He cleared his throat and unfurled a parchment. “It is with a heavy heart that I must inform the council that the battalion guarding the outpost at Deerpark Pass — Fox Battalion — was routed a fortnight ago. We received word of this defeat only yesterday. Casualty numbers remain unclear, but at the moment, it appears that approximately four hundred fifty Imperial soldiers are dead or presumed dead, with another twenty to thirty who sustained serious injuries.”
“Four hundred and seventy dead, missing, or injured?” asked an ambassador with a long face and even longer black mustache. He wore a cylindrical red hat decorated with golden bands, which marked him as a representative of the Central Steppes. “Do you mean to tell us that only seventy men from a battalion of five hundred and forty survived?”
“Yes, Ambassador Lorent. Your arithmetic is correct,” General Remington said. “The survivors are recovering at our winter camp. After that they will travel to the capital and enjoy a month’s leave before they return to the front.”
“A month’s leave. What a consolation,” muttered another ambassador.
“There is more bad news,” the General continued, ignoring the muttered comment. “Once the barbarians routed the battalion and took the outpost, they poured into the valley below. Several villages of House Druet have been razed. Three have been occupied. Within the occupied villages, all males above the age of ten were executed; all other villagers were presumably taken as slaves.”
Concerned whispers ruffled through the council room. Barbarian raids were one thing — they had been commonplace during this long war — but it was atypical for them to overwhelm an entire battalion and then occupy villages. Barbarians were wont to destroy villages; they weren’t wont to stay there.
General Remington raised his voice above the low talking. “Given recent events in the East, all of you can understand the absolute necessity of our upcoming spring offensive. I have here — ” he lifted the parchment in his hand “ — the exact conscript numbers we require from each House. Your new recruits — ”
“Hold,” said Ambassador Lorent. “We’ve been fighting the barbarians in the East for more than twelve years now. Many a sheep herder’s son from my own province has already died in a faraway land defending the Eastern Realm. And after all these years, what do we have to show for those deaths? We haven’t gained any new territory. The Empire certainly isn’t richer for it.” He shrugged and curled his lip, making his long mustache jut up his face. “So we have killed a few barbarians. Well done. But they breed like field mice. Each year there seem to be more of them, and each year there are fewer sheep herder’s sons. Now you ask me for more. What makes you so sure the people of the Empire want to continue providing you fodder for this unending war?”
Other ambassadors and lords nodded their ascent. Tasia sensed that the mood of the room might turn against the General at any moment. If it hadn’t already.
“Ambassador — ” started the General.
“I agree with the ambassador of the Steppes,” said a heavyset lord a few places down from Lorent. “The West is sympathetic to the plight of the East, but between the taxes and the conscripts we provide…” He unfolded his hands, held them up in a helpless gesture. “Like the ambassador said, it seems as if this war will never end. All it seems to do is swallow lives and gold.”
Tasia glanced at the faces of the other Western lords. Unrest amongst those houses was never good for the Empire. The West was the largest and most populous of the Four Realms, and the lords there had always resented being controlled from Port Lorsin — that was why the Western Rebellion had started in the first place, some twenty years past. Now, with the failure of their rebellion still a wound that had not completely healed, the Western lords were being forced to support a war that seemed to have very little to do with them. After all, they had an entire continent between them and the barbarians; why should they care what happened to the comparatively small and poor East?
“The benefit our fight brings, Lord Wendell,” the Emperor said, his voice rising above the mumbled conversations that had broken out in the council room, “is that it stops the barbarians from occupying the entire East and expanding their raids even further west.”
“With all due respect, Emperor,” said the fat lord, his jowls quivering as he spoke, “it sounds like a problem that the East should resolve. I don’t see why I should drain my own House’s coffers to solve their mess.”
A handful of other lords and ambassadors nodded.
It was a precarious moment. The room seemed to hold its breath, waiting for the Emperor to respond.
This was what she would have to face one day, Tasia realized. Her father had no good choices. He couldn’t abandon the East to its fate, but by providing the realm with the resources it required to push back the invaders yet again, he risked alienating powerful and influential lords in other realms. On top of it all, he knew that someone amongst these noble Houses had attempted to kill his daughter. Disagreement over the war had progressed far beyond civil debate.
Tasia surveyed the crowd, her eyes roaming from the fat Lord Wendell on one side of the room to the ambassadors beside him; to the two exotic-looking lords of Terinto; to Mylla’s father, Lord Galen of House Harthing; to the young and handsome Lord Simon of House Brundt on the far end of the room.
She’d bedded Lord Simon once, before he’d inherited his father’s House. He had been tender with her.
But now an unsettling thought occurred to her: What if he was the one who tried to have her killed? Simon was a Western lord, after all.
“We are one Empire,” the Emperor said. “You think what affects the East does not affect the West, but you are wrong. Tell me, Lord Wendell, the last time you garnished your roast with meravin mushrooms, where did those mushrooms come from? And you, Ambassador Lorent, how much coin did your sheep herders earn last year when they exported their wool East?”
No one responded.
“The Empire is a single body,” said the Emperor, looking from face to face. “And just as an infection in the foot will eventually poison the blood and sicken the entire body, so allowing an infection of barbarians in the East to remain will eventually sicken the entire Empire.”
Murmured conversation filled the room as lords and ambassadors agreed or disagreed amongst themselves.
An exhausted-looking lord with a messy mop of hair and a sparse, grey-blond beard spoke up. “Without the brave citizens of the East acting as a buffer for the rest of the Empire, soon you would be the ones begging the Emperor to come to your aid.” The lord was Albert of House Druet, Tasia realized, the Eastern lord whose villages had been sacked. His statement silenced his peers. “What none of you understand, because you are not there, is that the barbarians have been growing stronger these last three years. They’ve been harder to beat back. They’ve been killing more of our soldiers. The routing of Fox Battalion at Deerpark Pass… I’ve been expecting something like that to happen since last winter.”
The other council members seemed to weigh his words.
“Your Majesty,” said a new voice in a heavy accent. “We in Terinto appreciate your efforts in the East. Our lands are directly to the west, and although the barbarian horde would have to cross our desert first, if the East falls, we would be their next target.”