Hollin Emberling holds the war seat in the imperial precinct at Chimus, which makes him the man most responsible for where the empire spends its legions and how many it expects back. He is Fieri, born under Hell Creek like the rest of the court, and he came up through the army rather than the gem-revenue, which is rare for a minister and central to how he is heard. When Hollin argues that a thing can be taken, the precinct listens, because Hollin has stood on the ground he wants to take.
He stood on the ground at Phriorys. In 3358 SD he was a junior officer on the third march against Pyaganos, the most carefully planned of the empire's three attempts on the dragon's hills, and he came home one of the senior survivors the dragon chose to release. He has never pretended the third march was anything but a humiliation. What he took from it is the reason he is dangerous.
Most of the precinct reads the three repulsions as a sequence of fixable mistakes, each campaign undone by a particular error the next one will correct. Hollin knows better, and says so plainly: Pyaganos is not defending Phriorys, he is farming Chimea for spectacle, sparing exactly enough men each time to guarantee the empire comes back. Hollin watched the dragon release soldiers and run them down again for the pleasure of it. He understands the trap more clearly than anyone who votes in that room.
And he argues for the fourth march anyway. His conclusion is not that the empire should stop. It is that every march so far arrived too small to deny the dragon his game, that a force heavy enough to take and hold the northern hills in a single season leaves Pyaganos nothing to play with, and that the empire that built Chimus to prove a beast does not bound it cannot now concede the southern border to one. He may be right. He may also be a man whose ambition wanted a war and whose hard-won clarity handed him an argument for it. He does not seem able to tell the difference, and he has stopped trying.
He is the only one in the precinct who has seen the dragon work. That is why they believe him. No one has asked why the man who watched it all happen is the one who wants to go back. — attributed to the counting-halls, Chimus
What stands against him is not conscience but arithmetic. Wessa Wickling, who holds the treasury seat and the gem-revenue that pays for everything Chimus is, has spent two years telling the precinct what Hollin's fourth march would cost and where the money is not. The Blood Mountain gem flow that funds the empire's display has begun to stutter, choked by the grinding war in the occupied range, and Wickling's bloc counts every legion sent south to Phriorys as a legion's pay drawn against a revenue that is already failing. She is not arguing that the dragon should be left in peace. She is arguing that the empire cannot presently afford its own pride. The two of them have not been reconciled, and the fourth march waits on which of them the court decides to fear more.