Where: A side-track off The Road West, about a day west of the Village of Barovia — cart-ruts to firelight.
Status: Behind us now — the warmest night we’ve had in Barovia, and the most important. The reading happened here (Session 6). We left west at morning with real bacon in us.
The Vistani
After the Village of Barovia, the merriment was almost shocking: fires, fiddles, food, and people who laugh. The Vistani welcomed five armed strangers and a red-haired charge without a flicker of fear, and named their price for hospitality plainly: “the trade of a story.”
Sirius paid it, and paid honestly — the wastrel noble boy of Waterdeep, drunk in the family cellars at thirteen; the heroic grandfather who pressed a raven’s feather into his hand and shipped him off to a boarding school for priests, where they taught him to love the sun. The verdict: “Good story. Good trade.” Food went round. For one hour, Barovia was kind.
What Ismark told us of them: the Vistani can walk the mists — though they can take no one with them — which is where the rumour comes from that they serve Strahd. In Ismark’s experience they have never done anyone wrong, and their camp is safer than a night in the open. So far, so true.
The great tent
At the back of the camp stands the great tent — and what was waiting in it was Madam Eva, and the reading that is now our map. Candles, black velvet, two decks of cards, five fates, five personal threads, and one card only Sirius can read. The complete record, card by card: The Reading.
What we learned over the wine (Session 6)
- The Vistani pass the mists by an ancient agreement with Strahd — not allies, simply exempt, and not much bothered about anyone who isn’t.
- Do not try to ride out in a Vistani wagon. They tried carrying a passenger through the mists once. The wagon came out. The passenger did not.
- There are other lands like this one — the Domains of Dread — and ordinary sunny places beyond. The seasons still turn here; nobody could name the month in any calendar we know.
- Strahd has been what he is for seven hundred years, and the Vistani are an oral people — whom he envied, none of them know. Chase that answer in books.
- In the morning: bacon. Actual bacon, from beyond the mists, fried by genuinely friendly people. Sirius declared them the finest folk in this land, and for once nobody argued.
Open questions
- How long — and how — did Eva know we were coming?
- The Vistani walk the mists freely. The agreement is theirs. Could it ever be ours?