Chương 262: 51. Three Days of Preparation 1

Three days, in ordinary life, sounds like a reasonably generous number. Long enough to sleep in. Long enough to drink your way through two terrible evenings. Long enough to push everything that was supposed to happen today all the way to the night after tomorrow, and then tell yourself, in perfect good conscience, there's still time. But drop that number into a war, and it becomes something else entirely. It becomes: blink, and half a day is gone.

Look up, and another column of troops, another wagonload of grain, another crate of arrows, another letter, another order has already roared past while you weren't breathing. And then you understand, with complete honesty, that three days isn't preparation time. It's a countdown to execution. That was how my three days began. Day One After Hans's column cleared the city gates, the wind over Latapan seemed to go drier. Maybe it was just my imagination.

Maybe it was simply because I knew that from that moment forward, Cliffhold, Three Rivers Fortress, Olivia, House Eisenberg, the Dragon Kingdom's six hundred Dragon Cavalry, the four thousand from the Logistics Corps, and one fire dragon princess with a temper large enough that even her own father needed half a second to compose himself before reacting — all of it had been lashed together onto the same line.

Once you understand that you aren't just rushing toward something, but actively tying two nearly-burning places together with a single rope, the pressure takes on a very particular quality. Your legs don't give out immediately. You simply start to feel, with every meal, like you're borrowing time from a creditor who charges interest in blood. The rest of Day One, I spent almost entirely with paper. Yes. Paper. The most contemptuous thing in the world is generally not a sword, and not a dragon.

It's a sheet of paper — thin enough to crumple and pocket, obedient as rubbish in peacetime, and in wartime, capable of driving a perfectly sane person to the edge of a breakdown. Which Dragon Cavalry units move first. Which units hold. Which dragons are showing instability and can't sustain extended high-altitude flight. Which wagons of bowstrings need to be separated from which batches of arrow shafts.

Which grain shipments take the main road, and which need to detour the old forest route to avoid blocking the Dragon Cavalry's takeoff grounds. Tent counts, fire oil quantities, medicinal herbs, spare dragon saddle parts, rope, iron nails, bridge planking, reserve horses, replacement draft animals... By the time I'd stared at those dense columns of characters long enough, I understood something I hadn't before. The true substance of war isn't the charge. It isn't the battle cry.

It isn't the hero standing on a hillside, armor catching the wind, in a pose that looks magnificent painted in oil and hung somewhere to mislead future generations. The true substance of war is: Someone has to know whether there's enough salt. An ugly truth. But an honest one. By the third scroll, I had begun to genuinely question the value of my own existence. Right in the middle of that questioning, a set of footsteps approached outside — familiar enough to make my scalp prickle. Not fast. Not slow.

Measured, with the particular quality of a warning shot fired just before someone kicks down a door. I looked up. Of course it was Ignicia. She didn't bother knocking — pushed it open and walked straight in, the tail of her cloak still carrying the cold from the training grounds. She'd changed into a lighter field uniform today, no full armor, just shoulder and waist guards, the whole ensemble trading the usual princess grandeur for something more practical — specifically, the energy of I'm here to put you to work.

She swept the desk with one glance.

"You're not dead yet." I set down my pen.

"Not yet. But if you send me a third case of documents, I make no guarantees." She made a short, dismissive sound, picked up the top sheet, and looked at it.

"This is barely anything."

"Your Highness, that sentence is roughly equivalent to standing on a pile of bodies holding a battle-axe and remarking that the casualties weren't really that bad." She looked up at me. Those crimson eyes were very beautiful and almost entirely devoid of empathy.

"So?"

"So I would appreciate it if, in future, your attempts at comfort at least showed some evidence you'd tried." She didn't engage with that. She dropped the paper back on the desk, and without any warning, reached out and hooked two fingers under my chin, tilting my face up.

"... What are you doing?"

"Checking whether you're about to pass out." She was close. Close enough that I caught the faint scent of fire and iron that clung to her — not perfume, not sweetness, nothing like the kind of fragrance designed to make a person's thoughts wander. More like a contained disaster, standing in front of me with complete unreasonableness, using two fingers to inspect my face for signs of continued viability.

If anyone outside happened to see this, they would probably develop several imaginative conclusions that would not be kind to my reputation. She, obviously, did not care in the slightest. She studied me for two seconds, then frowned.

"You didn't sleep last night."

"I did."

"That's called losing consciousness. It's not the same thing."... She's infuriatingly accurate sometimes. If you spot this story on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation. Before I could argue, she'd already let go, her tone shifting into something that brooked no discussion.

"Half an hour. You're coming with me to the logistics yard."

"I thought my job was reading documents."

"Your job is knowing what you're actually marching toward your death with in three days."

"That doesn't sound like an improvement."

"It isn't one." She turned and walked out, tossing back over her shoulder without looking: "And wash your face. You look like the ancestors just finished spitting you out." Thank you. That image is considerably more vivid than you look tired. That afternoon, she dragged me out to inspect the Logistics Corps. To be precise: I was made to confront a fact. An expedition is not a group of impressive people charging forward.

An expedition is someone has to get these four thousand people — who look nothing like the protagonists of any story, but who will determine whether the protagonists starve to death — to the right place. The columns stretched out one after another.

Grain sacks, iron crates, tent frames, medicine chests, dragon gear, arrow materials, repair tools, field kitchens, wagon drivers, blacksmiths, camp cooks, laundry staff, general laborers, field medics — from a distance it looked less like a military formation and more like a city that had decided to stand up and slowly start walking. I stood on the high slope and watched for a while, then said, with complete sincerity: "... I'm starting to understand why you didn't want those two thousand combat troops."

Ignicia stood beside me, the wind pulling her red hair back.

"Only now?"

"Now I can see it more clearly." I watched the massive column being sorted and streamed below, managing a tired smile.

"Combat soldiers can fight. But without all of this, they'd probably spend three days marching and then spend the rest of the time standing in line with spears, waiting for someone to bring them food." She glanced at me sideways.

"You're not entirely without merit."

"Thank you. That assessment is so generous I'm tempted to cry." She ignored me, raising one hand to point at a distant line of wagons being inventoried — bridge timber.

"That batch of beams and rigging needs to reach Three Rivers Fortress first. If the crossing there gets cut in advance, we reroute everything behind us." She said it without inflection. Flat. Almost no rise or fall. And in that moment, I understood something. She wasn't learning to be a commander. She was being one, on instinct. Fire was her nature.

But knowing how to direct that fire toward the right place — rather than burning her own people first — that, she understood far better than I'd given her credit for.... Which was, in its own way, alarming. A princess who breathes fire is already enough of a problem. A princess who breathes fire and calculates supply lines and river crossing nodes is essentially the universe sending a formal notice to every enemy in range: you may want to start making peace with your choices.

By evening, Day One wasn't over yet, and Jessi had already begun generating emotional turbulence across the entire army. The reason was simple. She didn't like the field rations. No — that's too generous. What she actually did was plant herself in the center of the temporary field kitchen, lift a pot lid with one hand, stir twice with a ladle, and stare into the pot with the exact expression of someone evaluating a corpse for funeral arrangements — before turning to the cook responsible for it.

"Is this meant to feed people," she asked, "or to poison the enemy first?" I happened to be walking past. I stopped. The cook was a capable-looking middle-aged woman from the Dragon Kingdom, who nonetheless had her entire sense of professional identity visibly shaken by approximately one sentence of Jessi's.

"This — this follows military standard—""Standard?" Jessi scooped a ladle, didn't even blow on it, tasted it, and then allowed her entire face to contract as if personally confirming the opening course of the apocalypse.

"Do you people in the Dragon Kingdom sacrifice your tongues before every campaign?" I pressed two fingers to my temple.

"Jessi." She turned, apparently with time to spare for a smile.

"Want a taste, my lord?"

"I'm more interested in whether you're planning to declare war on the field kitchen before we even leave." She planted the ladle back in the pot with the authority of someone who had just inherited a kingdom she didn't ask for.

"I'm saving lives. If the soldiers can't eat, what are they supposed to fight with?" The irritating thing was that this was completely correct. Correct enough that I couldn't find a single angle from which to argue — and could only watch, helplessly, as she tied an apron around her waist and began taking over the entire operation with a level of competence that had absolutely no business being that suspicious.... Right. Jessi was not built for peacetime.

She was built for moments when everything is about to explode — so she can be there to insult everyone involved while quietly, efficiently, keeping the whole thing from actually going up. By the time I returned to my room that night, my hand ached as if I'd personally transcribed the entire Dragon Kingdom's family registry. And this was only the beginning. Day Two I woke on the second morning to the sound of arrows. More precisely: I was woken by Alvira's training grounds.

The continuous crack of fletching through air should, in theory, have sounded impressive. The problem was that when a sharp-tempered elven woman was firing verbal corrections between every shot, the overall effect became a very precise form of psychological warfare disguised as a morning reveille.

"Elbow up!"

"That wasn't loosing an arrow — that was throwing your life away!"

"One more off-center and I'll tie you to the target post so you can learn what accuracy looks like from the other side!" I lay in bed staring at the ceiling and thought, sincerely, that any archer who came out of Alvira's training without a complete mental breakdown would probably be very difficult to frighten on an actual battlefield. They were, after all, already experiencing something considerably more terrifying every morning. I washed up and went out to the archery range first.

Alvira was dressed light today — hair bound back, sleeves pulled tight, a short bow in one hand. She looked like a blade specifically designed to correct other people's mistakes. She spotted me approaching, gave me a single glance. Acknowledged.

"You're up early." I looked at the sky, then back at her.

"Is that sarcasm?"

"If you understood it, that's sufficient." Fair enough. At least she was in a perfectly normal mood today — normal meaning mildly insufferable. I stood to one side and watched several rounds. What I noticed was that her archers weren't being drilled in the kind of clean, photogenic volley formations you'd want for a parade — they were being pushed on three things, relentlessly practical: Speed. Steadiness. The ability to keep shooting while moving and using cover. She wasn't producing a pretty archer unit.

She was producing people who could stay alive while making sure others didn't.

"Are you trying to turn them into porcupines?" I asked, idly. Alvira nocked an arrow. Without looking, she raised the bow and released. The shaft cut through the morning mist and buried itself dead center in a distant target. She lowered the bow.

"Porcupines at least know to keep their spines pointing outward," she said, flat.

"Some of your people haven't learned which direction the enemy comes from."

"Then I'm counting on you."

"I'm always working." She turned to look at me, tone even.

"What you should do is make sure you don't die before I finish training them. That would be a waste." From her, that qualified as something almost resembling consideration. On the morning of Day Two, Yozora pulled me aside for two things that were deeply injurious to my dignity. First: letting her check my curse residue and mental load. Second: openly admitting that I'd been sleeping like I was being trampled by a relay team of ancestors, each taking their turn.

When she pressed her fingertips near the dragon scale on the back of my hand, her touch was light, her eyes steady. Morning light caught the side of her face and made her look like something that belonged in a shrine rather than marching out with the rest of us.

"My lord."

"Mm?"

"This isn't simple fatigue."

"I had a feeling."

"Your mind is still adjusting to the resonance the Dragon Soul left behind." She said it the way someone might describe the weather. I found the weather deeply unsettling.

"And the conclusion?" Yozora looked up at me.

"The conclusion is: please, for these three days, at least pretend you are willing to sleep." I was quiet for a moment.

"Pretend to be willing. Is that a technical term?" The corner of her mouth moved, very faintly — almost a smile, but not quite, the expression settling back before it fully arrived. She simply folded a talisman and held it out to me instead.