#he wasn’t getting justice he was sacking towns. this wasn’t war nor a battle it was cruel slaughter

[throwawayasoiafaccount]

i think most people would hate him if the showrunners decided to stick with canon

let’s not forget Bitterbridge and Tumbleton

daeron the war criminal deserved his pathetic death

[originaldetectivesheep]

The Thirty and One Nights' Momentary Diversion - Vilem and the Magic Beans

Tonight's tale wanders far back into the mists of the past: back behind the framings of fairy tales, to the days of myths, and legends -- and heroes.

Vilem and the Magic Beans

I was on the bridge because it was obvious, and because it was close: wagons in the center and the people walking would be pushed to the edge, to me and my hat and the stump of my leg sitting back to the rail between Jezek the Victory and green Tamara the Justice.  Me and my hat and me bowed forward in silence, stump out, crutch braced against the bronze head of the infidel under Jezek's foot, a coin for pity, for pity only. This was the only place in Pribram where you could beg in silence and hope to get anything at all: grotesque mutilated children would flop under the wagon wheels as they capered, and a musician with even a bagpipe or an accordion would be drowned out by the din of the passing crowd.  This was all I could have, this little patch that was killing me by inches, and the only reason I could keep it even here was the tabard I still wore, even as it fell to rags, showing that I'd been a soldier, and even on just the one leg would probably do for any drunken sneak who tried to steal my little patch of stone. I'd been a soldier once, and sometimes that got me a coin for pity – and sometimes it got grumbling about how the voinaj should do more for the men who'd lifted him to the throne, and a nose in the air from one who now got to feel superior for keeping their purse shut as they'd've done all the same.

If you asked me what day it was, or how it was, I couldn't've answered: all the days became the same, and fortune never changed, there on the bridge.  I earned too little to not grow thin and too much to starve outright; the sun went up and the sun went down, and with too much of my takings wasted on a mug of heavy black beer I curled up under half a rotten horse blanket and tried to shiver myself to sleep.  Any day the same as the one before, the one behind – even the day that Kardaus came back, even that one, had started just the same as any day else and was on a course to end even the very same.

I didn't notice him as he came, because he was on horseback, and I was staring down at the hat braced in the crook of my knee, the empty stump next to it: all I cared for horses was that they didn't step on me, and they never did – for anyone on a horse to throw a coin rather than an apple core was almost beyond possible, and for a horseman to not merely notice me but care was less likely still.  Even when I'd been whole, I never merited a glance nor a reaction from any horseman I wasn't myself trying to kill.  But here the horse stopped, blocking traffic with the grumbles of a few porters and a jingle of tack, and then the clattering crunch of hobnailed boots on stone as Kardaus swung down to stand before me.

"Vilem?" he said, saying it again when I didn't look up.  "Vilem?  Vilem from Trejtnar who was in the Life Guard to Knihov Courch?"  I looked up at that; I'd recognized Kardaus' voice at last, through the years and the hunger stupor, and had to look up and see who he'd become since we parted ways – how he was looking at me, and what the foremost captain of the age, a man who started as a rented spear and cut his way to the stole of a tehsildar of the distant Musoma Empire, might want with a crippled beggar he hadn't served with in ten years.  "It is you," he said, reaching down a hand wrapped in gleaming crimson leather, "but by each and all of the rumburkuk stood up around us, you're looking thin.  I've got a proposition for you, but let's get a square meal in you first – it don't do me good to see a good man going green and shriveled like commissary bacon.  Come on."  He flexed his hand, but I pushed myself up with my crutch and my one good leg – even like this, and him and his horse, I didn't want to make myself dependent on anyone.

Down off the bridge and around to the Trout and Lily, Kardaus walked his horse at my limping pace, and then ordered up a plate of sausage and fried potatoes, a loaf of bread sat between us: he read me out, not giving but letting me divide with him, and I paid for my own beer with the whole of the contents of my hat.  I was not too proud to eat – months crippled and starving cures you of that – and Kardaus waited, sipping at his beer as I ate up and slowed, looking up bright-eyed and full-fed enough to understand whatever it was that he'd brought me in for.  "It's been a long time," he said at last, "a long time since they paid us out after the fall of Rozmberk, and you went east while I went west – and I fear the years haven't been quite so kind to you.  What about it?  What were your adventures?  How've you been keeping yourself?  You've got the advantage of me; I can't take three steps without a catalogue of things I've done and a bunch I haven't getting called back at me by every gawping stableboy, so you know my history, but for you and the other who were friends with us, back under the Three Green Roses, I don't barely know you at all."

I paused, chewing, and took a pull at my beer.  There wasn't much to tell, and most of that Kardaus could guess at – as you could guess at any other old soldier you found begging and crippled on a bridge. But I owed him – for the meal and for more besides – and it wouldn't hurt to be civil.  "As you've said, I joined Courch's Life Guard; I survived Jindrichuv and then Kutuna, but I followed Broniek, my captain, when our pay was stopped during the siege of Kremnits, and then I enlisted with the White Goose of Pitriyov just in time to get penned up in Vtelno citadel after the voinaj lost the battle of Mlekojedy Field.  That was my last siege – a chunk of wall crushed my left foot, and the surgeon had to take the leg off at the knee, but they saved me – they saved every man who could work a crossbow, and sitting down, that's what I did for the next two months and a half.  The voinaj came back and broke the siege, and the war moved on – and even in garrison duty there's no place for a cripple.  I don't have a trade and it's too late to learn; when the bonus for the defense ran out, this was all I had left."  I spread my hands.  "It's a hard world, Kardaus; the priests will say that the rumburkuk sneer at those who make their own end, but there's been many the night where I've thought I'd sleep best with a knife through my throat – like that stone from the wall should have hit me in the brains instead of in the feet, and I'd be better off."

Kardaus was silent for a moment, tipping his mug slowly fore and aft in his hands.  "I feared it might have been like this," he said at last, "that it might have been like this for you, and for too many of our old friends when I didn't hear of you after I came back from the west.  Some, I heard were dead; some, if I asked long enough, I could find them in garrisons or on patrols; not enough with the rank and pay they ought to have for their merits, and too many, like you, who were just gone, that no man could tell if they were alive or dead or where they lay."  He took a pull on his beer and stabbed a sausage with the point of his knife.  "Yes, it's the way of this hard world – but it's no fate for a brave man.  You can do better – I ought to do better."  I looked up at that – Kardaus leaned in over the plate, his tankard pushed to the side.

"I made it a long way up, a high way up, and I've been paid well for what I've done for the Emperor – and more than that, what I could take out of the cities I've sacked in ransom.  But I could have done none of it if I'd died on the fields at Slavicin, Frystak, Myslocovice, any of a hundred places where death might have come for me like it might have come for any of us: where we and the other Green Roses saved each other's necks again and again.  We're square – all of us have done as much for each other – but the world's not fair, and it hurts me to see my old friends ground up by the wheels of chance.  I'm not here for charity; even if I had a palace to set you up in as a flunky, you wouldn't feel any better sitting like a lump on a golden throne rather than a stone bridge – not the Vilem I knew.  No, I want to help you help yourself; I want to set you up in business."

I settled back, eyes hard.  It takes a lot of nerve to try and con a beggar.  "Business.  And what business do I run, without a trade and with only one leg to stand on?"

Kardaus pushed a small pouch across the table, leather with the western double-crossing stitch on its seams.  "You take these, and trade them, out in the little market towns, to whatever rube you can put them across on.  You must have heard – heard the stories.  Well, it's me that it all comes back to; and it's others of my old comrades – Oldrich who lost an arm at Jhilava, Chvatil who had to have a yard of his gut taken out of him after Samorost, Jarek who came down with whistling fever penned up in Rynchnov with the Orlog of Zamel. Good men – and for the world that tried to kill them, magic beans."

"Magic beans," I said, flat and even.  I picked one out of the bag, and held it up in the dim light of the distant lamps: it was a bean much like any other, large as beans go, but with a waxy shell of a milky sky-blue that I'd never seen the like of on a bean before.  "Magic beans," I repeated, "that I should trade to some poor sap for his one cow.  Because it's a hard world."

"It is," Kardaus nodded, "and a poor sap who'll trade a cow for a magic bean deserves to.  In our day, there wasn't a need to – the dumb rubes put a hedging bill on their shoulder and then died next to us at Tremosna and at Myslocovice.  But the orlogs are all too broke to start another war, and so the rubes stay at home, cutting up the land smaller between then and not edging their turnips right, spreading blue rust out onto their neighbors' fields.  It'd be better for everyone if there was fewer – and there's not a one of them who doesn't want to climb up a beanstalk for adventure and riches."

"And what happens," I said, "when it gets about that it's the cripple who traded them the magic beans that won't even grow that stalk?  I can drift, even on one leg, as well as any old forager can – but I can't run like this, and that's a short end to the tale."

Kardaus just smiled.  "But it will – that's the part where the beans are magic.  Come on, Vilem; the stories are about heroes, not about cheats – and you know that I wouldn't put my old comrades into a corner like that.  The beans are real – as real as us sitting here, and they'll work as the stories say."

I blinked.  I blinked again, and took a heavy gulp of beer. "So," I said at last, "if I take that as true, and I will because you went so far as to find me again, then how did you get them, and why are you trading them off?  Why not round up a company of whole men, plant one, and go raiding along in the sky?"

Kardaus shrugged.  "I got them from the giants themselves – and while the beans work, that's about the only part of the stories that's true."  He rapped with two fingers on the table, and summoned the barmaid for another round of beer.

"I went among the giants up in the Kyonggi Mountains far to the northwest; you go far enough and you lose track of what's a mountain you're riding along, and what's a cloud, and it was so that I came to their country.  They were big enough, but they weren't fond of fighting; you duck their clubs and cut them on the shin a couple times, and they get tired of dealing with a real fighter real fast. And they were poor, and starveling.

"Time was, that they would raid along the mountain villages in the dead of night, steal men and eat them, take their treasure and hoard it like the dragons they all say are over the eastern edge of the world.  But these days, with the wars that have been fought and the wars that are over, all of those little villages are full of lean hard veterans and surplus ballistae, and those will do as easy for a thirty-foot giant as a thirty-foot siege tower.  So they stick to their clouds, and run cloud-wool sheep and drink rainwater, and wish for dumb manflesh, not so good at fighting back, to come up and knock on their door.  And that's how I put it to them to give me the beans, and how I came back to set up my old comrades in the business of dreams."

"Dreams?" I picked up my new mug and cocked an eyebrow.

"That's right; that's what you're selling.  Not beans for a cow: a cow for the chance of adventure, for the chance to fight for your life against high odds and maybe come back in one piece.  Just like we had.  Just like these rubes should have if there was a war to fight. Dreams wrapped in mystery, with death at the center, just like it is for five-and-ninety in a hundred who leave home with a spear over their shoulder.  You can do it.  They'll die gladly for the chance. And it beats the hell out of shriveling up to a husk, starving dead in the midst of plenty.  Will you take it?"

I thought for a second, rolling the beer around on my tongue.  To trade in dreams.  To see the land again.  To live, instead of withering to death.  And hadn't I been sold a poison dream just so, so long ago, to put me in this place?  I swallowed, and nodded.  "Yes.  I'll take it."  I set down my mug, and picked up the pouch of beans.

Kardaus smiled, and shook a handful of silver prazhky out of somewhere in his sleeve.  "Good.  You'll know your own pace, and which towns you want to start from, but take this and buy yourself a proper mystery cloak before you leave the gates.  You can pay me back when you run out of beans; when that day comes, find my agent at the Three Larks in Smolnepec and trade with him for a new pouch, and pay back what you can."  He clapped me on the shoulder.  "It's good to have you in; I know you'll do well for yourself."  He picked up his mug again, and drank deep.

I slept outside the walls of Pribram that night, for the first time in years, rolled up in a heavy new cloak that hung down low and almost covered where my leg was gone.  By the end of the next day after, I was out of the okrug for the first time in just as long, and curled up in the roots of a tree on the road to Podebrad.  And the next morning after that, I was standing in the shadow of the crossroads, as a young man came up, tugging and dragging a dry cow to the butcher's knife.  "Good morning, my son," I said to him, the cloak still down to shade my eyes.  "And aren't you having trouble with that cow?  Why don't you trade her here, and have an easier walk home?"

The boy stopped, his brows dark, his cow snorting and puffing, tossing her head at the rope.  "Trade here?" he asked.  "For what?"

"Beans," I said, stepping in, the crutch close at my side in place of the leg that was gone, "but not just any beans: magic beans, that won't grow for just anyone – and where they'll take you it's not just anyone who can go there."  I opened my hand under his gaze, the three beans shining in it sky-blue and spotted-silver and deep bloodstone red, a rainbow reaching down out of the stories to a muddy crossroads, and I saw his eyes bulge out wide, that one like him might have the chance to be a hero.