The Soiree

Synopsis

Koa went back to the inn in a stranger’s face to collect Hinta and what the party still owned there, and found the rooms gone through: the locks untouched, two potions and Aldo’s wooden holy symbol taken by someone who could read a relabeled bottle. Dwayne’s door had simply been broken in. In the hall a heavy man in banded mail was knocking on doors and asking who had been in that room, and when he turned his eyes were sunken and ringed dark. One of Beltran’s four.

Koa drew him off the other residents into the wrecked room, glad of it after weeks of whispering. The man hit hard, took a roar in the face that plainly frightened him, and went down under a single enormous blow. As he died a wisp of mist came off him and reached for Koa’s rage, and the band on his arm held it out until it thinned to nothing. The corpse carried coin, a ring of keys, a worn warhammer, and a parchment of sketched faces: Dwayne, Casper, Gwen, the innkeeper, the leatherworker, and possibly Ashanti. The three of them were not on it, being dead.

Downstairs he talked the terrified innkeeper into taking his family and running, before the guards came to turn the place over. Outside, an armored figure caught his shoulder and spoke in a voice he knew: Rheem, clearing the road so Hinta could reach him. He apologized for what he had said in temper the night before, and the guards came through the door while he was saying it. She waved him off and made herself the thing worth hitting, and was hit twice. Koa slipped away under three packs; Hinta found him, bruised and favoring an arm from her cell. She spent the walk to The Crack admiring the Mól tunneling and comparing it to Draazstone’s sewers.

The family could not be brought into the keep, so they went on to The Crack with Dwayne and Casper (both on the parchment anyway) and a letter to Leon. Back in town the street said one guard dead and two down, and a blood trail the watch were following. It also said the guards had recovered the blood-soaked armor of the lieutenant Zarif, which ends any pretense that he is simply away. The leatherworker’s shop was under new management, who said he had sold up and moved on to grander things, and were too frightened to be pressed. Rheem did not return.

They came to the soirée separately, unarmed but for one hidden knife, each met at the door, pinned with an octagonal seven-pointed badge and asked to keep out of the kitchens. Koa arrived as Garrett Breen, a horse-breeder from near Veren; Mikhail as an Escarian designer in fishnet and a trench coat, loud enough that nobody looked past him; Aldo as a southern Dhel guest. Lady Talia, who had put the names on the list, retrieved Aldo from a conversation he was losing and steered Gossiping Garrett toward better company. A Peredhel officer out of Vala, under field-commander Barbara Barnes, talked freely about the rebel Rena: a burned conscript camp, a besieged city, fifty sovereigns on her head.

The host toasted the resilience of her city, saluted the Valiant Few without naming them, and made a small joke of the Grayeras arriving late. Mikhail read it as sincere, and the whole evening with it: Materai resents owing Beltran her seat, runs the bank, and is lending the city’s own money cheaply to buy the council out from under him. She keeps a book on all of them. She tested Garrett Breen herself (no Breen has banked in Haudh-Gwenn in sixty years, and Naevora could recall only a long-dead Katakin Breen) and let it pass, and invited him to open an account.

Davi Solt was openly shopping his talents to other patrons and wanted out, and his hollow eyes were only exhaustion. Rainan Marr was cursed, withdrawn, and kept catching Koa’s eye. Mikhail spent the evening thawing Naevora (books, dry histories, ledgers read as puzzles) while upstairs two guests blundered into the study Aldo was working, drank something they should not have and slept through the rest of it. The book was shelved sideways in plain sight. He had it in his coat before the music started.

Then the front door opened, and Mikhail felt the sword before he saw the man carrying it.