Arc 1: Chapter 11: Amid the Mists
I ate the food that was brought to me, and left the mead less than half empty. I avoid impaired judgment at the most peaceful times, and wanted myself especially sharp then.
I sat. I waited. As the day grew later, I noticed a few things. For one, the locals started clearing out of the Cymrian Sword not long after I showed up. Secondly, perhaps three hours before sundown, the innkeeper sent his daughter back into the kitchens and she didn’t come back out. He took up the girl’s broom himself and busied himself tidying, ignoring me.
Then, about two hours before sundown, the mercenaries started filtering in. They came in twos and threes at first, small patrols or watchmen coming off their shifts. They stank of sweat and leather, calling for drinks the moment they laid eyes on the innkeep.
By dusk, the taproom was more than halfway to crowded.
From a corner table I observed the front door open for perhaps the fiftieth time. A group of five men — no, four men and one woman — stomped into the Cymrian Sword. They were more heavily armored than most of the other mercenaries, with scarred breastplates, vambraces, and greaves decorating their gray uniforms. They exuded the same bitter scent as the stables I’d noticed before, and their eyes were shadowed with fatigue.
“Captain!” At this word, every chattering voice in the inn went silent and nearly thirty mercenaries stood, some so abruptly their chairs clattered to the floor. The innkeeper was sorting glassware on the wall behind his bar and carefully gave no reaction to this new arrival.
It was the one woman in the group who stepped forward. She was a grizzled old hawk of a soldier. Her armor was simple, expensive, and marked by many failed attempts to kill her. Her uniform was finer than any of the others, the flinty gray material of her knee-length coat accented by silver thread. She wore a long cloak of such a pale shade of foggy gray it was nearly white, nearly the same color as her hair, and tucked a crested helm with a plume of white chimera hair under one arm.
She waved a lazy hand, and the entire room once again returned to its previous relaxed air. The old woman had large, intense eyes of a very deep shade of blue. The rest of her was so colorless that they seemed to glow within the stark lines of her skull. They fixed on another man who’d arrived perhaps half an hour earlier, a huge man wearing more armor than the rest. The captain made a beeline for him, and a few other sellswords with the look of company veterans gathered around that table.
I folded my arms, tucked my chin against my chest, and closed my eyes. To the casual observer, it would appear I dozed in the shadows at the corner of the inn’s common room. I was not asleep. I focused my senses, drowned out the din of conversation, and listened to the captain speak with her lieutenants.
“New orders from his lordship,” the captain said. She sounded younger than she looked, her voice lacking the rough edges one gained over the course of a long life. “He wants third company pulled back to the island.”
One of the men cursed. The big one waited a beat before saying, “we’re already stretched thin in this marsh.” His voice was a deep basso, polar opposite to his commander. “The irks have been out for blood ever since we got rid of the troll.”