Different Roads
Fern had barely finished explaining the Raven Queen’s warning when Behzad pointed two fingers at his chest.
If Fern or anyone else placed the Seven Tides beyond his reach, Behzad would kill them.
Fern insisted that he was trying to save Behzad’s life. The Council of Seasons would send its champions after anyone who attempted Requiem. Behzad heard something else: gods conspiring to undo his miracle in Dunedrift because they could not accept what he had accomplished.
He had saved thirty-eight people. Now the divine powers wanted to punish him for it.
The Rings of Creation would show him the way. If the gods chose to stand against him, they could send their champions. He would face them alone.
Behzad turned toward the cathedral doors, his enchanted cloak billowing behind him. He warned the others to stay away from the Gala. He intended to change Rosenhall there, and anyone who stood in his way would be cut down.
Then he was gone.
Fern looked to the others.
“What Gala?”
Across the sanctuary, Aywin Qinfina began to sweat.
Aywin claimed he had foreseen turmoil at the Gala. Many lives were in danger. Behzad intended to kill the Lords’ Alliance.
Nys knew enough about Aywin’s visions to question how he had suddenly foreseen so many deaths at once. Fern and Fable watched him struggle through an increasingly unconvincing explanation.
Finally, Aywin gave up.
“Promise you won’t be mad.”
Neither Fern nor Fable made that promise.
After the Taimavar interrogation the previous night, Aywin and Behzad had spoken privately. They were both angry, frightened, and desperate for a way to end the war. Aywin had suggested that the Gala would gather the Empire’s rulers beneath one roof. A single attack could eliminate the Lords’ Alliance before a rebellion ever reached the battlefield.
He hurried to explain that they had only been discussing possibilities. How was he supposed to know Behzad was a “crazy cultist” prepared to fight the gods themselves?
Fable wanted to know why Aywin had suggested it in the first place. Nys reminded him that the Gala would be protected by Rosenhall’s Sentinels. Fern asked what would happen after the rulers were dead. Why would the people accept a government installed by whoever had killed their leaders?
Aywin had believed Behzad could answer that question. If the other eligible nobles died, Lord Altassi might become the last royal claimant. Parliament would follow the constitution and place him on the throne.
That possibility had walked out of the cathedral moments earlier, promising to kill anyone who interfered with him.
Aywin admitted that perhaps he had not thought the plan all the way through.
Fern was hungry. Nys wanted to see Taurion home before curfew. Fable offered to go with her; there was still a killer loose in the city.
Aywin wondered aloud what the odds were that the Mincer would kill Nys twice.
Nys went pale. Fable glared at him.
Fern took the Prophet by the shoulders and steered him toward the Last Penny Hotel.
A City Closing Its Doors
The whistle sounded at Hammer and Hearth as the last workers prepared to leave. Some lived nearby. Others loaded wagons for the long journey back to Dunedrift or made for the boats crossing to the Cove.
The local workers gathered in small groups before heading home. No one wanted to walk alone.
Taurion waited with an empty lunch thermos. Nys noticed.
He admitted that he had stopped bringing lunch after she left. She used to pack one for him despite starting her guard patrol before he even woke. Nys shrugged. It had been part of her routine.
They walked beneath a pink evening sky while businesses lowered heavy shutters over their windows. Guards in full plate carried lanterns through the streets, warning everyone that curfew would begin in an hour.
Nys remembered a city that stayed awake long after sunset. Taurion told her how quickly that had changed. The Mincer had killed merchants, business owners, and a newly elected councilman whose body was found floating near the docks. Only then had the Counting House closed the gates at dusk and filled the streets with patrols.
“If it had been street rats,” Taurion said, “I doubt they would even lock the gates.”
Nys had been a guard when the Mincer first killed her. Walking those streets again, she asked Taurion what he remembered of their last evening together.
He had begged her not to go out. She had laughed at his worrying and left for her patrol.
Nys remembered reaching toward his face before she went.
Taurion did not.
The next time he heard her name, Detective Anderson was pounding on their door. Taurion had to tell the children their mother was dead. The family went to identify her body, only for Nys to stand up while they were there.
They had feared she was a revenant.
For a few days she remained with them, pale and white-haired, but distant. Then she told Taurion that whatever she had once felt for him and the children had died with her. She left the Cove soon afterward.
Nys stopped walking.
She remembered none of it.
Her last clear memory was the Mincer’s blade. The next was meeting Vulmer months later. She knew she had guided travelers across the Sapest during the intervening year, but the knowledge felt like a story someone had told her. She could not recall living it.
Taurion suggested it might be a consequence of her resurrection. He could not explain where the missing months had gone.
He was simply glad she had come back.
The Honest Hem
Nys’s childhood home stood above the Honest Hem, her mother Elaris’s clothing shop. Gala dresses filled the ground-floor windows. Unlike the enchanted displays at Devilish Silk, they stood perfectly still. Salt air had worn the paint from the sign outside.
Taurion warned Nys that the flat was not as comfortable as the house they once shared.
She reminded him that she had grown up there.
He flushed and unlocked the upstairs door.
The rooms were small and familiar: a hearth used for cooking, a breakfast nook crowded with the children’s belongings, and an old green couch magically extended into a bed over the coffee table. Nys and Taurion’s wedding portrait hung above the fire.
Elaris emerged from her bedroom and found her daughter half-hidden behind Taurion.
She had received Nys’s letter and already begun making her a dress for the Gala. She had kept the news from Taurion, hoping Nys could surprise him rather than risk breaking his heart if she never arrived. Now she pulled Nys into an embrace and immediately began fussing over how thin she looked.
Outside, Fable saw someone standing deep in an alley across the street.
Her darkvision caught only the figure’s outline and a glint of something reflective. It stopped moving when she noticed it. Fable drew her sword and watched until it slowly retreated out of sight.
She went upstairs, shut the apartment door, and locked it.
Nys saw her expression. Fable gave a small nod.
They stayed together.
Elaris welcomed Fable and immediately recognized her clothing as the work of her expensive competitor across the street. Fable was invited back to see what the Honest Hem could make for her. She was also invited to dinner.
Elaris had prepared her famous salmon and corn stew.
The pot contained plenty of corn, potatoes, carrots, and thick broth. Finding the salmon required considerably more effort. Taurion could barely conceal his dread. To Nys, one taste brought back childhood.
Fable quietly tried to add blood to her portion. Elaris caught her and accepted the hurried explanation that Fable had an iron deficiency. She promptly began worrying that the grandchildren needed more red meat.
Nys searched her mother’s pantry, found saffron and rice, and made Taurion a seafood risotto. His appetite returned at once.
For a little while, they were a family arguing about dinner.
The Man Vulmer Left Behind
At the Last Penny Hotel, Fern and Aywin had found a table, several drinks, and an audience of goblins and bugbears who paid them no particular attention.
Aywin had waited until “the girls were gone” to ask whether Fern thought his Gala idea was truly so terrible.
Fern understood the appeal of ending a war without marching armies across Rosenhall. But killing its rulers would not necessarily end the fighting. Someone would have to govern afterward, and the people would have to accept them.
Aywin thought the party had already earned that acceptance. They had helped Azmar, Wolford, and Dunedrift. They were going to catch the Mincer. Surely the Sapest would stand behind them by the time they reached the Gala.
And if the people did not love them, Aywin argued, they could fear them. He would even take responsibility for the killings himself. History could call him a tyrant if it meant no one had to send thousands of ordinary people into an open war.
Fern asked him to consider what might happen months later, when the next group decided to remove their new rulers by the same means.
Aywin demanded an alternative.
Fern suggested building support and learning what people in the Cove wanted. Aywin had heard too many versions of that answer. Every time he proposed a move, someone told him to wait, think, and gather more support. The conversation would end, and nothing would happen.
What would Vulmer have advised?
Aywin snapped his fingers and transformed into him.
In Vulmer’s voice, he delivered a measured strategy: secure the party’s influence across the Sapest, then extend it through Bradford and into the Crownlands. Rashly murdering the nobility would invite retaliation and destroy the government they hoped to build.
Fern agreed. It was good advice.
Aywin returned to his own form and dismissed it.
Vulmer had known how to navigate that kind of politics. Aywin did not. The Guildhall was gone, his fortune was nearly spent, and the Gala was only days away. How was he supposed to carry out Vulmer’s plan without him?
Fern told him they were still there.
Aywin wanted to believe him. He was no longer certain the party would ever agree to act.
Fern mentioned that recovering his memories as Corellon might give him a way to confront the Taimavar. Aywin seized on the possibility. If their god ordered them to stand down, perhaps the entire conflict could be resolved without bloodshed.
Fern could not promise they would listen. Their beliefs about him were bound up with everything he did not yet remember.
Aywin accused him of refusing to try because it might fail.
Eventually their conversation turned to Trinity. Aywin believed Fern’s efforts to reconcile them meant the party was beginning to sympathize with a Lords’ Alliance soldier over their own rebellion.
He described the day Trinity had been left behind. The Lords’ Alliance had moved against the orcs of the Raging Thunder Clan. Aywin intervened, the battlefield turned chaotic, and he saw Trinity on the ground beneath an enemy spear. He believed Trinity was dying.
Aywin could teleport Vulmer to safety, or run back under fire and risk losing them all.
He took Vulmer.
Fern did not claim he would have made a different choice. He also would not abandon the possibility that Trinity might still be willing to listen.
Aywin raised his empty tankard and called for another round.
By last call, both men could barely stand.
A goblin bumped into Aywin and spilled his drink. An exchange of insults became a shove. Aywin answered with a magical blow that sent the goblin across the room and through a table.
He declared that the blow had been nonlethal.
Fern congratulated him on his restraint just as the other patrons rose from their seats.
The Last Penny became a battlefield of broken chairs, spilled ale, flying platters, and increasingly bad decisions. Fern knocked one attacker into a table, seized a pie platter from a bugbear who had used it to block his fist, and cracked it across the creature’s head. Another caught Fern’s foot mid-kick and left him hopping on one leg while fists came from every direction.
Aywin shielded himself against the crowd, stunned a knot of goblins with a revelation they were in no condition to understand, and sent a bugbear through the window with a wave of his hand.
A patron ran for the stairs, shouting that he would fetch the guard.
He came flying back down them.
Bustomi Mithrilham followed, hammer in hand. The legendary dwarven wrestler had been walking the streets after curfew in the hope that the Mincer might try him. Hearing a bar fight, he could hardly refuse the invitation.
Bustomi embraced Aywin amid the wreckage. Then he smashed open a keg.
“Drinks are on me, brother!”
The Door Was Open
Across the city, Nys slept beside Taurion on the couch where they had once spent their early years together. Fable had taken the children’s room. Among their drawings and toys, she had found a card from Nys’s funeral, bearing a portrait of the woman she had been before the Mincer killed her.
Nys shifted in her trance and felt a draft.
The apartment door stood open.
A hooded figure watched her from the doorway.
Taurion woke to Nys’s alarm. The figure stepped inside and asked for the scabbard at her waist.
Nys demanded to know why.
“I am the hand of the Raven,” he said. He was delivering justice to the Cove, and he needed the knowledge held within the scabbard.
Then Nys saw the curved blade at his side.
“You put that thing in me, didn’t you?” she said
“You shouldn’t have been there.” he responded
“I was a guard doing my duty.” she answered
The Mincer walked toward her.
Nys drew her shortsword and struck him. Cold pain answered the wound, racing through her body like the memory of the blade that had killed her. Taurion threw himself from the couch, called for Fable, and filled the room with magical Darkness.
The Mincer’s scythe found Nys once. His following strikes cut through empty air.
Fable heard the fight from the children’s room and kicked straight through the wall.
Nys broke away from the blade, found the open doorway, and ran onto the balcony. She called for the guard with all the force her old training could summon.
“The Mincer has been spotted at the Honest Hem!”
Temple bells began to ring. Bootsteps sounded in the streets below.
Nys turned and fired an arrow into the Darkness. Taurion followed the sound of the struggle, drove his shoulder into the Mincer, and sent him crashing through the second-story window.
For an instant, the balcony was quiet.
Then the Mincer vanished from the street and appeared before Nys.
His scythe struck three times. She avoided the first blow and softened the second, but the third cut her down. He reached for the velvet scabbard.
Fable charged to throw him from the balcony. Her angle was perfect. The Mincer had nowhere to go.
At the last possible instant, he ducked as though fortune itself had shifted to spare him. Fable sailed over the railing, caught the outside wall, and climbed back up. She dropped beside Nys and drove healing magic into her.
Nys gasped awake.
The scabbard was in the Mincer’s hand.
She tried to sweep his legs from under him. Once again, he moved with impossible luck. His boot came down on the wound in her stomach, and Nys screamed.
Taurion stepped between them and struck him with a mason’s hammer.
The Mincer raised the scythe to Taurion’s throat.
“The Lady has not written your name in her book,” he said. “For that, you should be grateful.”
He vanished onto the roof and fled into the dark.
Taurion lowered the hammer and gathered Nys into his arms.
“I was there this time.”
Only then did she begin to sob.
Commander Neptune Ironbreaker arrived with the guard moments later. She found her former officer bleeding outside the home where she had grown up, the apartment door open, the children’s bedroom wall broken, and the man who had killed Nys once already gone into the night.