It was the hardest thing she’s ever done, turning Jaika away. Of course, she hasn’t done much, as far as her memories are concerned, but there’s something within Kara that tells her even in her previous life there was not one thing as difficult as sending Jaika home — she fucked her dozens of times on their little scouting expedition, and already misses the always-willing holes.
But as much as a tri-colour Beastkin stands out, a goblin would stand out even more, and Kara can’t be seen — she needs to get closer to the action.
Without Jaika, it’s harder to put up with the terrain. Kara longs for the temperate, rolling grasslands around Meadowbrook, for their gentle ascents and soft, tickling grasses. She longs to lie in the sun. Because here, up north, everything shifts abruptly, like all that’s missing from the harshly delineated transition is a loadzone. The lush grass ends, and dark, weed-riven soil dominates, broken up by puddles of boiling ooze and untillable rocks. That such a place seems to support many thousands of people where easy, fertile Meadowbrook supports only hundreds strikes Kara as lazy worldbuilding, or at least one hell of an oversight.
Or balancing, I guess.
Kara wonders where that thought came from. For what reason would the Goddess Sayla balance things, when she should be giving her every advantage she can get?
But, no, because there’s a God of Conquest out there, and one of Service, and probably more besides. She’s not the only one with perks. So the question is, who are the others? Who’s she?
These things have been in the back of Kara’s mind for a while, but it’s only on the meditative journey, as her pony stolidly picks its way over knobbled ground, that she really gets a chance to interrogate things with a clear head. What are the chances that three gods are in the same boat as Sayla?
It will be some time before Kara meets someone who can shed some light on all this. She currently waits across the ocean, in the twinkling port city of Mailai, a place so bursting with opportunity it will make Kara wonder how she ever thought balance came into it.
But that is some time off. Back in the present, she’s merely a minor warlord, trying to avoid getting swept away — and what better place to investigate why Eagleclaw’s supposedly big fuck-off army hasn’t come down than the camp itself?
She dismounts and ties her pony by a stream, some ways from the camp. There’s a small copse of dying trees to shelter it, and with any luck she won’t be long.
Kara takes stock. The clustered trees along the creek provide cover to creep close to camp, but there’s a lot of open, dead ground between there and the first cluster of tents. Going further up would let her come out on the north side, but then she needs to get past the town’s palisade, or skirt its edge, which is just too much ground to cover to risk it.
She formulates a plan that, like most, means relying on her luck — like most, it succeeds. As she trickles her way upstream she finds the ingredients she’s looking for: jorakwort, jorka root (which only novices find hard to keep separate, and the boldly competent Amateur Apothecarist has no troubles), and kotaknot. Her claws scratch a hollow in a thick root — a non-alchemical one — and she mixes the stuff with river water, mashing it with a rock. “I am so fucking good at this,” she whispers, as the slurry combines to a swirling silver liquid.
She laps up the potion with her feline tongue, stares into the half that remains — from its reflective surface stares a woman much like Kara, but with regular brown hair, no cute fluffy ears, and in fact not a dot of fur on her. The disguise won’t fool anyone who’s seen her before, but she’s betting that “calico Beastkin girl” is the main thing they’re looking for, and don’t have detailed descriptions of her face.
Kara leaves her equipment behind, with the pony — her leather tracker’s armour, her sword and her intricate spyglass (if anyone touches this last one she will burn this whole fucking dukedom to the ground).
In underclothes and bare feet she staggers across the muddy ground to the camp. The potion cannot hide her beauty, and the guise of a gorgeous, imperiled peasant woman soon turns the sentries her way. Two rush forward, shouting.
“Are you alright?” A tall, blonde-bearded one asks, face in shock.
“No,” she replies, coughing. “I come from Meadowbrook. I was in the fields when the goblins came… Even then I barely escaped.”
“By Thala’s grace!” The other swears, a portly, short man with bristly black hair. “You must speak with the Count at once.”
The men wonder at this mousey thing, whose eyes dart all about the camp, even under their escort — they do not know that this is not fear, but calculation, and as she assesses the ramshackle, sprawling tents and narrow lanes between them, she knows that a clenched fist of warhounds could scatter this army before it with minimal casualties.
The Count Joran Wickombe is a toothpick of a man, his gaunt face undisguised by hair or beard, and Kara finds the lack of effort distasteful. “What have you brought this wretch before me for, man?” Joran demands, in his weedy, scheming voice.
“She is from Meadowbrook, milord.”
“If she brings tales of goblins then Duke Acaster will hear her. It is of no concern to me.”
Kicked up the chain by the Count’s sloth, Kara marvels at her luck. “Sorry about the Count, sweet lady,” says the tall one, “he’s a good man underneath.”
Underneath what?That’s not a figure for hiding anything — no, the Count’s exactly how he seems, and if you realised that maybe you’d come over to me.
These stupid, smelly guards even usher her into the Duke’s tent as he’s in the midst of a war council, so accustomed to underestimating women that the danger never occurs. “Just wait here, sweet lady, and he’ll speak to you in a moment,” the kinder, taller man says, indicating a plump couch on the edge of the huge round tent.
Duke Acaster, a plate-armoured Lord of hard edges and scraggly hair, stands with his hands clasped behind his back, sneering. Before him, on the table, sit two brilliant green gemstones, each projecting a vertical twinkling image — one shows another man nearly identical to Acaster, and the other (far more interesting) depicts a hard-faced, mean looking woman with cropped hair, the colour of which Kara can’t know, because the gemstones’s projections tint everything a radiant, vaguely theological green.
“If you would just listen,” the woman says, to which both men respond with pointed sneers.
“No, I have had enough of listening, Lady Redbor. Endless dithering, endless discussion. Our fault for including a woman in these proceedings, I suppose.”
She bristles. “Duke Acaster, I am the Lady of Redfen. You will-”
“You rule only until your son comes of age. Yet even he, the child, would understand we can delay no longer.”
Kara’s ears are pretty much straight up at this, but she tries to look disinterested — not that it matters, since Acaster doesn’t even seem to realise she’s there.
“Delay? I do not counsel delay, I do not urge delay. The two of you-”
“Why, why, why I nevah!” The other hologram, despite looking like Acaster, sounds nothing like him — his incongruous accent is like nothing Kara has ever heard, but her mind, for whatever reason, associates it distantly with chicken magnates and prosecutors. “I have been uh leal and uh kind so-portuh of you, Vaylin, through all uh the accusations of you letting yuh womanly ways inta-feah with yuh duties. And I am uhcused o’ obstruction?”
Fucking hell, this one has to go quick, if only to save us all from his accent.
Vaylin Redbor pinches the bridge of her nose and groans. “While we scrabble over who shall sit in Castle Thornton when this is all done, the revolutionaries-”
“Revolutionaries?” Acaster says the word like it’s best kept as far from the nose as physically possible. “You line up to caparison them in finery. Call them as they are — shitheel peasants in need of discipline.”
“Call them what you like, Duke; with every day they fortify their position.”
“Then simply acknowledge I am the right choice for Thornton, my son is the right choice for Blackburrow, and let us get the men marching.”
That sets the other two to protesting, and Kara sees this is going nowhere. She snatches up a fine silk blanket from the couch’s back and busies herself wiping the muck from her feet. There’s probably some nice clothes around here she might steal, maybe even better armour.
At last, the conference ends, and Acaster turns around. “What are you doing here?” His whip-crack voice demands.
“I bring news from Meadowbrook. Count Wickombe sent me to you.”
He sighs. “Very well. What-” But before he can say anymore, Kara makes another impulsive, rash decision, but one she feels more or less good about. She strides to the heavily armoured man, gathers her mana to spring a boiling fireball in palm, then clasps her hand over Acaster’s mouth, and, with a polite smile, casts the spell.
What’s left of the Duke doesn’t have a chance to scream, and the muffled POP is lost amongst the wheel of carts in deep mud and the jovial shouts of drunk men.
Now, a smarter woman than Kara would realise right away that she has a lot more in common with the revolutionaries than the decrepit aristocrats trying to dislodge them. But Kara’s just seen plenty to engender sympathy for the poor, put-upon Lady Redbor, and frankly, you know, it’s just an arcane hologram so who knows how it’ll hold up, but that woman was hot.
She taps her claw against the rounded green gem, smiling as she sees energy swirl within in response. The hologram bursts forth again, and Vaylin stands with her arms crossed. “Yes, what-”
Kara grins, bows, low, deep, exaggerated, arms way out like some travelling dandy appealing for a free lunch. “Lady Redbor. You and I should meet.”
“Is… Is that Duke Acaster behind you?”
“It was.”
“You are… you are the goblin warlord.”
“You don’t need to be afraid of me, Lady Redbor. I come as a friend.”
“I am not afraid. I am awed. You are… the most beautiful woman I have ever seen.”
Well, sometimes these things just fall into your lap. “Oh, my Lady; we really should meet.”