fullofwonderalice:

Alice would not accept in a million years that she was lost. Granted, she had a bad habit of getting lost. However now…she was not lost, she was just unsure of as to where she was. Not lost, unsure. Her dress which had been freshly pressed this morning was now disheveled as was her hair. She had long abandoned carrying her umbrella gracefully and had it tucked under her arm as she trudged through the terrain. 

The blond wasn’t sure why her mother had forced her to come here. It was supposed to be a learning experience but you didn’t learn but when you were los-er…unsure. She missed her warm fireplace and Dinah. Her mother claimed this would help her become a scholar. Well she hated to inform her mother but she had no desire to be a scholar. England didn’t take kindly to women scholar’s anyway. 

Alice finally came to a clearing that had tents sitting off in the distance. She gave a groan and collapsed onto dusty ground. Perhaps one of them, whoever they were, could help her. There was standing off to the side and she swallowed harshly before approaching the figure, “Excuse me?”

Ping was beginning to realize that Captain Li - the paranoid, belligerent, handsome soldier who was in charge of training the new recruits - wasn’t really that paranoid after all.  When he’d claimed that people had been spotted in the vicinity of their camp - people who weren’t soldiers guarding the palisade - the recruits had instantly assumed he meant Huns, because there were no farms within a couple li of Wu Zhong.  Panic ensued, and doubt.  How could the Huns have struck so far south, quickly and quietly?  Wouldn’t farms and villages have been laid waste? What about their families, their homes?  And how would they ever know, since they were so far out of the way, that it really was the Huns until it was too late?

But the young recruit knew for a fact that people had been seen around camp, because he was almost certain they had all been seen by him.  They weren’t Huns, or so Ping assumed, because he had never seen a Hun.  They were women, and they weren’t even Chinese.  Which admittedly didn’t rule out their being Hun spearwives, but Ping hadn’t died yet.  He was the only one who seemed to be encountering them, which was probably a good thing in a camp full of men.

This time he approached with less caution than usual.  He might be learning to think like a soldier, but “learning” was the operative word, and repetition had made him bold.  "Hi,“ said Ping casually, sheathing his sword; then again in a gruffer voice, "I mean, uh, are you lost, ma'am?”