The Steward's Hand

Edric had been making his case since before the sun was up — Farthingholt, the lullaby, the songbook, the thin thread leading back to whatever he'd freed at that roadside shrine — and the rest of the party was still turning the idea over, not yet sold on it, when they found themselves standing in the archive doorway and the door refused to open.

It was locked, and warded, and Edric found out both facts with his hand still on it. The light that answered was a physical thing, a flashbang packed into a rune, and for one stretched‑out moment he could see nothing but black and white while the others scrambled to make sense of what had just gone off in his face. Pinned to the door at his blind eye level was a note, and someone read it aloud for him while he stood there stumbling into walls: a confession, in Bardolph Vane's own careful hand.

Adventurers — by the time you read this you will know that Ilsabet is deceased, and your obligation to her, whatever it might have been, is no more. You may yet still find a life here in Karrowmoor in search of your own ends, but I implore you to leave; this is a cursed land that will grab hold and never let go. It is this hold that drives me now, but please understand that what I do, I do for my love, my family, and House Ostrend that has given me so much. I write to you, a group of strangers to me, because I cannot bear to give this news to anyone I have long known. Casimir will not understand, and for that my heart breaks. Do not seek me. I have seen to it that your good names will be cleared.

Makani didn't wait for the second reading. He put his shoulder into the reinforced oak until it started giving up splinters instead of hinges, and through the widening gap he caught Bardolph himself — a shape at a distance, mounting a horse at the stables and taking off down the one road out of Grayvault at a dead run. By the time the door finally gave, the steward was gone from sight, and the alarm bell overhead had already started ringing.

They split without discussing it much. Zara ran for the house, the letter in hand, and found her way up a staircase hung with old Ostrend portraits into a master bedroom where Casimir knelt at his grandmother's bedside, sobbing past the point of words. Ilsabet lay still where she'd been put down for the night — no wound, no struggle, just an old woman who looked, for all anyone could tell without asking harder questions, as though she'd simply not woken up. A cup of cold tea sat on the nightstand beside a jar of pale, unlabeled powder and a spoon. Zara looked closer at it while Gilli murmured a prayer she wasn't sure would do any good, and neither needed a healer's training to see the shape of it: the flower in that jar could put a frail old woman to sleep in a large enough dose, and a large enough dose could just as easily be the last sleep she ever had. On the desk beside the bed sat a second note in the same hand as the one on the door — I did this of my own free will and volition. Bardolph — an unusually terse and heartless confession from someone who had lived with these people for decades.

Casimir barely looked up when the rest of them arrived, Edric carried in over Makani's shoulder still blinking his sight back.

The boy had questions of his own, though — why, he kept asking, as if the answer might undo it — and the party had questions to trade for it. Did the initials R.A. mean anything to him? Someone influential, someone with sixty years of standing in the valley behind them? Casimir turned the letters over and came up empty — he'd never heard the name, but if it meant something, he wanted to know as badly as they did. His grandmother, he said, had been trying to arrange financing in her last days, something to do with buying back a debt, through a clearinghouse in Bellwater she'd used for years; the papers were still on her desk if they wanted them. The Cold Forge, up in the Valley of Kirn, meant less to him still — a long‑dead trade, he said, from a valley that used to be known for its smithing, nothing he could connect to a runaway steward. The carriage that had left Grayvault earlier that same day, the one whose driver Bardolph had clearly known, he could put no name to either — only that the man was from Marrowdeep, and that whatever business he'd had with Bardolph was concluded before anyone else thought to ask about it.

There was nothing left to do for Ilsabet that morning except promise Casimir an answer, and nothing left to do for Bardolph except go and get one. Orion had the Ostrend carriage readied in the stables, and it was there that a second ward turned up, this one worked into the harness rigging itself: the same blinding trap as the door, set to trigger the instant somebody hitched the horses in a hurry. He found it, unpicked it, and pronounced the old carriage sound underneath its faded paint — wide‑wheeled, built for uneven ground, with room enough inside to stretch out and a fold‑out hatch in the roof for anyone who wanted to stand and wave at whoever they passed. Nobody wanted to spend the time upgrading it. Zara took the fastest horse they had and rode ahead alone to look for tracks and slow Bardolph down if she could catch him; the rest followed as fast as two horses and an old carriage could carry them.

She wasn't the only one on that road that morning. A stranger had come up from the Cold Pass on his own, dropped by a trade caravan and walking the last stretch toward Grayvault in answer to the same letter that had brought the others — a broad‑shouldered man in very clean armor, a paladin sworn to Lathander, who introduced himself, entirely unprompted, as Marcus DeWanker, the Crimson Rose of the Order of the Lathander, and seemed genuinely wounded that nobody standing in the road had heard of him. The men blocking his path weren't interested in his credentials. A big, burly one did the talking — road's closed, best you turn back toward Millstead — and when Marcus produced his invitation and flapped it open without much patience, the man read it, crumpled it, and told him to go back to whatever temple he'd come from. His two companions squared their shoulders.

It was Zara, coming the other way down from the castle, who found the tracks first — fresh ones, leading off the road toward the trees, the kind of sign that meant whoever these men were, they hadn't come alone. She weighed going in after them and decided against it; not alone, not off the road, not with Bardolph's own trail still ahead of her and getting colder by the minute. She chose speed over caution, put her heels to the horse, and rode straight on toward whatever was waiting instead of around it.

It was the big one who stopped her first — closing a hand on her horse's bridle, checking her face against a list on a scrap of paper he carried, half convinced she was one of the names on it and openly puzzled that the rest of her party wasn't riding beside her. She used the moment he spent working it out to try to pull back — and that was when the rest of it sprang. A man with a pair of daggers came at her quick as lightning, quicker than anyone expected out of the rocks, and put both her and her horse down before she'd had the chance to do more than draw a blade of her own. The carriage caught up in the nick of time, the rest of the party spilling out of it, and it was Gilli who reached her first, healing hands closing the worst of it before Zara was even fully back on her feet. Marcus, for his part, spent the opening of the fight sauntering in and out of it, not obviously a combatant at all — until, deciding that someone looked like they could use a hero, he put a sword into the big man's back and slipped away again before anyone could return the favor. Once she was up, Zara traded the blade for her crossbow and started putting bolts into anyone who'd been standing near her when she went down, with the particular focus of someone settling a score.

Archers broke from the tree line and the outcroppings above the road in the same breath the fallen tree across the path revealed itself as no accident at all, and the fight that followed didn't have a clean center to it — it moved, cliff to road and back again, and refused to hold still long enough for anyone to call it won. Orion caught two of them flat‑footed with a spray of grease across the stone and sent Bruin in over the top while they scrambled for footing, then went to work on the ones who'd taken the high ground — a whip of thorns to drag one off his feet, a wrench of unseen force to send another over the edge of the rocks entirely.

Makani went the other way, straight up the rock face after an archer who thought the height made him safe, and came down on top of him hard enough to end the argument.

Bruin went down more than once under the weight of it — knocked flat, healed back up, knocked flat again — and every time Gilli's light found him he came up swinging. Edric, still worn thin from a night without real rest and with no spells left to call on, spent the fight standing on the carriage roof doing more damage with his mouth than most of the party managed with steel, needling one enemy after another into mistakes.

Marcus threw javelin after javelin with an accuracy nobody expected from a man they'd met barely an hour earlier, then threw himself into the melee with the particular enthusiasm of someone meeting his first real fight in a new country. It was Orion who finally put the big one down — the one who'd read Marcus's letter and torn it up — with a single vicious uppercut that dropped him where he stood, and it was a last, quiet burst of sacred flame that finished the last man still standing after that.

They searched the dead and found a hundred and forty gold between them, split without much ceremony. One man was still breathing when it was over, and Zara knelt over him with an arrow in hand, its point pressed to his throat, while the rest of the party gathered close enough to hear whatever he was about to say.