When all lords met once more upon the central tent of their camp, they did so as men at the ends of their wits.

They had though victory so close that it seemed divine punishment for it to be taken from their right when they were about to bite down at the sweet morsel.They looked upon one another, in each of their gaze, weariness and awareness both for a war that they all knew had been underestimated, both in length and effort.

They found out that even without the Fox, there had been trouble in Yarzat, namely one of their servant.

And now all they could do was grind their teeth and ready themselves for the next assault.

"How long?"

The question came from Lord Domiek of Mandigan. His long, skeletal fingers clawed incessantly at the clean-shaven skin of his gaunt almost starved face, leaving angry red tracks upon a white field of pale skin.

He had arrived at the siege boasting five hundred foot and twenty horse, the ’’Peace Offering" from the Prince of Shaaza, who perhaps had realised that fraying all ties with half the south wasn’t so wise as he thought.

So he had sent the crumbs and claimed he shared the bread.

Now, less than three hundred of his infantry remained, and his cavalry had been winnowed to a mere five.

Even a deaf man could have heard the edges of dissatisfaction in his voice and even a blind man could see them. The man he brought after all were his , not that of his prince.

He was a man of few words, whispered to be a nuisance Prince Shaza had sent away just to be rid of his sour presence and solve the question of the demand for support the league had asked of him.

And looking at his hollow eyes, few in the tent faulted the Prince for the exile.

"The engineers assure us the new towers will be raised by week’s end," the Crownless Prince, Sorza, spoke quickly. He could feel the cohesion of his host fraying like a rotted rope.

"A week?" Lord Cregan of Apulio spat the words as if they were boiling water in his mouth. Among all, he held the sharpest grudge against the royal house. 𝗳𝚛𝚎𝚎𝘄𝕖𝕓𝕟𝕠𝚟𝚎𝕝.𝗰𝕠𝐦

It was the Oizenian shame at the Battle of Apulio that had left Cregan’s own lands a blackened waste, a tragedy that would have been total with the loss of his land, had the Fox not simply grown bored of burning his fields. And that admittely was no reason to take pride in and boast of.

"Little assurance that provides. We have cast half a dozen towers against those walls already. It is like throwing dry wood onto a furnace; the fire only grows hungrier, and we are left with nothing but cinders.

I recall being told this was a campaign of ease. A simple march to reclaim what is yours, Your Grace. Yet here we are, months into the dance, scratching our arses in the dirt. Though, in fairness, this is not the first ’easy’ campaign of yours to turn into a charnel house."

A low murmur of cursed agreement rippled through the tent, no one raising to the apparent hostility that was thrown to the prince. Of course that wasn’t the result of a coin’s throw, instead it was a slow erosion that began the moment the prince had led the country in defeat, which was then watered with the shame of his retreat in Apurvio and then of course regularly fed by the humiliation that was the treaty named the Peace of the Princes.

Which, ironically enough, was broken just by those same ones that had laid ink upon it.

Seeing all of this happen, Sorza felt the tension rising like a tide toward his throat. If the siege failed, he would be a prince of nothing, a man adrift in a world that did not forgive losers. There was nothing that could find him safety from the repercussions of its failure, namely the anger of a certain man.

He scrambled for the shield of rhetoric.

"My lords, I beg you, look at the truth of it!" Sorza cried, his hands raised in a calming gesture that did nothing to soothe the room. "The defenders are on their last legs!We have the power to replenish our losses while those inside can only count them. And where is their Fox? Where is the Peasant Prince? He hides in the shadows, months into the conflict, too fearful to show his face. He is a scavenger, picking at the scraps we leave him with! One more push, one more concentrated blow, and the Bastion will crumble like dry bread."

"Aye," Domiek spoke in a calm tone that somehow was heard throughout the whole tent, his fingers still picking at his reddened cheek and some trace of crimson started to appear.That , along with other similar scars on his cheek , proved it was an habit of his.

An unusual one to be sure, but not the worst a noble could have.

"And yet, despite your Grace’s remarkably kind words, we have naught to show for the blood lost but half a forest cut down to make pyres."

"The newcomer should be last to wag tongue, but he speaks the truth," rose the Lord of Balor Targenna, a man sworn to the Singing Cock of Ezvania. "We have suffered grievously, pouring the wealth of our houses into these trenches, and we have not moved an inch from where we sat at midsummer."

"My lord," Sorza tried again, his voice pitching higher.Eyes darting to where the other princes stood "By the time the towers are ready, the new recruits will have arrived from the south. Fresh blood for the breach."

"I was not speaking of the peasants!" Balor roared, slamming his gauntlet onto the table. "I care not for the rabble who do little more than rust the enemy’s blades with their common blood. I speak of Ser Mers. I speak of Sir Thomas and many others. Good men. True knights. We have lost the flower of our chivalry to those damn walls and that fucker the enemy likes to compare to a big stone.

No amount of mud-flecked peasants will bring a knight back from the worms. The horizon looks bleaker than a cow’s arse, your Grace, and no amount of silk can hide the stench."

A chorus of "Ayes" erupted. Of course, many of these same men had spent weeks mocking Mers’s for his earlier blunder. Yet the sight of his mangled remains at the base of the wall, and the realization that even his savage will had been broken by the "Mountain" on the wall, had softened their hearts with a sudden, hypocritical kindness.

And needless to say, that did not play in Sorza’s favour.

But his trouble were not over yet.

"And may I ask your Grace," a voice cut through the bickering, ready to deliver a gift of yet more bickering. "from which hollow earth you intend to pluck these fresh peasants?"

The speaker was Lord Mastro of Nonium. He had sat in the corner like a gargoyle of salt, silent for hours, until it deemed it worthy to let out his grievances.

"Lord Mastro?" Sorza said, a cold bead of sweat tracing his spine. Why was everything going so wrong? "I recall you had agreed to provide the levies in exchange for—"

"Your Grace," Mastro interrupted, "I have gladly sheltered the weight of your recruitment until now. I have bled my fields white to feed your ambitions. But that was before half my villages were scoured down to nothing but weeping women and babes in the dirt. You have reached into my lands and taken every man capable of holding a stick, and yet, what do I have to show for the vacancy in my barns?"

He opened his hands letting everyone see the sweet nothing in there.

"As soon as the Bastion falls, my lord," Sorza stammered, his hands fluttering like trapped birds, "you will be rewarded with the riches of the interior! Ample lands, the Prince’s own favor, and privileges that—"

"Aye," Mastro snarled, "those were the gilded promises of a month and a half ago. And yet, it seems to me the wall still stands as tall as the day we arrived, while we do nothing but batter the lives of my people against it. You promise me the harvest of a garden you have not yet entered, while my own fields going to rot for lack of hands.I am going to have a famine back home, once this is over."

Having no immediate solution to offer, Sorza’s eyes darted around the table in a frantic plea for aid. He looked to the Prince of Ezvania, but the man merely lounged in his high-backed chair, picking at a hangnail with a dandy’s indifference.

The Ezvanian had no love for this mud-caked campaign; he had brought his banners for his brother’s in law request, not for the any love of the gutter, and he was not about to spend his political capital to save a man he did not care for.

He then turned his gaze toward the son of the Prince of Kakunia, but the young man remained a statue of marble. He too would offer no lifeline both because he held none and wished not to put himself on such a ugly soup.

Just as the silence began to scream, the Prince of Habadia came to the aid, the gold rings on his fingers catching the flicker of light coming from the entrance of the tent.

Apart from Sorza he was the one with most in play on this campaign, so of course he would not let it come down to nothing.

And he was a man who understood that when blood failed to move a mountain, silver usually did the trick.

"Peace, Lord Mastro," the Habadian purred in a calming and soothing tone. "Your grievance is just, and your loyalty has been... profound. We are all indebted to the House of Nonium. To ensure your house does not suffer for its generosity, I shall personally see to it that every man you have offered, and every man you have lost is paid for in good, ringing silver from the Habadian vaults. A soldier’s tithe, you could say..."

The tension in the tent didn’t vanish, but it shifted well enough. Mastro’s jaw tightened, his eyes flickering toward the Habadian Prince. Silver was not a subject, and it was not a harvest, but it was a language he understood all the same.

"Your Highness is as generous as the stories say," Mastro muttered, inclining his head with a stiff, begrudging respect. "I thank you for recognizing the cost of my kindness."

At that small success the prince let out a slow, weary sigh that seemed to rattle in his chest. As the main architect of this League , he understood how the war was going better than most, and it was turning ugly.Uglier than he had ever expected.

Silver could quiet a disgruntled lord, but it could not conjure a victory out of thin air. They were tethered to this fortress like dogs to a post, and the leash was beginning to choke them. Without a quick, decisive triumph to lift the black shroud of the camp’s mood, the lords would soon be packing their silk tents and heading home.

And unfortunately for the war, he did not have enough silver to conjure bravery and filial duty , for all of them.

He straightened his doublet, preparing to offer a final, commanding word to bind the bickering wolves together for the immediate days. But before the first syllable could leave his lips, a sharp, metallic ruckus erupted from the rear of the pavilion.

Shouts of alarm and the heavy scuffle of boots against the dirt weaved through the heavy silence of the lords, like the bell announcing the start of mass. Nibadur’s brow furrowed.

He did not wait for an explanation; he stepped through the heavy velvet flaps of the central tent as if he were in an hurry to leave, the bright midday sun stinging his eyes.

He doubted assassins would move in the open day.

"What is the meaning of this disorder?" he demanded.

Outside, it seemed the boredom had got to someone’s head. Two of the Prince’s own house guards were in the process of manhandling a figure to the dirt. The stranger, meanwhile was struggling with a frantic, animalistic desperation as the guards forced his face into the dirt.

"Your Highness!" one of the guards called out, pinning the man’s arm back until the bone groaned. "This wretch was found attempting to slip past the picket lines. He carries no markings and when refused entrance suddenly tried to make it past with force."

The man on the ground let out a muffled grunt, his eyes darting toward Nibadur with a look that wasn’t fear, but instead holding the gaze of a man who had seen the end of the world and was in a hurry to tell the tale.

Useless to say, it was yet another unpleasing gift.