Rise of the Horde - Chapter 682 - 681

Calla Westyn arrived at Millbridge eleven days after departing the capital, the journey taking longer than the direct distance suggested because the eastern road through the Meren valley was not available for traffic that came from the north, which meant her carriage had traveled the western route to the valley’s southern entrance and approached Millbridge from below, adding three days to the journey and giving her three days longer than she had expected to read the briefing documents a second time and think about what she was walking into.

She was a woman in her middle years, compact and precise in the way that people were precise who had spent their careers in rooms where the difference between the word you chose and the word you did not choose determined outcomes that affected people who were not in the room.

Her hair was gray at the temples in the pattern that suggested it had been arriving there for several years rather than all at once, which was the pattern that stress produced rather than age. She moved with the economy of someone who had learned that every unnecessary gesture was a word she had not intended to speak.

She arrived at the market hall in the late afternoon light and looked at the Snarling Wolf banner before she looked at anything else.

It was a professional habit, the diplomat’s instinct to read the symbols that a party chose to present itself with before reading the party itself, because symbols were chosen without the same defensive awareness that governed face-to-face communication and therefore communicated things that face-to-face communication would have controlled more carefully. She looked at the wolf for long enough to complete the assessment and then looked at the orc who stood beneath it.

Khao’khen was larger than she had expected from the campaign reports, which described him in terms of his command decisions rather than his physical presence and thereby failed to convey that the two were related.

He stood with the economy of a body that had been through the campaign in physical terms rather than administrative ones, the particular stillness of a person whose fitness was not ornamental but functional and whose stillness was therefore a form of readiness rather than relaxation.

“Senior Diplomatic Arbiter Calla Westyn,” she said, in formal Threian, and then, shifting to Orcish that was accented but accurate: “I have been told you prefer direct communication.”

The surprise that crossed Khao’khen’s expression was quickly managed. “You speak Orcish.”

“Poorly. But sincerely.” She had learned it specifically for this assignment, over the eleven days of the journey, using the linguistic documentation that the border garrison intelligence office had compiled over years of contact with orcish traders and captured personnel.

The accent was bad.

The vocabulary was adequate for the purpose.

“Sincerity is more useful than polish,” Khao’khen said.

They sat at the table that Sakh’arran had prepared in the market hall’s main room, maps of the province and the southern territories spread between them alongside the diplomatic credentials that Westyn had carried from the council.

Sakh’arran took his position at Khao’khen’s right and assumed the role that Westyn’s Orcish reduced to interpreter of nuance rather than conveyor of words.

“The council authorized me to discuss the Horde’s proposal,” Westyn began, and her delivery was the delivery of someone who had decided before she arrived that the most useful thing she could bring to the first session was absolute clarity about what she was and what she was not.

“Without the precondition of withdrawal. I want to be precise about what that authorization means and what it does not mean. It means I am authorized to have the conversation. It does not mean I am authorized to agree to anything. Agreements of this kind require council ratification, which requires the council to believe that the agreement reflects the kingdom’s legitimate interests. My job is to determine whether a ratifiable agreement is possible, not to produce one unilaterally.”

“Understood,” Khao’khen said. “My position is also constrained. I can agree to terms that reflect what the Horde came here to establish. I cannot agree to terms that leave the conditions for a future invasion intact.”

“The invasion,” Westyn said. The word was not a challenge. It was a test of how the word landed.

“The campaign that Colonel Gresham’s predecessor conducted in the southern territories. The burning of settlements. The killing of non-combatant orcish population. The policy of clearing the southern territories for human settlement expansion.” Khao’khen said it without heat, the way a commander described the campaign that had made another campaign necessary. “That is what produced this war. The terms of the settlement must make a repetition of it impossible. If the kingdom is not willing to agree to that, no other term matters.”

Westyn was quiet for a moment with the quality of quiet that indicated she was deciding how much honesty this first session could support.

“The campaign that preceded this war,” she said carefully, “was authorized by a council composition that no longer exists. The current council’s disposition toward the southern territories policy is not a matter of official record in a form that I am authorized to characterize. Unofficially: the members of the current council who voted for the campaign that produced this war are no longer the majority. The campaign was expensive, produced significant civilian harm, and did not achieve its stated objective because the population it was intended to clear organized itself into the force that is currently sitting in this market hall.”

“Organized itself under this banner,” Khao’khen said, looking at the wolf where it stood in the corner of the hall.

“Under that banner,” Westyn agreed. “Yes.”

* * * * *

The first session lasted four hours and produced no agreement, which was expected, and produced the map of the distance between the two positions, which was what first sessions were for.

Khao’khen’s position was the Horde’s original proposal, unchanged in its substance if slightly evolved in the precision of its language after the campaign’s months of engagement with the Threian legal and diplomatic framework that Sakh’arran had been studying.

Formal acknowledgment of orcish self-determination in the southern territories. Withdrawal of Threian military forces from the frontier zone south of Valdenmarch. A formal treaty establishing the terms of contact and the mechanisms for resolving disputes.

Westyn’s position was that the council could potentially acknowledge orcish governance of the territories the Horde currently administered. Could potentially agree to a revised frontier line.

Could not agree to a treaty that characterized the previous campaign as an invasion, because that characterization would create a legal basis for reparations claims that the kingdom’s legal framework could not absorb and that the council’s political composition could not ratify.

The word invasion was the distance.

At the session’s end, when the maps had been rolled and the formal diplomatic language had been suspended for the evening, Westyn looked at Khao’khen with the honest directness of a person who had decided that the performance of diplomacy was less useful to this particular negotiation than the substance of it.

“It was an invasion,” she said.

“Yes,” Khao’khen said. “It was.”

“I cannot put that word in a treaty. Not yet. But I can tell you that the council members who voted for that campaign would not win the same vote today. What requires time is the formal record catching up to the political reality. The political reality has already moved.”

“How much time?”

“Less than you are prepared to give me,” she said, “and more than you would like.”

He looked at her for a long moment with the assessment of a commander evaluating a source of intelligence, not for what it was saying but for whether it was the kind of source that said what it meant.

He believed she meant it.

“We will meet again tomorrow,” he said.

“Yes,” Westyn said. “We will.”

She left the market hall as the valley’s evening light came in from the west, the river turning gold beyond the dock windows, the Snarling Wolf behind her in the corner of the hall watching the room with the same expression it had carried from Yohan to this table in this valley town in a kingdom that was beginning, very slowly and at considerable cost, to reckon with what it had done and what it was still doing.