Chapter 88

The festivities came to an abrupt end. Every banquet, every ball, every night of music and laughter was canceled without ceremony. Knights who had been loosening their armor plates in revelry returned grim-faced to their units, swords buckled once more at their hips.

And yet the air was curiously hollow, like a stage set that had been abandoned too suddenly. For most who had grown up in decades of peace, the word “war” still rang like a half-forgotten fable—something that belonged to another age, to distant borders and old chronicles, not to their own streets. Fear, dread, urgency—such things existed only as vague abstractions.

Earlier than before, Odelliana thought, her eyes narrowing as she read through the messenger’s dispatch. Nearly a month earlier than in the last life. If it continues at this pace, the proclamation for the Tribal Suppression War will come before the harvest is even finished.

“You were right after all, Odelliana.”

Blair’s voice was low, tinged with reluctant acknowledgment. He had prepared, yes, but still he had hoped against hope that her warnings would prove excessive, her fears unfounded. The reality, however, was unfolding exactly as she had foreseen. And he, like the rest of them, still could not make the horror feel tangible.

“It’s moving faster than I expected,” she admitted, gaze still fixed on the paper.

“Do you think Father will send reinforcements to Anatolia?”

Odelliana shook her head. “No. He’ll likely believe they can manage on their own. To him, a barbarian horde is hardly worth dispatching forces across half the realm.”

It had been the same in her past life. The Duke of Grüsewald had delayed, refusing to send aid until a formal coalition was assembled. Reports of raiders forming organized battalions, slipping past defenses, murdering and burning within Anatolia’s very walls had not pierced his sense of invulnerability.

“Still,” Malena interjected from her place by the window, “Anatolia won’t fall so easily. It’s a fortress city. Occupying a place like that isn’t something barbarians can achieve overnight.”

Most people would think like Malena. The news of a breached wall might shock them, yes, but faith in standing armies ran deep. With professional soldiers garrisoned in every major city, surely it could not take long to stamp out a rabble of tribesmen.

That complacency is what doomed them before, Odelliana mused darkly. Their halfhearted response only stoked the fire. And nothing will be different this time.

The Reveln royal house and the northern dukes alike had been too comfortable, too trusting in Anatolia’s strength, too dismissive of the barbarians as nothing more than savages. Even when the walls fell, even when smoke poured across the sky, they had shrugged and muttered, so be it.

To declare a Great Subjugation against mere “barbarians” was, for the royal house, almost an insult to their pride. Reveln prided itself on being the strongest kingdom on the continent—what would it mean to call upon every banner to crush raiders in the hills? And so the declaration had been delayed, delayed again, until blood ran deep and too many cities were already ash.

“Odelliana,” Blair asked at last, “how are preparations on our side?”

“There’s no cause for worry. Orders have already gone out to every merchant consortium, and contracts are signed. If all runs as planned, everything will arrive by autumn.”

“How much have you secured?”

“Enough to last three years.”

Blair blinked. “Three years’ worth? That much?”

“And that’s the bare minimum.”

His eyes sharpened. “You truly believe the war will drag on that long?”

“I do.”

Because in her last life, those raiders had not been ragged mobs. They had fought with steel and discipline. They had weapons supplied by hidden hands, their raids coordinated, their infiltrations precise. That was why Anatolia had fallen, why whole provinces had buckled before anyone admitted the truth.

Eisenwald was not blessed with fertile lands. The arable fields were few, and the terrain made transport difficult. Supplies could not be replenished easily once roads were closed. If the war cut off trade, famine would arrive in weeks. To stockpile now was not extravagance but survival.

“Then you’re right,” Blair said after a pause. “If this becomes protracted, we must declare full war readiness. Draft guidelines for conduct under siege. Organize distribution systems, rations, storage—all of it.”

“Agreed. I’ll lend whatever strength I can.”

Blair moved swiftly, convening the lords of Eisenwald to rally their support. But persuading them was no easy task. Many scoffed at him outright. What danger could mountain nobles possibly face from distant barbarians? Some even chuckled at the sight of a young lord fretting like an old nursemaid.

They stayed through the meeting only out of courtesy to his title, and their silence was heavy with doubt.

Still, while Blair pressed on with diplomacy, Odelliana turned to her own relentless work. She greeted every traveling merchant who crossed their gates, ensured caravans unloaded provisions, saw crates stacked in warehouses, hired mercenaries to oversee the expansion of storage halls. Every day was movement, planning, securing.

And then the rains came.

By the time the summer storms broke, word arrived like a blade across the throat: Anatolia had fallen. Its gates shattered, its lord hanged by the neck from the highest spire, its people slaughtered or chained as captives.

Shock swept the nobility. The same men who had dismissed the danger only weeks before now rushed to pledge aid, to offer coin, men, horses—anything. Their pride had been jolted into fear.

Eisenwald, better prepared than most, was the first to shut its gates. A lockdown order was issued; no one entered or left. Inside, preparations tightened into a war machine. Retired veterans returned to drill the young. Manuals for siege conduct were compiled, rules for rationing, storage, and defense drilled into every rank.

And all across the kingdom, the royal decree was carried by lightning-fast riders:

By command of King Frajard, the tribes that have seized Anatolia are henceforth declared enemies of the realm. A Tribal Suppression War shall be undertaken by a united host. All vassal states shall muster forces to the coalition.

The rains ended. The harvest neared. And with it, the first great war order of their age was sounded. Peace shattered in a single stroke.

***

“Have you heard, my lady?” Malena burst into Odelliana’s chamber one morning, breathless. “Sir Matthias—he has volunteered for the coalition.”

Odelliana’s hand stilled. She had never once pressed him toward this choice, never ordered or demanded. And yet he had gone on his own, choosing the path she had always known he would.

“I take it you won’t try to stop him?” Malena asked carefully.

“How could I? It was his choice.”

“But he’s still so young! Culling beasts in the wild is one thing, war is another. A battlefield isn’t won by strength alone—it’s tactics, formations, chains of command.”

Odelliana’s lips curved, faint and bitter. “You think I don’t know that?”

Yet she also knew Matthias was no ordinary youth. He was not merely quick or strong; he was the prodigy who, in time, would stand with a thousand and rout an army of eight thousand. He was the once-in-an-era talent whose name would be carved into history. And above all, she alone knew his true nature—that beneath his human form lay the hide of a beast, something that would not fall so easily.

“Funny,” Odelliana murmured, glancing at her maid. “You claim to dislike him, and yet you worry so much.”

Malena flushed. “And you? You’ve coddled that boy for years, raised him as if he were your own. Do you mean to tell me you feel nothing as he marches off to war?”

“Of course I worry,” Odelliana said softly. Her gaze slid to the window, to the distant mountains beyond. “But I won’t hold him back.”

The weight pressed on her chest like a stone. She had lived through this once, seen the carnage firsthand, carried the screams of the dying in her ears. To watch it come again, earlier than before, was worse than she imagined. And yet…

“To keep him here would be to block his path,” she whispered.

She had not raised Matthias only to shelter him. She had raised him because his talent demanded it, because his potential was too great to waste. Now the chance had come for him to rise. Worry alone could not justify stealing that future.

“If I meant only to keep him safe, I would never have made him a knight,” she said firmly. “I’d have left him as my page, my servant. But I chose otherwise. Because I believe he has what it takes. Because I know he will survive.”

Her eyes glimmered with iron conviction. Malena stared, struck by how unyielding her mistress could be, how her frail body seemed too slight for such unbending resolve. The woman who could weep for others without shame was the same woman who would send her most beloved protégé into the maw of war without hesitation.

“I trust the knight I chose,” Odelliana said simply.

And that was the truth. Matthias was not only her pupil. He was her rival, her aspiration, her impossible standard. He would return, and when he did, he would bring with him the very thing she had long desired.

There was no room for doubt.