VanBilt was summoned to the Great Hall again, this time with only me there to talk to him.

"Do you remember when I said that I wanted you to summon the nobles to the palace?"

"Yes."

"I'd like you to do that now."

"Now?"

"Yes, now. Use those sheets of parchment before you to write out letters to the heads of all of the noble families telling them that queen Esmeralda wishes for them to travel to the palace for a roundtable discussion about the affairs of the kingdom and their roles in them."

"Would you please tell me what you plan to do with them?"

"No; as I told you before, that's none of your business, all that you should be worried about is doing what you need to do to save yourself, which in this case means writing letters that are convincing enough to get all of the nobles here, and don't try slipping in any warnings because if you do we'll find them, and you know what will happen to you then."

By this point VanBilt's resistance was entirely broken. He sat across from me and obediently wrote out the letters that I told him to write without trying to cajole me into showing mercy to the nobles. The letters that he wrote were inspected and deemed acceptable. Messengers were sent out with the letters to the estates of the heads of the noble houses, and with our plan now in motion, all there was for us to do was wait. I spoke with Uraia after the messengers were dispatched, telling her that the bloody business of disposing of the nobles would be up to her and the Royal Guard.

"If I make you my accomplice then it won't be so easy for you to accuse me of being bloodthirsty," I said to her jokingly.

Now that the nobles had been summoned, Uther and I were in a race against time to get ready for the Volstaff invasion. As soon as we were done with the nobles all of the kingdom's forces would have to be consolidated and moved west. If Uther's numbers were correct, we could count on having a force of around twenty thousand men. These men were all we would have; it was too late to conscript, arm and train new soldiers. Uther would oversee the consolidation and mobilization of the troops. As for where they would mobilize to, that was yet to be decided. Uther had advised me that for us to prevail we needed to make maximum use of force multipliers, the terrain of the battlefield generally being the most advantageous force multiplier in battles.

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As was the case with almost all of the kingdoms, our border with Dranii was determined by a series of mountain ranges and rivers. The Volstaff army would avoid the rivers, fording them would be too much trouble. That left the passes between the mountain ranges as our best option for using the terrain to our advantage. To find out which mountain pass would best suit our needs I flew west with Myra to have a look at all of them. There were nine mountain passes in all. When going over the maps with Uther at the palace he'd said that the narrowest pass would be best, but I worried that if we had Dranii direct Volstaff to the narrowest pass they would recognize it as a trap. We needed to find another way to use the terrain to our advantage. To get a better sense of the characteristics of the terrain in the passes I touched down in each one with Myra to conduct a thorough examination of the unique attributes of each pass.

The only beneficial aspect of the narrowest pass was its narrowness. For setting up an infantry blockade it was perfect, but it wasn't suitable for what we had been planning. The pass that to me was the most suitable for what we had planned was the southernmost pass. The pass was wide, but it had one important feature that could be of tremendous help to us. There was a slope in the ground that was a fair distance from the entrance to the pass. The slope was mild enough that one could easily traverse it on foot but it was far enough from the entrance to the pass that anything immediately beyond the slope was not visible from the entrance to the pass. If we could hide some of our troops beyond the slope and use them to ambush Volstaff's troops when they had traveled far enough into the pass then we could potentially launch a devastating surprise attack on them. I returned to the palace and told Uther what I'd found and what my ideas were for how to make the best use of it. Uther knew which pass I was talking about and he understood my idea of using the slope to conceal ourselves from the enemy's field of vision.

I would leave the organizational details of our defense such as battalion numbers and troop formations to Uther while I turned my attention to other things. The chicks had now all mastered flight, and, remarkably, they had all chosen to stay. According to Myra they had all grown very fond of us and didn't wish to leave. I was glad that they had chosen to stay. I had my own fondness for the chicks that was independent of mine and Myra's synchronized feelings. I wanted to see them continue to grow until they were as big and formidable as their mother, only then would I be okay with them leaving, if that was what they should choose. The garden was getting too small for them; I told Cyrus to design and build a large coop for them in the fields behind the garden. The coop was to be built out of stone and sheltered with a thick bedding of straw on the floor to keep them comfortable. The fields behind the palace were to become their new home when they became too big for the garden, there they would have plenty of space and would still be close enough for me to keep an eye on them.