Ostrad

A river town east of Haudh-Gwenn, two days’ walk and a half, that grows food for people who do not. It has farms and fields close enough around it that an occupying army has to stand in them, and it has kept a trade agreement with Loshev for long enough that Loshev’s council took the news of its fall personally. It is a different place from Harad, which is the same sort of town on the other side of the city.

Every account of it is Leon’s, or Casper’s, or Orvayne’s, or Dwayne’s, and all four of them were reporting on a war rather than on a place. A wall, a building, a district, an inn, the name of the river it sits on: none of it was ever written down. It has a council, or had one, and a captain of the guard, and farms.

Campaign Updates

The army came east out of Haudh-Gwenn at the end of a winter, roughly a hundred and twenty men trained through it. What it came for is told three ways, and the tellings have never been reconciled: to force Ostrad’s trade prices down, to seize its farms outright because confiscating grain in Haudh-Gwenn’s own market had caused trouble at home, or to compel a tithe in grain out of the harvest. Whose army it was is not settled either. The first word of it called the force Haudh-Gwenn’s garrison; everything afterwards calls it Beltran Grayeras’s own, raised and paid for privately. By the time it was laid before Loshev’s council the distinction was itself the charge: a city keeping a standing army against the agreement between the towns.

The party watched the road that season and voted to wait until they were better equipped, knowing what they were giving up. A man who comes home from Ostrad with grain behind him is the man who fed the city, and cannot be touched afterwards.

Beltran took it by bloodshed, for its food. Then Ostrad resisted, and he marched east and took it a second time. A few died and more were hurt, and there was no massacre, which is the phrase everyone who describes it reaches for and then qualifies. Not yet, they say. What was done instead was done to the council: the whole of it was murdered and a new one seated on Beltran’s payroll, kept and paid and warned that salaries can be cut. For a good many people in Ostrad, daily life has barely changed. It is simply that there is less food, because more of what they grow is taken.

Then Orsugo’s gnolls burned the fields, and the army that had come for the harvest had to defend what was left of it. It fought them, took losses, and carried a sickness out of the fight that has kept it camped off the road well north of Haudh-Gwenn ever since, rather than bring it home.

Captain Margaret, called Totty, is old, out of the Dhel army, and was for a while spoken of in the past tense by people who did not want to ask whether she was still alive. She is. She answered the Valiant Few’s letter yes, was considered for a post at The Crack and passed over for a younger candidate, and stayed where she was to be their eyes in an occupied town.

Beltran is dead now.