Season 1

TL;DR

The town paid for five bandits. What the errand turned out to be attached to was a trade in people, and the thread ran from the jailer of Loshev through a council that had to be bought into moving, down the river to Haudh-Gwenn, and into a cave in the woods where captives were chained to the seats they were to be sold from. The Ten Lashes was broken and named, all ten of it, and the man at the top of it went home to a promotion. Three strangers who met in a courtroom came out of it with a fortune given away, a name of their own choosing, and a contract to open a sealed ruin in the western mountains, built of the same gray stone that had been under their feet since the first night.

First seen

• Dan: the jailer of Loshev, and the bottom rung of a ladder nobody knew was standing there
• Kithul: a wanderer with stone for skin, who put a name to the ruins
• Nathan Fox: the man who can make a council move, at a price the party had to go and collect from somebody else
• Casper: a slaver who changed sides and then stayed changed
• Ashtara Walnut: the ring’s recruiter, and the only person alive who could name the whole of it
• Beltran Grayeras: the name at the top, and the one that could not be used

What changed

• The Ten Lashes is finished and named: ten and no more, the captain dead, the holding camp cleared, a dozen people walked out of it free and three who did not.
• Loshev’s council is not the council that sat in the spring. Dan convicted, Alex Westwood dead and their land sold on, Nathan Fox seated and owed favors.
• Haudh-Gwenn cannot pretend it did not happen. The freed were walked in over the bridge in front of the guard, and every one of them can talk.
• The gray veined stone has a name. The Mól laid it, it runs under Loshev and Haudh-Gwenn and the slavers’ own camp alike, and the man who paid for the trade collects it.
• Three strangers are a company: the Valiant Few, with a bank account each and a contract riding west.

Left open

• What three men are supposed to do about a man his own city protects.
• The sealed Mól ruin in the western mountains, and whether it is still shut.
• Whether Ashtara Walnut keeps a bargain made at knife-point.
• What is eating Gwenivere’s magic, given that it is not mana burn.
• Two Amultan soldiers lost somewhere in the western mountains, and no ledger of the ring’s with their names in it.

Synopsis

A hunt for five bandits

Three men reached Loshev on the same day for unrelated reasons (Mikhail robbed on the Forven road, Koa carrying home a merchant he had been paid to keep alive, Aldo four days into a holding cell), and left the next morning under one warrant. The Council had road killings to answer for, and deputizing three strangers cost it less than looking at its own guard: Aldo’s accusation against the jailer Dan was heard in full and acted on not at all. Five names went east with them, and the fifth was a Loshev woman whom Aldo had last seen sitting on the jailer’s lap.

The jailer’s forearm

Leila gave up the name under questioning: a guard had handed her the map and sent her into the woods to warn the crew. Rather than turn for home they followed the bandits’ own map north instead, to a dead village of gray ore-veined stone where a kneeling statue stood up and proved to be Kithul, who goes where whispers in that stone send him.

In Loshev the Constable cut Dan’s sleeve open in his own cell, and one lash showed on the forearm, the same mark the Ravenhold captain who took Cleven Gemsmith wore nine of. What Dan gave up was not contraband. It was people: seized in the mountains, shipped by river in crates through warehouses paid not to ask, held outside Haudh-Gwenn and sold on south.

The problem after that was speed, not evidence. Moving Loshev’s council before the next shipment sailed meant Nathan Fox, who wanted a seat, which meant a resignation, which the party collected from Alex Westwood. Koa lost his temper and put the old councilor into a wall; Westwood signed, and was dead of the injury by morning. It was ruled natural causes. Fox was seated the next day, and his first act put Dan in a cell.

The cave southwest of Haudh-Gwenn

Down the river the work was done in borrowed clothes and borrowed names, until a man at the next table talked about crates and winds blowing north and offered to close a deal out at the ruins. That crew ended the night as one corpse, two men in their own cages and a dealer on the party’s payroll: Casper, who had watched Koa call on Vroga Waruk, the breaker of chains, and could not go back to the trade. He drew them the shape of it: five crews working the town, the Silver Web over them, everyone taken funneled to one site southwest.

They struck two days before the auction. Behind the barred door of the cage-hall the captives had been chained to the seats they were to be sold from, and the man in the fine coat answered a demand for surrender by asking how many the party would let die, then cutting three throats to settle it. He was the captain they had been chasing since Loshev. Koa put him down. Cleven Gemsmith came out of that hall alive, which was the whole reason for the journey; three people did not. Someone better dressed had already left the cave through a stretch of wall with no door in it.

The names that could not be used

They walked the freed into Haudh-Gwenn over the bridge at midnight, in front of the guard, having spread the story along the road first so it could not be buried after. There is no slavery in Idir, and it took a councilman’s son to make the guards write the word down.

The ring’s recruiter was cornered the next day, in daylight and under the town’s protection, and none of the three could do what killing her would have taken. So they traded: everything she knew, for permanent exile. Ashtara Walnut gave them the Ten Lashes entire, ten and no more, from the Loshev jailer at the bottom to Beltran Grayeras, who paid for all of it, son of Haudh-Gwenn’s High Councilman. To move on him, she said, was to move on the city.

They did not. The report carried back to Loshev had two holes in it, one kept by bargain and one because an accusation with nothing behind it costs the accuser more than the accused; the ring was pinned on a dead councilor instead. Beltran went home, had every slaver taken at the camp executed, and was punished for the embarrassment with a command in the town’s guard. The cave of goods they had taken was worth a fortune, and they gave it away: winter food to the river towns, timber for a shelter behind a Harad tavern, coin to send the freed home.

Gray stone, and a name

The dull gray metal veining Loshev’s oldest stonework was a curiosity on the first night, crossed on the ancient bridge and explained by nobody. It was no better explained at the end, but it had a name on it, and it was everywhere: the ruined village where Kithul was found, the collapsed keep inside Haudh-Gwenn, and, beneath the slavers’ camp, a hall of fallen pillars whose door had been locked from the ruin’s own side to keep something out. The Mól empire fell centuries ago, and the man who bankrolled the trade in people collects it.

The writer who bought a sheet of Imperial Mól script off Aldo in a tavern before any of this began had read it as a sealed ruin in the western mountains, and had waited out the whole business for the party to be free. They took his contract, and settled what the town had settled for them badly: Loshev was calling them the Dandan, after the jailer, and it cost a night of drink and two stolen tavern signs before Mikhail said the Valiant Few out loud at the Broken Shield and it stuck. Elliot arrived weeks behind his own letter, spent his last coin on a horse, and rode west with them at dawn.

A day down the road, badly hungover, they realized the mules were still in Loshev.