The next morning Felix came to Evan's room with Bess. The door closed behind them.
"Mr. Evan. I'll be direct. I went away to study for several years and came back to find myself effectively frozen out of my own family. My father's new wife has her people in every position that matters. My cousin Federik controls the knights. On the surface, everything is fine — I'm the heir, I have every courtesy extended to me. In reality, I have nothing. You're a perceptive person. Will you help me?"
"I'm a wandering swordsman passing through," Evan said. "What help could I offer?"
"You predicted the raid before it happened. You read Reuben's strategy before he executed it. You're not what you say you are." Felix kept his voice level. "I'm not asking what you actually are. I'm asking if you'll help me."
Bess added quietly: "His mother died when he was young."
"I know," Evan said.
Bess blinked. "How—"
"He called the Baroness 'my lady,' not 'mother.'"
A short silence. Then Bess, with considerably more feeling than her usual manner: "If you noticed that, you already understand his situation. You were with him for three days. If that doesn't make you a friend, what does?"
Evan looked at her for a moment. She was genuinely angry on Felix's behalf, which was a different thing from the calculated appeal Felix had been making. It was harder to deflect.
"All right," he said. "One intervention. Tell me the details."
Felix laid it out. The Aymon barony was prosperous — well-placed in relation to the Lia Fellwood's trade routes, with a small iron mine to the west that most of the neighboring lords envied. Felix's mother had died when he was small, her family a minor barony too close to Earl Eward's territory to offer much support. The current Baroness came from a viscount's house and had brought resources and connections that Baron Aymon needed. In the normal course of inheritance, the eldest son inherited regardless — but "normal course" had a great deal of room in it, and Felix had been sent to study in the capital, and when he'd come back, the ground had shifted.
Evan listened without interrupting. When Felix finished: "The assassin today. Do you know who sent him?"
"I suspect. I can't prove it."
"Then we don't touch that. What you can do is simpler." Evan went through it: the deference toward the Baroness, not performed but sustained — Felix could resent her privately but every public interaction needed to be impeccable. The sibling relationship had to be the same. Nobody who watched the family from outside should be able to point to a single moment of coldness from Felix. But manners alone wouldn't secure the succession. He needed something else.
"Your father will receive a levy call. Eward and Rein's war isn't over. Ask to lead the foot soldiers."
Felix looked at him. "I'm a Low-rank Knight. I'd be commanding conscripts."
"Exactly. Federik will command the knights — which is what he's good at, and what he'll want. You take the infantry. Nobody thinks infantry matters. You make them matter."
"And if we lose?"
"Don't lose." Evan looked at him steadily. "You want to know if I have a method. I have the beginning of one. Let me see your terrain maps."
Over the following two weeks, Felix moved through the household with a consistency that visibly unsettled the people who'd been counting on his bitterness. He called the Baroness "Mother" — once, the first time, it cost him something that showed only in his jaw — and then it was done, and after that it was only words. Yve's hostility didn't soften immediately but lost some of its edge. The Baron watched.
Twenty soldiers were assigned to Felix's command: farmers and laborers with no military experience. Rein took charge of their physical training. Evan stopped him from drilling them as knights and redirected the effort: two movements, endless repetition. A hooked glaive — a weapon Evan had sketched out and the barony's smith had produced from the small iron mine's stock — could thrust and could pull. Four-man groups, the four always moving together. No independent judgment, no fancy technique. Marching and stamina after that.
People laughed at the weapons. Evan ignored the laughter.
Twenty-four people rode out: Felix, Bess, Rein, Evan, and twenty soldiers with their strange hooked polearms and two crossbows and a supply cart. They were three weeks behind the main cavalry force and six weeks behind the war's beginning. The front was unstable — Earl Eward had hit hard and Count Rein was scrambling.
Four days into the march, a scout came back with a report: twelve men ahead, two of them Squire Knights, the rest foot soldiers. They'd been raiding villages and getting sloppy. They didn't know they were ten miles inside the wrong side of the lines.
Felix formed the unit without apparent excitement. The enemy saw the formation and came forward — they'd broken every resistance they'd faced for days, and this looked like more of the same.
"Crossbows — loose." One bolt went wide. The other drew blood on a Squire Knight's cheek and sent him swerving. "First rank — thrust!"
The hooked glaives went out as a single motion. Two men died immediately. Three others took wounds. The enemy formation had never encountered twenty people who all did the same thing at the same time, and the psychological effect of the first volley was as important as the physical one. They stopped. One of them turned around. Then several of them turned around.
Evan, meanwhile, had ridden straight at the unwounded Squire Knight. The man came up with his sword in both hands, confident in his armor, and Evan's rapier was already past the guard and in his throat before the downswing reached its middle point.
The second Squire Knight found Felix in front of him, took the blade exchange, and shoved Felix sideways out of the saddle with better technique and more weight. Felix hit the ground and rolled, came up with nothing in his hands, and looked up at a sword pointing at his face.
Then the same sword tilted sideways as the man holding it tried to process the blood running down his arm from a source he hadn't registered.
Evan caught his eye, very briefly, and moved on to something else.
"The field is yours," Rein said quietly, looking around at what remained of the encounter.
Two soldiers had injuries, one self-inflicted in the excitement of his first real fight. The enemy had left six dead and three wounded on the ground, with the rest gone into the trees. The Squire Knight Felix had engaged surrendered when the sword left his throat.
Evan sat his horse and watched the soldiers search the field, and felt something he hadn't been looking for: the specific satisfaction of a plan that had worked exactly as designed, down to the enemy's overconfidence, down to the psychology of the first volley. He was better at this than he'd expected to be. He wasn't sure what to do with that knowledge.