The Manifest

Two days left on Quill's deadline, and the party spread out across the city. By the end of them they had a name in a ledger, a commission into the deep forest, and an answer from Quill.

Mira will not call it fey

Kaelen took the bowls, and the thing the water had shown him, to Mira Thornweaver. He expected her to confirm it was fey. She did the opposite. Fey, she said, should not be able to work like this inside the walls — that is the whole point of the Pact — and the fact that something is working like this may mean it is not fey at all. "I would caution you from just assuming that it's fey," she told him. "Perhaps the fact that it is moving in that way means it's something else." She sent him to people who would know better than a Ranger: the Archive, and the Grove.

Fishing with the Archdruid

Kaelen went to the Grove and found the Archdruid fishing a little spring, and sat down beside him without a word until the old druid offered him a second pole. They fished a while. Then:

"You want to hear a secret? I'm a terrible fisherman." "What makes that funny — I could just tell the fish to get on the hook."

When Kaelen finally laid the matter out — the bowls, the baker, his own reflection — the Archdruid gave him the piece the party had been missing. He did not know any fey who did this particular thing. But pools of water and mirrors and reflective surfaces can, in some magics, be used for scrying — or as gateways. For scrying, he said, ask the followers of Ioun at the Archive; they are good at that sort of divination. But if the bowls and mirrors were being set out to be built into a doorway — a gate — then the priests of Avandra, who deal in travel and passage, would be the ones to ask. The party had the mechanism now. They had not yet said the obvious next sentence out loud.

"I'm not a hero"

Quill spent the deadline in the Archive, cold and thorned and miserable, until Elara found him and would not let it go. She said he had frightened three of her archivists out of the room. He gave her the whole of it:

"I'm not a hero, and everyone is asking me to be."

He counted the party off to her like a bill of complaints — a bard who will do whatever it takes to get what she wants, a ranger with hardly any experience and the confidence to lead strangers, a thief along for the ride, a cleric, and himself, "an amnesiac fairy who knows how to make some glittering lights" and forgets everything he is every two years. Why, he demanded, did a whole city's worth of people keep handing their problems to six strangers?

Elara did not coddle him. "The reward for work well done," she said, "is more work." Then she told him how the people who hand out dangerous jobs actually choose: who is the best I have, and who is available. He could fly; almost no one in the city could. He knew more than nine in ten people in Westmarch. And she confessed something of her own — that when she had used the Tess-Kydra on the Warren Stone, she had never used it before and was not at all sure what she was doing. "Could have made a crater where the Lodge used to be." Everyone is frightened, she told him. That is not a reason to stop. Then she sent him outside to do something he actually liked, for once.

Davian's dreams

Drakov was summoned to lunch with Davian Goldscale, ostensibly to give a report on the trip to Harrow Keep, and it turned into a confession. Had Drakov, the High Priest asked, been having strange dreams? Because he had. For weeks — starting, as near as he could tell, around the time the fog came — Davian had dreamed of a darkness spreading out of the forest, of chains crumbling and corroding, and of something chained and imprisoned that is beginning to stir. He did not know what it meant. He knew that in the dream, the darkness always came from the same place: the trees. He had asked Drakov because Drakov was the one person he knew who had lately been in the forest.

A note with an eight on it

A boy ran up to Thalia in the halfling quarter, handed her a folded note sealed with wax stamped as a number 8, and bolted before she could tip him. Inside: Vane & Daughters, Scale Street, tomorrow at the 11th hour. Ask for the yard, not the office. Bring the half-elf.

Thalia knew the seal — or knew the story of it. In her Watch days she had heard of the Eighth District: a thieves' guild nobody could ever find, widely held to be a myth, that supposedly marked itself with an eight. Westmarch has seven districts. She found Kaelen — the half-elf the note wanted — and the two of them agreed to walk into it.

Vane & Daughters

Scale Street runs down by the waterfront in Duke's Bridge, and Vane & Daughters is a carter's yard: drivers, stables, carts out of use. It was easy enough to see what "ask for the yard, not the office" meant, and easy enough to spot the man by the woodpile paring his nails who never quite stopped watching them. The shed they were pointed to had a door far too sturdy for a shed, built of good timber deliberately scuffed to look like throwaway wood.

Inside, at a desk with a ledger on it, sat a businesslike woman in her late thirties who named them before they named themselves. "The halfling and the half-elf. Please have a seat. My name is Petra. Do close the door."

She was plain about it. The party's questions had brushed up against the Eighth District's business, and the District would rather answer them than have them keep digging. What she was at liberty to say, for free, was this: certain parties had purchased from the District the use of a route through the Undercroft, for a period of a few weeks before the incident in the Warrens. Who those parties were, she did not know herself — but the answer could be bought. All Thalia had to do was put her name in the Manifest.

The Manifest is the ledger. Putting your name in it opens an account with the Eighth District, and "the ledgers," Petra said, "must always be balanced." She was courteous and entirely without threat, except for one line: if the party's questions started to cost the District, the sergeants might have to deal with them. Kaelen, quietly, spent ten minutes reading her surface thoughts, and found nothing but a woman wishing these two would make up their minds so she could get back to her abacus.

Thalia would not sign. She did not like what an account with a criminal guild might do to people also trying to work for the Duke. Kaelen signed it — his name into the Manifest, a request logged for the identities of everyone who bought passage under the Warrens before the fog. Petra told him to come back in two days, when the quartermaster would have set a price. So the party now knows the sabotage was paid for — a route bought, a paper trail kept — and the names are for sale, at a cost Kaelen has already begun to pay by being on the books at all.

The dragon who came to watch

Percival turned up in Westmarch. Quill, flying low over the streets and pointedly avoiding the Warrens, was buzzed by the little faerie dragon, who had followed the party in out of the forest for no better reason than that "watching you and your friends is very fun." He trailed Quill to the Sleepy Dragon, made a scene, and — coaxed onto a stool by Lyrique in front of the whole house — told a story. It was an old kind of tale, a fey maiden who fell in love with a human prince; it went the way those tales go, everything coming apart around the two of them, and it ended with the human dead and the maiden cast out of her fey court. The room loved it. Percival thought his own story was better than Lyrique's.

The commission, and Quill's answer

Back at the red-doored house, Ambrose Grieve poured the wine and delivered the Duke's first real order. The bowl the party had recovered — the vessel that mends the stones — was made in Celindara, the lost elven city, and the Duke is unwilling to let the safety of Westmarch rest on a single artifact. He wants the party to go into the deep Thornwood, find Celindara, and bring back either a second vessel or the method of making one. Celindara was a place of great learning; there may be more there than the bowl. There is no firm deadline, only as soon as you can — and one large problem the Duke left to them: nobody knows where Celindara is. The Archive might. The Grove might.

And Sera found Quill. She is barred from the forest now — her father has decided the sole heir cannot go gallivanting off — and so she asked him not as the Duke's daughter but as his friend. What the city needs most, she told him, is not another sword; it is knowledge, and losing it is exactly what has put the wards in danger. She would help him with his curse either way, she said, because he is her friend. Quill made her say it plainly — that she, his friend, was asking.

"If it is my friend asking… courage, bravery or not, I have an obligation. Then I will help you."

Quill is in. The party is whole for the first time since the Duke made his offer — and its next road runs back into the forest, to a city no living map can find.