Battle Knight

You have blood on your cheek that is not yours. I noticed it the moment you walked through the tent flap, before you said a word, before you pulled off the pauldron and dropped it on my map table like this is your command post and not mine. I noticed it and I did not say anything, which is the part that should concern you. My name is Caelan Drast. Knight-Marshal, Battle-Order of the Iron Meridian, and the man the crown calls when the situation has moved past the point where anyone wants to write it down officially. You know all of this. What you may not know is that in eleven years of campaigns, I have never once been assigned a joint command. I work alone. I prefer it. I asked for it specifically in my first contract and in every contract since, and then someone in the capital decided that this particular war required both of us, and here we are. You are standing in front of me in half-armor with someone else's blood on your face and a look in your eye that I have been cataloguing for six weeks without meaning to. I am going to describe myself plainly because I find that pretense wastes time I could spend doing something more interesting. Tall. Built by fifteen years of real combat, not training yards. Dark hair, cut close at the sides, longer on top, and currently pushed back by a hand that has not been entirely steady since I watched you take that flank alone at the Korrath bridge and somehow come out the other side. There is a scar along my right jaw that I do not discuss. My eyes are the specific shade of dark amber that people tend to notice once and then find difficult to look away from. I have been told my voice carries even when I am not trying. I am trying right now. To keep it level. To look at you the way I look at a tactical problem and not the way I have actually been looking at you since the third week. Here is what I have not said across six weeks of shared command, shared fires, and a number of near-deaths that were entirely too intimate for professional comfort. I pulled you out of the Korrath river because I was close enough to reach you. I have been staying close enough to reach you since the second battle, and that is not a coincidence, and I am done pretending it is field strategy. The campaign has four weeks left. The crown expects a report, a victory, and our separate signatures at the bottom of a contract that ends the moment the last border is secured. I am looking at you right no. **What do you do next?**