Session 4

Walking south through the day, the Schwarzwald seemed to be watching silently as they followed the trail the woodsman had set them on. With only the tramp of booted feet over the dry summer leaves for company, the brittle heat and dark, tree-lined path felt claustrophobic. Sebastien glanced at the blonde lump of misery marching alongside, and unslung his guitar. Warming up, the usual aching tunes were almost lost in the silence; but then he struck up again, recreating a ripple of cheerful music he’d almost forgotten how to play. Rafael, half an eye on Ariadne as she grimly kept up the pace in spite of the sword wound through her chest, flashed him a grateful look and started singing. His voice may have been trained to be heard over a storm rather than in a theatre, but the volume echoed through the trees, and as most of the others joined in, the woods started to feel less like an overheated trap.

Rafael almost laughed as he half danced up an old tree stump, a breeze flashing the leaves aside for long enough for a clean, fresh blaze of light to surround him like a halo. Ariadne’s veil turned up towards him, her head tilted as if she smiled – until she almost fell forward with a hiss, the scent of blood coppery in the hot air. The sea captain leapt down and with a gesture demanded she stand still and let him help. Strega or no, she’d be bandaged; though in deference to her veils, the white linen was wrapped over her black dress. The group settled back into near silence; though the pall of gloom was mostly shifted, save for Lena’s grim stalk onwards.

It wasn’t till after noon that the trees started to thin; and movement in the distance to one flank appeared to be wood gatherers. They sped up slightly – at least till Lena turned to glance at Sebastien, and then back to their other side; where something hung heavy and ominous from the trees in the westering sunlight. “What’s the danger in leaving the path?” he asked quietly, and her brief reply was nearly the first time she’d spoken that day. “Less now than if we wait till dusk.” All of them headed over to the shapeless mass, to find the half-expected corpse crucified between two trees. Euan, looking thoughtfully around them, nodded over to the woodsmen in the distance. “I’ll go ask around.”

Sebastien tilted the heavy, loose head, displaying the precise cut to the man’s throat. “Deliberate; you’d die of this slowly, bleeding out…” Rafael was more concerned with the man’s clothes – the heavy black leather of the Klippe, pockets emptied and blades all gone, except for a secreted hold-out dagger in the boot and, in the hem of the coat, a long, sharp coil of wire with loops at either end. “Sicario.” When the others looked at him in silent question, he looped it around a dead tree branch and tugged – and with disturbing ease, half the branch fell severed to the floor.

This body bore no tattoos, but still they took it down carefully, carrying it back towards the edge of the woods. Euan came back with one of the woodsmen and a lot of wood, which he happily lumbered alongside Heinrich on the trundle he’d been towed on. “We can go back to Konigsburg – they’re really helpful. And they really want that body out of the way; he said that the men told them not to take it down.”

The village was small; a scattering of wooden houses along the slightly wider road, with a stone Objectionist church at one end and a stone hall at the other, with a forge round the back. Sebastien, thoughtful after Rafael’s display, headed straight there and bargained for a bag of steel rings before going back to the inn and starting to stitch them around his collar. Lena took the body they’d carried up to the church and spoke with the priest there, who promised the man a burial on sanctified ground – and who also agreed to stand vigil. Just in case. Lena, eyes flicking to the dull grey blade the priest carried, asked to speak with him on her other business. The Kreuzritter call and response was accurate, and they agreed to meet at dawn. Euan took Heinrich – unconscious and badly wounded – along with his new friend to the local herbwife; who tutted and checked the battered giant over and nodded sharply. “I have some poultices which can help. They’ll cost you gold, though…” Euan, careless in his generosity, just nodded and slipped his purse out. “I’ll take everything you have to spare.”

At the inn, Rafael sat down with the landlord, an older man with a Highlands accent to his Eisen, whose voice rolled sonorously around the lamplit room as he told tale after tale. Rafael, entranced, bartered for a rich red Castillian wine and a Vesten brew which burnt the throat and warmed the heart; but paid more for the innkeeper’s stories than for the man’s drinks. “Have you ever thought about being on stage?” The man laughed, and shrugged. “In another life, that may have been, milord…”

As the sun set, the locals flocked to the inn, and Euan, back from taking care of Heinrich, was free to complete the deal he’d made the Sidhe to take the throne back. He picked out the brightest, blondest and boldest of the women in the room, and wandered beside her with two tankards of ale. “I thought of you, and I wrote this,” he started; and carried on with some of the most terrible love poetry known to man. Fortunately, his blushing audience was more enamoured of his glamour and his foreign charm than of his lyrics; and the rest of his night was spent in new and very enthusiastic company.

Ariadne, wound about in bandages and lashed by fate, stood in the room she’d been given upstairs in the inn, and slowly removed her veil and gloves. Looking at her naked fingers, she frowned absently, and carefully removed the top layer of her dresses. Under the swathes of black fabric, she wore a simple peasant skirt and blouse in dim colours. Taking a deep breath and pulling her hair about her face, she stepped outside to explore the village and feel a little taste of freedom before tomorrow, the day she’d have to meet her betrothed.

Back in the main room of the inn, Lena arrived, sniffed at the bottle of spirits and picked it up to leave; Sebastien’s offer of a glass of Castillian red let her slide into a chair and try to talk for a little while, before shrugging and taking the bottle of raw liquor upstairs with a quiet “Wake me for dawn, please.” Rafael leant back in his chair and listened to the exiled Avalonian’s tales with half an ear on the rest of the room; and when one of the local boys started boasting about having scored the foreign lass, his head turned to look around him. There was only one foreign lady in the village that he knew of, and she should be safe and secure upstairs in her room, behind her veils… He smiled absently and left the room; his urgency only visible once there were no witnesses. Out in the street, he paced carefully along, hiding the tension from the locals as he scanned around for a tiny dark-haired woman. It wasn’t till a flutter of skirts moved closer to the wood that he found her; staring at the stars with her face open and lost.

They talked late, the faint strains of Castillian guitar singing delicately into the darkness. Outside the trees, the Eisen night was warm and strangely peaceful; the calm before the summer storm. As Ariadne drifted back inside, her hair falling in her face mimicking the veil she didn’t know she hated, Sebastien nudged a chair in her direction. A regretful paper flower decorated it a moment later, and her shadow slid away.

The sky was barely grey the next day when Lena stumbled out of the inn, ducking her head in the horse trough and scrubbing at her face. She headed to the church and spoke quietly with the priest; and came back frowning. “He’s never heard of a priest called Gunther in the area. One more thing to ask about…” Everyone else except Euan and Heinrich were gathered to leave; the pair of giants having already sneaked out an hour before to avoid Euan’s overnight dalliance.

On the rolling plains southward shortly after they’d caught up with Euan, two men were spotted in the distance. Sebastien, glancing around, moved Rafael up to where he’d been walking, dropped his hat on the Vodacce’s head and vanished into the field to circle around behind them. Rafael glanced ahead, then carried on with Sebastien’s conversation while discreetly loosening his pistols. “Milady Ariadne; if any violence should start, please be so kind as to fall to the ground, preferably behind a bush.” As they approached the point the two men waited, one of them, a blond Castillian with a lilting accent to his Eisen, hailed them. “Good morning. Have you seen a Vodacce on your way through?” Rafael shrugged, “Only myself, I’m afraid.”  “Well, no matter. Good journey, sirs, ladies.”

Hidden by a dip in the road, Sebastien looked down on a troop of twenty men in Montaigne musketeer garb, counting out the irregularities. He started a fire of damp wood upwind, and as the smoke coiled around the horses, they jittered and shifted, bits jangling in the morning sun. It didn’t take much to spook them, and the troop started riding away from the smoke and into view of the oncoming travellers. Nineteen of the men were trying to soothe their mounts; one, right at the back, was settling his stolen tunic and sidling his newly acquired horse out of the way in the confusion. Sebastien, with a well-kept cavalry mount, swung back to join the rest of the group further down the road. “I left his previous owner with one boot off in the mud. Poor boy will get mocked by his mates for cracking his skull when he fell off – but they’re no Musketeers…”

At the gates to Hainzl, the guards sloppily crossed their pikes. “Business?” “Up at the keep.”  Lena’s answer was brusque. “Where from?” “Klippe Academy.”  “Carry on, gentles.”  The locals uncrossed their weapons, and leant back lazily. When asked about other graduates, they nodded; the Eastern Rose inn had seen seven of them staying the night before, and one going on south towards Klippe. The musketeers, they said, had been in town for a week, staying at the Eastern Rose. The guards recommended a different inn; the Three Owls, close to the keep.

The group separated after that; the Vodacce to the keep, to try to find sight or word of Antonio Vespucci, the Klippe to the Eastern Rose, for what news they could find, and Euan to gossip with the locals to find what the servants’ opinions were on their targets.

At the keep, Ariadne in servant’s garb with her face bare and Rafael uneasily stalking in similar gear beside her, the Vodacce pair slid through the corridors with practised discretion. In the distance, they saw a vision of blonde Montaigne perfection, dressed to the nines and fluttering beautifully through the halls. As they found their way to Vespucci’s chambers and those of the Eisenfurst, the rooms nearby were those of the Montaigne noblewoman – and as the opportunity was there, the locks were sadly ineffective in keeping them out. The trapped, poisoned chest hidden in the back of her rooms was barely more competent, Ariadne’s nimble fingers dancing around the metal of the keyhole. Inside were not the jewels and gold that might be expected, but instead paints and bottles of strange substances, clothes more suited to stealth or disguise, and pairs of tainted blades, poisoned and sharp.

In the kitchens, Euan found more people to chat to; his irrepressible smiles and boyish charm earning him a fair few new colleagues happy to tell him all about the news; how Antonio Vespucci ran the city for the Eisenfurst, how the Montaigne and the Klippe argued fiercely over following the Book, and how the Eisenfurst hadn’t been well for some time.

The Eastern Rose was a quality establishment, with a dining room as well as a bar. Sebastien and Lena settled at a table close to where the Montaigne were holding court, four of them lunching together. The one who seemed most central, a foppish boy, was identified as. Another, with the symbols of the Lightning Guard proud on his collar, sat beside him. A third, more Eisen-looking man, was uncomfortable in his uniform. The fourth, purest Montaigne face, was scowling into his wine glass as he listened to hold forth.

As Euan entered, Sebastien nodded him over to their table. The three of them caught each other up briefly on their researches and speculations; but were interrupted by the scowling Montaigne storming out to the bar. Euan took a few seconds, then rose to follow. “I’m probably the friendliest face of the three of us, after all.” As he slipped out, the two men from the road drifted in and settled at a table a little way away. Lena glanced over at them, and glowered in suspicion.

In the bar, Euan took two glasses of wine over to the Montaigne and started to ease him into conversation. His name was Jean Phillipe Sebastian Valroux de Matisse; and he was very obviously unhappy about his employers. He finished the drink and thanked Euan, then stood and, with a practiced half-bow, headed outside. Euan glanced over at the others, shrugged and stared back where the Valroux had gone with a question. A few nods of agreement from his colleagues, and he followed de Matisse out of the room, Sebastien and Rafael following. Ariadne took the opportunity to slip upstairs, and Lena sat back in her seat with narrowed eyes, considering the blond Castillian with a strange sing-song accent to his Eisen.

In the yard, de Matisse had stripped off his musketeer tabard and thrown it in the dirt; and his Eisen was loud enough and clear enough for half the street to hear. “The Montaigne are frauds; honourless dogs and cowards!” He was replied by the pounding of booted feet, and both the fop’s other henchmen, followed by a decent proportion of the twenty ‘musketeers’, appeared to take offence at his words.

Upstairs, Ariadne’s Eisen-style skirt and blouse and an impromptu pitcher gave the impression of a maid; and she walked nearly silently down the corridor, moving from door to door. The creak of one opening just ahead of her set her straight back to her disguise, and the priests in the room looked down at her disapprovingly. “What are you doing here?” She glanced further down the corridor, then in the best Eisen-accented Thean she could manage, replied carefully. “Fresh water was ordered, for the room at the end.” They waved her on, but watched her as she walked – and all she could do was knock, enter, leave the pitcher and turn back again.

In the bar, Lena stalked slowly to the two men from the road and stood over their table, glaring. The brunet glanced up with a sneer. “What do you want?” “To know what you are.”  The blond scowled up at her, then twitched his fingers with a sudden awareness. “What I am doesn’t matter – but you’re a witch!” The shouts from outside made his colleague start up and head for the yard, but Lena moved to block the blond. They wrestled with one another, knocking tankards flying, and managing only to delay and hobble each other till Ariadne came downstairs. She, judging the situation neatly, picked up a vase and knocked the stranger over the head before Lena’s wounds could start bleeding more. He collapsed, and the tiny Vodacce looked long-sufferingly at the Eisen Valkyrie and started shuffling her out of the door like a tug boat around a half-sinking frigate.

Outside, Euan and Sebastien moved to flank de Matisse, and Rafael cocked his first pair of pistols. Four against twenty weren’t fair odds; especially when three of the beleaguered minority were already wounded. Rafael’s pistols clicked empty, and he drew his sword warily. Euan, nearly overwhelmed by sheer weight of numbers, was barely holding off the Eisen. Sebastien’s wounds were getting the better of him as the Lightning Guard trapped him in a corner and lunged.

There was a moment of silence as the hidalgo collapsed, blood spilling dangerously around him.