B3Ch85-An epic tale (Patreon)

The goblin chieftain’s hall still stank of whatever the goblins had been burning in the hearth, but it had a roof and a long table. Hale had taken it for his headquarters within an hour of the walls falling. By the time he walked into the new TOC, Hale had a map of the next valley pinned flat to the table with four goblin daggers and was glaring at it.

“Fourth Corps took their town,” Hale said without looking up. “Garrick’s report came in an hour ago. Light losses. The adventurers found two warg dens in the hills before the assault went in and cleared them out.” He tapped the map. “Which leaves this. Roughly six more fortified positions between us and the city, and Second Corps still can’t get the wargs off their back.”

Harold leaned over the map. “And the prisoners?”

“Seven hundred, give or take. Mostly the old ones and the young ones, and the women who didn’t pick up a spear.” Hale’s jaw worked. “I’ll need a decision on them before we march. I’m not dragging seven hundred goblins through the mountains, and I’m not leaving them behind to tell the city what we look like.”

“Almost rather they did fight. I don’t like the options we have for them.”

Hale grunted and went back to the map. Harold was reaching for the coffee somebody had left on the corner of the table when the door opened behind him.

Brennig came in first, and two lords came in behind him.

Harold set the cup down and straightened, and the hall went quiet.

Brennig walked the length of the table without a word and stopped across from Harold. He reached into a sack slung at his hip, took out something wrapped in a filthy piece of goblin hide, and set it on the table between them. Then he took his hand away and stood there.

Harold didn’t look at it, and he looked at the three of them instead.

They looked beaten to hell. Brennig’s coat was gone, and his mail was split open along one side, and the pink scar along his jaw had pulled tight and pale across a fresh bruise underneath it. His eyes had sunk back into his head. Caswell stood behind his left shoulder, and for once the Australian wasn’t grinning or talking. His knuckles were split, and one arm hung stiffly at his side, wrapped from elbow to wrist. Urial stood a pace behind them both in what was left of his troll-hide cloak, half burned away, the system plate beneath it dented. He looked meek compared to the two Lords by his side.

Then Harold looked down at the relic, unwrapped it, and picked it up.

It was a crude little idol of gray stone, no taller than his hand, heavier than it looked. Some ancient goblin had carved it with more care than skill, a squat figure with a wide grinning mouth, and too many arms. They came out of its sides in pairs all the way down its body, each one holding a tiny tool: a hammer, a pick, a trowel, a saw, rope, a spade. Its thumbs had been worn smooth by a thousand years of hands.

Relics couldn't be identified until they were placed in a reliquary. But Harold knew this one.

He set it back down on the hide and let out a long, slow sigh.

“I’m glad to see you three made it back,” he said. “Losses?”

Brennig reached into his mail and pulled out a half-smoked cigar. He lit it from the lamp on the table and took a long pull. Then, without being asked, he passed it back over his shoulder to Caswell.

Caswell took it with his good hand. “Thanks, mate,” he muttered, and put it in his mouth.

“You were right,” Brennig said. His accent came through thicker than usual. “It was rooms. A series of chambers, one after another, going down. Each one only let in as many of us as there were defenders inside it. Five in the first. Then ten. Then twenty.” He let the smoke out slowly. “It doubled and kept doubling. Four hundred in the last.”

“And a time limit,” Caswell said around the cigar.

“And a time limit.” Brennig’s mouth thinned. “I tried to game it. Halfway down, we were hurting, so I called a long rest in one of the cleared rooms.” He shook his head once. “The whole thing reset. Every room. We had to start again from the top.” He looked straight at Harold. “Without your potions we couldn’t have done it. Not the second time. It’s scary to think of that guardian continually gaining strength as the years here go on. The berserkers were already a match for our best tier 3s in there. Our mana blades were the only thing that let us fight equally.”

Harold grunted. “There’s a reason nobody claimed that relic until much later, last time.” He looked down at the idol on the hide. “Having it claimed this early will be a great boon. With this one, we hold every relic from the lower Blackjaws down, as soon as Fitch claims the one by his new town at the dungeon.”

“We lost about fifty people claiming it, Count Harold,” Brennig said it quietly. “I hope it was worth it.”

Harold met his eyes and held them. But then his shoulders collapsed, and he pulled out the chair beside him and sat down heavily at the table, among Hale’s maps and daggers.

“As much as I hate saying it,” he said, “it was worth it.”

He reached out and set one finger on the idol’s head.

“This is a relic of the goblin race.” He turned the little figure so its many arms caught the lamplight. “This relic buffs unskilled labor so that it learns to be skilled labor faster.” He looked up at the three of them. “Now we can train skilled labor about 15 to 20 percent quicker. Imagine training new smiths 15% quicker. Or new alchemists. This relic is a game changer for our budding empire.”Brennig took the cigar back from Caswell without looking and nodded slowly to himself, the smoke curling up past his scar.

“So,” he said. “Easy enough to say the relic is priceless, then.”

Harold smiled grimly. “Here we are.”

“Here we are.”

“You know the choice.” Harold kept his finger on the idol’s head. “You can keep it. Seat it in your own reliquary, and your territory and the lords sworn to you get the bonus. Or you give it to me, and every one of you gets it. Every territory under my banner, yours included.”

“Oi, mate—” Caswell started.

Brennig lifted a hand without turning around, and Caswell shut his mouth.

“The way I see it,” Brennig said, “you’ve been climbing the boards up here. You should have plenty of authority to spend. And plenty of loot, since you’ve been back in your old hunting grounds.” He took a slow pull on the cigar. “I saw your guard when I rode in. System arms and armor on all of them.”

Harold’s smile stayed grim. At the far end of the table, Adeline had looked up from her folio, and she was quietly moving down the bench toward him, ready to cut in.

“I want you to promote Caswell to Baron,” Brennig said. “He’s earned it.”

“Done,” Harold said.

Brennig held his hand up again. “I’m not finished. You’ll have picked up more tokens up here. He gets a mana body token as well.” He tapped ash off the cigar onto the goblin chieftain’s floor. “As for me, I want something a little more particular.”

Harold dragged a gloved hand down his face. “All right. What can I do for you? The mana body token’s easy.”

“Oi. Urial too.” Caswell jerked his good thumb back over his shoulder at the big man. “He’s actually not bad in a fight. He should get something.”

Urial went red to the ears behind his half-burned cloak.

Harold chuckled roughly. “Anything for the people who actually fought with you,” he said dryly. “What about the other three hundred down there?”

Brennig waved the cigar. “I’ll reward them myself.”

“Generous of you.”

“I’m a generous man.” Brennig settled his weight. “I want an estate in the Basin, near your new grove of dryads, to grow tobacco.” He looked at Harold through the smoke. “The way I see it, you’ll be stacking every growth modifier you can find on that grove for your herbs. I want my estate inside it.”

Harold rubbed his jaw thoughtfully.

Behind him, Hale snorted. “So you just happen to want a piece of land next to a grove full of scantily clad women. To grow tobacco.”

Brennig took a long pull and blew the smoke straight into the Colonel’s face.

“Yep,” he said, and he smiled grimly, and Harold saw he was missing a tooth on that side that he hadn’t been missing a week ago.

Harold looked at Adeline. She had sat down beside him by then, and her face looked thoughtful. Then she looked at him and waggled one hand, very slightly, below the edge of the table.

He understood her well enough.

“I can do that,” Harold said. “But I’ll cut some of the gold I’d set aside for your reward. And you’ll pay a portion of every crop you grow there as tax.”

Brennig’s eyes narrowed. “How much tax?”

Under the table, Adeline laid five fingers flat on Harold’s knee.

“Ten percent the first 3 years, then down to five percent,” Harold said.

Brennig turned that over for a long moment, smoking.

“Done,” he said.

Harold picked up the idol and wrapped it back in the goblin hide. He reached into the pouch at his belt and came out with two small tokens, each glowing faintly blue, and slid them across the table. Brennig picked up one and turned it over. Then he flipped it back over his shoulder without looking.

Urial caught it against his chest with both hands and looked down at it, his mouth hanging open.

Harold came around the end of the table.

Caswell straightened up when he saw him coming. For the first time since he’d walked in, some of the old cockiness came back into his face.

The air in the hall pressed down on everyone in it. Caswell’s knees bent under it, and he held. Harold felt the System take it and bind to Caswell. He didnt even bother with the ceremony this time. 

Caswell Doyle, Lord of the Silverfin Pass, has been raised to the rank of Baron. 

Harold let go and caught himself on the edge of the table. Caswell stood there beaming.

“Well,” Caswell said finally, hoarse. “Shit.”

“Congratulations, Baron,” Brennig said, and handed him back the cigar.

Harold straightened and turned to Hale. The idol sat heavy in his hand.

“I need to send a package back to the Landing,” he said. “Get a detail from the knights and my guard to escort it to wherever an eagle can pick it up and fly it home.”

Adeline caught his hand as they came out of the TOC and laced her fingers through his, and she didn’t let go.

The night had come down hard and clear over the plateau. Fires were burning all along the old goblin walls, and the smoke went straight up in the cold. Somewhere down the ramp a legionary was singing badly, and somebody else was telling him to shut his mouth. Adeline steered Harold away from the noise toward the far edge of the plateau, where a big fire was going in the lee of a collapsed goblin longhouse. Past it he could see his own tent and a handful of others pitched in a tight ring. A section of his guard stood around the ring facing outward with their backs to the fire, and they weren’t letting anyone through who didn’t belong there.

The Redcaps were simply around them as they walked, though he hadn’t heard them fall in.

By the time they reached the fire, he could smell dinner.

Everyone was already eating. Sarah sat on a log with her bowl in her lap and her boots stretched toward the coals, and Robert, Theo and Jace were crammed onto the log beside her. Sokha sat on Theo’s other side with her helm at her feet and her shoulder tucked against his. Cassian had a stone a little apart from the rest, with his spear across his knees. Ren and Corwin had the big pot. Balfiel sat on an upturned crate with his back to the longhouse wall and a bowl he was pretending he wasn’t enjoying.

Jampa sat cross-legged on the bare ground a little back from the fire, his robes pooled around him and his arms bare to the cold, cradling a cup of something steaming in both hands. He had his eyes half closed and a small, contented smile on his face, and he looked as warm as anyone there.

Mira was on her feet in the middle of it all, telling a story with both hands.

“—so it’s got Theo’s shield, right? In its feet! And it’s flying up the cliff with it, and it’s screaming, and Theo’s screaming—”

“I was not screaming,” Theo said.

“You were screaming so much.”

“You would have been too!”

“In your underwear,” Robert said, and nearly choked on his stew.

“It was the middle of the night! It came out of nowhere while I was peeing!”

“So Theo climbs the cliff after it!” Mira flung both arms up. “No boots, no pants, holding his dagger in his teeth like a pirate! And he gets all the way to the top—”

“Forty-meter climb,” Jace said, without opening his eyes.

“—forty meters! And he gets to the nest, and there’s the harpy, sitting on his shield like it’s a throne, and it looks at him.” Mira put her hands on her hips and turned her nose up at the fire, a harpy on its throne. “And it lays an egg. Right there on his shield. While looking him straight in the eye.”

Sarah lost it. She folded over her bowl with her shoulders shaking, and Sokha laughed so hard she had to hide her face against Theo’s arm. Robert was wheezing. Even Cassian started to laugh.

From his crate against the longhouse wall, Balfiel gave a short, dry chuckle and immediately looked annoyed at himself for it.

“I kept the egg,” Theo said with dignity. “And we ate the dam thing. Stupid harpies.”

 “I made an omelet,” Robert said.

“A gift from the mountain,” Jampa said serenely. “The harpy was generous. Most guests are not given breakfast.”

“It tried to kill me and stole my shield,” Theo said.

“And then it fed you.” Jampa sipped from his cup. “Karma is a strange cook.”

Harold smiled at the story. He was glad Sarah had been able to get out and find the adventurers she wanted.

Elroy and Jenkins sat on a log on the far side of the fire, and neither of them was alone.

Elroy had his arm around an adventurer in a quilted gambeson with a hatchet at her belt and a lot of curly red hair escaping her hood. She was laughing at Mira’s story with her head on his shoulder. Beside them, Jenkins sat with a tall, dark-haired archer, her bow propped against the log and her knee pressed to his, and she was feeding him bites of bread off her own plate while he grinned like an idiot.

Harold slowly turned his head and looked at Adeline.

What the fuuu—

Adeline looked back at him, and then she put her hand over her mouth and laughed until her eyes watered.

“Poetry club,” she whispered.

“It worked?”

“Apparently, my love. It worked.”

Robert had turned on the log to look at Balfiel, still grinning. “What about you, Master Balfiel? You must have some amazing stories of great adventurers. You’ve been alive for, what? A thousand years?”

“More,” Balfiel said.

“Then you’ve got to have something.”

The old elf went quiet. He looked down into his bowl for a moment, and the firelight moved on his face.

“Bah,” he said. “I have no great stories.”

Across the fire, Jampa’s eyes had opened. He looked at the old elf for a long moment over the rim of his cup, his head tilted towards him, seeing or listening to something only he could see.

“That is not true, I think,” he said gently. “I think you have many great stories.” 

Balfiel looked at him. “I told you not to do that to me.”

Harold walked into the circle, took a bowl from Ren, filled it from the pot, and sat down on the end of Sarah’s log.

“What about that old story you told me once?” he said, around a mouthful of stew. “The one about the three races. That was an epic tale.”

Balfiel’s head came up, and he glowered at Harold across the fire, angry.

Then something went out of him, and his shoulders came down.

“I didn’t know I’d told you that,” he said quietly. “That is not a happy story. What do you remember of it?”

“A story of three races?” Mira had dropped back onto her log beside Jace, and she leaned forward with her elbows on her knees. “I thought we were at war with all the other races here on Gravesend? How can there be a story about races together?”

Balfiel turned his glower on her. “Things are rarely as simple as that, girl.”

Mira beamed back at him, entirely unbothered. “You try really hard to be grumpy, don’t you? But you’ve got a big heart.”

Balfiel pointed his spoon at her. His aura jabbed out of the end of it and caught her square in the forehead.

“Ow!” Mira yelped and clapped both hands over her head.

The whole circle burst out laughing again. Sarah was wiping her eyes, and Jenkins said something to the redhead that made her snort. Harold laughed with them. Then, when it died down, he set his bowl on his knee and looked into the fire.

“All right,” he said. “I’ll tell it the way he told me.”

Harold set his bowl down on the log beside him.

“First thing you need to know,” he said, “is that he was very, very drunk.”

Balfiel made a low noise into his cup.

“This was my second year in the valley. We’d just finished making some type of wine he’d been trying to create for a decade, and he got out a cask of wine he’d been saving since before I was born. Somewhere near the bottom of it, he told me this story.” Harold looked across the fire at the old elf. “He called it The Hammer, the Leaf, and the Lantern.”

“Ooh, I can tell this is going to be good,” Mira said, and pulled her knees up to her chin.

“Long ago, in a cycle nobody bothers to count anymore, the dwarves, the elves and the humans went to war.”

“Humans?” Sokha said. “Before us?”

“Before us,” Harold said. “There have been other cycles. Other humans. It’s how the Kingdom of Alnor and Harthi and Prium got here.” He went on before anyone could ask a follow-up to that lore drop. “Nobody remembers how the war started. Some insult at a border, some dead Lord, a mountain both sides wanted. It doesn’t matter. By the time this story starts, it's been going on for generations. The dwarves collapsed whole mountains onto elven armies. The elves burned the human cities to the ground and salted the fields so nothing would grow. The humans broke into the holds and killed everyone inside. Every one of them had a reason, as that’s just how it happens here.”

The fire popped. Nobody said anything.

“And the system rewards war here,” Harold said. “That’s the part he kept talking about. The system rewards you for killing the other races with reputation and merits. Every lord who led one rose on the boards, and every rank bought merits, and the merits bought power from the system store. Lords on all three sides wanted the wars. They had no reason to stop.”

“Like the Concord, like you are now,” Theo said quietly.

“A lot like the Concord and a lot like I am now, yes.” Harold nodded. “And all that time, the monsters grew. Every year the three races spent on each other, the wild places spread and the deep things climbed higher. Nobody was watching.”

“So who’s the Hammer?” Robert asked.

“Durrak.” Harold held up a finger. “A dwarven king. Stubborn as granite and loud as a forge, a smith before he was ever a king, and he never really stopped being one.”

“The Leaf was Aelindor. An elven prince.” Harold held up a second finger. “Proud, brilliant, and an alchemist.”

“Every elf in every story is so proud, and they're always an archer. Why can't we get one wielding an axe?” Jace said from his bedroll.

“Silence,” Balfiel said, without looking at him.

Jace’s mouth snapped shut, and Sarah snorted.

“And the Lantern,” Harold said, and held up a third, “was Mara. A human general, the youngest of the three by a long way. He said she fought like a summer storm and laughed the whole time she did it.” He glanced at his sister. “He said nobody could stay angry around her for long.”

Across the fire, Balfiel’s hands had gone still around his cup.

“So. There’s a fortress,” Harold went on. “In a pass somewhere. It’s the only road through the mountains for a hundred kilometers, and all three armies want it. One spring they all reach it at once, and it turns into the worst battle of the war. Three armies in one pass, all killing each other, for days.” He turned his bowl in his hands. “By the end, all three commanders had been cut off from their own people on the same broken stretch of the mountain. Durrak, Aelindor and Mara. Their armies were gone, either dead or pulled back. And they did what you’d expect.”

“They fought,” Cassian said.

“They fought. Durrak had Mara down in the rocks with his hammer raised over her head, and Aelindor had an arrow drawn on Durrak’s back from across the slope.” Harold paused. “And then the monsters came.”

“Oh no, I knew it.” Mira breathed.

“Everything in that pass had been eating for three days. Every scavenger and every predator in those mountains had smelled the blood. They came up out of the rocks after whoever was left alive.” He leaned forward a little. “Durrak never brought the hammer down. He turned around and put it into the first monster that came at them. Aelindor let his arrow go, and it went past Durrak’s ear and into the throat of something that was about to tear his back open. And Mara got up off the ground with a broken arm and her sword in the other hand… and she laughed.”

“Of course she did,” Sarah said softly.

“They fought back to back until morning. When the sun came up, they were the only three things alive on that slope. Durrak had a flask of liquor. They shared it together, the leaders of three races for the first time having a drink together.” Harold smiled faintly. At his elbow, Adeline’s hand found his knee.

“That should have been the end of it. They should have gone back to their armies and killed each other in the next battle.” Harold shook his head. “But they didn’t. They met again under a truce flag, a season later, just to talk. Then again. Then every year, for years. They drank, argued, and traded secrets. Durrak taught Aelindor to work stone. Aelindor taught Mara alchemy. And Mara taught the two of them how to laugh and enjoy life.”

“Aww,” said Elroy’s redhead, and Elroy patted her hand.

“And somewhere along the way,” Harold said, “Aelindor and Mara fell in love.”

Mira made a small sound and covered her mouth with both hands.

“They saw something nobody else did,” Harold went on. “The three of them sat together season after season and watched the war go on. They watched the monsters grow while everybody was busy killing each other, and they understood what it meant. If the war didn’t stop, it would only end one way. The three races would grind each other down to nothing, and the monsters would walk in and take the world.”

“So they stopped it,” Robert said.

“So they stopped it.” Harold nodded slowly. “The three of them were the most powerful peoples of their races. Durrak took it to the clans. Aelindor took it to the elven courts. Mara took it to the human lords. And all the Lords who wanted the wars resisted. It took years. But in the end, the three of them dragged their own people into a peace.”

“How do you hold a peace like that?” Sokha asked. “With all those people still wanting war?”

“An oath.” Harold looked into the fire. “The three of them made everyone swear it on Gravesend. Then they swore to each other. If one called, the other two would come every time, whatever it cost. If anybody came for one of them, they came for all three.”

Cassian said quietly. “It is impossible to bind an entire race like that, though.”

Harold was quiet for a moment. “For a while, it held. The roads opened, and the cities started to grow back. Trade and prosperity thrived between the races, and most importantly, the monsters were driven back. Aelindor and Mara had children. The first children to happen between a human and an elf.”

“Aww,” Mira cooed.

“But the men who’d lost their wars never forgave them,” Harold said. “No more battles meant no more reputation. No more climbing the boards. No more merits. They had to go out and explore the world. Delve the deep places. A lot of very powerful people wanted more power, and war was easier.”

Nobody was eating anymore.

“One night, one of the other dwarven clans opened Durrak’s gates.”

Theo let out a breath. “Course they did.”

“They led his enemies straight into his hold while he slept. And Durrak woke up to his halls burning. With his people dying all around him, he did the only thing he could think of. He called for his friends.”

The fire cracked loudly, and Mira flinched.

“Aelindor never came,” Harold said quietly. “He had been betrayed by his own people too.”

“And Mara?” Sarah’s voice was very small.

“Mara never came either.” He looked at the coals. “She’d been betrayed as well. You see, the races conspired to restart the wars. Gravesend does not like people remaining stagnant.”

Nobody said anything for a long time. Jenkins’s archer had her hand pressed flat against her chest. Jampa sat with his cup held in both hands, his eyes closed.

“Durrak’s clan was torn apart,” Harold said. “Most of them died in that hold. The survivors were scattered. Mara was killed. And Aelindor was exiled by his own people, and he never went home again.”

He picked his bowl back up. The stew had gone cold, and he didn’t eat it.

“Balfiel said nothing was ever the same after that,” he said. “The three races never came together again. They fractured. They started declining, a little at a time, cycle after cycle.” He turned the cold bowl in his hands. “That’s all I know. He passed out on the table right about there, and when I asked him about it the next morning, he threw a pestle at my head and told me he’d never told me any such thing.”

A few people laughed, small and uncertain.

Mira wiped her eyes on her sleeve. “But what happened at the end? What happened to their children?”

“I don’t know,” Harold said honestly. “He never told me.”

The fire burned. Out past the circle, somewhere down on the plateau, the bad singer had finally quit.

From his crate against the longhouse wall, without looking up from his cup, Balfiel spoke.

“That isn’t how it ends.”

Balfiel didn’t look up from his cup.

“Aelindor did not stay chained,” he said. “It took him eleven days to break free of the people who had betrayed him.” He turned the cup slowly in his hands and took a long sip. “When he got out, he left a great many of those dead behind him. He gathered every loyal soul he could find, and he rode for Durrak’s hold as fast as he could. Word hadn’t reached him yet of Mara.”

He was quiet a moment.

“He was too late. The hold was ash. The halls were full of dwarven dead, and Durrak was not among them.”

“He got out?” Robert said.

“Someone got his people out. His heir. A son, or a nephew; the tellings disagree.” Balfiel’s thumb moved along the rim of the cup. “The survivors fled, and the heir kept them moving. North, then east, then down into the deep roads, then up again. And Aelindor followed. For years. Every time he came close, they were already gone. The heir had learned the hard way that anyone could be an enemy, so he trusted no one. Not even the one who was looking for him.” His mouth tightened. “One by one, Aelindor’s people grew tired. Their families were waiting. Their homes needed them. And one by one, he sent them home, until there was no one left searching but him.”

The fire popped. Nobody moved.

“And he found them, in the end.” Balfiel’s voice had gotten emotionless. “In a valley under a mountain that belonged to another clan of dwarves. The survivors had gone to that clan’s gate and asked for shelter, as dwarves have always asked of their family.” He set the cup down on his knee. “That clan took them in, and then they killed every one of them. The old ones. The children. All of them. They buried them under their own floors and plastered over the stone so no one would ever know. And they swore to the rest of the Dawi that they had never seen a refugee.”

Mira’s hand had gone over her mouth.

“Aelindor didn’t trust them, though. He went searching. He snuck into their hold and found the floor,” Balfiel said slowly. “Then, in his rage. He killed that clan. All of them, down to the last.”

The silence at the fire had changed. Somewhere at the next fire over, the Gemheart guardians had stopped passing their skin.

“And Mara’s children?” Sarah asked. It came out barely above a whisper. “Please tell me something good happened to her children.”

For the first time, Balfiel looked up from the fire. He looked at Sarah for a long moment.

“Mara’s people loved her,” he said. “When she fell, a handful of them got her children out. They smuggled them across half the world, and they raised them. And as the children grew, people gathered around them. People who remembered what their mother had stood for. They grew into a faction, and the faction grew into a kingdom.” His face changed into something resembling contentment. “They carved it out of nothing on a great island in the inland sea, and that family still rules there today. Their descendants are humans, mostly. Long-lived. A little stronger than most. The blood runs thin now, but it runs.”

Mira let out a long, shaky breath. “Oh, thank goodness.”

“Did he ever go and see them?” Sarah asked. “Aelindor?”

Balfiel looked back down into his cup.

“He watched them,” he said. “From a distance, now and again, over the centuries. He watched them crowned. He watched them marry. He watched his grandchildren born.” He was quiet for a long moment. “He never worked up the courage to tell them who he was. He told himself it was to keep them safe. It wasn’t; he just couldn't stand in front of Mara’s children and tell them he had failed.” He was staring into the fire blankly now. “They lived a thousand years, near enough. And then they died, and he watched that too.”

“Oh, that’s so sad,” Mira said, and her voice cracked, and she leaned hard into Jace’s side.

“That’s awful.” Sarah was wiping at her face with the heel of her hand. “He never even talked to them? Not once?”

“Not after they were smuggled out, no. He watched over them from afar as best he was able, but they died thinking their father never came for them.”

“What happened to him after?” Robert asked.

“He never went home to the elves. Not truly.” Balfiel shrugged. “He found a forgotten corner of the mountains and hid himself away in it, and he stayed there until the world forgot he had ever lived. And then he died.”

He lifted the cup, drank, and set it back on his knee. “I told you it is not a happy tale. Most don’t know the story anymore. It was a long, long time ago.”

“Of all the ways to lose a person,” he said to no one in particular, “death is the kindest.”

For a while, nobody said anything. The fire burned down a little, and Ren leaned over and fed it a split piece of goblin roof beam without a word.

“It’s a cruel world,” Theo said finally, softly. “This place. It takes, and it takes.”

Cassian stared into the fire, his hand gripping his spear. “But some of what he lost wasn’t the world’s doing. People did that to him.” 

Across the fire, Jampa had opened his eyes.

He was looking at Balfiel. At the old elf sitting on his crate against the longhouse wall with his cup on his knee. He looked at him for a long time with that still, listening tilt of his head, and then he spoke very gently.

“That is a very sad ending, for a man who died,” Jampa said. “But I do not think he is finished.” He paused. “I think that he is just waking up from a long, long nap.”

Balfiel didn’t answer him.

He stood up off his crate, slowly, like a man much older than he looked. He took his cup and walked out of the firelight into the dark toward the edge of the plateau where he disappeared. Nobody stopped him.Adeline patted his knee. Then she leaned over, kissed him on the cheek, and put her mouth to his ear.

“If you don’t go after him right now,” she whispered, “I’m never making you that coffee the way you like it again.”

Harold turned his head and looked at her in horror.

She looked back at him, perfectly serene.

He looked out past the edge of the firelight into the dark, where Balfiel had gone. Then he let out a long sigh, nodded, and got up off the log. He set his cold bowl down on it, stepped over Jace’s legs, and walked quickly out into the dark after the old elf.

Sarah watched her brother’s back until the dark swallowed it.

Nobody at the fire said anything for a while. Ren fed it another piece of roof beam. Jenkins’s archer had wound her fingers through his. Out on the plateau, someone was hammering, slow and steady.

Robert was the one who finally broke it.

“That story,” he said quietly. He was looking at the place where Balfiel’s crate sat empty against the longhouse wall. “It wasn’t about some random elf, was it?” He swallowed. “That was his story. Master Balfiel’s.”

Nobody answered him.

Then someone shifted on the edge of the light, and Sarah turned. Dorgan had come over from the next fire at some point, and the other two Gemheart guardians with him. They stood just past the reach of the firelight with their helms under their arms. Sarah couldn’t have said how long they had been standing there.

Tears were running down Dorgan’s face into his beard. He didn’t wipe them away.

“Aye, lad,” he said. His voice was rough. “It was.”

He stepped forward into the light.

“We always knew there was an elf hunting us. Every dwarf of the Gemheart knew it. We told our children the elf was coming.” His jaw worked. “We thought he hunted us to finish what was started. We thought he’d betrayed us. We thought he was the one who never came.” He shook his head slowly. Beside him, the younger of the two guardians had turned his face away from the fire. The older one stood with his jaw clenched so hard Sarah could see the muscle jump.

“We ran, and we hid,” Dorgan said. “Year on year. We were on the road to our cousins when the Count found us.” He looked out into the dark, searching for Harold. “He saved us from what happened in that story.”

The older guardian set his hand on Dorgan’s shoulder.

“When blood calls—” he said, low and rough.

“—kin come,” Dorgan answered.

The younger guardian turned back to the fire, and his voice cracked as he thumped his chest. “Kin come.”