Book 5: Chapter 34
“What?” Cindy leaned across the table, her hands bracing at the edge. She stared incredulously at the disheveled man across from her. “They asked for what?”
“They haven’t actually asked, milady, but the idea was brought up in some of the council sessions they’ve been having to deal with the current issues.” The man, who wasn’t quite a spy but certainly wasn’t just one of Avalon’s scouts, was doing his best to remain professional and unfazed by his surroundings, but his exhaustion was evident and he was starting to flag. “They discussed it during a meeting that I managed to listen in on, but it didn’t seem like many were interested in actually trying.”
“I hope not!” Cindy dropped heavily into her seat. It felt like the weight of her responsibilities were driving her down into the floor and the only thing keeping her up was the chair. “Technically at war or not, we can’t afford to start annexing pieces of Nelam, and certainly not whole towns. I’m sure at least one person would insist that Kay didn’t leave me with enough power to make that kind of decision, but my vote would be hell no. That would be a massive tangle of problems we don’t need.”
Amanda both in agreement and in appreciation of how far Cindy had come under the short amount of tutelage Amanda could give her. “Correct, as things stand we wouldn’t be able or willing to take control of any of Nelam’s territory through annexation or conquest. Avalon remains at war with Nelam, but we won’t be initiating any battles with them unless things change dramatically.
The part time spy looked very uncomfortable, and Cindy didn’t blame him. Decisions at that level were very much above his pay grade. He was instrumental in gathering the information needed to make important decisions, but he normally didn’t have to deal with the Prime Minister and Avalon’s first duchess start reacting negatively about the information he’d uncovered. It would have been better to learn what he had to share and let him leave before reacting to the absurdity, but Cindy felt like she was on her wits end and hadn’t thought that far.
The sudden outbreak of civil war in Nelam had been startling, and to call it just a civil war might be toning down the situation slightly. It was more like at least one revolution against the government by internal actors, multiple simultaneous slave rebellions, and a cascading chain of conquered countries that had been taken over by Nelam recently enough that they still had partisans and key figures to rally around starting individual wars for their freedom all bundled up into one civil war.
It was even worse than it sounded too, because none of the factions were cooperating with each other. Some of the countries fighting to exists as their own nations again were against slavery and were doing their best to free slaves in the territory they had a level of control over, but some had no issues forcing slaves to be disposable soldiers for their “honorable battles toward freedom from Nelamian control”. That left groups of freed slaves attacking or at least refusing contact with forces that were absolutely on their side, out of fear of it being a trap.
The entire clusterfuck was made even more chaotic by the “traditional” rebellion taking place in the heartlands of Nelam. The nobles who’d served in various levels of power in the nation had revolted against King Glowl, citing tyranny and other concerns that made it “righteous and true” for them to try to overthrow the king. At the same time a portion of the military had decided that their general was now in charge and that the king and nobility should be dismantled entirely. Both sides of that nonsense were fighting each other and Glowl’s loyalist forces, with all three of those factions using slave soldiers to do a lot of the fighting. That brought the slave rebellions and fragmented nations that were against slavery as a whole into the fray against them.
With a minimum of seven factions fighting a nine-way war, no one was entirely sure who was who and who was fighting who at any given moment, the entirety of Nelam’s territory had devolved into a compete mess. Glowl hadn’t been seen publicly since his loss against Kay, and the border regions around Nelam’s control were also jumping many different directions under the pressure caused by the sudden disarray. A swathe of the towns and cities under threat of Nelamian invasion or annexation through subterfuge were making what Cindy thought was the right choice, sitting quietly while reinforcing their borders and waiting to see what happened. Others were being way too hotheaded and actually trying to conquer the now less defended fringes or jumping into the tangled discordant jumble of a war on one side or another, adding more fuel to the fire. The entire thing was a problem, and with refugees fleeing the fighting and unstable areas looking for any port in a storm, it was quickly becoming Avalon’s problem and thus Cindy’s.