**Chapter 15 — The Mowbray Request**
The grounds were still busy when Owen left the second training yard. Boots ground against the packed dirt, equipment cases knocked against benches. And farther down the grounds, the instructor he had noticed earlier was still working through his roster, calling out surnames one after another while soldiers answered and moved off toward their stations.
Two soldiers lowered their voices after he passed them.
"...made the General reinforce her blade. You could see the fire from over by the benches."
"Come on. He only awakened a month ago."
Owen heard enough to know what they were talking about and kept walking. He had no interest in correcting them, and he wasn’t going to stand there and listen to them argue about it either.
One of his maids was waiting near the residence entrance. She took in his sweat-darkened training clothes with a single glance.
"Lord Ferrers would like to see you in his study, Young Master," she said. "Once you’ve cleaned up."
Owen assumed Edith had already given her report. His father had spent the whole month waiting to learn whether Owen would actually be allowed on the subjugation, so it made sense that he would want to hear about it quickly. Owen wasn’t nervous. He knew he had passed. What he didn’t know was what his father intended to do with that.
He bathed quickly, changed into a clean dark coat with the Ferrers crest on the breast, and went straight to the study.
Edmund was alone when Owen came in. There were no officers gathered around the desk, only his father, who set down his pen and gestured for him to sit.
"Edith came to see me," Edmund said. "Congratulations."
"Thank you."
"Tempered Crest after a month of cultivation." Edmund leaned back in his chair. "And she tells me you made her reinforce her sword to meet one of your attacks safely."
There was something in his voice that Owen didn’t hear often, a quiet pride sitting just underneath the practical tone.
"I’ve known Edith a long time," Edmund went on. "She doesn’t do that lightly. But don’t confuse making her take you seriously for one exchange with being able to beat her. Those are very different things."
"I know," Owen said. She had shown him exactly how different they were the moment after it happened.
Edmund seemed satisfied with that. "Tomorrow’s schedule has changed. Edith was going to start your field preparation, but the first part of it will happen in a formal operations briefing instead."
Owen sat up a little straighter.
"House Mowbray has asked for our assistance with a monster problem in their territory," Edmund said. "Now that Edith has cleared you, you’ll be coming with the force. Mercer will give the full details tomorrow."
Owen had a dozen questions, but it was clear his father had no intention of turning the study into the briefing.
"I’ll tell you this much," Edmund said. "There have been deaths near one of Mowbray’s outer villages. The situation looks contained enough for a normal subjugation force, but it’s serious enough that they asked for support."
"Is Gareth going?"
"He is. So are Edith and Mercer, along with a Ferrers detachment."
Owen nodded. Edmund picked his pen back up, and Owen took that as his cue to leave.
Out in the corridor, his excitement settled into something more careful. Every fight he’d had since awakening had stopped before anyone was truly hurt. Whatever was waiting in Mowbray territory had already killed people, and they hadn’t been given that luxury. He didn’t even know how many there had been yet.
After breakfast the next morning, Owen waited with Gareth near the training complex for the briefing.
There were more soldiers moving equipment through the grounds than there had been the day before. Field packs, sealed cases and travel crates were being sorted beside the buildings, and the same instructor was still calling names and assignments from his roster while small groups broke away toward different preparation points. It looked less like an operation that had just been announced and more like one the whole household had been working toward for weeks.
Gareth leaned against the wall beside him with his arms folded. "So. You actually passed."
"I did."
"And you made Edith reinforce her sword." He shook his head slowly. "Half the soldiers out there are still arguing about whether it really happened."
"I heard some of them yesterday."
"Try not to let it go to your head. She’ll only make you pay for it later."
Owen didn’t doubt that for a second.
"What should I expect from the briefing?" he asked.
Gareth thought about it for a moment. "Listen carefully. Especially when Mercer starts talking about what they don’t know." He nodded toward the soldiers sorting crates. "The parts everyone is sure about are usually fine. It’s the unknowns that turn a simple operation into something that isn’t."
Owen kept that in mind.
A uniformed orderly approached them and stopped. "Young Master Gareth, Young Master Owen. Lord Ferrers is ready for you in the operations room."
Gareth pushed himself off the wall. As they started walking, his easy manner tightened a little. He didn’t say anything, but Owen noticed it all the same and understood that this meeting mattered, even if nobody was expecting a disaster.
The operations room was larger than Owen expected. A large illuminated map-screen took up most of one wall, showing two neighboring territories and the route that ran between them, and a long table stretched down the center of the room.
Edmund stood near the head of it. Edith was beside him in her fitted dark officer’s coat, with the Ferrers crest on the breast and her General’s insignia at the collar. Mercer stood by the map with a slim pointer in one hand and several report sheets laid out beside him.
Four other officers were present, three men and a woman. They all wore the same house style: structured dark coats with high collars, fitted trousers, polished boots, reinforced forearms, and the Ferrers crest worked into the breast or shoulder. The only real differences between them were the markings at their collars and cuffs.
Owen had grown up reading those markings. The woman wore a Major’s insignia. Two of the men were Lieutenants, and the third wore the markings of a senior Sergeant.
He noticed something else as well. Mercer was only a Captain. Edith outranked him, and so did the Major at the table. Yet Mercer was the one standing directly beside Edmund and holding the briefing materials. Rank in the Ferrers military and the trust of Lord Ferrers were clearly not the same thing.
Edmund waited until Owen and Gareth had taken their seats. "Mercer. Begin."
Mercer changed the map to show Mowbray territory.
Owen leaned forward slightly. He had looked at maps of Ferrers territory more times than he could count, and the structure here was familiar. The Mowbray estate sat inside its principal city, with roads spreading outward to smaller towns and villages.
What caught his attention were the differences. Mowbray territory was smaller than Ferrers territory and supported fewer settlements, but a broad forest took up a much larger share of its land, spreading beyond one cluster of villages toward the edge of the map.
Looking at it laid out like that, the estate seemed small. Ferrers and Mowbray were each the center of their territories, not the whole of them. Each family governed and protected far more people than its own bloodline: ordinary civilians, recruited soldiers, merchants, and entire towns and villages that depended on them.
Mercer pointed to a single village at the forest’s edge.
"These are the confirmed facts from the Mowbray report," he said. "Local hunters have been attacked during trips into the forest. Some disappeared entirely, and others were found dead. The confirmed death toll currently stands at twelve."
Owen looked at the village marker.
Around the estate, everyone had been calling this a subjugation, the same way they would talk about any other operation. But the people living beside that forest had already been paying for whatever had changed inside it, and twelve of their families had lost someone.
"Mowbray patrols sent to investigate found an unusual amount of monster movement deeper inside the forest," Mercer continued. "Tracks crossing one another, disturbed undergrowth, and enough separate signs to indicate that this isn’t one isolated animal defending its territory."
He set the pointer down on the table. "Now, what we don’t know."
Owen remembered what Gareth had said and paid closer attention.
"Mowbray’s scouts haven’t identified a single species responsible for every attack. They don’t know why different monsters are moving through the same sections of forest, and they haven’t confirmed a single dominant creature directing them. There’s also no confirmed Breach emergency and nothing to indicate a disaster-level threat. For now, this is being treated as a concentrated monster incursion requiring a systematic sweep and cull, not a regional catastrophe."
Owen saw the logic straight away. If one monster had been responsible, Mowbray could have sent a single strong cultivator into the woods and been done with it. But they didn’t know what they were dealing with or how far it extended. They needed enough people to cover separate sectors of the forest, stop more creatures from slipping toward inhabited land, and find out where the abnormal movement ended.
"As for why we were contacted," Mercer said, "Mowbray is capable of defending its own territory. But committing too much of its standing force to a wide forest sweep would thin its protection elsewhere. We’re the nearest allied Great Family able to provide a reliable second force, and Lord Mowbray contacted Lord Ferrers directly. Our houses have cooperated before, and the two of them are longstanding friends."
He glanced briefly at the officers. "This is a request for support, not a rescue."
Nobody at the table needed that explained. No one wanted Mowbray to look as though it couldn’t manage its own land.
"The objective is straightforward," Mercer went on. "We travel to Mowbray territory, meet their force and move to the affected area. The combined personnel will be divided into search groups to sweep designated sectors of the forest. Monsters found inside the active zone are to be eliminated, and each team will report any signs of where the larger concentration is moving. The immediate goal is to make the forest around the village safe again and find out what caused the movement."
Mercer moved the pointer from the village to the route connecting the two territories.
"The Ferrers detachment leaves the estate at eight tomorrow morning aboard one of the house’s private airships."
Owen’s eyes lingered on the route, on the point where it crossed from Ferrers land into Mowbray’s.
"From the family," Mercer continued, "Lord Ferrers will lead the delegation, and Young Master Gareth will accompany him. Young Master Owen has been cleared to participate. General Rooke will serve as senior military commander, I’ll accompany Lord Ferrers, and the officers in this room will oversee the soldiers assigned to the deployment."
Owen noticed how Mercer had phrased his part. Cleared to participate. He wasn’t being brought along as a symbol of the family. Edith’s assessment was the reason his name was still on the list.
One of the Lieutenants spoke up. "With respect, my lord, where will Young Master Owen be placed? This will be his first field operation."
It was Edith who answered, not Edmund.
"I’ve personally tested his cultivation, his endurance, his sword transformations, his fire control and his decision-making under pressure," she said. "I consider him fit to join under supervision." She paused briefly. "Fit to join doesn’t mean experienced. He’ll be treated accordingly."
The Lieutenant nodded, apparently satisfied.
Gareth didn’t add anything. He let Edith’s assessment stand on its own, and Owen found that he appreciated that far more than he would have appreciated his brother jumping in to defend him.
"Detailed team assignments will be decided after we meet Mowbray command and receive their latest forest reports," Mercer said. "Until then, this is what we have."
Edmund looked around the table. "Does anyone have a question that actually needs answering before we leave?"
The Major asked whether Mowbray would be providing scouts who knew the forest, and Mercer confirmed that their scouts would be attached to the search groups. The senior Sergeant asked about the weight allowance for personal equipment aboard the airship, and Mercer told him the full list would be posted that afternoon.
Nobody else spoke.
"Then the force moves tomorrow at eight," Edmund said. "Have your personal equipment and your assigned personnel ready before then. Dismissed."
Owen and Gareth left with the officers, while Edmund, Edith and Mercer stayed behind and bent over the map. In the corridor, the Major caught Gareth with a question about equipment, and Gareth waved for Owen to go on ahead without him.
Owen walked on alone.
The upper passage he took back toward the residence overlooked part of the estate, and beyond its walls, the rooftops of the city stretched into the distance. He slowed as he passed the windows.
He had always assumed the academy would be the first real reason he left Ferrers territory for any meaningful length of time. Instead, tomorrow he would be crossing into Mowbray territory aboard a Ferrers airship, heading toward a village where twelve people had already died.
Those deaths kept him from thinking of it as sightseeing. Even so, he couldn’t pretend he wasn’t looking forward to it. Another Great Family’s territory, another city, another house’s soldiers and the way they fought. Some old part of him had always wanted to see more of the world, and that hadn’t gone away. More than any of that, though, there would be real combat outside a training yard.
Every fight he’d had since awakening had come with someone strong enough to stop it if things went wrong. Gareth had held his épée at Owen’s neck and gone no further, and Edith had ended every exchange the moment it had shown her enough.
Once they entered that forest, nobody would be doing that for him. His sword would be expected to kill something that fully intended to kill him back, and the airship would leave at eight tomorrow morning.