The Duke's Bargain

This is before the recordings, and is set down from the notes.

Kaelen took them out of the forest fast and straight, and they were back inside the walls by nightfall with the Tess-Kydra and a letter that unmade three hundred years of history.

Where the relic goes

The first argument was about who got to hold it. Lyrique wanted the Tess-Kydra taken to Lord Brennan. Quill and Sera wanted it in the Archive, where Elara could use it, and Sera said plainly that she did not trust her uncle. The Archive won. They split up to report: Quill and Sera to Elara, Lyrique to Brennan, Kaelen to the Rangers.

Elara took the relic and a copy of Harrow's letter and went quiet over it. What disturbed her was not only that the war had been lost — it was that no record of the treaty survives at all. For an event that reshaped the kingdom, the Archive should be thick with it. Instead there was a hole where the history should be, and holes like that are made, not found. Quill stayed to study the Tess-Kydra under her roof.

Kaelen brought Mira Thornweaver the heraldry from the chest, and it stopped her cold. It had belonged to Edran Holloway — her own mentor, a High Ranger who walked into the Thornwood years ago and never came back. She told Kaelen to keep it and carry the man's legacy. Then Kaelen told her what he had started to believe: that Lord Brennan was behind the city's troubles. She did not tell him he was wrong. She told him to watch Brennan, quietly, and say nothing — and with that Kaelen was inside an investigation that had been running longer than he knew.

Back in the city the two amulets from the keep were identified at last. One was named a protective charm — an Amulet of the Unbroken Mind — and Lyrique attuned to it and has worn it ever since. The other would not give up its purpose.

The stone mended

Charging the Tess-Kydra took days. Every spellcaster the city could spare, Quill among them, poured a little power into the vessel morning after morning until it was full — and then the party carried it down into the Warrens and discharged it into the mended stone.

It worked. The crack closed, the light steadied, and the grey fog that had drowned the Warrens for weeks thinned and drifted apart and was gone. The city put out its own version of events on the broadsheets — something dangerous under the Warrens had broken and leaked, and the Duke's people had fixed it — true up to a point, and vague after that. The job the party had been hired for was, on paper, done.

The audience

Then the Duke sent for them.

Duke Aldric Westmarch received them in a small room, sat them at a table, thanked them for their service — and, when Quill asked one question too many about the stone, sent his guards out of the room. What he told them next is passed down by the rulers of Westmarch by word of mouth alone, never written, and he had decided the party needed to hear it.

• The Greenwood Pact is not a peace treaty. It is a prison.
• The forest is a living thing — ancient, hostile, and awake — that rose against humanity and made war, and could not be beaten. To survive, the city tricked the forest's own powers into a binding oath.
• Seven ward stones hold it: six ringed around the city, and one beneath the Citadel that only the Duke can reach. They suppress the forest's magic, and they are bound by the oaths of both sides.
• The stones are being sabotaged — deliberately, from inside the city — and the Duke does not know by whom. He does not believe Westmarch would survive another war if they fail.
• He trusts none of the noble factions or the temples with this. He asked the party to be his clandestine strike team: guard the stones, recover what was lost to the forest, and answer to him alone.

Everything the party had pieced together in a month — the sabotage, the seven stones, the lie under the Pact — the Duke confirmed in an afternoon, and added the one word none of them had dared use out loud: prison.

Quill's price

Quill did not take it well. Somewhere in the anger he told the whole table the thing he had been carrying alone: every two years his memory is wiped clean. He wakes with no past and a letter from a self he cannot remember, and his silver hair goes a little more crimson each time. He has perhaps six months left before the next erasure.

The Duke heard him out and made an offer: serve, and he would turn the resources of the city to curing the curse. Quill did not answer. He asked for three days, and walked out.