Season 3

TL;DR

The season began as a heist and ended with a method. The Valiant Few went into the thieves’ ruin under Haudh-Gwenn for leverage against Beltran Grayeras and came out standing in a second Mól keep, where the Elder told them the glowing sludge they had been selling by the vial was a city of tens of thousands taken apart. Given the one clean chance to take Beltran on the road, all three voted to let it pass and measure him first, and spent the rest of the season buying a council in Loshev one man at a time. That paid for a third keep in the eastern woods, which cost them a night behind bonfires and gave them the shape of a curse: two trees of an age, one bound to life and one to death, and the link between them the thing to sever. No curse was broken.

First seen

• Jhessail Vintree: the Matriarch of the Docks, and the councilor who told them what their heroism is actually worth
• Orvayne: the guard-captain passed over for Beltran; gives what he hears and no more
• The Muharib: the old empire’s portal-guards, and Kurvroc’s claim to their blood
• Dwayne: a hired guide who is also his paymaster’s ledger
• Razorleaf: the vine that has swallowed a mile of the eastern woods
• Blights: what a death tree makes, and keeps making

What changed

• A curse has a shape. Two trees of an age, one bound to life and one to death, and the link between them is the thing to sever. Fire will not touch it.
• Three of the seven keeps stand open, and the Elder is stronger for each: one spirit schismed across them, recovering himself a keep at a time.
• The sludge under Haudh-Gwenn is known, and known to be people. It is out of Gwenivere’s medicine chest and permanently in Mikhail.
• Beltran was left standing. The company chose to measure him and lost the one window the spring offered.
• The Valiant Few keep more than themselves: a furnished house in Loshev, a quartermaster, four of eleven councilors turned, Harad feeding the Crack, and thirty-odd refugees who are theirs to feed.
• Koa and Gwenivere are promised, on a stone he could not explain.

Left open

• Whether three people can break seven keeps, or whether breaking one alone only sets it running again over whoever lives above it.
• Who chose them, if anyone did, and whether the Elder is a guide or something worse.
• What the third symbol on the Elder’s map stands for, beside life and death.
• Whether Gwenivere’s illness can be reached by any road but her father’s.
• Beltran, untouched, with a bank and an army still behind him.

Synopsis

The heist that turned into a dig

Winter’s money went on armor and potions and was gone, and with Beltran Grayeras gone east out of Haudh-Gwenn the Valiant Few finally ran the job they had been putting off since the thaw. The reasoning was political: men with a hideout, a sewer and a bolt-hole would make useful allies against him.

They came out the far side holding something else entirely. The old Mól sewers beneath the ruin ran with a luminous green sludge that fed any spell laid on it, upstream to a crack sealed centuries ago beneath the house next door, whose cellar stair screwed itself into the walls behind them. The well at the bottom was a containment circle written inside out; turned the other way it emptied and dropped them into a second keep: the same corridor, the same relief map they had walked in a mountain the season before, and the Elder in the room at the end of it.

What the sludge was

What he told them took the morning. A city of tens of thousands had stood overhead, and the curse took every one of them apart, mind, body and soul, and caught the lot up with the water-elemental that guarded the door. The two are one thing now, and that thing is the sludge. The company had been carrying it in vials and arguing about tasting it. Gwenivere Velmont had been dispensing it to patients by the dose all winter. Ashanti had brewed a draught of it, and Mikhail had drunk it, and his smallest workings have not run dry since. Gwenivere wept and agreed to leave the stuff alone; Ashanti heard the same news and began planning larger doses.

The rest was terms. A curse re-prepares itself inside a moon, so breaking one alone only sets it running again over whoever lives above it: three at once, or none. It also came out that Aldo had been able to see and hear the Elder from the first and had held it back to test the ghost, which set the three of them arguing about trust.

The chance on the road, let go

They went south to the Crack and found thirty-odd people living in it, which made feeding them the company’s problem. The night turned into a council over Beltran. He was on the road east with nearly every trained man the city had, which is the one time a guarded man can be taken, and if he came home from Ostrad with grain, untouchable after. Orvayne, passed over for Beltran, gave what he heard and no more. Leon Yaegar laid out how to take the man alive, then said he would not do it in their place. Measure your enemy first.

All three voted to wait, and the season became a different one: instead of a war, a position. Harad agreed to feed the refuge, Forven’s sentenced prisoners were steered toward Loshev out of Beltran’s reach, and in Loshev the council was bought a man at a time and none of it with coin: Nathan Fox for Draazstone ore, Torgun Kurvroc for flattery about the Mól ruin his house is grown over, and for a public execution he means to have. Yullen Gemsmith staged a dinner to seat them beside Jhessail Vintree, who keeps the Lower Pier and does not dine out, and who read the exercise truest: the men praising the heroes of the hour will promise a vote and not cast it. Somewhere in it all Koa and Gwenivere became engaged, over a stone he could not explain.

The third keep, and what it cost

Kurvroc’s money also bought a guide: Dwayne, hired to tally what came out as much as to lead them in. Three days east the birds thinned ahead of them, and at the stone slabs lay eleven explorers come for the same ruin, drained with not a drop spilled on the grass. The punctures in them were sharpened wood, thrown by things of stick and dead vine.

The Twisted Grove nearly kept them. Barred out of the hall, they went in by a balcony twenty feet up the back wall over two assassin vines. A vault behind a tapestry gave up an electrum crown that sharpens the mind, and an argument Mikhail ended by saying aloud that this is how parties end. Then the dead tree at the keep’s center split open and poured out blights by the dozen; they burned wave on wave in the doorways and spent the night behind a ring of bonfires, the ground scratching open all round.

Cut free of the roots pinning him to the wall, the Elder finally said what a curse is. Two trees of an age, one bound to life and one to death, and the curse is the link between them; fire will not touch it. Positive energy strips the death tree, ash from burnt blights fells the living one, and only then an axe. He named the place a possible house of the Muharib, the empire’s old portal-guards. Aldo said plainly that no three people can do it; the Elder answered that leading the work counts as doing it.

Who chose them

They rode out through a path the Elder withered for them, spending himself to nothing, and the razorleaf closed behind.

The road home turned over the other question. Aldo drank a flask of midnight milk out of Dwayne’s cache and spent an hour seven hundred years back: a Peren field under the whip, a rebel tortured over a name, and Vëné walking through mage-fire. It joined up with the mountain keep’s telling: Vëné, whom the Elder names as the one who chose them, and Telvanius, who wrote the encyclopedias and worked for the rebellion while he did it. Aldo, who has sold men the feeling of being chosen for a living, argued for suspicion, and they agreed to go on learning. Then he rigged a coin-flip and gave Mikhail the crown, told Kurvroc a lie the man bought without believing, and went home to a downtime that put Mikhail flat with pneumonia.