Chapter 79:Blame Across the Table

"We’ve confirmed more than ten Dark Beasts roaming the western border region. Only this one, as far as we can tell, actually tried to push through the villages toward the capital."

Lucas laid out the state of the empire’s western frontier piece by piece, and none of it painted a picture of a border that was holding.

By his report, at least thirteen villages inside imperial territory had already suffered attacks from Dark Beasts slipping out of the Calamity Forest without warning. Casualties from those attacks had climbed to nearly three thousand. The Achor Division, the force responsible for guarding the smaller settlements along that stretch of border, had lost close to seventy percent of its strength in the fighting.

Achor itself, Lucas reminded them, was a joint special division drawn from factions across all Seven Pillar families, and its numbers, despite the losses, were still being reinforced even now.

Without it, he said plainly, the toll among the villagers would almost certainly have been far worse. Varka had already dispatched a detachment of his own personal imperial guard to secure the most exposed stretches of that border.

The report alone was enough to send a current of shock through the entire hall. Almost no one gathered here tonight had known anything about an incident this severe, this many lives already lost.

It wasn’t unheard of for Dark Beasts to appear near the western border. What was unheard of was this. Ordinarily, they did little more than prowl the treeline at the forest’s edge, never once stepping past it toward open country.

Hearing what a mere handful of them had managed to do once they finally crossed that line left more than a few people in the room visibly shaken.

"Missing, you said? Your own soldiers, simply gone? Are you certain that report is correct?"

Pentaron, Patriarch of House Austur, cut in before anyone else could speak, his usual easy manner gone entirely, replaced by something far more severe.

By Pentaron’s own reckoning, Achor’s combined strength was considerable, and more than that, the troops each Pillar family sent into it were never their lesser soldiers. House Austur alone, he said, had committed nearly fifty elite knights and two hundred regular soldiers to that division specifically.

It was common practice, too, for the Seven Pillars to place their own children, or gifted members of branch families, at the head of those units, both to lead and to let them prove themselves and build their names.

A seventy percent loss, against forces built that way, wasn’t the kind of number any of the Pillar houses could absorb without feeling it. Even with the tens or hundreds of thousands of troops each great house could field to cover the gap in raw numbers, losing an elite soldier, a true talent, was never simple to replace, not even for houses that size.

For a noble family outside the Seven Pillars, even one that had climbed as high as Archduke, a loss like that could be devastating. Talent of that caliber was never easy to find twice.

"The empire offers its deepest condolences, and we will answer for this fully."

Lucas said it carefully, making clear that the crown had never wanted this outcome, and that by the empire’s own law, the Achor Division answered directly to the throne. Whatever responsibility came from losing troops lent to it fell, ultimately, on Varka himself.

Varka understood that as well as anyone, which was why he’d already had the next step prepared. At his signal, soldiers began moving through the hall, carrying sheaves of paper toward each of the Seven Pillar families first, then, soon after, toward every noble house ranked from Duke down to Baron.

Each sheet listed names, numbers of the dead and missing, and which noble house or branch family they belonged to.

A ripple of shock passed through the hall as people began to read. More than a few found names they recognized among the missing.

It became clear, reading the timing of it, that Varka had deliberately held back the full scope of what had happened, choosing to reveal it all at once, here, where he could fold the grim news directly into a discussion of what to do about it.

For most of the family heads at that table, this was the first real information they’d received in some time. Once a unit joined Achor’s ranks, word in and out of that division had always run thin.

Each of the Seven Pillar families could now see, in black and white, exactly who from their own house had vanished.

It was Galen who moved first, his fist coming down on the table hard enough to make the papers jump.

The sheet in front of him made for grim reading. House Versys, it turned out, had taken one of the heaviest losses of any Pillar family tonight.

More than a hundred of his elite archers were listed as missing, and his regular infantry had been all but wiped out. By Galen’s own count, his house alone accounted for something close to a fifth of the entire seventy percent lost across the whole division.

Then his eyes caught something else, and whatever grim satisfaction he might have taken in confirming his own losses curdled instantly into something uglier. One house on that list had suffered almost no casualties at all. House Sarnel.

"Why does House Sarnel show almost nothing on this list? Did they simply vanish from their posts, and that’s how they managed to stay alive?"

Every eye at the table, and plenty beyond it, turned toward House Sarnel at once.

On paper, their contribution to the Achor Division had been substantial, Jeanne herself among the officers, alongside several members of their branch families, together making up one of the division’s larger contingents.

And yet the sheet in front of them showed almost no losses at all.

Ever since House Faeren’s long-vacant seat had left a gap in the western border’s defense, it had fallen largely to House Sarnel and House Melampus to fill it, sending more soldiers there than most other houses.

That made the numbers in front of them stranger still, and the whispers of envy around the table grew sharper by the second, nobles muttering to each other, wondering aloud how such a thing was even possible.

"Patriarch Galen, mind your words. Not one member of House Sarnel has ever disregarded an imperial order, or their duty."

The reply came from Elder Meron, seated at Cassius’s side.

Neither Meron nor anyone else from House Sarnel was willing to let that accusation stand unanswered. But the damage was already spreading, the room’s temper rising with every passing second.

Meron drew a slow breath before continuing, choosing to answer the room rather than simply Galen.

House Sarnel’s unit had suffered so few losses, he explained, because Jeanne’s company had split off from Achor’s main force partway through the campaign, with the direct approval of Achor’s own imperial commander.

Their purpose had been to run down a cluster of Dark Beasts that had scattered and threatened to strike several outlying settlements before the main force could respond.

Jeanne’s group had succeeded. Three villages had been saved, and the Dark Beast they’d pursued had been driven off entirely.

The trouble, Meron continued, had come from elsewhere. A far larger concentration of Dark Beasts had surfaced somewhere else along the line, in numbers no single house, nor the division’s own imperial commander, had been able to contain in time.

"That’s a convenient excuse," Galen snapped, clearly unwilling to let the matter rest there. "And yet none of you managed to kill the very Dark Beast that nearly broke through to this city, did you?"

Meron’s gaze didn’t waver.

"A convenient excuse? Are you forgetting, Patriarch Galen, that it was your own archers who let that Dusk Feather slip through their line to begin with, a failure of your own men’s duty, not ours? We were fortunate that Lord Rhaiven and Princess Helia happened to spot it flying toward Peria and brought it down themselves. Without them, this city might already have paid the price for your division’s mistake."

It was a pointed blow, and it landed. Whatever Galen had meant to say next died somewhere in his throat, his jaw working uselessly for a moment before he fell silent entirely.

Buried inside that exchange, almost too neatly, sat a quiet implication: that Helia’s own people seemed to have arrived at exactly the right place, at exactly the right time, to be the ones who’d caught that creature.

While the two houses traded blame back and forth, Varka’s attention had already drifted elsewhere, fixed on Evalia, who in turn hadn’t once looked away from the caged Dusk Feather.

"Enough, all of you." Varka’s voice cut clean through the noise.

"It seems our Matriarch from House Melampus has something that might actually bring us together on this, given how well her house understands the nature of these creatures."