The cups and plates clattered violently across the oak, several of them skittering off the edge and shattering against the floorboards. The map that spanned the territory from the Burdos River near the capital all the way to the southern banks of the Allendino, had taken months of meticulous drafting to complete, was spread through the wood. It took only a single moment of fury to ruin it.

Wine from three overturned chalices bled across the parchment, spreading like a dark, red river over the lines that made hills, castles and rivers.

Sorza would come to rue the loss of one of his only reliable charts later, but in the heat of the moment, he wouldn’t have cared if the very earth beneath his boots had split open to swallow them all.

He had been conned.

The Habadian Prince had promised him vengeance on a silver platter, but all Sorza had received was the bill for a service never rendered. Now, the Fox of Yarzat was coming to collect that debt with spears. Once, there had been five princes entangled in this mess, four, if one didn’t count the bastard , and now only two remained standing.

Unfortunately, the one who was supposed to be Sorza’s shield seemed to have stuffed his ears with wax.

"Is your prince a mole? Has he burrowed into the mud of Malshut and forgotten the sun?" Sorza thundered, his voice echoing off the stone walls.

He was directed his rage at Lord Domiek, a man sworn to Prince Shaaza of Sharjaan, he had been marching with them for months, but his presence was so small that one could forget he was even there.

He was always silent, eerily so, his face a mask of eternal boredom. No matter the provocation, the man rarely moved a muscle, save for his lips when he deigned to release the meager, clipped words he favored or when he scratched the clean shaven side of his face, sometimes so peristently that he drew blood.

"His Grace remains committed to the siege of Malshut," Domiek replied. His pale red cloak was gathered like a cocoon around his legs; even in the heat of a war room, the lord seemed obsessed with keeping his hem from touching the muck.

"Just as he has been for the last three moons! Bordering on four!" Sorza paced the length of the ruined table, his shadow dancing wildly in the torchlight. "Is there gold sprouting beneath his boots that he dares not lift a foot? Were he to link his host with mine, we could march against that Peasant Bastard in force and cut him out of his own saddle. Instead, he holes up until he grows mold, while the Fox laughs his whiskers off on the other side of the border.

Laughing at how easily we hand him the victory.And how foolish your prince is. Tell me, is he in league with Yarzat? Is this a ploy to watch me fall?"

Domiek gave a slow, rhythmic shrug. The white feather emblazoned on his chest remained as pristine as the prince’s cold rage.

"I am not privy to the inner clockwork of His Grace’s wishes," Domiek said, his eyes fluttering with the lazy intensity of a butterfly. "If he is truly allied with the Prince of Yarzat, he has made no mention of it to me. Perhaps you would like me to pen a letter? We were stewards to the Royal House once, before we were granted lands of our own. Perhaps a touch of that old, stifling tradition is the key to opening the doors that currently stay closed."

If it was a jest, Sorza found it entirely unamusing. He felt the urge to reach across the table and throttle the boredom right out of the man.

"We have sent three letters already," Sorza spat, turning his head to clear the bile from his mouth down onto the wet dirt. "That bastard Shaaza is more than capable of ignoring a dozen more, assuming he even bothers to break the seals. He sits there playing at a siege while the Fox gathers the Bull and the Hounds to my front. Does he think Malshut is the heart of the world? If I fall, he is the next meal on the plate."

Domiek smoothed a wrinkle in his sleeve "Perhaps His Grace believes that if you are the one to break the Fox’s teeth, the meal will be much easier for him to swallow later. A wolf prefers a carcass that has already stopped struggling, after all."

Sorza’s cheeks went up in distate "I am no carcass. And if I am to be a meal, I will ensure the Fox chokes on my bones before your master ever gets a taste."

"A jest, your Grace. Merely a jest," Domiek murmured, though his eyes remained as cold as the wine-soaked vellum.

"Perhaps instead of exchanging jests, we could focus on making one of our enemy," Lord Mastro of Nonium barked. His voice was like grinding stones, and his face was a map of fury. He had watched the Fox’s riders turn his orchards to charcoal and his villages to ash, and the servility that usually greased the wheels of the Prince had long since evaporated from the Dip of Apurvio.

Mastro turned to Sorza, his gaze hard. "If your Grace could bother to lend an ear outside these silk walls, he would hear the shouts of six hundred Habadian knights calling for blood. And if he were to listen closer, he would hear his own lords doing the same. We outnumber the Fox. We have the steel to claim a victory today, yet your Grace decides to play for time, waiting for the Prince of Sharjaan who is so craven he won’t leave his bed unless it’s for a feast."

Domiek didn’t so much as blink at the insult to his master. He simply watched the spit fly from Mastro’s lips with the detached interest of a man watching rain hit a window.

"The Kakunian rebels have joined our enemy," Mastro continued, his fist thudding against the table. "And still, we hold the advantage in numbers. But if we wait another month? Who knows? Perhaps the Romelians will march south too, and we shall find ourselves facing the Boy with the Imperial Crown alongside the Bull and the Falcon."

A chorus of ayes and sharp nods rippled through the tent. Lord Cregan of Apulio, a man who had lost everything but the clothes on his back and the sword at his hip in this war, stood tall beside his brother Dary and his nephew Nonning. If Nonium had been scorched, Apulio had been erased, as it were the first to suffer under the Hounds’ torches.

"We dilly-dally any longer and the winter will be upon us," Cregan growled. "We’ll be starving in the snow while the Fox stays fat in our granaries. We need our reprieve. We need it now.Already by store are empty and I’ll face famine. If you will not act , I will lose all hope in this campaign and go home. To the field I say!"

"To the field! To the Fox before the snow!" shouted Donald, Lord of Rileia.

His fiefdom was the only one untouched, nestled safely east of the Zauern River where the Oizenian border bled into the Dominion of Sharjaan.And yet he was the loudest of them all.

The tent became a cauldron of noise, a thunderous clamor for a decisive strike. They were proud men, who were made fun of for an entire war. They looked at Sorza, waiting for the command to unleash their horse and spears upon the enemy.

They did not know that the snow, the very thing they dreaded, was exactly what their Prince was praying for.

He could gladly have the war end like this.

Sorza opened his mouth, the practiced, non-committal syllables of a career diplomat already forming on his tongue. But the air in the tent was suddenly severed by the frantic rasp of heavy canvas being thrown aside.

A man burst into the command center, his breath coming in ragged, whistling gasps. He was clad in the livery of the Oizenian household guard, the Golden Sun emblazoned upon his breastplate.

The messenger didn’t wait for leave to speak. He dropped to one knee.

"Your Grace," the man panted. "Outside the southern perimeter... a rider has arrived. He comes under a peace banner and bears the Black Falcon . He claims to be an envoy of the prince."

The cacophony of the lords, the demands for blood, the shouts for winter, the insults to the Sharijaan, died a death so sudden it was as if a blade had been drawn across the throat of the room. Every head turned toward the tent flap looking at the man.

Sorza felt his heart stop, as it stalled in his chest, a cold, leaden weight that made his ribs ache.

But the silence did not linger long.

"What in the Hells does the Fox want now?" Lord Mastro roared, his hand white-knuckled on the back of his chair as he rose. "He’s sent a crow to pick at our scabs and now send word?"

"An accord!" shouted another from the rear of the tent, his voice high and strained. "It must be an accord for battle! He’s naming the field! He’s tired of the mud and the waiting, just as we are!I say we give it to him’’

"Or a truce," a younger voice suggested ’’He he seeks a way to fly home without losing his head!"

"A truce?" Cregan spat, his face reddening. "The Fox doesn’t offer truces to men whose lands he’s turned to cinder! He’s here to gloat! He’s here to mock us while we sit on our hands!"

The speculation spiraled, each man projecting his own fears and desires onto the unseen rider.

Sorza looked and heard them all, and did the only thing he could , despair.

Of all times this was the one the Peasant bastard had chosen.