A New Castle

az’s staff had been glowing at its crown for nearly an hour.

It seemed to brighten gradually as they walked, though in truth it was only the dusk above deepening around it. Children and townspeople glanced at the violet light as they passed, with more than a few lingering for a moment before continuing on their way.

Then Caerhaven began lighting itself.

City guards took to lanterns along the narrow streets, casting warm pools across the pale stone. Bells sounded somewhere off deeper in the city, their low chimes rolling over rooftops before dissolving into music, barking dogs, wagon wheels, and the murmur of thousands of people whose lives had little concern for six weary strangers.

The mead-hall was already crowded.

Warmth met them through the doorway, followed almost immediately by noise—not the harsh clamor of alarm or steel, but the sprawling disorder of people enjoying the end of their day. Chairs dragged across stone. Mugs struck tabletops. The scent of honey and warm bread filled the air, along with spices none of them, save perhaps the wizard, could name. Someone near the hearth was singing so badly, several others had apparently decided volume might accomplish what talent had not. Servers threaded between packed tables with platters raised above their shoulders while children slipped through whatever spaces remained beneath them.

Lunara stopped just inside, her face brightening.

“Oh, how I’ve missed people.”

The room seemed to hold nearly every shape of life Caerhaven had shown them in the streets. Pointed ears surfaced here and there throughout the crowd without drawing so much as a glance. Near the hearth, several Felina occupied one end of a table, tufted ears rising through their hair while long tails curled aside whenever someone squeezed past.

Karneth could walk into a room without becoming the dwarf in it. Av’elyth, were she there, would have been only one set of elven ears among many.

“Well then,” said the hosteller, marching toward them. “Six of ya?”

Navian glanced back at the group. His sister’s eyes were wide, and Gaz had already become distracted by the menu carved into the wall.

Navian smiled. “Six, yes.” He dropped a pouch of coins into the hand of the little man.

“Well, we don’t have six seats together, but we’ve plenty scattered around.” The hosteller swept an arm toward the crowded hall. “Sit where ya can and we’ll find ya!”

He tipped an imaginary hat with a grin and trotted away, already pointing at another customer.

One by one, the others descended into the banquet hall. Jaeshu had already chosen a seat near the back wall and was heading toward it, while Karneth stripped off his gloves on his way to the bar.

Their food arrived before conversation had properly settled: dark bread still warm enough to steam when Gaz tore it open, roasted vegetables, thick cuts of meat, bowls fragrant with herbs, and several smaller dishes whose contents none of them could identify.

Lunara discovered everything else.

She lasted perhaps four minutes before beginning a conversation with the people beside them. One moment she was eating; the next she knew that the woman at the neighboring table had come to Caerhaven from somewhere west of the city, that her uncle worked near the southern wall, the names of all three of his cows, and that the elderly dwarf sitting with them possessed an opinion about bowstrings strong enough to interrupt an unrelated conversation in order to express it.

From the very start, Lunara listened as though they had all known one another for years.

Navian had absolutely no idea how the conversation had traveled that far.

Across the table, Oesora had become suspicious of her dinner. She turned a small pastry between her fingers, studying the pale filling exposed where she had bitten through the crust. Gaz noticed the expression she wore as she chewed with the heroic concentration of somebody determined not to surrender to food.

She swallowed and quietly set the remainder down.

“You don’t like it?” Gaz asked.

With a wrinkled nose, the priestess studied the culinary specimen. “I don’t understand it.”

Lunara laughed hard enough that some of her drink nearly escaped through her nose.

“May I?” Gaz asked, already reaching toward the abandoned pastry.

Oesora slid the plate toward him with immediate relief. He took a bite, chewed, and found her watching him expectantly.

“You don’t like it either.”

“Not particularly, no.”

“Then... why are you eating it?”

He shrugged. “It’s food.”

There was nothing more complicated about his answer than that.

Oesora stared at him for another second before laughter escaped her, and Lunara—already two ales in and several degrees warmer in the cheeks than when they had arrived—leaned against her shoulder and joined in. Navian smiled into his cup. He had heard them laugh before, but not like this.

A woman passed behind Lunara’s chair, and something soft whispered across the back of her head.

“Wha—”

She twisted around, but the stranger was already disappearing between tables. Pale translucent wings rose behind the woman’s shoulders, their edges catching amber in the lamplight before folding close again as she slipped through the crowd.

“Hold still,” Oesora said.

She plucked something gently from Lunara’s hair and held her fingertips between them. A faint silver-green shimmer dusted their tips.

Lunara reached blindly for her own hair and succeeded only in dragging several strands across her face. “Oh!”

The surprise lasted all of two seconds before delight replaced it.

“Do I have it everywhere?”

“Only a little.”

That was apparently enough. Lunara immediately turned toward the woman beside her at the neighboring table to show her, and within moments the conversation had moved on without any of them.

At the far side of the hall, Jaeshu had settled into an unfamiliar kind of ease.

His hood was down around his shoulders.

Navian noticed that more than anything else.

The ranger had chosen his seat with the wall behind him and the entrance comfortably within view, but whatever instinct had placed him there no longer seemed to command the rest of him. He leaned back rather than forward, his shoulders falling, a pipe resting between two fingers as he listened to the room without appearing to measure every voice inside it.

Eventually his attention settled on something near the entrance, and Navian followed his gaze.

Entering through the front door stood a creature taller than most of the men nearby and broader through the chest, though neither was what held the eye. Dark scales covered him from the blunt ridges of his face to the heavy tail resting behind his legs. His hands ended in thick, clawed fingers curled loosely around a spear, and a simple guard harness crossed his torso, leaving much of the natural armor beneath exposed.

Jaeshu stared.

The ranger tapped the stem of his pipe lightly against the stranger’s arm behind him and pointed toward the entrance. “What is that?”

The patron followed the gesture. Tawny ears rose out the side of his worn hat, one twitching faintly before he looked back at Jaeshu.

“The Makodo?”

Jaeshu studied the guard again. “A dragon?”

The patron went very still.

“A dragon?”

Jaeshu nodded once.

For another heartbeat the man simply stared at him. Then laughter broke across his face.

“My daughter stopped believing in those when she was six, boy!”

Jaeshu looked back toward the scaled guard while the patron took a drink.

“Caerhaven has a few Makodos,” the man continued. “Seven, eight. Maybe more now. Most work the walls.”

“Why?”

The patron gestured toward the guard as though the answer stood plainly before them. “Scales. Strength. A blade has a harder time getting through him than it does you or me, and the city doesn’t have to hang half a forge off his shoulders to keep him alive. They’re good guards.”

Jaeshu’s gaze traveled over the sparse harness.

“Paid damn well, too,” the man added. “Caerhaven knows what they’re worth.”

Near the entrance, the Makodo turned his head toward some movement by the door, utterly unaware that he had become the subject of conversation.

“I have never known of those before,” Jaeshu said, drawing once from his pipe. “And I’ve traveled a fair distance.”

“Then travel farther.”

There was no challenge in the answer. The patron had already returned to his drink, and Jaeshu gave the Makodo one final look before settling against the wall again.

His hood remained down.

Across the room, Karneth had found his own people.

Several dwarves occupied the bar now, Karneth wedged among them as though the seat had been waiting all evening. One dwarf, wearing darker blue garb and jewelry in its beard, had produced another chair. Another had begun filling mugs. Whatever introductions had been required were apparently over.

One of the others clapped Karneth across the shoulder. “Taarn Castali, was it?”

“Aye.”

“Never met one from that clan.”

Karneth wiped his beard. “Now you have.”

The dwarf raised his mug. “To Taarn Castali, then!”

Karneth struck his cup against it. “To the Ferraro Clan!”

The explanation required nothing more. Nobody had asked what clan Karneth belonged to before allowing him into their circle. Nobody seemed to care that Taarn Castali lay nowhere near the Ferraro or that Karneth had never seen their river.

He was a dwarf.

Apparently that settled most things.

By then Lunara had made friends on both sides of their table. She leaned closer whenever anyone spoke, as though every conversation contained something she absolutely could not afford to miss. One of the servers passed, and Lunara greeted him by name.

Navian could not remember learning the man’s name himself.

Tonight, for the first time in weeks, a chair could scrape behind him without his hand drifting toward his sword. A door could open and nobody needed to turn. A child could scream and it meant another child had stolen something from him, not that something with teeth had come out of the dark.

The simplicity of it all felt almost a luxury.

Everyone seemed thankfully lost in their own circles, and even Gaz had found a circle of curious people to explain the mysteries of his staff to.

Navian finished his drink and slipped outside.

Night had deepened while they ate. Lanterns hung from iron hooks above doors and beneath awnings while shopkeepers pulled shutters across their windows. Somewhere overhead, a woman leaned from a second-story window to continue a conversation with a friend walking below, and a wagon rolled slowly over the stone until the sound of its wheels faded into another street.

Beyond the rooftops, the grove glowed.

Its brilliant green light rose above the trees in slow veils, soft against the night sky. Tiny sparks drifted within it like embers that had forgotten how to fall.

Somewhere beneath those trees, Av’elyth was still alive.

At least, Navian hoped the light meant as much.

No word had come since the stone closed behind her. Juna had said only that the druids would do what they could, and there was nothing Navian could add to that tonight.

Something cold pressed against the back of his hand.

He looked down to find a large shaggy dog standing beside him, its tail giving a single hopeful sweep.

“Why, hello there.”

The dog promptly shoved its head beneath his palm.

Navian smiled and scratched behind its ears. A second appeared from beneath a nearby bench with considerably less hesitation, followed by another wandering in from the street. By the time Navian crouched, the first had already leaned most of its weight against his knee.

“Well. This has escalated.”

One of them licked the side of his hand.

“Paladin!”

Navian closed his eyes briefly. He knew that voice.

The boy from earlier came running across the courtyard, mud splashing under each step, slowing only when he reached him. Two other children hovered several paces behind.

“Do you have another quest for me?” the boy asked, looking down at Navian among the dogs.

Navian kept one hand buried in the thick fur at the nearest dog’s neck. “You finished the first one.”

“Yes.”

“And I paid you.”

The child waited.

Navian studied him for a moment and finally understood. This was no longer adventuring. This was commerce.

“There might be one thing.”

The boy straightened immediately.

“Tonight”—Navian lowered his voice as though entrusting him with a matter of delicate importance—“I need you to go home, listen to your mother, and get a good night’s sleep.”

The child’s excitement collapsed.

“That’s not a quest.”

“It is if I’m paying you.”

That required consideration. “How much?”

“One coin for heading straight home and going to bed.”

The boy frowned. “How will you know?”

Navian glanced toward the other children before leaning nearer. “Those who carry the Light can always tell when someone is lying.”

With that, he rested a hand on the hilt of his sword. The blade began to glow softly white.

The boy’s eyes widened. His gaze dropped to Navian’s sword, then slowly returned to his face.

“Oh.”

His two companions exchanged a look. Navian kept his expression perfectly still.

“All right,” the boy said with sudden seriousness.

“I’ll see you in the morning.”

The three children ran off together, their voices already carrying into the street as they argued over what constituted going to bed properly.

Navian watched them disappear around the corner.

Soft footsteps approached behind him, and Oesora emerged from beneath the mead-hall doorway. She followed his gaze toward the street where the children had vanished.

“Is that... true? About the Light knowing if someone is lying?”

Navian rose with the beginning of a smirk. “Priestess, if it were, you wouldn’t be asking.”

Understanding crossed her face.

Her eyes narrowed. “You lied to a child!”

“I gave him a quest.”

Oesora tried not to smile.

One of the dogs solved the matter by abandoning Navian and trotting toward her. She bent immediately, and the smile escaped anyway as the animal pushed its head between her hands.

Navian watched her stroke the fur behind its ears. Her hair had begun to loosen slightly from the long day, and the lamplight from the hall reached only far enough to catch one side of her face. Behind her waited the warmth of the common room; before her, the courtyard lay silvered beneath the night.

She looked different here too.

Everyone did.

“I see you’ve met Newcastle.”

A dark-haired man with a chinstrap beard framing his weathered face stepped from the deeper shadows beyond the courtyard, approaching with an easy smile.

His longcoat was heavy and lined with fur, its belts crowded with satchels and well-used pockets, while the scarf wound around his neck looked older than almost anything else he wore. The dogs abandoned Navian and Oesora at once and gathered around him.

Oesora glanced among them. “Which one is Newcastle?”

The man slapped a hand against his chest, and the largest dog sprang onto its hind legs, planting both paws against him.

“This big boy.” He laughed as he rubbed the animal roughly along the neck. “They greet strangers from the outside for us. What they sense, I can sense.”

“Us?” asked Oesora.

For the briefest moment, Rikaard looked at her. Then he smiled. “Me.”

Navian glanced briefly at Oesora before returning his attention to the man. “I hope it's good news.”

“So far.” The stranger extended his hand. “Wolfhart Rikaard. Local beastmaster for this part of the city. I own the main stables, south, down that road. I believe we have your steed there for the night, safe and sound. Beautiful chestnut mare?”

“Her name is Lilly,” said Oesora.

“And she certainly looks like a Lilly,” Rikaard said. “Well named.”

Navian accepted the hand. “Well met, beastmaster Wolfhart Rikaard of Caerha—”

“Rikaard is fine,” he interrupted with a chuckle.

“Rikaard.”

“So what brings you people here?” Rikaard’s gaze moved between them, then briefly toward the hall. “A paladin. A priestess, it seems. I believe I saw a dwarf with you folks?”

“We came with his brother and sister to have our wounded friend healed,” Oesora said. “She was hurt up south of the Silver Stag. The druids have her now.”

Navian drew a quiet breath, not entirely comfortable with how freely she offered the information.

Rikaard’s eyes lifted toward the glow above the grove. “Ah. Yes, yes. That makes sense.” He gestured toward the green light drifting above the trees. “So you’re the ones who caused that. Rare thing to see. They don’t do it very often.”

One of the dogs circled back toward Oesora, and she let her hand trail along its back as it passed.

Neither she nor Navian offered anything more.

Rikaard watched them, waiting with a patient smile.

Nothing.

After a moment, he sighed.

“Well then...” He rolled one hand through the air. “Paladin?”

“Navian.”

“Paladin Navian. And...?”

“Oesora.”

Rikaard gestured for Newcastle to drop back onto all fours. “Priestess Oesora. From the church of...?”

“Ria.”

Rikaard planted one hand on his hip. “Ria? Shit, you’re far from home. That’s beyond the Hutchinson Woods.”

Again, neither offered him anything more.

Rikaard shook his head with a smile. “Well, Paladin Navian and Ria-Oesora, I welcome you and your compatriots to Caerhaven. It’s good to have you here. If you’re looking for steeds or anything of the sort, the stables are mine. Just let me know.”

A cheer erupted inside.

Oesora glanced over her shoulder. “Karneth?”

Navian listened to the pounding of mugs against tables. “Who else?”

Rikaard looked toward the hall. “Ha, and Karneth, your dwarf. Let him know we have ponies too.”

Oesora gave a quiet chuckle.

Navian offered Rikaard his hand again. “Thank you. I’ll likely visit tomorrow after we find somewhere to sleep. It’s been a long road.”

“Hold on.”

Rikaard knelt beside Newcastle. The great dog sat patiently while his master leaned close and whispered several long sentences into one ear, pausing once as though adding a detail he had nearly forgotten.

Newcastle immediately stopped panting and listened with grave attention.

Then, with a ruffling of the dog’s fur, Rikaard stood.

“He’ll wait for you here. When you’re ready to turn in for the night, follow him. He’ll take you to the best inn in town.”

Then another cheer rose from inside the mead-hall. Navian and Oesora glanced toward the door.

The priestess smiled. “We should probably get back inside and make sure your sister still remembers her name.”

Navian turned back to bid farewell to Rikaard.

Only Newcastle remained, looking back at them with a tilt of his head.

The dog then trotted to the front of the mead-hall and settled onto his haunches, as though he had already accepted his assignment.

Navian glanced at Oesora.

Together they gave Newcastle one last scratch behind the ears and went back inside.

The evening had shifted while they were out. The scattered group had drawn back together around one table, half-finished cups and abandoned plates between them. Karneth had returned from the dwarves with his mug, Lunara was leaning heavily into whatever conversation had preceded them, and Gaz was already speaking when Navian pulled up a chair beside the others.

“Caerhaven should have information we couldn’t find on the road,” Gaz said, folding his hands before him. “Maps. Merchants coming from the east. Patrols. If Orath has changed anything beyond the city, somebody here may have heard about it.”

Jaeshu leaned forward. “I want to ask about the roads south. Pedro warned us away from the Ferraro, and I’d rather know why before we choose anything.”

“Those are Ferraro Clan dwarves.” Karneth tipped his mug vaguely toward the table behind him. “River’ll kill you, they said. They’re the ones who’ve been shaping its course for centuries.”

Lunara began drawing an invisible map across the tabletop with one finger. “Maybe tomorrow we can find out who—”

“Not tomorrow.”

Navian looked around the table.

“We’ve been moving since the Silver Stag. Even when we’ve stopped, somebody has been bleeding, keeping watch, hunting, healing, or worrying about where we’re going next.” His gaze passed over each of them. “Let’s... take a day.”

Lunara blinked. “Seriously?”

“Seriously.”

Navian looked toward Jaeshu. “Buy whatever supplies you need if that’s what keeps you occupied. Find out where things are. But nobody is spending tomorrow planning a march toward Orath.”

Jaeshu considered that, then gave a small nod.

“Go see Caerhaven,” Navian told the others. “Eat. Shop. Drink.”

Karneth raised his mug from the end of the table.

Navian ignored him.

“Find something that has nothing to do with keeping the rest of us alive for a few hours. Tomorrow night, we meet back here. Then we deal with the road.”

Nobody argued.

That surprised him more than agreement should have.

Lunara was already smiling. “I’m going to the shops.”

“I’ll join,” said Oesora. “It’s time we got some clean clothes.”

The archer lifted her cup toward her, missed the angle slightly, corrected it, and drank.

The crowd thinned gradually as the night wore on. Families carried sleeping children into the streets. The musicians packed their instruments away, and servers began clearing tables faster than new cups appeared upon them.

Eventually, the six of them spilled back into the night.

Newcastle was attentively waiting exactly where Rikaard had left him, wagging tail and all.

Lunara greeted the dog as though they had been separated for years rather than an hour, while Gaz raised the glow of his staff above them and Newcastle set off through the lantern-lit streets. Jaeshu followed near the rear, pipe in mouth, still preoccupied by the Makodo he had seen in the mead-hall, while Karneth walked beside him recounting stories he had collected from the Ferraro dwarves with increasingly unnecessary enthusiasm.

Their furry guide led them several streets deeper into Caerhaven before climbing the steps of a large, well-kept inn. The keeper appeared almost immediately and greeted Newcastle with the familiarity of an old customer, producing a treat from somewhere behind the door.

Newcastle accepted his payment, gave a single bark, and trotted back into the night.

“Special guests of the Wolfhart, eh,” the keeper said, looking over the weary group. “Worry not. We have more than enough baths and rooms for you all. Follow me.”

Gaz dimmed the light of his staff until it vanished entirely, while Jaeshu yawned and began loosening his cloak. Lunara leaned against Karneth as they made their way upstairs, and the dwarf answered the climb with a hiccup loud enough to follow them down the hall. One by one, the others drifted toward their separate rooms, weariness finally outweighing whatever conversation remained.

Before long, the corridor fell quiet beneath the sound of six doors, one by one, softly closing.