A Time of Tigers - From Peasant to Emperor
Chapter 1718 - 1718: A Kingdom At War - Part 1

Oliver wondered whether that was a compliment indirectly, though Blackthorn did not seem quick to expand on it, and he didn't exactly address the matter itself, but he had to dare to think that there might have been some hint of approval for all he and his men had achieved, after Blackthorn had allowed him that wanted freedom.

"We will do things the same," Blackthorn said. "I have heard the weaknesses that you suppose of your fledgling army, and I will do what I can to accommodate them. Otherwise, I believe we are best acting independently. That is – if you don't do anything stupid. I can tolerate your strangeness to a degree, but overstep, General Patrick, and I warn you, I shall have no trouble stripping you of rank. Verdant Idris will lead in your place, if so necessary."

"I will keep that in mind," Oliver said.

He had heard that Verdant had taken his duty as a diplomat seriously in Oliver's absence. He supposed that he should not have been surprised by General Blackthorn's seemingly high opinion of the Idris man because of that.

Blackthorn waved him away with his hand, dismissing him without the usual formalities. He was a strange complexity. He enforced proper discipline and procedure in the matter of his soldiery, but when it came to his interpersonal relations, his decorum lacked the large majority of that special care.

But when Oliver reached the door, Blackthorn stopped him again.

"Was she useful?" Blackthorn asked.

Oliver turned to look at him.

"Was she useful?" Blackthorn repeated again. "This daughter of mine. You took risks in playing with Tavar, and you brought my daughter along with it."

"…I apologize," Oliver said. "Perhaps I should have been more careful in selecting who I exposed to danger."

Blackthorn tutted. "Out," he said. "I grow quickly tired of you. Man or woman – you shall not dare to take a Blackthorn lightly."

Tavar took his marching slowly. His intentions seemed not to be simply to move his troops from one location to another. He paused for a good deal of time in certain places, performing – or so they assumed – tasks that Blackthorn and Oliver's scouts could not discern.

"It stinks of a trap," Blackthorn said distastefully, each time the report was brought back to them, but the result, it seemed, benefitted Oliver and his men.

Where there might have been a week of marching to close that distance, and to descend down upon Ernest, Tavar took a month.

For all the supplies that it must have cost him to do that, Tavar took a month regardless. It allowed Blackwell in the east the time he needed to move as well – though neither Oliver nor even General Blackthorn knew quite what his intentions were.

That took, Blackthorn didn't like. He interpreted Blackwell's lack of communication as an insult. "He thinks our reactions would leak our movements to the enemy," Oliver had heard him fume. "He thinks us to be such base creatures. He's dragging on this war far too long – that fool needs to move."

It was as if Ernest existed in pocket, isolated from the outside world. That was what Oliver was beginning to feel. They fell deeper and deeper into the throes of winter, and those short dark days did not help matters. The walls that they'd added to the defences seemed to only serve better to keep them locked inside their own cages, with the very same ideas that they'd toyed with for weeks.

A strange feeling came as a result of it – a feeling that should not have been associated with the upcoming battle, when they were so heavily outnumbered. It was not a feeling that should really have had a place in any General's hearts, if they were to call themselves mature, but both Oliver and General Blackwell felt it. It was impatience. They'd been prepared for a good while, and each week longer that General Tavar took, that impatience grew.

Naturally, Oliver made sure to secure his boons from it, in training the solidness of his army. But the one thing the scouts could see, and they could report on, was that General Tavar was doing very much the same.

A large part, it was supposed, of that extra time that he spent, was in drilling his men, and turning that troop – of over a hundred thousand men – in a single, unified army.

"One forgets, he was the head of the Academy," the Minister of Blades had commented upon hearing it. "He can be both an educator, and a General. One can support the other. I fear that his years spent in charge of that Academy have not made him rusty. They might even have empowered him."

On those wide open plains, of which there were plenty on the march between Ernest and the Royal Capital, Tavar once more saw his men drilled.

"King Germanicus, if you would," Tavar said, having the man take the lead once more, with ten thousand men under his command.

Germanicus responded with a loud cry, and a war hammer held aloft. He was not on horseback then, but he seemed to stand as tall as a mounted man. At the very least, his men had no difficulty seeing him.

He charged forth against an invisible foe, and his infantry rippled behind him, sieging across the field to support their King. They were a mixture of the Treeants, and of the conscripts that had been collected from other parts of the Kingdom. General Tavar had taken the greatest care in that.

For another man, he might have allowed for a mock battle – but not King Germanicus. The man was strong enough that a single wayward strike, accidentally placed, could easily kill a man of the Fourth Boundary.

His excuse, in getting the King to do such things, was that the men be kept sharp. But his actual intentions, it could be noted, by a more astute observer, seemed to be far more concentrated on King Germanicus himself, than on the soldiers that he led.