The truly deserving of this fate, the condemned, murderers and rapists and thieves who prey on the weak and defenseless, they move in raucous packs howling in anticipation of battle, and are also easy to avoid. This many Savage Legionnaires also means there are four times as many taskers as Evie is accustomed to seeing in camp. They stalk between the tents and around the fires, clubs and whips in hand, their hard leathery faces unstained by blue runes surveying every coin-tainted Savage with suspicion and perpetual disdain. Their presence seems enough to enforce the Legion’s rules against brawling and raping. It helps that they disarm the Legion between battles; the only weapons in camp are flagons of rice wine, carried by most of the criminal rabble.

Evie can only assume they’ve discontinued the Revel until the rebellion is put down, although whether it’s intended as a punishment or mandated out of necessity she can’t know.

Evie notices many of the battle-ready Legionnaires are enthusiastically slathering their faces with a deep blue grease. They then smooth it out until precisely half their face is completely covered with a thick sheen of the foul-smelling muck, as if their flesh runes have spread to overtake the flesh there completely. Evie reasons that this must be how they intend to distinguish conscripted Legionnaires from rogue Savages on the battlefield tomorrow.

She enters a clearing free of tents, necessitated by crops roped off in the middle of the ward. The smell of rice paddies is unappetizing, but the scent of these crops is beyond foul. In fact, they smell like death. Evie quickly realizes it’s not the paddies assaulting her nostrils, however. It’s a new decoration that’s been added to the ward recently, after the arrival of the Savage Legion. Evie’s gaze is drawn high into the air above the paddies, and what it beholds curdles every drop of blood in her veins.

The decapitated bodies of those Elder Company members Laython slaughtered and whose heads he sent to the upstart rebellion have been impaled on towering wooden spikes. The spikes are planted in the middle of the Savage Legion camp inside the keep walls. They’re arranged in a perfect row, the headless corpses elevated high enough to be seen from every edge of the ward. As the heads were intended to be seen by Evie and her forces, the bodies are a message to the remaining Legionnaires who might be tempted by their fellow Savages’ betrayal.