The council that convened in Duke Ferron's stilted longhouse the following evening had none of the funeral's hush left in it by the time the shouting started, and Remus, standing near the door with his arms crossed, understood within the first ten minutes that grief and governance were, unfortunately, two entirely separate problems that refused to wait politely for each other.
"We need a General," Pompey said, laying it out plainly the moment the last of the invited parties had settled around the long table.
"Not eventually.
Now.
Corvath's army retreated humiliated, which means it's a matter of when, not whether, he comes back smarter about it, and this settlement cannot survive smarter without someone whose full-time work is thinking about exactly that."
"There is no General," said a broad-shouldered man near the table's far end, one Remus recognized, after a moment, as Aulus, one of the handful of soldiers who'd made it out of the Autumnshade raid alive under Tacitus's own direct order to run rather than stand with him.
He'd carried a fresh, raw scar across one cheekbone ever since, and something in the flat, exhausted set of his jaw tonight told Remus this conversation had been building in him since well before the funeral.
"General Caligula's dead.
Word finally reached us three days ago, carried by a woman who'd walked most of the way from what used to be Oldtown. He held the city's last gate personally, long enough for half the garrison to get clear, and died exactly the way Tacitus did, which is to say alone and without anyone left standing close enough to carry his name home afterward.
That's two Generals gone inside a single year, and no King sitting anywhere close enough to commission a third."
The room went quiet at that in a different way than the funeral's quiet had been, colder, more exposed.
"Then we appoint one ourselves," Annabelle said, and something in the crisp, unhesitating way she said it told Remus she'd been turning this exact problem over long before the meeting started.
"I don't say that lightly.
I've spent the last year keeping the Ember Works' books balanced through a war, and I can tell you plainly that an army without a clear head at the top of it isn't an army, it's a very well-armed crowd, and a crowd panics the first time the grain runs short or the wall takes real damage. We don't have the luxury of waiting for a legitimate crown to get around to solving that for us.
Whoever we pick, we need them picked by tomorrow, not by whenever King Belsarius happens to escape."
"I'll add the number nobody's said out loud yet," she went on, before anyone could answer her directly.
"We're feeding one thousand, one hundred and change on rations meant for a garrison a fraction that size, and every soul in this settlement knows, whether they'd admit it to a stranger's face or not, that the only reason nobody's rioted over short bread yet is that they still believe somebody competent is in charge of deciding who eats first when the numbers don't stretch far enough.
That belief is worth more to us right now than any wall Remus could build.
The day it cracks is the day this settlement stops being a kingdom in exile and starts being a very large, very frightened crowd standing in mud, and I have watched exactly that happen to a market once before, over considerably smaller stakes than a war, and I have no intention of watching it happen here."
"She's right," Pompey said, quiet, turning his unlit pipe over in his hands.
"I've read enough history to know how these things usually go.
A kingdom survives losing its army. It rarely survives losing its own belief that somebody's steering it.
We don't have the luxury of a long argument tonight, however much this room clearly wants one."
"Pick who," Duke Ferron asked, and Remus watched every head at the table turn, by unspoken agreement, first toward Gregory, and then, a half-beat later, toward Andrea.
"Not me," Gregory said, before anyone could put the question to him directly, and something in the quick, unpracticed honesty of it told Remus his brother had already spent considerable private time arguing himself out of wanting it before this meeting ever began.
"I've thought about it since we heard about Caligula.
I want to say yes. I fought with the Blue Angels long enough to know I can hold a line and think fast when it matters, and I won't pretend that isn't true. But I left this family once already to go earn something on my own terms instead of being handed it, and if I take a General's rank now because my father's the ranking Duke in this room and my brother built the wall we're all hiding behind, I'm not earning anything at all.
I'm just doing the exact thing I walked out the door to stop doing.
I'd rather serve under whoever gets picked and prove myself the honest way than take the job because nobody in this room wants to be the one who tells Duke Ferron's son no."
"That's the most sense you've made in a council meeting in your life," Aulus said, and there was real respect underneath the dry edge of it.
"For what it's worth, the men who made it out of Autumnshade with me would follow you regardless.
You were there. You fought.
That counts for more with them than any rank you'd have been handed."
"Then let it count toward something smaller than General," Gregory said.
"Field command, under whoever ends up holding the whole of it.
I meant what I said."
Every eye in the room turned, next, toward Andrea, and Remus felt his own chest tighten with a dread he hadn't fully anticipated feeling.
"I could do the job better than anyone else sitting at this table," Andrea said, flat, without a trace of false modesty in it, the plain, professional assessment of a woman who had never once pretended to be less capable than she was purely to spare someone else's feelings.
"I've thought about this longer than any of you have, because I think about every problem this settlement has longer than any of you do, and I want all of you to hear me say plainly that I know exactly how good I'd be at it before I tell you why I'm turning it down anyway."
"Why," Duke Ferron asked, not unkindly.
"Because half this settlement already whispers about me behind closed doors," Andrea said, "a foreign woman with no family name anyone recognizes and no history anyone can verify, standing closer to the Duke's son than a servant should, and every one of those whispers is going to get considerably louder the moment I'm the one giving soldiers orders instead of just advising the man who does.
I'm not interested in spending my authority defending my own right to hold it instead of spending it on the actual war. Put someone in the chair the room already trusts by instinct. I'll stand behind whoever it is and make sure every decision that reaches them has already survived an honest argument first.
That's worth more to this settlement than my name on a commission would be."
Something in the flat, unsentimental honesty of it settled the room in a way Remus hadn't expected, and he understood, watching her say it, that she'd left out the truer half of her own reasoning without a single person at the table catching the omission, and that he was, for the moment, the only one in the room who could have caught it at all.
"Then it's Aulus," Pompey said, after a long moment, "with Gregory as his field second, and Andrea as tactical advisor to both, answerable to this council until such time as a legitimate crown exists to formalize the arrangement properly.
Does anyone object?"
"I'll do the job," Aulus said, slow, clearly turning the shape of it over in his own head before committing to it out loud.
"On one condition.
I want it understood, by everyone in this room and everyone outside it, that I'm not General Tacitus's replacement. Nobody replaces that man.
I'm just the one holding the door open until whoever actually deserves the title walks through it."
"Agreed," Duke Ferron said, and something in his voice suggested the condition had cost him nothing at all to accept, because it matched, almost exactly, the thing he'd already said himself over the water that morning.
The vote, when Pompey called for it, passed without a single dissent, and Remus found himself watching Andrea rather than the rest of the room while it happened, and saw, in the careful, practiced stillness of her face, something she was working very hard not to let anyone else see her feeling.
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