The Almighty Dominance (by Sunshine) novel Chapter 780

Alexander stepped forward.

"Father. If the crown prince is allowed to choose my place from outside the table," he said, "then may I choose his place from outside the table too?"

The Emperor looked at him, and something in the old face was very interested.

"As long as it's a county," he said. "Empty. Heritable. And poor. Then yes, you may."

...

"There's a place called Martydom," Alexander said.

The room was quiet.

"The last counts there were two old brothers. They both died without an heir, and the land went back to the Crown, and as far as I know nobody's lived in the house since." He looked at the crown prince. "I heard it's empty. I think the crown prince could live there."

The Emperor frowned.

"Martydom. I've never heard of it." He lifted a hand toward the gallery. "Prime Minister. Is that name on our records? Find it."

...

The Prime Minister came down from behind the rail with a tablet in his hand and his reading glasses on, and the whole room waited while he scrolled.

"Yes, Your Majesty. Martydom." He read from the screen. "Formerly a county seat, reverted to the Crown. One castle, in fair repair. Wide arable fields, some woodland, a river. It's classed as —" he turned the screen slightly — "a middle-income region, Your Majesty. Not rich. Not categorised as poor."

The Emperor turned to Alexander.

"You heard him. It's not a poor county. Are you sure you want to give it to the crown prince?"

"I'm sure," Alexander said. "It wouldn't be fitting for the crown prince to start somewhere poor."

...

The crown prince narrowed his eyes very slightly.

He was not a fool. He stood at the table for a long moment and turned it over, looking for the knife inside it.

A castle. Arable land. A river. A middle-income county, in the Prime Minister's own words, when every other heir at that table had just been sent to a salt marsh or a dead mine.

If the idiot wanted to hand him a good county out of some idea of brotherly courtesy, then the idiot was an idiot.

"What do you think, crown prince?" the Emperor asked.

"It's not poor. It's middle-income." The crown prince shrugged. "Why not."

"Then it's agreed." The Emperor sat back. "All of you. You have one month to hand over every business and every account in your names, and to be gone to your land. Go incognito. I'll see you in five years."

...

They came out of the old room into a long corridor lit by wall lamps, and the six heirs dispersed down it in six directions without a word to each other.

Alexander had gone perhaps twenty paces when quiet footsteps came up behind him.

"Tenth Prince." It was the Second Prince, the First Queen's son, narrow and pale and walking at his elbow as though they had always been friends.

"Tell me something. What exactly do you know about Martydom?"

...

Alexander did not slow down.

"It's in the middle of your mother's family," he said.

"Isn't it? The duke whose land runs all along the north side of it is your grandfather. The marquis to the east is your uncle. Every estate that touches Martydom on every side belongs to somebody with your mother's blood."

He smiled slightly.

"And I've heard your mother's family hates the crown prince more than anybody alive. So I imagine they'll know what to do with him once he's sitting in the middle of them."

The Second Prince laughed.

He laughed quietly, delightedly, into his hand, the first real sound he had made all evening.

"Oh, he'll get nothing out of that land. Nothing." He shook his head.

"My grandfather will see to it. Every buyer, every bank, every road, every contract within fifty kilometres. He won't earn a coin. He'll watch that middle-income county slide downhill every year, and he'll never understand why."

Alexander smiled. "Then keep driving it downhill, every single year. Leave him nothing to show our father but a record of going backwards."

The Second Prince clapped him once on the shoulder.

"Don't worry. You've put him in the one place in the Empire where we can take our revenge at leisure."

Alexander walked on down the corridor alone, under the old portraits and the wall lamps.

"Well," he said to nobody. "Who told him to pick a fight with me?"

...

Three hundred kilometres away, in the Baroness Tiffany's house, a young woman was shouting so loudly the staff in the kitchen had stopped working to listen.

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