He leaves Miravet, obviously. His brother will pay for what he has done, but after two years in a tower Antoni could hardly achieve that if they were alone and his brother were unarmored and weaponless. They've freed his mother, too, and he takes her and Joan and departs for Conesa — it's still controlled by his brother, but at more remove than Miravet. He asks his mother if she knows why his brother has freed him. She doesn't. He asks Joan if he knows, what with the not being locked in a tower. Joan doesn't either. His brother isn't stupid enough to trust Antoni's loyalty to an oath alone; he must have some other reason.

(He will conclude, eventually, that his brother genuinely believed he was too weak to pose a threat. He doesn't expect to ever know if his guess was right.)

He spends the next several months regaining control of Conesa. By Neth he's built up enough forces to begin to launch assaults on his brother's holdings in Miravet. He... is not so unsuccessful as to lose control of Conesa. His brother launches a counter-attack, and Antoni drives him back easily.

A year after his release, he negotiates a marriage with Baroness Constança Berneda, the daughter of a nearby Baron-and-Worldwound-veteran; it'll be her brother who inherits, but with her father as an ally, it'll be easier to raise men to fight for Antoni's rightful inheritance. A year after they marry, she bears him a daughter. (Their son, two years later, will die the same hour he's born, and the cleric will pronounce that even if they did resurrect him he wouldn't survive. They have another daughter, afterwards, and then several long years of barrenness.)

The next several years are marked by constant skirmishes, occasionally successful enough to take small pieces out of each other's territory, usually not. A group of peasants near the border petitions him to stop. He generously refrains from having them executed for the suggestion. He'll stop when his brother is dead.

His mother dies, six years after his release. His youngest sister's husband dies two years later, and rumors accuse her of slipping poison into his meals. That's not Antoni's problem — if she's incompetent enough to get herself caught she can face the consequences — and most likely the rumors will die down when it becomes clear that she's in charge. His eldest sister has a perfectly ordinary marriage, for a Chelish noblewoman, and his middle sister is a priestess; neither of them shows any inclination to interfere with him and his brother, and Asmodeus be willing, neither of them will pose trouble.

His little brother's situation is more precarious. Galè apparently neglected his religious education, in those two long years when Antoni and his mother were trapped in a tower, and now Antoni is paying the price. Joan has none of the ambition befitting a man of his station, which Antoni cannot find it in himself to be upset about, and invents heresies seemingly by accident, which is much more problematic. It'll reflect on the family if anyone notices, but Antoni most of all, and he cannot afford that. He tries his best to redirect Joan towards wizardry — it's not cunning or cleverness that he lacks, but sagacity — and punishes him when he asks stupid questions and does his best to ensure that Joan never ends up in the same room as a priest outside of services.

And he keeps fighting. But Galè is still in control of Miravet, which is the better piece of land anyway, and Antoni cannot muster the strength to take it and cannot recruit any more men to fight for him without a revolt and every day the fighting stretches on there's a greater chance the Crown will grow sick of it all and decide to settle it themselves—

—and then the Four-Day War breaks out, and everything turns upside down.

He's worried, when he hears that the conquerors are replacing some of the nobility, that they'll look at the situation in Miravet and Conesa and decide they can solve it by installing some Lastman with no right to rule whatsoever. But months pass, and they make no attempt at interfering. Probably they have bigger problems to worry about than a pair of squabbling baronies.

Then the conquerors promulgate an announcement about a "constitutional convention." Antoni is under no illusions that the convention will have input into anything that matters — the conquerors are hardly going to allow the convention to proclaim Asmodeanism the state religion — but they surely have no reason to care about obscure points of inheritance law, so perhaps they will allow the convention to exercise genuine influence there. He's sure he can come up with all kinds of justifications that the conquerors will appreciate for why Galè has no right to rule. He tried to usurp his brother's claim; he has half a dozen acknowledged bastards and far more than that unacknowledged; he isn't even Lawful. Antoni, in contrast, is a perfectly ordinary noble, with one bastard (that he knows of) whom he doesn't acknowledge (he hears this is very important to Osirians, and the latest rumors say some of the conquerors are Osirian). The conquerors can't possibly replace every noble in Cheliax. If they were backing his claim, he could take control of Miravet in an hour.

(and his wife's family is in danger of collapsing and his middle sister is missing-presumed-dead and a traitor to the new regime besides and he doesn't dare hope that Joan has managed to hit on some form of heresy that the Iomedaeans will find acceptable and he has far more to gain than to lose—)

The conquerors don't deign to offer him or his brother seats as nobility. This is, admittedly, a reasonable call on their part, what with how inviting either of them would by necessity involve wading into the mess that is the current political situation.

But the announcements made very clear that each county is to elect a representative by vote of the people. Each barony will first send a representative to an elected council, and from there everyone on the council will vote for the convention representative.

He orders his peasants to vote for him. He tells his wife's father that it'll really be best for both of them if he's elected. His wife's father orders his peasants to vote for an obedient representative of his, obviously, and then orders said representative to cast his vote for Antoni, which had been in doubt. (It will come with a price, obviously, if he succeeds as he must.) Half the county convention seems to actively be trying to avoid being voted any further; he threatens those ones and bribes a couple of the rest and no one else in the county has any ideas better than "bribe enough people to get to the county convention."

He wins easily.