3.1 People with Ears

General Summary

Day 21

  We split up for the rest of the day. Hella and I practice magic and I show her how to feel her boundaries when she’s casting so that she doesn’t overwhelm herself again. Bran goes to find work from his guild. Rosalia goes to check in with some friends.   While Hella and I work, I have a flashback of my own time as an apprentice.  

I’m incredibly young, still wearing apprentice robes. I’m out in the wilderness somewhere with my Mistress and a group of other elves. There is companionable laughter around the campfire and there’s this charming older elf, mid-300’s. I’m standing there in my apprentice robes, dripping sweat, and he tosses a sword to me and says “my turn!” and instantly I’m defending myself against a rapid onslaught of continuous blows. The group of elves around the campfire are only half-paying attention. As I’m being attacked and frantically defending myself, my Mistress starts giving me instructions: “Recite the 5 rules of transmutation magic backwards.” She’s grilling me as I’m being physically tested. I can remember being trained like this before. In this cold, dark underground space, dressed like I would be for mid-summer, and Mistress is having me painstakingly prepare scrolls with very little light in the frigid cold. Meanwhile there’s another elf singing loudly, and telling interesting stories and generally being a pain. They’re bundled up for the cold. I have a dim sense of a group of people clustered around my Mistress, similar to how I had Dal and Lyssa and Thalien around me. But this was a time long, long ago, when nothing seemed as critical. All of these people, while I was put through torturous hard things, greeted me kindly afterwards. My lesson with the swordsman ended in a crushing bear hug. The musician handed me a bottle of mulled wine and told me to sit and get warm. All of these glimpses of my own apprenticeship tell me again that it was very hard, that I was always asked to do more than one thing. I was never enough to be good at just magic. I had to know so many other things.

  I reflect on how I’ve been treating Hella like a child, really. She seems so young, only 15 summers, but given the things I’m sure she’ll have to face, I should train her better. I resolve to devise a proper curriculum for her, or at least a set of principles to follow while we work.   We sit down to supper while waiting for Bran and Rosalia but are interrupted by a smartly-dressed elven woman. At home I would have identified her as a respectable merchant or tradesperson, not a noble. She is clearly looking for me, so I invite her to sit with us.   She speaks Elvish with a Frontier accent, not from a city or anywhere near the capital. Of course Alder told her of my presence here and she came to seek me out and offer some level of help. Her village of about 250 people was lost 20 years ago and back then I had sent soldiers to help the survivors escape. It wasn’t Alder’s unit, so I must have done this many times. How many of the elven survivors on this side of the mountains are here because I sent soldiers to protect them as they fled our homeland?   She tells me that people rarely come through the barrier mountains with the people they entered. She hasn’t heard of any high-ranking military or noble elves making it through. Her village crossed with some heavy cavalry members and they were all separated and never seen again. The elves here have their own terms for this: The Lost are people who have been separated - perhaps dead, enslaved, or simply...lost. Others are Seekers - the people who search out the Lost and reunite them with their families. Some Seekers began by seeking their own families, but others are fate-spinners who are looking for anyone at all.   The woman, Dreah, is a tailor by trade. She’s found a living here making clothes that humans sell and pass off as their own, though the elven techniques are clear to my eyes. She has been here for 20 years and in that time has seen only one or two hundred elves pass through. Elves here sometimes gather about once a moon, and some live in chosen families on the farms. It sounds bearable.   She offers to outfit my new party and gives me a human-style dress in soft grey fabric, as well as an address for Bran and Rosalia to find her at. She is surprised when I tell her that I have a human fate-spinner in my group. Again, I’m grateful for Thalien’s foresight in training him. What else could I expect from a fate-spinner?   And lastly, she asks if I might know of her younger sister - Trephala. She was a mage in the army. I think this is probably a common style of question amongst our people here.   Eventually she leaves and Bran returns, sweaty and grimy. He’s found guild work in exchange for the use of a forge, but it’s apprentice-work and he’s clearly frustrated and upset. We plan to sneak me in tomorrow night to transmute the hot metal into workable steel.   When Rosalia finally stumbles in, she’s in fine form! She’s been drinking and playing cards with some old guild friends and has won 60 silver pieces, only half of which need to be paid to the guild to get them off her back.

• Despite her...inebriated state, she was working to gather information for us while playing cards.
• The Lord Mayor has been opening large, standing contracts with the mercenaries’ guild
• There are more mercenaries in town than there should be
• They’re being used as teachers and officers in an army that is separate from the town watch
• The Lord Mayor may be planning on taking control of the freestanding villages and becoming a Lord Earl instead
• One of the card players is an accomplished tracker
• 4 days South of Ipth, in the far hills, there are abandoned ruins
• “People with ears” are there - soldiers
• At this point, Rosalia slurred that “people with elves are called ‘ears’”, which seems like a ripe opportunity for me to tease her later
• Morten the money lender thinks that the Lord Mayor is going to fight the elves
• This will be a sort of fake crisis that he uses to break away from the First Lord in Haven

Elven soldiers sound like something I’m responsible for, whether I know it or not.   Before we sleep, I send my magic searching for Lyssa. Again, I feel that she is so very far away, but this time I slip into her eyes for a moment.   She is seated at a campfire with her bow and an animal roasting over the fire. Around her are four dwarves.   Briefly, I sense that she is aware of me, then the magic fades and I’m left drained and exhausted. I shouldn’t do that again unless I know I’m safe...I hope Lyssa of all people will know and trust me enough to know that I’ll find her as soon as I am able.  

Day 22

In the morning Rosalia is infuriatingly chipper. Can all mercenaries recover from their drunkenness this quickly?   She sheepishly tells me that as much as she was gathering intelligence yesterday, she was also being worked for information. Her “friends” had heard about the commotion we caused at the gates and were asking her lots of questions about it. She doesn’t remember saying anything incriminating, but it still may get back to the Lord Mayor. If nothing else, we need to be careful. I should think of what I’ll have to say if we are detained. I can’t imagine a militant Lord Mayor would be happy about an elven Dread Lady appearing in his city. I wouldn’t have been happy about it either.   With the rest of the day, Rosalia shows Hella and me around the city

• It’s very busy, with lots of oxen and mules
• There are people in refined clothing being pulled by rickshaws, often drawn by dwarves
• The craftsmanship of human clothing and structures is so temporary - they wouldn’t last more than a decade
• The markers of wealth and class are in the sheer volume of decoration, not in the quality of worksmanship
• The city seems unplanned and expansionist, like there was no long-term thought to its growth
• There is no space for nature here, except in closed-off personal gardens

  Eventually we make our way to Dreah’s shop, which is in a well-to-do neighbourhood and looks sort of gaudy. The shopkeeper is not happy to see an elf when we enter. He takes us into the back to see Dreah and tells me to use the side entrance if I come again. Unsurprising.   After giving Rosalia’s measurements, we return to the inn and prepare for our nighttime adventure, on which Hella will accompany Bran and myself. At the forge we transform buckets of slack and steel bloom into usable ingots, managing to make 4 ingots of human steel and 2 elven. It takes us all evening to purify the metal and drag it back to our rooms, but at least Bran will have a starting point to forge, and no one will steal our metal.