She feels a sudden rush of hesitation as they leave her to the meat of her mission, a few moments in which Evie actually considers abandoning her plan entirely and returning to the fleeting safety of her cold rebel base camp. She actually feels herself shaking, from her toes all the way through the ends of her ratted hair. It’s enough to convince her that not only shouldn’t she do this, she’s obviously incapable of it.

Fortunately, that sudden bout of panic is only the feverish precursor to a moment of clarity. Staring at the lights of the roadside camp, Evie realizes the situation isn’t more difficult, it’s actually providing her with the perfect cover and concealment. She’s dressed as a Savage Legionnaire and wears the blue runes. If the garrison was locked down, she’d have to scale the walls and risk being found outside and alone with no explanation.

As it stands, there’s an overwhelming mass of people who look just like her wandering freely and fervently inside and outside the keep without suspicion from the Skrain.

Evie waits until the perimeter patrols have passed. She sheds her night colors and creeps swiftly across the valley to the nearest uninhabited edge of the camp she can navigate. The familiar clamor of many voices colliding over the crackling of a hundred firelights fills her ears and moments later she’s stepped into the flow of the camp itself, seemingly unnoticed. She pilfers a horn of rice wine from an inattentive Legionnaire and adds a drunken sway to her walk. It carries her all the way through the outlying encampment and through the open gates of the keep.

The Legion fills the ward inside the walls; the Skrain not sleeping in tents must be enjoying the seclusion and shelter of the barracks. Evie has never seen so many Savages gathered in one place. There must be hundreds if not thousands of them, conscripts from every city in the Crachian nation. It’s easy enough to move among their numbers, particularly the ones drawn from the back alleys and wharfs and disused nooks of places like the Bottoms, the simple out-of-doors folk who’ve never held a weapon and don’t belong on a battlefield. They huddle together in silent, dead-eyed groups, keeping close to the nearest fire or gnawing on some tasteless strip of meat that was dried for a sliver of a moment before it turned rancid.