Freedom's Price · Aurôrum

The freed are walked into Haudh-Gwenn over the bridge in front of the guard, the Chantry takes the wounded, and the party corners the one person who can name the whole ring, then has to decide what she is worth alive

TL;DR

They came out of the cave counting: three captives dead, a cart of prisoners, and a fortune nobody had time to move. Edrick and Malik rode for Harad to raise honest men for the buyers; the rest force-marched the freed into Haudh-Gwenn by midnight and made the town look at them. A night in the Chantry left Koa hallucinating his own face back at him, and the morning turned up Casper half-buried and bleeding. His last piece of information put the party on Ashtara Walnut’s doorstep, where none of the three could bring themselves to do what the situation called for.

First seen

Beltran Grayeras: a name for the lordling who fled the camp, and a family that comes with it
Xylum: a ranked man of the ring who would not talk to nobodies
The senior Chantry healer: an ornate mask, and an offer of anonymity to anyone hunted
Westwood: a village where land has quietly changed hands

What changed

The Ten Lashes is named, all ten of it, from the Loshev jailer at the bottom to the man who bankrolled the whole of it.
Ashtara Walnut walks free on terms: four days in Haudh-Gwenn, three in Harad, then south out of Idir and never back.
The town cannot pretend. The freed were brought in over the bridge in front of the guard, and every one of them can talk.
Casper is alive and living behind a Chantry mask, which is the only reason he is.
Mikhail is, on paper, Ashtara’s suitor: a cover for daily check-ins.

Left open

Whether she keeps a bargain she made at knife-point.
What three people are supposed to do about a man his city protects.
The buyers due at the camp, and whether Harad gets there in time.
The manacled man who went over the bridge rail into the river.

Synopsis

Three of the people they had come to free had died in the cage-hall, everyone still standing was a bad hour from not standing, and the cave held more prisoners and more goods than three men could move. Aldo argued the job was finished (Cleven was found, which was what they had been paid for) and lost. They split the spoils, paid the hired men, and sent Edrick and Malik riding for Harad to fetch its honest captain and a crew; whatever the buyers arrived carrying would be theirs.

The interrogation went nowhere and cost more than it was worth. Xylum would not deal with nobodies and wanted a real power across the table; there wasn’t one in the room. Koa set his weapons aside and tried anyway, and Xylum (bound, and losing nothing by it) threw himself at him. Koa ran him through and then spent an hour keeping him alive. Aldo’s nerve had already gone, mid-threat, when he pushed the crossbow into Mikhail’s hands and said he did not know what was wrong with him.

Cleven Gemsmith, drugged through most of his captivity and disgusted by the stew, had two things worth having: talk he had overheard of new construction at Westwood, with men sent down into the camp’s chasm to cut a tunnel toward it; and the leader he was never allowed to see, who spoke like a man of Haudh-Gwenn and was said to have been a prodigy.

They force-marched to reach the bridge at midnight rather than let it wait for dawn. The guards could not make the word fit their mouths (there is no slavery in Idir), and then a councilman’s son confirmed every word of it. The story had already been spread among the freed on the road, so that nobody could bury it later. One manacled guard went over the rail into the river and did not come up where anyone could see.

The Chantry took the wounded and would not be argued out of it: masked, gray-robed, thick with incense, dosing its patients over every objection about urgent business. Mikhail was handed a sedative tea and slept the night he had meant to work. Koa was given the bitter restorative brew and spent the night elsewhere entirely: the slavers came back as spidery things, and he cut through them to a mirror with wicked eyes in it. He woke near noon with Gwenivere Velmont sitting over him, and learned from her that the brew is a mildly addictive hallucinogen.

Casper had been hunted while they were gone. Koa found the two traffickers they had caged in the ruins murdered where they sat, and Casper under the rubble beside them, stabbed with something that would not let a wound close. He put Gwen’s door off its hinges to get him inside, and she opened it from within a moment later. Between her, the Chantry and a healing draught argued over at length, he lived; the masked senior of the order offered him a mask of his own and a new name to live behind.

What Casper had bought with the wound was an address. Ashtara Walnut had caught him following her, left him for dead, and gone to Lord Grayeras’s office looking for a councilor’s protection. She answered her own door (four foot four, scarlet-haired, perfectly composed), slipped a grapple, shrugged off Mikhail’s sleep as though it were weather, and offered to talk. In daylight, shielded by the town’s nobility, she could not be killed and could not be carried off; and off to one side all three admitted none of them was willing to execute her anyway. So they took the trade: everything she knew, for permanent exile.

She gave them the ring entire: the jailer in Loshev, the captain they had already killed and buried under the name Walter, herself, a man they only ever heard called the Trapper, Zahir, Xylum, the warehouseman Julius and the captain of the guard in Forven, and one more away east in Veren. And then the name above all of them. Beltran Grayeras oversaw the operation and paid for it: son of High Councilman Lord Grayeras and of Lady Grayeras, obsessed with the Mól, keeper of a hobgoblin alchemist out of Draazstone who considers himself one of them, and buyer of the late Alex Westwood’s land. To move on him, she said, was to move on the city.

She would court Mikhail as pretext for the daily check-ins, sent him to her tailor with a letter establishing it, and led them out through her wine cellar into the tavern next door with a lipstick mark on his cheek to sell it.