A Time of Tigers - From Peasant to Emperor-Chapter 821: The Masked General’s Response - Part 1

As it happened, their building was done in quiet. Halfway up the hill was where Oliver stopped. They were now well within range of the walls. They could have sprinted up to them if they wished to – though they'd have to eat at least one volley of arrows as payment.

As they worked, periodically, Nila would send one of her arcing shots up over the wall. She killed another two men like that before the Macalister men were forced to withdraw from the wall entirely.

"That will do," Oliver said eventually. He'd only used half of his shields and stakes. The rest remained in a pile, untouched, at the bottom of the hill.

"You don't wish to go all the way, Captain?" A soldier asked, confused. He must have already been seeing the battle's conclusion in his head, but Oliver knew that it wouldn't be that simple. It was the same situation as Volguard's riddle of the captured castles – there was a point where taking too much, whether it be space, lives, or castles, worked against a strategist.

Oliver was acutely aware of that fact.

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"Not today," Oliver replied. His work ended there, and he returned to camp, though not without leaving a few torches burning near their fortifications, to keep a good solid eye on them.

That night would be the first night that Oliver positioned a guard of men to wait at the bottom of the kill, with bows and arrows at the ready for any men that might dare to affect their building.

The next morning was a particularly cold one. The snow hadn't come, and the world was even more frozen because of it. The soft layer of top snow had frozen into something harder and crunchier. Even the sun seemed reluctant to show its face in such dire temperatures.

A man's breath fogged in front of his masked face as he looked out over a wall, reviewing the moves of his enemy from the day before.

"What do you make of it, General?" A man asked – one of his trusted attendants. He had only been allowed to bring three with him. His only true allies left in all the world.

The man smiled a broad smile. The mask only covered the upper half of his face, and his thick scared lips were clearly visible. The squareness of his chin made the deepness of his voice less surprising. "Beautiful," the General replied. "I very much feel like I am playing Battle."

"Unexpected, for the son of a Sword," the attendant remarked.

"Most unexpected indeed," the General replied.

"The men are… Well, as they have been. They're downright mutinous. They find it insulting that we've allowed the enemy so close, despite being so numerically superior," the attendant said.

The General took that information well. It didn't make his smile twitch in the slightest. He was thinly dressed for such cold weather, a fact that would entertain those in the Royal Capital. There'd always been mention that General Talon was a man with a frozen heart – this would only be further evidence of that fact.

The attendant, however, knew differently. Frozen he might appear to those that did not know him well, but that was a mistaken perception. General Talon was a particularly passionate man, deep down, though it was rare that he revealed such passions. For him to be smiling – and first thing in the morning at that – was a moment of particular import.

The attendant drank his master's smile in, determined to savour it, for it came few times enough. Like a solar eclipse or a shooting star, it was a thing of rare and singular beauty.

"And what do you think, Gadar? Do you perceive a mistake in my actions?" General Talon asked. With that deep voice of his, his question sounded particularly threatening. Had he asked it of a normal man, he would have been shaken, fearing that he'd overstepped. The attendant did not make that mistake, he knew General Talon was more straightforward than that.

"I do not, my Lord," the attendant replied. "Not a mistake… Though I do perceive, perhaps, a hesitation."

"Oh?" Talon said, turning his head, the ornate leather mask over his eyes and nose creaking from the motion. "That is a rare thing for you to accuse me of, Gadar. It sounds almost as if you suppose I'm abandoning my duty."

"Not abandoning it, my Lord, but perhaps enjoying it more than you ought to," the attendant replied. It was a daring thing to say to one's superior officer, but Gadar had been with Talon for long enough that he trusted the General would not take it the wrong way.

"Of course, you're right," the General admitted easily. The wave of tension that the man had allowed to build crashed away all at once. General Talon's conversation was much like his strategy, in that sense – the way he was so easily able to make concessions, even after having allowed such extraordinary pressure to build. "But what else can I do, with such a treat in front of me?"

"He really might appear in front of you, if you allow him free rein much longer," the attendant warned. "These seemingly innocuous things that he has been doing – having those riders barrel around the hill three times a day, harassing us with minor assaults, and now building these barricades, they're all bound to build to something. A fact, my Lord, that you taught me."

"Indeed," General Talon said. "Everything on the battlefield holds significance. Everything builds towards victory. Something as simple as a soldier falling into the snow can become the very snowball that ensues a crushing defeat, providing it has something else of a similar nature to lend it weight. Dominus' son seems to understand those qualities.

Or perhaps, he is merely imitating his understanding of them. Either way, the boy is creating quite a bind."

"That victory on the first day, over the cavalrymen…" The attendant said. "That was our soldier falling into the snow, wasn't it?"

"Indeed it was. Look at what he has been able to build from it. Admirable," General Talon said.