how a war is won

The air cools fast as he descends to the cells, breath still quick from the sword drills the messenger had interrupted. It's his first time there in the three weeks since they’d taken the keep. The smell of staleness and damp reminds him of the long marches through stuttering rain, the kind that leave one unable to remember the feel of dry clothes.

His superiors already stand before the bars. The general with his sash of highest office. His captain beside him with the ever-present steely set to her jaw.

“Lieutenant,” the captain greets first, a hardness in her voice that isn’t for him.

“Captain Nikane," he returns. "General Avinar.”

Behind them, the prisoner reclines almost relaxedly against her cell wall, motionless in an unassuming tan shirt and trousers, giving no visible reaction to their footsteps or conversation. He takes in the strong-boned features of Palic in her face, half-obscured by muddy brown hair. The crimped wave to it suggests it had spent some time in a tight braid before the tie was taken in a search.

He asks, “Found on patrol?”

“No, in the stables,” answers General Avinar.

He nods. Takes a moment to collect his words, before he steps forward and enunciates carefully in the tongue of the southern nation. “I am Lieutenant Ilan of the southwest army of Geale. Will you tell us who you are?”

No reply. No more response to her language than to theirs. He turns back to the others and says, in Gealenn, “Let me check her hands.”

A wave brings over the guard stationed down the corridor with the heavy ring of keys. Ilan unbuckles his sword to the squealing groan of the heavy door being unlocked and nudged open, hands it to the guard on his way through. Better to trust in his own strength with an unknown prisoner than give her access to a weapon.

She doesn't recoil as he approaches, and kneels. Doesn’t resist when he takes her right hand from her lap, and runs his fingers over the edges of her palm. The passive surrender is incongruous with what he feels.

“Sword calluses,” he announces. For certainty he reaches up, seeking the muscle definition in chest and shoulders that would tell of extensive training.

Halfway there, the hand in his twists. Fingers close iron-firm around his wrist in the space between two heartbeats. Not even a blink, and dark eyes snap from insensate to deadly clear focus.

“If I wanted a beast on me,” the prisoner says in perfect Gealenn, “I would have fucked your horse instead of poisoning it.”

- - -

By the time they return, the listless disregard is gone. The prisoner's gaze tracks them cool and steady from where she sits cross-legged in the corner, a scrape on her cheek that hadn’t been there before. Ilan imagines her pressing herself along the bars, searching for weakness. She won’t have found any.

“Bringing me a blanket?” The taunt rolls from her lips too easily, spoken like someone born into their tongue.

In response, General Avinar states, “You know where you are.”

“Huret castle, newly a possession of Geale. Finished pissing in all the rooms yet?”

“You are under the detention of the Gealenn army.”

“Yes, hard to miss, what with all the neighing.” The last part is drawn out mockingly, emphasising the nasal tones of their language. She does have an accent, in fact, remnants of clipped Palici vowels and sibilant consonants making themselves more apparent the more words she speaks. Not born into it, then, but still better than Ilan’s Palici picked up from market stalls and streets run through as a barefoot child.

She goes on, “Speaking of horses—”

“Not poisoned.” The general takes a step forward, boot thudding on the uneven stone as a clump of red-brown dirt flakes off its recently-polished surface. “Why lie about that. Why were you really here?”

She tilts her head, a slow stretch of her neck, face set in precise ease. She doesn’t reply.

“A flogging would be good for morale.” The captain's statement is matter-of-fact. “Not as good as an execution, but—”

“But,” Avinar continues, “if we’re worried about morale, we could always just strip her and hand her to the camp.”

The prisoner’s gaze slides, unhurriedly, to meet the other woman's. “You’d let them do that to me?” she asks. She sounds, for all the world, to be caught in nothing more than mild curiosity. “Captain Nikane?”

Nikane pauses, her hesitation at being addressed by name short but telling. Then she spits, “I’d only be eager to find out if a Palici bleeds faster on her back than on my blade.”

The three officers don’t have to share a look for the same realisation to have settled between them. Things have just become delicate, past dealing with a simple soldier or spy. Combat training is one thing, but adding to it proficiency in the enemy language, familiarity with opposing commanders, that gives something higher. Rank.

Rank means interrogation grows complicated, that ransom or exchange must be considered. Risk must be calculated with more care, when the possibility is impairing someone who could know something vital. Extreme techniques may have to remain off the table, if worthwhile negotiations could be made over a bargaining chip of unharmed return. Rank, right now, means protection.

Maybe the prisoner knows this. She doesn’t look afraid. She looks almost approving of the verbal repost, even as she looks back to the general. “And you really condone treatment like this, Your Highness?”

At that one, it’s Avinar’s turn to pause. “That is not the title I use here.”

“Oh, yes.” An exaggerated bow of her head, as if in deference. “Prince-General Avinar, bundled off to the border while the princess rules beside the king at the capital.”

“I am leading this entry from the front lines.”

“Entry,” she repeats. And then she smiles, frost-cold in the way the outside of it looks every sliver genuine. “I’ll be making an entry into your country when I want to fuck your sister. This is called an invasion.”

“Khere,” the general uses the Gealenn word for the southern territory, “was part of Geale once.”

“Not in living memory. Ketre has been Palici for generations.” Disgust bleeds into her pristine features like spilt wine. “And am I to believe you’ll stop, then, now that you’ve reclaimed your border?”

He replies without breaking her gaze. His words have the tone of a commander. “We have Khere. The southeast flank is holding progress in Cenne. One does not give up a war when one has the advantage.”

“Of course not.” Her smile sharpens. “So you’ll come down, into Vetan? You’ll never get past the river.”

The mood buckles in a heartbeat, focus twisting within the dank underground stone, punching through the layers of simmering challenge that had been thickening in the air.

“And what, exactly,” says Nikane, “will be waiting for us at the river?”

The prisoner stops. Something flashes in her eyes, the only flicker since she’d been caught of failing control. Then her expression shutters very deliberately to blankness. Her silence, suddenly, sounds a lot less like calculation.

General Avinar turns on his heel, striding toward the stairs without a backward glance. Captain Nikane falls into step behind him. Ilan, after a moment, doesn’t.

Instead he walks forward until he reaches the bars, speaking for the first time in the exchange.

“You know our names.”

The prisoner flicks her head, like she’d forgotten he was there. He talks like he’d missed the entire previous conversation, tone jarringly bland. His eyes find hers and hold.

It wasn't a bad time, he'll tell his superiors later, to press. Just a little.

“Will you give us the courtesy of yours?”

For a time she says nothing. Her tight mask doesn’t fall again, not now, but her regard bores into him.

And then, finally, “My name is Vel, Ilan."

- - -

They launch the incursion from Huret. Vetan is sparsely populated, with a climate too volatile to lend itself easily to farming and a river too unpredictable in its patterns of flooding. The near-bare stretch had formed the natural border in times past before Palic had pushed north. It’s no particularly valuable territory to claim, not in itself, but Geale has no intention of stopping once they have it.

The original plan hadn’t anticipated Palici resistance until the better settled areas deeper into the territory, but a strategy revision meeting over a map had revealed something new. The stretch where the Lykara River narrows to its easiest place to cross, the ground dips into a low basin. A perfect location for a two-fold assault to leave an army hemmed in on three fronts, fighting uphill on each flank and slowed from advancing by icy mountain water and archers likely waiting across it.

A few directions to their best scouts return the confirmation of what awaits them. When the time comes, they don’t cross the river at the narrow. On the general’s orders they make a loop down south, riding up alongside the bank to claim the high ground, surprising the split Palici forces.

The day is cool and the mud sucks at the hooves of the horses. For all the wild, desperate uncertainty of the battle, the river feels like it ought to be a furious rapid in counterpoint. It isn’t. The melts are low this season, the Lykara babbles like a babe in the background until it’s brought to silence, choked with fallen bodies that it fails to sweep away.

Geale takes victory.

- - -

“I hear congratulations are in order.”

The prisoner’s voice is dull like unpolished steel, ugly and sharp underneath. Vel. Possibly a false name. Not one they had recognised but they didn’t have a lot of information on the Palici command, unlike the other way around apparently. She stands today, back straight in the centre of her cell.

“How did you hear that?” Nikane asks, and keeps her tone flat. Vetan isn’t taken yet, Avinar was remaining with the contingent holding the river. They’d kept their base camp by Huret’s walls, supplied by the castle stores, and Ilan had elected to sleep in the tents with his soldiers. Only she had returned to the keep.

“Guards this morning. Did you hope to surprise me? You know how soldiers brag, always someone they felled or someone they fucked—oh, I forget I’m in Geale now. Those might not be different people.”

The captain doesn’t blink. “I’m here to give you one chance to make a case for ransom. If your army is willing to pay, you just might make it back to them.”

Vel laughs, unexpectedly. The genuine shock in it cracks like fracturing wood. “Is that a joke?”

Nikane draws in a breath. “Does it seem one?”

“Well I’m sure you relax after a victory as well as the best of them. Tell me, do you visit the brothels or only serve in them—”

“Why no ransom?”

“Because,” her gaze hollows into a stare, “Palic will look at what happened at the Lykara and think I betrayed them to you.”

“You did.”

Vel rocks back a step as if struck.

Nikane grins, baring her teeth, and leans in to lay one palm against the cold coarse iron of a bar. Three of her fingers are bandaged where they’d been broken in the recent battle. “That wasn’t very smart, you know,” states flatly. “Giving up your only guarantee of remaining alive and in arguably one piece.”

She’s already striding away, out of sight when the word catches her—

“Wait.”

She pauses, doesn’t turn, takes a long while to decide not to ignore it.

“Captain Nikane.” The call isn’t loud. It is level, but only barely so.

Unhurriedly, she makes her way back into the very edge of vision. Vel doesn’t meet her eyes again as her lips move, words stumbling their way out. Her accent seems suddenly more pronounced than before. “There’ll be an attack. Here.”

The captain does blink, now.

“There was another plan.” The words fall like they’re being cut out with a knife. “To take back Huret if you moved to target Vetan. The remaining Palici army will avoid the south and come from the base of the mountains.”

A moment passes, two. “You expect us to believe you?”

Something crumples, silently, behind the Palici’s expression. “If my people find me here—” she falters. “You said it, what I am now to them." Her gaze remains on the stones in the corner. "You led the flank before the Prince was sent out for this campaign. What would you do to a traitor?”

The captain’s hand twitches at her side, broken fingers curling not enough for a fist before she flexes them back. The medic had said to keep them still. “Yes, I did lead,” she replies softly. “Which means I have a little lesson for you, Palici maggot. You’re not just a traitor to them.” And she spins again, walks away this time without pause. Her last words ring out a half-damped echo down the corridor.

“Prove yourself a traitor, and you aren't worthy of anyone’s trust.”

- - -

Palic surges a week later from the west, the base of the mountains.

They don’t find the Gealenn army disorganised, preparations focused half a day’s ride down the scraggly Vetan plains. Instead they’re met by a perfectly rallied defence, archers on the walls and solid lines in front, the captain’s messenger readied to leave at the first drum of oncoming hooves. A precaution only, certainly not based on anything so much as trust, but an easy enough measure to take in any circumstance.

The messenger rides back full speed with reinforcements from the second camp by the river. The general may complain, later, about being summoned like an underling, but he has little to be unhappy about when the cry rises. The castle is held.

- - -

“You’ve done Geale a service.”

Vel lifts her chin at the general’s words, seated against the back wall with her knees pulled loosely up. Primly, she states, “I’d rather clean the cunt of every whore in Palic than service Geale as it hunts our people like game.”

She says it as if the brothels of Palic aren’t filled by Gealenn prisoners. War is bitter, it goes how it goes. Even raised in the royal palace, Avinar knows this. Calmly, he pulls a fig out of his pocket and tosses it through the bars, a flick of a wrist well-trained in landing a spear. “Keep telling us what you know, and there will be a place for you with us.”

The sweeter tactic of questioning, to build gratitude instead of fear. Ilan had officially advised him to take caution with such a prisoner. Nikane did not know he was here.

Vel doesn’t look down as the fig falls perfectly into her lap. “A place on my knees with a sword to my neck?”

“I have authority to grant you citizenship. You know who I am.”

“Ah, yes.” She reaches a casual hand across, grasping the fig almost delicately. “How does it work with a royal double-birth? Do they even remember which one of you was the firstborn heir?”

It’s not a question that merits entertaining from a prisoner, but the answer comes well-recited. “The problem of inheritance will be decided on the basis of merit, in time. While our father remains well, it is no problem at all. I can assure you that my sister and I hold equal power.”

“Indeed.” Slowly, Vel stretches her legs out in front of her, never wincing as she shifts across the rough stone floor. “Yet you’re sure you’ll prove yourself, aren’t you? Out here leading your army to glory, having already secured the greater role?”

“You—”

“Thing is,” her back straightens, she leans forward, “I’ll bet you everything I have that the Princess-Councillor is sitting in court thinking the very same thing.”

Avinar swallows once, feels an ache in his clenched jaw that’s become familiar over the years. He stops himself from glaring with ease of practice. “Keep the fig.”

The laugh he receives isn’t cruel. The prisoner slouches again, shoulders rounded, a little away from the wall. In that moment she looks small, a hunched figure in one corner of a cell empty except for dust, caked in the grime of her days of captivity. She says, “So you’ll continue into Vetan?”

His jaw loosens. “No, after the attack we’ve decided to secure the west. The area is supplied from the town of Pavin, we burn their farms first and cut them off.”

“Leave the farms, they’re on Pavin’s east and will have the most soldiers protecting them. Take the town and take the supplies for yourself, come from the north.”

He gives a low nod, and turns. “Thank you.”

“Palic won’t take me back,” Vel states flatly at the bare opposite wall as he walks away. “And unfortunately a fig isn’t much good to clean cunts."

- - -

“You’re listening to her?”

The cloth sides of the strategy tent are thick, dirtied from the mud of long campaigns and stained sporadically from rounds of making emergency camp with bloodied fingers and shaking hands. They do nothing to dull the edge in the captain’s voice.

“I’m using her,” says the general, words deliberate. “Like you did.”

“Only when she was squealing for her own hide.”

“She’s an asset, an advantageous one. One that could be significant in this war.”

“She’s a traitor. And you give her promises? Put your trust in the pretty girl saying what you want to hear?”

The words are idle, almost absent-minded, as Ilan cuts in, “She’s not that pretty.”

As an attempt to diffuse the tension, it succeeds. Nikane turns slowly away from her superior to regard the lieutenant.

“So you’ve noticed?”

They’ve worked together a long time, she could be jesting. She isn’t. She’s not that kind of commander.

Ilan doesn’t reply, doesn’t rise to the taunt, doesn't shift attention from where his eyes are still glued to the map spread out on the table. After a moment he says, only, “It doesn’t look like a bad plan.”

- - -

The general orders the attack.

The ground to the north is hilly, ground dry rock and dust this close to the mountains. There’s even less here than in the heart of Vetan, the reason why Pavin lies the crucial supply point. Lines of soldiers weave in and out of sight as the army plods over the bucking rises and falls of the land. The town has yet to breach the horizon from even atop the highest swell, before they come.

Not the same bored soldiers reported by scouts around the farms, but ones who ride down from slopes and ridges with artful mastery of the terrain. Their horses are fresh and their armour strangely mismatched as they fall over the Gealenn ranks, fighting with more fervour than skill and a touch of something that feels like anger. They have surprise, and familiarity, and resolute refusal to give an inch on any advantage they’ve gained.

Geale retreats.

- - -

“We stand as your tribunal,” Avinar states for the three commanders.

Vel blinks from where she hadn’t been given a chance to stand, curled on her side against the wall. “What—”

“You will be sentenced and executed as a spy.”

Her countenance fractures, a fine fissure splintering incrementally outward. “I—You didn’t take Pavin? Why?”

“Shut her mouth,” the captain says calmly, “before it oozes any more slop.” “Why?” Vel repeats, voice beginning to rise. “You were ambushed?”

Avinar looks to Nikane, not addressing the prisoner. “She dies next dawn.”

“Did they have red hair?”

Silence. Slowly, barely, the general turns back. His tone is flat. “What?”

“The soldiers protecting Pavin.” Vel pushes up, scrambling to her feet. The toes of one half-decaying boot slip on the ground. “Did you see their hair?”

Over Nikane’s sound of disgust, Ilan takes a cautious step forward.

“I saw one lose her helm.” His tone is subdued, but firm. “Her hair was red.”

There’s an exhale from behind the bars, audible. “Then, those protecting Pavin, they just have been—they weren’t ours. The town is across the old border of Fieras.”

It takes a few seconds for the Palici-pronounced name to register. Fieras. A nation once, tucked along the western coast under the mountains, now a part of Palic for almost two decades.

“By law,” Vel was still saying, expression pinched tight, “Fierai territories are not permitted to keep soldiers.”

Ilan offers slowly, “You’re claiming that you were unaware of the Fierai force.”

“There is no Fierai force, not officially. Even if there were, they’d never fight with the Palici army. Fieras’s desire to be part of Palic is only slightly greater than its desire to be part of Geale.”

“She lies,” states Nikane promptly.

“Wait,” from Ilan, softly. Not believing, exactly, but thoughtful.

“Pavin will call for reinforcements,” Vel talks over both of them, too hurriedly. “But the force that tried to take Huret will have come from the mountain keep of Brakis.”

“Leave,” says Nikane, and it’s an order. Ilan has to obey. Avinar doesn’t. He stays long enough to hear the last words, tossed out like the final log on a dying fire.

“There’s a path to its rear through the mountains. With a portion of their numbers sent to Pavin, this will be your best chance."

- - -

“You can’t,” Nikane is already saying as she arrives to the meeting, “You can’t believe her.” It’s a statement not a question.

“It’s plausible,” Ilan concedes quietly, “what she claims. Just the risk—”

“To be balanced against the reward.” Avinar’s voice is firm as he interrupts them both. One of his hands drifts to the map in front of him, illustrated with unmistakable military precision and marked with the great strongholds of both sides of the border. The other rests at his hip, sash of office pinched idly between thumb and forefinger. His tone brokers no argument. “I want Brakis.”

- - -

She’s led to a wagon squinting in the shock of daylight, bound and surrounded by four armed guards and the bustle of an uprooting camp. They leave her hands tied and the rope woven between the slats of her seat enough times to resemble a farmer’s attempt at a tapestry. The journey isn’t smooth, the entire hulking mass of the Gealenn army—minus the numbers left holding Vetan and Huret—contorting its way through the foothills, but it goes with grim determination. Brakis is a jewel of the mountains, a jewel built of solid rock between the impenetrable walls of an unassailable natural pass. And thanks to their Palici, they have a way in.

“So, what did you do to get punished with guard duty?” Vel breaks into the air after a few hours of listening to the grind of wheels on uneven ground, crunching like the spit and crackle of a watchfire.

“No one else is permitted to talk to you,” Ilan replies from the other side of the wagon. His hand rests casually over the slit on his belt that marks his rank, near the hilt of his sword.

“There were other guards in the cells.”

“Not in close quarters.”

She grins, showing teeth. “Your general has a very high opinion of my abilities.”

“General Avinar is reserving judgement on you either way.”

Her mouth softens a little. Her voice falls to match as she says, “He’s judged I’m more useful alive than dead.”

“For now.”

“Your captain disagrees.”

Ilan inclines his head noncommittally.

“What about you?”

“I fall to the highest command.”

“That wasn’t an answer.”

He pauses. ‘He wants to believe you’ would be the truth, as would ‘she doesn’t’. And, ‘I hope he’s right’. Instead of any of those he switches to her language to say, “You still haven’t told us why you were in our camp.”

There's a cock of her head at the less than subtle attempt to unbalance. She comments dryly, “You speak Palici like a cowherd’s wife.”

“Probably,” Ilan replies without missing a beat. “I grew up on the border.”

The little cough of a laugh is surprising, and new. Her voice sounds rougher in her native tongue, quicker and throatier across the syllables. “So you know the borderlands?”

“Yes, my area of expertise. General Avinar is from the capital of course, Captain Nikane was reassigned from the north.”

“Are they hoping I’ll fuck you?”

He starts before he can steel himself not to. “No.”

“Are you?”

“I—”

“They want you to talk to me, don’t they?”

Ilan takes a breath, considers the last few minutes, and decides not to deny it. He throws his question like a gauntlet. “Where were you born?”

Ropes pull taut as Vel shifts in her seat. The sunlight from the tiny slit of a window catches in her stringy hair, picking out an almost vibrant glow from the dull brown. Her skin is pallid from weeks of confinement. She answers. “Not in Palic.”

The upward twitch of his brows shows his surprise.

“My father is Palici,” she elaborates. “Else I wouldn’t have been eligible for promotion.”

He doesn’t hide his sliver of a smile. “So you are of rank.”

She looks away.

The trap falls on them at one narrow pass, not even close to their destination. It starts with a small rock fall, scattering and confusing them. Then the rocks become larger. Then the arrows come.

Ilan hears the shouts from inside the wagon, the clatter of an army falling to pandemonium. Somewhere in the fray is the general's yell, the echoes of his command down the lines to get out of the mountains. They fall with the ill grace of a stumbling bull, through too-small gaps and down too-steep slopes to get to flat ground, horses screaming and axles heaving as drivers scramble to keep a course.

When Vel looks back up inside the confines of the shuddering walls, her gaze is clear, and her eyes are bright. The fire in them says, You should have listened to your captain.

- - -

She’s laughing as she’s dragged from the wagon. “These foothills,” she bites, “have been used to break armies for centuries.”

Across the haphazard camp attempting to ground the chaos for the night, Avinar is marching his way toward them. Nikane intercepts him before he arrives.

“You did this.”

He comes to a stop, opens his mouth.

“General, Captain,” Ilan calls before a reply can be given, too loud and too sharp, an attempt to force their attention from each other and from the tipping point that he can smell in the air. One of the lieutenant’s hands is tight around Vel’s bindings, the other tighter around the hilt of his sword. “We must decide where to go from here.”

Nikane’s gaze wrenches in his direction, then away again, down to the prisoner at his feet. She takes three heavy steps closer. Her upper lip curls. “The soldiers will want blood for this. We’re close to Pavin. Tonight we gather what we have, tomorrow we put her on the post and let them tear her apart. Then torch the town like we planned.”

“No.” Avinar falls to her side. “Fighting in blind rage never did anyone good. The west is too defensible. We focus our efforts on Vetan, keep a lookout for attacks from this direction.”

At that, the captain turns fast enough dust kicks up from under her heel. “You want us all to turn tail because you’re ashamed of your fool’s trust?”

“You speak above your station.” The words are quiet, the warning in them like the hiss of a bowstring.

She doesn’t act like she hears it. “While you use yours to listen to quick-talking whores with too-good promises of glory.”

On the ground, Vel spits.

“Oh yes, go to Pavin. That’s where they really are, not Brakis. My people will win, and I return a hero.”

“Ignore her,” Avinar says flatly, and looks to Ilan. “Lock her back in the wagon, do as the captain says in the morning.”

But before the lieutenant can even nod, Nikane is pressing on. “And Pavin?”

Their gazes meet again, lock, burn. “No.”

The sound that comes from her throat is pure disgust. “These soldiers won’t accept retreat.”

“They will.”

“I led them before you did. I override you.”

There’s a beat, a moment grinding to complete stillness despite the ruckus all around. The silence between two heartbeats, after a precipice and before the fall.

The general’s lip curls in something that might be fury or might be vindication. He says, “Then you are dismissed.”

- - -

The morning is heralded by two runners, racing the dawn.

“General,” one announces, “the former captain has left camp, and three regiments with her.”

“General,” the other announces, distress plainer on his face, “she was bound again and guards posted outside but in the morning the door was open.”

“Who?” he asks, though he doesn’t need to. His head is heavy, not from a night of drink but a night of barbed thought.

“The Palici.”

- - -

“You,” the general says to his new captain as they retreat for Vetan, eyes fixed resolutely above the head of his black mare, “know this terrain, yes?”

Ilan sits sedately in his saddle, composed like a soldier well-used to keeping his head through tumult, humble as one who’d risen in rank through quiet competence and not burning ambition. “I know Khere,” he replies. “The terrain is similar in Cenne and Vetan. But not out by the mountains.”

“What is your opinion on the Palici army’s movements?”

“I agree the west is too defensible. The land is difficult, they know it, we don’t. But the more I consider, the more I believe Brakis is not a practical base location. I believe she told the truth there.”

“Ignore her.”

He bows his head. “Indeed. Pavin is not practical either, too much valuable farmland. The army would set themselves in easy riding distance of Pavin, Huret, and the Lykara.” The realisation runs over him like a cold salve. “Like—right here.”

And suddenly they’re not retreating.

The outriding scouts spot the Palici camp first, vast on the south bank of the river. The soldiers are thirsty for a fight, the bitter taste of defeat heavy on the backs of their tongues, this opportunity entirely unanticipated but welcome like a desert storm. The decision is easy.

“Form up, charge them.” The general’s command unfurls down the lines like a whip.

It’s a hard battle. Spontaneous on both sides but it becomes clear they were not expected, assumed perhaps to be continuing west. Geale has the positional advantage with the camp backed against the river, they’re winning when the Palici reinforcements arrive.

Except, they don’t. The forces who’d accosted them in the foothills surely, and the ones stationed at Pavin, but they barely come over the hills before they’re joined by another company. Nikane. And those true to their old captain who’d left with her, who’d been rallying to raid Pavin when they’d seen the soldiers there called away, and had enough loyalty to follow.

Surprised from the side, the Palici lines crumple.

- - -

And then it’s over.

- - -

In the aftermath of victory, a man wanders away from the revelries at the centre of the new camp.

Vetan is won. Nikane is returned with their gratitude, though with her old captaincy out of the question. But there’s a thread wound too tightly around it all, a thread that feels like the well-calloused fingers of a certain former prisoner who’d never answered why she’d been in their camp.

Captain Ilan finds himself in the strategy tent, a slightly dented goblet of wine half-forgotten in one hand. He’s not drunk, he rarely is, but that night he wouldn’t have minded being so. He’s not a man who likes to doubt. He’s done nothing but it lately.

There is one certainty that’s crept up upon him slowly, relentlessly. That that first slip was no slip. That the Lykara was no accident of hubris, no boastful misstep. Huret was aid, and Pavin and Brakis set up like the precise toss of a loaded die at a gaming table. Yet, so was Vetan, an angry captain sent to Pavin and an ambitious but now cautious general, prince, retreating to the river and—somewhere along the line—his own promotion. She’d given them two defeats, three victories. Why? Defection?

His eyes fall on the half-unrolled map on the table, snare on something.

And suddenly he knows.

“Fieras’s desire to be part of Palic is only slightly greater than its desire to be part of Geale.”

Two defeats and three victories—split perfectly either side of the border of Fieras.

“Where were you born?” “Not in Palic.”

A campaign redirected to weaken the Palici side, finished with a border-raised captain.

The sunlight from the tiny slit of a window catches in her stringy hair, picking out an almost vibrant glow—a glow that just could be a tinge of red.

Not defection. Surgery. Clean and deadly precise and using her enemy as the blade. Why betray a country when you can betray two, escape one before things finish unfolding and be embraced again by the other.

“I return a hero.”

He steps back.

Tomorrow, he’ll report to his general with what he knows, what he thinks he knows, what he can dare to suggest. Tonight, he stands in the empty tent and feels the prickly rise of admiration for an opponent well met, and the slow-churning disquiet of being caught up in something beyond him. In that moment, he cannot think anything else to do. He lifts his goblet.

To the surgeon.

fin.

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