The diplomatic flag appeared on the western road on the fourteenth day.

The Verakh network reported it at noon: a carriage bearing the kingdom’s diplomatic standard, escorted by fifty Royal Guard cavalry, moving south at the pace that formal diplomatic travel required. Behind the carriage, a second vehicle, unmarked, carrying documentation whose volume suggested a mandate rather than a message.

Sakh’arran brought the report to Khao’khen at the market hall.

"She is coming back," Sakh’arran said.

Khao’khen looked at the report. The diplomatic flag. The Royal Guard escort. The documentation vehicle. The same configuration that Westyn’s first mission had used, the configuration that said the council had made a decision and the decision was being delivered by the person whose professional function was to translate decisions into agreements.

"The dispatch reached the council eight days ago," Sakh’arran said. "The council convened. The council voted. Westyn was dispatched within four days of the vote. The timeline is consistent with a decisive vote rather than a contested one."

"The vote’s direction?"

"The flag is the direction. The council does not send diplomatic representatives to deliver rejections. Rejections are delivered by military couriers. The flag means negotiation. Negotiation means the council has decided that the alternative to negotiation is the alternative that Aldrath’s dispatch described and that thirteen thousand casualties have demonstrated."

Khao’khen stood at the window. The eastern plain stretched before him, the terrain where the campaign’s battles had been fought, the ground that held the dead of both armies and the marks of the engagements that had put them there. The ground did not care about diplomatic flags or council votes. The ground held what was placed on it and waited for whatever was placed next.

"Prepare the table," he said. "Same room. Same maps. Same everything."

"Same terms?"

"The same terms we offered before the council rejected them. The same preamble. The same frontier line. The same mutual recognition clause. Nothing has changed about what we require. Everything has changed about what the council is willing to provide. The terms are the same because the terms were always correct. The council’s willingness to accept them is the thing that has changed, and the thing that changed it is the thirteen thousand soldiers who are not going home."

* * * * *

Calla Westyn arrived at Millbridge on the seventeenth day, the carriage entering the market square in the afternoon light, the diplomatic flag above the carriage’s roof catching the same wind that caught the Snarling Wolf banner above the market hall.

She stepped down and looked at the banner. The same look she had given it on every arrival. The wolf was in the same position. The wolf was always in the same position.

But the valley around the banner was different. The eastern plain bore the scars of the engagements that had been fought since Westyn’s departure. The positions were different. The Horde’s formations were positioned further east than they had been, the ground gained in the new phase’s battles visible in the forward positioning of the defensive lines and the Roarer emplacements and the siege equipment’s firing positions. 𝕗𝚛𝚎𝚎𝐰𝗲𝗯𝗻𝚘𝚟𝚎𝗹.𝕔𝐨𝕞

The wolf had not moved. But everything around the wolf had been transformed by the thing the wolf had been doing since the council rejected the peace.

"Senior Diplomatic Arbiter," Khao’khen said, when she entered the market hall.

"Commander," Westyn said.

She sat. She opened her document case. The mandate was thicker than the previous mandate’s documentation. The council’s legal office had been working.

"The council has authorized the full diplomatic mandate," she said. "The vote was twenty-one to four. The expanded mandate includes every element of the previous agreement plus additional provisions that the council’s review of the campaign’s events has produced."

She paused.

"The word is in the preamble."

The room was quiet.

"Invasion," Westyn said. "The council has authorized the use of the word invasion in the treaty’s preamble, in reference to the campaign conducted in the southern territories. The legal counsel’s objections were overruled by the council’s vote. The preamble reads: ’The Threian kingdom acknowledges that the invasion of the southern territories, conducted in the years preceding this agreement, caused orcish civilian casualties, was an act of aggression that the current council condemns, and will not be sanctioned by any future council composition.’"

Sakh’arran translated. His voice was steady. His hands were not.

Khao’khen heard the word. The word that the campaign had been fought to obtain. The word that the council had rejected and that thirteen thousand dead soldiers and three months of additional fighting had been required to produce.

Invasion.

One word. Six letters in the Threian script. The weight of everything the campaign had been.

He looked at the Snarling Wolf banner in the corner of the hall. The wolf’s snarl. The wolf’s direction. The wolf that had been raised above a city built by survivors of the thing that the word described, the wolf that had traveled from that city to this valley and had fought the forces of the kingdom that had done the thing the word described and had not been beaten and had not been broken and had stood in this position, in this hall, snarling at whatever stood in front of it, until the thing in front of it said the word.

He thought about the dead. Not the campaign’s dead. The dead before the campaign. The dead in the settlements that had been burned. The families. The children. The people whose destruction had been the reason Yohan seeks retribution and whose memory had been the fuel that carried the Snarling Wolf from the city’s walls to this table in this hall in this valley where a diplomat from the kingdom that had destroyed them was reading the word that acknowledged their destruction.

Invasion. The word existed in the document now. The word that the first peace offer had asked for and been denied. The word that thirteen thousand additional dead soldiers and three months of additional fighting had been required to place in the document where the word belonged. The cost of the word was measured in the bodies on the eastern plain and the ford and the corridor that the word had been earned across, and the cost was the cost, and the word was the word, and the word was there.

"Proceed," Khao’khen said.

Westyn opened the mandate’s full text. The negotiation began.

The wolf waited. The word was spoken. The distance between the word and the agreement’s completion was the distance of a negotiation, and the negotiation was the work that the word made possible.

The wolf waited. It had been waiting since the city that raised it decided to exist. It could wait for this.