What's wrong with me?

Raina woke up with a start. She was not in the tub. She was in a bed. Or more specifically, a mattress on the floor. And she was naked under the sheets.

The last thing she remembered was sitting in a tub with Willy. Her ankle still throbbed but it also felt strange. She checked. Someone had bound it.

She looked around. She was in a tent. A lantern illuminated the space but she could tell it was light outside. She looked around for clothes but saw none. She covered herself in a sheet and went looking.

She didn't go far. Two tent flaps later she found Willy, going through a platter of sausages and opening scrolls. Her uncle, Willy's brother and cousins, the boy king, and half a dozen Lamanbhurg bannermen breakfasted with him.

Uncle Sylar glanced once at a sheet-covered Raina and turned his face away. The other men did their best not to ogle as well. Only Willy looked at her directly. He smiled and Raina shivered. "You're up."

Raina could only nod. Then she found herself blushing. "Just in time," Willy said, nodding at a servant who had just entered the tent.

The man was carrying one of Raina's chests. She scurried back from whence she'd come, the man following behind. He set the chest down, bowed, and left. Raina rifled through for something decent to wear. Once properly dressed, she returned to the table.

The men said polite hellos. A servant pulled a chair for Raina. It was a little too far from Willy and that annoyed her for some reason. What's wrong with me?

But she got out of her head when a platter of sausages and eggs was set in front of her. The sausages were glistening from the frying pan and Raina felt her hunger in its full intensity as the smell wafted into her nose. She dug in.

The men mostly ignored her. They were too busy discussing their next moves and what surrender terms to offer Reendeni lords in the area. After eating, Raina said her goodbyes and left.

She had 12,000 prisoners to see to. Willy wanted her to assess how much each of them could be ransomed for. It was a job that would take weeks but it was important to release prisoners whose families were too poor to pay anything appreciable as soon as possible instead of wasting valuable resources feeding, housing, and guarding them.

Raina had the prisoners swear oaths to never fight her people again, oaths she didn't doubt they would break as soon as they could. But Willy, creative as ever, had ordered his men to take an ear off each releasee.

It was a lot more merciful than Nylarn Lamanbhurg would have been. A dead man can't fight, had been one of his favorite sayings.

By the end of the day, Raina had released 9,000 men, each one relieved of an ear and informed in no uncertain terms that he would be killed if caught taking up arms against them.

The remaining 3,124 were corralled while a small army of clerks began the process of interviewing them and sending demand letters to their families. Raina also had to keep a record of who was captured by who. Soldiers could be a testy lot about their cut of a ransom.

"Did we break even?" Willy asked when she met him later that evening. It was the first time they were alone.

"We haven't finished assessing all the ransoms," Raina said.

"A rough estimate," Willy pressed.

"Using a base ransom for all the captives plus the value of the plunder we took, minus what you're paying the men, not yet," Raina said. "But we have the king. He has to be worth so much more. We'll make a nice profit."

"We will not be ransoming Amynthas," Willy said. "We're taking his whole kingdom. It's our land. They stole it. It's time we took it back."

"How long is that going to take?"

"Two years. Maybe three. We'll have to wait for the chancellor to arrive with more men. That should be in the summer or early next year. He's mopping up the last remnants of the rebellion. After that, it's open season on the Reendeni. But first, we'll march to Lamania."

"Will the chancellor help underwrite this campaign?" Raina asked. It had been an expensive war. Their coffers were running dangerously low. All they made from the ransoms and plunder was going right back into the war machine. King Amynthas' ransom would have been a nice boost but they weren't seeing a penny from that. "We were just supposed to be fighting Laman, not every Reendeni that ever lived. We can't afford to keep the men we have in the field until next year."

"We can keep everything we conquer," Willy said. "Lamania and Cardinum for a start. The incomes from those two cities and their lands should replenish anything we're spending now thrice over in due time. I also got us a ten-year tax holiday and the chancellor has promised a cut of the customs duties from Deltopolis once the city is taken."

"How much?"

"A tenth. For fifty years."

That calmed Raina's worries over finances. Deltopolis was the second-largest city on the continent, thrice as large as the royal capital at Confluencia and ten times the size of Lamania. With a cut of its customs and their conquests, the House of Sherhor would be drowning in gold for the foreseeable future.

Bankruptcy had brought down more noble houses than war. With war, at least you would be too dead to care. Going broke was so much more shameful because you had to live every subsequent day as a has-been— all while the commoners laughed at you.

But there were other worries. "Will Lamania fall as quickly as you hope?" Raina asked.

The city was sacred to her family but she had never been inside it. It had been lost a couple of years before she was born. The Reendeni also had a nasty habit of assassinating their rivals instead of challenging them to a duel as Rhexians did— which made Lamania off-limits to Lamanbhurgs. All Raina knew of the city was that its walls were formidable.

"Hopefully," Willy said. "The Cardinese have already dispatched envoys to negotiate a surrender. I hope the Lamanians have the same sense. If not, my men are still within their walls."

"You never recalled them?" Raina asked. "The chancellor said the Reendeni knew you had stashed men inside the city."

"I was attacked after I read the chancellor's letter if you remember correctly. By the time I woke, Calistarnes had sealed the city. The men couldn't leave."

"Are the men alive?" Raina asked.

"I don't know," Willy admitted. "But Calistarnes never knew who the men were. He can't know. I limited communication to signals instead of letters or messengers for precisely that reason."

"How many men did you stash?"

"Two hundred."

"Will they be enough? If they're alive?"

"Their job is to sabotage the defense from within while we attack from outside. If they can buy us enough time to ram a gate, or even better: open one, that would be more than enough."

Raina encamped with the army on the recently cleared battlefield for twenty days while the men rested, healed, and repaired their equipment. Raina caught herself thinking about her husband. A lot.

Instead of seeing Robyr in her dreams, she saw Willy. He never discussed her falling asleep in the tub or anything that wasn't related to the war for that matter. Raina also got the nagging feeling that he was avoiding her, which hurt her more than she thought it should.

They didn't interact much. Willy held trials for accused traitors, accepted surrenders, and tested the siege equipment his carpenters were building.

Raina's plate was also full. She had to pay soldiers their battle bonuses, dispatch ashes and lump sum payments to the families of the deceased, have new barges built, and plan for future provisioning.

Her duties were increased by the growing army. More and more lords arrived with their hosts, hoping to win themselves some glory by riding Willy's coattails.

The army that left the battlefield by the second fork of the Luche was twice the size of the one that had marched onto it. Reendeni villages, towns, and cities all surrendered well in advance of their arrival.

Only Lamania remained stubborn but the city's fate was sealed. On the day they arrived outside its walls, a green fire burned atop one of the city's guard towers late at night. Willy's men were alive.

The siege of Lamania was no siege. Willy's infiltrators had rented a row of houses hugging the city's northern wall and spent their time hollowing it out to a thickness of one layer of bricks. One strike of the ram and it broke.

The city fell in minutes. Calistarnes died fighting and Laman fell on his sword rather than surrender.

Willy held a grand celebration in the great hall of the palace at Lamania for all his officers. After a little too much wine, Raina climbed onto her husband's lap and stuck her tongue down his throat. In full view of everyone.