The bandit camp was a bandit camp. It was makeshift, ugly, and built somewhere high-up but near a road. There was never much variation on that sort of theme, and the differences Gregor had seen mainly came down to how long the bandits had been camped out. This one was clearly in the middle of the life cycle- old enough to have both the perimeter wall made of wrecked carts and its first coating of graffiti, but young enough to lack the traditional display of heads on pikes.
Gregor and Libra stood watching it, just inside the treeline, studying it silently. Gregor might have been concerned that they would be spotted, but that would presume a level of discipline that Gregor doubted in any sentry in this camp might have. Gregor drew a very sharp distinction between a "rogue military camp" and a "bandit camp", and whatever its origins this was clearly the latter by this point.
"Do you suppose," Libra said from beside him. "That if we announce ourselves, they'll hear us out?"
"Was plan to sneak in and do diplomacy while enemy sleeps?" Gregor replied.
Libra didn't reply. He just straightened himself up, cleared his throat, and stepped out with Gregor into the open.
"Former men of the Northern Army of Ylisse!" he shouted. "I come bearing the words of Prince Chrom."
There was a creaking on the barricade, just audible in the still morning air. A bearded, bleary-eyed guard stood up over the edge and looked down on them. His expression of bewilderment became more and more wild as Libra's words appeared to process through his brain.
"You what?" he said, words sounding equal parts confused and annoyed.
"I come as a representative of Prince Chrom, the Exalt in Waiting," Libra said. "I am Libra, of the Prince's Shepherds. I wish to speak to your fellow men and your commander."
The sentry stared at them for another moment.
"You what?" he said.
"Will you please let me in?" Libra said, unfazed. "I mean you no harm. The only weapon I carry is this ax, which you may relieve me of if you wish.
"Yes! Well, I don't know. I mean," the sentry said, as important functions clearly began to fire to life inside his head. "There-there's a gate on the other edge of the fence. Just keep walking to the left." He paused "No, wait. My left." He paused again. "No, I was right the first time. Your left."
He ducked out of sight behind the barricade, still mumbling to himself. Libra, taking the whole exchange in stride, turned around and faced Gregor.
"We're off, then," he said.
"Gate is on right," Gregor said, craning his neck to one side.
"Indeed."
The inside of the camp seemed to transform as they walked around the perimeter. The exchange between them and the sentry, it seemed, had not gone unnoticed. The camp seemed to stir from sleep with remarkable speed. Men clambered up on the sides of the barricade apparently just to confirm to themselves that the story was true, though Gregor stayed close to the treeline as he walked anyway.
The "gate" the sentry had mentioned was more precisely a gap in the barricade, with a wheeled cart blocking the most casual sort of entrance. As they approached, two slightly more alert-looking sentries hauled it out of the way so they could pass, while the one from the wall met them in the gap.
"You really work for the prince?" he said, sounding appropriately incredulous for a man who had first heard the story two minutes ago. "Is he here?"
"I do work for the prince, but do not wish to discuss his military comings and goings at this time," Libra said. "My companion, Gregor-"
"Yes," Gregor said.
"-is also one of Prince Chrom's Shepherds, but does not intend to participate in diplomatic talks. He is simply here to assist in my protection."
The bandit sentry stared at Gregor, who did his best to look protective.
"Okay then," the sentry said. "Look, uh. I don't think any of us were expecting this."
"I'd be surprised if you were," Libra said with a apologetic tone. He looked around at the small cluster of assembled sentries, before settling back on the one who had met them up on the wall. "You look capable. Would you mind taking us to somebody in a position of authority here?"
"Sure. Yeah," the sentry. "The boss will want to hear from you anyway, so you, uh, just follow me."
Libra nodded, and the three of them set off toward the middle of the camp, down a haphazard central avenue between the biggest tents and makeshift huts. Gregor took note of the latter in particular, because they struck him as somewhat out of place. Sheds cobbled together out of broken-up crates and barrels were never a good sign for men outside the law. Bandits on the move obviously preferred tents and other non-permanent structures, and bandits interested in fortifying their position would usually only do so if they were defending something worth keeping, like a trade route through a mountain pass, not a trail through the back of a forest. These men were not only amateurs, they were desperate amateurs.
Gregor found himself being scrutinized by the camp's resident's as they walked toward the center. Gregor counted a couple dozen pairs of eyes, a bit less than what he would expect from a camp of this size, but also considerably less than what the Prince's soldiers had prepared for. It was possible that this was all an elaborate ruse, that a hundred hardened warriors were waiting in an underground passageway to ambush an overconfident enemy, but as he surveyed the nervous and expectant expressions on display, he found that increasingly unlikely.
Libra had gotten one thing right. Once the rest of Prince's soldiers found and attacked this camp, it could only end in slaughter.
At the center of the camp was, as expected, the largest tent, made from stitching together several smaller ones by the looks of it. It lurked on a small rise, giving it a small height advantage over the rest of the camp, but not so much that it cleared the outer wall. As the sentry hurried inside before them, Gregor noted that it was one of the only vaguely competent things Gregor had seen from the inside of the camp. Though, if his suspicions were right, there should be something else around here. He looked around and, in the shadows beside the opening of the lead tent, he found it.
He tapped Libra on the shoulder, and pointed. Libra stopped. "Oh, Naga," he said quietly.
Gregor had seen displays that were more subtle, more obviously terrifying, or more effectively manipulative. But he didn't feel the need to put much analysis into this one. A upright spear with five bleached skulls rammed through the top said all that needed to be said. The sign below that simply read 'TRAITORS' was almost redundant.
As Gregor and Libra silently studied the display, the sentry quietly stepped back out of the tent.
"He, uh, he's still sleeping," he said quietly. "He probably won't wake up for a few hours, so..."
The bandit trailed off. Libra cleared his throat. "Who is asleep, exactly? I'd be happy to meet with anyone with the authority to speak on the camp's behalf."
"Oh, of course. I just figured the Wreck would, uh, wouldn't like it if I didn't come to him. That's the boss, Wreck. Well, we used to call him Captain, but now he just tells us to call him Wreck, and so... yeah..."
The bandit trailed off again, and apparently became very interested in his boots.
Libra took the sentry by his shoulder and sat down on a nearby crate. "Tell me," he said. "What's your name?"
"Lavan, sir. I don't think the Prince would have heard of me," the sentry said. "It was going to be my first year in the army."
"And when did things take this turn, Lavan?" Libra said. "When did soldiery become banditry?"
"When the money stopped, sir," Lavan said, more confidently than he had said anything else. "It all started when the Plegians attacked the capitol. We didn't have any orders, they stopped sending us supplies, nobody was getting their wages. We were running out of food, even."
"And so you turned to banditry to stay fed," Libra said
Gregor watched with fascination as Lavan deliberated on Libra's question like an embarrassed schoolboy. If Libra had been planning this plan of attack from the start, he couldn't have chosen a better target to start with. Lavan might have been technically a bandit, but he was still a young man who was almost certainly at the bottom of the pecking order in this camp. Still, it was surprising that all it took was a couple soft questions to make it clear that under the surface there was still just a nervous recruit. Gregor didn't know if that said more about the state of morale in this camp, or how far people would trust someone in a priest's robe. Maybe there was some truth to how Naga was supposed to guide her followers.
"Wreck told us that if the Exalt had forgotten us it was only right to fend for ourselves, and we could take what we needed because it would just come out of taxes eventually. And then we heard the Exalt was dead. Some of us wanted to go back after we heard the war was over and the Prince had won but Wreck... Wreck said we were on our own now."
Lavan's eyes drifted over to the display of skulls. He shook his head, and instead stared off vacantly into space, right in the direction where he just might have been able to see the glow of military campfires on the horizon.
"You're here to kill us, aren't you?"
Libra grasped his shoulder tightly, and forced Lavan to look him in the eye. "No," he said. "I just want to hear your story."
"The sentence for banditry is death. Wreck said that, everyone says that," Lavan said insistently. "We haven't just been taking tolls off of people, we've been stealing and... oh gods."
"There is always room for forgiveness in the heart of Naga," Libra said. "I want you to remember that."
Lavan nodded. Gregor looked around them, where a small handful of the camp's other residents had gathered, watching the conversation with varying expressions. There was, he was surprised, very little hostility. Or at least much less hostility than he normally expected from bandit camps. At any rate, Libra's mention of forgiveness seemed to go over rather well, and there was a murmur of intense discussion tempered by anxious glances towards the main tent.
Libra seemed to have noticed the attention they had drawn as well. Gregor assumed most people could hardly fail to notice a ring of interested armed men around them. Shaking the dirt off his robe, he stood, turned, and spoke apparently to Lavan but obviously to the world in general.
"The penalty for desertion and banditry is, nominally, hanging," he said. "However. I am a personal friend of the Prince, and as such hold a position of authority in our expedition. If we need not come to blows, then I believe I could easily persuade the Prince to decrease your sentences, or even suspend them for those here who were not directly responsible for any capital offenses. My companion, Gregor, will vouch for me."
Libra gestured to Gregor as a symbol of stability, as so many others had before him. He nodded, feeling that any negative gesture would be extremely unwise in these circumstances.
Libra turned, quickly but casually surveying the expressions on the assembled amateur bandits. Most of them seemed to buy into what Libra was saying, which he attributed to either the triumph of optimism or just that priest's robe doing a lot of work again. But now those anxious glances towards the tent that obviously housed their leader seemed positively fearful. It seemed they all knew who would take the brunt of the blame in this arrangement, and how they would feel about it. Libra, if he noticed this, did not show it. He just turned, and faced the only logical place to go.
"And now, I need to talk to Wreck."
