said. “It’s just an odd name. Derbalor. I’ll have to think about it. But I like what you’re thinking. Plow Balian. But then again, I am a Clevlan. And it is Clevlan blood in my veins.”

  Draka agreed. He wrote on the folded paper, ‘Take time.’

  “I will.”