Olimpia

"We need to find the main camp of the Crescent Moon force up here," Kanieta said into the silence, eyeing the swirling smoke as she tried to spot the warbans she knew were moving around in it. "After that, we can look at our options. I have a warband on its way up here that I am sure can arrive without being spotted, but without a critical target to put Derg's warriors on the back foot, it will be driven back into the Northern Woods. We just cannot divert the numbers to a full-on conflict right now, which I am sure he is aware."

"How are you staying in contact?" Green asked, his distracted eye snapping into focus suddenly. "Can the message be intercepted or altered?"

"It's a messenger spell in the shape of a fox. And no," stated Kanieta, forcing her voice to remain level as he questioned her spellcraft, "The safety measures can not be broken, though it could be destroyed. Which is why multiples are sent out for redundancy." Green looked skeptical and mildly curious about it. "The spell has an inbuilt pattern of mana that needs an identical design presented to it to deliver the message. If it is stopped too long without the pattern being presented, it self-destructs. If the outer shell is broken, it self-destructs. While it's not impossible for Derg to have someone who can get past my spellwork, the odds of them being in between here and Forest's Edge are unlikely. So yes, I am confident in secure communications."

Green dipped his head in recognition of her point, soothing her irritation at him. "So we have warband of…"

"Two thousand eight hundred and change."

"Not exactly an overwhelming force," Green commented, his eyes flicking at her in confusion at her clipped tone.

"And we aren't going to get any better for a while."

"How many does Derg have?" Asked Green.

Kathren turned to the side, looking at her cousin, prompting her to answer, "We don't have an exact number. But he should have between fifty to a hundred thousand."

Green snorted and started coughing as he choked on his own saliva. After a few seconds, he got out a horse, "What?" Before clearing his throat and continuing, "You have that many warriors as well?"

Kanieta caught the glint in his eyes as he asked his second question, feeling a little bit of admiration. Green and been… moody… over their journey.

He nearly constantly had a distracted expression on his face. But more than that, he was making mistakes that he had proven when they first met were beneath him. It was only luck that no enemy was around to capitalize on his constant missteps and noise.

If he wasn't basically an experiment for her to see the effects on an Olimpian's soul when it was nearly ripped to pieces and healed, she would have already told him to go back or just left him behind. That, and leaving Franklin behind to possibly be killed or just report that she left them, would be a political headache she didn't want to deal with. It would be better to die out here.

And there was no way that Badger would leave Green, as he was constantly hovering around him like he was some kit that would hurt itself the moment he turned away.

It was not an entirely unfounded feeling, as Green was developing a reputation of walking with them one second before turning around the next and stomping back the way they came. Or his face would go blank or fill with fear out of nowhere at nothing.

The worst part — the thing that put her hair on end — was that something interesting was happening to Green, but he was refusing to talk about it. Or even so much as acknowledge it, just remaining quiet. The selfish bastard. What's the point of an experiment that can't be accurately documented!

No matter what Nareta said, all of her irritation was not stemming from how she had to note what was happening to him as an external observer.

The first time he froze with a blank face, Kanieta thought that he had become a shell. That the healing had gone wrong or wasn't completed correctly, and his soul was ripped out by something. Her heart almost stopped as she thought her experiment had ended before it really began.

After that first episode where he froze while walking, Kanieta started watching the elf closely. She started taking note of his fluctuating emotions, as she suspected they were related to his situation.

Right after she started, she noticed with mild concern that it was happening at a seemingly increasing speed, regardless of how long it lasted, but that wasn't what Kanieta was most worried about. That belonged to what she noticed while studying him. She detected that the world's mana would ripple around him when his emotions shifted. It was subtle, but anyone looking would notice it.

And Kanieta was damn sure that Green wasn't the cause.

As fascinating as it was, the time when she could focus more on studying Green than traveling was over, much to her annoyance. Derg was becoming quite an annoyance.

This could open up a whole new field of magic involving the soul. Though maybe it would be best to leave that branch closed… She thought with trepidation before pushing the ridiculous thoughts away. If it wasn't her, then it would be someone else getting the credit.

And to create proper defenses, one needed to know how to cast the spells.

On the bright side, she had noticed that in between the world… suppressing him? Whatever the right word was, Green was affecting the ambient world mana around him, though she doubted he realized that whatever his clumsy castings were, they would alert anyone looking.

Needless to say, Green had a lot on his mind. But despite all of his distractions, the old him was perking up for the first time since they left as he tried to learn how strong her faction's warbands were. Some habits just never leave us, huh.

Kanieta flashed her teeth as she said, "Not quite that many. But I designed my warbands to buy time so our mages can complete our war spells. And to… infiltrate the enemy lines." At the last part, her eyes flicked to her faintly smiling cousin.

Green's eyes narrowed at Kanieta when she emphasized infiltrate, rightfully mentally substituting infiltrate with assassinate. "As for the Crescent Moon," Kanieta continued before the silence became too heavy, but she could not stop herself from sneering at the name of the traitors. "Nearly everyone above the age of adolescence is a combatant. It is a complete warrior's society, with few among their number having the skills to create anything but destruction. Many of our factions found it easier to offer them all the support they needed to hold back the Letairry on the front lines instead of going themselves." She paused for a moment before adding, "And you should know that there was another seventy-five thousand Crescent Moon fighting in our rear guard action. Though they seemed to have disappeared a week and a half ago."

"That's not reassuring," Green murmured, getting nods of silent agreement, "but in the long term, we have the advantage because they won't be able to make effective war."

"Potentially," Nareta broke in, causing everyone but Kanieta to look at her in confusion, “Ughh… you're going to make me say it, aren't you?" Taking a breath, she visibly steadied herself before saying, “Derg… isn't stupid." The words seemed to physically pain her as they came out of her mouth. "There is more than one reason he took the Cradle. Besides food, his army needs very little else. They are known to fight successfully with tooth and claw if needed. And we have no idea what the capabilities or numbers of the blood mages are."

"So long term, they will be weakened, but not broken, and we need to keep the two forces apart," Green clarified, only getting a slight eyebrow crook in reply from Nareta. After a bit too long of a pause where Green was looking at the woman to see if she would do anything else, he hesitantly continued, "In the short term… we need to find and destroy the main northern force of the Crescent Moon. Are you sure there will be one up here? They could just be raiding the forts to keep them off balance." Green said, gesturing to the warbands burning fields with only a few of the outer forts actually being anything close to attacked right then.

"They have to," Kanieta said, "Seventy thousand warriors aren't going to magically appear all by themselves. They can't get through the Northern Forest, and I already sent troops to hold the gap between this line of fortresses and the forest. Going around the fortresses while dealing with increasing numbers of the Lost, they won't have the food. The only option is to punch a hole."

"If they have to punch a hole," Green muttered, his eyes sweeping back and forth over the forts, "The farther to the east, the weaker their troops become, and too close to the forest, you will send a force out to trap them against the forts while they attack."

Kanieta nodded in agreement, "We might not have the forces to take them on in a head-on battle, but they have a lot of territory to defend, and we can focus on a single point. Derg, or his advisers, knows it too. There really aren't many options of where to attack with all the scorched ground between us."

"So they will expect you to try something, but not us…" Kanieta looked at Green, expecting an explanation of the vague statement. "Everyone inside the forts might not be legion trained," Green said, sweeping his hand out to take in all of the towers sticking up over the gently rolling hills. "But there should be enough to form a legion."

Kanieta's ears flicked as she grew excited at the thought. If they could convince the Olimpians to fight with her, then it would open up an entire front on Derg, drawing away more resources.

But working together did not look like it was going to happen.

She didn't know what happened here over the last month, much to her embarrassment and shame, but it didn't take a genius to figure out that atrocities were being committed. Anyone from the Cradle working with her factions of the Kin was… unlikely.

But it would still be worth a try. The worst that could happen was they tried to kill her, but Kanieta doubted they would succeed. Foxes were nothing if not slippery.

Nodding her head as she made up her mind, Kanieta said, "We should try and make contact, but we should not distract ourselves. Our main objective is to find the Crescent Moon Camp and prepare for our assault."

Green grunted in acknowledgment, but his eyes were already glazed over, and he was looking off to the side, his emerald eyes slightly squinted. A flare of annoyance welled up inside of Kanieta as he was distracted by nothing while talking to her… again! But she chose to be the bigger woman and pushed the emotion down. For the seventh time…

Franklin was too preoccupied with keeping an eye on the test subject, so Kanieta turned to her cousin to have the important conversation, "Should we follow or wander in the dark."

Nareta looked at the small packs of wolves setting fires to the fields, then said, "They won't go back without accomplishing something. And they aren't going to accomplish anything doing that. We would have to find a likely fortress to fall, then wait for it to happen."

"It's going to be dark tonight. We can cover a lot of ground."

"And never find anything, always dancing around our objective while an unnoticed fortress falls."

"So we should do both and see who gets lucky."

"Obviously, that was what I said in the first place."

"The warband should be here in four days. They will have to pull back if we don't find it by then." Hurring added.

"So we don't have any time to waste." Kanieta told him before returning to her cousin, "I'm going to scout. You go find a place for you and the baggage to hide while I go do all the work."

Nareta grimaced at Kanieta before releasing a world-weary sigh and looking away in resigned compliance.

"Good," Kanieta chirped, "Now, if you excuse—

"No," Green said, cutting Kanieta off and stopping her as she got up, "We need to go in that direction. There is something over there."

Turning, Kanieta saw Green looking away from the fortresses to the southeast, his face twisted with curiosity.