Kamran briefly closed his eyes, clenching his fists to keep from boxing his own ears or tearing the shirt from his body. He’d been forced to change into formal wear for the purposes of this meeting, which was one of the more ludicrous customs of peacetime. The near decade they’d spent away from the battlefield had made the once legendary leaders of Ardunia now thick and lethargic, stripping these military summits of their urgency, degrading them all in the process.
Kamran was not only prince of Ardunia, but one of only five lieutenant generals responsible for the five respective field armies—each a hundred thousand soldiers strong—and he took his position quite seriously.
When the time came for Kamran to inherit the throne, so, too, would he inherit his grandfather’s role as commanding general of the entire Ardunian military, and there were few who did not resent the prince’s impending elevation to the distinguished rank at such a young age. The title should have gone to his father, yes, but such was Kamran’s fate. He could not run from it any more than he could reanimate the dead. His only recourse was to work harder—and smarter—to show what he was worth.
This, among other reasons, might explain why his comrades had not taken kindly to Kamran’s overly aggressive counsel, and had all but called him an unschooled child for daring to suggest a preemptive attack on Tulanian soil.
Kamran did not care.
It was true that these men had the benefit of age and decades of experience to support their ideas, but so too had they been idle in the last several years of peace, preferring to laze about on their large estates, abandoning their wives and children to toss coin instead at courtesans; to dull their minds with opium.
Kamran, meanwhile, had actually been reading the weekly reports sent in from the divisions.
There were fifty divisions spanning the empire, each comprising ten thousand soldiers, and each commanded by a major general whose job, among others, was to compile weekly briefings based on essential findings from lower battalions and regiments.
These fifty disparate briefings were then issued not to direct superiors, but to the defense minister, who read the materials and disseminated pertinent information to the king and his five lieutenant generals. Fifty briefings from across the empire, each five pages long.
That made for two hundred and fifty pages a week.
Which meant every month, a thousand pages of essential material was bequeathed to a single unctuous man upon whom the king himself relied for critical intelligence and instruction.
This, this was where Kamran lost his patience.
The dissemination of key information through a defense minister was an ancient practice, one that had been established during wartime to spare the highest-ranking officials the critical hours that might otherwise be spent poring over hundreds of pages of material. Once upon a time, it had made sense. But Ardunia had been at peace now for seven years, and still his fellow lieutenants did not read the reports for themselves, relying instead upon a minister who grew only more unqualified by the hour.
Kamran had long ago circumvented this impotent practice, preferring to read the briefings in full through the lens of his own mind and not the minister’s.
Had anyone else in the room bothered to read the sitrep from these different reaches of the empire they might see as Kamran did: that the observations were at once fascinating and worrying, and together drew a bleak picture of Ardunia’s relations with the southern kingdom of Tulan. Sadly, they did not.
Kamran’s jaw clenched.
“Indeed,” the minister was droning on, “it is often to our benefit to maintain a sense of rivalry with another powerful nation, for a common enemy helps keep the citizens of our empire united, reminding the people to be grateful for the safety promised not only by the crown, but by the military—to which their children will devote four years of their lives, and whose movements have been so well calculated in this last century, under the guidance of our merciful king.
“Our prince was divinely blessed to inherit the fruits of a kingdom built tirelessly over many millennia. Indeed the empire he is one day to inherit is now so magnificent it stands as the largest of the known world, having so successfully conquered its many enemies that its millions of citizens may now enjoy a stretch of well-deserved peace.”
By the angels, the man refused to shut his mouth.
“Surely there is proof in this, is there not?” the minister was saying. “Proof not only of Ardunia’s skillful leadership, but in the collective wisdom of its leaders. It is our hope that His Highness, the prince, will see in time that his experienced elders—who are also his most humble servants—have worked diligently to make thoughtful, considered decisions at every turn, for certainly we can see how—”