Chapter 241: Malice

Chapter 241: Malice

Mortification. That was a good word. A descriptive word. It was the right word for the job. Embarrassment wasn’t strong enough and humiliation would have been overdramatic. Mortification. A perfect fit for how Jadis felt as she pulled the wagon down the road that morning.

Not all the soldiers had heard them during their carnal activities the previous night, but a few was enough. Now they all knew and the teasing was relentless. Just as Kerr had once told her, if and when the camp overheard you fucking, they were going to use that as ammunition to haze you for as long as they could. Be it mercenaries or soldiers, the result was the same. Lots and lots and lots of teasing.

Aila, Eir, and Sabina were handling the attention fairly well. Her ears might burn bright red, but Aila was skilled with stern expressions and she was getting better at them every day. Eir had a kind of immunity to the jokes and innuendos, her status as a priest and healer meaning no one wanted to offend her. Plus, Eir didn’t actually seem all that bothered by the reveal, her sweet and calming smile tainted by a twinkle of amusement. Sabina was absolutely embarrassed, but she was also keeping busy working on enchantment prep while riding in the wagon, so the distraction helped her cope.

Thea and Bridget had a little more trouble handling the constant jokes. Thea was shy by nature and having her private business on display definitely bothered her. Still, she was also a veteran soldier. While she’d never been on the receiving end before, she’d certainly been around the kinds of teasing that were being levied in her direction, so she knew how to brush the commentary off. Bridget, though, was a relative neophyte to mercenary work. She spent the morning inside the wagon, hiding from the ribbing.

Kerr, naturally, was completely unbothered. That was to say, by the sexual innuendoes and jokes, at least. She was perturbed by the fact that she somehow missed Nora waking Willa, Lutz, Jaxton, and Landry so they could eavesdrop from their tents. The sex jokes, though, those she actively participated in, both at her own expense and to tease everyone else in Fortune’s Favored. She really was a shameless mercenary.

Like a true vanguard, Jadis took the brunt of the attention. When Jay had been cooked in the tunnel, all of her clothes had burnt off, so once they’d made it back to the camp most everyone had gotten a look at what she was normally hiding with her skirt-pants and armor. It didn’t take much of a leap in thought to come to the conclusion as to why there were some rather vocal sexy times going on at night in her tent. Jadis had never heard so many different innuendos for a big dick in her life.

The jokes were good natured and ultimately harmless, though. Jadis let them come, suffering the mortification of having multiple people she barely knew tease and jibe her about her sex life. Considering what an asshole she’d been when she’d lost her cool a couple of days prior, she felt like she owed it to the soldiers to let them get their fun in. Besides, some of the jokes were actually pretty funny.

One thing that Jadis noticed was that Willa never joined in. Other than the frankly gentle poke in the morning that had released the dam, the captain hadn’t said a further word about it. Maybe she wasn’t the type to make those kinds of jokes, or more likely, Jadis figured it was rank kind of thing. She was a captain, after all, which meant she probably had to maintain some level of dignity. Jadis could appreciate that.

It wasn’t until late afternoon when the majority of the teasing stopped. By then, the expedition had made it back to the abandoned Crossroads Fort.

“Looks empty,” Jay noted as she stared at the stone walls from the edge of the surrounding clearing. “But it looked empty last time, too.”

“What are the odds that they try the same ambush twice,” Aila asked from where she stood next to Jay.

“Fifty-fifty,” Jay shrugged. “Either they’re in there, or they aren’t.”

“I don’t think that’s how odds work,” Aila mumbled under her breath.

They were waiting for Kerr and some of the soldiers to finish a full sweep of the surrounding clearing before entering. In all honesty, Jadis didn’t think it was likely that the bandits would try to attack them again at the fort. When they’d last parted, their forces were severely depleted, their remaining members were mostly injured, and it had only been a few days. It was likely that Stavros and his crew would need more time to heal up and recover before trying anything. If they tried anything. Jadis still hoped that they’d seen the last of them.

It took time, but they thoroughly searched the outside of the fort, then the inside. Everything was as they had left it, with no sign of bandits having come through. There weren’t even any stray demons to be found.

“Yes,” Thea answered simply.

Jay and Thea were on the northeastern side of the fort walls. Her two other bodies were watching on the southeast side and the west side of the fort. Neither Dys nor Syd saw any signs of movement, meaning the only point of contact was to the north. At first Jadis thought that the small, vine-bundle demons were making their way towards the fort, but a few moments of observation proved that assumption false. The demons were skirting the edge of the fort clearing, pulling themselves along with their thorny vine tentacles in strange hopping motions. As Jadis watched, more and more of them emerged from the trees to the north-east. What started as maybe six to ten of the minor threats turned into a dozen. Then two dozen. Then more.

There had to be forty, maybe fifty of the fiends making their way from the east side of the clearing to the west. As she watched, Jadis realized that there might have been even more, their numbers obscured by the forest that the horde was still halfway staying within. Just as Jadis was about to give up counting, another shadow moved into view, demanding all of Jadis’ attention. The creature was huge, even by Jadis’ standards. It towered twenty feet in the air at least, probably more, and yet Jadis almost didn’t see it among the trees. She felt she could be forgiven for that, since the damn thing was one of the trees.

It was like the broken stump of one of the giant pine trees had pulled itself up out of the ground and decided to go for a nighttime stroll. Huge roots spread out around the bulky trunk, crawling across the ground like spider legs drawn by a demented person with no concept of biology or restraint. The bark of the thing moved and shifted in the dim light, occasionally revealing thorny vines peeking out from cracks and holes in the wooden body. The much, much smaller bramble fiends were riding on, or rather, riding within the larger demon.

“Is that a bramble fiend matriarch?” Jay asked as she watched the monstrosity traverse the edge of the woods.

“No,” Thea shook her head. “Th—that’s a nithetre.”

“Nithetre?”

Thea glanced up at Jay, giving her a slight nod.

“Nithetre. It’s an old, old t—type of demon, like grundwyrms. It means ‘Tree of Malice’ in the old elvish language.”

“Sounds pleasant,” Jay murmured. “So what the fuck is that ‘Tree of Malice’ doing? Why isn’t it attacking the fort?”

Thea shrugged helplessly, just as much at a loss as Jadis.

“I d—don’t know. Maybe it, ah, doesn’t know that we are here?”

That was certainly possible. Jadis couldn’t imagine a situation where demons would ignore mortals. Whenever demons saw living people or even animals, they always attacked ruthlessly. Otherwise, from what Jadis had observed, they usually wandered aimlessly while looking for prey. Aimless was not what Jadis would call the horde crawling across the northern expanse. No, they were moving with a purpose, heading for a destination.

“West,” Jay huffed as she watched the demons disappear into the trees. “Why are all these demons heading west?”

“Why d—does it have to be the same direction we’re going, too?”