Work Text:
Celeste knits during war councils.
She doesn’t care if it makes her look disengaged, uninvested in the war because she’s the ruler and her people will never put her in the danger of battle. She doesn’t care if it makes her look incompetent, too young even by Starling standards to understand urgency or the intricacies of their strategies. If in spite of her words and actions in every council, and the hours afterwards she spends pouring over maps and supply inventories, someone is still misled by her knitting , then they were never worth her time.
She deftly loops red yarn around her needles in the hat she’s making. “We don’t need another draft. The current problem is a shortage of supplies, not troops, and bringing in more people will only cause hunger and illness in the camps.”
Lord Betel frowns across the table. “The problem is both. The Nightshades outnumber us six to one.”
Also true, and Celeste tries to not let it show in her face how deeply the reminder cuts her. The thought of drafting more people, of forcing people who wouldn’t even fight of their own volition to die- it makes her sick. She will do it if she has to, but not now, not when it might be for no reason.
“We can consider more troops once we’ve secured a source of food for our soldiers who are already in occupied territory.” Celeste frowns at the map spread out across the table. The Nightshades have taken a scorched-earth tactic with a lot of Starling’s resources- what they really want is land near Starling’s whaling waters, and they don’t care much about preserving what’s on the land itself.
“Do we have any information on the position of Nightshade supply caravans or ships?” She asks. They’ve successfully intercepted some, but the Nightshade military has had increasing ingenuity in not getting tracked down.
General Gliese shakes her head. “Latest intelligence is that they’re forcing Moonling prisoners to speed their ships up by manipulating the currents. They’re too fast… and no longer reliant enough on the wind… for us to easily keep track of.”
Celeste sighs. Her needles click as she knits two stitches together and tries to ignore the tight feeling in her chest as she considers what other options they might have to get food to their army.
Taking back one of their cities would give them access to the food the Nightshades have stockpiled behind the walls. But they don’t have the numbers or weaponry for that. All of the Starling cities Nightshade has occupied are heavily defended.
Celeste allows herself to look away from the map for just a second, to give her mind a break from the overwhelming proof of how doomed they are. She runs her soft yarn under her fingers and makes a few more stitches. The pressure in her head lessens.
She examines the map again. A bit of the original border between Starling and Nightshade, from before the war, reaches not so far from the battalion of hers that she’s most concerned about. They haven’t attempted a counterstrike yet, already overwhelmed on familiar territory and unwilling to put themselves further at a disadvantage by heading into Nightshade proper. Still… there’s undamaged farmland there, and at this point the Nightshades have made home territory more hostile than enemy territory.
Celeste sets down her knitting and points at a midsized town not so far past the Nightshade border.
“What if we strike here?”