SWORDPOINT DIPLOMACY ch3

In the morning, scouts managed to track the blood and other signs. Whoever she'd hit had basically dragged themselves a truly impressive distance before signs disappeared.

At a guess, Rose would say that her injured friend had met up with an accomplice who had slowed the bleeding and carried them to safety.

'They're probably alive,' Rose thought, despite all the blood. 'Whoever that is, they're more like me than the average person. Just the fact that they could see well enough in the dark to target the tents proves it for me.'

She kept her thoughts to herself. She didn't have proof, and after the bloodbath, her people desperately needed the morale boost.

Morale was her responsibility. She thought about it a lot.

Her mind was changing. She wished that her brother was back already. There was no one else she'd want to talk to about her doubt.

The reports said that things were on track with the river, at least. It should just be a couple more days.

The city walls seemed to be taunting her at this point. She'd been there 6 days, and Rose felt less motivated to reduce collateral damage. She felt…

'I want to get even,' she realized, and felt a little sick. 'I want to hurt them because they hurt us. But we're the ones in their home.'

Her thoughts were trending dangerously close to treasonous again. No… they were over that line, she admitted, if only in her head. She thought this war was wrong, stupid, grasping, greedy.

Rose put her hands on her head and rubbed at the skin, trying to work out the painful tension. She was too stressed.

From the start, her goal had been to force the defenders to see that they couldn't outlast a siege. They'd forecast the result, and they'd surrender to save lives. The nobility would be taken captive, the regular people left alone, and a new government installed out of the trusted personnel with Rose's army.

It still wasn't a bad plan, although it relied heavily on the enemy commander holding similar values to Rose.

But she started thinking. It was just a thought, and then she expanded on it, and - and she didn't have to do it, of course. If nothing else, she knew that Etienne would really dislike it.

'Would he really?' she wondered, in a stroke of inspiration. 'He hates the idea of hurting the regular people. He doesn't want to risk starving them out. Wouldn't this way be better?'

Rose rode the full circle around the walled city, eyeing the spot where the river entered the wall. She couldn't get close without drawing a lot of suspicion and arrow fire. It was dusk by that point, but people on the wall were definitely watching her go around on horseback.

There was an odd temptation, though.

'If I got closer, would I see Marcel? Would he come out to try to kill me?'

She scrunched up her face, shocked at the thought. 'What the fuck?' Unsettled by her own thoughts, she left her horse with her squire and went to pace in her tent. That's why she was awake when the regularly scheduled nighttime fuckery kicked off.

Rose lifted her head an instant before she knew why. Then she heard a distant yell. "I hate these people," she said to herself, hastily resecuring her swordbelt. "Hate, loathe, despise, will not befriend."

She was surprised to realize that it was true.

There wasn't much time to grapple with her first experience with hating other people. Rose burst out of her tent and gathered her guards. She ran so fast she practically flew to where she heard trouble, blowing past people who clearly hadn't even heard what she had. She spared a moment to be annoyed with the limitations of normal human senses.

This time was different. She heard metal clanging and shouting. Rose burst into the confrontation and catalogued the damage- about 20 raiders, a few of whom were dead, and at least 5 of her people were down and bleeding if not dead.

She lost track of the altercation. This was the type of thing that she was made for, the thing that made her blood sing. She hacked and stabbed and danced, feeling the crunch of bone and batting the night raiders around. Even through the fog of her focus, Rose tried to leave some of them alive. She wanted at least two of them to live a few hours as a source of information.

She came back to her senses in a clearing. There was a ruined tent flapping in the wind. She counted and saw one, two… five. Five of her people on the ground. Two of them looked dead. A few others were standing at a distance, holding their hands up, and looking at her with wide eyes. Prey eyes. Rose's heart thumped in her chest. She licked the back of her teeth.

She forced it down. She took deep, steadying breaths. And she sheathed her blade. It would be absolutely fucking disgusting to clean later, but for the moment that was not her biggest concern.

"Check for survivors," she bit out as evenly as she could manage. "If there are any, have them taken to the healing tent and word sent to me."

There was a chorus of agreement and bowing.

Then, after it was all over, her guards showed up panting.

Rose gave them a look of utter disbelief. She shook her head, lost for words. Maybe it was for the best because her befuddlement at their incompetency shook her right out of the predatorial headspace that she was in.

She should have checked through the camp for other problems, and she should have sent for generals and had a meeting. But there was blood in her hair and on her face and Rose needed to get the smell off of her and to calm down. She entered her tent, asked for water to be brought to her, and paced like a trapped animal as she waited.

When she had two buckets she began using the water gingerly by wringing it out in a cloth, keeping anything dirty out of the bucket and getting the mess off of her skin and hair before it dried. The second bucket she poured over herself, past giving a damn about the way that the water splashed onto the pretentious rug in her tent. It would soak into the dirt underneath eventually.

She felt more like herself. And then she felt a little ashamed. Rose pushed those feelings down to be dealt with sometime less inconvenient.