War.
The word felt heavy, like a stone in his pocket that grew colder with every passing hour.
Basil could not understand it, not for the love of all that was sacred. His father had always taught him to look beneath the surface of things, to dissect a problem until its skeleton was revealed, but war defied his logic. If a man killed his neighbor in an alley for his boots, it was murder, and the law demanded his life. But do it under a silken banner, amidst the thunder of drums, and suddenly that same act was valor.
It was a riddle with no answer.
He looked at the targets in the garden, those hay-stuffed puppets with charcoal faces, and saw the mockery of it all. War was a performance led by lords and princes, who gathered the common-born like harvest wheat, directing them to ride this way or that. They told their sons and knights it was "mettle" to drive a dirk into another man's guts and strip the warm boots from his cooling feet.
