Winter's End
The last of the winter's conversations: a masked woman who has already read Mikhail's past, an alchemist who cracks the book in an afternoon, and a grief that ends with a name the company did not expect
TL;DR
The winter’s loose ends, tied off. The masked head of the Chantry took Mikhail upstairs and proved she already knew his history (read off a dream-catcher his own sleep had stained), then offered lessons in magic the Congress never sanctioned, for lessons in how the Congress works. Ashanti broke the alchemy volume in an afternoon. Over dinner Landor de Bellun told Aldo who burned his wife and son alive, and it was Leon Yaegar. Then spring came, Beltran marched a hundred and twenty men east, and Aldo bought a token into the ruins.
First seen
- Beltran’s lieutenant: does the captain’s work, and wants him gone
- Boras: Beltran’s bookkeeper, a bald hobgoblin of the Jewels of Erôth
- Merer: the fence who sells front-door entry to the ruins
What changed
- Mikhail has a teacher outside the Arcane Congress, bought with what he knows of it.
- The alchemy volume is legible: Ashanti reads catalysts and reactions where the party read a cipher.
- The company holds a token into the ruins and a contact inside the guard.
- Beltran and some hundred and twenty soldiers have marched east, leaving a skeleton watch.
- Jaden did not kill Julius; three weeks of Chantry care left her someone else entirely.
Left open
- Where an army marches in early spring, and what it means to take.
- Whether Jaden and a Peredhel general can stand in the same room.
- What Landor does now that he knows Leon Yaegar is here.
Synopsis
She took Mikhail up to a loft above the hospital, thick with incense and stacked with scrolls. What he noticed first was the crystal sphere: too large and too flawless to be glass, and so a focus, not an ornament. The Slumbering Queen, masked head of the Chantry of Tranquility, told him she knew he had studied at a university, and how she knew: her sedative and his own dreams had stained one of the house’s dream-catchers, and the stain can be read. He stopped pretending. She admitted, in turn, that she practices well outside anything the Arcane Congress would sanction, and that the Congress does not train a mage so much as wipe away the one he would have become. Her offer was a trade: the books and theory behind the healing he has been chasing, against everything he can tell her of how the Congress bends magic. Then she went down to her rounds.
Earlier in the winter Gwen had introduced them to Ashanti, an archaeologist who had been in and out of the shop all winter; between them the two women are developing a concentrate that sharpens a potion if it goes in at the last moment. Aldo greeted her in flawless Tazion and was embraced as a countryman, and spent the evening declining to explain it. Mikhail spotted Congress sigils on her kit. Given the cipher he and Elliot had built, she had the alchemy volume open and teaching within the hour. No reagent is sacred, she said; the property lives in the reaction, and the right catalyst will carry it out of almost anything. She showed them the spearhead at her throat, an heirloom of an old Taziondale line, and talked about the war with Peredhel. Later the party performed the songs written about themselves so badly that nobody in the tavern recognized either one.
Koa walked Gwen home and spent a chaste night in a plain apartment, then made her check her accounts against the bank that had emptied his own. It had left her alone.
The dinner was Aldo’s, in a fine house left outside the guarded district and grown quiet for it. Landor de Bellun took him for old Yovance money and talked freely: the black sheep of a great estate, schooled in Peredhel rather than at home, who came back with ideas about freedom and freed every servant he had inherited. When Peredhel invaded he commanded; he gave an order that might have set the war back years, and his fellow nobles ignored it and spent his loyal soldiers as a screen for their own retreat. The victors burned his estate for the justice of the people he had once owned, with his wife and son inside it; his servants carried him wounded into Idir. Aldo, sitting in a false face all evening, sat in real silence and said he was sorry. Then he mentioned there is a Peredhel general in town, gave the name, and watched it land: Leon Yaegar is the man who beat him, and Landor blames him for his family and for the chains put back on his people. He invited Aldo to Westwood, and the cane he leans on turned out to hold a blade.
Jaden found Mikhail in a tavern, months after Forven. She had not killed Julius; the trial has slid to mid-spring, and she left town rather than trust herself near him. The arson attempt at Forven met a guard ready for it: two buildings burned, nobody died. The party argued long over telling an Amultan soldier that a Peredhel general is now an ally; Mikhail cast the deciding vote, and steered her toward the Chantry besides, having watched what the same care did for Leon. Three weeks of it gave back a woman his party would not recognize.
The rest was groundwork. Aldo gossiped out the captain’s routine (the guarded streets, the single assistant, the near-daily walk to the barracks with four soldiers) and learned the assistant is a bookkeeper called Boras, a bald hobgoblin of the Jewels of Erôth, who keep stone-names and hire out their mastery. Eighteen gold to Merer bought a token into the ruins. He and Koa turned Beltran’s lieutenant, who does all the real work and wants his captain gone by anything short of murder. And with the roads dry, the word went round: the garrison is marching east, Beltran at its head, a hundred and twenty men to a place nobody would name. What they left behind was a skeleton watch, and a door the company already had the key to.