Bastien looks back. He experiences a fraction of a second of rebelliousness—why is she looking at him like there's a plan? There is no plan. She might be ruining the fragments of a plan he'd been trying to prepare for by lying low and biding time, in fact, so—

"How many people are in this fortress?" he asks the guard, eyes only leaving Teren's face to land on his halfway through the question.

The guard sneers, "Seventy hundred," seemingly unfazed by the blade at his throat. But he's nineteen or twenty, at most. Natural for him to think he couldn't possibly die.

Bastien's gaze at him is flat an unimpressed; his focus is actually elsewhere in his field of vision now, where Viator is climbing back to his feet and kicking spitefully at the bars to Byerly's cell—or his hands, if that's still an option.