Deals made, Deals Lost I

Synopsis

They found Aldo where he had drunk himself blind, in Edrick’s cask room with two of Edrick’s men watching over him and a hand of cards held backwards. Mikhail apologized for the night before. Aldo called Koa self-righteous and stupid, then said he stuck up for Mikhail because Mikhail was a good man, as near to forgiveness as the morning was going to get.

Koa took Gwenivere aside by the chasm and told her what the ooze is made of, so that she would not try it on her own wasting illness. It opened her up instead. In Amulta magic is inborn and runs in blood, a limb you cannot see; the children who have it are found young, the rich ones youngest, and everything taught them afterwards bends to the war. There is a wall of ice on the Yovincia border, lake to lake, held up by nothing but Amultan mages. Her father led the research into making a person’s magic larger, and his subjects were a few children and his own three-year-old daughter. One of them, a boy called Elijah, grew into more power than a body could carry, and what her father did to freeze it left him frostbitten and worse. The estate was attacked years later, and the work and its cure went with it.

Then Koa gave her the tourmaline he had carried since Gemsmith put it in his hand, offering it with I don’t really know what this means. She cried and said yes and got her arms round him, and neither of them named what had been asked. Aldo told the cave they were engaged. Mikhail went to Gwenivere to learn what Koa had intended and found she was fishing him for the same answer. The cave threw a celebration regardless, and somewhere in the middle of it the two of them stepped aside and settled it themselves.

Mikhail spent the better part of ten hours on the hidden chamber below. The electrum filigree threading its pillars spells an array, but not the containing kind they had grown used to: this one commands. It rules water and the things water is made into, and it answers to a legend about a basin. The broken pillars cut the conduit feeding it, so it does nothing at all; mending it would want a master who can meld stone and metal both, and the basin is far too large to carry off. A sample drawn out with tongs never rippled, came away dry, and poured like ordinary water once clear of the bowl.

They also put light down the chasm (dancing lights, then a lit torch) and none of it reached anything. Three together placed the floor well past a thousand feet. A descent was discussed at length and shelved as too much to risk on a hole nobody had found the bottom of.

Going north they collected what they came for and rather more. At Harad, Captain Jack agreed to feed the refuge out of the town’s surplus, with Luca Green running it and refugees rotating out to work Harad’s fields for their keep. At Forven, the attempt to break Julius Anguil out of his cell had failed badly: the fugitive ex-captain of Forven’s guard and his mage were dragged back by cloaked, armored men nobody could name, the mage with every finger broken and his mouth bound against speaking. One of the crew, Freya, got clear. Forven hangs nobody and sells sentenced prisoners to whichever state claims the stronger grievance. So the party told the woman now running its guard what Beltran has been building, and she agreed to steer the sale toward Loshev, which keeps the mage out of his hands.

Leon stopped following them somewhere on that road and began leading. He knows Loshev (he has traded here before on Vala’s behalf, with the Prince’s leave) and has four hundred gold of Crestborne garments coming as samples for Draazstone, where a visitor presents himself as the warrior or the trader and never both. He also carried the town’s newest quarrel: Kurvroc is putting it about that the Crestborne name is tied by family to a freed Ten Lashes slaver, and Leon has taken up one of the contracts they lost by it. Philomena was passing through with her mother and invited Koa on a walk, pointedly without the other two. A guard mentioned that Dan is still rotting in a cell. The errand list ran to a page before anyone had unpacked.