Alric continued recounting the first months of Khal-Drathir’s siege without hesitation, his voice carrying clear across the council chamber.

  The Seneschals listened in brittle silence, their demeanour chastened by the Emperor’s previous rebuke. His eyes remained fixed on Alric alone, posture serene, as though listening to his favoured son’s report.

  “That is how the first three months of the siege began, Your Majesty.” Alric reached the end of his sentence, and a careful voice rose to meet him.

  It was a timid sound, a perilous cough testing whether its presence would be met by blood as before.

  “If the Emperor permits,” Durell said, tone syruped by deferential civility, “the Council seeks clarification on an aspect of the siege which the Lord Commander has not yet touched upon.”

  The Emperor simply looked at him and inclined his head.

  “Speak,” Alric’s reply came flat.

  At his brusque answer, several Seneschals’ expressions flickered for a breath before returning to their courtly calm.

  Durell’s oily smile hardened, then smoothed again with practiced ease.

  “Then I shall begin,” he said, folding his hands at chest level. “As you have stated, the first three months of the siege proceeded with notable success due to your decisive command and force fo will. Yet many of these field decisions, as required by protocol, specifically Section XXIII of the War-Conduct and Spoil-Management Codex, oblige the Lord Commander to consult his assigned Seneschal to ensure due process in both war and record.”

  He let the words linger.

  “In your case, Lord Vaelgard, this obligation was not merely singular. You, as the only commander entrusted by the Empire with two legions, were assigned three Seneschals. An unprecedented privilege of oversight and counsel.”

  He leaned forward slightly.

  “And yet,” he continued, “from my understanding, and from the written entries of the Council’s own ledgers, only a portion of these procedures were followed in Khal-Drathir. Some, however, were not.”

  He bowed his head just enough to be formal, eyes glinting with avarice.

  “The Council therefore seeks to understand your reasoning, Lord Vaelgard.”

  Alric met his gaze with tempered silver.

  “My reasoning,” he said, “is founded on the same principle that governs every battlefield command: consultation where consultation is possible. You speak of privilege, Lord Seneschal Durell. Yet three Seneschals do not make consultation swifter. They make it slower.”

  A ripple ran through the crescent benches.

  “You were present in the pavilion, yes. But every question, report or approval required three agreements.”

  Durell’s smile stiffened once again.

  “And while your counsel is bound to the Codex, it is not so to the rhythm of war and its breaking of steel. Siege breaches do not wait for consensus. Fire does not pause for ink to dry. Men do not survive the time it takes three Seneschals to decide which clause applies.”

  Alric continued.

  “I followed Section XXIII as far as the field allowed. But its arguments do not require a Lord of War to delay action until procedure catches up to reality, not when the Great Sun of the Empire has entrusted him with two legions.”

  “I acted when the moment demanded it. Because the Empire entrusted me with that authority. And because hesitation would have meant needless loss of equipment, time and lives.”

  Only then did he look toward the Emperor.

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  “And I remain accountable to Your Majesty alone.”

  Silence eveloped the room once more, its stifling pressure resting upon the Seneschals’ backs.

  Then, a soft tap sounded.

  “Lord Commander,” Caellis intoned softly, “We do not deny your burdens, or the urgency of the field, but your argument assumes the Council demanded consultation during the heat of battle. To be precise, we did not. Neither does the Codex.”

  “Section XXIII,” he continued, “requires consultation before or after decisive actions have been taken to their expected end, not in their midst.”

  He lifted a parchment, tapping it.

  “We would not dream of halting a Lord of War mid-strike, but the Codex is explicit: When circumstances permit pause or preparation, the assigned Seneschal, or his direct delegate, must be informed of intent or outcome.”

  His eyes, more sinew than colour, narrowed.

  “In Khal-Drathir, Lord Vaelgard, there were many such occasions. Weeks of preparations between major assaults, in fact. Yet in those days, no further notice of intent was given, neither were any post-action reports. We could not even find a request for procedural addendums in our ledgers.”

  His voice carried the sharpness of quills.

  “In saying so, the Council does not condemn the speed of battle. It simply questions the silence so ever-present in the spaces between.”

  Alric leaned back just slightly in his chair.

  “When circumstances permit pause or preparation,” Alric began, “a commander must indeed consult his Seneschal. And in my case more so. as I had three.”

  “Yet your argument supposes that the spaces between existed to begin with. Speak, Lord Seneschal Caellis, and we will listen, did Khal-Drathir seem that kind of place in your eyes?”

  “In your ledgers you may well indeed see weeks of preparations. But as these may look as simple peacetime retreats in your parchemnts, to the troops manning the fields, they were anything but that.”

  He lifted his hand slightly, as if measuring weight.

  “Frostbite, repairs, sabotage, counterfire, nightly assaults, collapsing tunnels. And these are the least of it as you might remember from the daily alarms.”

  The chamber stilled.

  Caellis’ finger twitched against the table reflexively.

  “There were no ‘spaces between’, Lord Seneschal, none. We buried man every morning, quelled fires by night, rebuilt engines that snapped in the cold, rotated men from the perimeter so it might stand.“

  He leaned forward, presenting his shoulders.

  “You speak as though I denied you council out of disdain. I did not.”

  His gaze swept the crescent, falling on Caellis last.

  “I denied you council because there was no time in which men were not bleeding, breaking or starving under the weight of that battle.”

  He straightened against the chair’s backrest.

  “What you call silence, was war, Lord Seneschal Caellis.”

  Caellis forced his hand to still.

  He was about to answer, but a hand rose beside him.

  Vaudrel’s; unhurried, almost languid.

  Caellis yielded immediately with a faint lowering of his gaze.

  “Your Majesty,” he began, “if it pleases the throne, I would speak.”

  The Emperor turned to him and, after a moment, nodded.

  Vaudrel’s gaze found Alric’s.

  “Lord of War. None here dispute the brutality you endured in this Southern Campaign, nor the storm you so heroically weathered and broke. But where Lord Seneschal Caellis’ concern touched upon procedure, mine touches clarity.”

  He dontinued, hands folded upon the wooden table.

  “As previously stated, though we lack full knowledge of every event and consequence, most of the campaign is accounted for. Save for one matter, Lord Commander.”

  A pause. Alric didn’t look away; he knew where this would end.

  “A specific presence,” Vaudrel reusmed, “not found in any ledger or parchment. Kept apart, shielded from the eyes of protocol.

  “A woman.”

  A ripple of unrest shifted beneath the brocaded seats, murmurs rising only to die in their throats.

  “Reports reached this chamber, fragmented and irregular, yet corroborated by differing accounts, that a Drathiri woman was spared by your hand and kept within your tent.”

  Vaudrel’s tone held no accusation, only placid statetement of fact.

  “So we ask, Lord Commander. Are these reports truthful? Did you spare such a woman?”

  Alric’s gaze remained steadfast, unflinching.

  “Yes.”

  The chamber stilled at once, the word falling like dark steel on brittle glass.

  The crescent held its breath.

  Only the Emperor showed no visible reaction, hands still upon the armrests.

  As Vaudrel opened his mouth, Alric reached into his tunic, and withdrew the sealed parchment Veracles had given him.

  He held it up briefly, letting the seal catch the sun’s eye.

  “I have prepared a document that formally accounts for the matter, Your Majesty.” His voice held no hurry nor shift borne of anxiety.

  The Emperor gestured to one of the clerks standing near the perimeter.

  The man approached, head bowed, and took the parchment from Alric’s hand. He crossed the white floor with practiced silence, ascended the stone dais, and placed the document before the regent, then he withdrew.

  The Emperor looked upon it for a breath before breaking the seal with a soft crack of wax.

  His violet eyes moved across the text in silence, parsing its lines with the precision of a man who had read ten thousand reports and knew when one mattered.

  Alric remained seated, hands at his sides.

  The Seneschals waited, rigid in their seats.

  At last, after interminable moments of oppressive hush, the Emperor lifted his face.

  He did not speak to Alric. Instead, he turned to Vaudrel and extended the document.

  “Read it aloud.”

  Vaudrel bowed his head, hands stretching forth to take the parchment. His eyes searched the Emperor’s features for intent, but found only violet immutability.

  “As Your Majesty commands.”