Fuffing Finally in Forven II

Synopsis

The Color Stay’s illusion covers the whole building, so a man bathing feels himself undress and does not see it, which after six weeks of caves nobody minded. Aldo stayed behind with a bottle.

Walking up through the guarded quarter, Koa and Mikhail caught the eye of a snaggle-toothed guardsman who had helped them take the slavers. He remembered them and did not want to be seen remembering them: things were rough under the new man, and a great many of the old guard had been dismissed. He named a place for that night and moved on as two more uniforms came round the corner.

At Gwen’s shop two masked Chantry members were collecting a standing order: a reminder about a transfer, a promise to see to it, and Gwen’s own remark that her weave is starting to fray. Then the shop was theirs. Mikhail cleaned the wrecked back room with a few minutes of magic and Gwen went quiet watching him: she can no longer work magic like that herself. They gave her the whole account: the trapped keep, the centuries-old bird, the ghost of a man who saw the empire fall and says the curse can be ended by work done across Idir; thirty-odd volumes with five subjects hidden under the plain one. She knew the books (Telvanius’s guide, which she had handled before, having learned a little Taal for her examinations) and said there is a partial crossing between Amultan magic and Mól. Given notice, she would come look at the alchemy lab under the old slaver den.

The worse news she took standing in an empty shop with the door watched. The new captain of the guard is the lordling who paid for the whole slaver operation, the man Koa saw fleeing the auction camp. He has since purged the force and turned it on the shopkeepers. She confirmed Orsugo is real, and terrible, and described a rarer kind of gnoll, bigger and meaner and swinging chained flails. She had not heard the rest: that the gnolls make fire with their hands, that they burned much of Loshev, and that they are moving this way. What she offered against all of it was the Gish, the crown’s own mage-warriors, who might be moved by a well-made written appeal.

A bell kept making her flinch, and Koa listened at the front and heard why: a guardsman buying goods at a fraction of their worth and calling it protection. She paid two silver to make him go, and refused Koa’s offer to stand in the shop all winter: resisting only shifts the weight onto someone poorer. She identified and re-bottled the keep’s potions instead. Koa admitted he had told Mikhail about her affliction, hoping a scholar might do what medicine has not, was forgiven, and then asked her, badly, to a meal with just the two of them. He left six silver hidden on the counter, to cover the vials, the identifications and what the guard had taken.

At the hospital Mikhail learned that Yara and Elliot had been treated and moved to an inn nearby, that the place already knew about the gnolls and had posted watchers, and that Casper was discharged and still helping. He asked to be taken on as a volunteer to learn field medicine, and the request went up to a Count who was indisposed and then to the Duchess, a hobgoblin in an extraordinary shifting mask, who asked whether he was squeamish, whether he could read and write, and how many days a week he meant it. Five of seven. She took him before sunrise, in plain clothes.

They found Leon Yaegar in an inn sitting room on a crutch, far less haggard than in Ridh, grateful for the conversation Koa had given him there and willing at last with his full name. He explained why patients sleep without terrors here (the Chantry’s head weaves a catcher that keeps the dreams off a sleeping mind) and mentioned, without drawing a conclusion, that the barracks has swollen and now trains with whips in the Yovance manner. His counsel to Koa, who cannot keep anything off his face, was to learn cards: first with friends, then with people who are not.

Walking there, Mikhail had told Koa the thing he tells nobody. He is Peren, out of Bardh, and the symbol of Lady Eravil he wears goes inside the sleeve because of what Idir thinks of the Dhel. Even Trinity does not know. Koa, raised by free folk who took anyone in, said it changed nothing.