The cursed Lady Eravil effigies

Small figures of Lady Eravil Dark Eyes, crude and simply made, the sort of thing a person can turn out without fine tools or any great skill. Anyone would take one for a devotional trinket, and everyone who was given one did.

The erratic woman handed them to sitting councilors of Haudh-Gwenn as presents, each arriving as though from a relative the recipient trusted. What they carry is something on the pattern of an evil eye, and it dulls the faculties of whoever keeps it. Beltran had hired her to find, hold and distract the party; the effigies were the errand she was running alongside that, and between them, Johanka Materai’s burned house and the attack on Lady Talia Salahaudhi’s, three votes against Beltran came off the council floor at once.

The trail to them ran through Khudan, who under interrogation half remembered the words dark eyes. Lady Eravil is Peredhel’s goddess, and Asiya Azrak’s Peredhel ties made her the likeliest councilor to have taken one and thought nothing of it.

Two were recovered, both in the same room, at the councilors’ secret meeting on the day the town hall burned. Asiya was wearing hers on a pendant and believed it a gift from her daughter; told what it was, she called it hideous and threw it on the floor. Prompted, Elren Amin dug a second out of his own baggage, heard what it did to a man’s wits and said, “Maybe this is why I was bested by a small door of fire.” Talia had never heard of them and undertook to ask around. Koa took both away to be destroyed.

How many she made, and who else is still keeping one on a shelf, was never written down.