"Leroy."

The camp stank with mud and an anxious tension. The lightly drizzling rain drumming atop tents and plinking off the metal of the men's helmets and cuirasses added a constant drone to the would-be silence, periodically joined by a squelch of boots padding through mud or the cough and sniffle of a watchman. The sparse embers of the fire which had provided a comforting warmth to the enclosure's center could still be sighted popping and fizzling out in the night air beneath the shelter of damp, half-charred logs propped into a moderate pile, though any other remaining light streamed only from the worn-down oil lanterns adorning the posts stamped into the earth every few feet across the campground's two entrances. Between these, the grass had been trampled into shoddy packed-dirt which in places stemmed out to reach towards the barracks tent or rain barrels. All were encompassed by a makeshift fence of thin logs haphazardly propped into a perimeter that split on its eastern and southwestern sides where a respective lookout stood with a musket slung loosely over his shoulder.

"What's the time?"

An older man among the few conglomerated near the wilting fire-pit shifted at the request, hands patting at his torso and waist in search until one was raised towards his face with a pocket-watch clutched between fingers. The man lifted a thumb, wiped away droplets from the glass face, and peered down with squinted eyes.

"Half-past ten." He eventually responded, the low tone of his voice betraying an obvious disappointment with that news.

"The convoy was meant to be 'ere two and a half fucking hours ago." Returned the original voice almost immediately as Leroy had finished. Its speaker had asked the same question a half hour earlier and very well knew that the convoy was rather obviously still running late, but seemed to have felt the need to remind everyone else.

"Could'a just got held up. It's happened plenty times afore, especially with all this rain. They don't stone-pave the roads outside'a the big cities here, you know that?" Leroy let the watch return to his waist-side and his hand to the shaft of the spear he'd been shifting his weight against, its butt now driven an inch or so into the mud at their boots.

The first man didn't seem particularly pleased with this answer, which he made abundantly clear with a jerk of his head and a wad of spit sent sailing against the wet earth. "Shit. That's shit and you know it. Quartermaster'd have 'em by the fucking balls if they were delayed more than an hour, rain be damned. Nah. Bet summot's gone wrong."

The older man sighed, piecemeal armor of his uniform clanking subtly as he gave a short roll of his shoulders. He'd seen the sleek functionality of the Durranian military machine in action for long enough to know that Willerd was probably more right than he realized. This rain was a dusting, hardly a storm, and imperial caravans weren't known for their tardiness even to outposts this far outside their proper network. Still, fear spread through a camp like a pox, and there was no need to start speculation this early into the night. "Might'a, but what then? Naught we can do 'till morning, and by then it could come and be gone with hardly a fuss."

"Right. Or the bandits what picked it clean will'a got away scot-free after bleedin' out the convoy-men, and the quartermaster'll have our fuckin' heads on account of not stoppin' 'em." Willerd shifted in his makeshift seat atop an empty rations crate, fingers drumming impatiently against the wood beside his legs.

"Could be the rebels." A third and lighter voice pitched in from the sidelines, seemingly much to the chagrin of the other two. As Leroy raised a hand and parted his lips to dissuade the notion, Willerd stepped in first.

"You shut your fuckin' hole, Cedric. You shut it right now."

"Well I'm – I'm only saying." The third man protested, navigating across the damp ground to work his wiry frame a bit closer to the others. "I mean, aren't we here in the first place because of the rebels? We should be—"

"You should be blabberin' about less shit like that is what should happen."

Leroy stepped in properly before Willerd could continue his rant, a diplomatic hand raised in the space between the stocky man sat on his crate and the scrawny youngblood who was, even in the dark of night, quite visibly clutching at his spear with what must have been a white-knuckled grip beneath his gloves. Both sets of eyes turned in the old man's direction instead, and Leroy let out another sigh before angling his head towards the youngest of the three with a weary smile worn over his face.

"You're a bit new in this camp, aren't you lad?"

Cedric shifted his weight uncomfortably from one foot to the other, unsure of the other man's intent. "Ah, yes sir. Yes. I was assigned here from Westguard just a week from last monday, an' I arrived at this post not two days ago, sir."

Leroy's smile warmed a bit, one hand raising to brush off Willerd who had begun to scoff at just how recent the youth's assignment had been. "Oh, don't bother with the 'sirs', lad, I'm not yer superior an' certainly not a knight besides. Call me Leroy, if it please." As he spoke, the man had found a crate of his own to rest upon, a satisfied grunt escaping from behind his lips as he'd lowered himself onto it, gesturing nearby to suggest the newest addition to their fire-pit chatter get a seat for his own.

"Cedric, s—, ah, Leroy." The lad returned with a hesitant smile in turn, finding seating atop a filled and sealed rain barrel which had been wheeled near the firepit a day or two prior. "Cedric Rudges."

"Rudges?" Leroy's brows folded, "That a family name, or just something you picked out for yourself?"

"No, sir." Cedric winced, catching himself a moment too late, "Sorry. No, it's a family name for us."

"Never known families with nice proper names like that'on to get conscripted or levied."

The younger man shook his head, the ill-fitting kettle helmet wobbling slightly atop it as he did, "Oh, no, I think my father would've raised hell with the baron for weeks if any of our family got levied."

The third man tuned back into the conversation with a shocked laugh, "Not bloody levied and a rich brat to boot? And you wanted to come out here?" Leroy shot him a look of warning with the hope that he might quiet down, but the gruff man had become much too involved in a fit of bemused chuckling to even notice. Leroy sighed again – it was becoming a pattern – and a hand raised to run absent-mindedly along the back of his neck beneath his own helmet.

"Where did you say you were from, lad?"

"Ah, Hazelton, sir." Cedric winced once again at his repeated mistake though didn't bother to correct himself this time. He might've been new, but he wasn't blind, and the fact that Leroy had only been telling off his fellow watchman's digs rather than contradicting him had only dug more harshly into the young man's nerves. "It's a small town upriver of the Heyford a ways, no more than a couple hundred folk."

"Mm, Fordsworth. That's a real heartland city isn't it? You aught'a look out for Brent one of these days, then. I think he's from around the same area if memory's still serving me well enough." Another quick smile and a lean forwards to pat reassuringly upon Cedric's shoulder before he went on talking. "Myself I'm from Redwillow, originally."

The younger man's brows raised in surprise, "Redwillow? Redwillow on Tharron?" He returned a quick shake of his head in disbelief upon receiving a nod, "How the hell did you get so far out west from the Tharronese? I didn't even know they were levying from the eastern border."

"Talkin' too fuckin' much, prob'ly." Willerd continued his interjections, though was now clearly paying a bit more attention to whatever booze he'd stuffed his belt-flask full of while his eyes were scanning the treeline. Leroy gave him little mind.

"Oh, I've not been on the eastern edge of the empire for the better part of two decades, lad; the Tharronese isn't even something I can recall 'sides from the sounds of the runnin' waters. No, I was levied from Redwillow a long while back, probably wasn't even much older than yourself at the time. Was brought in as a pikeman for the Regnan border skirmishes."

"Regnan border skirmishes?"

"Well, they would've been a bit before your time."

"Oh, well I figured that, sir, it's just that I read a lot of Durranian military history before I signed on. I wanted to, well, know what I was getting into first." Leroy gave the younger man a look of sympathetic disapproval and concern, to which Cedric was quick to respond. "Ah, my apologies, sir. I only mean to say that the books our family had must have been incomplete; those border skirmishes were never mentioned."

Leroy shook his head, "No, no, lad, never you mind that. Those fights were over in barely a month. Probably not even worth a footnote in those sorts of books." A kind half-smile had warmed his face without quite reaching up to the man's eyes before he'd continued, "It's only that, all in those books, I d—"

"Oi, shut the fuck up for a moment."

Willerd's continued interjections seemed to be irking the older conscript, a slight crease slipping onto his upper lip as he once again faced the man to give him a proper telling off, "Now listen, Willerd, there's..."

Leroy's voice trailed off at the sight of his companion's posture, the man's head snapped fully to the right with eyes opened wide, glued to a patch of trees scattered over the top of a hill which overlooked the encampment's southern fence. All went quiet for a short few moments, the other two soldiers exchanging a worried look before their gaze shifted to Willerd once again, then up to the foliage he was staring at so intensely. The relative silence wasn't broken until, in a gruff murmur, he announced news that would've been expected by his posture.

"There's somethin' in them fucking trees."

"A fox?" Cedric's voice was shaky despite the attempted levity. Willerd, evidently, did not appreciate the comment.

"Don't you fucking second-guess me, Greenie." The man's eyes didn't leave the trees as he slowly slid himself from atop the crate, boots squealching as his weight pushed into the earth once more. "I've been on scout duty enough times to know what a fucking face looks like in the dark."

"Bandits?"

"Bandits or somethin' worse." He'd pulled himself into a full stand without breaking line of sight for even a moment, one hand searching carefully to his side until he was able to find a grip around the spear he'd left leaning nearby, the other keeping a tight grip on the hilt of a sword sheathed in his belt. The posture of all three remained frozen for a number of seconds, the ever-constant pattering of raindrops the only sound in the cool night air. The larger man's head tilted to the side, pupils straining to the corners of their sockets to remain on-target as he called aimlessly over his shoulder. "Leroy, get one of the boys over here with a fucking gun. Head to the barracks an' t—"

Willerd's instructions were cut short by the far-off twung of a snapping cord and a much more nearby thud as a steel-tipped bolt sailed out of the treeline and embedded itself squarely into the large man's left shoulder, the impact alone sending him staggering back a step to two and struggling to maintain his balance even as his padded coat absorbed the brunt of the hit. He'd scarcely had time to right himself before another landed at the center of his stomach and had him reeling into the mud. Mouth hung open wide as he struggled to regain his breath, the sudden shock of the attack leaving him sprawled against his back, fingers digging through wet dirt in desperate attempts to re-find the polearm he'd dropped. Through the haziness within his skull, he could barely make out the sound of Leroy's shrill cries echoing in the campground behind him just as another set of voices began to sound out from the south.

XX

Montgomery let the air escape his lungs in a slow and deliberate sigh through puckered lips. Breathe in, breathe out. That's what Bridg' had taught him back home, right? That was supposed to be the easy trick?

It wasn't working.

When his sister had opined the merits of remaining calm, however, he'd imagined she probably wasn't picturing him caked in mud and cradling a loaded crossbow. That just wasn't the sort of situation he'd been known to find himself in, was it? Well, maybe the first one, depending on just the type of day it had been.

And yet, here I am.

Thoughts of his family weren't exactly helping the young man keep his thoughts level-headed either, now were they? Their last conversations hadn't been what he'd describe as friendly, but that was as much his own fault as was his current crossbow-clutching position on a wet hillside – which was to say entirely. It was entirely his own fault. He imagined that, in moments like these, lots of people would take the opportunity to stop and ask themselves how they'd arrived to it in the first place. For his own part, Montgomery wished that he had the luxury of posing those questions to himself and that the answer wasn't so obviously just because he was an idiot.

Was that fair to say? His habit of verbal-flagellation was another of many that his sister had tried and failed to help push out of his head, after all. Then again, if she could guess where he was now, she very well might call him an idiot too. That's if she didn't figure he was already dead.

"Hey. Hey! Quilton!"

The hissed whisper to his right managed to tug the boy out of his spiraling anxious thoughts, head snapping to the side and away from the camp he'd been 'scouting' to find its source. Another figure saturated in muck had crawled up the hillside beside him, dragging themselves forwards to its crest by their elbows, body flattened against the slick grass. 'James' had been the man's name if Montgomery was remembering right – something that started with a 'J', at least. He'd been the first to eagerly welcome the new arrival into their troupe as well as the first to stuff the crossbow into the new arrival's hands and tell him to take a vantage point up on the hill. He'd also, Montgomery had noticed, had a habit of referring to him by the hold he'd left rather than the name he'd introduced himself by. An outsider first, a comrade second. Oh, he'd just felt so welcomed.

"How many we looking at?"

"Ah, th— I can see three sitting down at the campfire." Montgomery's voice was almost startled as he gave his response, the young man having nearly forgotten that he was technically supposed to be keeping track of these things. "Then there's one more by each of the gates, and they've got those, uh, long-gun things." 

The man pulled up beside him delivered a quizzical and almost judgemental look. Montgomery just shrugged his shoulders as best he was able from the strange position. Even if he'd been better-trained, better-prepared, and better-skilled, it didn't seem like there was much more he would've been able to tell; most of the camp's lights had probably been put out hours ago, and the rain was keeping most of the men in their tents.

He thought the other man might've sighed, but it was difficult to tell.

"Not exaclty the best scouting report I've ever heard."

Yeah, it had definitely been a sigh. Montgomery felt a twinge of annoyance behind his ribs to join in with the ever-present anxious lump. He spent a few moments thinking up ways to remind the other man that he'd been the one to send him up here in the first place and that he'd never even held a crossbow before three days ago and that scouting camps definitely hadn't been the type of work that a lifetime on a farm had trained him for, but once again found his thoughts cut short by James' drab voice.

"Eyes forward, Quilton."

He released a grumble beneath his breath, but his gaze returned to the camp regardless. So soon as he did, a wave of panic washed across the boy – one of the three men by the fire had his own gaze trained in their direction. Montgomery felt his entire body tense in response, his companion's hand shifting over to rest against his shoulder before he could form so much as a single word.

"Easy, there. Easy. He hasn't seen us yet."

"He hasn—? He's looking right at us!" The panic in his voice bubbled back to the surface, as if there needed to be any sort of verbal reminder of his inexperience.

"He's looking in our direction, not at us. There's no chance he can spot us here."

"Why not? We can see him." 

Montgomery was hissing through gritted teeth at this point, feeling as though he and the encamped soldier in question might as well be making eye contact by this point. James was quick to brush the comment off with a barely audible chuckle, but even the younger man wasn't quite inept enough not to notice the worry baked into the sound. The elder between the two let his mouth open and shut a few times, apparently trying to come up with some sort of scenario that would justify the stocky man down around the firepit staring at their hill in particular for such a long period of time without him having seen them, but such efforts quickly seemed moot as the other two heads shifted in their direction as well.

Breath could be heard whistling into James' nose as he pushed himself to the side, obscuring his face as best he could behind the bush he'd crawled near. Montgomery, on the other hand, sat frozen, wide-eyed, and mostly useless despite the three men below all peering up right at him. Could the other two see him? He couldn't tell. Could the first one still see him? He couldn't tell. Was he going to die? Definitely. Without a doubt. There was no possible way that this was going to play out without him dying. They were going to either bring over one of those long-gunners and blow his head clean open or else just get the whole company to march right up the hill and—

"Shoot him!"

Montgomery blinked.

"I...d— what?"

"Shoot him! The fat one!"

It took a few more blinks to properly register what was being suggested. Shoot? Him – shoot? A person? He'd barely even been able to hit targets back at camp, and those had been a lot closer than the man downhill! Not to mention that he'd been stood upright and – and this wasn't even supposed to have happened! He was just supposed to be on lookout! Backup, at worst! And now he was expected to loose the first bolt? Oh Gods, was this turning into an assault? He wasn't prepared for this. There was no way he was prepared for this. No. Better to just slip back down the other side of the hill and get back to Wayford before—

"HIT THE FUCKING LEVER!"

And so he did. Without much thought into the actions he was taking, James' shout forced the younger man into action. Hardly even taking the time to properly aim, Montgomery's right hand had practically slapped up against the underside of the crossbow that'd been hugged up against his body for so long, the wound string snapping forwards with a forceful twung that made the boy flinch.

By some miracle – some act of the gods – the bolt found its mark.

Montgomery flinched again as he saw the projectile slam against the man's body with a surprising force, upper lip curling with dissatisfaction at the sight only moments before he watched another bolt fly out from a patch of bushes that couldn't have been thirty feet to his right. This one, apparently, was launched by someone relying less on blind luck and managed to down the large man entirely.

All around him, Montgomery could hear the rising shouts of the men and women of the troupe as their cover was very thoroughly blown. Bellows echoed around him as fishermen and woodcutters reached for spear and sword and axe and mace, preparing to storm the encampment with nothing but numbers and fervor on their side. Down below, the boy watched as red-suited soldiers came spilling from out of their tents, the knot in his stomach only tightened by the second. Without him even realizing, James had pulled him to his feet and screamed something inflamed with inspiration into his ear before pulling sword from scabbard and charging down the hill.

Left at the hilltop, the boy forced down a deep gulp to keep the contents of his stomach in place, fingers shaking while he fumbled for the grip of the short blade strapped around the left of his waist.

He was going to die today after all, wasn't he?

XX

A vague memory swam around at the very edges of Montgomery's mind: once, he'd been kicked by a horse. It hadn't been a particularly powerful kick considering the animal in question – he probably wouldn't have been around to remember the occasion at all if it had been – but, in some moment of very poor decision-making in his adolesence, he'd managed to annoy the creature enough while roughhousing with one of his brothers that it had decided a swift punt to the gut was a good way of getting him to leave it be. Unsurprisingly, it had been right, and must have felt quite pleased with itself when the boy spent the next however many minutes on the floor writhing in pain. Luck had been on his side then as well, apparently, since the hoof managed to somehow avoid cracking any number of his ribs and left behind very little but a dull, throbbing pain and a particularly nasty bruise. Aside from when his siblings would tease him about the incident, it rarely came to mind.

At the moment, the memory had resurfaced less out of reminiscence than familiarity. That shortness of breath, that deep and throbbing ache stretching across more guts than he even knew he had, that fuzzy and light feeling in his head – the one that would soon be replaced by a blunt pain similar to the one now in his stomach – they all felt so suddenly familiar again. It was like an old thought brought forward by a pleasant smell or specific sound; once it hit the senses, memories that a person hadn't even known they'd made could come flooding back in. It was also distinctly not like that – smells and sounds tended to be less impactful, in the literal sense, than a mace to the lower torso.

The boy's gods must have been on his side after all, he figured, seeing as he'd still managed to keep the whole 'not being dead' thing going so far. It might've just been the shock talking, but he was fairly sure that he'd gotten away without any shattered ribs yet again. Well, the one on the bottom right might've had a crack in it, but it's not like he knew enough about...anything even vaguely resembling the studies of medicine or biology to say for certain. It just happened to sting like hell around that bit of his body when he'd tried to prop himself up on his elbows. Even so, it was just one of the many blessings to count; that it had been a mace rather than a warhammer or, gods forbid, a spear that'd ended up making contact through all the immense protection offered by his tunic, that it had made said contact low enough to avoid treating his skeleton like a ceramic bowl but not quite low enough to have left him a eunuch or, only slightly less paralyzing to imagine, confined to a chair for the rest of his life, and that it had been a glancing blow that knocked him back onto the earth rather than something with enough force to have done much worse to his innards than dull pain.

Despite all that, the thought which brought the subtle hints of a smile to his face was the realization that he'd now managed to get both sides of his figure completely slathered in wet dirt. So far away from the farm, yet his clothes fared the same as ever.

There was no commanding voice to drag Montgomery's wandering mind back to the present this time around. Shouts and cries floated in from every direction, seeming so far away from the boy and his current mud-ridden world, but they'd faded into the background alongside the clangs of metal against metal and the occasional booming crack of what he assumed must be sparked gunpowder. No, what managed to pull attention away from his scattering thoughts was the sound of something else squirming along the ground nearby.

He knew he couldn't push himself up into anything even resembling a sit – that had already been tried and failed, after all – so a crane of the neck would have to do for getting a look at whatever it was. 

His heart nearly finished the mace's work for it when the boy hiked his head upwards and craned it to the side, eyes straining through the dimly-lit night only to be met with the sight of a stubble-ridden, kettle-helmet-topped face belonging to a stocky man dressed in red.

The man's jaw was clenched tight, shaky breaths taken through gritted teeth as he tugged himself through the dirt and towards Montgomery's position, clearly in a similar amount of pain. As gaze shifted away from the larger man's bloodshot eyes, it was easy to notice a bolt's wooden shaft protruding from a damp reddened patch in his shoulder; a second further down in his belly, its placement no doubt the reason he kept weight propped against side and shoulder while using his right elbow alone to heave himself nearer by inches at a time.

Montgomery recognized him. By the sheer anger he could see in the other man's eyes, he'd clearly been recognized in turn.

"I know...I know your fucking...your face, boy. I know it. I know your fucking face." The thick Durranian accent seeped out from the wounded man's throat as he finally dredged himself up beside the younger of the two. The brace of his arm faltered, sending him reeling forwards to plant a cheek into the muck not six inches away from Montgomery's own.

They stared at each other for some time in that position. Montgomery imagined it must only be pain and fatigue which kept the soldier beside him in place. It was those same two factors in part which kept his own back stuck against the ground, given a great help by a third: fear. Sheer terror, if he was being honest. Untethered panic if he had the energy to feel it.

This was it then, wasn't it? All that work, all that eastward wagon-hopping from Forlan to Quilton to Brimmings until he'd finally made it to Wayford. All of that revolutionary eagerness, it was all going to end here. Wet, muddy, aching, shivering cold, and too scared to do so much as twitch a finger in defiance as he watched the man beside him muster up the strength to raise back onto his shoulder, left arm reaching for a blade at his belt while those mutters about faces kept wheezing from his obviously strained lungs. These would be his last feelings – his last thoughts – as he'd finally watch that wonderful luck run out at just about the same time he'd watch that knife jam into his chest.

Oh gods, I really should've listened to mom.

And then came another crack of powder. One close enough to make the boy's ears ring and eyes wince shut in protest. The response had hidden the sight of the shot's impact, but a slight squint of his opening lids revealed the boy's would-be killer now laying plainly dead in the mud, blood pouring from a gaping hole in the right side of his torso where the projectile must have exited.

If the earlier blow from the mace hadn't already forcefully emptied the contents of his stomach, he would've lost them just then.

It was only as the shrill whine of his ears began to subside that he noticed the quiet of the camp, the sounds of the skirmish that he'd tuned out quite a while earlier having entirely vanished to be replaced once more by the quiet patter of light rainfall. In the dim night's air he could barely make out the shape of a figure standing in the corner of his vision and just outside the reach of a still-burning lamppost. The figure remained still as the boy's eyes did their best to focus, at first only able to register the odd and yet quite distinct appearance of what must've been a handgun's barrel angled towards his left, smoke still trickling up from its front. In the figure's other hand sat the hilt of a lengthy blade, one which the mysterious being seemed to twist before digging its tip into the mud, leaving the weapon behind as they stepped forwards.

Instinctively, Montgomery couldn't help but wince. He'd never owned a sword before – much too expensive when a spear or axe could do just as well – but even he knew that'd only end up dulling the thing. Still, probably shouldn't be casting too much judgement on his savior, right?

Was it one of the others from the group that he'd been carted over here with in the first place? He hadn't remembered any of them having weapons or supplies better than hand-me-downs that'd already been handed down three or four times after they'd been taken off someone else – and certainly nothing as high-maintenance or powerful as a handgun – but maybe they'd taken this one from an imperial's body? One of them had to have a gun stuck in their belt somewhere, right? Only seemed natural. Then again, he wasn't even sure if any of the others would even know how to shoot a gun. Was there anything more complex to it than pulling a trigger? Maybe they'd just gotten lucky, or—

Oh, well that explained it. He'd died. He'd already been killed and his mind was just filling in the gaps while his body was running out of blood.

Now visible, the figure was certainly no manner of militiaman he'd ever seen; if they had been among the group he'd joined with in the first place then he definitely would've noticed. They didn't exactly look like an imperial soldier, either – not unless the Durranians now had a very different kind of army than the one he'd seen patrolling the border towns back home.

In the dim lamplight stood a girl who must've been somewhere around the boy's own age, if perhaps a small bit younger. That by itself wasn't surprising – there were just as many daughters as sons of farmers and miners and fishermen eager to join up with one militia or another – but her appearance was...well, 'weird' seemed to be the word that jumped to his head first. Her silhouette was masked by a ratty cloak hanging from her shoulders, its dark material frayed and tattered practically to ribbons along its edges all the way down to where it hung near similarly black boots that lightly squealched into the earth. Cloths and leathers of black and red hues were strapped around her waist by a lopsided belt and draped loosely as a faux-skirt above the equally dark fabric of her trousers.

Really got a theme going for her, huh?

Her hands and arms were partially bound in brown cloth wrappings, but her midsection was laid bare. Montgomery's eyes lingered on a faded scar traced to the far left of her navel before, as they ventured upwards, he immediately flicked them immediately to her face after noticing that her chest was bound in a similar fashion. He'd been raised with manners in mind, after all, and focusing around clothes like that for too long seemed like a less-than-stellar first impression to make on someone who'd just saved his life.

Instead, he was met with a gaze nearly as unnerving as that of the dead Durranian in the mud beside him. Instead of anger, however, this girl's eyes were uncomfortably cold in a manner that he couldn't quite put into words. She held a wide stare back at his own, a pair of strikingly pale blues seeming to bore right into the boy's head for no more than a second or two before quickly diverting, tracing up and down his body in turn. Somehow, the strange girl's method felt much more uncomfortable than he imagined his own – the look in her eyes reminded him of the way his father might've scanned over a newly-purchased workhorse for faults.

Ah, there were those horse thoughts again. No place like home.

He could hear her boots squishing another step or two forwards until the girl was just at his side, body tilting forwards at the waist while her apparent appraisal continued. Bits of hair dipped down over the tops of eyes which refused to return to their former contact with his own, "Hrm. Olet ainoa, eikö maatilapoika?"

...what? Was that—what?

The 'already dead' theory seemed to be gaining some ground; those were nonsense-words he'd just heard. Either that or his head had been knocked harder than his stomach and translating very sensible sentences into total gibberish. That didn't sound like Tuvantine and it definitely wasn't Durranian. Skovodi, maybe? He might've heard Skovodi once, and maybe it sounded like that? Even if he was right, what was a Skov doing this far upriver, anyways?

Just as the strange girl's eyes were trailing up to meet his face once more, her posture snapped back upright with a startling speed, pistol immediately raising to level against some target off to Montgomery's right in a single motion. The neutral expression of her face hadn't much changed, though he noticed a slight furrow in her brow as she murmured beneath her breath with those strange foreign words, "Unohdin yhden."

Montgomery grimaced, brian now throbbing inside his skill as expected while his head tilted to the right to follow along towards whatever had startled his savior. A pang of worry spread down his throat when he made out the sight of another red-clad man stood a few yards off into the camp, a musket clutched against his arms. This soldier was much younger than the now-lifeless one to the boy's left. Thinner too, even his uniform gambeson and padding unable to conceal the wiry build beneath. The gun visibly shook in his grasp, its barrel pointed roughly in the strange girl's direction with an unassured posture that made it clear even to Montgomery, who had not so much as seen a firearm properly in use before probably twenty minutes ago at best, that he had never held one before in his life.

"Put it down."

It took Montgomery a moment or two to realize that the words had come from the girl. The voice was certainly feminine and seemed to appropriately match her odd appearance – the high pitch and nearly nasaly tone sounded much too young to come from an experienced soldier – but this time in a language he could actually understand. It was odd, then, that her accent was perfectly Ardranic; it could've belonged to any one of the hundreds of women he'd pass by on the streets of Quilton on trips into the city with his father. Those words she'd spoken before could've been Elven for all he knew, so to hear the stranger speak in his own tongue startled him enough that he nearly forget the pain pounding through every bit of his head and torso.

Those returned quickly enough, though.

"Th-they—you killed them!" The scrawny soldier's voice wavered as violently as his weapon, words slipping from his trembling lips and jaw. If he was any more accustomed to this violence than Montgomery, then it didn't show.

"Yep."

For the second time in a row Montgomery could sense his pain momentarily overtaken by confusion and a dull shock at the girl's voice, so casual and aloof despite their situation. There he lay, coated in mud and internally bleeding, and this stranger sounded little more than vaguely annoyed. If it wouldn't have hurt quite so badly he might've even managed a laugh. None of this night had even slightly resembled the stories he'd heard of his uncle's time as a levy; if only dad could see him now.

"I'd kill you, too." The soldier flinched at her words despite their flat delivery. Though it was only natural that this Durranian would've shot and stabbed the both of them right then and there if he could, Montgomery couldn't help but feel for him; even from the ground, with her acting as his protector, there was something about the matter-of-fact manner of the girl's speech coupled with the way her wide eyes seemed to shine in the dim lamplight that was...unsettling. "So put it down."

Seconds passed. The gun was not put down.

Apparently annoyed by how the soldier seemed frozen in his spot, Montgomery vaguely made out the sight of his savior's eyes giving an irritated roll before her arm shifted a bit to the left, the sound of another blast of powder cracking through the camp and his ears alike, and another wave of pain rolling through his head that made the boy wince just as the second shot sailed past the soldier's helmet.

The musket was dropped immediately, splashing more than clattering onto the ground.

Montgomery's eyes creaked back open just in time to catch the girl lowering her own gun in turn, letting it hang by her side while the soldier shrunk away. They each stood still in their places for a moment before the soldier took a single step back. He took another when she didn't move, and another after that; the notion that she apparently wasn't going to kill him while defenceless emboldening him enough to create a bit of distance. When his ankle bumped up against the side of a crate and sent him realing to the side, it was all he could do to catch himself by the elbow and scramble back into a stand, spitting a single word to the girl with a voice full of venom and raw fear before making a panicked, stumbling dash towards the encampment's entrance and out into the forest beyond: "Witch!"

 And then it was silent again. Somewhere in all of that chaos the rain had come to a stop, Montgomery couldn't really have said when. The small sigh that escaped the girl's nose managed to remind the ground-ridden boy of his ever-present confusion and the absurd amount of questions he very much needed to ask. What had happened to the rest of the group he'd come here with? Where were the crates of weapons and metal they were supposed to have stolen off with? Who was she? Why had she saved him? Why was she dressed like that? Attempting to actually voice any of these, however, only resulted in a low groan that trickled painfully from his throat.

Oh. Right. The internal bleeding.

Though his eyes were only barely managing to hold themselves open by that point, he'd noticed the girl's gaze snapping back onto him in response to the best sound his lungs could manage. Lids drooped shut as her boots squished across the mud to return to his side, and he could hear rather than see her bend into a crouch that left her leaning over his form again. Despite his best efforts, the adrenaline had long since worn off, but he could hear the girl speak in a manner much too aloof for how he imagined someone tending to a very possibly dying man on a battlefield aught to be composing themselves.

"Don't worry, you're not gonna die." She sounded dismissive if anything, and honestly he would've felt pretty insulted if his brain had even been capable of those kinds of emotions in that moment. Before his consciousness left him entirely, Montgomery could make out a single word more.

"Probably."