The Decision

Synopsis

Twenty-three days after the curses broke, the party rode south out of Wraithblade Keep with six days of trackless plain ahead of them. Nobody talked much. Aldo had barely touched a drink since he came back — one sipped at a tavern while he was watching Kurvroc’s place, and nothing else — Mikhail already had what he needed to go home and graduate, and Koa kept riding through his own first year without getting anywhere with it.

They smelled Ridh a mile out, weeks after the fire. Nothing in it was whole but the tavern, which had been built of stone. Gnoll and hyena prints had come through a little over a week earlier, with drag marks where survivors were hauled off, which put a camp near enough to patrol from. And a pony had come in that morning.

It belonged to Amergin Innis, an old gnome on a bar stool in the ruin with a traveling lyre and a notebook, who made Koa recite the party’s horses by name before believing them. Mikhail knew of him: a composer out of Ustos, famous inside the discipline and unknown outside it, because he never wrote words for his tunes and other performers attached their own until his name came off them. He had composed nothing in nearly a century, and compiled biographies now instead, work he could put his own name to. He had come for the Valiant Few, and had already interviewed nearly everyone they knew.

He had the morning the curses broke written down in that notebook, having watched the land light aglow shortly after sunrise. He worked at Aldo about having no surname and at Mikhail about the Slumbering Queen’s disappearance, and Mikhail killed his theory about it by pointing out that it made her look as though she had walked out on the suffering. Then Aldo, homesick, asked for something old out of Galderia, and Amergin played it and Aldo sang. Afterward they picked the man apart: he had asked Mikhail nothing at all, Aldo did not think the meeting was chance, and none of them believed why he had stopped playing.

On the road out Aldo gave the other two his surname, unasked, an hour after refusing to sell it to a biographer. Valain. There was a lot of baggage attached to it, he said, but it was his. Mikhail answered with something of his own: no coin at home and no sponsor, so he had run drugs with a friend until he could afford a lute.

Haudh-Gwenn cheered them through the north gate and then handed them the bill. Lady Talia set it out: a city split three ways over how Beltran was ended, fifty destitute refugees out of Ridh, and neighbors hoarding against a thin harvest and a near winter. Taelor the armorer had disappeared for making Aldo’s armor, and the shop staff would not talk. Then she handed Koa a letter. She had been served notice of a trial for her own part in the uprising, with no date set while evidence was gathered. Since the council needed the public back and the party still had it, they settled on forcing both trials forward by public demand. Koa would argue his case and would not accept a guilty verdict, and the other two would step in if it came to that, knowing it meant never coming back.

Ashanti had been sealed in the curse-keep alone for twenty-eight days, and her first words were “so it worked?” Her nights had changed on the night the curses broke, independently of anything they told her, and she had been dosing herself with a lucid-dreaming tincture to fight what came in them. The nightmares were already general. Going home to northern Taziondale, she gave them the Sil, who changed a region of her own country, Silencio, until people stopped going there. At The Crack, Leon Yaegar got everything but the bond and answered with strategy: an army against Orsugo needs a banner, Haudh-Gwenn’s name will take years to clear, and Veren should be it.

Gwen opened her own door before Koa could be announced. He gave her the whole of it in order, and then the two options: Nancáro could press the thing back down and buy time, with no help for her, or cut her free of the dream now and cost almost all of it. “None of us thought that was a decision we should make,” he said. “It’s your decision.” She took about a minute. Hearing that the city was already suffering the nightmares, she said that suppressing the beast might relieve some of it. “It’s the only choice. Suppress.” Then she refused to be congratulated for it. “I don’t have a choice. I know I’m being presented with options, but there is no choice here. What would you do if this were you, Koa?” He conceded he would not have waited as long as she had. When she stood to go and find Aldo, Koa noticed a bump at her waist, and neither said anything about it.

Koa spoke Nancáro’s name into the air and the god stepped into existence in the room, seen by all three of them, Mikhail flinching because he had not expected it to work, Aldo looking at him with contempt. “Understood. I’ll see to it that it’s taken care of. You’ll have a few years. Best of luck.” Then he stepped out. Gwen saw nothing of him, only cold coming in, a rigidity to the air, and voices very far away. What followed came through the three of them in waves that built to a climax of pain, and some of it stayed: the essence they had been spending on the waypoints had never been theirs, and standing that close left them with more of it. The few years were the containment’s, not hers. Getting further meant Amulta, where her father’s work sits in High Lady Arcium’s own hands and cannot be copied, and where a proper wedding would hand Koa her name and her estate with it. She would not settle it today.