Chapter - 15 Pieces Of A Bigger Machine

“What does that mean,” Aldric asked, “for us?”

Lady Borghanai hesitated, and Flare found herself watching the hesitation more closely than she'd watched anything in days. She'd never seen this woman anything less than perfectly composed—not even at the funeral of her own son—but under the combined weight of both Solmere father and daughter's attention now, something in her posture drew tighter, just slightly, just enough for Flare to notice.

“I think,” Lady Borghanai said, choosing each word with care, “it may be connected to the Ashbound Accord. Talvane sits close to both Kaldreth and Serevine, given how neutral the island's always claimed to be. If Sister Aveline felt the need to seek protection from Kaldreth's aristocracy specifically, rather than simply reporting the treaty as news, then something is already moving that we haven't been told about.”

Miriess from her chair let out a short but sharp laugh. “Moving against us? With what, exactly? Two little states barely holding their own borders together?”

“They know that too,” Lady Borghanai said, not looking at her. “Luthain holds the greatest military strength on this continent—no in the whole human realm, and isn't openly hostile to any single nation. But strength doesn't lower hatred, General. It never has. If it did, my people would never have lost the Great War.” She let that sit a moment before continuing, steady despite the room's tension. “Hercules is gone. Whatever restraint his presence bought us, the simple fact of an unbeaten Champion still walking, that's gone with him. I imagine both courts think of Luthain as something closer to their equal now, for the first time in generations."

“Equal!” Miriess's voice climbed, incredulous. “You'd know all about equals, wouldn't you. You only ever thought of your own son as the Champion. Do you truly believe my daughter is anything less than he was?”

“That isn't what I meant.”

“Miriess.” Aldric's voice, low, warning.

Her mother winced at the tone, more from habit than genuine chastisement, and turned toward the servant hovering near the door with brittle, wounded dignity. “Take me from this. I won't sit here and be spoken to like this in my own house.”

Nobody stopped her. The servant guided her out with practiced care, and the room settled into a different kind of quiet once the door closed behind them. Heavier, more honest, the kind of quiet that only seemed to exist in this house once Miriess had left it.

Aldric exhaled and turned to Flare. “Your thoughts.”

She hadn't expected to be asked directly. She took a moment before answering, turning the problem over.

“We guard the borders,” she said finally. “Properly. Not just patrols but real, visible strength. That neither of them mistakes hesitation for weakness. There's an old saying.” She glanced at Lady Borghanai, unsure if it would translate across a life lived among elves, and decided to say it anyway. “Even a frog killed a dragon, once, in the stories. Nobody remembers when. They just remember it happened. Strength doesn't guarantee safety. Being underestimated is its own kind of weapon, and I don't want to hand that weapon to anyone who might already be planning to use it.”

Aldric studied her for a long moment, something unreadable moving behind his eyes, and nodded once. “Then we start there.”

The three of them talked well into the evening, moving eventually to his study once the receiving hall's tension had fully drained away, mapping out a plan neither the war council nor Miriess would hear about until it was already underway.

***

Lady Borghanai stayed at the manor for the better part of a month after that, an arrangement that raised eyebrows throughout the household despite Aldric's insistence that her presence was purely strategic. Between the three of them, they worked out a quiet channel. Letters sent through merchant contacts and scholarly correspondence still active in Talvane and Serevine, hoping to gather whatever information might be moving beneath the treaty's surface before it moved against Luthain.

Flare, for her part, had little room left in her days to dwell on any of it. The dead rallies hadn't stopped since the mountain range, if anything they'd grown more frequent. Scattered reports arriving from border villages and forest edges across half the country, always the same pattern: a horde of mindless corpses, sometimes small, sometimes enormous, and never, in a single instance, any sign of the woman herself among them.

She and the rangers rode out to meet nearly every one of them.

One mission, weeks into that stretch, stayed with Flare longer than most.

A farming village near the southern border that was famous for its silk production, sent word of a rally moving through its outlying fields at dusk, and by the time Flare's party arrived, half the harvest had already been trampled into ruin. Corra took command of the approach with her usual blunt efficiency, splitting the group to flank the horde from both sides while Ilse worked a quick ward around the nearest farmhouse to keep its family safely inside.

It should have gone the way it always went. But it nearly didn't.

A second, smaller wave broke from the horizon behind them halfway through the engagement, catching Tomas and Duna from an angle nobody had accounted for, and for a handful of frantic seconds the fight came dangerously close to becoming two separate losing battles instead of one manageable one. It was the twins, Josen and Peyt, who saved it. Wordless as always, falling back to back in the gap between the two fronts and holding a line neither of them could have held alone, buying just enough time for Flare to tear through the original horde and double back before the second wave overwhelmed anyone.

Afterward, sitting in the wreckage of a half-trampled field, Corra had laughed, “We nearly got freaked by them mincemeats. Tomas, that's going in your record as the most embarrassing near-death of your career.”

“At least I didn't nearly get skewered by my own shield-brother's blind side,” Tomas shot back, nodding at Josen, who only grunted, entirely unbothered.

The farming family they'd saved sent word ahead of them to the capital. When Flare and others returned, a name had already attached itself to them in the taverns and market squares. The Cinder Watch, someone had apparently coined it, for the ash-grey banners Shgrove's company carried and the burned, blighted ground they so often left behind wherever the dead rallies fell. It wasn't a name any of them had chosen but it stuck, repeated with a warmth that Flare hadn't heard attached to her own name in long time.

Her image began slowly to shift with it. How the city spoke of her, a grudging thread of gratitude working its way in alongside the fear.

It wasn't enough to fix what the land itself was losing.

***

By the time three full months had passed, nearly a fifth of Luthain's territory had gone the way of the Frostveil Forest. Patches of dead, lifeless ground spreading wherever the rallies had passed through in force, miasma soaking into soil and root system alike until nothing living could take hold there again. Flare had tried, more than once, to reach for it the way she'd reached for the tornado's core, the way she'd pulled the black curtain from Fen's blood—and found, every time, that the skill simply didn't do. A person's blood carried a current she could follow. A storm's stolen bodies gave her something to seize hold of. The land itself offered nothing of the sort. Whatever miasma settled into open ground stayed there, patient and permanent, indifferent to anything done to it.

The consequences arrived faster soon. Crop yields collapsed across entire counties where the dead ground bordered still-living farmland. The blight creeping outward by degrees too slow to panic over and too steady to ignore. Rabi crops that meant to last through winter thinned month by month. Smaller villages, the ones without the stores or connections to weather a bad season, began reporting outright famine. Children too weak to work the little land that still produced. Elders died of hunger in high numbers.

Aid came eventually, from the ministry and from House Solmere both. Grain shipments, coin, healers sent to villages. It wasn't enough. It was never quite enough, no matter how much Aldric personally authorized or how many of the Solmere family's own stores Flare watched emptied into wagons bound for the countryside. Too much ground had already died. Too many people had already gone hungry before help ever reached them.

The protests started outside the palace gates. Smaller than Flare expected at first, a scattering of grieving families and hollow-cheeked farmers holding signs crudely lettered with the names of villages the capital had never previously bothered to learn. They grew larger with each passing week, and Aldric, rather than sending guards to disperse them, began going out to meet them himself, standing in the cold at the palace gates, speaking with families who had lost children, listening to accusations he had no good answer for, absorbing anger that Flare suspected—watching him from a window above, he privately agreed was justified.

She had never respected her father more, and never felt more useless standing beside him.

***

It was in the middle of that same difficult month that the correspondence from abroad stopped.

No further letters arrived from the scholars or merchants Aldric and Lady Borghanai had quietly reached out to in Talvane and Serevine as if every contact they'd carefully cultivated over weeks had gone silent all at once. Aldric, buried under the weight of the protests and the famine relief efforts both, had little time left to chase down why.

It was Lady Borghanai who came to Flare instead, one evening near the end of that month. A single folded letter in hand, a reply from Sister Aveline after weeks of nothing.

“Your father's occupied,” she said, by way of explanation, offering it to Flare directly. “I thought you should see this. Normally I should show it to Lady Miriess but I don’t think she would want to see me, right.”

Flare unfolded it. It was short. Shorter than anything she'd expected.

Dear friend. Leave Luthain.

That was all.

Flare read it twice, then a third time, as if repetition might reveal something the words.

“That's it?” she asked. “Nothing else?”

“Unfortunately.” Lady Borghanai's voice had lost some of its usual composure. “Whatever made her to write that, and only that after weeks of silence. I don't like what it suggests.”

Flare stared down at the four words a while longer, a cold, creeping unease settling into her chest.

Something massive was moving somewhere beyond the borders of Luthain—the Ashbound Accord, the silence from abroad, this single desperate warning—felt like pieces of a bigger machine. In which she was just a cog.

She was missing something. Something big. She could feel the outline of it pressing against her entire being, and she had no idea what it actually was.