All My Summons Become Divine Girls

Chapter 218: Paid in Land

The Flint war room had been running since dawn, and the maps on the long table had stopped being reassuring somewhere around the second report.

A border commander stood at the table’s end, reading out the week’s blockade summary while the Patriarch listened without moving. The roads were holding, the merchant guilds were turning back on schedule, and then came the part the man had clearly been dreading out loud.

"A coach under the Seliza banner crossed into the region five days ago, my lord. It returned the next morning, and our riders report her trade offices along the south route have begun redirecting caravan schedules."

"Meaning the Serpent intends to open a lane," the Patriarch said quietly, and the room went quieter with him, "our blockade starves nobody if her purse feeds them."

His eldest son leaned over the map from the other side, tapping the southern trade route with two fingers, "we can’t fight both, father, the war chest is built to outlast one poor region. If Seliza’s gold starts flowing before we march, the arithmetic stops working, and every week we wait costs us double."

Nobody argued with the numbers, because the heir was rarely wrong about numbers, and that had become his entire function in this room.

The scout report came next, and it emptied the air out of the room more thoroughly than the Seliza news had.

The three men had returned from the east with their maps confiscated but their memories intact, and what those memories held was a town that should not exist. Granaries were being restocked while walls stood manned in rotation, with patrol gear one commander at the table refused to believe until the sketch reached his own hands.

Last came a white-haired child who had vanished from one side of a square and reappeared on the other, while the whole town treated it as normal.

One of the younger commanders laughed at the child detail, and the laugh died alone.

"He caught our men, walked them through his strengths like guests, then gave their horses back," the Patriarch said into the quiet, turning the scout sketch over in his hands, "nobody returns working eyes out of mercy. The exile addressed a message to this table, and it reads that his region will not fall to a column of knights and a season of hunger."

"Then we stop planning to send knights," the heir answered, and slid a black leather folder down the table.

It had arrived that morning by a courier who had waited outside the gates rather than enter. Half the men present recognized the seal of a man whose name the capital only said in certain rooms.

Negotiations had been running for weeks through intermediaries, long before Hajin ever paraded scouts through his market, and the folder held the answer to the family’s final offer.

"Commander Dreth accepts," the heir said, opening it to the single page of terms, "with one change, he refuses payment in gold."

"Then what does a man like that want?"

"Land," the heir read the line as written, "the eastern territory itself, carved into a domain under his own name once it falls, with full command of the campaign until it does. He answers to no Flint officer while it runs, and nobody gets to account his methods afterward."

An older commander pushed back from the table at that, his chair scraping loudly, "my lord, I served the Order when they expelled him, and I ask you to think about what he did to earn that."

"When a northern Gate broke open mid-raid, he collapsed the only pass out of the valley with two hundred of his own men still fighting inside it, then reported the operation as zero casualties, because dead men had already been struck from his rolls."

"I know what he is," the Patriarch said, and signed.

Kenny learned about his own assignment in the armory that evening, where he had been spending most evenings lately with a bottle for company.

The heir delivered it personally, dropping the orders on the bench beside him, "you’ve been assigned as regional advisor to the vanguard, since you grew up beside the exile and you’re the only Flint who walked out of the Gate that made his name. You ride when Dreth rides."

"Then you should listen to your only expert," Kenny said to the floor, his grip slowly tightening around the bottle, "the outer ring of that Gate ate my entire squad in an afternoon, and the thing ruling its heart was worse than anything in the family histories. The Knight Captain stood before the throne and swore the exile killed it alone."

"The Order confirmed the core, cousin. What of it?"

"Your father thinks he bought a monster," Kenny laughed, and there was nothing in it but glass, "the east already has one, cousin, it just plays a lord during the day. My orders put me in the front row for the introduction, so do me a favor and mark my grave now, it saves a trip."

The heir studied his cousin for a long moment, then left without answering, because there was no number he could put against that.

Two floors above the war room, in the corridor she had spent a childhood learning by sound, Uriel sat against the wall beside the flue that carried voices up from below.

She had heard all of it, from the Serpent’s lane through the arithmetic to her father’s pen scratching across the terms. The family had just given away a piece of the east to a man the Order threw out for burying his own soldiers.

She had also heard the word exile a dozen times tonight, and every time it landed she remembered a head pat in a palace courtyard, hating how much she remembered it.

Back in her room she wrote by a shuttered lamp, keeping the letters quick and small enough to burn in a second if footsteps came.

{ They hired a man from gate stories, and father is paying him in your land. The one they call Dreth. He rides with the vanguard, and Kenny rides with him, and I do not know how to send this without killing us both. }

She read it twice, then lifted the loose floorboard under the window and laid the letter on top of the others she had never sent, each one addressed to no name at all.

The Patriarch worked alone in his study long after the house went dark, the family ledger open to pages he had not shown the war room. Two estates in the western hills were already pledged against the campaign’s first season, while the honest columns said a second season would take the shipyard shares and the town houses with it.

The house of anvils could afford Dreth, or it could afford to lose, but it could not afford both.

He sat back and let his eyes travel the study wall, over crests and commendations from kings long dead.

They stopped on the small portrait he kept where visitors never sat. If the war stretched past spring, there was one asset left that the family had never been willing to sell, and he had been refusing offers for it since the year she turned twelve.

He looked at it for a long time, and then he closed the ledger without writing anything down.