"<span style="color: Magenta">If I might address such a concern, Your Grace.</span>" Jeanne chimed in, prefacing her statement with what sounded like a request to speak up, but to any trained Orlesian ear, would instead be heard as<i>'just shut up and let me handle this'</i>. Admittedly a bit rude, but the knight had grown used to straddling the fence between blunt servitude and outright disrespect, and as far as she was concerned, was actually quite good at it. "<span style="color: Magenta">Twenty chevaliers should more than suffice as protection during the expedition. I can personally vouch for the expertise of each and every last one of them. Should the need arise for more than our current allotment, no reasonable number of men will make any difference to the result.</span>"<br/><br/>Circling around to the front of the table, Jeanne let her shoulders slouch a bit and glanced down the line of volunteers with a narrowed gaze, one hand gently resting atop the hilt of the sword strapped to her side in a very<i>regal</i>pose for a woman of her station as she once again spoke up, voice raised and taking on a far more assertive tone now that she wasn't politely speaking to them through the Duke. "<span style="color: Magenta">In my humble opinion, a smaller group is the ideal choice here. With larger numbers, we would only run the risk of attracting a wayward horde right to us. The goal should be to slip through undetected, with only as many knights as we need to dispatch any stragglers in our path. Adding another sixty men would simply bring <i>more</i> risk of a horde than it would offset with the added benefit of protection. For all intents and purposes, failure to remain undetected might as well be outright suicide, regardless of how much we prepare for such a possibility.</span>"<div class="messageTextEndMarker"> </div>