The sun shone on Londray Bay with the soft brightness that was particular to early autumn. It bathed the walls of the Dunes in warmth, and filled the towers of Baron Delondeur’s keep with golden light.
The same light fell over the entire city of Londray, spreading from the massive, sand-colored castle walls at its northwest corner. Mixing the wide and regular streets of recent, planned construction with old cowpaths, Londray was one of the greatest cities in the Fourteen Baronies—one of the few that would even be considered a city by a Concordat southerner, much less anyone from the great city of Keersvast, stretching, as it did, across an entire island chain.
Still, it was an impressive place holding thousands of souls—all bathed in that sunlight that marked one of the last truly warm days of the year. Soon enough, the short autumn would give way to a winter that threatened to freeze the harbor for months. Today, the city could rest in its beauty, wealth, and warm breezes.
In the shadows that light cast all over the city, people went about their daily business. At the harbor, they hauled in nets to mend, swabbed decks, or sorted their catch. Foreign sailors, whether the huge, bearded Islandmen from the north or the lithe, fair-haired Keersvasters from the far southwest, rolled off of their ships and into the taverns, ale-tents, wine-shops, bathhouses, barbers, and brothels.
In the rich quarters of the city, knights, lords, and wealthy traders sipped their evening wine or settled in to the first course of dinner. They ate in front of expensive leaded windows from bright plates. Liveried servants stood ready to attend to every wine glass and utensil through every course of soup—chilled at great expense, against this last gasp of heat—fish, meat, fruit, cheese, and more.
At the city’s margins, where the summer sun was broken into shadows by high-piled shacks that leaned into one another as they rose above the street, families jammed together over tables happily covered with what fish or bread they could afford.
At the gates leading out of the city, most along its eastern wall and others to the north and south, clusters of green-cloaked men gathered, awaiting the turn of the glass that officially ended their campaigning season. For a few months, the war was done. The war that had once been the Succession Strife—fourteen Barons alternately supporting a king, pulling him down, or fighting to put themselves on the throne—had now become a simple fact of life. No one under two-score years in Londray had been born in a city at peace. No kings were left to support or oppose; now the twelve Barons that remained fought for their own borders. Some, perhaps, harbored the ambition of a crown. Most claimed to simply be answering the grievances done to them or their people.
The signs of war were all over the city. Of course there were the gathered hundreds of men waiting to be released to their homes, hopeful of pitching into the harvest or the last months of fishing, or hopeful of heading to the drinking, dicing, and wenching with their pay. There were the armed and armored men who patrolled the walls of the Dunes still, green cloaks blazoned with a sand- colored tower; there were the ballistae that dotted the walls; there were the ram-prowed ships berthed in the harbor.
Yet there were quieter signs, as well. Men and women, lamed or missing legs, blind or one-armed, slumped against tavern walls with shallow wooden bowls in one hand and simple signs in the other. In the poorest parts of the city, the sign might be a crude charcoal drawing of a horse on a piece of hide, or a drawn bow, or a spear. Whether this signified the nature of their service or the source of their injury was never entirely clear.
These were the most numerous.
In tradesman’s streets, the veterans slumped in the same way, holding the same bowls, but their signs were more likely to be lettered. Most contained only a word or two.
Aldacren.
Green Forks.
Thasryach Pass.
The Vineyards.
Giant’s Winter.
One particularly elderly man, who managed a knobbed wooden crutch, a bowl, and a sign—by the expedient of having the latter looped over his head with a bit of string—had crossed out the last word upon it and written a new one. It had read Vale of the Kings. Now, it read Vale of the Graves.
Many walked past them without seeing them. Others, near their own age, who bore a scar or lacked a finger, tended to pause and drop links and bobs into the bowls, or to hand out stale half-loaves.
If such folk were seen on the streets of the richest parts of the city, it never took long for green-hatted, truncheon wielding guards to move them on.
In the Temple District, Fortune’s white-surcoated guards in their conical helms were not shy about moving them on with the flat of their blades.
Guards at the Temple of Braech didn’t always use the flat. If word spread that a ship of Braech’s Dragonscales—the crazed holy berzerkers—had put into the harbor, most folk avoided the Temples altogether, and the beggars doubly so.
One man, his age hard to tell, stood up from his spot along such a tavern wall. Matted and overgrown brown hair fell into his dark eyes, which were ringed and clouded and stared into the distance while seeing nothing. He tossed aside a sign that read “The Crossing” and tipped the contents of his bowl into an older man’s, seized up a crutch, and began walking, dragging a badly twisted left leg behind him.
Slowly, painfully, sweating profusely before long, the man made his way towards the docks as night slowly fell over Londray. He didn’t turn aside to the calls of women walking in the streets in flimsy dresses, or to the ale and whiskey sellers in tents. When he passed by a stall where a man sat with beringed hands folded over an ample stomach straining against dirty robes, beneath a sign promising healing tinctures and mystic oils to soothe any pain or rheumatism, his hand moved instinctively to his belt for a weapon that wasn’t there.
Not that it would’ve done him any good; the charlatan had leather-clad, heavily armed guards to either side of him. Still, the man spat in the direction of the alchemist’s stall in a last small gesture of defiance.
He set his faraway eyes on an empty quay and kept walking. Each step was pain, but each step was closer to ending it.
When he reached the long stone quay he tossed away his crutch, heard it splash in the water, wished he could’ve turned to see the hateful thing sink. Instead, he hurried on.
At the first sufficiently far spot, where nothing was tied, he paused and gathered himself, leaning against a post for support. Ought to pray, he thought. Then aloud, he said, “Braech, Fortune, Urdaran…Cold, even the Elven Green, if any of ya hear me, then freeze you and yours for all you ever did for me.”
Then he lifted his bad, twisted leg towards the small dark waves below, ready to plunge towards them.
He could’ve sworn that no one shared the quay with him. With the harbor not yet full, nothing had tied up on it; it was too far from the warehouses and known to be too shallow for the biggest ships. Yet, before he could fall, a hand seized his shirt and pulled him backwards. In his shock he fell upon his bad hip and bit off a yell, prepared to swing his fists wildly and fight for the life he’d been about to end.
Then he saw a woman appear out of the darkness of the air, the night’s shadows simply peeling away from her like a dropped veil. In a surprisingly deep and raw voice, she said, “Water’s still warm, but I take it you weren’t out for a pleasure bath.” One of her hands, rough and calloused, settled lightly on his head. “Why?”
It was a simple question. The simplest. And also the most complex. Yet he found an ease entering him, a warmth that began to spread from the woman’s hand as soon as she had spoken.
“It hurts,” he admitted, in a faraway voice. “I’m tired. And hungry.”
“I’ve a friend who can help with the last one right now,” the woman said. Despite the huskiness of her voice, there was a hint, nearly hidden, of a rich music behind it. But only a hint. “And the second takes but a few turns sleep.”
“I don’t sleep well,” the man responded.
The quay was silent for a moment but for the play of the water against the stones. Her hand against his head still exuded warmth, and he felt himself dropping towards sleep, then abruptly yanked away from it.
“Can’t let you pass out on the quay…ah, what is your name, anyway?” There was a pause as the woman sighed and he thought he heard a few muttered words. Something about someone else, a name he didn’t catch, who was better at this.
“Tibult,” the man replied, slowly, as if the word was slow in coming to him.
“Well, Tibult,” the woman said, “I can help you with some of what troubles you. But I need privacy just now.”
She raised her hand from his head and the warmth it had brought began to recede. Her fingers clasped his forearm with a grip as strong as any he’d ever felt and hauled him to his feet, seizing him with pain. He found himself leaning on the woman’s shoulder and was surprised to note that she was taller than him, even if he could stand upright.
“Privacy was what I was after,” Tibult muttered. The warmth and calm that had filled him dissipated, pressed out of him like juice from a grape. Pain and hunger and despair wrung it from him as they welled back up.
“I’m willin’ to pay for it,” the woman said, reaching for her belt. Her hand came back with silver dangling in it, three links. “Now I can give you this and you can watch the quay for a turn or two and then you can hare off and get drunk and fed. But if you’re willing to earn a little more, tell me, Tibult—do you still know soldiers, where they’ll be gathering tonight, and where to drop a word that’ll get ‘round?”
“Aye. What d’ya mean?”
“I mean, friend Tibult, for a rumor dropped in the right places, gold. And if all goes well, I have a friend who can do something about that hip.”