Help Us
Session: 2025-01-25
Something woke before the rest of him — the same part that had been listening to Serenholme since they arrived. He lay in the room at the back of the inn, far enough from the front that the road sounds didn't reach, and took stock of the feeling.
Still wrong. Same quality of wrong.
The morning food came out: milk, juice, chamomile, ham and eggs and potatoes. One of the regulars at the bar said something about the man of the sea getting put down for the day by a fish — toast or proverb, nobody clarified. The streets outside were light on foot traffic, and what foot traffic there was didn't linger near them.
The woman came down the street with two children, moving in the other direction. She was working at not being noticed.
He clocked it.
A piece of cloth fell.
Zephyr picked it up. Something written on it: Speak with Merle. West of the church. Help us. He folded it once and pocketed it. He looked up. Mica Strongbow — he'd get the name later — was already gone.
The church on the embankment first.
The path up had been recently cleared; someone had done it deliberately, not long ago. At the top: the church and a watchtower beside it that looked older than everything else on the hill, the kind of construction that made Zephyr go a certain kind of quiet. A graveyard to the south, small and tended. Ten graves, maybe fifteen. The markers were new.
Mirabelle was working. The church had been something else before — another god's building — and she was converting it, stone by stone and cleaning rag by cleaning rag. She had the focus of someone with a clear task and the time to do it properly.
She looked at him and said man of the coast. Not unfriendly. Not inaccurate. He'd made that choice; apparently it showed. She said he could establish a Grove in the area — that the land would hold one. Said it plainly, like a practical observation.
She knew about fish-tongue. A hallucinogen, she said. He had been watching for the plant on Svala's behalf. He filed the information and thought about how to handle that conversation.
The storm, she said, had been horrible. The town had lost many men. The graveyard confirmed the scale from a distance.
Merle was west of the church, as promised.
Hut. Hides drying outside. A metal still that said something about priorities. Merle didn't seem surprised to see them.
"Serenholme is dark and full of evil."
He let that stand. There wasn't a lot of equivocation in it.
Something was wrong with the people in this town, Merle said. The mayor specifically. Said it in the particular sense — not political wrong, not difficult wrong. Wrong the way something goes wrong when something else gets into it.
On the way back they found her.
Devy Cromwell — the mayor's wife, the kind of person who would accuse a Land Ho man of stealing her goats — was sitting in the road, clacking two rocks together. Covered in dirt. She was talking, something about her children or about dancing or about both at once in a way that didn't resolve. Then, in the middle of it: "Something has tainted the land. Slithered from the ocean." Then back to whatever she'd been saying.
Zephyr checked with what he had to check with.
Nothing divine affecting her. She just wasn't there.
He thought of the glistening shapes at the waterline.
They went back to the inn. Someone needed to make sure Beau was alright.