"Then why didn't you say so?"
Maisaak stared at him as if he were simple. "Do I really have to explain it to you?"
It hit him like a fist in the chest, stealing his breath and making his entire body sag.
"You want them to fail. You'd send ten thousand soldiers to die if it would rid you of the Onjaefs."
"I don't like your tone," Maisaak said, his expression hardening. "And to be honest with you, it wouldn't matter to me if they succeeded or failed. If her idea works, Jenoe takes back Deraqor, and he can spend the rest of his days defending it from Fal'Borna raiders. If they fail, Jenoe will die, or at best return here disgraced and broken. Either way I'd be rid of him."
"The sovereign will never allow this."
Maisaak laughed. "You have much to learn about House Kasatha. They're fools, the whole lot of them. I suppose at some point in the past they must have been somewhat more, or they'd never have managed to become Stelpana's ruling family, but Joska was greedy and small-minded and ambitious to a fault, and Ankyr is no better. If I tell him the invasion is a hopeless waste of men, then yes, he'll reject the idea. But if I tell him about this plague, and the opportunity it presents, and if I remind him of the wealth of the Horn and the lands around Deraqor, he'll give his approval. He might even send us gold to help pay for the war."
"You want to be rid of them that badly?" Enly asked, appalled by what he was hearing.
"I wouldn't expect you to understand. You're so besotted with the girl that you don't see the Onjaefs for what they are."
There was nothing Enly could do here. "I'll talk Tirnya out of it," he said, starting for the door. "I don't care if you give me a direct order never to speak to her again."
Maisaak laughed. "No wonder you couldn't keep her in your bed. You don't understand that girl at all. You could no more talk her out of this than you could teach her to fly. She's made up her mind, and the more you try to dissuade her, the more determined she'll be to prove you wrong."
Enly wanted desperately to fire back a retort, something that would silence his father and wipe that smirk off his face. But he could think of nothing to say, and in the end he simply left the chamber.
Chapter 13
In the days following her audience with His Lordship, Tirnya's mind was so filled with thoughts of taking back Deraqor and the Horn that she could barely sleep or eat. Her wounds continued to heal, and five days after meeting with Maisaak, she began to train with her men once more. She worked them hard-so hard that her lead riders seemed puzzled. Oliban went so far as to ask her if the men had angered her in some way. She assured him that they hadn't.
"I just want them ready," she said.
Oliban had given her an odd look. "Ready for what?"
"For anything. Look around you, Oliban. I'm not the only commander pushing her soldiers."
This much she knew was true. Her father wasn't as eager to fight the Fal'Borna as she was, but he was warming to the idea. To her surprise, Stri Balkett hadn't dismissed the notion out of hand.
"It could work," he said over dinner in the Onjaef house two nights after the audience. "But I'm not convinced the sovereign will allow it."
Jenoe also remained skeptical about their chances of convincing the sovereign. Still, both Stri and Tirnya's father were pushing their men harder than they had in years, just in case.
Aside from Stri, Tirnya and Jenoe had told no one about their conversation with the lord governor and lord heir. Even if Maisaak hadn't ordered them to keep the matter to themselves, they knew better than to discuss the invasion with anyone. If they were to succeed in this venture, they would have to take the white-hairs utterly by surprise.
Tirnya knew, though, that even surprise would not be enough to overcome Qirsi magic, and for days after their audience with Maisaak, she racked her brain, trying to develop a workable strategy for their attack. She wondered, if the lord governor had known how formless her plans were for this invasion, whether he would even have considered her proposal. She had, of course, never led an invasion before; neither had her father, though he did have far more battle experience than she. In the first several days after the audience, however, Tirnya was afraid to admit even to Jenoe how formless her plans were. Surely, she thought, with a little time she would come up with something. She avoided him, and she wasn't terribly subtle about it, though if Jenoe noticed he kept his thoughts to himself. Finally, after several days of trying to think of a way to defeat the white-hairs and coming up with nothing, of feeling overwhelmed and fearing that the audience had been a terrible mistake, she raised the matter over the evening meal at home.
"How does one plan something like this?" Tirnya asked abruptly as her father poured her a cup of dark wine. "I wouldn't even know where to begin."
Jenoe grinned. "I was wondering when you'd ask me."
She felt her face redden. "You knew? And you didn't say anything to me?"
"It seemed clear that you didn't want to talk to me about it, at least not yet.”
She stared at the roasted meat and boiled greens that sat in front of her. "I thought you'd think me foolish for having suggested an attack without having any strategy for one."
He shook his head and took a sip of wine. "If you, or any commander your age, had come up with a workable plan on your own I would have been very much surprised." He eyed her over the rim of his cup. "This isn't going to be easy."
"I know that."
Jenoe nodded. "Good."
"So," she said, relieved to be talking about it. "How do we begin?"
"You start with your soldiers," Jenoe answered, sounding so calm that it reassured her. "Always. How many? How do you get them where they need to be? How do you arm them and clothe them and feed them and shelter them?"
She nodded. It made perfect sense. "Right. Of course."
He raised an eyebrow. "So? How many?"
Tirnya ran a hand through her hair. "Well, you said the other day it would take every soldier under your command, and then some."
"Yes, I did. But I'm asking you what you think."
"I don't know, Father. We'll need far more men to take the city than they'll need to defend it."
"True. We'll probably need siege engines as well, and they'll need to be assembled quickly. The longer we take to build them, the more opportunities the white-hair shapers will have to destroy them."
"Will siege engines even work against sorcerers?"
Jenoe tipped his head to the side, considering this. "The sovereignties had some success with them during the Blood Wars, though mostly in the early years." A grim smile touched his face and was gone. "Later on, we were usually the ones defending against sieges rather than the other way around."
Tirnya thought about it briefly and then shook her head. "Siege engines won't work," she said. "They're too predictable, too slow, too much like what Eandi armies have done in the past. We need to try things that have never been done before. That's the only way we can win."
Her father grinned. "Now you sound like a commander. What do you have in mind?"
"Nothing yet," Tirnya said. "But we'll come up with something. The two of us, together."
Jenoe nodded. "All right."
They traded ideas for the rest of that evening, coming up with little that might actually work against the Qirsi, but irritating Zira, who would have liked to enjoy what she referred to repeatedly as "a normal conversation."
The following day, as Tirnya made her way to the training grounds, she found her path blocked by Enly, whom she also had been avoiding, and who clearly had been waiting for her.