Alistair had worked himself to the bone for three days now. He’d been making pyres for the few remaining villagers. This work of putting the village to rest had been interspersed with patrols and forays of the land around Bredon, ensuring the undead had truly been pushed back. All this had to be done alone. Dogan was gone, and no one had come to check up on the wayward settlement.

That changed on the afternoon of the third day. Alistair had just finished saying a final prayer to the Lady before he set fire to kindling at the base of a wood heap. Sprawled atop it was the body of one of the children. In their hands, Alistair had made sure to lay one of the wooden idols in their hands. He hoped it would bring them some measure of solace on their journey to the afterlife.

His thoughts were interrupted by the sounds of a horse clopping behind him. The paladin turned to see a friendly face. Something he sorely needed right now.

Ilvara sat atop the saddle of her steed, looking past Alistair at the funeral mound. Even with her veil, Alistair could see sorrow in her eyes. She might not have been human, but she recognized a ritual of mourning all the same. The two of them watched silently together as the fire burned away into nothing but ash.

“It’s been a while,” said Alistair, his voice devoid of warmth.

Ilvara steadied the animal beneath her, tightening her grip on the reins. “Yes,” she replied. “I’d hoped to meet again under better circumstances than our last.”

“Life has a way of defying our expectations,” he said, unable to tear his eyes away from the smoldering ground. “What brings you here?”

“I followed the call of the rune I left you.” From her pocket she grabbed a very similar looking stone. It glowed brightly as if to signify their proximity to one another. “It’s been an eventful month.” She cast her eyes over the remains of the village. “For the both of us, it seems.”

Alistair could only grunt in response. His mind was still haunted with memories of days prior. With his work finally complete, he found it hard to summon the strength for anything, let alone talking.

“Can we talk?” Ilvara asked. Something in her voice sounded urgent. “Perhaps somewhere a little less bleak?”

A silence passed over them. Both of them ruminating on how to carry on a conversation after such a difficult day. Finally, Alistair managed to straighten himself out with a deep breath and brisk shake of the head.

“There’s a hill not far from here.” He nodded in its direction. “Overlooks the village. Heard it was a nice place to go and have a think.”

The two of them set off there together. Alistair led the way, Ilvara following a few paces behind. She made sure to give him some space. No doubt she could tell he was hurting though how much, even he couldn’t begin to describe.

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Ilvara watched as Alistair went to sit down on the grassy knoll. He tucked his knees to his chest almost like a child. If she hadn’t stumbled upon him at such a weak moment, she might have made a jab at him for it. Not today though, she knew better than that.

She dismounted from her saddle and went over to join him. It was clear to her that she’d have to lead this conversation. The normally eager and friendly boy had lost much of the luster she’d last seen him with. An eventful month indeed.

Alas, her own news wasn’t anything cheerful either. But it had to be said, sooner rather than later.

Ilvara knelt next to him, both knees resting on the ground. “Do you remember when we parted ways?” His expression didn’t change, so she continued. “I said I was going to look more into the dragon egg theft. And the maps we’d found on the mercenaries.”

Again, the human grunted in response. She was starting to be reminded of home with all this gruffness. Such a feeling brought her little comfort, oddly enough. Perhaps Ilvara had grown accustomed to the more emotive humans compared to her own people.

“Well,” she said. “I traced their steps back to the last town the mercenaries were meant to visit, before they were spooked by the dragon. And I found this.” From her pack she took out another letter, almost identical to the one they’d found. “It describes their real target. The place they were meant to take the egg all along.” Alistair furrowed his brow, but still he said nothing, eyes cast on the horizon. “It was Isenfall. They were to bring the egg to your people’s capital, Alistair.”

“Our duchy’s capital, you mean,” he corrected her, as if it made much of a practical difference. “The noble that wanted the egg must have lived there. Doesn’t seem so odd.”

“Remember what I told you.” Ilvara felt her voice give way to a hint of emotion. Frustration, in this case. “A noble that knows where to find a dragon egg and tell a mercenary band exactly how to steal it would not be the type to just idly place it on some pedestal for visitors to gawk at. They would have to have known a dragon’s habits, how to fool them, how to evade them long enough to get the egg where it needed to go.”

“What are you getting it?”

“What I’m getting at, is that there was never an intention to receive the egg.” She took out the crude drawings of the mercenary, illustrating their path south. “The only objective of the theft was to get Kazumth to attack your city of Isenfell, along with every other place he attacked before then.” Ilvara pointed to each of the marked out towns along the path of the mercenaries, each representing the deaths of hundreds of human souls. “Someone meant to inflict as much damage as they could on your people, the dragon and its rage being their weapon of choice.”

Alistair finally turned toward her, interest piqued. “How can you be so sure?” He narrowed his eyes, clearly confused by the implication. “Why would a human, noble or not, want something like that?”

“Because the person wasn’t a human,” she replied. When he shot her a difficult look, she shrugged. “Or at the very least, their goals don’t align with their fellow man.”

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

“You speak of treason? To the duke?” Alistair’s voice reeked of disbelief.

“Perhaps.” Into her pack she dug out another piece of evidence. An illustration she’d made of some seal. “Or, a greater conspiracy. This is an approximation of the noble house that had comissioned me for the assassination of the Viscount in Adelgard. Notice any similarities?”

She handed him both pieces of parchment and let his mind do the rest. It took only a few moments of scrutiny for him to let out a difficult breath. There it was. Her words were starting to break through to him.

“We ought to take this to someone knowledgable in noble heraldry,” he suggested. “Maybe they can identify the house.”

“No need. I’ve already done the legwork.” When he gave her an incredulous look, she returned it with equal fervor. “What? You already knew I was a pathfinder of this area for some time. My people did more than make maps. We studied your heraldry, kept track of your noble lineages, made notes of important visits.”

“Why?”

“My people have inherited many traits from the fae of the Winter court.” Ilvara closed her eyes. She didn’t want to see his reaction to this embarrassing truth. “One such trait being paranoia. Our peoples have rarely met, and even rarer have been the moments where we’ve gotten along. For hundreds of years pathfinders like me have wandered your kingdom, drawing maps and taking notes for…the future.”

“A future of what? War?” He pressed her further, his words stabbing at her like a knife.

“A precaution, nothing more,” she lied as easily as she breathed. It seemed to sate him, nonetheless. “More importantly, this noble house doesn’t exist. The coat of arms is fake. A well-made fake, but a falsehood nonetheless.”

Alistair’s skin grew pale. “So what you’re saying is…”

“Mhm. Someone is coordinating an effort in this little part of the world to sow discord and chaos. And they’re using every resource they can get a hold of to do it, without getting their own hands dirty.” From her pack she procured more parchment—another map, this one of Geevshey origin. “And I’ve got a sneaking suspicion of who, or what, might be behind it.”

With her finger, she traced a circle around where they were in Bredon. Then she shifted over to roughly where the current border of Deadwood was meant to be. Up until a month ago, she’d imagined this to be an accurate representation of the border. In her research, however, she’d come across a disturbing discrepancy.

“This is a map I drew when I took over from my predecessor, a little less than a year ago. A necessary part of my work, to ensure the accuracy of our records. I thought little of it as the land was mostly quiet. The pathfinder before me had made no mention of any trouble they’d detected during their assignment.” She sighed, the stress of all this work coming back to her. “But once I’d discovered the conspiracy of the letters, I went back to older maps to see if I could find a pattern. And I did find one.”

“Nothing good?” Alistair asked lightly, almost as if to hope he was wrong.

Ilvara shook her head. “Not at all.” From her pack she spread out another map, this one clearly older. She laid it out next to the first and pointed to the first inconsistency. “Take a look at this. Notice anything different?”

Alistair leaned over next to her. Whatever feeling of loss or depression he’d felt before seemed to have gone away. In its place was anxiousness, a growing fear of what was being implied. Ilvara knew he was capable of connecting the dots, even with his inexperience. She knew that of all the humans she’d met in her travels, this one would be willing to listen to her.

“This…can’t be right,” Alistair whispered, his eyes darting back and forth across the pages. His trembling fingers traced from one map to the other. “How could they have expanded like this, without us—”

“Even knowing?” Ilvara interrupted, her tone a grave one. “That’s what I’d like to know too. Maybe it was just too subtle. A foot or so every other month, a league every other year. It’s been decades since your people’s last war with the Slough, right?”

“B-But even so, Wyrdwood rests on the border. We were meant to look out for the corruption, we would have noticed…” He pressed a hand to his forehead. The boy looked ill. “We would have noticed,” he repeated, as if to steady himself.

Alistair didn’t sound convinced.

“The dead aren’t without brains, believe it or not,” she said softly, careful not to offend him. “They must have planned this carefully. Vampires and their ilk are crafty things.” She pointed her finger at the border, close to where they were, and illustrated how the corruption had crept up so far in such a short time. “See here, Wyrdwood and these other border posts. The corruption at the border barely moved an inch. Here, near Bredon and the Mansgrave though, it’s pushed in quite deep.”

“How could the people here not have seen it?” Alistair said, shaking his head in disbelief. “Or the duke? Even the Lady…” The paladin, perhaps smartly, didn’t finish the sentence. Such thoughts could have been seen as blaspehemous. To his people at least.

Ilvara had no such compunctions toward the lake goddess.

“The dark magic of the Slough is nothing to scoff at. Just as your Lady takes her power from the three groves, so to do they. The two they corrupted near a thousand years ago, that is.” Ilvara pointed out the two bodies of water, deep behind the borders of Deadwood. “Given time, they might have learned some new tricks. The same way your people learned how to make more paladins and daughters of fey magic.”

Alistair was silent for a long while. This was a lot to drop on him after what she could only imagine he’d been through. Before she made it to him, she’d galloped through town. It didn’t take a genius to figure out something horrible had happened there. A place once vibrant and full of life had been made deathly silent. Seeing the child’s corpse burning on a pyre, all handbuilt by the boy—nay, the man—in front of her, and Ilvara knew her return had been ill-timed.

All the same, this information needed to be spread to those who could do something about it. As a winter elf, child of fae, the humans had little reason to listen to her, let alone believe a word she had to say. Not that she could blame them. Centuries of enmity between their species made it that she didn’t want to get involved either. If Kazumth kept his word, she might be able to return home sooner rather than later. Wash her hands of all of it.

But something about her time with Alistair made her pause. Something in his forthright manner, how he treated her before, even after she’d revealed some difficult truths to him. His charity made her feel obligated to help him this one time, help his people with a very real threat.

After minutes of torturous silence, he turned to her. “We have to tell someone,” Alistair said, his voice surprisingly calm.

“Who?” she asked. “Who would believe us?”

“The Earl I traveled with. Sir Manus Druim, surely he would.” Alistair nodded to himself, as if to reinforce the supposed truth.

Ilvara narrowed her eyes. A brief thought flashed through her mind. Of the melee she’d witnessed outside of Celidon forest. With her honed senses, she’d listened in on the knights as they spoke in the aftermath of the battle. She’d recognized the aura of reverence the oldest among them had from the men, how his orders were taken without question. This must have been the one he meant.

“Where can we find this ‘Earl’ of yours?”

Alistair cast his gaze back on the horizon. To the west. His expression hardened.

“Isenfell’s my guess.”

Ilvara bit her lip. They had another long ride ahead of them then.