A recap for the party. Read this before we begin again.
Milivoj broke in a crowded hallway, with Sirius quoting liturgy about hands.
He took the bones. Not for darkness — for the boys. The hunters wanted 300 gold to search for Lazlo, Hans, and Franz, and as Milivoj left the Blue Water in despair, a stranger stepped from the shadows: a man in a deep cloak who never showed his face, with a short black beard like half of Barovia and shoes far too clean for any honest street. One small thing. Take the bones to the Vallakovich crypt. Come back tomorrow. And there the gold was, and the hunters went out, and St. Andral’s stood unhallowed with its heart in a stranger’s hands. Milivoj would not apologize. You left him confined on his word, sentence deferred — and you left with the only clue the thief’s fine shoes ever dropped: a handful of long iron nails from the crypt floor, custom-made, signature work, waiting for someone who could read them.
Then dinner at Wachterhaus. Lady Fiona received you like equals, fed you well, and laid her cards on the table with unsettling speed: the Baron killed her husband, she believes; Victor broke her daughter Stella’s mind three years ago; and she will see them both dead — “they just don’t know it.” Her price for your help is proof of what Victor did. Her gift, unasked, was intelligence: Izek’s fire, werewolves west who steal children, the winery’s name — the Wizards of Wine — and the fact that a man at her table said Strahd five times and the night stayed empty. The name alone summons nothing. It matters who speaks it.
And in her hallway, on a perch, a raven watched with intelligent eyes — and Sirius’s divine sense named it: fiend. Not her — her hand was warm, her soul her own — but the thing on the perch. You whispered about it behind a bathroom door, and something listened at the keyhole, and heard the word, and by the time you came out the fiend had fled the house entirely. “It’s just a bird,” she said. A gift from a dear friend she cannot name. Her sons told you the rest: when her husband died she wrote to the abbey about raising the dead, vanished for two weeks — and came home with a raven, and with peace.
At the Blue Water, Ireena stood on a stage for the first time in her life and sang a song she dreamed. Two walked together — one wore the morning golden, one wore the night blue. A whisper in the stone. A hunger. A brother’s wine drunk down, a cloak nailed across the sun, a valley without summer. A widow beneath the lake, hunted through harvest and snow by a raven on the shoulder of the shadow of a man. And the line that followed you up the stairs: they’ll snip it, and they’ll spin it, and I’ll wake another girl. She doesn’t know where the song came from. She was just happy you heard her sing.
The Wachter twins want their friend Bluto back — the sad drunk the lake ghost loves best, gone north two days ago to “right a wrong.” The inn has started watering the wine. And in your locked room, on the floor, lay a letter that no one delivered, in impeccable penmanship, from the Ravens of Barovia — who do not support Lady Wachter, who knew exactly what shook Sirius’s faith that evening, and who now have your reply lying on the floorboards, asking for a meeting.
Morning came gray, five days before the Festival of the Blazing Sun. The Workyard smith turned your one clue over in his palm and named it without a moment’s thought.
“Oh. You’ve got Henrik’s nails.”
Henrik. The coffin maker. His shop is just down the way.
Knock.