How can someone we have never seen decide our death?
Bren asked it first, which was how the important questions usually surfaced in the group — Bren, who had lost the fear but retained the directness that fear sometimes masks, asking the thing the rest of them had been constructing in silence.
They were on a rest rotation, four hours between deployments, sitting in the ruins of what had been a farmhouse before the northern push made it a landmark. The roof was mostly gone. The walls were mostly there. It was better than open ground and that was the ceiling of available comfort.
Bren had the coalition bulletin in his hand, the one with the princess's image on the cover. He had been looking at it with the expression he used when something wasn't resolving correctly.
"I've never seen her face," he said. "Not in real life. Not once. She's never been anywhere near this." He gestured at the farmhouse, the absent roof, the general territory of everything they had been living in. "She doesn't know my name. She doesn't know Sorin's name. She doesn't know any of us existed." He set the bulletin down. "How does someone like that get to be the reason we're here?"
No one answered immediately.
"She's not the reason," Orren said finally. "She's the explanation. The reason is something else."
"Then what is the reason?"
Orren looked at Kael.
Kael had been thinking about this for weeks — assembling, cross-referencing, pressing the pieces of the record book and the spear symbol and the general's pause and the cycling engagements against each other until patterns emerged. He had not said aloud the shape he thought he could see, because saying it aloud made it real in a different way, and real in that way had consequences.
He said it now.
"Resource territory," he said. "The northern lands. The ones we've been cycling through without actually taking. They're not strategically valuable in a military sense. Orren confirmed that weeks ago. But the geological surveys — Orren found reference to them in the supply documentation."
"Mineral deposits," Orren said. "Significant ones. The kind that don't appear on military maps but do appear on trade route projections."
"So the coalition isn't here to protect anything," Ysse said slowly. "It's here to clear something."
"Clear the existing territorial holders. Exhaust both sides of the conflict. When it's done, whoever commissioned the coalition moves into cleared territory under the cover of peacekeeping or reconstruction."
Silence.
"And the princess," Bren said.
"Gives it a face that isn't a mining contract," Kael said.
Bren looked at the bulletin for a long moment. Then he turned it face down in the mud.
"She doesn't know," he said. It wasn't a question.
"I don't think so," Kael said. "But I'm not certain."
"It's worse if she doesn't," Bren said. "Because then she's just like us. Someone whose name got used for something they never agreed to."
The farmhouse walls stood around them in the grey afternoon. Above the absent roof, the sky moved with low clouds going somewhere else.
Kael thought: we have never seen her face and she has never seen ours, and somewhere in that mutual invisibility the whole machinery runs without friction, and the people who designed it understood that the invisibility was not a side effect but the mechanism itself.
He kept the thought. He added it to the list.
The list was almost complete.