Fox's Cunning

Synopsis

The night’s work was robbery in a good cause. The dock stash sat inside a hollow pier leg: five gold, eleven silver, a pouch of unappraised stones and an iron key that Aldo identified as a master key, cut to open a great many locks: manacles, or a warehouse, or both. The house came next, after dark, and Mikhail wedged himself in a window that Koa had to pull him out of before anyone noticed the door was unlocked. Aldo emptied the liquor cabinet and took Dan’s best clothes, which he meant to have re-tailored and wear to the man’s trial purely for the effect. Throwing the rest back into the wardrobe sprang a hidden compartment, and a parcel of unidentified herb fell out of it. Under the floorboards were four worn guard swords; in the slit mattress, a dozen pennies. It was over that mattress that Trinity Barnaby came through the door with a sword out and arrested him.

She marched him to the guard station, straight into the Constable’s interrogation of the prisoner, where it was sorted out in about a minute. She bought him a drink afterwards and made it clear the apology was not the whole of the offer; he was too tired to take her up on it.

The Council meanwhile did what the Council does, and three days went in without a hearing coming out. Koa worked the last stash alone (a lacquered box in a forest stump packed with rolled parcels, one pouch smelling faintly wrong) and came back to find that Philomena and Phillipa had left town, leaving him letters a tavern messenger tried to charge him for. He did not pay. He recovered the note, two gold owed, and a healing potion sent with the words to keep you safe. Over a bad breakfast they agreed the box was Keif with one outlier in it, and Aldo brokered the spoiled pinch to a street buyer for three silver, which made Koa a drug dealer without asking him first.

Tariq, reached at last and four cups into his morning, sniffed the outlier and named it golden Keif. Then Mikhail produced the wardrobe herb, and Tariq tasted it and stopped being tired: it is the compound burned to keep trafficked people docile, and no honest reason exists to keep it in a wardrobe. That was the case, and it still did not get them a trial, because a trial needed the Council. Tariq’s advice was Nathan Fox.

Fox’s house has a boot-brush at the door, slippers waiting inside it, several courses at dinner, and a host who greets guests in whichever of four languages suits them. His terms came between courses. He would expedite the trial and reform the town, and in exchange wanted a seat on the Council. Seats being for life and the number needing to stay odd, that meant a resignation or a paired appointment plus the Constable’s sponsorship. He had already chosen whose resignation. Years of Alex Westwood’s correspondence lay on his table, running through Haudh-Gwenn contacts to businessmen in Meshtes who buy people, with a report from a paladin of the Order of the Broken Chain naming the same men. Late in the evening Fox produced better news: a decoded letter saying a shipment would be collected at Haudh-Gwenn by the month’s end. Cleven Gemsmith might not be gone yet. Mikhail read the performance for exactly what it was and took the deal anyway; Tariq agreed to sponsor Fox and to be incurious about where the evidence came from, the alternative being a boat leaving without them.

Westwood was old, and did not fold under a bluff. What ended the argument was Koa, whose opinion of the town had been souring all day, and who lost his temper and put Westwood into a wall hard enough to crack a rib. Westwood conceded and fetched a resignation letter already drafted and waiting, then could not breathe and went down mid-signature. Weighing a murder charge against the errand, the party spent its last healing potion on the councilor it had just injured. Westwood recovered, signed, and delivered the letter in person to High Councilman Nikolas Rook. While they were escorted away, Koa and Mikhail went through the study and took more correspondence and a cipher book: a manual, out of Peredhel, for coding dates into ordinary letters by moon phase. By the end of the month meant the new moon of Awalan, a week from the following day, which is time enough to reach Haudh-Gwenn by river. They reported the theft to Tariq, who wrote his sponsorship of Fox and found them a boat.

The Council seated Fox the next day, and his first act pushed Dan’s conviction through to a cell. Westwood was found dead that same night of the injury nobody outside the room knew about; having resigned in their own hand and before witnesses, they were held to have died of natural causes, and nobody asked further.