"The man who betrayed you," Colonel Finareo said. "He slipped into our ranks during enlistment. The fault is mine, my lady — I should have caught it, and I did not. I take full responsibility."
"Don't trouble yourself over it," Averifa said. "What happened to him?"
"After a thorough interrogation, he was executed for his crimes."
Their attention was drawn outside, where a small crowd had formed.
Ares stood in the open with a bound man in front of him. Emperor Siwalt Grande, stripped of everything he had ridden in with.
"Convenient," Ares said. "Your presence on the battlefield saves us the trouble of hunting you down in your own empire."
He shoved him, hard, and the defeated emperor went sprawling into the dirt.
Siwalt propped himself on an elbow and looked up.
"Do you plan to end me?"
Ares drew his sword. It came out glowing, divine light running the length of it, and his answer was chilling precisely because it answered nothing at all. It only made perfectly clear who held every card on that field. The Emperor's fate rested entirely in his hands, and Ares wanted him to sit in the dirt and understand that.
Averifa watched from a distance with her mind full of political arithmetic.
Ares had to understand the consequences. If he took down the Emperor now, here, the victory belonged to him alone — not to Prince Mendelt. And for the prince's plan to work, Mendelt needed to be the one the continent saw delivering the final justice.
Ares knew that. Ares had sat at the same table she had.
But he seemed unusually emotional, and it made her wonder whether he was genuinely about to go through with it.
He leveled the glowing blade at the man on the ground.
"One question. Your own spy warned you the war was a trap. Why did you attack anyway?"
Siwalt looked up at him defiantly, and confessed the whole of it.
"The invasion was a pretense," he said. "I came for her. The Duchess of Sheram. A valuable bargaining chip — and a woman worthy of being mine."
That was the last straw.
A furious energy exploded outward from Ares. His eyes lit with raw power, frost tore through the air around him, and he raised the divine sword to bring it down and end the emperor for good.
The blade was already falling when a golden arrow sliced through the air and buried itself in the ground directly in its path.
A massive pillar of ice erupted at the point of impact and stopped the strike cold.
Shocked, Ares turned.
Averifa stood at a distance with her golden bow still raised.
The immediate danger had passed. His anger had not. He stood over the captured emperor and rounded on her.
"Why did you interfere?"
"Heir of House Nozenleaf," she said, addressing him by his formal title, calmly and deliberately. "Get a hold of yourself."
She came closer and laid the reality out for him where everyone could hear it.
"If you are the one to take down the emperor, it completely ruins Prince Mendelt's strategy. Everything he has built, from the first rumor to this field. All of it, for nothing."
"Marshal, please," Colonel Finareo begged. "Sheathe your sword. Please."
Watching the standoff, a chilling memory came up in Averifa without being invited. She had not seen him this enraged since that terrible day in her past life — the hall, the full moon, the thing she had done to Lorenza.
Siwalt, unfazed, tried to explain himself from the dirt.
"I only wanted to strengthen my empire. That is all I have ever wanted. And I needed her help to do it."
Ares was completely unmoved. "I don't care about your excuses."
"Then hear this one." The emperor pushed himself up a little. "My life for my people's safety. Guarantee them and do as you like with me."
Ares ignored the plea. He sheathed his sword instead, with a single sharp sound that made half the men present flinch.
"Finareo. Watch the prisoner."
The tension had barely begun to leak out of the air when a soldier came running.
The architect of this entire war, Fifth Prince Mendelt, had arrived on the scene.
He made his entrance and thanked them both formally for securing the victory.
"A future crown prince," Averifa observed calmly, "shouldn't bow his head so easily."
Ares ignored the pleasantries entirely and went straight to the point.
"I request permission to execute Emperor Siwalt on the spot."
Mendelt smiled — a confident, entirely untroubled smile.
"I intend to let him live."
"You—"
"I have spoken with him directly," the prince said. "I expected a savage brute. What I found was a man with an ambition powerful enough to be worth something. He means to build the greatest nation the world has seen, and he means to do it even if it costs him his own life. Men like that are rare, and they are useful."
He looked around at them, and it was clear the whole shape of it had already assembled itself behind his eyes.
"Taking his life and his land is the small version of this. It would be far more strategic to win his heart instead. That is how the entire Strald Empire comes under my control."
And then Prince Mendelt revealed the secret weapon that would make the plan work.
Siwalt Grande Strald was the illegitimate son of a late king.