To Call on a Raven
Twenty-Seventh Day of the Fifth Month 293 AC
"I could also call it compassionate that you would be willing to bear your grief alone to not mar the happiness your daughter found. But it is not that simple, is it?" you ask, caught between disdain at the cruelty and folly that must have driven the girl away and pity. The man was still a better father than yours ever was to have realized the error of his ways, to be willing to let go. "I will not judge you either way, no matter your choice in this, for it is you who has to live with it. If you wish for forgiveness, it is not me you should ask for it. I don't peddle false reassurance, but I could have a message passed to her. It is not a gift that I possess to do so on my own, but it is something I can ask before a Heart Tree."
"Ask?" Lord Grafton had been hanging upon your every word as a drowning man to even the feeblest of flotsam, but now he seems bemused. "Do these Gods just speak to you when called, as one might send a raven from keep to keep?"
It is admittedly hard to force down a smile at how right and yet how wrong he is all at once. "They have so far, I can only hope they will again," you say, playing the part of the humble prophet still.
"I've no Heart Tree to show you do," he replies. "My kin burned them all when they took Gulltown from the last of the Shetts." His features darken with the shadow of fear, though he hides it swiftly.
"No matter, I can find one on my own, there are many hollows and crannies where weirwoods reach out to the sky with pale limbs and crimson leaves." You bow respectfully, preparing to leave, when he stops you with a question you had long expected.
"My daughter said the wildlings tortured and slew the knights with her." The lord grimaces in disgust. "Strung their guts from the branches while they still lived..."
With a shake of your head you offer a bold interruption, for a low-born priest at least: "The Old Gods do not
demand such things, though neither will they reject what is freely offered to them in supplication. It is our choice and ours alone what we are willing to give the gods in return for their boons."
"Then they
are evil?" The words hold little in the way of conviction
"They simply
are—beings older than any mortal mind can grasp. They were here before the coming of the First Men when the woods grew unbroken from the Red Mountains to the Lands of Always Winter and the Children of the Forest could make that journey without once setting foot on the ground. If they are strange it is because they are the elders in a world much changed."
"I'll have to pr...
think," the lord corrects himself sharply. "Go..." he waves you off.
With a deep respectful bow fitting for the guise you excuse yourself, walking swiftly out of the keep and through the bailey past the same two guards, seemingly just as bemused at your reappearance as they had been at the first sight of you.
***
Returning home for the first time in many days you are greeted by news from far and wide, most of it good, though much of it strange. For one the journey to the lands of the Ifequevron had revealed than they had not perished but returned to the realms of the fey, prompting you to consider a journey seeking them further, though not without a great deal of thought, for time itself runs strangely in those realms. Moreover, with the help you had sent them, Salladhor Saan and Wyla are continuing to slowly bring the Basilisk Isles to heel, having won a decisive victory on the Isle of Toads over a coven of storm-weaving hags ruling over fish-men. Though the greater prisoners are far too precious to bleed for such a petty cause, one of the servants is a fitting conduit for conferring with Bloodraven.
Thus the creature dies spitting curses at you in the name of the 'Deep Masters'.
A better death than Damphair, you think amused. And so you pass again into the hidden fastness under the Hill.
***
The old sorcerer's gaze is lost in some murky distance, whether in distance or time you cannot say. Still he hears your softly-spoken request instantly: "The old fool's looking for his daughter, eh? Something to be made of that maybe..." he trails off before uttering words that seems strange indeed from his lips: "Handle it as you see fit."
You smile.
Strange, and all the more flattering for it.
Still the ancient Greenseer can't quite leave it at that: "Keep the child safe and the bard Danar hidden. He's skilled and quick, not just when running towards a fight but away at need. A rare thing that in a stoneborn, twice over in a minstrel."
"And Dalla?" you probe.
"Make use of her skills as you wish, but be careful. A silver tongue is not among her gifts, more like rusted iron. Good for shaming clansmen into following her, but little else."
What do you do next?
[] Write in
OOC: Anti-gravity interlude next.
