"Eight thousand."
Aldric said it quietly, at the head of the table.
He had said it as a statement and not as a question. The number had been on the small folded summary Maira had laid in front of him at the second bell of the morning, when she had come into the inner chamber alone in the small flat way she had been coming into the inner chamber for the year past — without an appointment, without the small ceremonial wait at the corridor that the senior captains observed at his door, with the long bound dossier under her arm — and had set the summary on his desk and stood at the desk and waited for him to read it.
He had read it.
He had then sat for the count of perhaps two minutes at the desk without speaking.
He had then asked her — in the same quiet voice he was using now at the head of the council table — to convene the full council at the eighth bell. The full council. Not the inner council. Not the captains. The full council, with the eleven civilian seats and the four military and the two stewards, in the long form he had not called for three years.
She had inclined her head.
She had gone out.
Gorlim had come in at the seventh bell. Gorlim had read the summary at the same desk, in the same way Maira had laid it for him, and had not, in his reading, made any of the small sounds he made when he was being shown a thing that surprised him. He had read it through to the end. He had set it back on the desk. He had said: "We brief the full council."
Maira had said, from the corner, "My lord, I would brief the lord and the captain marshal only."
Gorlim had said: "Captain. The civilians have, by the small careful work of fifteen years, been the people who have made this country a thing the lord could lead from a fence-rail with his son. The civilians will, in the next three years, be the people who hold this country together when the matter on this desk arrives at the gate. You do not, with respect, brief the lord and the captain marshal only on a matter the civilians will hold by their own hands. You brief them all. You take the risk that one of the eleven civilians, on his way home from the council, will speak a sentence in the wrong public house and that the sentence will be carried south. You take the risk because the alternative is a country in which the eleven civilians are, on the day the matter arrives at the gate, the people who learn the matter from the gate-watch's lips. The risk of leakage is real. The risk of a country whose civilians learn its matters from the gate-watch is worse."
Maira had drawn a long breath.
She had inclined her head.
She had said: "Captain, you have the lord's voice in this. I will brief the full."
Now, at the council table, she had briefed it.
She had briefed it with the small careful flat documentary precision Aldric had been admiring in her for eight years; she had set out the source — a Ranger of the southern circuit, by name Méril son of Méglin, who had been working out of a small inn at the foot of Methedras in the lower-Isen valley for the previous nine months, posing as a long-distance carter for a Dunlending coast-trader — and she had set out the source's three months of careful observation of the long valley north of Isengard's outer gate. She had set out, in the third quarter of the briefing, the source's count of three separate breeding-pits along the long valley, each by his estimation operating at the level of perhaps two thousand at-arms creatures and an unknown number of younger. She had set out, in the fourth quarter, the small careful estimate she had drawn — in the lower bound, five thousand under arms; in the upper bound, eight thousand; in the projection at the rate of breeding the source has observed over three months, twelve to fifteen thousand within four years if Saruman's pits run at full capacity for the duration.
She had then set out, in the fifth quarter, the small flat last sentence of her briefing.
"My lord — the source has, since the last dispatch we received from him eleven weeks ago, gone silent. The standing channel at the inn at the foot of Methedras has been checked twice in eleven weeks. There has been no further message. The inn-keeper, when asked at the second check by our courier, said the carter who had been at the inn for the previous nine months had not returned from his last delivery. We do not know whether the source has been killed, captured, turned, or merely lost in the long road. We do not know — therefore — whether the intelligence on this desk has been wholly his work and is therefore reliable as the work of a man who is now dead, or whether the intelligence on this desk has been wholly his work and is therefore reliable as the work of a man whose final dispatches were the work of a man who was already in another hand. We do not know. I am setting it before the council with the warning. I would, in my own assessment, give it a seventy percent weight of reliability. I would not, by any pass of my own, give it a hundred."
She had stopped.
The council had been silent for a long count of breaths.
Aldric, at the head of the table, had let the silence go.
Now, at the end of the silence, he had said: "Eight thousand."
The number sat in the chamber.
The eleven civilian council members did not, for the long count of breaths after Aldric's statement, react. They had been at the table for the better part of an hour. They had been hearing Maira's briefing in the small flat way the function's head had been delivering it. They had not, by any one of them, interrupted. They had been writing notes on their small tablets at the standard council intervals. They had been registering, in the small steady careful way of council members who had been doing this work for years, that the matter on the table was not a matter for their voices but for their long careful absorption.
Eorlund, at the captains' end, broke the silence first.
"My lord — the projection."
"Yes."
"At the upper bound, fifteen thousand within four years."
"At the upper bound."
"Our standing forces — full mobilisation — three thousand. Levy at full call, perhaps five and a half. We are looking, my lord, at a multiple of three even at the lower bound of his count."
"Yes."
"And the multiple, by our count, does not include the orc-bands of the Misty Mountain's western foot that Saruman has been sending up the road at us in the years past, or the Dunlending levies he has been recruiting at the harvest-festivals at Dunharrow."
"It does not."
A pause.
"My lord."
"Speak it, Eorlund."
"My lord — the question I cannot, at my place at this table, hold. How long."
Aldric set his hand on the table at the head.
He did not, for a beat, answer.
He had thought about the question for the count of perhaps the previous hour and a quarter, in the inner chamber and in the corridor coming down to the council and at the head of the table during Maira's briefing. He had not, in any of that time, reached a number he was prepared to set on a council table. He had reached a shape — the shape of a country whose long peace had, by the work of a single hand in a tower in the long west, been compressed at the rate of perhaps three years' compression for every year of preparation. He had reached the small flat private fact that the long-peace timeline he had been carrying in his head since the southern ridge — the timeline that had given him perhaps twelve years to bring the country to the level it would need to be at when the matter at Isengard reached the country's western marches — was, by the small flat hand of Maira's source, a timeline that had just been reduced by perhaps three years.
He did not, at the council table, set this out.
He said: "The window is shorter than we have been working to."
A pause.
"By how much, my lord."
"By perhaps three years. The full long-peace timeline I have been working to has, by this morning's intelligence, lost three years off its tail. The country has — by my count at this table — eight to ten years before the matter at Isengard reaches the country's marches in full. Not the twelve to fifteen we have been working to. The work we have been doing in the past three years will continue. The work we will do in the next eight will be the work of three years compressed into two. We will not — eleven civilian members of this council — be giving up any of the civic work that has been adopted by this council's hand. We will not be giving up the library, which will be built. We will not be giving up the hospital, which will be built. We will not be giving up the market-square expansion, which will be built. We will be — by the small flat accelerating hand of the next eight years — building all of those things faster. The country will not, in becoming the country it has eight years to become, set down any of the country it has been becoming. We will carry it all. We will build it all. We will, by the small careful accelerating work, hold what we have and grow what we need at the same time."
He paused.
"The work is — eleven civilian members of this council — the work each of you has been doing. You will do it at three-fifths of the time you have been doing it in. The military matter at this table will be handled by the captain marshal and by Captain Maira and by my own hand. The work you do at your own councils will move with the small accelerated rhythm I have set out. You will tell your people, at the small inner councils of your regions, that the realm is in a season of building faster. You will not tell them what is in this dossier. You will not, on your way home, in any public house, name the number eight thousand. You will carry the number in your own heads. The number is for your own decisions in your own regions. The number is not, by the inner-channel arrangement of fifteen years of council practice, for any other ear in the country than the ears at this table."
The eleven civilian members inclined their heads, one after another, in the small flat agreement that had been the standing form of council adoption since the first founding meeting fifteen years ago.
Eorlund inclined his head.
Gorlim inclined his head.
Maira inclined her head.
Celwyn, at her side-desk, inclined her head and set the small careful note on the side of her tablet that she set when a council session had reached its adoption-form.
Aldric did not, on the adoption, look up.
He had been looking, for the last three sentences of his own address, at the small folded sheet of paper at the corner of the desk — the small folded sheet that had been delivered to him by the chamber steward at the seventh bell, in the chamber steward's own hand, with the small private seal Halbarad had been using since the autumn for the inner correspondence he had been sending up to the inner chamber from the lower chamber on the days he had not been able to climb.
He picked it up.
He unfolded it.
The sheet had on it, in the old man's hand, a single line.
The window is shorter than you think.
Aldric registered the line.
He registered the small flat coincidence that the line was the same sentence he had, at the head of the table, said in his own voice some minutes ago without having yet read Halbarad's sheet.
He set the sheet on the table beside his elbow.
He looked at the eleven civilian council members.
He looked at the captains.
He looked at Maira.
He said: "Eight thousand. Eight years. The country was forty-seven of us once. We will be the country we need to be in eight."
The council closed at the tenth bell.
He stayed at the head of the table after the council emptied.
The chamber steward, who had been waiting in the corridor for the doors to open, came in at the eleventh bell with a small kettle of the winter herbal Arethil had been sending up for him at the long council days. He set it at the corner of the table. He inclined his head. He went out.
Aldric did not, for some minutes, reach for the kettle.
He sat at the head of the table.
He read Halbarad's sheet a second time.
He folded it.
He set it inside the inner pocket of his coat, beside the small embroidered seven-pointed band of the house that Tauriel had stitched into the right cuff thirteen years ago.
He stood up.
He went to find Tauriel.
⚜ ━━━━ ROYAL PROCLAMATION ━━━━ ⚜
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