Swamped

"Y'know, I wouldn't mind doing some work for you," you say. "Take care of the boring stuff, like fixing the dents in armor."

You know he doesn't care much for fixing armor. It has to fit its wearer, so there's not a lot of room for creativity with it.

"Assuming I'm still in shape for it. Which would kind of depend on how the fight goes, y'know?"

No response. Probably Gray-maw promised him something, and you'll have to make a better offer.

"How's that book?" You glance at the author... oh. It's Corser, that young Bogknight with the weird fixations. Wouldn't have taken Feldspar for a fan of that stuff; maybe he's just run out of things to read.

"Better than your babbling."

Ouch.

"Well, it's just... we've got a whole six prisoners here, and the Bogknights have two of ours. Maybe three if something happened during the raid, I'm not up-to-date. Point is, there's going to be prisoner negotiations soon, and we'll have an edge in the negotiations."

You smirk a bit.

"And I bet I could swing a few more books from them. Give you first crack at them, of course. Even make requests if you're interested in anything in particular."

He gives you a glare. You're close, but not quite on the mark.

Oh hells. You know what he's telling you - he wants the book first. You've got a good guess at what book will satisfy him, at least, but you have no idea if the Bogknights even have it.

Off the top of your head, you can see two options if they do. Neither is all that good.

First option - try to make arrangements so that the fight happens after the prisoner exchange. The main problem with this is just the number of people you'd have to convince; you want them to delay the fight, to hurry up the negotiations, and to either let you handle the negotiations or to ask for a particular book as part of them. You'd really have to stretch what little credibility you've got to pull any of that off.

The other option is to slip into the Bogknight base and take the book yourself. Obviously, this is extremely risky; but if it works, you could have the book by tomorrow.

Of course, if they don't have it in the first place, neither of those plans is going to do you much good.

So how are you going to handle this?