It took me a year and a half to get out. It was not planned, and it was not orchestrated. It was a fluke, and the only reason I got out was through luck and patience. That’s it. It was inevitable that if I stayed quiet and obedient and patient long enough that random Qin error would open a door for me.

I deserted the Qin Army on a warm night in early fall. It was the night of a day of meaning, and a number of the soldiers in Ma-Halad who were off duty had taken the opportunity to get extremely drunk. The Butcher demanded religiosity even from those who were not particularly spiritual. Soldiers faced expulsion or court martial for unseemly behavior, which included drunkenness. But wine flows on days of meaning. Wine flows and brawls happen. Wine flowed, and just after dusk a brawl broke out inside the barracks. I’m not sure how it started, but it spread like wildfire. I was chained to a pillar in a closet, which locked from the outside. I was valuable, so I was kept secure. A soldier was locking me to the chains for the night when the drunken brawlers swept through the hallway like a tidal wave, demolishing everything in their path. The soldier was taken down by a chair to the back of the head. He collapsed on top of me, knocked out cold, the key to my manacles still in his hand. The drunken soldiers did not think to check for an errant elf beneath him, and they passed through, the damage done, nothing else in the hallway to destroy. I pried the key out of his hand and unlocked my manacles. I knew the layout of the building well. I knew on the second floor there was a loose window next to a gutter. I fell unmoving on the floor whenever I heard the rumble of more drunk soldiers. Most of them never even noticed me. It was insultingly easy to get out of the barracks.

Ma-Halad, then, was a military outpost. There was not much to it besides the barracks, the train station, and a paltry market. I stayed in the dark alleys and picked my way across town to the markets. I found a tavern’s cellar door propped open with a stick, slipped down into it, and managed to steal a sackful of cheese, several loaves of flatbread, and three skins of water without anyone noticing. Under the cover of night, I ran east into the grass.

Chapter 33

CHAPTER 33