I. A Real Bed
Morning came to Vallaki without much light.
Mist lay over the streets, and a rooster called somewhere beyond the inn. For once, the party had slept indoors, behind doors and upon mattresses. Da’amir and PaK had shared one room. Validus and Haleria had taken the other.
PaK had found a real bed.
He seemed rather pleased with it.
Da’amir discovered that his roommate snored from more than one mouth. Haleria offered him spare cotton for his ears if they ever shared a room again.
There was every reason to expect they would.
Downstairs, a man the party had not yet met tended the Blue Water Inn. Urwin Martikov wore a waistcoat and a small tie; scars crossed his face. Danika, he explained, worked the later shifts. When Haleria asked where they might hire a cart for the winery, he pointed them toward the stockyard.
Breakfast consisted of hard cheese, eggs, biscuits, black tea, and instant coffee. Validus added sugar to his coffee, tasted it, and added more. Da’amir suggested that, at some point, the sugar might prevent him from tasting the drink at all.
There was still no milk.
Before that could become another problem, the large man in a purple and green jester’s costume beside the bar stood up. The fabric tore across his stomach.
Blinsky offered the cat a toy.
He displayed an empty hand, closed it, and produced the sound of a little bell. The bell itself appeared in Da’amir’s teacup. Da’amir picked it up and jingled it as he drank.
They finished breakfast and went to find the stockyard.
II. The Third Cart
The stockyard occupied a broad section of town filled with livestock, wagons, stacked timber, and the groan of a mill. Among the vehicles stood a painted carnival wagon belonging to Rictavio. Its proprietor initially assumed the party had come to pay its rent.
They wanted a cart of their own.
The Wizard of Wines was roughly twenty miles away, and they would need to haul its shipment back. Haleria paid 8 silver for a cart, received a key, and unlocked the chain pinning its wheel to the mud. It was due back by the next dawn. After that, the price would double.
She summoned a horse to pull it.
The party passed through Vallaki and out along the road toward the vineyard. Da’amir helped Validus watch for trouble. Haleria handled the mount; PaK listened.
They made better time with wheels beneath them.
III. A Child in the Woods
At a curve beside the forest, they found Szoldar firing his longbow from behind a rock. Green magic struck his cover and burst against it.
He was relieved to see them.
He had heard a child crying among the trees and gone to investigate, thinking it might be one of the children taken from Vallaki’s orphanage. Something with claws had seized him in the woods. He had escaped, but his attacker remained out of sight.
The party tried to find it. Szoldar fired into the trees and withdrew toward the cart. Da’amir used his ten-foot pole to vault upward for a view over the forest. Validus searched. Haleria kept her crossbow ready.
From above, the woods looked empty.
PaK went forward with his shield.
A hand came out of a tree as he passed.
“Oh, sweetheart. Whoever made you didn’t know when to stop. Granny can fix it.”
The green hag caught him. Haleria’s bolt struck her, but PaK was already changing. Where he had stood, the hag now held a toad.
She asked whether that felt better. Perhaps someone would kiss him now that he was prettier.
Validus brought cold iron to his whip. The hag noticed. She stepped into the trees, and the forest closed around her with PaK in her hand.
Da’amir could still see the road on the other side of the trees. There was no hut or visible trail where she had gone. When the party tried to enter, they came out facing Vallaki again.
PaK was gone.
Szoldar climbed aboard. With no path to follow through the woods, the others continued toward the winery.
IV. Five Flowers
Farther along the road, small purple flowers grew from thorny bushes.
Haleria had little interest in stopping after what had just happened. Da’amir wanted to look at them. He could not identify the plants, but he thought they were beautiful and picked five.
Validus opened his book on lycanthropes. Its pages now showed a drawing of the flowers: moonteeth orchids.
Left beneath moonlight, an orchid would glow. Eaten while glowing, it could protect a lycanthrope from moon frenzy for three days, preserving the eater’s faculties and preventing the change.
Da’amir kept the flowers.
The road descended toward a meadow. A sign directed them west to the vineyard. Rain began to fall across its tended rows.
V. The Vines Move
The Wizard of Wines stood beyond the vines, a two-story stone building with ivy on its walls and an open loading dock. A well, an outhouse, and a newer stable stood nearby.
Something rustled among the dead growth.
Shapes pulled themselves from the vineyard and came toward the cart. They were small creatures made of twisting wood, able to slip beneath the soil and erupt again where the party least wanted them.
Validus turned the edge of his whip into an axe head and struck at the creatures’ weakness. Da’amir brought out a torch, though an early throw struck a scarecrow rather than its intended target. Szoldar fired from behind the others. Haleria watched the earth as well as the creatures above it.
She spotted movement beneath Da’amir’s feet and warned him in time. The claws that rose from the ground missed him.
The party cut and burned its way through the attackers. One wounded creature burrowed away toward the winery. They put out the fire spreading through the vines and scarecrow with water from their canteens.
The building was still silent.
VI. Granny’s Children
Elsewhere, PaK could hear Validus through the trees.
The hag carried him into a small hut set in a bog among glowing flowers. Inside were alchemical supplies and a huge fleshwarp tending the stove.
She put PaK down and returned him to his own shape. She had collected the frightened toad’s urine in a jar.
Granny called him an ugly duckling and promised to fix him. She said she had rescued him from slavers, just as she had rescued his “cousin” Dingo. She showed PaK the enormous figure at the stove. Scars marked the places where Dingo’s extra mouths and tendrils had once been.
The hag spoke of a madhouse where, she claimed, a deranged cleric experimented on people like them. She insisted that PaK’s human companions would sell him there for coin.
PaK told her that he had been with his friends. They were looking for wine.
Granny said Dingo had thought he was among friends, too.
She gave PaK an oatmeal-raisin cookie and sent him out to fetch wood, with Dingo to accompany him. PaK was frightened. He went.
Dingo pointed out a towering tree. He needed no axe. One blow brought it crashing to the ground.
PaK praised the work and helped him chop the wood.
VII. The Open Dock
At the winery, barrels of wine already sat loaded on a wagon beside the open dock.
Da’amir proposed taking the shipment and leaving. They had come for wine, and wine was right there.
Haleria listened to the empty building. A vineyard this large should have had people working in it. Validus observed that bringing home one load would not restore future deliveries if something had driven everyone away.
They drank from the available wine and felt their wounds close. Then Haleria examined the entrance and sensed druidic magic beyond it.
They went inside.
Four enormous wooden vats dominated the room. Dead ravens had been pinned to the rafters with wooden spikes. Empty barrels bore the winery’s mark.
On the stairs, a druid wearing a crown of antlers poured green liquid into an open vat.
He turned toward them.
“Vallaki must die.”
VIII. Roots Underfoot
The druid rose above the floor as plants and fungi burst through the room. Roots caught at the intruders’ feet, slowing them whenever they tried to move through his ground.
Szoldar’s arrows struck at him. One stopped in front of the druid and broke apart, its wood reclaimed by the growth spreading across the room. Validus’s whip met bark hardening around the man’s body. The living armor made him difficult even to pick out for a clean blow.
Haleria tested what she could learn about him. He had no obvious weakness, but his Fortitude was the poorer defense. She turned to a spell that sapped his strength.
Validus made him afraid. Da’amir pressed into reach and used his feints and dirty fighting to leave openings. Szoldar found a snare among his gear and set it at the doorway behind the druid, where the man might step if he retreated.
The druid did not retreat.
He drove forward, keeping the roots alive around them. Bark enclosed him; when it burst away, fire went through the room. Haleria and Szoldar took the blast. Da’amir survived it and a blow from the druid’s staff. Validus escaped the fire and brought the man down with his whip.
Being on the floor did not stop the roots.
They rose in a line and pierced Szoldar and Validus. Szoldar’s body went limp among the vines. As they fed the druid, he stood again.
Validus tried to tend his own injuries and failed. Haleria let her mount go so she could give the fight her full attention. Her hymn caught the druid badly enough to leave him deafened.
The snare remained behind him, still untouched.
IX. The Ten-Foot Pole
Da’amir considered how to get the druid into it. Driving him backward with force was one possibility. A bolt tied to a rope was another.
Then there was the ten-foot pole he had carried since the road.
Da’amir moved between the vats, pulled out the pole, caught the snare, and dragged it beneath the druid’s feet. His timing was perfect.
The trap closed.
Szoldar had placed it. Da’amir had made it count.
The druid fell in two pieces.
For a moment, the winery was quiet.
X. What Had Burrowed Away
The wounded creature from the vineyard had survived.
It burst from beneath the floor and sent roots through the survivors. Da’amir and Haleria escaped the worst of it. Validus fell.
Haleria poured healing through the room and brought him back to his feet. Da’amir drew his torch and swung at the wooden thing, but it slipped away and clawed him.
Validus rose. Haleria raised her crossbow.
Her bolt struck for barely more than a scratch. It was enough. The creature came apart in a scatter of twigs.
They searched the druid. His belongings included a magically enhanced spear, a wooden shield, hide armor, and a scroll of revealing light. Validus took the spear, treated as a staff; Da’amir took the shield, and Haleria took the scroll.
They had won the room.
Szoldar had not survived it.
XI. A Name for a Life
Validus looked at the hunter’s body and felt something familiar: the same presence he had felt when Da’amir lay dead on the road.
A life might be restored.
This time, there was a name to cross out in exchange.
The names belonged to people the party had met and might call allies. Blinsky. Lucian. Van Richten. Yevgeny. Others. The power did not offer to take the druid or an enemy instead.
The choice was Validus’s.