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"You all understand the first purpose of our raids," Ashlynn continued a moment later as she shook off the memories that tried to drag her back into the shallow grave Owain’s knights had buried her in.

"We need supplies, and if we can’t grow or raise enough on our own, we will raid them from our enemies.

Not once or twice, but continuously until we manage to provoke a response from the Lothians themselves. "

"What if the Lothans don’t respond?" Ignatious asked, breaking his silence for the first time in the meeting. "The Dunns are proud men. They may attempt to resolve things themselves instead of looking weak in front of the Marquis."

It had been that way eighty years ago when Ignatious was still part of the Inquisition, fighting alongside the local lords.

At the time, not only the Dunns but all of the minor lords vied for advantages, whether it was in the assaults they led or the castles they defended, there was constant competition to exit the war better and stronger than their rivals while setting those same rivals up to suffer even greater losses.

For Baron Dunn and Baron Hanrahan to face assaults on their farms and livestock would be an embarrassment that they should work to conceal until they had resolved the problem.

Even if it caused a shortfall in their winter tithe to the Marquis, showing up with a sack full of trophies taken from ’demons’ and an excuse of excessive raids was far better than appearing before your liege lord with your hat in hand, hoping he would help to solve the problem plaguing your lands.

"If we only attacked Baron Dunn, that might be true," Ashlynn acknowledged. "But I’ve studied Baron Hanrahan well. He only set foot on the field of battle once during the War of Inches, and his Barony has been struggling ever since the funds from that war dried up a few years ago. If we put pressure on him, he’ll demand that Bors Lothian dispatch knights and soldiers to protect his caravans. "

"Ah, I see," Ignatious said as he caught on to Ashlynn’s plan. "If the Lothians send men to reinforce the Hanrahans, then Baron Dunn will demand the same treatment for his own barony. He won’t be willing to expend the lives of his own men when he can force the Lothians to expend theirs."

"Bors Lothian will never risk the lives of his own men over something as petty as this," Nyrielle interjected.

"Especially not since the visit I paid him at the end of his pathetic excuse for a war," she said with a dark smile. One of the secrets to the Vale’s ability to weather wars that seemed to flare up each generation lay in her bestowal of the Kiss of the Void on the rulers of Lothian March.

She had learned the hard way that killing a Lothian Lord only resulted in a new heir ascending to the throne, sometimes with more ambitions than his predecessor.

Even if she left behind nothing but children, an uncle or elder cousin would declare himself the regent, and a war of revenge would begin just a few years after the last lord died.

If, however, she stalked the current Marquis carefully during the war, waiting for a moment when he had reaped a measure of success that would allow him to back down after a declaration of some form of victory, she could drain away what ambition and thirst for conquest remained within him before delivering a series of defeats that made continuing the war look pointless.

Once she’d reduced the current lord’s ambitions to a shadow of what they had once been, he would safely retire from the field, giving the Vale of Mists and the neighboring Eldritch nations decades of respite while the Marquis turned his attention inward to matters within his own domain.

Only when the old lord relinquished his throne would a new lord start the cycle anew, seeking a way to achieve what his predecessor never had.

"Bors has lost what drive he had for personal glory long ago," Nyrielle explained, smiling slightly as she remembered the look of terror on the human lord’s face when she appeared in his command tent one night during the War of Inches.

To this day she didn’t know whether he was more terrified of her or of the fact that the High Priest who had been at his side for the duration of the war had proven to be utterly incapable of stopping her from reaching the Lothian Lord, but the sight of the priest’s broken body at her feet certainly hadn’t done much for Bors courage when he faced her.

"For years, all Bors has cared about is how he can pass on the March to his son," Nyrielle said definitively. "It’s become his last lingering obsession since the death of his wife. So Bors won’t risk the men that he wants to pass on to Owain," Nyrielle concluded.

"He’ll demand that the Eastern Barons send some of their men to reinforce the border, borrowing the power of his vassals without risking his own men. "

"What about Lord Owain?" Ollie asked as he thought back on the ruins of the Heartwood Clan’s village and the stories he’d heard from Milo about the summer campaign against the Dunns.

"When Lady Ashlynn embarrassed Lord Owain at the Summer Villa in the spring, wasn’t it Marquis Bors who sent Owain to assault the outlying villages in order to ’redeem’ himself?

What if he sends Owain or Loman to deal with the raids? "

"Then we count ourselves lucky that he delivers himself into my hands early," Ashlynn said with more venom in her voice than she’d meant to. Taking a deep, shuddering breath, she reigned in the white hot surge of anger that flooded her heart and tried to focus on the things that were most likely.

"In the end, it won’t matter whether Owain comes or the Eastern barons," Ashlynn insisted. "The goal is to force them to spread their forces across the frontier, sending men in every direction without knowing where we may strike next."

"You’re fattening them up for me, aren’t you, Your Dominion?" Savis said as he caught on to Ashlynn’s plan. "You want to use little brother, to use Commander Tausau’s raids to force them to commit enough men and soldiers that it’s worth letting my men off their leashes to crush them."

"We need to hand the Lothians a crushing defeat," Thane said, tacitly agreeing with Savis. "Two or three would be even better. We need to fracture the lords of the March in order to give Lady Ashlynn an opening. At the same time, we need to thin the ranks of the Lothian’s knights. In wars past, we’ve lost between five and ten Eldritch warriors just to pull down one heavily armored knight.

The fewer of them who can take the field later on, the better," the Lord General said.

"What sort of opening are you trying to produce?" Virve asked, cracking her knuckles in anticipation. "Is the goal to draw down the defenses of Lothian City enough that we can strike directly at their heart?"

"None of this ends until we topple the Lothians from their throne," Ashlynn said. "We do that one of two ways. Either we lure them out of the turtle shell of Lothian City and the defensive sorcery of the Church..."

"Or we bleed them enough to crack their defenses wide open," Thane added, finishing Ashlynn’s sentence smoothly as he turned to a dark figure who had been silent throughout the meeting.

"Aspakos, the fame of your Sorcerers of Sundered Earth and their vast knowledge of the arcane has reached us even in this faraway corner of Eldritch lands. I can think of no one better to take command of the fourth pillar of the Vale’s forces. "

"You want me to lead the sorcerers I’ve brought with me against these Lothians and their little vassal lords?

" Aspakos asked in a voice that was thick with disdain.

"Lady Nyrielle should already have informed you of my answer.

This war is no business of ours. We did not come here to take sides in your blood feud.

It is better if we stay to the side while you wage this war," the broken-beaked sorcerer said.

All around the table, several people stared at the powerful sorcerer in open-mouthed shock, but little seemed to ruffle Aspakos’s feathers.

The multicolored glyphs adorning his dark robes shifted slightly in hue, each of them turning darker as the sorcerer’s presence seemed to grow thin, as if he was no longer worth paying attention to now that he’d said his peace.

One person, however, saw through his sorcery clearly and didn’t hesitate to voice her disapproval.

"You said that we share an enemy among the humans," Nyrille said as her midnight eyes focused on the mysterious sorcerer. "You said that you wouldn’t participate in a battle between our armies, but if their sorcerers and mystic warriors take the field, if we face Inquisitors and Templars in the battles to come, do you truly intend to stand on the sidelines and do nothing, just because this isn’t the ’war you came to fight? ’"

Nyrielle’s question hung heavily in the air, and a dark wind seemed to blow from behind her, stripping away the magic that allowed Aspakos to remain unobserved and unobtrusive for much of the meeting.

He might have held himself apart successfully so far, but in Nyrielle’s mind, the ability to stand aside was withering like grapes left too long on the vine.

If Aspakos couldn’t even be counted on to face the enemy they shared, then she might have to reconsider the terms of their... arrangement.