Golius motioned for him to sit across from him at a table set with a teapot and cups, as well as small plates of food. The servant filled one of the teacups, handing it to Bron once he’d taken his seat. The general raised his cup in a toast. “I’ve been curious all day. Did the itzuli pray for guidance regarding my offer?”
Bron returned the toast, drinking his tea when Golius did. The servant promptly refilled the cups. “Only if praying meant trying to open the gate.” He didn’t dare lie about that. Others had seen Disaris by the stone, witnessed him struggling with her, and heard him say she’d accidentally opened the gate. No one with enough intelligence to fill a thimble would believe that, certainly not Golius. And he didn’t doubt the general had already questioned the men who’d accompanied them to the temple long before he summoned Bron for his report.
“You were right to be suspicious of her request,” he said, raising his cup in a second toast. Golius was smart, but alsoprideful. He despised those toadies who plied him with empty flattery, but was susceptible to the occasional, well-placed compliment.
He subtly preened at Bron’s praise. “I thought it too coincidental that of all the places to pray and all the gods to pray to, she chose the very temple used by the Daggermen to exchange information between their dens.” He downed the second cup of tea. “What did she say when you caught her?”
Bron shrugged, feeling anything but nonchalant inside. “The truth. She was trying to escape. She didn’t believe you any more than you believed her and knew the gate offered a means of escape.”
Golius slammed his cup down, sloshing tea over its rim. Storm clouds gathered along his brow, and he glared at Bron. “I made that offer in good faith. In essence, she calls me a liar.”
That generous helping of pride sometimes led to being easily offended. Bron stepped carefully with his response. The last thing he needed was for Golius to dispatch soldiers to his tent and drag Disaris back here for punishment before Bron could sneak her out of the camp.
“I don’t believe that to be so, lord,” he argued. The storm darkened even more. “A woman forced, by threat of death, to do the bidding of a powerful man would find it hard to trust the promises of another powerful man, especially one who just took her prisoner. There is no one in all of Daes who hasn’t heard of the fate of captives on both sides of the war. Your generosity toward her is admirable but also unusual. Would you believe it were you in her place?”
Golius stared at Bron without speaking, his black scowl gradually lightening. “I suppose not,” he said in a tone that warned he still wasn’t quite convinced. He finally shrugged and relaxed in his chair, though his gaze remained locked on Bron. “Once you leave my service, you should consider applying to mybrother as an ambassador. I think maybe some of your skills are wasted as a battle mage.”
Bron acknowledge his superior’s praise with a bow. “I will consider it, lord.” Empty words now that he’d chosen a path guaranteed to get him imprisoned, exiled, or executed. Likely all three.
Golius nodded when the servant raised the teapot and watched as the man poured. “In the end, it doesn’t matter if the itzuli believes me or not. She is and will remain my prisoner whose talents I’ll use against the Keforin army, with or without her cooperation.” He pointed a finger at Bron. “I’ll will make it your task to pave the way for making her compliant and save us all a lot of trouble.”
Assigned a task he’d never complete, Bron left the general’s quarters. Instead of returning to his tent and Disaris, he retrieved his horse from the stables and rode toward the second encampment. Night had fully fallen, and a guard would have delivered Disaris her supper by now. He wished he might ride back to his quarters and assure her his plan, simple and hastily created though it was, would work. Instead, he’d have to believe she’d do what he said, even with the risks involved. She might be afraid, but she was one of the bravest people he’d ever known.
The second camp, nicknamed the Nesting Grounds, was half a league away from the first. A town of sorts itself, it was made up of tents and ramshackle huts built of discarded wood and brick. Like its sister encampment, it had sprung up overnight when the Daesin army established its presence on the plains below Baelok. Unlike the first camp, it was populated, not by soldiers, but by their families. Wives and children, mistresses and bedding maids. There were also cooks and launderers, nurses and seamstresses. Brewers and sutlers lived among them as well, selling their ales and other goods scavengedfrom conquered territories that weren’t usually included in the baggage trains.
Some Daesin generals deplored their presence, calling such camps expensive distractions at best, a nightmare to guard and control. At worst, they were hotbeds for internal fighting among troops vying for the favor of a bedding maid or sanctuaries for enemy spies posing as a tailor or cook.
Others, like Golius, considered them essential to the army’s morale and fighting capabilities. “Their usefulness far outweighs their disadvantages,” he once told one of his commanders who’d campaigned for the removal of the Nesting Grounds. Bron agreed with the general. In his experience, no soldier fought harder than one trying to protect his nearby family or one who found solace, no matter how temporary, from the hardships of war.
Bron guided his horse towards the Nesting Grounds, pausing at intervals to chat with some of the troops who hailed him as he passed. He had a purpose to the social interaction. Those who saw him pass would recollect to others who asked that the Moon Raven was making a rare visit to the Nesting Grounds to spend time with a bedding maid.
“Do you not have the itzuli in your tent, Commander?” one of the captains had asked him, a puzzled look on his face as he handed Bron a cup of wine. “You’d not have far to travel for a bit of company.”
Bron downed the wine and passed the cup back to the man. “Have you seen the itzuli?” he asked, letting a derisive note color the question. They both laughed while he silently apologized to Disaris. Once he reached the camp’s perimeter, he nudged his mount into a gallop towards the Nesting Grounds. He indeed planned to pay a bedding maid for her services this night, just not for ones others so readily assumed.
The sprawling settlement lacked the first encampment’s regimented order. Instead of a strict grid pattern consisting of straight lanes with clear design for the efficient movement of troops, wagons, and horses throughout, the Nesting Grounds were a chaotic swirl of structures planted in haphazard fashion—wherever there was space or preference—with no thought of order or how drivers might navigate supply wagons down meandering paths with dead ends and rutted lanes that slithered one way and then another throughout the camp’s interior.
The lack of any organized system was the element Bron counted on to keep Disaris hidden until he could retrieve her. It was difficult to guard or surveille surroundings that changed with every slapped-together construction of a sutler’s stall or newly churned road created by a provisions wagon. Those guards assigned to keep some measure of peace among the camp’s denizens were too busy preventing them from pilfering supplies straight off the wagons to be on the lookout for a lone woman hiding among the cargo.
Another hour remained before the current wagons would arrive, and Bron took the opportunity to seek out the part of camp the bed maidens claimed as their domain. Raucous laughter and music spilled into the evening air as he led his horse on foot through tenebrous shortcuts to a common area populated by a small crowd of people. The campfires lit within the center illuminated troops enjoying the company of a favorite or affordable bed maiden for the evening. One bed maiden, a lad Bron knew to be a favorite among several of the men in his company, sauntered toward him. Dressed in diaphanous silks and adorned in jewelry worthy of an aristocrat’s treasure house, he was more beautifully coiffed than most of the maidens around him.
Bron bowed briefly and tried to sidestep him, but the maiden gracefully countered, blocking his way. A slender hand glidedalong Bron’s sleeve, and the maiden smiled with practiced sensuality. “May I hope you’re finally here to see me, Moon Raven?”
“Not tonight, Elal,” he said, gauging his chances at success for darting around the persistent maiden. “But you can tell me where I may find your friend Uzmina.”
Elal stuck out his lower lip in an exaggerated pout. “Why would you want her? I’m far better company than her and worth what I charge. Ask any of your men.”
Bron tried to hide his impatience. On the surface, this conversation played perfectly into what he was trying to show anyone who observed his movement. However, time was not a luxury, and he didn’t have any of it to spare haggling with a random bed maiden. “I don’t need to ask. I’ve heard them praise you often, however, it’s Uzmina I’ve a yearning for tonight.”
Partially placated by Bron’s flattery, Elal sighed and waved a slender arm in the general direction of Uzmina’s whereabouts. “The last time I saw her, she was working her magic on a brewer in exchange for a cask of his wine.” He glided away to seek out his next potential mark, leaving Bron to locate his competition.
He found Uzmina alone in front of an ornately trimmed tent surrounded by an abundance of flourishing greenery and flowers that perfumed the air. She paused in trimming a spill of pink blooms cascading out of a pot and offered him a delighted grin. “Bron! This is a welcome surprise!” She set down the shears she held and ran to embrace him.
He’d met Uzmina when he first transferred from his previous garrison to Golius’s siege camps months earlier. An evening of too much wine, too much loneliness, and the bleak shroud of bitterness had brought him, staggering, to the Nesting Grounds. Uzmina had been his companion until the next morning. She’d given him a tincture to settle his queasy stomach and hadn’t tried to rob him when he’d passed out on her bed. He’d returneda second and final time, drawn more to her kindness than her beauty or bed talents.
“You mourn someone,” she said during the aftermath of their second coupling. He’d expected her to pick up the purse of coins by her bedside and shoo him out of her abode, but to his surprise, she remained beside him, combing a lock of his hair with her fingers. Her comment made his heart wrench for a moment.
“My mother,” he said. “Friends lost to the war. I doubt there’s a person within twenty leagues of us who doesn’t grieve for the same.”
