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It isn’t easy to hide in a camp when you’re the only person with scales. It’s hard to lose people tracking you when you’re leaving a blood trail.

Oh, you’ll be tempted to do something stupid, like hide in the garbage, or in a sump pit, or under the latrine. Or at least I was.

They found five soldiers while looking for me; sleeping under or in cart, in storage rooms with supplies over them. Hidden dugouts where they retired to sleep during working hours. They were pretty creative, just not creative enough.

Honestly, if they’d done a coordinated sweep of the camp, or used the dogs... but they didn’t. I was twice able to avoid my hunters and get behind them. By morning, they were convinced I was no longer in camp.

Which was just good luck, because I couldn’t exactly move around openly during the day. I hid inside half a broken barrel that someone had taken to using as a stool. Honestly, it was fitful sleep, and if they’d moved it at any time, or used the space underneath, say to store a pack of gear?

Good gods, it would have been a horrible place to die.

That night, I was more mobile. I had hoped to go through a supply tent, or a field hospital; nope, those places were guarded.

The cooking supplies? Guarded.

.....

The trash pits? Guarded and being actively burned.

Worse, the new moon was becoming fuller, and there weren’t enough shadows to hide in, anyway.

But there is a saying, that every army travels on its stomach. In other words, logistics, or the distribution of supplies. Such as daily, or in this case, nightly supply runs. All supplies came to the main army outside the main gate. Those supplies then went left and right, to other gates.

The army by the Rice Gate got half a barrel less of water that delivery, but I got a free trip past the guards.

Never jump from a moving cart; especially when the bones of your wrists and ankles are still knitting. Just trust me on this, it’s a very painful combination.

The road was patrolled, and there were sentries every so often along the cliff opposite the outside wall. So, the north side of the road was too risky.

South of the road, anything resembling a source of fresh water had soldiers “guarding” it, though most did nothing of the sort after dusk.

As I’ve said before, health gains are down to a single point a day while seriously injured. That didn’t always apply if I had enough biomass, but it took me two days to get to that point.

Honestly, you don’t want hear about every rabbit or robin that I chased, or how I couldn’t trap anything while moving at my best speed.

If the ground had been fertile, it would have had farms on it. While not barren, the pickings were slim, and remained precisely because they were either inedible to humans or had skills to avoid them.

Still, it was good to be resistant to poisons and diseases, to be capable of getting at least some nutrition from the scrabby wooden shrubs.

For four days, I kept a nocturnal schedule, avoiding mines and lumber camps and especially avoiding watch towers that seemed to have been erected at random, overlooking what to me looked like just another patch of land.

The beasts in the few woods I came across were hostile and territorial, and I learned to avoid them.

In that time, I managed what would have taken less than a day along the road.

[You have 18/40 health.]

Well, it was still more than I’d had at any point in the main camp. Still... had the camp by the Rice Gate been this well fortified and watched earlier? Certainly not along the north side of the bridge, where they faced the battlefield. The presence of scaffolds indicated plans to build a second story to their wooden walls, and one of the towers was already being supplanted by one made of stone.

Where the Uruk had built downward, the inmates had built up. It looked like the beginnings of small fortresses on either side of the bridge, and possibly it was. Still, security is only as good as the people manning, or in this case, not manning the walls.

Some fool had left out a shirt that was obviously too big for me, but it was better than the nothing that I had, so I swiped it wet off the laundry line. It wasn’t hard to see why the rough-spun fabric had been left unwatched; it was wool and wrinkled and about as comfortable as wearing a small fire.

As for the bridge, it was all but unwatched. Why bother? It was the middle of camp and the cliff faces made certain it was secured. I mean, if you’d given me almost a thousand soldiers, I’d think I could spare ten or so to watch the cliffs, just in case. No, I’d made it about halfway to the shrine before some soldier or other noticed that I had a reptilian head, and might not belong there.

After some questions in High Dauric mixed in with another language I didn’t recognize, they just took me prisoner and threw me into a bamboo cage to sleep the night. Honestly, had I hit another growth spurt without noticing? The cage was too small to stretch out in, which didn’t help when the Lucid Dreaming reached out of the Dreamtime for me.

“There you are!” Kismet griped at me. “Did you really let yourself get beaten up by a dog?”

“It wasn’t quite that simple.”

“Really? Everyone here thinks it was that simple. There was some kind of dog, and you passed out from fear, and it just dragged you off behind enemy lines.”

“That is ABSOLUTELY NOT what happened.”

“Really? Because that’s what’s circulating here among people who matter. I mean, you could kill all hundred or so of those soldiers holding you...”

“There’s about ten times that many...”

“Interrupting me! Rude.” She took a bat at my eye, which, dream logic, wasn’t there when she finished her swing.

She blinked. “Anyway, your reputation is pretty much crap right now.”

“And how does that affect those of you still inside the citadel?”

“It’s not fun, Rhishi. Not fun. Everyone and their newborn children are on half rations, which is another way of saying not enough food. Oh, and those sneaky ninjas I told you were sneaking around everywhere? Turns out they aren’t all that sneaky. Or maybe someone just sent an apprentice ninja after Donna or something.”

“Someone tried to kill Madonna? Is she okay?”

She took on a mock-haute pose. “Oh, I’ve simply been stabbed, dahling. It’s absolutely TERRIBLE. Oh, and I’m sure the wound is poisoned or something. Dearest Kismet, can’t you please massage my feet? I’d get my worthless husband to do it, but he’s off drowning his sorrows in captivity instead of just killing them all.”

“It’s not sorrows, and they’re resistant to drowning.”

“That doesn’t mat... RHISHI! Tell me you haven’t gotten cursed AGAIN.”

“I am a Truthspeaker, and literally CANNOT lie to you.”

“By the gods, you worthless gobsmack! Didn’t we just clean you of a curse? Just last season? Haven’t we been through this before?”

“We have...”

“And here we are, not even ONE SEASON later... One fricking season, mind you. And now, you’re all cursed over again?”

“I’m not doing this to myself.” I said.

“Oh, no, you didn’t do ANYTHING to yourself. Not. The. Topic. You really ARE a child of two, aren’t you?”

“Until after the Festival of Planting.” I said.

“Oh. Close enough to THREE. Really, Rhishi. Learn to take care of yourself.”

“I’m actually...”

“Nope. Talk to the paw, and the paw says, shut up, adults are talking.”

“You aren’t...”

“I’m closer to it than YOU are. Now shut up.”

“Okay.”

“Okay?”

“Okay.”

The siege of the outer wall was going well, or terribly. With the exception of a series of foolish sorties from the Rice Gate, two inmates were dying to every guard, and they had just short of that many troops.

There were, by law, three months and a week of supplies inside the walls, which would last until winter on half rations. Admiral Kwan Lun had delivered a rousing speech, and people seemed to be waiting patiently for the fractious inmate army to just fall apart and admit defeat.

Yeah, that wasn’t happening any time soon.

In the morning, they took me out of the cage, manacled my left hand to a chain which was also fastened to a series of men and women with similar fashion sense, and led about to perform menial chores.

My new guards spoke only Mandarin and High Daurian, and laughed when I asked about Hwang Lan. And then they would spit on me, because that was their habit with all the prisoners.

Whatever. They were feeding us well, and I was only five nights away from full health.