What Happened Last Session
The Boy at the Pond Had a Name
The washer man led the company off the snow and into the bog, and somewhere on that road it finally occurred to somebody to ask what he was called. Catfold. Nineteen at the end of the fortnight. The boggers keep no horses — “we have no ambitions of greatness and knights” — so he walked the whole way while four knights rode.
The village at 0706 was huts on stilts over grey mud, and the people in it were visibly starving. Their Elder Ellery received the company in a hut full of sage smoke and gave up everything he had. The bog was rich once, many villages across it, all paying their taxes freely to Dowell. Then, about twenty years ago, a single snowstorm came out of the west and buried them for a month. It has never snowed there before or since. The plants died and the animals starved after them — and it isn’t that everything died. It’s that nothing grew back.
And during that storm, a knight came who fought death and won. Ellery sang the rest of Catfold’s half-remembered song, forgetting most of the words himself, and never had a name for the man.
Come Kill Me If You May
He arrived while they were still sitting with the Elder — black mail, black plate, black shield, a great sword wrapped in black cloth, and a challenge in verse.
Blade on blade till one is felled — and this the forfeit dread: the fallen bares his beaten breast; the victor runs him through. I took that stroke in ages gone. The grave refused me, too.
Brave Sir Robin took it, on the grounds that somebody had to and the village couldn’t. It went badly and then worse: a torturous break that cost him half his spirit, then a sweep that put him on his back with a great sword through his chest. “It looks like I am the victor,” the black knight said, and everyone there heard the disappointment in it.
Then he rode off, and Arthur knelt to sew Robin up and found no blood, no heartbeat, and something under the plate that did not feel like a man. Robin talked his way out of it, and Arthur — being a knight and not a physician — decided to believe him.
The Duel He Tried to Lose
He came back that night with the same verse and a worse forfeit: fire. Ro’an answered it, but not with a sword. He asked whose seer the man served, which realm he thought he was protecting, and how a storm over starving villagers honoured either. He guards the realm of the dead, it turns out. He has been at it so long he no longer remembers what he was guarding, and his own name is lost to the flows of time.
Then the black knight threw his sword and shield onto the ground, knelt, and offered his neck.
Ro’an obliged him. The blade went through with almost no resistance, and the helmet rang hollow on the ground. The body caught fire, stood up without its head, collected it, took its sword back out of Ro’an’s hands, thanked him for the duel, and rode away burning. At sunrise the light passed straight through the horse.
Salt from a Clear Sky
Deep in the Lost Dead Forest they found the Red Seer: a heap of crimson robe that pulled the damp out of the air and shaped it into faces, male one moment and female the next. It read Seeli’s scroll, and the letters wrote themselves across the page — WIGHT. That was the thing to defeat. But “the wight falling is not that of the white.” The snow was never his. It belongs to something else entirely, and the Seer could not say where it begins.
It restored everyone’s clarity, asked for a knight in payment — one who is open in their desires and fears — folded itself up, and came along.
At a weeping tree it set the terms: show him what it means to be glorious and honourable, and the winner will be filled with salt and sent to the deep. The winner. Seeli challenged him anyway, and had to fight honestly — throwing it would have broken the terms. She denied his first blow, traded on the second, and on the third he tripped her and took her head clean off.
A pillar of salt fell out of the sky, drove through the black armour and kept going into the earth, until nothing was left but the sound of grinding. It is still standing there, running up into the heavens.
Looking Ahead
The company is Glory 2, one step from Knights-Gallant, and it cost them Seeli — who then stood up, picked up her head, and took the dead man’s title, his ghost horse, and his sword. She will not age now, and there is exactly one thing left in the world that can kill her.
The storm is still coming. It was never his to stop, the boggers are still in its path, and the party promised to protect them over a meal those people could not spare. They are heading south to trace the weather back to whatever is making it, and they will need another seer to name it. They also owe the Red Seer a knight, and the only name anyone has offered is a nineteen-year-old who does laundry.
A man who has spent an age learning how to die will still not know how to stop.