Fuffing Finally in Forven I

Synopsis

The boat came into Forven through a winter dock crowded enough to nearly cost it a hull. Mikhail stood a while looking at the spot where a stranger’s midnight conversation had once kept him out of a coffle, and then they went to the guard station.

The story there was told by a man with a mangled leg. The captain’s house had been trapped from the door up; two guards died going in, a third in the pursuit. Cazzik had been a sellsword before he was a captain: an accent from beyond the Dhel, a reputation in Peredhel, and two of his old crew in town by chance to get him out. He went east into the woods. Kiras Hallo, the officer over the wounded man, took the gnoll warning seriously once the room stopped hearing gnomes, and agreed to set night watches, since the war bands come at night. She was frank about Julius, Forven’s richest man, whose warehouses the slavers used: he is in a cell, he has a defense manufactured for every charge, and he will very likely walk. She promised to send word of the verdict. She also spoke, half-joking, of the merchants who come to Forven out of the forest rather than the river: cloaked, armored, and terrible to anyone who steals from them. They might, she said, be the ones to settle with Cazzik.

Jaden was still in town, weathered in, and needed no lesson in gnoll tactics from anyone. What she needed was talking out of the plan she confessed upstairs and alone: to kill Julius herself the day he walked free, for everyone who had worn the chains she wore, and then vanish east. Mikhail asked her to be patient and clever, and to spend her freedom on something larger than one corrupt man. She said she would think on it.

A porter then summoned the Valiant Few to a tavern, where Lenore was waiting. Cazzik’s wife wanted the evidence looked at again: the traps were for old enemies, the deaths a tragedy, the lash tattoo one mark among a hundred her husband carries. She would not accept Aldo’s copies and demanded the originals in Captain Jack’s keeping. Koa called her an idiot to her face; Aldo walked her out playing the gentleman and suggested her husband might earn goodwill by hunting the war bands. Then the company followed her, guessing she would run straight to her husband: locked out of her seized estate, packed up at an inn, and paying six gold to force a place on the last boat to Harad. They talked their way aboard on a promised performance and sang the ballad of Dan below decks while she watched from across the room. Two days of choppy rowing, and small talk got them the roster of her husband’s old company: six of the Tillermen left where there had been seven.

At Harad, Jack was up to his elbows in a collapsed bridge, an old Mól span long since rebuilt, dropped by ice under a wagon. He took the gnolls seriously, put Luca Green on Lenore to watch her quietly, and confirmed that Ashtara Walnut had left Idir entirely, which surprised him less than the fact that the party had let her. Luca’s men, heavy-handed as ever, shot the horse out from under Lenore’s courier; Keith came round in a wine cellar with broken ribs and gave up the message he carried. The crew had reached the university: a library in Bardh, south of Meshtes through the mountains, a week’s ride for men with horses, which the party no longer had. The trail would have to keep.

Aldo, who had been off the drink, was found face-down in his own dinner after an afternoon of Lenore’s hospitality; she left in disgust and never spoke to them again.

They took the rest of the way to Haudh-Gwenn by water, and knew something was wrong before they were properly ashore: no guards at all in the poor streets, then a wall of new uniforms in the market that the locals stepped around without looking at. At the armorer Hinta had vouched for, Aldo collected finished Galderian leather that made him look like somebody’s son, and the smith’s gossip supplied the rest: the city has a newly announced captain of the guard, the force has been rebuilt around him, and his name is Beltran Grayeras. They kept away from the guard station, went to the Color Stay on the free rooms they had never used, and let its illusion feed them while they worked out what to do in a city that had become somebody else’s.