Ben-hadad chimed in for the first time. “I don’t mean to distract us from this highly profitable colloquy that is still not answering a question we haven’t been able to answer for many months, but maybe we should talk about the battle that’s going to shape our entire future that we are going to fight tomorrow?”

Big Leo looked down at him. “You take that crazy talk and get out of here.”

“What’s a colloquy?” Ferkudi asked.

No one answered him.

Kip acquiesced even though he felt he was close to figuring it out. Another almost. Kip Almost.

“Enough,” Kip said. “Let’s go inside.”

They moved to the map in the command tent. By this point, Kip had trained others in how to create the things, which was fortunate given that they needed new maps constantly as they moved.

“Let me lay this out plainly,” Kip said. “Tomorrow’s battle at Dúnbheo will either be the crowning achievement of all our work to keep our strength secret, or it will be the end of our hopes to save Blood Forest.”

There were grim faces all around, and a few muttered curses. Handsome General Antonius Malargos cursed quietly. He was perhaps the only one who hadn’t guessed.

“It’s for this that I’ve tried so hard to paint us as raiders by force allocation and by strategic disposition. Tomorrow we fight our first pitched battle. They shouldn’t expect us to be prepared for this kind of fight. I’ll be blunt, we might not be. Before now, retreat has always been part of our plans. If things went poorly in a raid, we ran. I hope we haven’t engrained that into our troops.”

“We won’t run, my lord,” Antonius said. It was his supreme confidence in Kip that made him a useful battlefield commander. It spread to his men. Kip could only hope it spread enough.

“Here are the stakes,” Kip said. “Hiding behind its Greenwall, Dúnbheo has always been a defensive redoubt. They never projected force into the forests beyond them. But perched as they are at the mouth of the river, they have kept the river open to the lake. Besieged, it’s been nothing to the war. Freed, it can become a gateway to a huge number of supplies. Lost, it becomes a stranglehold.”

“We free it, we can save Green Haven,” Cruxer said. “We lose it, we lose Green Haven.”

“Right,” Kip said. “And we don’t know how bad things are inside the city, except to know they’re bad. They’ve been able to bring in some supplies from the river, but the capital’s mostly needed those supplies for themselves. We can’t expect any help from the city. The Council of Divines is made up of old cowards. At best, if we’re already winning decisively, they might send some small force to help. I doubt it.”

“That’s just fantastic,” Winsen grumbled. No one upbraided him.

“But if we win,” Kip said. “If we win, with the skimmers we can land anywhere on the lake. We’ll own the lake. With resupply readily available to us and to Green Haven, and with our forces able to strike anywhere we choose, lifting the siege of Green Haven will be only a matter of time.”

“Save the city, save the satrapy,” Cruxer said.

Cruxer was right, and Kip was maybe telling too much, but he always wanted his inner circle to know the full strategy. If he was killed, someone else would need to take the torch. A lot of lives depended on it.

Not that he said the last part aloud. That would only devolve into protestations that he couldn’t die.

Dúnbheo was a strange city. It had once been the religious center of one of the nine kingdoms. Dúnbheo had been deliberately shunned since the establishment of the Seven Satrapies, but never destroyed. Apparently it was a beautiful place, and Lucidonius had believed that every beautiful thing man creates points to how the creative spirit of Orholam himself lives in all people.

So instead of being destroyed, the city had been starved of influence. No one born in the city or who had spent more than ten years there total could hold any position of power in Blood Forest, the Chromeria, or the Magisterium. Thus, as soon as any family native to the city rose high enough to entertain ambitions of being greater, it left. It bore and raised its children elsewhere, and those children generally didn’t want to come back, lest they spend more than their decade there.

It meant, oddly, that there were a lot of nobles dispersed throughout Blood Forest and Ruthgar who had ties to the place—because the smart, the ambitious, and the strong were exported instead of killing each other off. The Malargos family had first risen from Dúnbheo, which was one reason Tisis had so many ties to Blood Forest while her family was technically Ruthgari.

“Commander? Over to you,” Kip said.

Cruxer pointed to a map of the city as it had been before the siege. It showed the city surrounded on three sides by trees and also filled with trees, more than any other city in the world. He gestured, and a swath of trees around the city walls disappeared.

The maps were put together now by a team of drafters and Derwyn Aleph of the Cwn y Wawr, who was in charge of the scouts, and Tisis, who interviewed the refugees. The maps now allowed them to advance time and see the reports appear as they had come in.

“Two months ago, the Blood Robes cleared the forests around the city for a hundred paces in every direction. They believed that the city was being resupplied through the trees.”

Derwyn said, “Which is nonsense. There were ladders and rope swings concealed in those trees so that single scouts and messengers might move through the sylvan giants quietly, but entire convoys of food? Impossible.”

“Any caves?” Conn Arthur asked.

“Few, and none deep,” Derwyn said. “Not only do you have the tree roots to stop that, but there’s the groundwater to deal with. The river runs partly through the city itself.”

“It is possible there could be caves,” Ben-hadad said. “Purely from an engineering perspective. But I guess it depends what you mean. Do you mean do the inhabitants of the city have any tunnels, or are you asking about sappers?”

“Either, both,” Kip said.

“The city might have made tunnels. If you took your time—and I mean years—you can dig and pump out the water and seal the tunnels with luxin and support them appropriately,” Ben-hadad said. “I mean, you’d be constantly fighting the roots and leaks in the wood and luxin. But it’s possible. The city has been here a long, long time. But to do it and then maintain it would require a permanent corps of drafters. Drafters of average ability? I’d say you’d need thirty or forty, which is expensive and very hard to keep secret. You can hide what one or five drafters do, but when you have forty, people wonder, people gossip, and spies find out.”