“Don’t take any nonsense,” she went on. “You speak with my authority, and the Lady Regent’s, and that of the High King. And send me Lord Forest Grove soon as he’s ready. Tell him the Count should be here fairly soon, and I’ll need him then to report on the situation up near the front.”

Lord Rigobert Gironda de Stafford, Baron Forest Grove, was in charge of the allied . . .

Montivalan. We’re all part of Montival now, not just allies. Completely and utterly forget how we spent the first ten Change Years fighting each other, Tiph, and the next ten watching each other with gimlet-eyed suspicion and thinking about fighting each other again someday. Down the memory hole, as Sandra puts it. You’ve got seven regiments of Yakima foot from the Free Cities in this army and glad to have them, the stubborn bastards fought us to a standstill, after all. Montivalans.

. . . Montivalan screening force to the northeast.

His men were buying time for this army to form up. Buying it with blood, and now he had to come back for a conference.

There was no avoiding it, but Tiphaine d’Ath looked in that direction, towards the distant line of mountains, and suppressed a fierce desire to be there.

And to know what the hell’s been going on up there. Reports just aren’t the same.

COUNTY OF THE EASTERMARK
BARONY OF TUCANNON
(FORMERLY SOUTHEASTERN WASHINGTON STATE)
PORTLAND PROTECTIVE ASSOCIATION
HIGH KINGDOM OF MONTIVAL
(FORMERLY WESTERN NORTH AMERICA)
AUGUST 18, CHANGE YEAR 25/2023 AD

Make a mistake, you sons of bitches. You’re out there. I can feel it, I can smell it. Come on, screw up.

Ingolf Vogeler carefully leveled the binoculars from where he lay just below the crest of the ridge, using a hand to shade the lenses so they would give no betraying flash in the noonday sunlight. This whole country on the fringe of the Blue Mountains was smooth ridge and slope making valleys, sometimes with a bit of a creek running down the vale between, sometimes dry, getting steeper as you went east.

Send me a nice cocksure kid, Lord, he thought. Or Manwë or Varda or whatever. Nineteen, a hard-on with legs, he’s invincible, he’s immortal, he knows it all. Give me something to work with.