The Sword in the Stone - 2.3

Mishka was missing.

The infuriating, arrogant alien who thought she was better than everyone else around her was gone. The alien who was her only way to get home was gone. Astrid had asked one of her many priest-guards to find her, and he had tried, but beyond someone at the gate who said he’d seen Mishka leave the palace in the dead of night, there wasn’t a trace of her.

Which meant that Astrid was going to have to face a demon alone. A demon that had apparently killed the last person to successfully pull the sword from the stone, and although no one came out and said it, they all clearly expected her to perish in the attempt. One of the servants had even asked another within Astrid’s earshot what type of wood they should order for her coffin.

They’d blushed and apologised profusely when they’d realised she’d heard, but it was clear that everyone fully expected her to die. After all, she was just a woman, and this medieval world was worse than the worst upmarket gentleman’s club on Pescia.

Truth be told, however, the misogyny had hardly registered to her, so overshadowed as it was by the fact that she was going to die. She’d hardly slept a wink, her heartbeat was constantly in her ears, and her entire body felt like a spring about to release. Every instinct in her body was screaming at her to run, but Mishka had told her that wouldn’t help – that she was somehow bound to this place.

Besides, she was constantly being watched over by at least six of the priest-guards, and somehow she doubted, absolute monarch or not, that they were going to just stand around if she tried to leg it.

Which was why, instead of running off across country as fast as she could, she was sat on a gilded throne in large hall packed with people, expected to ‘hold court’ – as if she knew anything about ruling a country! Most of the petitioners at the front were clearly well to do, nobles and perhaps rich merchants, but behind them, dressed in slightly scruffier and worn clothes, were a few members of the lower classes.

“The first petitioner, Duke Ferris of Grathumbria!” called the crier to her right.

The tall, sharp-featured, scarred man emerged from the crowd with all the confidence of someone who had ruled the regency for the past twenty years, and clearly expected to keep on ruling for twenty more.

Due to some quirk in their laws, Astrid had been told, major proclamations and edicts could only be issued by a monarch, which meant that he was rather desperate to get her to rubber-stamp some ‘important documents’ before she got ripped apart by a demon.

“My Queen,” said the duke, bowing low.

“Hello, yes, fine,” said Astrid. “What do you want me to look at?”

“This is an edict formalising and legalising control of lands traditionally controlled by several noble families,” he said, offering a document to one of her guards, who in turn brought it to her.

Thanks for Mishka’s brain parasite, she could read and understand what should have been unfamiliar characters and symbols. Astrid peered at the alien legalese, trying to make sense of what it was saying. It seemed to be a writ giving several families, including Duke Ferris’, the deeds to wide sections of the country that had previously been ‘fecklessly managed commons.’

Astrid didn’t consider herself particularly political. She’d taken part in a few protests as an archaeology undergraduate, but that was mainly in an attempt to impress a very cute philosophy major who’d been three doors up in her dorm. Natasha had been a beautiful alven woman, and a fiery and angry anarchist. So, in an effort to attract her, Astrid had started reading the fashionable radical philosopher’s – or at least, pretending to – in the dorm’s common room where she might see, and attending rallies and political meetings in the hopes that she might be noticed. But apart from one semi-drunken snog it hadn’t amounted to anything, and Astrid had all but forgotten about the red-haired alf as she’d moved into her post-graduate studies and started writing her thesis.

Still, a bit of that radical edge must have rubbed off on her, because something chimed in her mind as she looked over the document. One of the old books she’d ‘read’ that had been about the ‘Seizure of the Commons.’ It was something that the landed gentry had done on Alavar, her ancestors’ home worlds, where they’d taken what had once been communal land and appropriated it, the result of which being that a whole lot of poor people had become destitute and been driven into the city’s en-masse.

It seemed that the duke was trying to do the same thing here.

This wasn’t her world, but all the same, this annoyed her. This guy, with his fancy clothes and sword and lands and power over the lives of who knew how many people wasn’t content with what he had. He wanted even more, and he was ready and willing and eager to hurt people to get it.

“I’m not authorising this,” she said, handing it back to her guard.

The duke blinked rapidly, and there were murmurs throughout the court – some, from the nobility, angry. “I’m… sorry?” said Duke in soft tones, beneath which she could hear a hint of steel. This was a man used to getting his way.

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Her first response was to shrink and wither before his burning gaze. But she stopped herself. What did she care if he got upset? She was going to die later that day anyway. Mishka wasn’t going to save her, and there was no way Astrid was going to kill some massive demon with a sword.

“I’m not signing that,” she said. “It would hurt a lot of people. You don’t need more land.”

The duke bristled, but slowly retrieved the document. There was a cheer from the back of the room, and what sounded like mutinous murmurs from the front. “I… see. Well, perhaps we’ll come back to that one,” said the duke, taking another and offering it to her guard. “Here perhaps, this is a writ standardising the taxation across the kingdom.”

Astrid glanced over the document, and scoffed. Standardising was right. She recognised this one too from the one history class she’d taken: a ‘pole-tax.’ A ‘pole-tax’ was a flat tax paid by every single person in the kingdom whether they were noble born or serf-farmers: five gold. Trivial for nobility to pay, crippling for the poor.

Astrid stared at it for a few moments, before grabbing the quill that was on a small sideboard slash desk, dipping it in an ink-well, and beginning to roughly and brutally amend it. She didn’t know much about tax systems or what made a good one, but she was pretty sure that she could do better than a pole-tax, or whatever onerous system they had otherwise.

“My- my queen!?” said the duke in a terrified voice. “What are you- what are you doing?”

“Oh, just a few modifications,” said Astrid, crossing out most of the text and writing in her own law. The worried murmurs in the room increased, and despite her imminent demise, Astrid felt a sense of smug, slightly reckless satisfaction. She looked it over, smiled, and then stamped it with her seal. The page glowed gold as her seal took hold, and she handed it to the crier. “There.”

“Her majesty, Queen Astrid Baxter-Griffiths, first of her name, has issued the following royal proclamation!” cried the crier, crieringly. “Her Majesty has decreed that the tax code is to be reformed! From this moment forth, all taxes will be weighted according to income earned, either in coin or in kind, with the following brackets…”

He continued onward for a while longer, spelling out the various divisions she’d sucked out of her thumb, and which fell very harshly on the richest.

When he finished was a moment of silence as the court tried to figure out what Astrid had done.

Then all hell broke loose. The nobles started braying in anger, and a few moments after that there were cheers from the back of the room as the poorer petitioners realised that Astrid had massively cut their taxes while raising them on the rich. At least, that was what Astrid assumed she had done.

Eventually the priest-guards managed to restore order, although the assembled nobility were looking at her as if they wanted to murder her, and the duke’s hands were trembling with rage.

“This is- what have you done!?” said Duke Ferris.

“Progressive taxation,” said Astrid. “We don’t want people to be destitute, right?”

“You- you cannot do this!” shouted the duke, taking a step towards the throne.

As soon as he moved, the pair of priest-guards beside her stepped forward and drew several inches of steel from their scabbards. Lightning crackled around the weapons, and the duke froze. A hush fell over the room, all of the nobles tensing.

Huh, thought Astrid. So apparently the priesthood was more loyal to her than any status-quo? That was reassuring. She didn’t really know why they would do that. Perhaps they realised that the real threat was Baelgoroth, and that she was needed to fight him?

Well, if she had that kind of backing…

Astrid straightened her spine and put on her best imperious smirk. “As I understand it, I can,” said Astrid, tapping her crown. “Absolute monarch, right?”

“My- my queen, be- be reasonable,” said the duke, clearly struggling to control his mounting fury. “This will- this will upend the natural order! Destroy the nobility that binds this kingdom together!”

“Suck it dry, you mean,” said Astrid.

She chuckled to herself, if only Natasha could see her now…

“We will- we will fight this!” shouted the duke, what remained of his temper shattering. “You will not get away with this- with this womanly perversion!”

‘Womanly perversion?’ thought Astrid as her anger spiked once more. ‘I’ll give the little misogynistic twerp “womanly perversion.”’

“I’m going to be dead by tomorrow, what do I care?” shouted Astrid, a feeling of reckless abandon gripping her once more. “In fact, you know what?”

If she was going to die, then she was going to at least make this horrible little man’s life difficult before she did so. Astrid grabbed a piece of paper from the large stack to her left and scrawled something else, then grabbed her seal and stamped it. The piece of paper glowed gold, and she picked it up and began to read.

“Effective immediately, all noble titles except my own are hereby abolished. All subjects of the crown, regardless of gender or species, will be equal before the law,” said Astrid. “There, suck it, Mr. Ferris!”

The until-moments-ago-Duke’s face turned as red as a beetroot, and he let out an inarticulate roar as he grasped the hilt of his sword. He took another step forward, but before he could fully draw his weapon the priest-guards, who for whatever reason seemed indifferent to her quite radical proclamation, struck him down, their blades cleaving through his unarmoured body and making him crumple.

Astrid gulped and put a hand to her mouth. Maybe… maybe that had been a bit rash.

No one in the room moved.

Then the nobles screamed and went for their weapons, which they all had. Astrid yelped in alarm and jumped off her throne, cowering behind it as a massive melee broke out between her priest-guards, joined, by many of the poorer petitioners, and the nobles.

Fire and lightning crackled from the priest-guard’s blades as they formed a line in front of her, and she put her hands over her ears and closed her eyes, trying to shut out the terrible screams and clashing of steel. On and on and on it went until eventually the room fell silent.

She opened her eyes and peered around her throne, her eyes boggling at the sight of dozens of dead people and the slick, red blood that was slowly spreading out to cover most of the throne room’s large flagstones.

She gulped.

That had escalated quickly.

“All hail Good Queen Astrid!” shouted one of bloodied, but alive commoners at the back. Well, not a commoner, she thought – she’d abolished feudalism in a fit of pique, and, it seemed, kicked off some kind of revolution.

“The People’s Queen!” shouted another. “The People’s Queen!”