Aftermath Pt 4

Synopsis

With hired killers loose in the city, the party would not sleep at their own house, and the captured barracks was worse: its defenders had drunk their way through most of the barrel over a victory twenty hours old, and nobody at all was in command. Aldo lifted a cup out of a sleeping man’s hand and sat down among them. Koa drank alone at a window, watching fires burn out across Haudh-Gwenn.

On watch, Mikhail caught a figure standing openly forty feet off with a clear line on the front door, and put a question in its ear. It jumped, looked for whoever had spoken, and went back into the dark.

Then the nightmare took Koa. It walked him down through everyone worse off for what he had chosen, and a familiar hobgoblin voice told him they suffered because the Slumbering Queen was not there. In the dream Mikhail agreed and Aldo nodded along. He woke drained and, for the first time, unsure of himself.

In the morning Aldo climbed the derelict beside the barracks, found where the watcher had dropped through the collapsed roof, and pulled a clean fresh feather out of it. Koa named the bird: a land-fowl of the cold southeastern forests, whose stiff feathers are the preferred stock for fletching arrows. Not bolts. Their watcher was the archer.

At Lady Talia’s, a rump council sat: Talia, the councilwoman Khadija Dalzen, and a proxy speaking in Johanka Materai’s name. They ranked what could still be saved: the hospitals, the districts left with no drinking water, the Color Stay still burning days on and refusing to go out, and the south bridge. The Valiant Few were given the sellswords and nothing else.

The one move that could end the war outright was in the wealthy quarter. Alyphe had gone home from the hospital under the family’s own guard, which put five of eight council seats under a single roof, and Khadija wrote a sealed writ offering the army its full pay and a bonus to disband. Aldo voted against going, Koa for it, and Mikhail cast the deciding vote. Before they left, the proxy raised mubārazah, the honor duel: Traxian, knowing whose sword had killed his son, might well demand one of Koa.

The estate sat far back behind raw iron pikes and trees screening the city out so completely that stepping inside felt detached from it, which Aldo recognized at once as how people like this come to make the decisions they make. Traxian met them wearing a saber in his own house, under a title used nowhere else in the city, and opened by asking whether his son’s body had been released; it had never been at the Chantry at all. He wanted an apology and got one. He had loved his son and had never been proud of him, and what he could not forgive was who had done it.

The ask was that the council’s voice send the army home. Traxian’s terms were a true majority, no sitting captain of the guard, and the party’s own camp breaking first. Mikhail argued that their camp would obey where an order handed to Dhel mercenaries might never be delivered, and Asiya Azrak carried the point, correcting his mine of the army to the council’s. Alyphe put a hand on her husband’s arm. Beltran’s men would break camp first, with Asiya carrying that order herself, unescorted, since Traxian refused her the family guard. The second condition was vigilantism: a trial for the man who killed his son. Koa accepted on the spot and warned he would hold nothing back, and Traxian was about to answer when Alyphe said that was admirable and no less than they expected. He yielded.

Two written voices were held up, three ayes, and the first standing army in living memory was to be disbanded. Buying off the mercenary commanders needed two hundred gold above wages; Aldo offered the party’s own, and Alyphe overruled the room, saying it should come from the Grayeras coffers as a donation and the beginning of charitable work. Her husband blinked at her in open shock, and agreed. High crimes, they learned, are judged by the council itself.

Outside, Aldo expected the family to take public credit for the peace and in time to demonize Beltran themselves. Mikhail put it plainer: when this was finished they were done here. The argument turned to Koa’s guilt, and Mikhail, hearing an odd weight behind it for the second time, asked outright whether he had had a nightmare. He had. Then Aldo yawned in the middle of the street, and Mikhail after him, and the magic in it had come with no word spoken and no caster in sight. Mikhail found her, a disheveled woman pretending to shop where nobody was shopping, fixing on Koa with a rising smile. Koa put her down with the flat of his greatsword rather than the edge, and they bound and gagged and blindfolded her while she chanted, over and over, in a language none of them knew.