Wyrmbane watched Sorrow as she studied the requests for more information he'd brought her. He wasn't quite certain what he'd expected from her this morning, but it wasn't this unflappable calm. If he didn't know otherwise, if he hadn't read her reports, he would say that it was just another, ordinary day.
"So, what now? Who's in charge?" She asked, laying out the requests in front of her and studying them.
"Nominally, Fordring is, in this theater." No one, including himself, had actually considered the possibility of losing the majority of Fordragon's units, of losing Fordragon himself, in one single engagement, their very first true engagement, no less. An engagement that had gained them absolutely nothing, and lost them so much...
"Hmmm." He had rarely heard such a blandly noncommittal response before, but Sorrow delivered neutrality in spades with that single, swallowed syllable. "Nominally?"
"I take my orders from the Crown." And he'd never been as grateful for that fact as he was at that moment. It had been bad enough before, now things looked even more dire. "You sound...unimpressed." How far could he push this? But he was running out of time to do this the polite way. "Not sold on Fordring? Don't trust him?" If so, that was an unusual stance for her to take. Most of the Order had been more than happy to see Fordring return to the ranks. But then, she was very clearly no longer with the Order.
She made a soft sound, half pained, half exasperated. "I trust Fordring, as a paladin, implicitly. I have reservations about his plans here, however. He has been out of touch for years. And now, he suddenly wants to return, fall back into a command, build a new Order and go for Arthas? I'm afraid he'll do exactly what Fordragon just did, and take more of our best with him."
Wyrmbane leaned back, resting the tea cup on his chest and staring at her. So, he wasn't the only one who had these thoughts. These doubts. Mograine's 'implicitly trusted' General had them. Which meant that Mograine probably had at least heard them, even if he didn't fully embrace them.
And she was willing to air them. Not in public, but to him. She wasn't afraid. She wasn't so impressed by Fordring's acclaim, his position, that she kept her mouth shut and her thoughts to herself. She did not intrude on Halford's pondering silence for a long moment, letting him digest her words while she marked up the missives he'd brought her with scarlet ink in bold swaths.
"And what now?" She finally asked. "This must have changed...everything?"
"It has. We will be moving up in support of Fordring's push..." He took the edge of one of the maps he could see on the table, giving it a slight tug to let her know he wanted it out from underneath what she was working on. She lifted up the papers from it, and he slid it out, positioning it further down the table. "He's trying to break through here..." He placed a fingertip on a point quite a bit north of the Wrathgate.
She leaned in close to get a better look, before sliding back into her chair and settling what had to be her chin in her hand. "The Breach? That's going to be..."
"Is it viable?" If it truly wasn't, then he needed to know. He needed to be ready to shift again, to try to consider alternate options. But the very idea of losing Fordring's troops the same way that they'd just lost Fordragon's made him sick.
She was silent for a long moment, head cocked as if she was listening to a voice he didn't hear. "It's viable. Ugly, but viable. If we do not have the resources to move the armies by magery or airship, it is probably our only option."
"We do not have the resources to move the bulk of them that way, no." If this was to work, they needed ground access. He could move a lot of his assets, Fordring probably the same, by those means but this was going to take more than his and Fordring's specialized, elite forces. This was a war. It required armies. It would take the elite units to get through this Breach, to hold it long enough for support to arrive and come through. But after that, they had to move onward, towards the Citadel. They couldn't bog down this early...
"Then yes, I reluctantly agree that this is the way we'll have to proceed. The citadel is enviably secure."
Well, that was one way to put it. At least they now had that one way to proceed, before the Ebon Blade had come to them, they hadn't even known that route existed. He'd take 'ugly' over nonexistent any day. Without it, they'd have to get inventive, and he'd prefer to not dangle inventive in front of the Lich King. They'd brought quite enough champions to tempt the Scourge without adding to the mix. It was a terrible situation, they would need their best people to have any hope at all of succeeding, but bringing their best would give the Scourge their best. There was simply no way around it, all that they could do would be to try to minimize their losses...but on the other hand, they could not be too cautious. They were here to win. They had to win. "I want to leave tomorrow morning."
There was an infinitesimal pause in her scribbling, before she gave a slight nod and carried on. "No reason to wait. I doubt if Fordring will, and if you're his support, then you need to be there."
"And you?"
"I'll either be there with you or I will be there with Mograine, but no matter what, I will be there."
He nodded. If Mograine truly saw her as he claimed to, as his general, then of course she'd be there. It would be folly to assume he'd be allowed to keep her that long, he was a little surprised she was here, now. But then, she was supposed to be the Ebon Blade's somewhat approachable, still living, paladin liaison. "When do you think he'll want you back?" If her time here was fleeting, he didn't want to put her in a place where her loss would be a setback he'd have to recover from.
She paused in her scribbling, giving the slightest cock of her head that he knew meant she was in discourse with...whatever it was that was guiding her. She'd never bothered to even try to hide it. It was part and parcel of what he got with her, that...and the whispery, shifty little geist attached to her. Probably more that he hadn't seen yet, the Ebon Blade seemed willing to endow her with what she needed to get the job done for them. "I have no place in the planned engagements for the foreseeable future. The Ebon Blade will be working to secure the smaller tactical targets on the perimeter of the glacier itself. Fast strikes. I am ill suited to lead in that, Mograine has death knight commanders who can and will do the job much, much better than I could."
Of course he did, Mograine's forces were uniquely suited for what she was describing and she would stick out like a torch in a cave. A bright, living vessel of the Light surrounded by undead. Even though he understood that he'd never actually experienced what she was, what she felt like, in this close proximity to her, he could feel her heavily enchanted, death knight forged, armor fighting to obscure what most paladins would proudly exhibit for the world to see. If she was alone in a sea of undead, she'd shine like a beacon. She'd be target number one, and there would be a good chance she could be tracked. There was very little to differentiate Mograine's death knights from the Lich King's, on first and second glances. But Mograine's singular paladin was a different creature altogether.
"Then I want to send you forward with our main body." It would not be the most daring of places to keep her, but he'd gotten no hint that anybody, including her, expected daring exploits in her future. "I'd like to attach Jeremiah to you." Kill two birds with one stone, there. She needed an aide, Jeremiah had been trained to be one for one of Fordragon's officers. She wasn't in a unit command, she was free from a lot of those responsibilities, she had the time and the space to keep an eye on him. And she understood exactly what he'd been through...he'd hate to put the youngster with an officer who didn't. Fordragon's units had been shattered, and he doubted if they'd ever be rebuilt. No one would want to serve in the ghost of a dead regiment, destroyed in the way that it was.
No, it was best to stick Jeremiah with her. All he intended to do was plant both of them in the middle of his main force and move them out of Wintergarde.
"He's not going to like that." She replied in what he was beginning to pin as her mild voice, separating it from the artificial doom and gloom laid over the top of it. It had been annoying at first, but he found himself reading through it more and more easily. There was no real weight behind it, she understood as well as he did. It didn't really matter if Jeremiah didn't like his new assignment, all that mattered was if she was willing to take him on as such or not. Jeremiah had come to Northrend to be an aide to an officer. And aid an officer, he would.
"He's not going home."
She sighed, pulling out a clean sheet of vellum and bowing her head to study her pen as she dipped it in ink and swept it across the page. "I know. I'll watch him,certainly enough. He just won't see this as a favor...yet."
Of course he wouldn't. But at least she did. This was the best he could do, given the circumstances. "How well do you know the route?"
Her relaxed, mild stance shifted slightly...that was another of those questions she didn't like. But he was not going to dance around them. He wouldn't come right out and pry, but she knew a hell of a lot more than she should. And he doubted that whatever she was listening to was the full source of that. "Sorrow. Here's my promise to you... I'm not prying for that. If you want...need...to keep whatever it is you're hiding, to yourself, I'll overlook that. Right up until it hits things I need to know to keep my men safe and my objectives secure. I don't care how you know what you know. But I need to know what you know."
She sat for a second before putting aside the report she had been working on and pulling out the main map again. "I've been on the ground, in person, all of the way to the valley that ends in the Breach. More than once. I...don't have...my personal surveys to that, but I have been to here." She drew a firm line in red down across the middle of the approach to the Breach, through the area that Halford knew was Fordring's planned base to move on the Breach from. "I've taken the route you plan."
There was a stubborn finality to her tone, he was pushing at the edge of where she'd answer him. He could not think of a reason why she would have been there, and he knew that was exactly the reason she was pulling back from him. "Fine, fine." If he pushed, he'd lose. He didn't need to know, all he needed to know was that she had apparently been there. On the ground. More than once. Taking the same route. It made no sense, it bred a dozen or more questions, but he was going to let those drift...for now. "I know I told you I wanted you with the main body, but." It made no sense to leave the only person he had with him who claimed to have taken this route back with the main body. He knew it. She knew it.
"I will lead your scouts through, but you keep Jeremiah in the main body. I don't want to lead and babysit at the same time."
"Agreed."
