Lyra was in the middle of a briefing when the messenger arrived, her instincts already screaming that something was wrong before the boy even opened his mouth because the seal on the letter he was carrying wasn't the standard military dispatch seal. It was Commander Valen's personal mark, one he didn't use for routine updates.
She excused herself from the briefing. It was something about supply requisitions for the border garrisons that she'd already stopped paying attention to twenty minutes ago. Now, standing in the corridor, she read the letter. By the third line her hands had gone still and cold against the paper.
Sir Brennan's expedition had engaged the Barrens settlement ahead of schedule. They had attempted to force entry but failed. Sixteen marked as dead with fourteen more of their wounded being saved, having suffered significant equipment losses including two supply wagons and a mage's staff. The report stated he and the survivors were retreating to the northern staging point and would require medical support and reinforcements.
The letter didn't use the word 'defeat.' It used words like 'tactical withdrawal' and 'insufficient intelligence regarding enemy fortifications' and 'necessary reassessment of engagement parameters,' but Lyra had been around military reports long enough to know that the more formal the language, the worse the actual situation had become, and this was very formal indeed.
The letter also served as a summons by the commander, no doubt to question the validity of her previous reports.
She found Commander Valen in his offices two hours later. The room was already full of people who shouldn't have been there, ranging from staff officers she didn't recognize to a nobleman in civilian clothes who stood too close to Valen's desk to be formal. His posture suggested he was used to being the most important person in whatever room he walked into. Valen himself was standing at the window with his back to the room; he didn't turn around when Lyra entered, which told her that whatever was happening had been happening before she got the message and would continue happening whether she was there or not, even though he had summoned her to this.
"Commander," she said finally, causing Valen to turn. His face was the kind of blank that Lyra had learned to read as controlled anger. Not at her, at least not entirely; rather, it was directed at the situation, at the fact that something he'd orchestrated had fallen apart and now he had to manage the fallout.
"Lord Jarves's daughter," the nobleman said before Valen could speak, and his tone was pleasant in the way that people were pleasant when they were measuring you for something. "I don't believe we've been introduced. I am Sir Micheal Brennan. You may have heard of my younger brother."
Sir Brennan, the knight who'd led the expedition, the one who'd ignored the order to give their writ and report if it was declined, who was supposed to negotiate but instead attacked before reinforcements could be sent and gotten sixteen of his soldiers killed. He was the younger brother of this nobleman who stood in the commander's offices like he owned them all, which meant the entire expedition hadn't been a military operation so much as a family arrangement dressed in armor.
'So that's how it is,' she thought as something cold and sharp settled behind her ribs. This was the kind of thing her father dealt with constantly as of late, the quiet back-room trades where favors were currency and young men with connections got sent to safe commands to build their records. Except this command hadn't been safe at all, and now a noble family had blood in the water and Valen had to figure out how to spin it. She realized soon after he had planned to throw the blame onto her.
"Sir Brennan's force encountered resistance far beyond our projections," Valen said as evenly as possible. His voice was smooth and practiced in the way of a man who'd delivered bad news to powerful people before. "The settlement's defenses were more extensive than our intelligence indicated. Your brother conducted himself with appropriate aggression given the circumstances and withdrew when the tactical situation became untenable, which is commendable."
'Appropriate aggression.' Lyra thought to herself, having to stop herself from laughing aloud, but a small smile still passed her lips. Brennan had attacked a fortified position with fifty soldiers and three mages, throwing them against defenses they knew nothing about, and Valen was calling it appropriate because the alternative was admitting that the whole thing had been a political favor gone wrong.
Sir Micheal Brennan seemed to accept this framing, or at least he didn't argue with it, but there was something tight around his eyes that suggested the commander's suggestion of 'reassessment of engagement parameters' hadn't quite done its job. "And the Emperor?" he asked testingly. "How does His Imperial Majesty view the situation?"
"The Emperor views the situation as an opportunity to demonstrate Imperial resolve and might," Valen said, and there it was, the pivot she knew was coming, the moment where the disaster of their own making became a justification for escalation. Lyra felt her stomach drop; she knew what was coming next. "The unauthorized settlement in the Barrens represents a clear and present danger to Imperial territorial integrity. The attack on Sir Brennan's lawful expedition along with refusal to entertain or hear the Emperor's offer all but confirms that the settlers are hostile to Imperial authority. His Majesty will be authorizing a full military response towards their unprovoked attack."
Not a 'reassessment.' Not a 'diplomatic solution.' A full military response, which meant a full army, which meant hundreds of soldiers and siege engineers alongside proper battle mages, the full might they tended to use for Imperial conquest. The kind her father discussed at dinner like it was weather but with a note of weariness, describing it as a beast all its own, made up of those who pressed too hard or far in the war itself and those wanting to make a name for themselves. The combination forming into an army that, according to him, could have easily taken plenty of land back from the demons if used properly.
And now it was being directed at a small village out in the Barrens, pointed at a man named Chris who had built his village from nothing, who had no idea that the empire's mad dogs were about to descend upon him.
"We will be sending the heroes alongside them for this expedition," Valen continued, and Lyra's attention snapped back to the room because that was new information, something dangerous to know. It meant someone had convinced the Emperor that the summoned heroes were the right tools for what was essentially a colonial enforcement action. "Elara and her companions along with the rest of the summoned have been reassigned from border patrol to the Barrens campaign effective immediately. It will serve to be good experience for them."
He said that, but she knew the real motives behind it: a means to get rid of the more rebellious ones and those who the empire felt would be problematic. They couldn't do it publicly, but if it happened while fighting the 'fearsome' village it would be martyrdom, Lyra thought to herself, doing what she could to keep her face neutral and her hands at her side, refusing to let any of it show. Showing anything in a room full of men like Valen and Sir Micheal Brennan was how you lost leverage you didn't even know you had; it would snowball till her family became little better than the commoners. It made him realize they already heard or felt that some of the heroes like Elara were quietly sympathetic to Chris's situation. They were being sent into a fight that none of them fully understood, choosing violence to get their way.
"And me? I very much doubt you summoned me to hear already made decisions, sir," Lyra asked respectfully but with clear notes of annoyance. If Valen was reshuffling personnel, she wanted to know where she was being placed so she could plan around it.
Valen looked at her for a moment with mild annoyance of his own. She easily saw something flicker behind his eyes, a perk of reading people, noting the calculation gleam they now held. "I had you summoned as you had direct contact with the settlers and their leader," he said. "Your reports were instrumental in the initial assessment but clearly left out a lot of clear details. But regardless of that, the Emperor feels your presence would lend... diplomatic weight to this expedition or at the very least cause them to lower their guard and give our troops an opening. You'll be accompanying the force as a special adviser to the commanding officer."
Special adviser. It was a title that sounded important but meant nothing, and Lyra knew exactly what Valen was doing with it. He was putting her where he could have her watched and where she couldn't cause trouble from the capital, while framing it as an honor so she couldn't refuse without looking like she was shirking Imperial duty. It was elegant in a cold-blooded sort of way, and her father would have been proud of the maneuver if it wasn't being used on his daughter.
"When do we march?" she asked, because the question wasn't whether she would go — she couldn't refuse without consequences that would fall on House Jarves — but rather so she knew how much time she had to figure out what she was actually going to do once she got there.
"Three weeks," Valen said. "The forces will assemble at the northern staging point. Sir Brennan's expedition will provide advance intelligence on the settlement's defensive capabilities while keeping watch and reporting whatever he sees."
Sir Brennan's expedition. She understood that Valen was deliberately erasing the connection between Sir Micheal Brennan and Sir Maxwell Brennan, the failed expedition leader, building a wall of separation between the noble family itself and the military disaster their no doubt cast-out child had caused. The fact that he was doing it so openly told her how much political weight Sir Micheal actually carried.
She left the office with her mind racing and her hands still cold, walking through the corridors of the Imperial administrative quarter without really seeing them because all she could think about was Chris standing outside his walls as an army of the Imperials' mad dogs made their way to put him in irons.
The heroes would be a problem or possibly an avenue they could use, because she knew some of them might not want to fight once they understood what they were actually being sent to do — or the ones like Elara, upon realizing what was really happening. She had seen enough of Elara's quiet doubts and the Ranger's sharp observations to know that the Empire was sending people who would no doubt turn on them, and this was the perfect way to remove them: send a message to the survivors and prop the fallen as acceptable losses.
She needed to find Elara before the march orders reached them. She needed to talk to her alone, somewhere without listening ears, and she needed to do it in the next three weeks before the army moved.