The Three-Sided Coin

The house stands in Haudh-Gwenn and belonged to the Ten Lashes before the ring was broken. Its name, and the names of the couple who kept it after, Joscelyn and Aimie, appear in one list of Beltran Grayeras’s lieutenants and nowhere else. Everyone else called it the old bait-tavern and left it at that.

What the two women ran it as was a message-relay and a safe-house for the Valiant Few, and they ran it well. The woman working the front knew the company’s faces through their disguises. The barmaid passed signals with a hand and a foot to help a patron cheat at cards, which is the sort of thing the house was good at. A coded exchange at the bar was enough to call a meeting, and when one was called the barkeep cleared a full room inside a few minutes by announcing a rat infestation, producing a rat that had been dead a long while, and waiving every tab on the floor as she shooed people out.

The end of it came as a warning rather than a raid. Orvayne told the company that the guard had left the place standing open deliberately, as bait for a sweep meant to take in known troublemakers. They went back to the ruins first to put their old tavern disguises on and leave the obvious weapons behind, so that three armed strangers walking in would not trip the watchers. They counted the watchers as they went: a well-fed figure lying cloaked in an alley, someone at a second-floor window, and on the way out a man feigning a limp whose armor clinked under the cloak. They let that last one alone rather than take him in the open. The couple split over what to do with the warning. One would not leave and would not look anybody in the eye about it, and said she was willing to take the gamble; the other pleaded that the business was not worth their lives. It took a long argument, and the example of what had already happened to Gwenivere Velmont, before the first of them broke down and agreed to go.

They went to the Crack. Rather than leave the stock to be seized they loaded the whole of it onto a wagon, and the high-end drink went with them and was worth more to the refugees living in that cavern than it would ever have been worth to the guard. They asked two things: that Casper be left in place as a lookout, and that nobody be told where they had gone.

The raid did not follow. The guard wanted a larger haul than two tavern keepers and preferred to keep the trap set, and the house was still watched when Aldo came back to scout it. He found the hidden passage under it had a single consistent user: a gruff, mild-featured half-orc, whose face he studied closely enough to wear afterwards. Who that man answers to was never discovered.