A Time of Tigers - From Peasant to Emperor
Chapter 1679 - 1679: The Coming Storm - Part 3

"Or I can have you tell me here and now," Blackthorn said, not voicing any threats along with that line, but the forcefulness with which he said it seemed to imply it.

"I wonder," Fitzer said. "What if it had been you that I faced, General Blackthorn, with those two thousand men? Would you have managed to best me? Would it have been a better fight for I?"

There was a brief silence, in which Fitzer smiled at the small little victory that he imagined he held. "No. I do not think you could have. I think you yourself are aware of that fact. That is why you come to me, rather than speaking to your ally, is it not? These are times of war, and yet you see him as a competitor. Ha! Childish, Lord Blackthorn. Childish indeed. Though I suppose I was no different with Tussle, for all the good it ended up doing the two of us…"

"Speak," Blackthorn said. "How did you allow yourself to be bested?"

"Allow ourselves to be?" Fitzer said, flashing just the smallest hint of his own rage. "Do you think we willingly marched to such a dishonourable defeat? Do you think we willingly wasted the hope of our King?"

"Willing or not, it happened."

"…We had them crushed," Fitzer said. "We had them defeated. There was nothing left of them. It was a bit of a dance… That Volguard. Damn it, he was a problem. I could sense the smell of his strategy on every little move that they made… But then… There were those strange little performances that Oliver Patrick did… They seemed so meaningless at the time, but were they meaningless now?"

"What performances?" Blackthorn said.

"The smallest little manoeuvres. Forward, then back again, never seeming to achieve anything. He gave no commands. He hardly seemed to exist. He did nothing. Nothing at all. They just endured… They held on for longer than they ought to. The individual man – aye, they fought well. They fought well. The strategy under Volguard, it made use of every ingredient that they had. But ours was better. Tussle and I. We didn't ruin it. We had them dead to rights. It was checkmate… And then it wasn't," Fitzer said. "When they ought to have been least dangerous, there was something, as if the whole world had come into alignment, and suddenly, the most natural thing was for Tussle to die."

Blackthorn did not interrupt. He listened, like a boy enraptured by tales of the past. Now Fitzer fell back into his chair before the fire. He seemed practically haunted as he reminisced. It was the same battle that he had played out in his mind, thousands of times before.

He was quiet for a good minute. He was somewhere else in his mind entirely. He hardly seemed to notice that Blackthorn was in the room with him any longer. The entire might of his being had been dedicated to solving the riddle as to why they had lost for weeks on end. He closed his eyes, and he fell back into that same mode of thought, his fingers lacing themselves together.

"Peasants, they were… Peasants. We knew them to be that. But they wouldn't die. They wouldn't go down quickly enough. There was something wrong with them. They didn't have the resistance of trained soldiers, they had something else. When we stabbed at them, it was like fighting with the sea. We drew wounds, but we couldn't crush them… The whole thing was like grabbing a cloud… But was it not fine?"

"From those walls atop Solgrim, we didn't ruin our strategy, we played with the utmost care. Prince Hendrick warned us continually not to take unnecessary risks, to use our men to the fullest, and we did just that. Tussle, the bastard, kept correcting me, pointing out my mistakes, and I did the same to him. It was a rush – I knew us to be fighting well then, even though I hated the bastard, he could sniff out all that I was doing wrong, and as a pair, I was proud of what we could do."

"Was it the cold, I wonder, that slowed our men? They were made to camp in it… The march had tired them. Did that weaken them? When the cavalry came, and the horses were forced to run in the snow, did that slow them too, and make them less effective..? Maybe. Maybe. All of it will have played a part."

Fitzer shivered suddenly, and his eyes flashed open. "Solgrim. I didn't like the feel of that place. It hated us. I got the sense of that. Every second that I stood on its walls, it was like it wanted to spit me off. I've never got a sense like that from a fort… It ought to be inanimate wood. Why was that damn place so rich with feeling? Have you felt it, Blackthorn?"

"…I've been there," Blackthorn offered. "I felt nothing, and saw nothing, but the wood of good walls."

The Emerson General twisted his lips. "It was not an imagined sensation. It stank of danger. Perhaps that was what blinded us to the danger of those hidden men – every aspect of the place felt the same danger. Our instincts ought to have been able to sniff them out. But we were in a fog. How can a place weigh with such history? Just what has gone on there?"

"…You know very well what went on there," Blackthorn said impatiently. "Get on to the point, man."

"Ah… Yes. Yes. That is where he fell, isn't it? That man… We should have known something was off when we saw the statue. Gods, it was like the man was alive. Haunting that was, Blackthorn. Haunting. I dared not go near it. I must admit I had respect for the man – the way he lived. He stuck to his principles, didn't he? And then, when it was too much for him, he vanished. Well, vanished until he went to die after Arthur, against that Pandora Goblin. Much freedom in that. The way he moved, for lack of a family… But then, I suppose he did have a family… in Oliver Patrick," he shuddered again, and his eyes went wide.