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The last time I’d seen anything near this scale had been the Doom of Liesse, when every major Callowan and Legion force west of the Hwaerte had engaged the Praesi and wights under the Diabolist. Yet, however apocalyptic that day had been, in the end it’d been only one day. The Grand Alliance’s attempt to reclaim Hainaut would be a great deal more sustained than that.

The numbers were staggering, when put to ink and impossible to ignore. The Army of Callow would be fielding, in this campaign, a little under thirty thousand soldiers – the entire Second, Third and Fourth Army. Counting only the forces of Lady Aquiline and Lord Tazin the Dominion would be offering up at least twenty thousand, but if Lord Yannu’s promises of Alavan captains came through the numbers should end up closer to twenty-five. General Pallas had seven thousand in fighting fit, though before mustering the full roster of the Tyrant’s Own she’d want horses brought in since the kataphraktoi were running low on remounts. General Rumena still had thirty thousand to pledge to the offensive, the thinned numbers having actually strengthened the southernmost host of the Firstborn in several ways.

The exact numbers of the Proceran forces in Hainaut were harder to determine, on the other hand, since their chain of command was the stuff of nightmares for any Legion-taught officer. As in most things warfare, the Lycaonese were a notch above the Alamans: the armies of Hannoven and Neustria were under the combined command of the Iron Prince, they shared supplies and kept track of their casualties. While they relied a little too heavily on the nebulous rank of ‘captains’ for my tastes – officers that could command anywhere from a hundred to a thousand foot, horse or even a mixed force of both! – but they were typically well organized and well trained. The northern royals fielded, between the two of them, a solid eighteen thousand. Including four thousand of that solid Lycaonese heavy horse we could never have too much of.

The Alamans forces were contrastingly disorganized, which to my admitted surprise hadn’t even proved to be entirely their fault. The last Princess of Hainaut – elder sister to the current one – had hired every fantassin company she could get her hands on the moment Keter began to stir, but a lot of those had taken severe losses failing to defend the northern shore. Half the originally contracted companies no longer existed or no longer fielded the amount of men they said they did, and maybe a quarter of the current mercenaries in Volignac service were ‘successor-companies’. Those were, essentially, mercenary companies raised from the survivors of broken ones and laying claim to an old contract under a different name as the successor of the disbanded company.

The mercenaries were trouble, and not just because they were fiercely independent. Fantassin captains habitually lied about their numbers so that they might claim more supplies from the Grand Alliance, or bargain for better remuneration, and weren’t above lending each other soldiers to fake their way through inspections. We hung the captains we caught at this, but that tended to lead to desertions so we had to be careful. It didn’t help that even the principality Alamans troops had their issues. There were the forces of three royals serving in Hainaut: Prince Etienne of Brabant, Prince Ariel of Arans and naturally Princess Beatrice of Hainaut. The Arans soldiery was steady, but also under the prince’s personal command and he was often reluctant to take risks. If Hainaut fell his principality was the next on the block, he often reminded us, but for all that the Brabant folk were arguably more trouble.

Not because they were as cautious, on the contrary: Prince Etienne had bankrupted himself arming everyone he could in his principality and sending them north when the situation in Hainaut first went bad, which while a brave and necessary gesture was also the source of the trouble. Maybe a third of the Brabantines were actual trained soldiers, even their ‘officers’ were green as grass and though when they had the upper hand they were enthusiastic fighters their morale was otherwise… fragile. I’d not call a coward anyone who took up arms against Keter, but when you put shoemakers in armour and sent them to fight the likes of beorns they had a distinct tendency to rout. The conscripts had to be closely watched, and carefully used.

The forces under Princess Beatrice Volignac were the fewest, since they’d been bled hard failing to defend their homeland, which I found a damned shame as, practically speaking, it was a force entirely made of veterans. They fought hard, mercilessly, and with a burning spite I could only admire. They were also in some ways the least well-equipped, and the heaviest draw on Grand Alliance resources of the forces in the region: the capital of Hainaut had fallen, as had most its largest cities, so there was little coin behind them and only sparse land to feed them. At this point, the House of Volignac had more fortresses under its rule than towns – and its armies weren’t even the largest force within those fortresses.

Accounting for the inevitable lies and grandstanding, our estimates had the total Alamans forces in Hainaut at around forty-one thousand. Fantassins companies made up for about fifteen thousand of that, and the Brabant conscripts maybe another ten to twelve thousand, so that meant more than half the number was less than reliable. If we got lucky the armies of Twilight’s Pass would be able to send around ten thousand our way, mostly Bremen and Rhenia men with maybe a few from Brus. Which meant that at the end of the day, when all those forces would be brought together, there would be around one hundred and sixty thousand soldiers on the field. And that would be on the Grand Alliance’s side alone. We were, typically, outnumbered at least two to one by the dead.

The campaign hadn’t even begun and already the numbers involved were giving me a headache, so naturally I’d consulted the finest military mind at my disposal as soon as she was fit to be scried.

“It’s logistically impossible for you to feed that many soldiers as a single force,” Marshal Juniper of the Red Shields bluntly told me. “You’ll have to separate them into several armies or you’ll run out of supplies after a month or so.”

“Our scouts have confirmed the Dead King left the roads mostly intact,” I pointed out. “If we march along Julienne’s Highway and spread out to prevent raiding, we could have an active supply line.”

Named after an ancient First Princess of Procer, the highway was one of the major roads of northeastern Procer: it began in Salia, headed east through the city of Aisne, up into Brabant through the major trade city of Tourges and ended up north in the city of Hainaut, capital of the eponymous principality. It was large, made for wagons and very well-maintained. The Dead King had skimped on the upkeep some, our scouts had said – which made sense since he didn’t usually use wagons of his own – but ensured it remained in state to be used by his troops, and therefore ours. It was pretty much impossible to feed this large an army without using carts and wagons to bring in rations so I expected we’d need to do some repairs while we campaigned, but my sapper corps should be capable of handling that much.

“The Hidden Horror will ruin that road the moment it becomes obvious it’s the axis of your offensive,” Juniper growled. “Think, Catherine. His priority is stalling us while he finishes his bridge, he’ll pull out every stone from the defensive line to Hainaut if that’s what it takes.”

“That’s just as much of an issue if we split our force into smaller armies,” I pointed out. “They’ll have to follow roads as well, if smaller ones. And we might move quicker, with the Twilight Ways, but he’s got better awareness out on the field. If one of our forces pulls ahead of the others it’ll get surrounded and annihilated.”

Or worse, slaughtered and raised anew. Sure, we could open gates into the Twilight Ways – but we could only open so many, and only make them so large. An army trying to retreat from an active battle would lose most its numbers to the retreat, assuming it could even pull one of those in good order. My legionaries and the Lycaonese probably could, but the Levantines and the Alamans? They were brave and hardy fighters, I meant not disrespect there, but they weren’t disciplined.

“You’re looking at it from the wrong way,” Juniper said. “Going up the Highway you’ll get stuck in one of the natural bottlenecks. The dead could mass in Lauzon’s Hollow-”

It was the name of a natural ‘pass’ leading the highway into the hilly and rocky highlands of Hainaut, which while not exactly narrow was steep-sloped and easily defendable. Last year during our offensive we’d taken the dead by surprise there, smashing the force defending it with a deep raid of kataphraktoi backed by Named and then held it open long enough for our army proper to arrive. That trick, though, would not work twice.

“- or the overpass fortresses at Cigelin,” she finished.

Fortresses was something of an oversell there. Les Soeurs de Cigelin, or the ‘Cigelin Sisters’, were a pair of large towers overlooking a dip in the hills the highway passed through. They’d been built atop very abrupt slopes at the point where the dip was deepest, one on each side, but the real danger was the chain-gate they commanded. A massive chain allowed a portcullis of enchanted steel to be raised or lowered across the road, and while it was hardly an unbreakable obstacle given enough mages or sappers it would be a costly strongpoint to force. Last time we’d used the Ways to go past it and then struck the garrisons holding the towers from the back, after drawing them out, but it’d slowed us down by at least a sennight. There wouldn’t have been nearly

as many nasty surprises waiting for us near the capital if not for that delay.

We’d torn down the fortresses and the chain-gate as we retreated, of course, but I knew better than to expect not to see them standing again this summer.

“We need those places under our control, Juniper,” I pointed out. “By the time we get to the capital it’ll be filled to the brim with corpses led by Revenants, which means a siege unless we want to throw away several dozen thousand soldiers storming the walls.”

And we couldn’t have a siege without supply lines to feed our soldiers, that much went without saying. Julienne’s Highway was our best bet at such a thing.

“You are throwing away your only strategic advantage, superior mobility, to turn your army into a lumbering battering ram you want to smash through every gate until you reach Hainaut itself,” the orc growled. “Losing scrying is making you too cautious, Warlord. If you split your army in three along three lines, the first taking the blue road towards Luciennerie in the west-”

I kept an eye on her profile in the mirror but the other was on the map spread out in front of me, displaying northern Procer. Luciennerie was a minor fortress by size, but it was the key to western Hainaut and more: holding it would give us control of the blue road when it went further west into Cleves, and so allow us to anchor our flank to our allies there.

“- the second marching up Julienne’s Highway in the centre and the third going east by the old mining roads, aimed at Malmedit-”

Malmedit was a city, at least in principle, though even before the war against Keter it’d been turning into an empty husk. The city had grown out of multiple mining towns fusing into a single larger one, and lived off the ore trade, so when the ore had run out the people left for greener pastures. The Dead King had dug tunnels from further north that connected to the old mine shafts and he used the city itself as a staging area, since the lands beyond Malmedit itself weren’t really fit to march an army across. If we took the city, though, we could collapse the mine shafts and shut the door on Keter’s fingers.

“-then all three losses would be severe enough he’ll have to commit to battle,” I finished with a frown. “But he won’t shy from that, Juniper. He has the bodies to spare, and he knows that if he defeats even one of those armies he can turn this entire campaign into a rout by collapsing that flank.”

If either the eastern or western army was beaten back, the central one would have to withdraw or see its supply lines cut by raiders. If it was the central army that was beaten back it’d be even worse, as both other armies would have to retreat for the same reason.

“So he’ll commit forces against all three offensives,” Juniper said. “He’ll be going after that victory hard, because if he wins it and finishes the bridge he has a decent change of overrunning as far as southern Brabant before a defence can even be mounted. And when his armies are committed, his reserves emptied, then the fourth army – the one you kept back, kept quiet – take the Twilight Ways and hits the capital directly. While it’s been stripped of defences.”

My eyes narrowed as I stared hard at the map. It was a bold plan, it was true, but then that tended to be Juniper’s preference. And the basics of it held up to scrutiny, I thought. Once the dead committed to the battles, once they sent their soldiers out, it would not be possible for them to be recalled in time. They’d have to race across broken terrain, often without roads, while we cut through with the Twilight Ways. The army that assaulted the capital would be taking a risk, but if it paid off… We could keep a strong garrison in Hainaut then send forces to hit the enemy in the back as they tried to hold off the army going up Julienne’s Highway, taking the dead in a pincer. Victories there, which should ensue swiftly, would open the road to the capital and allow for supply lines to be established.

Hells, with the dead out west and east stuck defending fixed positions we might even not suffer too badly from raids on it.

“It could work,” I admitted. “And the smaller armies would lessen the burden on our logistics a great deal. Mind you, that’s also thrice as much supply line to defend.”

“I’d wager they won’t even raid, at the start,” Juniper grunted. “Keter will want you in deep before striking, it won’t want to risk spooking you. After that, well, that’s what you’ve got all that Alamans horse for. It sures as Hells isn’t to win battles.”

I snorted. The Hellhound’s enduring dislike of Proceran light horse continued to amuse. Especially since she’d several times suggested Callow acquire its own in the past, should we ever get the means. Juniper appreciated the value of light cavalry on the field, which was hardly surprising given her taste for winning by manoeuvre. It was just that she believed, and I tended to agree with her, that Alamans light horse was useless against most kinds of undead. Unlike Proceran peasants the skeletons wouldn’t break and flee when charged at, and the riders just weren’t armoured heavily enough to withstand staying in melee long. As skirmisher, outriders and patrols they were still leagues better than anything else we had but given how many of them we had I’d have eagerly traded a few thousand for their equivalent in northern horse.

“It needs refinement,” I said. “And I’ll need to take it to the other commanders. But it sounds like the bare bones of a plan.”

We didn’t leave it at that, of course: I still had at least two hours before crippling headaches indisposed the finest general of my generation, and I intended to use every moment of them.

It was another five days until the delegation from Mercantis arrived at the Arsenal.

I was not part of those who received the six merchants lords led by an ambassador. Given the amount of gold the crown of Callow still kept in the city – from the coin the dwarves had paid me for my… mediation down in the Everdark – I’d been expected to, and my absence did not go unremarked. I left them to the First Prince, knowing that as long as I kept handing her such pretty hooks there were few fish she would not be able to catch. My hours were spent arranging the upcoming campaign, consulting both Vivienne and Juniper when I could and then taking those increasingly refined plans to the regular war council. Prince Klaus had his own notion of how the campaign ought to be conducted, but they were not incompatible so steady progress was being made.

After two days of being ignored, the diplomatic party from Mercantis realized that I had not the slightest intention of reaching out to them. They tried to arrange something through Cordelia, who to my great amusement ‘declined to interfere in Callowan affairs’, so when faced with that failure they finally took direct steps. It wouldn’t be that easy, though. When the merchants sought an audience with me I passed them off to my designated heiress Lady Vivienne Dartwick instead as a calculated insult. They’d walked out of the room as soon as it was halfway polite to do so, Vivs told me afterwards. Good. I wanted them angry: anger would dull their edge, and dullards was what I wanted to deal with. The letter I received from Cordelia that evening was short and unsigned, but undoubtedly hers.

They want you at the table, the First Prince said. They want something from you. Anger them further.

It was heartening to see that these days Hasenbach knew me well enough not to even doubt my ability to infuriate other people. I was no noble, and I was hardly a deft hand at the games of those born to that station, but when it came to giving slights it must be said that I was rather well learned. I sent a messenger to arrange a meeting with the head of their delegation, Ambassador Livia – making sure her name was misspelled, a detail as petty as it was personally satisfying – but sent Lady Henrietta Morley as the Callowan representative. Vivienne’s secretary was known as a lady as a courtesy title, as while she was the heiress to Harrow she had no lands of her own, and she held no formal position in my court. I was later told that sheer disbelief that she’d be snubbed this way had Ambassador Livia stick around for nearly half an hour before she left in a fury. I received a formal letter of complaint about my rudeness from the Mercantians, and without missing a beat responded by handing it over to Archer so that she could do a theatrical reading of it in the meal hall.

Indrani got a few Alamans priests to sing as a background chorus while she declaimed it in the style of epic poetry, which I thought was a nice touch. It was the little pleasures that made life worth living.

I knew Hasenbach had read them prefectly when they still tried to get me in a room after that. Mercantis officially requested an audience with the high officers of the Grand Alliance, to speak of the large loans it had extended over the war effort, but to my amusement this time I didn’t even have to do a thing. Lord Yannu flatly refused to have the matter considered a Grand Alliance one, since neither Levant nor Callow had taken loans. So what was it that Mercantis wanted from me sorely enough they’d suffer repeated insults and still try to have talks? The merchants lords of the City of Bought and Sold were a proud lot, and not afraid to make their displeasure known when provoked. Whatever it was they wanted, they mustwant it very badly.

The following day I threw in another slight for good measure, requesting that they be contained to lesser parts of the Arsenal while war councils were held through the Mirage, and it must have done the trick because that afternoon I got another letter from Hasenbach. They want Cardinal, it said. Owned or buried. It took me, I had to admit, almost entirely by surprise. But it shouldn’t have, looking back. A neutral city at the crossroads of Calernia, whose neutrality would be backed by several realms and a treaty binding Named? It was a natural rival for Mercantis, who would still benefit from the ease of transport over lake and rivers but lose out in most other regards. Cardinal would be, to the Consortium, the death knell of their influence.

It would do worse than destroy them, in their eyes: it’d make them just another of the Free Cities, another squabbling city-state the great powers would run roughshod over with little consequence.

“Owned or buried,” Vivienne repeated.

I’d shown her the letter before consigning it to flame.

“Buried begs no explanation,” I grunted. “So long as the Red Flower Vales remain a fortified border instead of a city, Mercantis is still presumably the main trading partner for Callow.”

Trade with Procer had, even back in the days of the Fairfaxes, never been widespread. It’d been mostly restrained to luxuries, and even that much had died after the Conquest when Praes shut down the borders. Mercantis’ days of influence over my home were soon to disappear anyway, though. Even if Cardinal never saw the light of day, I intended on seeing peace between Callow and Praes: my homeland’s grain would start heading east instead of downriver, and the need for a middleman starkly decline.

“Owned is trickier to ascertain,” Vivienne frowned. “The land for Cardinal will have to be ceded by Callow and Procer, so they can’t possibly think to buy it. At a guess, they want control of the trade in the city.”

I slowly nodded. It made sense. The concessions needed for the Consortium to have such a stranglehold would probably involve privileges granted by laws and treaties, which they could not help to secure without Callow’s assent. They had leverage on Procer given how it was in debt to them – though thanks to Cordelia’s caginess they likely didn’t realize quite how badly indebted the Principate was – but they had little they could realistically strongarm me with. The Callowan gold in the vaults had been placed there by the Kingdom Under, so they couldn’t do a thing there without angering the dwarves. That left pretty much only threats to sabotage the finances of the war effort as a whole. After all, while the defensive fleet of Mercantis meant it would be hard to attack militarily the city had so few mercenaries left to call on at the moment that the thought of it attacking Callow with any degree of success was laughable.

“So we know what they want,” I grunted. “And why, at least in part. Now we move on to the trickier parts.”

We had their aim and their angle of attack. In a sword fight that would be enough for any halfway decent blade to settle the match, but diplomacy was not so clear-cut. Hasenbach would have sweet-talked them into a degree of trust towards her, by now, since she was good at being mannerly and they believed they had a knife at her throat. The nature of this game was that the First Prince just wanted to settle this to everyone’s satisfaction – but mostly Mercantis’ – while the Black Queen was just being the worst sort of ruffian. Catherine Foundling, right? What a wench. Have another cup of wine, ambassador, and tell me more about what you want so that I might help you get it. No, on the silk glove side I considered us to be well handled. It was the steel I’d have to bring to bear, and that was more delicate than you might expect.

Too much steel and you had a fight on your hands, too little and they shrugged you off. There was an art to it.

“It can’t be anything physical or provable,” I mused. “Else we’ll have a legitimate diplomatic incident on our hands.”

My being a prick to their diplomats wasn’t that, even if they liked to pretend otherwise. I was in no way obligated to grant them an audience if I didn’t feel like it, though after my slights if the shoe was ever put on the other foot they’d be perfectly within their rights to humiliate me just as publicly. Assaulting the diplomats, though, would be something altogether graver. It’d soil my reputation, Callow’s and push them closer to Malicia.

“Don’t forget the Tower will likely have a man or woman in the diplomatic party,” Vivienne pointed out.

I didn’t bother to say that we couldn’t prove that, since even if I had doubts that Malicia had outright subverted one of the merchant lords into her service I had no doubts whatsoever that she’d bribed at least one to spy on her behalf. There was a reason they’d been brought in through a fake location and kept blindfolded through the translations. So the enemies to beat here were fear and greed, I thought. Fear of being left behind by the world that would rise from the fall of Keter, greed for gold and influence and power over others. I didn’t have the know-how to craft an acceptable settlement deal with Mercantis, but that wasn’t to be my role here anyway: the First Prince would see to that end of it. My part was forcing the merchant lords to back down from their ambitions, so that Hasenbach could slide in and offer them that alternative.

“So it will,” I murmured back, then shook my head. “I need to talk to Masego.”

Vivienne cast me a wary look.

“Why?”

“Because he knows the wards of this place inside out,” I said.

Including those protecting the diplomatic quarters where our friends would be sleeping.

“Make it known to the First Prince I’ll need a few days,” I told Vivienne.

I did not insult her intelligence by specifying this should be done secretly. It was important that she and I not be seen to be collaborating, as part of out strategy rested on the appearance of us being at odds. If I was out of control, Cordelia could not be asked to prevail upon me with sweet reason. Why, I was trouble for her as well! I’d wager some of them would suspect something was going on, but the cordial working relationship between Hasenbach and myself wasn’t exactly public knowledge. And it couldn’t be denied that my stint as the Queen of Winter had left me with a… reputation. I was not above using that, if it came down to it.

“I’ll handle it,” Vivienne said, then cocked her head to the side.

She hesitated.

“Yes?”

“What for?” she asked. “The days, I mean.”

I hummed, considering.

“Best you don’t know,” I finally decided.

“That reprehensible?” she asked, brow rising.

“It’s better for the both of us if you keep your hands clean,” I patiently said. “You know that.”

She breathed out, as if gathering patience of her own.

“I know you’re trying to smooth the path of succession,” Vivienne said, “but this is getting out of hand, Cat. I don’t need to be protected.”

“A lot of your appeal as a queen will be that you’re made of paler cloth than me,” I bluntly replied. “It would be counterproductive for you to start tainting your reputation.”

“I ran with you for years as the Thief,” she said. “That ship has sailed.”

“You also fought in a rebellion against Praes,” I pointed out. “Look, Vivienne, I didn’t pick your name out of a hat. I can trust you to take care of our home, and I respect your ideals. But we have to be practical about how this gets done or there’s going to be trouble. I’m a warlord with no real claim to the throne, and you’re deriving your legitimacy from the howling void that is mine. If this is going to hold without a civil war, you need to be popular enough no one wants to fight you. That means sometimes you’ll have to be distanced from necessary evils so your reputation stays clean.”

“There’s no one else here, Cat,” Vivienne calmly said. “For whose watching gaze are we doing this distancing?”

My irritation mounted.

“If you’re not going to be involved, there’s no reason for you to know,” I said.

“To give advice,” Vivienne said. “To provide a second pair of eyes. To make suggestions. Unless you no longer consider me fit to serve these purposes.”

“I didn’t say that,” I sharply replied.

“I know,” she said. “But you’ve been using this as a reason to take a step back from me, Catherine. For some time now.”

That sounded like an accusation, even if she’d tried to make it otherwise. It was also infuriatingly vague.

“What are you saying, exactly?” I asked, frowning.

“That it would be natural if it stung,” Vivienne delicately said, “that even after all you have done, since the truth about Diabolist has been known, there are some among our countrymen who would rather see me reign than-”

My fingers clenched.

“Enough,” I cut in. “Enough. We are not talking about this.”

She looked at me, and it burned that Vivienne looked not angry but instead tired and a little sad.

“We will have to, sooner or later,” she replied.

“I have actual real problems to deal with, Vivienne,” I told her through gritted teeth as I rose to my feet. “Instead of… whatever this is. Handle what I asked you to.”

I didn’t wait for an answer. I left the room limping, headed for Masego and the answers he’d have for me.

It felt like fleeing.