A Time of Tigers - From Peasant to Emperor
Chapter 1678 - 1678: The Coming Storm - Part 2

It was a haggard individual that Blackthorn found. There were bags under his eyes, and the shine had very much gone from his pupils and irises. It was a glassy look that he gave Blackthorn, and when he stood, it was perfunctory. He didn't stand particularly straight. His mind was evidently distracted, though his body at least remembered to perform his courtesies.

"You look a state," Blackthorn commented indiscreetly. "Have they been treating you so poorly?"

He knew the answer to his own question, simply by the tray of food that he saw left untouched on General Fitzer's side table. The man had neglected it for a place in front of the fire. That he had a fire at all, and such an amount of wood, went a great deal to show how well he had been treated.

Fitzer snorted at that, though it was a weak sound, as if his soul was leaving his body through his nose. "No. No. I have been treated well, far too well. Disgustingly well. Sickeningly well. If I had been given cause to rise to anger, this ordeal might have been easier."

"An ordeal it is nonetheless, however..?" Colonel Reid noted. It was the sort of thing that Blackthorn himself would not have picked up on, and the Colonel knew he had permission to give such prodding at times. General Blackthorn would give him a glare if ever he went too far.

"I am defeated," Fitzer said harshly, spitting the term like venom. "Would you expect it to be otherwise?"

"I've seen many defeated men," Blackthorn said. "You bear it worse than others, but I suppose not as badly as some. You have not slit open your stomach, or carved a hole in your wrists. You intend to live."

"For the responsibility that my life carries, for my Prince and for my men," Fitzer said. "Not because I see a hope of victory."

"Of victory?" Reid said, taking charge of the conversation once more, knowing full well that Blackthorn preferred to watch, rather than talk, so that his instincts could judge a man, rather than his words. "What sort of victory did you have in mind? Of rebellion? To raise those ten thousand men you have outside up into a combined force, and overthrow the meagre hold that Oliver Patrick had on you?"

Fitzer shook his head. "We would not have triumphed. That is not the sort of victory that I was speaking of."

"What sort of victory, then?" Blackthorn said, speaking more harshly and more impatiently than would otherwise have been acceptable from equal men.

The General Fitzer tapped his temple with a finger. It seemed the gesture of a mad man, especially the slow and almost caressing way he did it, just barely stopping himself from massaging his temples. "It's a victory up here, General Blackthorn. A war in the mind."

"…Of what sort?" Reid asked, clearly not knowing where else to go with his line of questioning. He was as lost to Fitzer' seeming bout of insanity as Blackthorn himself was.

"Of what sort?" Fitzer said again, laughing. "Come now. Come now, you ought not need to ask. Do you have no empathy, no foresight, no ability to put yourself in the shoes of your enemy? It's obvious. You dogs, you know full well that it's obvious. I can sense the confusion off you, Blackthorn. You think I am blind, just because there are now cracks of uncertainty in my heart? You know as well as I do that what happened here, it doesn't make a lick of sense. That's why you're in front of me, isn't it, to find out why, and what for?"

"If you know that, then make our work easier," Reid said, speaking quickly, knowing that Fitzer's manner of speech was the very sort of thing that could work quite easily to make Lord Blackthorn grow angry.

"Ha. Yes. The defeated man, he holds the seeds that you need in your understanding, does he?" Fitzer said.

"You spoke of victory earlier. Victory of the mind," Reid prodded. "What sort of victory, what sort of battle would you be fighting? Why did you and those men not rebel?"

"Would you have preferred that we did?" Fitzer said with a smile.

"It would have made far more sense to," Reid said. "It would have been the logical course of action."

Fitzer raised his hands up together in front of his face, pinning them as one, so that they looked like the wings of some butterfly or bird. He flapped them in front of Reid's face. "This is what beat us," he said, gently flapping them. "This that we don't understand. Something beyond my perception. It was not logic. If it was logic, our numbers would have prevailed. I still do not know where we went wrong. Neither do I know where my comrade Tussle went wrong… Though I suppose – I suppose it hinges upon one thing. The fact of those hundred men they had squirreled away in Solgrim. Yes… But those alone…"

"That. Speak of that," Blackthorn said. As of yet, he knew nothing of the method Oliver Patrick had used to secure victory, other than the fact that it was not a siege that he repelled, and that, by some miracle, some of Oliver's men had managed to capture Prince Hendrick.

"Oh, it wasn't the most profoundly cunning bit of strategy, and it was barely the sting of a bee," Fitzer said, shrugging. "We didn't think to check too thoroughly, beyond our initial scouring, because what would be the point? Any contingent, we assumed, would be barely fifty strong. Perhaps they were double the estimated number, but they ought not to have been able to do anything alone .And yet they were. For whatever reason… The tiniest little seed."

Blackthorn gave Fitzer the most intense of stares, imploring him to continue. Fitzer could not have avoided noticing the look, even if he'd wanted to. He heaved a long sigh. "To tell you more would be to benefit you. Ask him yourself. I am quite sure that you can, can't you? Swallow that magnificent pride of yours, and do what you ought to do."