"Alice, should I start calling you Master?"
"Are you insane, Ashen?"
She didn't even lift her head from her book as she answered. Apparently, his habit of pulling random stunts wasn't an isolated incident.
"Haah... Read this."
He pulled up the conversation he had lifted from the parasites and laid it before her, word for word.
Alice cast her book aside and read through the papers. Not once did her expression change.
When she finished, she casually tossed them away and returned to her book.
"I'm sure neither of us cares what the rabble says or thinks, but if you're bringing this to my attention, then I'm guessing you believe the men won't obey my orders?"
"I don't believe it. I'm a hundred percent certain." Ashen replied with a gloomy expression. "We already tested it last week, and it ended disastrously."
"True." She nodded.
"So, what do you think? Should I cut off all their heads to make an example?"
His empty eyes and emotionless voice would have scared any normal woman shitless, but Alice merely shook her head disapprovingly
"Then what?"
"Hmm…" she closed her eyes for a brief moment.
"It is not possible to take apart and fix a problem within an army with ease," she said eventually. "Their being unable to accept a powerless, unknown woman, an outsider, means they're already firmly tied together on the inside. Since they're sturdy on the inside, they won't fall apart easily when facing the enemy. They're elites."
"And so?"
"If I were to slit the throats of the loudest, the sturdy army would fall apart from the inside and become a mere crowd. The captains who cursed at me would be cut down, and their positions filled by men who are good at flattering. Instead of captains with ability, I'd end up with captains who are good at bootlicking, and that's not correct." She turned a page. "An army is a body held together by both its inner and outer workings. I'd rather not remodel the outer layer only to watch the inner layer rot."
Ashen examined her expression carefully.
Despite the words she'd just read, there was no resistance in her at all. Only the look of someone calculating what she'd need to do next, the way someone might plan how to repair a piece of machinery rather than respond to an insult.
He realized, again, freshly: Alice was a psychopath.
A clever one, though.
"I need Lucia. Lend her to me?"
"Of course. Can I ask why?"
"I'm going to use her as my eyes and ears, to examine what mine can't reach."
"Consider it done."
"Also," she added, "why did you want to call me master? Is this some new kind of play? If it is, I'm all for it."
"The soldiers are disregarding you because they see you as a weak woman; they still think of you as someone who shares my bed and little else. So I figured that if it became publicly known that the marshal is under your control, it would at least lessen their contempt."
Alice finally collected her gaze from her book and turned toward Ashen. For some reason, her eyes were filled with suspicion, as though she were looking at something closer to discarded food than a person.
"That is quite indecent. The words may not be wrong, but your way of thinking is pitiable. In the entire world, what lord tries to solve a military matter by turning himself into a slave? I have thought it before, Ashen… you are a bit insane. At the very least, you are not normal."
'Why do you care?!' 'You're the psychopath!'
Ashen grumbled the thought to himself and said nothing out loud.
***
***
Every man, no matter how good his character, carried at least one secret he never wanted to see daylight.
For the generals currently under Ashen's command, those secrets were now in the hands of the last woman any of them would have chosen for the job.
Alice found Lucia in her tent that evening, half-sunk into a worn sofa, surrounded by notebooks and loose pages in a sprawl that looked like an ecosystem of its own.
Lucia's eyes were closed, her breathing slow, somewhere between sleep and simple stillness.
She opened her eyes before Alice had taken two steps inside.
"Who is it this time?"
"Captain Hale. Third Company."
Lucia didn't sit up. She lifted one hand, fingers already finding the right notebook in the pile without looking, and tossed it lightly onto the low table between them.
Alice picked it up and opened it.
The handwriting was Lucia's, neat and small, each entry dated and cross-referenced.
Hale's entry ran two pages. By the time Alice finished reading, she understood completely why a man who spoke that loudly about other people's worth had spent the last six years making absolutely certain no one ever asked about his own.
"Thanks."
"Just put it to good use, sister. No need for thanks."
"I will."
*
To handle reining in the army, Alice divided it into three simple stages.
First, she made them know their place.
She gathered the captains and senior officers under the pretense of a logistics briefing, and when the grumbling started before she'd even finished speaking, she let it run for exactly as long as it took her to lose patience.
"Are you all discussing household matters in front of your king?" Her voice didn't rise, but it did not need to. The content itself was plenty lethal.
"Very well. Let me remind you of your domestics."
"Every meal you shove into your faces every morning comes from me. The shit that comes out of you afterward, that's mine too, because I'm the one who arranged for it to leave this camp instead of sitting in it. When your swords break, who do you go to? Who finds the blacksmith, who provides the wagon to carry the weapon there and back, who feeds and houses the men driving that wagon while they do it?"
She let the silence stretch.
"I am the household manager. I am telling you that I am your monarch in everything but name. And you're upset because you have to be slightly more mindful about what you say and chew a little less while you say it?"
Everything she'd named did, in fact, come from Ashen. But what was his was hers, so she hadn't told a single lie.
Some with thin skin felt ashamed and stopped their gossip in the following days. But the majority simply took her words as another subject to bash.
So, for the ones who stayed stubborn after that, she escalated.
She started moving through the camp accompanied by a handful of small devices, no larger than a fist, that hovered at shoulder height and followed her without any visible tether. Anyone caught speaking against her, in any tone she judged worth noticing, received a jolt from one of them sharp enough to drop a grown man to his knees, with no warning and no appeal.
For the handful who were both loud and useless, she made an example instead. Two executions, carried out without ceremony, in front of the units those men had commanded. No speeches. Just the fact of it, delivered plainly, and the unmistakable message underneath.
For the ones who survived both of those and were still stubborn, she used the notebooks.
She never read the contents aloud. That would defeat the purpose. A quiet word in private, three or four specific details only the man himself could have known, and a calm description of what it would mean if everyone in the camp learned them at once, in a place this size, where there was nowhere to run and no face left to hide behind. That was usually enough.
The generals tried going over her head, of course. They brought their grievances to Ashen, expecting the man who'd built his reputation on low casualties and high morale to rein in his increasingly terrifying woman.
Ashen's response was, if anything, worse than what they'd already experienced.
"Alice Sinclair gives military commands in my stead. She is the acting Marshal. Wherever I am not, she is your monarch." He looked around the assembled officers without any particular heat in his expression, which somehow made it land harder. "I'm not punishing you for your conduct right now because the acting Marshal is fully capable of doing that herself. Any mistake that happens within this army is hers to forgive. Not mine."
Not even a month later, the army answered to Alice with the same speed it answered to him, and in most cases with considerably more visible fear.
*
Ashen watched the transformation complete itself and felt the tension in his chest finally ease.
The Narkals were pressing harder with every passing week, and it wouldn't be long before he'd need to spend more time at the very front of the charge than behind it, if he wanted the army to stay healthy.
Alice taking total control was the best news he could have asked for.
'I guess it's time…'
He summoned Mel from the Hourvault.