What He Kept
Session: 2025-04-23
The town was quiet in the wrong way.
Two people at the edge of it — watching from a distance that said they had decided not to help. Nobody else in the road. The houses had their doors. The quiet was the kind that followed something, not the kind that preceded it.
Mica was outside her own house, and she was badly hurt.
Zephyr found the children before anyone had to decide what to do with them. He was good at that — at producing exactly the right motion in situations that required something Vath didn't know how to manufacture. The children crossed the space between them and their mother. Mica held them.
Merle was dead.
They sat with Mica until she was ready to talk.
A voice had come out of Stend while he slept — not his voice, some other language, coming from his body. Boyd had gone to get Merle. Merle had come.
When he woke, he started asking questions. Who were the people who'd been here. How long had they been in Serenholme. What were they looking for.
Merle got tense. He started downplaying things.
He asked where he'd been.
He threw him out of the room, and then he followed, and then Merle was dead. Mica was hurt. The two people at the edge of town had watched and not helped.
She thanked them for killing him. She said it plainly, like a statement of fact. Vath couldn't find a way to respond to that, so he didn't try.
Merle's hut was the size of a small room. Enough floor to sleep on, a stove in the corner, a bookcase with oiled sacks. Six bags of rations — dried meat and fruit — and a pile of animal furs that would go for around fifty gold with the right buyer. The kind of space someone had chosen because it was enough.
The chest at the foot of the bed was unlocked.
He went through it methodically. A leather-bound book with dried leaves and flowers pressed flat between pages. A gaffe hook. A uniform — bloused shirt and pantaloons, the kind Seawatch officials used to wear. Two pouches of soft metal shot. A tied-and-knotted pouch with fifty gold coins, doubloons, and some tokens stamped with symbols and glyphs he didn't recognize. Pouches of gunpowder in a saltpeter blend. And at the bottom, in a sack: a blunderbuss.
The scabbard was the thing that made him stop.
Old, well-kept. A crest stamped into the metal he'd seen before — not on a scabbard, but on a small pin worn by someone who hadn't offered to explain it. He turned the scabbard over in his hands. The same mark. Not a Harper symbol. Something that didn't have a name — that Silverwatch and Seawatch had both been part of, that Eslin had been part of, that Merle had been part of. Kept at the bottom of a chest under a bed in an unlocked hut at the edge of a coastal town he'd lived in alone for years.
He hadn't been a hermit. Whatever he'd been, he'd been it for a long time.
Vath set the scabbard down. He kept going through the chest.
They asked around until someone gave them directions to Ern Lindsor's house. Somebody had been living there — had been running mine operations out of it, answering to Ern's name, doing Ern's business. Ern was dead in a salt mine. Had been for a while.
The door opened.
The man inside looked at them for a moment. Then he put his hands up.
"You have caught me," he said.
No hesitation. No argument. Just the hands and the words and the expression of someone who had been expecting this for longer than today.
Vath looked at him. Then at the house that wasn't the man's house.
The town was still quiet.