We weren't part of the plan. We were the plan.
It was Ysse who built the complete picture. She did it the way she did everything — quietly, thoroughly, without announcing the process until the conclusion was ready. She spent two days after the battle moving through the camp's administrative edges, finding the places where information accumulated and was not yet organized into the form that hides what it contains. Supply manifests. Reassignment orders. The casualty tallies she had watched being selectively recorded in the valley. A partial copy of the pre-engagement deployment map she found discarded behind the cartography tent, which Orren identified immediately.
She laid it all out for them on the third evening, on the floor of the barracks when the surrounding men were either asleep or close enough to it.
The eastern regiments — their regiments, the Low Quarter conscripts, the farmland levies, the dock workers and mill hands — had been placed at the front of the advance deliberately. Not as the strongest force. As the first contact force. The function was to locate the enemy's primary defensive line by walking into it, which was a very efficient way to use soldiers you had assessed as expendable, and which explained the padded manifests — if you plan to lose a percentage of a regiment, you account for the loss before it happens.
They were never meant to win the first engagement. They were meant to absorb it. The actual tactical force — better equipped, better rested, drawn from the coalition's more valued regiments — had advanced behind them once the eastern conscripts had drawn out and partially exhausted the enemy's front line.
The battle the eastern soldiers had fought was not the battle. It was the measurement.
Bren, who had been listening without speaking, said: "They used us to find out where the arrows came from."
"Yes," Ysse said.
"And the supply corruption. The extra names on the manifests."
"Buffer for expected losses. If you plan to lose forty men from a unit, you can redirect forty men's worth of rations without anyone in the official count noticing."
Silence.
Kael looked at the deployment map. At the small marks indicating eastern regiment positions — front line, open ground, no cover. At the larger marks behind them, the coalition's real force, held back. At the arrows indicating the order of advance.
They had been placed there. By someone who knew what those positions meant. By someone who had, at some point before any of them were conscripted, written down their names in a book with a shorthand designation beside each one.
"The record book," he said. "My name. The others on that list."
"Pre-selected for front line assignment," Ysse said. "I think the designations indicate specific roles. Yours is different from the others on the page."
"Different how?"
She paused for a moment in the way she paused when she was being careful.
"The others are marked for assignment," she said. "Yours looks more like — observation. As if someone wanted you in a specific place, for a specific purpose, that has nothing to do with the battle."
Kael sat with that for a long time.
The symbol on the spear pressed against his back.
Someone had put him here. Someone had wanted him here. And it was not for the same reason they had wanted everyone else here.
The list of things he did not understand had not shortened. But it had sharpened.