The nameless road-folk

They came into Loshev in early spring, a dozen or more of them, all in the same heavy travel cloak: plain, functional, cut for weather, dyed a simple green or a simple brown. Nothing about any one of them stood out. What stood out was how many there were, and that not one of them so much as nodded at the Valiant Few, who by then could not cross that town without being smiled at. They were taken at first for Free Folk, which they are not. Tariq al-Mahir had already turned them out of the field at the town’s edge and made them rent rooms like anybody else.

One of them sat down for a drink and talked: a tall red-haired man with green eyes, broad in the shoulder and heavier than he looked, close to Aldo’s age, stronger in the hand than his build promised, carrying the smell of a long road. The road, he said, is their home. They travel as a family, many of them family in fact and the rest family found along the way. They leave as small a footprint as they can, help where they can, and live in what harmony they can manage. They do not kill without cause: they were not hunting the gnolls burning the countryside, though the burning had become their business to the extent that people had died of it, and they would do what needed doing to stop it spreading.

They practice circle magic, and no one else on these roads has been named for it.

Asked what they call themselves, he said first that the word could not be pronounced, and then, pressed by a man he had decided was not a fool, gave the truer answer: he could not tell. They keep the name to themselves.

Little else about them was ever discovered. Orsugo they have followed for years, picking up his rumors across the east as his fires got brighter, and they say he has been of interest to them for some time. Whether that interest runs any deeper than a traveler’s caution, why a dozen of them were in Loshev at all, and what they are to the flame ritual in the mountains, are all open, and asking has since become harder.

Mikhail let slip in the middle of the conversation that he had learned his magic from books. “You’re one of them Congress people,” the man said, and his face closed. He stood, said it was a good thing he knew nobody who knew magic, and told them on his way out that he had already met others. His people have distrusted Mikhail from that evening. Mikhail read it as fear rather than malice: a man who expects to be reported, and his people investigated.