A week after leaving Ingot, Rai Half-head and his band of misfits made shore for the final time about ten miles from Old-Scout’s camp. Rai, if he’d had it his way, would’ve made shore for a final time a mite closer to their final destination than two hands of miles from it. He didn’t much fancy the idea of hiking through this terrain with a crew of 60 men and women who had maybe 40 full sets of limbs between them. It had been hard enough with just him the first time through. Alas, time and tide wait for no man, and apparently, they took their toll on barges as well. Rai squinted a glare at the last of the loose timbers that were splintering and spinning into the fast current of the Dupandover River, imagining the body of Lord Sticky-Fingers spinning and splintering instead. He blew upwards irritably, sending a lock of greasy flaxen hair sweeping up and out of his eyes with the sour breeze of his breath.

It had been tight quarters for the past week, with the raft packed so tight with people that there was barely room for the barge-men, an impromptu group made up of those soldiers who still had all their limbs, to brace their feet while pushing their way down-river, and that wasn’t even mentioning the hullabaloo that ensued whenever someone needed to relieve themselves. What all this amounted to, in the end, was Rai being considerably dirtier, smellier, and more uncomfortable than he had been in some time. He didn’t dare take out the small stash of soapweed he kept in a watertight compartment in the bag Old-scout had given him. He had no illusions about keeping it if he did.

Rai Half-head may not have been the street-rat he once was, but he was no noble numbskull wandering down dockside where he didn’t belong either. He might be younger, and more fit and agile than most of these old hacks he had with him, but Rai Half-head still remembered well the time when he watched Big Jim, scariest pit-fighter ever to claw his way out of the Debtor’s-Den on Seaview Row, get beaten to death get beaten to death by a hand of old men and a few of the more recklessly desperate aging whores, all because there was a rumor that the man had enough coin to afford a meal of more than spoiled potato spuds and burned fish. Rai Half-head wasn’t near as scary as Big Jim had been, and not even close to as capable. Additionally there was a world of difference between less than ten elderly folks armed with nothing but wooden sticks, and a hundred of the damn wrecks swinging around swords and axes. His lips quirked at the thought of the old coots shambling about, half-blind and with weapons on the edge of being too heavy for them, stumbling about. His lips quirked, and his angry squint at the water lessened slightly, easing into his characteristic smirk.

Rai turned away from the water to lay eyes upon his ragtag army of shambling old men, and the handful of old women who were little better. The senile old sergeant was whooping at them, trying to get them to form up and march upon the ‘enemy'. He seemed rather certain that said ‘enemy’ was either hiding in a thicket of birch trees some 30 yards distant, or that the birch trees were in fact, enemy forces, cunningly disguised as trees. Rai let out a sigh and marched towards the man, mustering up as much confidence as he could. He’d heard Pointy-Beard say that was all it took to be a good officer at one point or another. Admittedly, this comment had been followed by Natalia asserting that this was most certainly not the case, and Big-man shaking his head wearily. But then, what did those two know about being officers anyways? Out of the three, Pointy-Beard was the only one with any experience in the matter.

Rai clapped a hand on the shoulder of the aging sergeant, who was currently giving one of the closer birch trees a side-eye so intense that Rai was certain the old fool intended to either fight it or make an attempt at seduction.

“Oi!” he said loudly, knowing the man to be hard of hearing from their week’s travel, “We be needin’ tae form up and march…” He paused on the verge of saying ‘west’, realizing that he was not exactly certain which direction that was. It could very well be directly towards the river they had just exited. So, he turned with as much confidence as he could muster, and pointed towerds the direction he knew the camp to lie, “Thataway!”

The old sergeant squinted at him for a moment, before leaning in close and whispering in a harsh voice.

“Sir, with all due respect, we are surrounded by enemy troops!” He peered around fearfully, and hunched his shoulders, appearing smaller. “They’re everywhere.”

Rai leaned forward, putting himself closer to the old man, keeping his voice and eyes as serious as he could manage, while gritting out through clenched teeth and burnt lips.

“I know that, ye hear? I know.” The old sergeant drew back, surprised.

“Ya do?” The gruff man’s quizzical voice carried further than he probably meant it to, his puzzle amplified and let loose for all the world to witness. “But no one ever sees ‘em! I’m always the only one! The only one watching! Truly you see ‘em, Sir?” Rai clumsily fumbled his way through yanking the man back towards him, putting panic into his hissing voice.

“Quiet, sergeant! Do ye be wantin’ them that’s waitin’ fer us tae know that we know that they’re there?” The old sergeant appeared puzzled as he attempted to deconstruct Rai’s sentence. The scarred young man sighed, and rubbed his eyes as though exasperated by the old sergeant’s daftness.

“We,” Rai said, gesturing between himself and the old man, “are nae supposed tae know that they be there, see? They’re all disguised like, aye?”

“Aye, aye, true enough, true enough.”

“And if they be hidin’ out in these parts, sae well that naught but ye and me are smart ‘nough tae see ‘em, they probably don’t want a damn thing tae do with me and you, or our men righto?”

“Righto, righto, as you say Sir, as you say…” The old man trailed off for a moment, before saying out the side of his mouth while pointedly not staring at a birch tree a few dozen feet from them, “Do ya really see ‘em sir? Truly?”

Rai looked the man right in the eye, and saw the fear, the pain, the anger, and the paranoia, and in a voice so guileless that it might’ve belonged to Mute, he spoke a truer lie than he’d ever uttered before.

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“Yes.”

***

Braxton ran his tongue over his teeth slowly, tracing each one individually, a mirror to the slowness and careful consideration of the enemy camp before him. He spent special time tracing the three uneven molars on the lower left side, which had been broken off in a fistfight as a boy. He’d always found it inconvenient that it had been that side which took the blow, rather than his right. He’d always preferred chewing with his left side, and had never really gotten over the habit, even though it had been nearly 35 years since the fist of the blacksmith’s son introduced itself to the side of his face. A hammer to an anvil, as it were, as Braxton’s father had taken great delight saying at the time.

His current conundrum was a fair bit more concerning that his three broken teeth, and was turning into nearly as great a headache as the getting of the former caused. It had been ten days since Half-head set out for Ingot, and the lad had just arrived back with their ‘troops’ early this afternoon. Braxton was currently trying to figure out exactly how he was going to storm an enemy garrison of 140 men with a force made up 60 geriatrics, most of whom had less then the total allotment of limbs the Reaper intended for people to have at birth.

Braxton didn’t even have the luxury of time to really plan something, as hiding that many people for a couple of days was hard enough, especially with the regular patrols that the camp had taken to sending outwards in a half-mile radius of the encampment. The best he had been able to come up with was a strategy to make the Vencheng think that their numbers were greater than what they actually were, by adding bannermen to their charge, to give the impression of a company, or maybe even multiple companies, instead of the three squads of elderly soldiers that Braxton had to work with. Attacking at night would help, but there was still little that he could really do.

Braxton leaned back on his heels, holding in a grunt at the cramps that were starting to form in his calves from crouching for so long, and rubbed his eyes tiredly. He needed to reframe his priorities. He was approaching this like taking the encampment was the point. That, however, was not the mission priority. Mission priority was, as so eloquently defined by Rai Half-head a few hours previously; “-tae get them caged folk the threshing hells out of there”.

Therefore, this was, in essence, a rescue mission. A complicated rescue mission, given that there were over 20 hostages that needed to be extracted. Braxton stopped rubbing his sandy, tired eyes as a thought occurred to him. Not all of the hostages were really ‘hostages’ were they? No, some of them are what he was certain his old commander would’ve referred to as ‘potential assets’. Or at least, they could be, if he could get them out of the cages before the fighting really started. A small, tightlipped smile made itself known on Braxton Bolindear’s face as the bones of an idea, and the sinews of a plan came together. It was a bad idea, to be sure, and the plan was just as likely to fall to pieces as bear any weight, but it was better than anything he currently had to work with.

***

Knight Captain Robert O’Donnell was picking splinters out of his hand when he noticed it. Well, noticed is a strong word, he didn’t notice ‘it’ specifically for nearly another minute, what he noticed instead was a general feeling of wrongness, as though something in this current setting wasn’t quite right.

He nearly snorted at the thought. There were a lot of things about his current setting that ‘weren’t quite right’, so why should there be anything that he thought of as stranger? Well, logical or not, he felt that something was off. He took stock of himself and his current whereabouts, cycling through his senses one by one to see if he could identify what was bothering him. On his second cycle through, he heard it; the call of a Pin-tailed Sandgrouse. It wouldn’t be an especially jarring sound to most, save for one thing: The Pin-Tailed Sand Grouse was indigenous to the southern portions of Anacsot, and to a more limited extent, the eastern dunes of the Pewhoasil Dessert. It was not, however, ever seen in climates as comparatively cold and wet as the Dupandover forest.

Robert wasn’t a purveyor of birds himself, but Braxton was. In fact, Braxton had, during their stay in Goldstern, dragged him to a travelling menagerie, purely for the sake of seeing a bird that the Sergeant Major had only had the opportunity to see once before in his life. It was a bird that Bolindear found oddly compelling for some reason beyond Robert’s comprehension. The bird they had gone to see, had, upon their arrival, let out the very same cry he was hearing now. Robert raised his eyes, attempting to appear nonchalant to any guard that might be watching, even as his heart pounded in his chest.

It took a few minutes of looking, interspersed with long moments of pretending to be focused on a particularly stubborn slinter in his hand, but eventually, Robert found Bolindear, perched twenty feet up in a tree a few dozen feet beyond the border of the camp. It was a remarkably exposed position for him to be in, where any watcher with keen enough eyes might see, and Robert wondered briefly what the man was playing at. When they made eye contact, the weathered sergeant-major began to speak to him in scout sign.

Attack. Next. Midnight. Get. Key. You. Before. Get. You. Out. Before. You. Fight. During.

Scout sign was a primitive thing, not ever really intended to be used for complex speech or interaction, but after a couple of repetitions and modified signs- figuring out ‘Key’ had been particularly difficult- Robert understood. He needed to obtain a key before an attack that would come tomorrow night.

After receiving the message from Bolindear, Robert attempted to continue his day as though very little had happened. And was met with mixed results. He was jumpy, and most of the people around him noticed, although they also seemed to chalk it up to stress mostly, for which he was thankful. He watched carefully, for any opportunity to obtain a key, but none came. It wasn’t really a surprise, given that there were only three keys to the cages in the entire camp. One for the Mercenary leader, one the overall commander of the expedition, and one for Sven Asplundh. Robert didn’t fancy his chances of taking on of those keys unnoticed at all. He tried to think around how to do it a thousand different ways, but nothing came to him. As he worked late into the afternoon, he tried to plan his heist, but nothing seemed to be likely to work. He couldn’t even talk it over with Caj, since the overseers had taken to splitting the two of them up, not liking how chatty they got with one another.

It was early evening when opportunity struck. One of the noble prisoners decided to make a break for it, and was tackled by one of the Vencheng soldiers. In the ensuing wrestling match, one of the many square pouches on the soldiers belt came open, and something tumbled out and rolled across the ground, coming to a rest at Robert’s feet. It was a small paring knife, the kind likely meant for the slicing of apples, or peeling of potatoes. Robert didn’t even think before slipping the knife into his sleeve. In fact he had no idea what he was going to do with it until late that night, as he sat awake trying to plot how exactly he was going to steal a key to get them out of here by tomorrow night. It was when he saw Sven lead Maxim, who, like all the prisoners, had his hands bound at night, out to a ditch a scant ten feet from their cages to relieve himself, that he realized a plan for the knife that lay cool against his left forearm. It was a plan far darker than the retrieval of a key. Indeed, it was a plan darker by far than the theft of any item owned by man. It was a plan to steal a life.