The Valiant Few's Loshev estate
The house of the late Alex Westwood of the Loshev council, forfeited for want of next of kin and granted to the Valiant Few for breaking the Ten Lashes
A four-bedroom house in one of Loshev’s nicer districts, which the town came to own because Alex Westwood of its council died leaving nobody to inherit it. High Councilman Nikolas Rook granted it to the Valiant Few for dismantling the Ten Lashes, with Nathan Fox reading out the papers. The writs put the tax at a gold a month, and the councilors of Forven covered the first year of it. The company read them through, signed, and went to look at what they had been given.
It was stripped bare and structurally sound. Everything that had been in it had already gone to the auction house for the estate sale of the dead owner’s goods, which is where a volume of the Mól Encyclopædia that had been sitting on the bookshelf went before anybody ever slept in the place. The one thing left standing was the master bed frame, which was built in and could not be carried out. Later inventory adds an old claw-foot tub, a decent lock and no stable.
That sale, run by Cleven Gemsmith and openly crooked, turned out to hold three more volumes and an Arcane Congress spellbook, and Aldo robbed the barn of the lot in the face of a cook he had already got dismissed. The four volumes came home under a floorboard he pried up in the main house, wrapped in cloth, and stayed there until they were quietly put back to clear the innocent man’s name.
The house sat empty and cold through that first winter and well past it. Coming back through the snow that winter, the company found the shutters standing open and snow and water gone into the hardwood, and lit the hearth to dry the floors out. Elliot took a room for the winter after the argument over what he owed them, and worked through the compendium there; six of the seven Mól keeps were located off that winter’s reading. When fires swept Loshev they took a building nearby and left this one alone.
It was furnished at last over three days the following year, main room and three bedrooms, in a long haggle that ended with the last chair arriving on the morning they rode out. It has been the company’s Loshev address ever since, and it was still theirs when an injured stranger was laid up in one of its rooms while they worked out what he was.