“Just as planned.”

-Inscription on the front gates of the mausoleum of Dread Emperor Traitorous

The locals called them ‘Mavian prayers’.

Centuries ago, before these were lands of princes and plots, what was now called Iserre had been the cradle of a war between the Arlesite regales of the south and the proud Alamans chieftains of the heartlands. The few respectable books written on the subject in that era – penned by Atalante or Stygian scholars, when not by Ashuran officials – agreed that the Arlesites had been on the winning side more often than not. The current lay of Iserre itself spoke to those victories: though many of its people spoke Chantant, it was Tolesian that was the most common tongue and Arlesite customs that were most kept to. The land has been won by the aggressive southerners leading warbands out of their stone keeps, Alamans tribesmen slowly forced out of their ancestral holdings by a thousand lost skirmishes. Those old tribes must have had a hundred names, but as a tapestry of tightly-knit kin and cultures they’d been colloquially known as the Mavii. And though eventually forced into flight further north, these Mavii had left behind the marks of what had once been a powerful and wealthy confederacy. The so-called ‘Mavian prayers’ were more common sight in northern Iserre, it was true, but even in the rest it was not uncommon to see long rows of grey raised stones sketching out some symbol or meaning now long lost.

Iserrans now insisted those stones had been raised as prayers to the Gods Above, each representing a passage from the Book of All Things, but the Wasteland books I’d read on the subject of Procer had expressed a great deal of skepticism on the subject. For one, the Alamans had not kept to the House of Light as it was now known. Every tribe had elected priests and kept faith to the Hallowed, as in those days they’d called the Heavens, but personal worship of great spirits and angels nominally beholding to them had been just as prominent. Some of these spirits, I now suspected, had not been lesser gods or remnants of wilder ages but instead wandering lords and ladies of Arcadia. The suspicion had grown from the shapes I glimpsed of these raised stones, how they had been pleasing to my eye in some ineffable manner even now that I’d broken ties to Winter. It had been good as confirmed, however, when I’d found this particular ‘prayer’. It was a barrow, or a tumulus as those were called in Procer, though one larger than any I’d ever heard of in Callow and crowned by a strange pattern of great stones. Three concentric rings, the stones of them interlocking to give the illusion of a full and complete circle when one stood at the foot of the barrow.

Standing at the centre of it, I’d felt a whisper of the sensation that had once filled me when shaping gates into Arcadia with the strength of Winter. This had been a thinning of boundary once, I thought, a place enshrined in some eldritch manner. Whatever power had coursed through these grounds vital and vivid in olden days had long died out, but it had left behind a taste of itself. Like a desiccated ancient riverbed, I decided. I could have run my fingers along the traces of the old currents carved into what was now stone and dry sand, charted their shapes and guessed at the intents, but there would be no bringing back the old waters. The world had moved on, the stars were no longer aligned. Whatever patron the Mavii had once bargained with had abandoned the game for fresher ones. Still, there was something about the place that appealed to me. It would serve for what I intended.

“There,” I said, idly pointing with my staff. “Gently.”

The four legionaries awkwardly moved to the side. All were orcs and warrior-fit, so the large table they were moving might as well have been a sack of feathers, but amusingly enough they were having to be careful of not wrecking the table instead of labouring under the weight of it. They set it down in the snow with a muted crunch and I met their salutes with a nod before they retreated to the bottom of the barrow. Where more work would await them, for it was a veritable procession that was setting up my headquarters at the heart of this Mavian prayer. Chairs and smaller tables, along with precious maps and a library’s worth of scrolls and reports. A writing desk, with quills and ink and all wax for seals. Last of all, the same sinfully comfortable armchair I’d stolen from the Count of Old Oak a few years back. Hakram had proved, as always, that he was a prince among men when he’d revealed he’d had that little piece of furniture brought along for the Proceran campaign. It’d been kept with Juniper in the First Army, whose supply train was the largest, but now that all four of the divisions of the Army of Callow were reunited I had wonderful cushions to sink in once more. Vivienne wandered in with the last of the additions, seemingly amused at the burrow I’d had assembled.

“And when it starts snowing or raining, shall you bravely retreat?” she drawled.

Leaning against one of the tall stones, long skirts swishing against her boots as she tread through the snows, Vivienne looked like some noble’s daughter gone on a ride more than the former Lady-Regent of Callow. The pales shades of her blouse and dress made the laughter in those blue-grey eyes seem lighter, somehow, more innocent. Or perhaps simply less weighed upon, I thought.

“I’ve already had the outskirts of the barrow warded by our mages,” I said. “For wind and quiet.”

“One of Masego’s patterns?” she asked, idly pushing off the stone.

“Yeah, though I’m told they can’t get it to work the way he said it should,” I noted. “He has a very unique definition of ‘elementary knowledge’, our Zeze.”

That some of our senior legion mages had outright admitted the scrolls Hierophant had left on the subject of warding might as well be gibberish had served as a fresh reminder that I’d been dealing with some of the finest mages on the continent since becoming a villain and I that I should temper my expectations accordingly. The rituals he’d taught my mages lines in the days of the Fifteenth had since become the standards large-scale sorceries of the Army of Callow, but not all of them could be used without him guiding the casting and there was no real replacement for Masego to be had. Talented mages were costly and time-consuming to raise, and unlike the Wasteland I didn’t have centuries of teaching methods and arcane knowledge to dole out to raise any even should I find talented individuals – which I couldn’t, because unlike Praesi I didn’t have well-trained agents out there looking for the signs of young children with the Gift. Add onto that the fact that the Legions of Terror had picked clean the most obvious magical talents in the kingdom after the Conquest, and it was no wonder that so few of my mages were of Callowan stock.

“And for the wet wrath of the Heavens?” Vivienne idly asked, leaning over one of the tables to have a look at the scrolls stacked on it.

“I dabbled,” I shrugged.

It was one of the more abstract uses of Night I’d resorted to, which had been interesting in its own way. Spinning threads of a miracle I had seen before – the bubble of stillness the Sisters had forged around me when we’d tried to gate out of Iserre – I’d crafted a sort of intangible roof and bound it to the stones. Komena had perched herself atop one long enough to call the work ‘clumsily-executed but clever in principle’, which was the closest she’d ever come to complimenting something I did with the Night. Vivienne hummed, and pursued it no further.

“So,” she said. “Are you going to tell me why you’ve called a halt to the march and ordered the Hellhound to establish a fortified camp?”

Leaning on my staff, I began slowly limping around the edge of the raised stones. It was a fascinating thing, the way the interlocked slabs allowed me to glimpse down at odd angles. Revealing the sight of my armies camped below, raising palisades and digging ditches.

“Because we’ll be fighting a battle soon,” I said. “And there’s no point in running around until we know we can win it.”

“How do you know we’ll be fighting a battle?” Vivienne asked, brow furrowing not in disbelief but in curiosity.

Wondering what she’d missed that I had not, how she could remedy that failure when the chance next came. It had not escaped me that she’d taken my tongue-lashing differently than Juniper. My Marshal had judged the fault to be in herself, and so that the mending of it must come from herself as well – Juniper had turned back to books and discussions with other commanders, the familiar whetstones of her mind. Her art of war had been found insufficient, and so she would better it until this was no longer the case. Vivienne, though, had been harder to gauge. She was… learning, if there was any word that could be used for it. Looking at the successes of others like she was trying to squeeze out the essence of them to make it her own. It was a little unnerving, at times, and at others frustrating. Mostly for me, when I found the whisper of my instincts a hard thing to explain.

“Because we are headed to a pivot,” I said, “and this… isn’t enough. Our army and the Pilgrim’s, that’s too small a scale compared to the magnitude of power gathered. It might be that it starts with simply us, but it won’t stay that way.”

“Because the story,” she slowly said, “requires more than simply us and the Pilgrim. Yet you have fought battles before where-”

I raised a hand to interrupt her.

“The breaches, Vivienne,” I said. “They make a lot possible and therefore those things will happen – because once the groove is there, the possibilities will flow into it like water.”

I cleared my throat.

“We can have that talk later in more detail,” I added. “Council won’t be for hours yet and I don’t want to have repeat myself.”

She nodded.

“I should see to the Jacks, anyway,” Vivienne said. “Adjutant’s coming to join you?”

“Eventually,” I said. “I’ve sent him to get me a proper suit of plate fitted.”

“It has been odd to see you limping about without one,” she admitted.

I snorted and waved her away. As she walked away I propped up my staff against the side of my armchair and lowered myself onto it with a sigh of pleasure. I sat facing rings of stones with an unobstructed view, tables at my sides groaning with the documents I’d sent for. It wasn’t long before I caught the slight sound of leather on snow, my only advance warning that I once more had company.

“You have the supplies?” I called out.

“And you claim you don’t have the fae hearing anymore,” Robber complained. “Bullshit’s what I say.”

My minion popped into sight, leaning against the left arm of my chair. I was rather impressed he’d made it that far without my picking up on it even when I’d known he would be coming.

“You’re just getting old,” I mocked, because it was always a bad idea to give so much as an inch to a goblin.

He should be around sixteen now, I thought. Goblins rarely made it beyond forty, and that was for the better bloodlines – of which Robber was not, and that was setting aside the harsh lifestyle of service in my armies. Thirty was likely when his body would start breaking down, barring rituals to stretch out his lifespan, and at that thought I suddenly regretted the quip.

“You’re telling me,” the Special Tribune complained. “Only cowards make it to fifteen, but I just can’t seem to croak. I’ve had to make my peace with the fundamental truth of this world, Cat: I am simply too good to die.”

I smothered my grin, the earlier regret chased away as quickly as it’d come.

“A heavy burden to bear,” I solemnly agreed. “I know it well.”

He eyed me rather skeptically.

“Didn’t you die that one time?” he asked.

“I think I’m on three now,” I muttered. “It’s not one of my better habits.”

He snickered.

“No wonder you sent me after these, then,” he said.

I had sent off Special Tribune Robber on a most important errand, and as I pawed through the knapsack he’d brought me as tribute I had to concede he’d done his duty well. Two bottles of Vale summer wine were set on the table to my right while I squirrelled away the satchels of wakeleaf into the many pockets of my cloak. Save for one, which went to stuff my pipe. Passing my palm over the herbs had them lit with the slightest touch of Night, and I inhaled with pleasure before lying back in my seat.

“All right,” I said. “Serve as my hands.”

“I figure Archer might object,” the little wretch cackled.

“You might notice I didn’t send for a footrest,” I warned him.

He hurriedly made elaborate apologies that coincidentally happened to insult Indrani more often than not, but I put him to work. Against three stones, three sheets of parchment were put up: one for the Grey Pilgrim, the Tyrant of Helike and the Black Queen. Robber skittered around with ink as I dictated to him, his handwriting godsawful but honestly not that much worse than mine.

“The Pilgrim wants a draw with the Black Queen,” I said. “The Pilgrim wants to preserve the Grand Alliance armies. The Pilgrim wants Procer at war on only one front.”

Robber’s sloppy drawing of the Peregrine as bearing a heavy mustache and a crooked nose was physically inaccurate, but in the interests of morale I allowed the misrepresentation.

“The Tyrant wants leverage on the First Prince,” I said. “The Tyrant wants the means to position the Hierarch. The Tyrant wants there to be no victor in Iserre.”

Kairos’ illustration had him either bearing horns or with his head on fire, it was hard to tell, and I was fairly certain that his arms ended in fingers and not crablike pincers. Still, I decided it wouldn’t do to infringe on the vision of so accomplished an artist.

“You going to tell me what you’re after now?” Robber asked, sounding genuinely curious.

“That doesn’t matter,” I said. “It matters what they think I’m after, because that’s what they’ll plan according to. We’re not the only ones scheming here – if we plan assuming that everyone else will be passive we’ll just be wasting ink.”

“So what do they think we’re after?” the goblin said.

“The Black Queen wants to preserve her armies,” I said. “The Black Queen wants leverage over the Grand Alliance. The Black Queen wants the soul of the Carrion Lord.”

Which were all things I did want, but not necessarily in the manner they’d think I did. I wanted Black back not to make him my foremost general or use him against Malicia, but because he was my father in all but name and I’d not allow his fucking soul to be snuffed out by the blind machinations of the Pilgrim. I wanted leverage over the Grand Alliance not to force treaties advantageous to me but instead to get everyone at the table for the Liesse Accords: the intent wasn’t hostile, and to be blunt if there were other ways of getting there I’d much prefer using those. As for the preservation of my armies, while it was true whether that assertion came back to bite them or not would depend on how well they’d assessed my degree of ruthlessness. I didn’t want to get any of my soldiers killed if I could avoid it, but that didn’t mean I’d shy from battle either if it was the best means to get what I wanted. Sadly, I was dealing with the Peregrine and a madman who’d tricked the likes of the Wandering Bard. I’d assume, at least in principle, that they had a decent read on my personality.

“And now one more parchment,” I said. “The pitfalls we have to avoid, how we’d lose.”

“Folding on those wouldn’t be losing?” Robber asked, skeptical.

Nimble fingers flicked ‘my’ parchment, though mercifully there was no representation of me sketched aside from a hastily filled-in crown.

“It’d be a defeat, certainly,” I said. “But put that parchment above the others, because botching any of those would be the defeat.”

It went above Kairos, and to my amusement the goblin had to drag a chair and climb it so he could both hang it and write on it. Dipping the quill in an inkpot, he turned to me with an expectant look.

“The Grey Pilgrim cannot die,” I said.

Inconvenient as that line was, it needed to be drawn. If Tariq died and we’d killed him, a death feud was struck with Levant. If Tariq died and the League killed him, eighty thousand Levantine troops would be marching east instead of west. If Tariq died by accident, well, likely I’d get blamed somehow. I pulled at my pipe and spat out a mouthful of smoke.

“The western and eastern coalitions cannot lose more than a fifth of their forces,” I said.

He let out a low whistle at that. The quill scratched, though his gaze kept flicking back to me curiously. I sighed, and explained after another drag of wakeleaf was released.

“For us, a fifth would be about twenty thousand dead,” I said. “For them it’d be somewhere between fifteen to thirty, depending on whether or not they can merge their armies before the fight. If either of us loses more than that, we’re crippled as a field army for at least several months. We can’t afford that, given the situation up north.”

“And the League?” he asked.

“Can’t be considered reliable in any sense so long as the Hierarch and the Tyrant are running it,” I said. “Preserving its armies isn’t a priority – to be honest, I’d feel safer if we carved away them by at least a fifth.”

I drummed my fingers against the arm of my seat, staring at the fresh ink on the parchment. I worried my lip thoughtfully and only after a long silence did I speak.

“The Grey Pilgrim cannot have get a draw against the Black Queen,” I finally said.

I could not, in the end, trust him with that kind of power over me. Not even for the sake of making an alliance. Robber finished the words with a flourish, as if a twist of the wrist could make his calligraphy look anything other than cramped and sickly. I had not exactly picked the most able of scribes.

“Finished?” Robber asked.

I nodded. He scuttled down, quite blatantly pilfering the quill and inkpot before putting away the chair.

“And now?”

“Now,” I murmured, “I think.”

The parchments, those tidy little triumvirates of desires and pitfalls, hung in front of me but I did not need to look at them. Putting them up had served the purpose I’d had it done for, allowing me to place it all together as a structure instead of a series of abstractions. I closed my eyes, let it all fall together.

“I can leave, Boss,” Robber quietly offered.

“Don’t,” I said, chewing on my pipe. “We’re going to play a game, you and I.”

“Ominous,” the goblin praised.

The wakeleaf burned my throat, filled my lungs, and for a moment I felt a strange joy go through me like a spasm. I was enjoying this, I realized. This feeling, like my mind was full to burst and empty at the same time. Like I’d been filled with jagged edges, glittering pieces of madness and brilliance and that there was a solution to the crawling chaos, a twisting and winding formula that would bind it all to my will. I breathed out, smoke and heat leaving my lips, and smiled. Eyes fluttering open, I snatched the staff and hobbled to the parchment-bearing stones with feverish energy.

“Now,” I said, “to a layman’s eye, it might seem we’re in a spot of trouble.”

“If have a few of those, if you need spares,” Robber offered.

“But if you look at it closely, we have angles,” I continued. “For example, though the Tyrant will stab anyone who looks about to win in the back he is in fact our ally.”

The goblin choked.

“What was that, Boss?” he said. “I can’t believe I heard it right.”

I knocked the butt of my pipe against barely-dry ink under the drawn caricature of the Tyrant.

“Kairos can’t accomplish what he wants if there’s no truce,” I said. “Think about it, Robber – if his whole reason for getting into this war is getting leverage on Cordelia, then he needs room to actually use that leverage. He can’t do that from Iserre while openly at war with her. If blunt coercion was all he needed he could have gone after her armies to force her hand, but he didn’t. You know what that tells us?”

Robber’s eyes narrowed in thought.

“The cripple’s not willing to hand this war to the Dead King,” my Special Tribune said. “He’ll duck and weave, but these are matron games – a knife here and there before we all sit smiling.”

“Aye,” I said. “And one thing more: he needs me at that table, the wretched little bastard. If I don’t agree to truce talks then all his schemes are dust. He can’t make a separate peace with Cordelia, not when he’s trying to twist her arm. He needs to be the kingmaker in this threesome of ours, not the sole enemy, and that means having all of us at the same conference where he can play us off each other.”

“What’s he mean to use the Hierarch for, anyway?” Robber asked.

“I’m not sure yet, but it doesn’t matter right now,” I said. “What does is the fact that the moment I try to push for a peace conference he’ll back me to the hilt regardless of all other considerations. See, no victor in Iserre is only important for him insofar as it’ll affect the conference that follows the fight here. Balance of power and all that. But if I make it clear that the only way he gets that conference is walking my line, you know what follows.”

“He walks, like it or not,” the goblin finished. “He’s our borrowed knife.”

“So he is,” I grinned. “Now Tariq, Tariq’s what Black would be if someone ripped out the part of his mind that itches to fix things and shoved a Choir in there instead. If a situation goes south on Tariq, he won’t double down or throw a fit: he’ll measure the risks, and if there’s no worth to the strife he’ll cut his losses and prepare for the next round.”

“Hate to tell you, Boss, but the situation hasn’t gone south on him yet,” Robber reminded me.

“It doesn’t need to, that’s the beauty of it,” I told him.

I spun on myself, lightly tapping the Pilgrim’s parchment with my staff.

“See, the only thing in there I can’t allow is the draw,” I said. “He wants to preserve the Grand Alliance armies? So do I. He wants Procer to be able to turn north? So do I. To get what I want out of this, I don’t actually need to screw him out of most of what he wants.”

“As I’ve been given to understand,” the Special Tribune mused, “he also wants to slug you in the story real bad, so to speak. And he’s really a bastard kin of the Carrion Lord, he’ll have schemes afoot and blood that’s lizard-cold.”

“Ah, and so we get to the tricky part,” I conceded. “If I walked up to the Grey Pilgrim right now and offered him everything he wants save for the draw, he’d refuse. But that’s not because he’s a fanatic, Robber, although he is. He’s not your average screaming, barn-burning zealot: he’s the exemplar of the long view. The Pilgrim is what the Heavens use to make sure the forest fire doesn’t become like, well, the last few years essentially.”

“He’ll come after you quiet and sudden, Boss,” Robber said. “And you’re good at the second, but the first famously ain’t your wheelhouse.”

“You’re missing the point,” I said. “He’s the broad view hero, Robber. They don’t have another one of those, it’s the entire reason he’s so influential in the first place. Fighting him at all is a mistake. The key to handling Tariq is twisting his arm in that same broad view: making it clear to him that if he actually takes a swing at me, the costs will make even a success so utterly ruinous it’ll defeat the entire purpose. And the moment he knows that…”

“He takes the wins he can,” the goblin said. “And cuts his losses on the rest, drawing back for the next round.”

I drew back myself, coincidentally, emptying the ashes of my pipe onto the snow and gazing at the loose constellation of sentences.

“You know, Robber, there’s a story back home that in the old days there was an Alban king who went mad,” I said. “Thought he was made of feathers, so he ordered all the palace windows nailed shut and all the doors closed. Wouldn’t even take off his cloak, since he was convinced without it the slightest breeze would disperse him into a million tufts.”

“So he ‘fell down some stairs’ and an ambitious daughter succeeded him?” Robber snickered.

“He was an Alban, even if mad,” I chided. “No, they suffered his whims intent on waiting him out. Until one day a window broke in a storm, and he dropped his cloak in fright but did not dissolve. The old king, the morning after, summoned the court and announced he realized now he had been mad and was cured of his madness.”

“That’s distastefully uplifting,” Robber opined.

“Story’s not over,” I said. “You see, the king had realized he was not made of feathers. He simply had a coat of them, for he was in fact a bird.”

The goblin grinned.

“So what happened to him?” he asked.

“Oh, they settled him down,” I said. “But a few weeks later he climbed the highest tower in the palace and leapt down to take flight.”

“Did he?” Robber asked.

“We have a saying about it,” I smiled. “A king can fly-”

I shrugged.

“-but not for long.”

Amused, the Special Tribune bared needle-like fangs in approval.

“See, the thing is,” I murmured. “I always thought that he must have deep down known he was mad. Because if he hadn’t known, if he’d really believe that with all his heart…”

I chuckled.

“Now and then, Creation has been known to grant the mad a pair of wings,” I said.

“So what’s your Callowan folk wisdom leading to, Boss?” Robber asked.

“Let’s find out, my dear minion,” I said, “if we are mad enough to fly.”