Grand Duke Fernandez traveled in overwhelming splendor, with tens of thousands of troops clearing the road and guarding his person. He had learned from the crossbow attack and would never again offer the enemy so easy a chance to kill him. Saint Miller had not yet been conquered, but he was already appointing officials and nobles to govern each recovered district. The journey was, at least publicly, a declaration of political authority.

On the surface, that was all it was. A huge army meant no one would dare disturb him. Fernandez rode in a great open carriage drawn by eight horses and talked warmly with nobles who supported him.

“I hear Augusta’s commander is a lowborn man called Simon?”

“Yes. A free commoner from Viscount Derek’s family lands. He earned a little merit and became an officer. The Viscount is trapped in Birch Fort, so nearby forces should be Simon’s.”

Fernandez reclined against the carriage's soft cushions while the other nobles quietly shifted aside to give him more room. “Courage without strategy. Simon has caused me some trouble, but he is still a bird trapped in a cage. However desperately he beats his wings, he cannot escape. Noble blood carries meaning. A lowborn man's momentary luck cannot overturn it.”

Raised within a system that treated bloodline as destiny, Fernandez despised Simon's common birth. Yet he was not entirely foolish. The inspection was more than a display of authority: his carriage crossed the armies' tacit boundary, and Locke cavalry predictably followed.

Even all Augusta’s forces together could not defeat this enormous army. Fernandez rose to the carriage platform beneath the holy-feather banner and saw scattered dark specks in the distance.

“Drive away those flies. I will camp here today.”

The nobles blanched. “Your Grace, this is the front line. It is dangerous.”

“This is Holy Cross land. I am Grand Duke of Holy Light. There is no place where I cannot stop.”

His will was absolute. The nobles could only arrange the camp and its defenses with pounding hearts. They had agreed to an inspection, not to sleeping on the front line. Had they known Fernandez intended anything so reckless, none would have joined him. Count Connor might have possessed enough authority to restrain the willful Grand Duke. No one present did.

Fernandez’s bold act drew strong Locke reaction. Soon a Locke army fortified a nearby height. Holy Cross troops tried to drive it away and were punished badly. Fernandez held his main force still, waiting for the enemy to gather.

Some thought he intended to force a decisive battle and crush the Locke resistance in one stroke. Yet the roughly fifty thousand Holy Cross troops present might still fail against the enemy in a direct clash. If Fernandez brought in more reinforcements, any sensible Locke commander would simply withdraw. When the Locke army grew to roughly twenty thousand men—many of them recruits with only a few months of training—it established a firm position and began issuing challenge after challenge.

After several days of waiting, the Holy Cross troops grew restless and petitioned for battle. From a hastily erected tower, Fernandez watched Simon ride out beneath a noble's square banner and openly taunt the camp. Displeasure tightened the Grand Duke's face. “Where are my knights?”

Nobles sent challengers. Simon unhorsed three in succession, and Locke cheers darkened Fernandez’s face. Then a thousand-man Holy Cross unit was sent; Locke answered with an equal force, and the result was ugly.

“Brutes. Every one of them,” Fernandez cursed. No one dared breathe. He mastered himself and forced a smile.

“Simon’s low birth makes him ignorant of strategy. Gathering twenty thousand men looks impressive, but are there Locke troops left nearby? They have likely dragged in every militia. One battle can break them, and all land east of Pran will be mine.”

No one dared ask whether he was sure he could defeat them. Since entering Saint Miller, the Holy Cross had won few small battles without numerical advantage. One-to-one was not reassuring, especially with Simon looking fierce. Still, Fernandez had recovered land through sound overall decisions, and the nobles listened.

Knowing that he could not defeat the enemy with confidence, Fernandez shut himself inside the camp and refused every provocation. The Locke men challenged throughout the day, then beat gongs and drums through the night, denying the entire Holy Cross camp any real rest. Fernandez endured it all. He was waiting to verify the intelligence supplied by his ally—the secret weapon Count Lovett had placed in his hands.

Scouts returned with excellent news. “Good. Count Lovett did not deceive me.” Fernandez had cautiously verified it. With Locke forces gathered before him, their grain stores must be empty. This was the time to strike.

Fernandez took care not to reveal his intention. The granary raid required only one or two thousand men, all lightly equipped private soldiers from noble households and led by knights he personally trusted. Any force of that size would eventually be detected as it moved through hostile territory, but it only needed to reach the target first. Under a hazy moon, a local noble from Saint Miller guided two thousand men around the Locke camp. The route lay almost completely unguarded.

After a full day of rapid marching, they reached the target: a granary for which the southern nobles themselves were responsible. The transaction behind the raid needed no explanation. On paper, the South would suffer catastrophic losses.

When the Holy Cross troops stormed the compound, they found only a crooked collection of the old, the weak, the sick, and the disabled. Their weapons and armor were complete enough to make them resemble real soldiers from a distance, but the granary's apparently respectable defenses tore like paper at the first touch. The commander drove his men inside, scattered the guards, and immediately set fire to the stores. By remarkable coincidence, a large stock of oil and rendered fat waited among the grain to help the blaze spread.

The attack had never been the difficult part. The return journey would be. Even the slowest Locke commander must have reacted by now, and the fighting strength already displayed by Derek's men promised a brutal road home. Grain and oil fed a towering blaze that painted half the sky red. On a nearby hill, Derek watched the performance through a monocular assembled from carefully ground crystal. Glass was unavailable, but crystal was not; the true expense had been the craftsman's labor and the countless ruined lenses required to produce a usable instrument. The finished device magnified roughly six times, enough that nothing inside the granary escaped Derek's eye.

Handing it to eager Verut, he sneered, “They truly went to great lengths. The performance is convincing.”

It was more than convincing. No later investigation would uncover an obvious flaw. The dead were genuine, and the grain consumed by the fire was real. The southern nobles had sacrificed enough wealth to bankrupt a count in an instant. The deception worked precisely because its cost was genuine—they had thrown away their own child to bait the wolf. Verut, witnessing such a ruthless political method for the first time, felt a new door opening in his understanding of the world.

As the Holy Cross force began withdrawing, Derek took back the glass. “Stop thinking. Go kill these rats. Perform well, and if I have another someday, it will be yours.”

Verut leapt at the promise; the device tempted him more than a knight’s fief. Derek sent him with only a small force. The scene had to look real.

The southern nobles and Fernandez had built a stage upon which they meant to deceive Derek. They could hardly complain when he forced his way into the play and rewrote the ending. The returning two thousand did not even qualify as the true prey. At best, they were an appetizer before the main performance.

When the ragged survivors reached the Holy Cross camp, Fernandez laughed. Two thousand elite soldiers meant little; he could lose ten times that number. What mattered was the enemy's food. Shortage would weaken the Locke army and erode its morale over time.

He challenged Locke for the first time and was punished again, but he did not mind. “What use is brute courage? Noble blood proves itself at times like this.” He saw his holy-feather banner over Saint Miller and believed the Fernandez name would rule its people forever.

The nobles' praise became increasingly extravagant. They hailed the exalted blood of House Bruno and declared that a first-time commander had already secured a place in the histories of war. Some spoke of restoring the glory of the Holy Cross Kingdom in a single campaign, then carrying the offensive into Locke's Northern Province. As Fernandez's vassals, they would all drink from whatever spoils overflowed his table. Many sincerely believed every word. Beneath the appearance of victory, no discordant voice survived.

Fernandez allowed the praise to lift him, though a fragment of caution remained. “We can already see the first light of victory. Keep the prey before us under close watch. When my arrow finally arrives, it will be the Locke army's death.”

For three days Locke troops seemed crazed, challenging constantly and attacking forts at night. The more numerous Holy Cross troops hid, but morale rose because everyone believed the enemy was nearing starvation.

On the fourth night, amid the familiar intermittent thunder of war drums, scouts found traces suggesting that Locke soldiers had been slipping away. The next morning, the cooking smoke above the enemy camp had thinned, while far fewer men appeared to issue challenges. Fernandez abruptly remembered the story of how Count Connor had once been deceived by enemy cooking fires.

“Have the enemy run?” he asked. “Probe and see whether they remain.”