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There were any number of reasons why Aindriu kept going to Cat Lake. The woman from Sweetwater needed a cart, clean water, and medicine - she might not survive back to Aldertref without better medical care than Aindriu could manage in a forest, let alone being carried like a sack of flour for days on end. There were other slaves, other prisoners, other people being treated like firewood, to be used up and thrown away, within walking distance. And the rage in Aindriu's heart at basically everyone even tangentially involved had not abated yet. She could pick any one of those reasons, and it would be true.
It wouldn't make up for failing them. People - and cats - had died, been maimed, been violated while she was dreaming pointlessly weird dreams in the Chrysalis, and while she'd been waiting for better opportunities that never, ever came. They'd never forgive her for not helping them in time, and she didn't do this in hope of earning that forgiveness. This was for her own satisfaction. To do it right, just once.
Sun, she'd known they weren't above that, and she'd still thoughtlessly touched Fionola and reminded her of what had been done to her. One of the few people she'd been able to save at Krellen Ford, and she'd gone and hurt her. Who knows how many more missteps she'd made in handling the freed prisoners and their traumas that she hadn't caught?
Aindriu sighed, shaking her head. She'd come to the edge of the treeline. Cat Lake lay ahead, and a stoutly built fortress stood at its edge.
'Looks big enough for a few hundred,' Mirna commented, his estimate roughly in agreement with hers. 'Most of that'll be prisoners, some just merchants, so call it fifty mercenaries. Should be in reach for you. Any plans?'
"I was going to kill everything that wasn't in chains or surrendering," Aindriu drawled out absentmindedly, most of her attention on analyzing the fortress and developing a more detailed plan.
The fort design was fairly basic, but sturdy - a reinforced palisade made of tree trunks planted in the earth forming a crescent around a compound of large wooden buildings with thatch roofs. The whole assembly was nestled up against Cat Lake, with a dock and a few boats tied to it, and a single gate on the forest side. The forest was cleared out for a fair distance around the fort, and the clearing was split with ditches, dug to hamper any impending attack.
'You're doing a terrible job of convincing me you're not a barbarian,' Mirna pointed out.
There were five guards on the watchtowers built into the walls. A set of barracks buildings for soldiers and slaves, a storage building, and a clear area in the center of the compound, presumably for... trade. Not easy to see much more than rooftops over the walls, though. The gates were open, a large wagon with armed men and women on mounts in escort winding its way through the maze of ditches to reach them.
Aindriu stretched lightly, warming her body up a bit. "But seriously, I'm going to approach in the open. As far as I know I can't turn invisible, so I'm just going to walk up as if I'm a legitimate messenger. Ideally I get in before anyone calls me on it, then start killing. I'm tough and strong enough to win a lot more than I ought, and I'm fast enough to pick my fights. So I want to dance around the compound, fight as few people at a time as I can, and inflict casualties as fast and frighteningly as possible, until they start surrendering." At least this time they hadn't committed any more-horrible-than-expected crimes that she was aware of, so she could actually let them surrender. She was killing a lot of people today, and they all deserved it, being murderers and kidnappers to the last, but she'd still like to slow down a little.
There were a few more details than that - she was already mentally mapping the compound to work out where she'd want to maneuver, how she could stop people getting away with prisoners, the ideal point to start, where and when to use which weapons - but it was all fiddly detail work, she could talk Mirna's metaphorical ear off but he'd probably lose all interest by the first quarter. Most people weren't that interested in the things she got excited about.
She paused, cocking her head. "Speaking of which, can I turn invisible?"
'I have very little idea. You seem to have imbibed enough of the power of the Silent Wind and the Sphere of Speech that you might be able to, but if you can't do it on reflex you probably can't do it at all.'
Aindriu spent a while thinking invisible thoughts just in case, and then, lacking a witness to check for her, stepped out of the forest edge and started towards the fort.
The total distance was pretty short, but actually crossing it took a fair amount of time, navigating through the maze of ditches all dug to prevent a straight charge, following in the wake of the arriving wagon. Once she was about halfway there, she was hailed by one of the guards on the watchtowers, so apparently invisibility wasn't among her powers.
Five active guards on the walls. Probably a few more in the slave pens. Unknown number - thirty to fourty - in between their guard shifts and on standby, the bulk of them in the barracks. A few of the actual merchants. Plus the newly arriving wagon and its guard crew.
Aindriu slowly flexed her fingers, focusing purely on breathing in and out, as she walked between the ditches. Intellectually she knew none of them knew what her intentions were, or had any reason to suspect, but the approach was still pretty nerve-wracking, because they could riddle her with arrows from those towers the moment they actually perceived a threat.
Guard crew was pretty multiethnic - one of the women atop the wall looked like an Icewalker, with a yew longbow, and there was one man who had the look and crossbow of the Blessed Isle about him. The pursuit of profit at the expense of other people knew no strict boundaries of ideology or nationality, those two had been on opposite sides of the war two years ago.
Once she was close enough, one of the watchtower guards called down to her. "Halt, who goes there?"
She came to a stop, and called back, "My boss sent me ahead as a runner! Our wagon broke down in the woods, wanted me to buy some parts to fix it!" It was probably acceptable if she just got started right there, but it'd be better if she could get in the walls before the blades came out.
"Hahah, terrible luck," he commiserated, chuckling. "Ask the boss, we aren't exactly a cart shop but you can buy something - you bringing goods for sale, or planning on purchase?"
Aindriu shrugged, not quite able to get into a giggly mood. "Purchase, we're here to pick up a lot of slaves." Technical truths were the best kind. She was pretty close, now - past the ditches, straight shot to the front door.
"Better get in here fast then, there's a big buyer who just came in, you can bid against him!"
Aindriu nodded, peering through the gates at the party that had just arrived and was being greeted by a well-dressed, somewhat portly woman.
They weren't just bandits - their armour and clothing were too uniform. Rokan-jin - their bronze-scaled armour and asymmetric longbows were fairly distinctive, with few parallels in Pretannia. Two seven-man fletches, plus a few traders in the wagon to handle the actual sale. Neither of the cataphracts - each fletch was organized around a single fully armoured leader, a lighter-riding serjeant, two glaivemen, an archer, and two support servants - wore the dragon-mask restricted to Exalted, thankfully.
Well-equipped, and all on mounts - four on two-legged clawriders, wings flapping lightly just to stretch, with the other ten on horses. Soldiers of one of the Grand Orders, the Rokan-jin's most elite forces. Those were professional troops in a professional capacity. Aindriu immediately marked them as the greatest threat, as she stepped into the gate and up behind them, a few of the soldiers turning to look at the approaching girl.
Aindriu offered them a smile, and flung a dart through one of the cataphracts' helmets - the bronze sheet didn't do much against the raw power of the Fomorian king - into the back of his head, melting his skull in emerald fire.
With no need for stealth anymore, Aindriu started breathing at full force, the world around her bathing in dark red light, leaving a bloody tint in the grass as she passed by.
There were a few beats while everyone tried to adjust to the sudden change from negotiation to battle, which Aindriu used to draw her new sword and charge down the line of panicking horses, maiming as she went - the legs mostly weren't armoured, and lopped off cleanly. Quickest way to get them out of the fight. Humans only of course - the horses had nothing to do with this, and between sheer surprise and her superhuman powers she had enough of an advantage to not need to hit the animals, so she just let them stampede out the gate past her in terror.
Six more were out of the fight by the time she was at the front of the wagon and leaping across to the other side - killing the driver as well as she passed - and the cataphract she reached had his sword ready. His clawrider mount - a large, horse-sized bird with terrible sickled footclaws and a toothed snout instead of a beak - snapped in to bite her, splintering her shield in half.
While its teeth were still embedded in the wood, she twisted the shield towards the ground, hurling the clawrider off-balance and down to the ground, crushing the cataphract's leg under its mass.
Aindriu let go of the shield and darted up to the grounded cataphract, drawing a long-bladed dagger from her waist and plunging it into the gap between their breastplate and their helmet while they struggled to get out from under their riding bird. The struggles didn't stop immediately, so she jerked the blade around sharply in the wound until they did.
Shield was gone. In the open. At risk of arrowfire. Eight Rokan-jin down. It was good enough for now.
Aindriu dashed between the snapping jaws of two infuriated clawriders, their riders dead on their backs, and pulled a dart off her chest and offhandedly flung it up to the watchtower, killing the Icewalker as the woman drew back her longbow's string, trying to aim. The arrow spiralled off into the air.
In the meantime three darts came at her from the walls, one missing, the other two plinking off her armour.
Aindriu barrelled into the door of the barracks shoulder-first, slamming straight through it as smokelike letters spelling out 'hinges' dissipated from where the hinges had been, getting out of the line of fire just before the crossbow was fully wound.
And into a common room filled with mercenaries looking up at the noise coming from outside - the centerpiece of the day before she'd interrupted seemed to be a fidchell game being played between a brown-skinned Linowan and a pale Lyrian.
None of them had weapons ready or armour on. It didn't take long.
Aindriu flicked blood off the sword and unslung the spear from her back into her left hand as she moved from the blood-streaked common room, corpses still blazing with green fire. Down the hall into the rest of the barracks, dark red light roiling on the walls.
Individual rooms along either side. Would take too long to go into each, so Aindriu simply strode down the hallway at a calm, restful pace to give herself time to breathe, cutting down groggy mercenaries as they stepped out to see what was happening, using the spear held vertically as a shield to interfere with any attempted counterattacks.
That wasn't everything, but it was the braver ones. The cowards would get to surrender.
Aindriu kicked down the door of the last room, slipping in as its occupants - two tall Pretannic men - backed away from her, whimpering.
They hadn't taken up arms against her, so she decided to accept that as a surrender, simply barking an order to "TAKE UP FARMING!" at them before leaping out the window.
She snatched another dart in two fingers and flung it towards the crossbowman on his watchtower - she'd memorized the position and they hadn't known where or when she'd come out, so they took a moment too long to aim, and her dart was already inside him by the time he was ready for accurate shooting. She'd tried to send her emerald fire with the dart, but it guttered out after it went a few meters away from her. Though the dart itself did enough injury that she was comfortable marking him as out of the battle and breaking into a jagged run across the compound, darts soaring into the earth around her.
Four armoured mercenaries were quick-stepping towards the docks, chivvying the portly woman in all her finery between them. That was the owner of this house of human suffering.
Aindriu ran them down.
They were actually armed and ready for a fight, so it wasn't just a matter of cutting until her arm tired, she had to deflect an incoming spear thrust, hack off the arm, thrust her spear into the face of the mercenary behind the screaming armless one, and then cut down the entrepreneur who ran this place in a brilliant green pyre.
The other two guards came in past the burning corpse as it started to fall to the ground, having started their attack before their employer was on fire and not quite registered the change in situation yet.
Draw back to buy space. Bind with sword and spear, exchange of point - push their weapons off the line that targeted her, and hers onto the line that targeted them. Step back in to press the thrust home.
That was the martially ideal response to a thrust, but Aindriu wasn't masterful enough to handle two spears at once, especially not when she was distracted by a dart bouncing off the back of her head and getting tangled in her hair. She should have just swept both aside and moved on from there, and she was already hissing at herself for it even as she engaged the leftmost spear with her sword.
The loss of focus meant even that didn't work - she pushed that spear off the line, but too far, she'd lost the counterthrust, the time it took to bring her point back on-line would give the guard time to counter.
And she hadn't overshot it by enough to do anything about the rightmost spear as it slammed into her armpit, punching through the chain-linked armour and her hardened white flesh, landing home inside her upper ribcage.
Cracked armour. Torn flesh. Broken rib. Punctured lung.
As the spear was withdrawn, lines of Foresttongue writing describing the wounds it would have wrought crawled out of where the wound should be, scrawling themselves across the shaft of the spear and Aindriu's hauberk, before slowly dissipating.
Aindriu blinked and decided to work out the details later, making a short charge to clothesline the left-side guard with her sword arm - she couldn't bring the point on-line without freeing him to counter, but the arm was on-line.
In a twisting sequence of footwork she never could have done spontaneously before Mirna, a quarter-turn hurled the clotheslined guard off his feet and at hers, the swirling momentum continued into a step for distance over the prone body, and finished in another quarter-turn that flung the spear in her left hand around in a sharp arc to crack into the nose of the woman who'd just stabbed her, sending her flying onto her back with a bloody spray following her.
Aindriu had spun a bit much, and her braid whipped around and landed in her mouth. She spat it out with a giggle, working a kink or two out of her shoulders and catching her breath as her opponents groaned on the ground beneath her, and screamed, and burned, depending on which was which.
Gods, this was fun. Just enough power that the beautiful techniques worked reliably, a field full of targets, and a righteous cause for using them. A righteous cause that was actually going to happen, something she wanted to do that was working!
Aindriu looked down at the more intact guards. "Tend your friend and stay down," she commanded. The woman whose arm she'd hacked off wasn't going to be guarding a slaver camp anymore, but she could still do something worthwhile with her life if someone stopped the bleeding. "AND RETHINK YOUR LIFE CHOICES!"
With that, and a thrown dart from somewhere in the camp catching in the links of her armour, she whirled away to the next target.
The docks had three river barges, sized for comfortable passage down the Chaolais River - those were the best bets for screaming slave merchants and the remaining guards to escape, and possibly with some merchandise, so she spent a couple of minutes chopping down masts and slashing holes beneath the waterline. Unfortunately her green Fomorian flame burnt too efficiently - it only blazed for a few seconds before it completely annihilated all its fuel, so it didn't transmit very well across the barges, leaving Aindriu to do most of the damage through pure cutting.
That still didn't take very long, though, and wisps of words for the keel dissipated into the air like smoke as she bounced off the mast of the last barge - shattering it behind her with her kickoff - and used that to propel herself back into the camp, the barge falling apart behind her.
Six more barracks buildings. Most of them would be slaves, and it was time to start getting them free, now that the bulk of the guards were neutralized and the easiest escape path was closed - everything else was by land and she could run them down if she needed to.
The watchtower guards seemed to have given up on trying to stop her, she didn't get pelted with any more arrows or darts, and a glance up to the towers showed them empty - they were probably outside the walls and running by now.
Aindriu was coming up on one of the barracks. The door was a ways away, but she didn't really feel like walking all the way around to reach it (it was a whole ten meters, unconscionable), so instead she jumped up and slammed into the wall with a double-legged flying kick that shattered its way through in a burst of green fire and dissipating words in the air, laughing madly as she descended into the barracks on a falling piece of its wall. Gods, she could never have done such a ridiculous thing on her own.
"GOOD AFTERNOON!" she bellowed, as she landed in a slave pen, filled with hollow-eyed prisoners looking deeply confused.
Two guards on alert at a set of bars blocking the pen off from the barracks front door. She killed one with a thrown dart (the one stuck in her mail), and the second with a charging thrust between the bars. They'd been expecting her to come through the door.
One more swing of the sword cut open the bars, and she whirled around with a grin. "You are now free! Everything in this camp is yours, feel free to take it as compensation for the trouble!" They could leave through her hole, of course, but the weapons were up at the front, so they needed access to that.
"Um-" One of the prisoners started to ask for an explanation, and Aindriu fully agreed he was owed one, but she'd have to handle that later, there was still more work to do!
She ran through the other side of the wall and broke into the next slave pen in the same way, repeating the basic procedure to set the prisoners free - one of the guards was smart and dropped her spear the moment Aindriu's crimson light burnt itself into the walls, so she accepted the surrender, handed the spear to the ex-slaves, and moved on. What happened after that was not of interest to her.
The third longhouse wasn't a slave pen, it was an administrative building - she'd broken into a well-appointed room with a well-dressed merchant holding his shoulder against the door to keep it barred shut. He looked most put out to have her appearing behind him through his wall.
She killed him and stepped out into the hallway, going through the empty room on the other side and out the wall - he wasn't armed but she doubted he was completely unskilled with weapons and the merchants were the ones paying bandits to kidnap people from their homes and drag them to this disgusting place, so she was only going to leave them be if they were explicit about surrendering for judgement.
There were probably more merchants in the longhouse behind her but running them all down wasn't really on her priorities list and she didn't have an infinity of time - she'd deal with the ones that crossed her path, that was it, the ex-slaves could handle their own quarrels from here. She'd have to come back once the place was clear, medicine was probably in there.
Aindriu plowed through the third slave pen - they weren't laid out exactly parallel, so she landed in the front this time, thrusting her spear through both guards before they could turn to face her and cutting open the bars with her sword before moving on.
The fourth one was facing her directly, she could have gone through the door, but she decided to break down the wall next to it instead because the looks on the guards' faces at the sheer pointlessness of it were hilarious.
They were quicker on the draw, so by the time she'd slammed one into unconsciousness and tooth loss with the pommel of her sword, the other one had managed to get around her spear and chop into her arm with his axe, yielding a flurry of text describing the terrible harm he'd have inflicted on her if her power hadn't rejected it.
While he blinked at the uselessness of his strike she headbutted him unconscious, cut the bars down, told the prisoners they were free, and moved on to the last longhouse.
Aindriu just kicked open the door this time, bursting through the wall didn't save her any time and the joke from the last one was better not stretched to the point where it got boring.
"Stay back!" one of the guards shrieked. They were inside the slave pen.
The one speaking to her had a sullen prisoner braced in front of her with a sickle-shaped Lyric nobleman's sword pressed against his throat, a wild look in her eyes.
The other guard had his back to her, a Tepet repeating crossbow pressed against his hip and pointed into the gaggle of prisoners, threatening them to stay back.
Aindriu came to a slow halt, resting her sword and spear on her shoulders. "Or you'll kill them?" Blood-red light played across their faces as it roiled out from Aindriu's body.
The woman nodded wildly. "In a heartbeat! I can't win, but I can make you lose! You want to save them, I heard the yelling!"
Aindriu hummed, catching her breath. They couldn't kill that many before she killed them, if she went ahead. Those repeating crossbows carried ten bolts and there was no way he could fire them all before Aindriu reached them. The other guard could definitely kill a few too.
Not acceptable casualties, but a tiny sliver of the amount of people in this slave pen alone. "What's your price?"
"You let us both go! Free and clear!"
That was agreeable. "Sure. Let them go, drop your weapons, armour off. You leave with the clothes on your back and not a lick of profit for the things you've done." Honestly it wasn't even that big a deal - they didn't have much on hand - but Aindriu was feeling petty, and their weapons and armour would go to better use as the property of their prisoners.
A droplet of blood spilled down the sword's blade as the Lyrian woman pressed it into her hostage's throat, the man's eyes filled with fear. "Strike you, bitch. We go with everything, slaves included. I don't Gradigging trust you without a hostage in front of me."
Unacceptable. Aindriu didn't trust them not to hurt the prisoners either, or just keep them.
Aindriu took a slow, deep breath, licking her lips. Well now. That was the way she wanted to play it, was it? "New offer: Escape is off the table. You drop everything and you submit to their judgement," she nodded to the tense prisoners. They'd hurt one. She was getting spiteful now.
"I can and will kill them!"
"Yeah. You can," Aindriu nodded. "You can kill five or ten. And then you'll die the slowest, most painful death I can manage without getting nauseous. You will not escape and I will not permit you to surrender. You'll pay them back in screams." She smiled brightly. "Your choice!" The smile was put-on and faked, of course - she wasn't feeling that chipper about the idea of the prisoners getting hurt. But a saleswoman always had to offer her service with a smile.
The woman shivered, sword shaking in her hand. "I..."
"Put it down," Aindriu commanded, voice booming. "And you'll get to spend the rest of your life making up for this, instead of screaming."
The sword fell from nerveless fingers, and the woman released her hostage, backing up into her companion. "D-do it..."
The man took one hand off the firing lever of the crossbow and slowly crouched down to set the weapon on the ground. "Damn it..."
Aindriu sighed, her whole body going loose. It had worked. Maybe she should have just let them go in the first place without worrying about the weapons, but it had worked. With a backhand slash she cut the bars down. "Everyone, you're free. Everything's yours, I have no demands of you. Just leave those two mostly intact, they did back down in the end and I promised they wouldn't die screaming."
The blonde man sounded like he had the chuckle forced out of him as he rubbed his nicked throat. "I think we can manage that. Thank you."
Aindriu chuckled, wiping the sword and spear clean and sheathing them. "Just a bit more, then I'll explain." She turned, unlimbering the crossbow from her back, and started running.
The slaves were freed, and running around the camp, looting the armouries and overrunning the vastly outnumbered surviving mercenaries and merchants. There were two tasks remaining, then Aindriu could head back to the others.
She needed medical supplies - clean water, bandages, ideally medicine. And she needed transport. There might be wagons stored in the camp, but there were a lot of slaves, so she'd always need more.
The Rokan-jin themselves could run, she didn't really mind, but their wagon was hers now. She'd simply have to make sure they understood that.
Aindriu burst out the fortress gate, and sure enough, the surviving Rokan-jin were running, desperately wending their way through the maze of trenches. They weren't the only ones, there were a few scattered fleeing figures going in every direction towards the forest.
She left the latter alone, they could flee and she wasn't sure at this point who was a mercenary and who was a former slave. They were widely dispersed, so it was unlikely enough people would stumble across Fionola's group to endanger it.
Moving at an easy, unreasonably-fast jog, Aindriu cranked the crossbow's lever, pressing a bolt home as the pulleys spun, tautening the absurdly-stiff prod of the advanced Realm crossbow. She pressed the stock to her shoulder, and sighted down the bolt at the one driving the wagon. Looked like the official in charge of this expedition, he was dressed a little too prettily to be a working man.
Aindriu came to a halt for one second, and relaxedly breathed out as the man looked back at his pursuer in horror, gently brushing the trigger.
Aindriu wasn't an athletic woman, and she'd always had finite caps on her strength of arm and how effectively she could develop at the martial arts. She'd strained against them, but without supernatural power to give her the health she'd never had before, there was only so far she could get so fast.
But even an asthmatic could throw a dart, and Aindriu had had a very productive childhood with crossbows, darts, and javelins, all the toys a growing girl needed. She knew for a fact after the Bull's War that she was one of the finest midrange mortal markswomen in the Northeast, and with the power of the Fomorians coursing through her, she could outshoot most gods.
The bolt sprouted from the Rokan-jin official's eye as Aindriu broke into a run again, cranking the next bolt home. She only needed to stop for a bare second to get a good shot, she could spend the rest of the time running. The wagon swerved as the horses lost their guidance.
The horse-mounted archer - the one surviving one that also had both his legs and wasn't catatonic with pain - strung his bow and sighted in on Aindriu.
If she had been frailer, the crossbow would have taken time to reload, but Aindriu was stronger than she looked in the first place, and she had better things to be doing, so the power of the Fomorians made it easy to draw the crossbow, every bit as fast as the asymmetric longbow the Rokan-jin rider carried. Faster, with the mechanical advantage of the cocking lever.
Aindriu took a leap over the first trench, and used the flight time and its smooth passage to sight in on the archer and loose a bolt into him before she slammed home on the other side of the trench. Two more before she was at the wagon.
He was armoured, and against common crossbows he probably would've been okay, a little rattled, his armour a little torn. The advanced Realm crossbow snapped a bronze plate in half and buried the bolt in his shoulder up to the fletching.
He got his shot off, and it was admirably accurate, but his arrow just bounced off her cheek as she reflexively tightened it, the way she'd respond to a punch. She flinched back on reflex - she wasn't a stranger to getting shot at but it being that close was always concerning - but it didn't actually hurt. No need to finish him, he was out of the fight.
Aindriu's aim tracked to the glaivemen - anyone could pick up that bow and resume shooting at her.
Before she could fire, the Rokan-jin pulled to a halt, dismounting from the horses in a clatter of armour scales, presenting Aindriu with two glaives, while the serjeant wheeled his clawrider around, preparing to charge her, and the two servants and the wounded archer crouched behind them. The other fletch of soldiers - all of them missing their left leg and looking too worse for the wear to be effectively fighting - did not dismount, but painfully pulled their mounts around behind the somewhat pathetic glaivewall.
And with that, she'd won, as the careening wagon continued on past them - she simply offhandedly fired her last bolt at the serjeant, not really caring whether he survived it or not so long as he was too distracted to charge, and changed her course to run down the wagon as it left the soldiers behind.
She wasn't faster than a horse in a clear run, but she was faster than one meandering through defensive ditches, so she caught up before too long, leaping into the driver's seat of the careening wagon and shoving the official's dead body off. Aindriu snatched up the reins, and carefully pulled them back - firmly enough to get the message to the two horses pulling it, but not so aggressively as to startle them further.
"Shhhh, horsies," she cooed, slowly calming them down as their pace decreased, tracing a U-shaped sigil on the reins with her thumb and gently cooing a few words in no language at all. Horses were more her father's animal of choice than hers, but she knew the tricks to managing most animals. As they came to a stop, she glanced back into the wagon's covered bed to make sure she didn't have any passengers (she didn't, the last of the officials were fleeing out the back), and leaned forward to pat the horses' flanks. "Good girls."
Aindriu slowly wheeled the wagon around as the horses acclimated to the new situation, heading back down towards the nonplussed Rokan-jin soldiers and ignoring the officials she passed.
She cranked a bolt into the crossbow just in case, and then set it down beside her, holding up her empty hands in the universal sign of nonviolence. "All I want is the wagon! You can all leave!"
The mounted serjeant was gritting his teeth. It was actually a little hilarious, she'd hit but failed to kill, and it was instead sticking up out of his head, having penetrated just enough steel plate and quilted coif to get firmly stuck in there without actually going into his scalp or skull. "Anathema..."
"... Probably." Aindriu wasn't sure exactly where she stood in the Rokan-jin's Immaculate theology, but she knew it wasn't anywhere nice. She was pretty sure she wasn't in the good books in anyone's theology, all things considered. "But I don't need or particularly want to kill you. Go in peace."
The Rokan-jin were buyers for the slaves, and part of this chain of human suffering, but these were just soldiers serving their Queen. It hadn't been their decision and the culpability got pretty tenuous by the time it reached them. She'd had to wreak terrible destruction on them because they were one of the more dangerous military units in her way, but as far as she was concerned, that was the end of it.
The serjeant growled low under his breath. "I should kill you for what you've done." They might have a different view of it, though.
"You can't." Aindriu had just torn through an entire fortress of mercenaries. She was starting to get tired, but finishing off the last three full and seven half combat-effective Rokan-jin would be utterly trivial. The absolute worst they could do was kill the horses. "You can't kill me, and you can't even inconvenience me without selling your lives. It's not worth it, go home to your families."
"Strike you..." But his spearpoint lowered, as did his head. Religious fervour and anger for his fallen comrades wasn't enough to make him give up his life. If he stood a chance he'd do it in a second, but he knew as well as her that he couldn't do anything against her. She knew that feeling well - boiling fury and complete helplessness to do anything with it. She didn't really like making anyone feel like that, even if she was pretty sure this had been the best route - the two hundred and fifty or so slaves she'd just freed would have been feeling the same.
Aindriu chivvied the horses through, past the Rokan-jin soldiers, keeping her attention perked for any attempted backstabbing. She didn't really have a response. She knew full well that she'd sold her soul to the Fomorians for this power.
Some time after she passed, the Rokan-jin remounted and sullenly trotted their mounts away.
As the tension faded, the bloody red glow around Aindriu slowly did so as well - it wasn't gone, but it wasn't as overpowering as it had been. And suddenly an immense wave of tiredness crushed down on her - she had to actively force her eyes to stay open. "Wha...?"
'Founders, seriously?' Mirna muttered. 'Your fitness is pathetic, girl, a full anima flare should take a toll on your stamina, not knock you on the floor.'
"I'm the fittest asthmatic you've ever seen," she slurred, forcing herself to stay up as she brought the horses to a halt.
'Forbidden blue, I just gave the power of the Yozis to an asthmatic barbarian.' He sounded somewhere between exasperated, disgusted, and bitterly amused.
Aindriu stumbled off the driver's seat of the wagon, slinging the crossbow over her shoulder and focusing on the byplay with Mirna in an effort to keep herself awake. "Regretting the deal already?" Medicine. She had to get the medical supplies.
'I didn't actually have a choice in the deal in the first place, but I'm definitely regretting it a little. Couldn't my Green Sun Prince have been fit? Or civilized? Maybe even both?'
"Think about it this way, you have low expectations to live up to!" She leapt the trench, stumbling to a landing in front of the gate, and staggered through.
It was chaos - freed slaves were running throughout the compound, grabbing supplies, and there were a handful with spears fending off two very agitated clawriders, the cataphracts' mounts, who were flaring their wings and snapping their jaws and generally quite distressed.
Hopefully they managed that all right, Aindriu was nowhere near steady enough right now to do anything about that more complicated than killing the toothbirds, and she wasn't going to kill a pair of loyal, grieving animals.
'I suppose if they don't give you any big jobs you're not too likely to get us both killed. This is an utterly pathetic bright side, by the way,' he added, as if not quite sure she realized.
In flickers and bursts of speed, and one point where she almost fell asleep standing up, Aindriu stumbled into the merchants' longhouse, nodding politely to the other looters. "Where's the," she blinked and fell asleep on her feet for a few seconds before pulling herself conscious again "laundry?" That was the best bet for clean cloth, she could turn it into bandages. She'd have to pass on the medicine, she was going to fall unconscious before she ever found where it was stashed.
A young boy, about seven, blinked slowly and picked himself up from the cabinet he was rooting through, pointing down the hall. "Third door on the left, Miss?"
"Thaaaaanks," she slurred, half-dashing, half-staggering down there. Fortunately no one was looting the laundry, so she was able to sling a bundle of sheets over her shoulders and grab a pair of metal buckets.
Two more stops.
She punched down the door to one of the bedrooms, quickly scouring its cabinet. Sure enough, she found the merchant's bottle of whiskey, and wrapped it in the blankets resting on her shoulders. It was the closest she was going to get to an antiseptic without finding the actual physician's stores, and she was not going to remain conscious long enough for that.
'Their booze locker? Seriously?' Mirna sounded utterly gobsmacked at her priorities, despite not having a gob.
"I have a cunning plan," she noted, jogging to the dock and filling the buckets, before moving back out of the fort, careful not to spill. She could probably boil them to semi-purify the water, with an actual fire if her own didn't work for that.
One foot in front of the other. Keep moving. Don't spill, don't drop anything. She had to focus everything she was and ever hoped to be on that, she was so tired...
A strong arm looped around her shoulders, helping her stay up. Aindriu looked up with a slightly-witless smile - it was a big ma... no, boy, he was broad-shouldered and tall but he wasn't that old, with a broad, open-featured face, and a soft, conical cap in the Lyric style, with the end flopping forward. "Thank... you..."
He looked away, continuing to help her stagger towards the gate. "So, uh. Wheah to?" Not Pretannic. His Foresttongue was in the thick, non-rhotic, sing-song Lyric dialect - he was making an effort to be understood, but he wasn't as good at it as her father and Lyric relatives were. At least he wasn't doing it at high speed, sometimes Lyrians could get beyond her ability to parse.
"Will you help? I..." She lost her train of thought so she stopped talking, hoping she could find it again. "... safe?" It would be a legitimate absurdity if she ended up being carted off by someone else in their slave trade. It was really just an inconvenience to her - she was pretty sure she had the power to casually escape any practical imprisonment by the time she was rested. But if she was delayed and the Aldertref prisoners left, Fionola Sweetwater was probably going to die on the way as her infection progressed without treatment.
"Uh, yeah. Yes. Ah'll do whud yuh aks. Nuttin moah." His voice chimed. She could trust him. "Ah kinda owe yuh."
"Wagon," Aindriu yawned heavily. "Northeast. Rendezvous with group. Don't let them leave..."
Her body seized the opportunity the boy presented and immediately ordered a complete halt to all activity - she fell limp in his arms, the buckets clamped in her hands in a death grip, dimly aware that she couldn't completely go slack yet.
She wasn't fully asleep immediately, so she could sort of hear his sudden yelps as she slumped into him, and was dimly aware of being dragged the rest of the way up, but the moment her back went horizontal on the wagon bed, she was lost to Creation.
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