B3Ch81-Departure. (Patreon)

Reyes Jubilee pulled the rings off his fingers one at a time and laid them in a row on the desk. He did it every morning before he opened the forum. The forum made him twist them, and he had already worn a raw groove into one knuckle that winter.

The window behind him looked down on the harbor. Gray water, gray sky, and the masts of the Concord’s fleet standing up out of the fog in two neat lines. At least something was going right in his part of the world. He looked at his morning café con leche and pulled up his panel.

The front page had already sorted itself, and the thread at the top had been up less than a day.

ALLIED ARMY OF THE PENINSULA — MOVEMENT ORDER, PUBLIC RELEASE 4118207 replies

Sovann’s southern campaign megathread. 14 lords and counting 2914563 replies

Velthari Check-ins (North) 61904418 replies

Further down, where he had to scroll to find it, sat the Concord’s own.

Concord Trade & Barter — Western Routes Open 3110 replies

Three thousand. He had paid a crafter good gold to keep that thread alive through the winter. He tapped the first massive thread open with the edge of his thumb.

Lord Tobin Ashgrove — Allied Army S6

Pinned. Public release, cleared by Colonel Hale’s staff.

The Allied Army of the Peninsula marches from the staging ground at Hell’s Edge in the last week of January. Our objective is the Blackjaw goblin city. At departure, our strength is nearly 300,000, including adventurer companies under contract and quest to the army.

At the same time, a second allied force under the northern lords is moving north to fortify the lands against the Velthari before the thaw. If you hold a northern town and haven't been contacted, post it in this thread, and my staff will pass it on.

Civilians and caravans: the four march routes are closed to all traffic unless contracted with the Allied Army from the day we depart. Routes are posted in the second reply. Stay off them. Our scouts will turn you back. The goblins will not bother.

Adventurer companies wanting a contract with the army, post in Allied Army Contracts, not here.

All further movement notices come through this office. If a post claims to speak for the army and is not signed by this office, it is a lie.

By order of Colonel Hale, commanding, for Count Harold Calder.

Lord Mattias Kerr — Wyndhold

Three hundred thousand. How the hell did he force all of those people to work towards one goal?

Adventurer — ThisIsSparta

300k? You mean 300. THIS. IS. BLACKJAW

Adventurer — HodorHoldsTheDoor

@ThisIsSparta its three hundred THOUSAND. read the post. also the spartans died

Adventurer — ThisIsSparta

@HodorHoldsTheDoor spoilers bro

Reyes set the cup down harder than he meant to. These fucking people.

Lady Odile Fenwick — Marsh Crossing

We are a northern holding, and nobody has contacted us. Posting as asked. Marsh Crossing, four days east of the Reach. Walls, three hundred spears, no healing supplies.

Lord Tobin Ashgrove — Allied Army S6

@Lady Odile Fenwick: Received and passed to northern command. Expect a rider.

He checked the reply's time against the post above it. Eleven minutes. That was an impressive reply time on a thread like this.

Crafter — Ines Duarte

Is anyone else going to say it? Somebody finally took charge. One army, one plan, one man giving the orders. Why can nobody do this anywhere else? The gnolls took two more towns in the midlands last week, and the lords there are still arguing over whose banner goes in front.

Lord Henrik Dahl — Ostmark

@Ines Duarte Because nobody else has a Count Calder. We tried a council in the midlands. It lasted until we lost a wall and a town.

Lord Gerrit Hale — Sandmere

No relation to the Colonel, before anybody asks. I keep getting that. But I’ll second Lady Duarte. Our kobold front has nine lords on it and nine plans. We would trade every one of them for a single man who could make the others shut up.

Adventurer — GandalfTheGreyArea

the west has the concord. the concord has a plan too. its called “sell your neighbors at an auction”

Adventurer — Ackbar

its a trap

Lord Pieter Vos — Grenshaw

@GandalfTheGreyArea Some of us live within the Concord’s reach and would rather you didn't post that where their lords can read it. Please.

Reyes read that one twice. He pulled the pad at his elbow closer and wrote Vos — Grenshaw on it in a neat hand, and underlined it once.

Adventurer — xX_KoboldGobbler_Xx

forget the north. has anyone SEEN whats happening down south. sovann is speedrunning the whole coast

Lord Arun Chantha — Prey Lvea

I can confirm what is in the other thread. Lord Sovann’s alliance has taken the submission of fourteen lords since the start of the year. I was the eleventh. He didn’t kill my people to do it either. His engines are able to throw projectiles from farther out than anything on my walls could answer. My gate was down by noon of the second day.

Adventurer — JohnWicksDog

@Lord Arun Chantha respect for posting that. most lords would lie about it

Lord Arun Chantha — Prey Lvea

The men who came through the breach first were not his, though. They were tall and dressed in gray, and they did not speak our tongue or any other I know. One of them held my gate alone against my household guard. We weren’t able to touch him while he disarmed all of my people.

Adventurer — Pell_gone_south

been on sovanns adventurer contracts a month. can confirm the healing thing. they hand out potions like water. took a spear through the lung tuesday, back on the line wednesday. we have lost almost nobody. ALMOST NOBODY. in a WAR

Lord Feodor Rusk — Kesselmark

Fourteen lords and almost no losses. A season ago nobody in the south could brew healing in that quantity. Ask yourselves where it comes from.

Crafter — Heisenberg_Brews

we all know where it comes from. say his name

Adventurer — CritFishing

potion lord. potion lord! POTION LORD!

Adventurer — CritFishing

ok nothing happened. was half expecting the sky to fall on my tent ngl

Adventurer — HodorHoldsTheDoor

@CritFishing too soon man

Reyes found he had picked up one of the rings and was turning it between his fingers. He put it back in the row.

Crafter — Sable_of_Two_Rivers

I’m a working alchemist, so let me put numbers on this, since nobody here seems to know what they’re looking at. A competent journeyman makes maybe forty healing draughts on a good week. The Landing has been selling them by the thousand for a season, to anyone with coin. Now he is supplying three hundred thousand men in the north, and if half of what’s in the Sovann thread is true, a whole war in the south on top of it.

Crafter — BobRossHappyLittleVials

@Sable_of_Two_Rivers happy little potions

Crafter — Sable_of_Two_Rivers

@BobRossHappyLittleVials I will find you.

Lord Henrik Dahl — Ostmark

@Sable_of_Two_Rivers The Alchemist’s School at the Landing teaches healing potions first, and all of what they make goes to the war effort. They make a royalty on what they create.

Lord Feodor Rusk — Kesselmark

@Lord Henrik Dahl Which means probably the most powerful lord is selling the rest of us the same medicine he keeps in his own army’s wagons.

Anonymous

my lord sold our whole grain store this winter to buy healing off the landing. we ate turnips til spring. It was worth it. the concord quoted us triple because of transportation cost. The landing has been creating a secure trade route through the entire peninsula. You dont think Count Harold is only working on the army while he has all of those lords in one spot, do you?

Lord Tobin Ashgrove — Allied Army S6

This thread is for movement notices. Southern campaign talk belongs in the Sovann thread. Replies lock at sundown.

Reyes closed the panel.

The harbor sat gray and quiet behind him, and the masts stood in their lines. He had spent a year binding two hundred lords who hated each other into something that answered a single voice. Then he stood in a gallery at the Solstice and watched Calder strip him of every lot on the floor and put his slave consignments in front of the whole of humanity. And ridicule him for it. Who is he to judge him? 

Now half the world said the Count’s name like a prayer, and the other half drank his potions. While they resented his own faction.

His own campaign against the lords west of the divide had stalled for want of healing. There was more resistance than he expected, when he expected almost none.  

“Joder,” he said quietly, to no one.

He put the rings back on one at a time, slowly, and the groove on his knuckle burned when the gold went over it. Calder had been handed too much too fast, and somebody had to remind him he was a man and not a weather system. Not the center of the fucking universe. 

He turned in his chair to the aide waiting by the door.

“Summon my advisors,” Reyes said. “All of them. Today.”

Harold came down Hell’s Edge's main street with his knuckles split and sweat still cooling under his gambeson. Jack walked at his shoulder eating a winter apple, bored with the whole morning.

They had spent first light in the yard behind Dalen’s small keep with any lord who wanted a turn, and a good many had. Word of the exhibition had gone around the camps. Half of them had come to test the Count, and the other half had come to find out whether Elroy was a fluke.

“The one with the flail,” Jack said around the apple.

“What about him?”

“Dead inside a month. Drops his left shoulder every time he winds up. A goblin with a spear and half a brain will find it. And who uses a flail?”

“The big redhead?”

“Two weeks.” Jack took another bite. “He likes to watch his own swings.”

Harold rolled the shoulder where he’d caught the redhead’s practice blade on his pauldron. He’d crossed blades with forty-odd lords since dawn and had the same thought about most of them. A lot of the men he’d sweated beside in that yard were going to be names in a ledger by spring.

They passed under the gate, and the wind off the field found the sweat in his collar.

His guard waited on the road beyond with the horses, and Sarah’s team stood with them, clustered around Jampa. The monk had his red robes on and his arms bare to the wind, and he looked warmer than any of them. He was talking with his hands folded in front of him, and as Harold came up, the whole team let out a breath at once. Mira had both hands over her mouth.

“—so the river never fights each stone,” Jampa was saying. “It knows where it is going, and the stones learn to move. That is what my teacher told me, anyway. He also told me butter tea would cure baldness, and look at us.” He touched his shaven scalp, and Theo laughed out loud.

Harold had asked Jampa to sit with Sarah about her perk drift. See if he could do anything about the conflict with her perk drift. He couldn’t brew a fix for that part. Perk drift was resisted with a strong will. The person needed to hold a picture of who they were so hard that every new perk had to grow around it. She had to build it herself.

The other half of the problem was earning perks at all, and that half he could brew. He’d spent most of the night bent over his kit, and the vials sat in his pack now, still faintly warm. The Communion would pass whatever they earned to the rest of the team, so only one of them had to drink the various concoctions. For that one person, though, life was going to be hell.

Carter saw him coming and snapped off a salute crisp enough to slice bread. He’d been doing it all week, ever since the lords started turning up in numbers, and it grated on Harold every time. He understood it, though. Images were powerful.

“We’re ready to leave at your word, sire.” Carter pitched it to carry. “Colonel Hale and his staff rode out an hour ago, and the army’s stepping off now. The scouts have been out the last week.”

“Thank you, Centurion.” Harold dropped his own voice. “You can quit saluting me like I’m a general. Nobody’s watching.”

“Everybody’s watching, sire.” Carter’s face stayed straight, but his mouth twitched at one corner. “That’s the point.”

Balfiel came around the end of the horse line with his hands tucked into his sleeves. “Are we finally going to do something, then?” He stopped short and looked Jampa over, the robes, the bare arms, and the frost on the road around his sandals, and both eyebrows climbed. Jampa smiled back at him and gave him a quick bow.

“We are.” Harold pulled the vials out of his pack and held them up. “What do you think of these?”

Balfiel had them out of his hand before he finished asking. He turned his back, muttering in elvish, and Harold felt the old elf’s mana slide into the glass and go probing through each one. The muttering stopped, and Balfiel scoffed.

He handed them back. “Try again.”

“What’s wrong with them?” He said indignantly.

“Your binding on the third is lazy, and the first will spoil inside a week.” Balfiel sniffed. “Try again.”

Harold shook a fist under the elf’s nose. “It will not spoil in a week, and you know it. Is it so hard for you to say something is good work?”

Balfiel looked down at him from his full height. “Then do good work, boy.”

Harold snatched the vials back, shoved them into the pack, and Elroy made a strangled noise into his glove behind him.

Adeline came out of the gate with a pack over one shoulder and four Redcaps at her heels. One carried her bedroll, and another had already gone ahead to hold her horse’s head. Robin walked at her elbow telling her something that made her laugh. Robin was one of the most dangerous creatures on the continent, and she had him carrying her water skin.

Mira caught Harold’s eye over Jampa’s shoulder and threw him an excited wave. He lifted a hand back and turned to look down the road for Cassian.

He meant to keep the man close until he worked out what to do with that request. Part of him wanted to do it for no better reason than to watch Reyes Jubilee’s face when he heard. He’d sent it to Margaret to find out whether it could be done at all.

“We’re all here, sire,” Carter said. “We can leave whenever you like.”

Harold frowned at the road.

Then Cassian came around the corner of the wall on a horse every bit as tall as the brutes Fitch and Maren rode, a dun with feathered feet the size of buckets. Mors laid his ears flat and showed the other animal his teeth. Mors was still the bigger horse, but that horse was no slouch either.

The man had depths. He’d been one of the most powerful adventurers in Harold’s first timeline, and one of the hardest to bring to heel, and Harold knew next to nothing about him past the dragon and the fires in the south.

Cassian reined in beside them and nodded. “Morning, my lord. I hear we’re taking the scenic route.”

“Something like that.” Harold looked over his people. “All right, let’s go. We’ve got an errand to run before we catch the army up.”

Carter’s brow came down. “Do we have time for that before the first engagements, sire?”

Harold shrugged. “Before the first big one, yes. They’ll be fighting every day, but it’ll be warbands until the goblins pull themselves together. We’ve got about a week before anything major, and the ground for that one’s already being prepared. Hale knows what he’s doing.”

Carter looked at him a moment longer, confused. Then he stepped in close and dropped his voice. “The crafter company? They haven’t been here.”

Harold winked at him and swung up onto Mors.

Adeline brought her horse up alongside him, smiling, loose in the saddle in a way he hadn’t seen in weeks. She and Sarah were laughing about something, and from the way his sister kept glancing at him, he could guess which story.

Behind them the rest of the team was mounting up. Fitch had given them the horses yesterday, great placid beasts out of his own lines, and none of the five had sat a saddle for more than a day. Robert had both fists knotted in the mane. Jace had given up on dignity and was simply waiting for the animal to decide for itself.

“Five silver says the big one’s on his arse before the first bridge,” Elroy said.

“Ten says it’s the archer,” Jenkins said.

“I CAN HEAR YOU, AND YOU KNOW MY NAME,” Mira said.

Harold turned back to Carter. “Did Lord Brennig get off on his grail quest? He needs to claim that relic soon.”

“Left before dawn, sire. Took his household century and a century of the Knights.”

“Hm. That should be enough.”

“Lord Caswell went with him,” Carter said. “And that new lord, the one Elroy spanked around the square. Urial. Both of them brought their household troops.” He paused. “You do seem to be collecting battle-junkie lords, sire.”

Harold snorted. “That’ll be plenty, then.”

He put his heels to Mors and trotted up to the head of the column, and the stallion tossed his head at the open road.

“Let’s ride!” Harold called back. “We have a dwarven clan to talk to.”