Harveen

He and Jaden came out of the slaver camp and asked for a word before the party rode: two Amultan soldiers in the padded underclothes of armor they no longer had, with accents Aldo placed at once as neighbors of his own Galderian. Four of them had walked away from a war that is still running, and two of the four never came out of the mountains. He nudged, he joked, and proposed they all party sometime in a room where nobody was in the mood; Jaden was not amused.

The secret was his to keep and he did not keep it. Pressed on what the four had been doing, he told them outright: two were defecting and two had followed out of loyalty, Raerin Corvain was one of the defectors and he was the other, none of them running to anywhere in particular. Jaden said he should not be telling them. He answered, what are they going to do, report us. They held equal rank, he said, and had served a long while together.

Afterwards he told Aldo privately that going west after the missing men was a fool’s errand and chasing ghosts, and that Jaden would not be talked out of it. Aldo built a delay from that. The pair meant to go west at once and the company needed them held three weeks, until Elliot’s supplies caught up, so Aldo got him drunk, left stolen signs in his room, and had him arrested. He thought it an excellent idea, preferring a cell to the mountains, and Jaden could prove nothing.

He went west with the expedition in the end, and spent the day arranging not to. When Elliot could not ride, Harveen volunteered to take him home, and Koa, reading the offer for what it was, would not hand Elliot to a man he could not trust in a fight. His quiet way out gone, he followed Jaden sulking. By dusk the two of them were bound and gagged beside a hobgoblin fire, tied, the hobgoblins explained, only to stop them killing one another. Cut loose, he said she had tried to kill him; she said it might not be the last time.

He recognized the ground where the Amultans had been taken, and at the cairn he named the man beneath it: their officer, though the first word he reached for was commander. Jaden had read the initials on the slate herself before he said anything. He gave there the one warm thing anybody ever got out of him, an account of Aldred: a brawler who could put Raerin down unless Raerin was being tricky, never Jaden, and who was not much with a sword but was never afraid to hold one.

Then Jaden, when she could speak again, said the rest. Raerin had wanted to carry Amulta’s case to someone with the power to help and had never really meant to desert; Harveen had put the idea in his ear and kept it there. The two accounts of the capture itself do not agree, and neither has ever been squared with the other. Jaden’s is that the chaos he made that night is what got all four of them taken. Harveen’s is that they were taken while they slept, and that what she is describing came later: he tried to break free while they were held, the captors turned violent for it, and the night they got loose went the same way. She went for him and had to be pulled off. Nobody else ever confirmed any of it, and he was never made to answer it. He bolted into the grass, was put to sleep and dragged back, and the camp stopped speaking to him.

On watch that night Aldo caught him at the horses. He said he had come for wine, then said he was leaving. Aldo told him he could go but would not rob them going, watched him take his own bag and nothing else, and let him walk. He looked up the hill towards the cairn before he went. He was gone at first light, nobody followed, and nobody has heard of him since.