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It took Toustain nearly two months to recover from the injuries he had sustained; plenty of time for him to plan how he would now reap his revenge on Baron Pétois. During his time recovering at a small palazzio of a Tilean merchant friend, Toustain had many visitors, not only from among his Tilean friends, fellow mercenary captains and commanders, but also, as time went on, from an increasing number of folk that had fled south from the Baron’s estate and the town of Mont Briècque. Among these people were several of the Baron’s garrison, who could no longer tolerate the treatment that they received in his service. One of these same soldiers also warned Toustain that the Baron had heard rumours of his escape to Tilea, and had paid for someone to seek him out and assassinate him. It was these very same rumours of Toustain’s escape that had started the increasing stream of ‘refugees’ from the area surrounding the Donjon Briècque. Toustain realised that if his whereabouts was now general knowledge, it would not be long before the attempt on his life would occur. So, as soon as he was well enough, he began to move between a series of other safe havens only known to a limited number of his closest friends; and never staying for long in any one place.

Meanwhile, Toustain had begun to gather a huge following of peasant folk from Bretonnia, all of whom had suffered terrible hardships under the Baron’s tyrannical reign and all of whom had a reason to want to see the Baron deposed. This peasant army gathered itself around the Tilean town of Ravola, at the southern end of the Nuvolone Pass, where Toustain’s mercenary companies were based. Toustain sent orders to his company commanders to select suitable men, from among the gathering Briècquean peasant throng, who could be trained to fight with hand weapons and use crossbows. The young man realised that he would need to have a sufficiently large enough force of trained fighters to be able to carry out his plan of guerrilla warfare against the Baron and to inflict a war of attrition on the tyrant’s own fighting force. He also knew that he alone could not provide sufficient funds to pay for the equipment and provisions required for his growing army, in addition to paying the mercenaries he retained to train and fight for him. Consequently, he contacted all the Tilean merchants who had a grudge to bear against the Baron, because of the punishing duties he levied on their trade goods. After several months, Toustain had secured the financial support of a good thirty of so merchants to fund all that he needed to make his campaign against the Baron practical.

It was a good eight or nine months after Toustain’s near death and narrow escape from Donjon Briècque that he put his campaign into effect. During the intervening time, he had had his company commanders split his peasant and mercenary army, now over a thousand strong, into smaller units and trained to fight as skirmishers. The tactic that Toustain had planned was for these units to carry out swift and random strikes against the Baron’s troops, his goods wagons and holdings, after which the units would then disperse in order to move less conspicuously and be far more difficult to track to any one place against which a counter attack could be made.    

Over a period of several weeks, mounted units were moved first through the Pass under the cover of night and then fanned out into the countryside beyond. Next foot units, comprising mainly of peasant militia armed with crossbows, were moved through by various means, chiefly hidden within traders’ box wagons, empty casks or disguised as migrant workers and travellers. After another month, Toustain was notified that all the skirmishing units were in place and ready. While he remained at a safe location within Tilea, and held his pike-men and republican guard units in reserve at Ravola, the lightning strikes started in earnest.