The Grand Hall of the Ildanach Highlord’s Manor wasn’t up any sets of stairs but was rather straight ahead from the main door. It was grander, less disciplinary in form, used often for banquets and the like, but the general tone of the place when we entered rather near to noon was somber and annoyed, more in line for the Negotiation or Judgment Halls.

There were fourteen people in the room before we entered– all five of the military Generals, including Chirone who looked like he had already given up, and Garret, who was brooding in the corner. There were also all five of the major Guildmasters, Dahl, Keeper Ialdi, the Highlord himself, and, of course, his new fine lady, slim and graceful, yet concealed with a dark navy cloak that included a hood. Something about her seemed vaguely familiar, but I dismissed it before it could distract me. Maybe I had just seen her wandering about the city once, or as a customer in a shop I frequented. I had more important concerns.

Ennis offered me a smile that was a mixture of strained and relieved when we walked into the hall. A majority of them were seated, but Ennis was not, instead leaning against the back of his chair, set up against the massive table that took up a large swath of the room. Rufais was seated at the head, of course, and we entered at the foot, letting him glare down at us more efficiently.

“Who are these you’ve brought?” Berne asked, or demanded, really, as we entered. Berne was the head of the Lumbering Guild; his house oversaw the processing of the raw trees and redwood branches into something stackable, usable, sellable. He was a stout man, portly, not terribly tall, and not the brightest either from what I had heard, but I’d had little interaction with the man myself.

Ennis had predicted that he would stand against me, but that had been before Callian’s death, before Rufais had completely lost all sanity.

“This is Captain Wolfe, Lord Guildmaster,” I said, voice unduly bright. “Surely you’ve heard of him, or the two of you have met.”

“Lord Berne,” Hector greeted, following my lead and offering a slight bow.

Berne made an irritated noise and proceeded to vocalize some annoyed and even offended sounds, yet none of them were words.

“I believe Guildmaster Berne was referring to your female companions,” Durnin said smoothly, and I was reminded of the day he had hinted at my allegiance to Lord Ennis seemingly so long ago. He was still a terribly slimy human being, and my hatred of him burned deep for how he had sold out the Turyn Temple.

“Why don’t you ask Dahl?” I said, maintaining the same chipperness in my tone despite the fact that I was glaring daggers at the Guildmaster.

Durnin arched an eyebrow at my response and turned to look at the High Inquisitor, standing in the shadows towards the back of the room.

Dahl took a step forward, a little further into the light, and my expression slipped for a moment, letting the surprise show on my face before I masked it. The High Inquisitor did not look well; there was a strange glint in his icy blue eyes that was suddenly reminiscent of Rufais. His face was paler than normal, drawn and gaunt; he looked as though he had lost several pounds just in the few days since I had seen him last, before I had departed to fight the Aeron Army. His lips curled in a sneer, no longer carrying himself with the calm superiority that had defined him previously.

Keric’s words echoed in my mind combined with the demon’s warning of his soul being fractured. What exactly had the Inquisitor done to himself?

I hoped it was causing him pain, whatever it was.

“Sryes,” Dahl said, practically hissing her name before he visibly drew himself up, composed himself on the spot as clearly as though he had picked up a physical mask such as mine and plastered it over his face. “Crusader. What are you doing with this heretic?”

“What were you doing with Keric Thurien?” she rebounded, and I felt a strange pride in how calm she sounded, even if I’d had essentially no hand in it.

Anger flashed plainly across Dahl’s face– vicious, violent anger, the kind that I would see in a man’s eyes before he tried to murder me on the spot, so abrupt and shocking that I could see Jes almost take an unconscious step back, though she held her ground at the last minute.

The anger vanished from his face, but it still seethed in his eyes, was plain in the way that he clenched his fist and his teeth. “Where is Keric?”

“The prisons,” I answered with a polite smile, intervening. “We discovered, see, that you had mistakenly blamed my friend here, Raesh Erendi, for the crimes that Thurien was instead committing. I’m sure you had no knowledge of his actions, though, of course.”

Dahl was shaking slightly now, and though I knew this was to our definite advantage when it came to getting him to confess, I couldn’t help but feel disappointed. Dahl had been a worthy adversary; he had successfully cornered me between himself and Rufais and made my life miserable. He had taken the lives of my team. And yet now he was a devolving husk of himself who couldn’t even maintain composure in front of the city’s highest officials. It felt like an insult to the memory of those whose lives he had taken that he wouldn’t even be fully mentally present to experience his own downfall.

“Is that so?” he asked through clenched teeth.

“Indeed,” I said mildly. “Speaking of which, we’ve both been cleared of all charges. Isn’t that right, Keeper?” I looked at Tiana. The last time I had laid eyes upon her, she had cowered away from my gaze, refused to stand up for me upon my wrongful arrest.

This time she did not. She met first my gaze and then that of everyone’s in the room who dared to challenge her, head held firm and raised high. “That is absolutely correct, Captain. And it’s good to have you back.”

I smiled and, as her eyes met mine again, we exchanged slight nods. 

“I made no such order,” Rufais growled, speaking for the first time since our arrival, though I was fairly certain his eyes hadn’t left me once, as though he were attempting to set me on fire with only his gaze.

“No, you didn’t,” Ialdi confirmed, straightening up even more somehow. “I did, as the duly appointed Keeper of Ildanach, whose job it is to uphold truth and justice– even and especially when those things conflict with your wishes, Highlord.”

Rufais finally ripped his eyes from me in order to turn his incendiary glare upon Ialdi, who didn’t flinch.

And then the woman in the blue cloak, his fiance, leaned down and gently whispered something in his ear, carding fingers through his hair.

I tried not to be disgusted at the fact that this woman was probably younger than his son had been. That wasn’t so uncommon a practice, particularly when an heir was needed.

Rufais did not stop glaring, but he did lean back in his chair and stop speaking, which I figured was progress.

Once again, something about her movements struck me as familiar, and this time I squinted at the woman a little harder. Did I know her?

“Yes, well,” Berne said, clearing his throat, clearly not entirely sure what to make of all of this. “You know why we’ve summoned you here today, I assume, Captain.”

“You want me to save all of your lives and the city, again, despite your general lack of gratitude and disregard for my wellbeing outside of when I’m saving all of your lives and the city. Yeah, I figured.” Now that the actual negotiations had started, I went and pulled out the chair at the foot of the table, plopped down in it, and put my booted feet up on the polished redwood carelessly. “Since all of you wise and important people are all here gathered in one room, I have a question to pose in return. Why?”

There was a moment of silence.

“Perhaps you could expound on your query, Captain?” Lady Faolain said. I liked her, so much as I liked any of the slimy politicians around the table– Ennis excluded, of course. She liked me to an extent, or at least thought my attitude amusing and my abilities useful. She was the one who had suggested my public flogging, which made me wonder if she didn’t have a sadistic streak in her or two, but that was besides the point at the moment.

“Sure,” I said, flashing her a smile that was a tinge more genuine than the rest of my act. “Why should I possibly save you and your city again when I just got back from a week of first being sentenced to fight this same Khane-cursed army by myself, then being thrown in prison upon my return, and then having my team also thrown in prison and through… let’s call them exceptional circumstances,” I looked directly at Dahl, “ending up dead. Why should I possibly help any of you when all I have been shown from this city has been contempt?”

“Because there are innocent lives on the line,” Ennis said quietly, looking at me with those same pleading eyes that he’d shown me at the house just yesterday.

My team hadn’t been dead yet then, though. “I fail to see why that is my problem, when you are the ones who dug yourself into this mess and then proceeded to alienate the singular card you had up your sleeve,” I responded icily, looking Ennis directly in the eyes as I said it.

Several of them looked very taken back, including Ennis. I could see Whelan and Faolin’s surprise, the slight betrayal as they looked at Ennis. He had promised them that I would be on board, that I would agree to their terms and Rufais would sign the charter and everything would be fine.

“They just want your head,” Durnin pointed out, picking a grape from a fruit spread at the center of the table. “If the card we have up our sleeve refuses to play, then perhaps other measures will be necessary.”

“I look forward to you trying to take down the man who slaughtered a six hundred man army single handedly,” Hector drawled. “I’ll watch; it should be fun.”

I hid a smile. He always had my back, and he knew it sounded a lot better coming from him than me.

Durnin’s expression went through a number of stages very quickly, and it was highly amusing to watch, mimicked in some form or another by everyone in the room. They started with disbelief and moved into shock, and then quickly on from there to horror and fear.

Berne got stuck on disbelief and just refused to move past that, which wasn’t entirely unexpected.

Faolin looked intrigued rather than afraid when she was done, prompting me to smirk at her.

Dahl looked suspicious, perhaps making some correct assumptions as a result of his expanded knowledge of the world compared to the other inhabitants of the room, but it didn’t really matter what he thought. He was effectively no longer important for this conversation.

“That’s absurd,” Berne said, and a couple of the generals that I hadn’t worked so closely with seemed to mirror the sentiment from a purely practical mentality. “No human could do that.”

“If you’d like to appoint me as one of your Chantry gods, I wouldn’t object, although I feel like that could cause some religious issues considering the mask and all,” I said casually.

One of the Generals– Mistros, I thought his name was– made a sound of rage, probably the only actually religious man in the room aside from Jesne, who was a bit understandably conflicted at the moment. Everyone else just rolled their eyes or didn’t respond to my incredibly blasphemous and arrogant comment.

“It’s not possible,” another General spoke up, Barnabas. I liked this one, though had never had the pleasure of fighting with him exactly. I’d only been assigned to his group one time, and he’d been occupied with running half of Chirone’s battalion during that period. It had been a strange week. “Always appreciated you, Captains, thought you both did good work, considered you honest men. But six hundred men against one simply isn’t possible.”

“If you’d like, we can take a quick trip out to the Aldras river, and I can show you the evidence otherwise,” Hector said levelly. Even though he himself had never seen it, there was no hint of doubt or hesitation. “I’ve fought with him for close to five years, General. You learn pretty quick that he’s the exception to the rule.”

“Why don’t we ask his superiors then?” Whelan said. Guildmaster Whelan was a small and frail specimen of a man who looked older than he was with nearly pure white hair. He tended to wear cloaks and hoods as his lack of weight would regularly leave him feeling cold. His house headed the Carpentry Guild and were probably responsible for building the very table at which we sat. I hadn’t interacted with the man at all prior to this, but Ennis had said he would likely be on my side of things, and he seemed a relatively close ally of Faolin.

Whelan turned to Garret and Chirone. “What say the two of you?”

“I’ve never seen a man do what he’s claiming,” Chirone said, shrugging. And then he met my eyes. “But I’ve also seen that particular man do several things no man should be able to do.”

Garret looked at the ground for a long moment, and then, finally, he looked up at me– and then he looked at Hector. He’d always liked Hector considerably more than me; besides, Hector was one of his actual men. They’d known one another better. He looked at Hector for a very long moment, and then he scuffed his boots against the floor and turned his eyes back down to it as well. “I don’t know about any of this business at Aldras,” he said gruffly before looking up at Whelan. “But those boys don’t lie. Hector’s a man of honor, and the other one, well. I don’t know if he could lie to save his life.”

“It’s true,” Ennis verified quietly. “It’s one of the reasons I liked him. He never lies.”

“He’s also never said he killed the men,” Faolin pointed out, looking at me, though, of course, I had told Ennis as much. They didn’t know that. “So what say you on your own behalf, Captain Kazere?”

“It might not have been exactly six hundred. How many would you have sent in a siege force to Ildanach? I was rounding. But I did slaughter them all, and I did do it without another human hand for aid. Rufais is the one who sent me out there to either succeed or die. Why don’t you ask him how big he thinks the army was? because he sure thought it would be enough to end me.”

Rufais started laughing, quiet, but less unhinged than the last time he had done this. It was more sad this time. “Oh, I did. I sent him to die against an army, four hundred, five hundred, six hundred men– I thought it might have been a thousand if Tirnaog were there too! And he just came back, sauntering back into my city like the demon spawn he is.”

“Tirnaog didn’t fight,” I said. “Got them to hold off. So, yeah, six hundred sounds about right.”

“Tirnaog seems to be refusing to fight again until your head is clearly visible on a pike, detached from your body,” Faolain pointed out. “It’s obviously not in our best interests in any form for us to capitulate to them. We understand this. However, we need some kind of assurance that you won’t just run off.”

“How about this? You give me what I want and I promise you I won’t run off, and then you get no assurance other than the fact that I have so far been a sucker for saving this city and the fact that the things I want that you can give me obviously won’t be happening if I let the city burn. How about that?” I snapped.

“What are your terms then, Captain?” Whelan asked. He was calm; I liked that.

“Has Ennis not already related them?” I drawled.

“The Turyn Priest’s body was moved and reburied already, with his mask, on the location of the ruins of the Turyn Temple,” Faolain said, voice quiet. “I saw to it personally.”

I blinked in surprise and turned to look at her. “That was fast.”

“I am not lying to you, Captain. I do not doubt you killed the men you say you killed, nor am I a fool.” Her lips tilted upwards just a bit.

I smiled back, though mine was cold. “Alright. Good. I’ll do the rest of it myself, but I want to see the law drawn up that none of it is to be touched again. The Temple stays, the grave stays, anyone who disturbs it will be put to death.”

“That is–” Berne began, outraged, but once again turned to spluttering. The man seemed to have a difficult time getting words out when he was emotional.

“It is inane, preposterous, absolute madness,” Dornin finished Berne’s sentiment, much calmer but still with rage under the surface. “We are avowed to the Chantry, not your heretical–”

“Then enjoy meeting Death; I’m sure the goddess whom I worship will be thrilled to welcome you into her gates when the city burns and make you choke on those words,” I said blandly, and to accent my words, even went so far as to remove my boots from the table and stand, turning my back on the lot of them.

“Leon, where are you going?” Ennis said, deeply alarmed.

I whirled on him. “You are my friend, and so I will say this more kindly to you than I would have to them,” I said, tone still icy. “I told you when I gave you these yesterday– they are not terms for negotiation. They are demands. They are met, or I will leave. If they somehow did not comprehend those words when you told them, or if they cannot understand them now, then I hope their ignorance is full enough to give them bliss during their final hours, because this city will burn, and I will watch cheerfully from the sidelines.” I turned on the rest of the room.

“Have I been quite clear enough? I am done helping you for nothing, and I am done negotiating only to be stabbed in the back. You will do what I want, and you will do it now, or you will die. This is what happens when you give one person all the cards and exhaust every last ounce of mercy from them. You have made your bed, and you will lie in it, one way or another. Are. We. Clear?”

“And if the armies don’t do it, will you do it yourself, Captain?” It was Dahl asking the question, which surprised me. I had expected it to be Rufais.

“Depends on who the survivors are. If it’s you, the madman there, or you morons,” I gestured to Durnin and Berne, “then probably. That’s kind of besides the point though, don’t you think? Are we clear or not?” I asked the room at large a second time.

“We’re clear,” Faolain said, voice firm and strong. “Whelan?”

“Clear,” he agreed. “With Ennis, that makes a majority.”

Ennis nodded his agreement.

“Continue with your demands, Captain,” Whelan said graciously. “For those of us wise enough to value our lives,” he added with a pointed look at the other two Guildmasters.

I resisted the urge to snicker too heavily and turned back towards them fully, though I did not resume my seat. “As I said, the Temple stays, the grave stays, no one touches it. I want a monument to the Turyn, to the caravan that Rufais threatened to murder, without whom I would have left you all to burn a while ago.” I grew quieter, looking down for the next demands. “I want my team pardoned, their slates wiped clean,” I said softly. “And I want monuments for them too, for each of them. I want children to look up to them and know that it was the Turyn and the outcasts who saved your city, not your precious Chantry or your Lords.

“And I want Jesne Sryes to have a platform to say her piece and present the evidence she has gathered against High Inquisitor Dahl and his alliance with Bishop Friel as well as a coalition within the Church known as the Loyalists who have been plaguing our city and likely several others in an endeavor to turn humans into Riftling beast monsters and unlock the secrets of an immortal army as well as eternal life.”

There was a moment of dead silence.

“I know that last one was kind of a lot to take in; we’ll deal with it once the army’s gone. Do we have an accord?”

“We do,” Faolain said, and she snapped her fingers. A few servants rushed out of the shadows where they had been tucked into their little nooks and crannies to serve the lords and ladies gathered. One of them was a scribe. “Draw up the contract immediately. Ennis, would you like to oversee?” Both she and Ennis looked to me for my approval.

I nodded. “I trust you,” I told Ennis, the warning in my eyes nevertheless.

Ennis inclined his head slightly and went to oversee the formalization of the contract.

In the meanwhile, Faolain drew another envelope out of her flowing dress sleeve. “And this, Lord Ildanach, is for you– the contract discussed to assuage the people and the Chantry that such impulsive actions taken from grief will never happen again. Once both contracts are finalized, our work here will be complete.”

“I hope you don’t mind,” Ennis spoke up. “I’ve taken the liberty of including a pardon and security for yourself, as well, Captain.”

I looked over at him in surprise and then smiled ruefully. “Probably for the best. Thank you, Terrance.”

He smirked slightly back at me and returned to the contract.

“And what if I don’t want to sign either of them?” Rufais demanded, glaring harshly down at the paper that would officiate the handing over of a great deal of his power.

“Then the Chantry could turn against Ildanach,” Faolain said levelly.

“The Chantry won’t have a chance; I’ll leave it to burn first,” I muttered.

“You and your people will not be immortalized in my city,” Rufais snarled.

The woman leaned down again to speak to him quietly, but he shoved her away this time, quite harshly.

“I will not have monuments put up to the ones responsible for the deaths of my wife and son in my city!” Rufais stood, yelling.

“Fine,” Faolain said abruptly. “Sign the contract.”

Rufais stared at her. “This–”

“Says not a word about the Turyn whatsoever,” she interrupted bluntly. “Sign it, and I promise your signature and approval will be given to nothing this man wants,” she gestured at me.

A blind man who had spent any time in court at all could have seen what she was doing, but I watched curiously anyway, wondering if he were that far gone so as to miss the trap.

“Ava,” he called out, and for a moment my mind didn’t even parse the word from his mad ramblings, “is this the one you wrote?”

The woman in the cloak moved over to his side, but when he had shoved her back, her hood had fallen from her face. I stared in growing horror as she moved over to him. “Yes, Lord Rufais,” she spoke softly. “If you sign it, our children will be free from consequences from the Chantry.”

Our children. That was how she had manipulated him. He would do anything to protect even nonexistent children after the loss of his son.

Rufais took a breath and then did indeed sign it.

Faolain removed the paper before he could do anything further. “Excellent. Well done, Ms. Norel.”

“The Turyn will have no monument!” Rufais declared.

“Yes, they will, you fool.” I didn’t know why Durnin was bothering to explain it to him; I doubted Rufais was going to get out of the Manor much to notice himself. “Now you don’t need to sign his contract; only they do,” he gestured at the three Guildmasters, his glare fixating on the woman.

The woman, at whom I couldn’t seem to stop staring since Rufais had spoken her name– the woman named Avaline Norel.