Ravenhold

Ravenhold is a busy port in the north of Vala, standing where two rivers meet. Neither river carries a name anybody downriver uses, which is the usual condition of things in this town: what Ravenhold does is known the length of the province, and what it looks like is not. Its people are tight-knit and keep an accent separate from the rest of the province, separate enough that a man who has heard it once can pick Ravenhold sailors out of a council chamber by their voices alone, and be believed when he does.

The Port

The ships are the point. Goods out of Taziondale and Galderia pass through Ravenhold on their way south into Idir, and its vessels are reckoned the best way to move them. Forven trades for what it can and says plainly that it is neither populous nor prosperous enough to be the only trade Ravenhold’s ships make. Loshev counts it, with Lvov and Haudh-Gwenn, among the affluent neighbors whose custom paid for a small town’s unusually good infrastructure. A river route runs down from the town to Lvov, and on south from there.

Downriver the town has a reputation for sharp dealing, and it is held with feeling. A Loshev trader has been known to bring his hand down flat on the table at the mere mention of the place, having been swindled by Ravenhold yet again.

The Town

Ravenhold was not always Peredhel, and the buildings say so. The architecture predates the nation’s rule and reads as older to anyone who knows the earlier style, which is how a foreigner with no Peren upbringing at all can still find his way around the place. In Loshev the story is told harder than that: that the Fox family’s Lucia comes of Ravenhold nobles who fled when Peredhel took the city, and that Councilor Ithrielle Nyvaal’s people were low Peren cloth merchants of the same town who married and foreclosed their way up out of poverty. What is said in Ravenhold itself is only the softer version, that the region was something else once.

People here rent rooms rather than take them. A stranger looking for an inn will find instead a house of let rooms with a shared bathroom at the end of the passage, where tenants live semi-permanently and the landlord knows which of the men asleep in the street below belongs to him. That is the only interior of Ravenhold anybody who came south has described. No mayor of the town, no council, no captain of its guard has ever been named this far downriver, and neither has a single street, dock or ship.

Campaign Updates

The whole affair began here. Loshev’s council sent Cleven Gemsmith north to find merchants of Ravenhold, and what he found was Captain Torr, a ship’s captain out of the town with a cat-o’-nine-tails inked on his arm. Torr founded the Ten Lashes and captained it, and his Ravenhold crew was the working arm of the whole ring: tattooed men off the boats who met Dan at the Loshev docks to hand something over and see a crate loaded, and who moved crates and abducted people down the river through Loshev. Torr was killed in the raid on the auction camp on the 6th of Orie, 671 AYR, and the ring dissolved with him. Members are loose in Forven and Veren yet.

Aldo woke in a rented room here with no memory of the night before and walked out of the town carrying a stranger’s ancient parchment, a ceremonial dagger, a key and two rings. Whose they were he never learned. The first riddles the company had to carry are all Ravenhold property, taken out of one night that the only man present cannot remember.

One thread out of the town is open. Phillipa’s egg-collecting contract was taken over by a very influential individual in Ravenhold, whom she did not name, and whose terms were different. When she learned the eggs came from Al-Sāmiyah, a bird that thinks and speaks, she stopped dealing in them. What the buyer wanted with them was never written down, and nobody has gone north to ask.

Nathan Fox is rumored to be considering a second estate up there, though he maintains that Loshev will always be home. Nobody in the company has been to Ravenhold since the morning Aldo left it.