Beltran's rings and papers

Four rings came off Beltran’s hands. One of them turned out to be the linked ring. The other three had no magic in them whatever and were worth taking anyway.

One was his signet. Two days afterward Mikhail forged an order to Beltran’s army in Beltran’s hand and forged the seal along with it, and never thought to reach into the bag for the seal that would have done the work for him. One held a bloodstone, green shot through with red. The last had been resized many times over the years and looked like something he had owned since he was much younger, most likely a gift from his mother.

Aldo stripped the body while Beltran’s mother was out of the room fighting the fire he had talked her into fighting. Armor and boots went onto a table, and the rings and the amulet into a pile beside them, set where they could be collected later without being obvious to anyone who walked in. The documents he handled differently. They came out of a wide leather belt pouch and went straight into his own pocket, away from the pile, on the chance they named something the party did not know about. He did not read them that night.

What was in them was never written down. What they were worth was the handwriting: with Ashtara Walnut’s older correspondence, Beltran’s letters were the reference set Mikhail worked from when he forged the order that sent an army to sit outside Haudh-Gwenn and wait three days.