Rumormonger

Synopsis

Two days after his return, Leon Yaegar came to the party’s newly furnished estate, alone (Arthur Freym was pointedly not invited), and gave his report. The road had been uneventful under Draazstone’s protection. The goods had bought a great deal of poor steel, molded rather than forged, good for training and one short campaign: enough to arm fifty men properly and a hundred badly. Ring mail besides, made by chained convicts; wood-and-steel bucklers, the breastplates being far out of reach; and, through an old contact near Galderia, six heavy crossbows of real quality. He had traded the old cart for two wagons, and stocked repairs for Edrick.

Then the lecture underneath it. Morale is the heaviest thing in any war, morale rests on faith in the cause, and the three of them are what the men look at when the faith slips. Mikhail’s offer of a rallying song he turned down flat: the songs that carry are the ones people make themselves.

The bad news came slower. Rakhzan, who had put the eagle eggs into the party’s hands, had been found out for it. Draazstone’s justice took an eye, a punishment meant to strip a man of split focus, then his freedom, and left his family’s name in ruins. The whole arms trade exists because of him. Koa wanted to do something about it and Leon shut the notion down: nobody wins a war on another people’s customs while his own is unfought.

One bright thing. Koa’s hope chest was going south with the wagons, and Leon turned it over, tested the hinges, and told him he was a natural-born craftsman who had spent his life chasing the wrong work. Koa then produced the three-legged chair, and the moment did not survive it.

The evening belonged to Nathan Fox, who wanted Aldo’s opinion on a bottle and got Mikhail instead, and found him better company than expected: a key to a lock I usually have to hit with a hammer. What he paid out for the stories was gossip, and a great deal of it. The central Mól ruins in the heart of Haudh-Gwenn sit uncleared and uninhabited, which he thinks the Grayeras family arranges deliberately, and Beltran among others has spent time inside them. The tannery fire there was blamed on ruin squatters and was in fact a warning from the guild that holds the ruins, the Silver Web, which suggests they have something over the council. That council is life-appointed and elects itself, one popular seat excepted, and its seats pass down families by bribery. Its head, Lord Grayeras, is rumored to have bought his way into the Grayeras name. Beltran’s mother is fierce and doting; his older sister is an outcast who refused a Merrick marriage at a ball loudly enough that it is still repeated; and two councilors, Genta and Varro, have not spoken since a warehouse accident cost Varro’s son a hand. Fox asked, in passing, whether anyone knew the story behind the Birdman. He had seen it himself.

Aldo carried it back, and the three agreed to sit on all of it: no move against a divided council until the militia is ready, and none toward the ruins guild until they know whether those are people worth dealing with.

Koa spent his last day at the forge. Hinta would take the cutlass (he had seen atrocities done with that blade and could not keep it) only if he revered Tavius or Snaga, and he chose Snaga. Steel is forged with memory, she told him, and can be given new purpose; she warned him never to let either of the others wield it, and sold him a canabo, an earthbreaker, for four gold. She also has a third cousin, an albino hobgoblin scholar of Mól history and planar energies, banished to Yovance, and Mikhail reluctantly wrote to him about the planar water, routed through Fox’s couriers, Yovance being at war with Peredhel.

They found Dwayne outside fletching arrows and asked him east. He accepted; he had been waiting to be asked. Fox’s parting confession was that he had investigated the Birdman himself, by hiring a man to walk the town in a matching costume, which frightened a councilor badly enough that he stopped. He would like to be told if the thing turns up elsewhere.