The Valiant Few

Synopsis

They came back to Loshev as people the town pointed at, and spent the first morning deciding what not to say. The report they gave the Council was accurate as far as it went: the ring, the camp, the captives, and the late councilor Alex Westwood, whose land had been bought for the next stage of it. Ashtara Walnut they left out because they had given their word; Beltran Grayeras because an accusation with nothing behind it would cost them more than it cost him, and because he cannot move openly against them either without answering the same questions. They would work on his reputation instead. Nikolas Rook praised their diligence, Torgun Kurvroc watched them throughout, and Nathan Fox said nothing at all.

Yullen Gemsmith had them to his estate for a many-course dinner in the Peredhel manner, which Aldo and Koa navigated and Mikhail, several glasses in, did not; Cleven enjoyed that more than anything else all evening. Father and son argued over the mette-hina rite, and Cleven refused flatly to father children he would have to send away (I say we break the mold), and left early.

Over sherry Yullen offered each of them a choice: coin and finery, or a favor owed by himself and his line. Aldo and Mikhail took the favor, and Aldo spent his at once, sending his ruined Galderian crossbow home to a master through Yullen’s contacts. Koa took the tangible thing: a deep blue spinel, an aqua tourmaline, and a black opal appraised at a hundred and thirty-one gold, each with its writ so no dealer could cheat him. He put the opal in his new Haudh-Gwenn vault. He also produced the great rough stone out of the slavers’ haul, and Yullen named it a Nar: a gem that grows warm against metal with no flame near it, mined far to the east on the edge of the Daelands, and butchered in the cutting. He offered to cut it properly, which would take months and might ruin it.

He let slip, once Mikhail pressed him, that the Council means to honor the group formally, and that there is a difficulty: you have no name, do you? The first attempts were bad and the tavern attempts worse, and the morning found all three waking in company: Koa beside a woman of the Fox household, Mikhail beside Trinity Barnaby, and Aldo curled around two stolen tavern signs, one of them the jail’s own. A guard came asking; Aldo blamed Tony, was recognized as a hero of Loshev, and was let off so thoroughly that the man stayed to ask for an introduction. Worse than the theft was what the town had settled on calling them: the Dandan, after the jailer still in a cell for it. It was at the Broken Shield that Mikhail finally said the Valiant Few out loud, and it stuck.

The weeks that followed were quiet. Mikhail read everything Loshev held on the western mountains and wrote music. Aldo paid off his armor in Haudh-Gwenn, drank widely, and came back with the harvest of it: Beltran had returned, silenced the men repeating rumors, had every slaver taken at the camp executed, and been punished for the embarrassment with a command in the town’s guard. Koa spent the weeks sanding Gwenivere’s shop and asking after Haudh-Gwenn’s central ruins, where a guild called the Eights takes a toll at the door and has never opened the door upstairs. Gwen went looking for an old recipe for a curse-warding ointment, and Nathan Fox had a winery approved and hired Aldo as its sommelier, paid in bottles.

Mikhail took his mother’s warped rapier to Trugs, a hobgoblin smith lately arrived from Draazstone whose work is rumored to carry a hint of magic, and got a reforging on the original guard for a gold and a custom blade for forty, the forty fronted by Yullen on a written promise. Measuring him meant fighting him, so Trinity and Jaden were recruited to do it, and did it exhaustively.

The Amultans wanted to go west at once for their own people, and the party wanted them to wait for supply and company. Harveen had already told Aldo in private that he did not want to go, which is where the idea came from. Aldo settled it by getting him drunk and leaving the stolen signs in his room, which put him in a cell for the delay and left Jaden certain of everything and able to prove none of it.

Elliot arrived weeks behind his own letter and put the contract in writing: a Mól ruin in the western mountains, never breached, cracked for the knowledge in it, which he means to publish; he would join them once they had secured it. The tavern argument that night ran the Mól together with the Idiran curses and with mana burn: if that society was a magical one, its ruins might hold a cure. Elliot wrote furiously through all of it. He drew a line the party had not: there are grand Mól ruins and simple ones, built for different purposes. Then he spent something over a hundred gold outfitting them and his last coin on a horse for himself, and rode out at dawn.

A day down the road, badly hungover, they realized the mules were still in Loshev.