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.

The lack of resistance was actually starting to worry Jadis and she wasn’t the only one. As they spent one more night at the Crossroads, there was a lot of discussion about how few demons they had come across that day. A handful of bone thieves and bramble fiends and that was about it. Considering how the area was basically undefended and uncontested, the demons should have been far more prevalent. There were a lot of theories as to why, but with no hard evidence, theories they remained.

That night Jadis stood watch, all three of her selves serving the first watch rather than splitting up the night. Aila and the others insisted that Jadis get more rest while she could, though after several days of not taking a turn on watch, Jadis felt as though she had to. Everyone else needed breaks from the duty, too. Besides, after the boost to her stats, she was feeling far less drained from pulling the wagon all day. Her Strength had gone up so much that the massive bulk of the wagon wasn’t as difficult to pull along, plus her Endurance had gone up as well, giving her more stamina to keep going. All in all, she felt more than capable of taking the first watch and insisted that she do so. The others agreed, though she did not stand the watch alone.

“You doing alright with all the teasing?” Jay asked Thea as they stood near each other on the top of the fort wall.

“I’m fine,” Thea said quietly. “It’s not that b—bad.”

“Really?” Jay glanced down at the former soldier. “They were at it all day. I felt like my ears were going to burn off.”

“Mm,” Thea hummed, not taking her eyes off of the open area surrounding the fort. “I—I think they already g—guessed what we were doing and were just waiting for the c—confirmation.”

That was a fair assumption. Jadis and her lovers hadn’t been particularly subtle about their unusual dynamic. With the need to have sex at least once every three days, there had been lots of opportunities for them to be caught in the act. Considering how vocal some of her girls could get, Jadis was surprised they hadn’t been found out sooner.

“P—plus, what else is there to t—talk about out here?”

“Huh?”

“Long patrols are b—boring,” Thea shrugged. “You have to find something to talk ab—about. Right now, it’s, ah, us.”

 Jay nodded. Thea probably knew what it was like better than anyone else in Fortune’s Favored exactly what it was like to stand watch for long hours on mind-numbingly boring guard posts. She’d made a career out of it before switching to the private sector, so to speak. If she felt the soldiers weren’t going too far or doing anything out of the ordinary, Jadis trusted her assessment. Thea would let her know if there was something to be worried about.

“Ah,” Thea perked up a few moments later. “There, see that?”

While Jadis had been mulling over Thea’s words and not paying too close attention to their surroundings, the dependable guardswoman had kept her eyes ever on the watch. She pointed with her spear out across the wall towards the forest edge, indicating where Jay should look.

The night wasn’t too dark, with a half full moon out and no clouds in the sky, but it still took Jay a few seconds of searching to spot what Thea had seen. There, along the tree line and partially hidden in the shadows, she could see movement. At first, she thought it was just the wind moving the underbrush, but after a moment she realized that the brush was moving further than it should. In fact, it was moving beyond the reaches of what any stationary plant should be capable of.

“Bramble fiends?” Jay whispered a question.

“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 hoping 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?”