.
When we arrived back at the command tent, Bron was in the middle of briefing a middle-aged bird-man and an older gentleman who looked a lot like Bron. By the time he noticed us and beckoned for us to come over, I had overheard enough to know that the senior was the chieftain and that they already had reports about my action.
Nonetheless, his words upon our arrival were, “What did you do, My Lady?”
“I gave a fairy a lesson on leaving herself exposed to attack,” I answered with a wicked grin. “She’ll be thinking twice before just flying right up and hammering on the barrier like that again.”
I turned to the other two and curtseyed. “Greetings, good sirs. Tia Mona, adventurer.”
The chieftain’s brow was wrinkled a bit. “It seems the fairy and the artillery have ceased their barrage. Did you take her out of the fight?”
I shook my head. “I don’t know. But even if I didn’t, she and her companions have to rethink their strategy now. I just suddenly appeared in her face like that. She didn’t see me coming at all. She has to take me into account now.”
“Are you planning to stay here and help us?” he wondered, and I could understand why. Just hitting the fairy once and then leaving, never to be heard from again, wouldn’t do them any good in the long run.
“As I’ve already told your son, I and my partners already have a job. I helped you because it’s in our best interests for you guys to stay in the fight against our common enemy, but that doesn’t mean I can just stay here indefinitely.”
With a nod, he asked, “So how long can you stay?”
“I was already planning to remain here all day,” I answered. “I was planning to fly back after sundown, since it’s much less fatiguing for me to stealth at night. I use a Dark magic spell for stealth. So, for now, staying here isn’t delaying my trip.”
“So you’re probably just holding off the inevitable,” Sidis worried.
I glanced at her elders with a smile. “I think these men would disagree with you, considering how calm they are. Even when he became concerned enough to warn me to evacuate, your uncle remained confident.”
She looked at me like I had gone mad. “How could he be confident? The other side has brought in a fairy knight! They are really powerful, you know!”
I was struck by the contrast between this and a normal military context. Situationally, this was a junior officer injecting herself in a conversation over her head, but rather than getting annoyed at the kid speaking out of turn, the men were giving their young relative indulgent smiles.
“I know very well about how powerful fairies can be,” I told her with a grin. “You should meet my mother. But mortals have their own ways to fight. I expect your tribe has some powerful resources of its own. If I buy them a little time, your tribe can put those resources into play.”
“How can you be so sure?” she demanded.
“A deep penetration to cut off the head of the snake before it can react carries a high risk of defeat. You only try it when a conventional strategy is undesirable. I’m betting your grandfather has resources that would hinder a normal invasion, so the Berado were trying to preempt them with their decapitation strategy.”
The men’s studied poker faces were probably confirmation of my guess.
“You sound like you have some military experience,” the bird-man commented.
“I’ve done some work in Lang Doria,” I explained. Then I looked back to the chieftain. “I should tell you that the ground forces who came in with that fairy weren’t dressed like Berado. They looked like Orestanian mercenaries.”
He nodded. “They’ve been avoiding using the Orestanians this close to the border, to avoid angering the Arelians. This group was probably only to be used if the primary plan looked like it might fail.”
After they backed up and properly introduced themselves to me– Dorin the chieftain, Saerim the air commander– and finished questioning me, Sidis brought me to have that long-promised breakfast. Obviously they didn’t want me around for their strategy discussions. But Saerim joined his daughter shortly after we sat down in the mess tent, and I was at last able to ask the questions I had been hoping to ask, while enjoying cold cuts, cheese and some amazingly delicious butter on freshly baked (still warm!) rye bread. I had never thought of any of this as breakfast food, but it seemed to be the standard.
It was no surprise that he wouldn’t answer most of my questions, for security reasons, but on one subject I hit the jackpot.
“Yes, we know about those two,” Saerim nodded. “The Berado chieftain loves showing off his new brides to every visitor he receives. His allies and vassals are grinding their teeth with envy. The word is, they’re both young, beautiful and very well-endowed.”
“He’s already taken them as brides?” I asked, my alarm rising.
He shook his head and held up his hand in a calming gesture. “He would not have actually taken them into his bed yet, Miss Mona. It’s far too early. They would still be in bridal training at this point.”
Sidis frowned. “Dad means they have to stay kept in chains until they’re subdued. My grandmother told me all about what happens to captured brides. And Dad, it’s ‘Lady Tia’.”
Saerim gave me a questioning look, but I waved it off. “We are a long distance from Doria. It doesn’t matter here. I would rather talk about my client’s daughter. And about the other woman. They really are showing off both of them as concubines?”
“That’s our information,” he said. “I can’t reveal who is telling us, but we have very clear reports. Both the quality and number of a man’s brides affect his prestige, and unbedded brides who may still be traded are valuable diplomatic pieces.”
His frank words on that subject seemed to bother Sidis as much as me, but she kept her mouth clamped shut while Saerim took a sip from his mug of the black, thick tea the mess tent was serving.
He set it back down and asked, “Is there a reason you weren’t expecting two women?”
“We already knew there were two, but we thought… well, we thought one of them was an accomplice of the kidnappers, rather than a victim.”
His eyes narrowed. “You’ve used the word ‘kidnappers’ more than once… the Amaga rarely take unwilling brides any more, but in the past, we sent raiding parties and took prisoners. Is that not what we’re talking about?”
I frowned, being reminded that the Amaga were from the same culture as the raiders I killed shortly after my arrival on Huade. It sounded he saw taking women in a raid in a different light than whatever he considered ‘kidnapping’ to mean.
“Raids into Orestania still happen, but they aren’t as common as they used to be,” I told him. “If there are still a lot of Orestanian girls coming into the Tabad, then some of them are probably kidnapped and smuggled here. For the victims we never recover, it isn’t possible to distinguish the ones going here or to illegal slave markets. It’s all the same thing from our point of view, anyhow.”
He nodded. “My mother was one of the last foreign women for the Amaga. The old chief made my father take her, but he died not long after that. Father-in-law banned raids outside the Tabad when he took over.”
I scowled. “Meaning you still raid other tribes inside the Tabad.”
He gave a slightly embarrassed smile. “Rarely, and we generally do it in retaliation, Lady Tia. Our first goal is to recover our stolen daughters. But I admit it’s difficult to stop our men from grabbing a few extras. A man with no wife is deeply motivated, and it’s a custom that’s thousands of years old. My father-in-law was only barely able to stop the raiding into Arelia and Orestania. Perhaps my brother-in-law will be able to put an end to raids altogether someday.”
Somewhere inside me, some part of me was deeply dissatisfied. Probably multiple parts. Tiana’s sense of justice was offended. Robert’s American perspective railed at the clear crime. And there were others. Sirth had burned up what remained of her life in the effort of saving women and children from men who would capture them. And I had the vague feeling that one of my forgotten lives had been the victim of a bridal raid.
I asked, “You said that Chieftain Dorin banned those raids. Did he not let women like your mother go home?”
“He offered, in Mother’s case, because she was still new,” he told me, gently. “She chose to stay. She was already carrying me, and feared her father would order the pregnancy ended.”
“Have you married any of these captive brides?” I wondered. Sidis looked a little bothered by the question, but Saerim took it without offense.
“For my mother’s sake, I’ve always avoided it. As a result of my choice, I have only this child’s mother and I’m currently taking care of a younger girl who has not yet chosen whether to go through with marriage. I won’t force her, so perhaps she’ll choose somebody younger.”
With a sigh, I decided to drop it. I had no idea how this culture worked, and frankly, I had no idea whether he was telling the truth or just feeding the foreign woman the lies she wanted to hear, but I would be unable to rescue any victims I discovered here anyway.
“You also have that water folk lady, Dad,” Sidis added, sounding a bit annoyed. “You’ve made a daughter with her. She counts.”
He chuckled. “Well, I suppose that’s true.”
I tipped my head. “Water folk?”
“You probably know them as rusalki,” he told me. “We have an agreement with a group that lives here. We assign a tribesman to each of their members, and in return they don’t bother anyone else. Mir doesn’t call herself my wife, but I suppose Sidis is right, since we certainly have a permanent relationship.”
That had slightly gobsmacked me. Rusalki are monsters that farm magic aquatic species for their mana, but need to supplement it by having sex with mortals from time to time. They’re better behaved than loreleis, but from what I understand, they’re known to capture mortals and trap them in a blood-slave-like relationship. A rusalka can reproduce with either a mortal man or a related male monster called a vodyanoy, but vodyanoys are incredibly rare.
I had never heard of them making a voluntary arrangement with mortals instead. I made a mental note to report this back to the Royal Knights once things got back to normal.
“So, about my client’s daughter,” I said to get back on the subject. “Are you able to give me any information on her current location?”
He leaned back, considering his answer as I took a sip of tea (that I had laced with lots of milk to render it drinkable.) Then he gave me an answer that almost caused me to do a spit-take in his face.
“I do not know their exact location,” he stated. “But we have heard that they escaped, two days ago.”
