Fen was quiet for a mont.
"When do you need an answer?" she asked.
"I’m here for two more days," Elara said. "Before I leave."
Fen nodded once.
Elara stood and went to find Venn to tell her she would be taking all three candidates back to the capital, and also that she had a significant number of questions about the program’s funding structure and intake pipeline that she wanted to address before she left, because the program was good and good things required sustained attention or they stopped being good.
Behind her, at the edge of the training yard, Fen stood and watched the current cohort run their coordination drill, and for the first ti in four months, she was thinking about sothing other than what she was waiting for.
She was thinking about what ca next.
The two days at the training post passed quickly, which was what happened when Elara found sothing worth paying attention to.
She spent the first morning with Venn going through the program’s funding structure, which was — she had expected sothing like this but had not expected the specific shape of it — chronically underfunded in ways that were not visible from the administrative summaries because the administrative summaries had been written by people who had learned to present inadequate resources as adequate resources, which was a skill that people in underfunded programs developed out of survival necessity but which made accurate assessnt from the outside extrely difficult.
The training post was running on approximately sixty percent of what it actually needed. The gap was being covered by Venn and her senior instructors doing more with less in the specific ways that competent people do more with less — cutting corners that could be cut, stretching supplies that could be stretched, absorbing personally the cost of things the budget didn’t cover. The program was good despite its funding, not because of it, and Elara sat with that distinction for a long mont before she said anything.
"How long has it been at this level?" she asked.
"The last significant funding review was eleven years ago," Venn said. She said it without particular bitterness, which was sohow worse than bitterness would have been — it was the tone of soone who had been managing an unfair situation for so long that the unfairness had beco simply the weather. "Since then, the allocation has been adjusted annually for basic cost increases, but the base number has never been revisited."
Eleven years ago was the middle of her father’s reign, when the court had been occupied with its various elaborate preoccupations and the training post for beast knights had apparently not been among them.
"What would the program look like at full funding?" Elara asked.
Venn looked at her with the careful expression of soone who had been asked this question in their own head many tis and had answers ready but was not certain about the wisdom of sharing them with soone they had known for less than a day.
"Tell ," Elara said. "Specifically."
Venn told her specifically.
The cohort size could double. The assessnt stage could be extended — it was currently compressed to fit the budget’s constraints on facility ti and instructor availability, and the compression ant that so candidates passed through faster than the ideal level of certainty about their readiness warranted. The equipnt had been adequate twelve years ago and was now behind several generations of developnt in areas that mattered. There were techniques that Venn knew about, had studied, had in so cases personally developed, that were not in the current curriculum because there was not enough ti in the current curriculum to add them.
Elara listened to all of it. She took notes. She asked specific questions — not the general encouraging questions of soone performing interest, but the specific questions of soone calculating, working through the implications of each elent Venn described, testing the logic of it.
By the end of the morning she had a clear picture of the gap between what existed and what was possible.
She drafted a funding revision proposal that afternoon in the small office Venn had given her — not a full reform docunt, which would require the budget commission and take months, but a preliminary authorization that would release ergency supplentary funds imdiately from the imperial discretionary reserve, which was a chanism that existed for exactly this kind of situation and which she had been careful to establish operational control over in the second week of her reign precisely because she had known she would eventually need it.
She wrote the number. She looked at it. She wrote it again more clearly, so there was no ambiguity about what she had authorized.
She sealed it and gave it to Arek to send to the capital by shadow courier.
"It will take ti for the full reform to process," she told Venn when she gave her a copy of the authorization. "The budget commission, the formal review process — that’s months. But this releases the supplentary funds imdiately. Use it for the highest-priority gaps first." She paused. "I’ll want a report in sixty days on where it went and what changed."
Venn looked at the docunt. Then she looked at Elara with an expression that had moved past the careful preliminary version of approval into sothing more direct.
"Yes, Your Majesty," she said.
---
The second day was for the three candidates.
She t with Teva and Dorin in the morning, together this ti rather than separately, because she wanted to see how they were with each other — whether the dynamic between them was competitive or cooperative, whether they had the quality of people who could work alongside soone else capable without making it a problem.
They had the quality. She watched them for an hour in a joint assessnt exercise that Venn ran at her request — not a test, not formally, but a practical scenario that required them to make decisions together under ti pressure. They were not perfectly coordinated. They disagreed twice, sharply, and resolved both disagreents quickly and without residue, which was better than perfect coordination would have been. Perfect coordination between two independent people was usually performance. This was real.
Afterward she sat with them and laid out what she was offering. Not a standard palace guard posting. She had thought carefully, over the previous two days, about what she actually needed and what the existing category structures could accommodate and where she needed to build sothing new.
She needed people who could move. Who could go where she went, including places the standard guard complent didn’t go — forest paths, garrison back gates, villages that weren’t on the official maps. Who could make decisions when a situation developed faster than instructions could be issued. Who understood that their value was not in their physical capability alone but in their judgnt, and who had the judgnt to justify that understanding.
"The posting is mobile," she said. "You will be based at the capital but not confined to it. The work will be varied in ways I cannot fully predict because I cannot fully predict what the empire is going to require." She looked at them both. "I need people who are comfortable with that."
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