Beng Shai almost looked kind, sympathetic even, as he watched Yuze bleed. "Tell me why you want to destroy us. The truth."
There was so much blood in Yuze's mouth that it was hard to breathe, let alone speak. Beng Shai hadn't struck him once, nor had Kai Low, who'd ducked after a whispered argument with several senior tribal members.
Yuze hadn't understood the words, but he'd recognized the subtext.
Kai Low had been kicked out, and he wasn't happy about it.
He wasn't sure why either. Kai Low seemed as eager as the rest of them to take strips out of Yuze's glesh, but something had happened while Yuze had been distracted getting chained up that had gotten Kai Low kicked out.
He'd probably been too eager, Yuze thought bitterly. Wanted more than his fair share of Yuze's flesh, but Yuze only had so much to give.
And it was no fun taking it from a dead man.
***
Chenzhou's trip north had been peaceful for the most part. At least, for the first two days.
On the third, they'd spotted smoke on the horizon and spurred their horses into a run, expecting to find their own comrades in the midst of a skirmish.
What they'd found instead would haunt Chenzhou for the rest of his life.
It was a small camp. A dozen tents and a few more wagons, a few stands for drying clothes and food, even pens for animals.
And all of it burned.
It was still smoking as they rode up.
Everything…including the bodies.
There were at least two hundred of them. All too small to be warriors.
As Chenzhou and his men walked through the camp, their horror grew. Many of the bodies had arrows still in them, and a few even had other weapons, swords and spears that had cracked in the heat of the fire, but whose blades remained pierced into the flesh.
Even the children had been struck down before they'd burned, one of Chenzhou's scouts pointed out quietly.
The attackers had run down everyone; they found several bodies yards outside the camp, trying and failing to get away.
And a fire line carved into the ground just past the last of the bodies. Someone had used shovels to dig trenches, clearing away just enough of the wheat that the fire wouldn't spread once it was started.
The scout found the starting point for the fire a few minutes later, pointing it out to Chenzhou and the others. "They dug the fire trench and piled all the plant growth here." He gestured to a completely black spot that was almost circular except for an arm branching off towards the camp. "They started the fire here and guided it to the camp. With the dry summer, it wouldn't have taken much."
"Why burn it if they'd already killed everyone?" One soldier wondered.
Another one pointed out an obvious fact that managed to disturb them all even more. "There's no way they checked that all of them were dead before they started the fire."
"Who would do this?" A younger soldier asked. "I thought the tribes knew better than to mess around with fire in the summer?"
"They avoid starting fires like this year-round," Chenzhou corrected. "It's very rare that they burn anything but a cooking fire."
"So this wasn't them?" The young soldier looked confused.
"Well, it wasn't us." Another soldier said, sounding like he was personally insulted by the idea. "We'd never attack a camp of women and children."
Chenzhou would never allow it; that was true, but there were definitely some people in the Camelia who had been fighting the tribes long enough to be bitter and willing to do a whole lot worse than he was.
"Anyone in the Camelia evil enough to do something like this would deserve the hanging they got," another soldier growled.
"It wasn't us," Chenzhou assured them. He knew where all the current Camelia troops in the borderlands were, and none of them were close enough to have been here and done this without running into Chenzhou's group.
The embers of some of the larger fires were still glowing.
Chenzhou stiffened, eyes darting around the landscape. Guards had posted as soon as they'd found the camp and given no indication they saw anyone else, but a camp of unprepared women and children could have been taken by a force a fraction of their own number, and a smaller force was easy to conceal in the overgrown, wild wheat fields.
"This was meant to look like us." The scout said somberly. "These weapons are ours. Or they were at some point."
"Taken off the bodies of Lord Zhao's ambushed forces?" Chenzhou's stomach sank. What was happening in the borderlands?
***
What the hell was happening in the borderlands, Eirian wondered as she looked out over the burned camp.
The fire was almost a week old, according to the scout who had found it, and the older one was several miles away. Both were smaller tribes whose warriors were mostly absent; no doubt they'd been fighting her forces, and most of them were likely dead.
Everyone in the camp had been killed before the fire, even through the fire damage the scouts pointed out the surviving signs of battle. Horsemen had run them all down before dragging the bodies back to the camp and burning them all.
But according to these scouts and Eirian's own knowledge of fire and how it burned, these camps had been burned before the tribes had attacked her forces.
Was that why they'd attacked?
Eirian's forces hadn't engaged anyone before they'd been attacked, so she had no idea who could have burned these camps. It went against everything Chenzhou and the Crimson Army stood for.
Chenzhou and Mingzhe's forces hadn't been anywhere close enough to be responsible, and it was unlikely they would have escaped the notice of Eirian's forces.
But why would the tribes be attacking each other when they were allied in fighting the Camelia?
"These are old weapons of ours," Wayland said, quiet after he'd pulled the shaft of a burned arrow from the body of a child.
"You said the tribes would use our weapons when they had them." Chenzhou and Mingzhe had told her the same at different points. The tribes were scavengers.
"But this is…" Wayland trailed off, pale.
"These are only our weapons." Vitali broke in, grim. "This is meant to leave no question that we did this."
~ tbc