A recap for the party. Read this before we begin again.
You never made it to the coffin maker’s door. The town came for you first — six guards on every corner where there had been one, all carefully not looking at you, and then Izek filling the street, eight feet of him, an arm the size of a man hanging at his side. “The baron wants to see youse.” It was not a question, and the eighteen guards folding in around you were not an honor guard.
The Baron received you in a back office with festival floats going past the windows and his wife grinning at his shoulder — grinning, and grinning, and grinning, and never once anything else. He knows about the orphanage. He has eyes everywhere; some of them may even be metaphors. And he had a bargain instead of a cell: bring him evidence that Lady Wachter consorts with the devil, and you will be deputies, and her fine warded house will be yours entire. You hold his writs now, sealed in wax. You also left something behind as surety. Izek’s hand came down on Fëanor’s shoulder, and the Baron smiled his reasonable smile, and explained that your friend will be perfectly safe — as long as you make progress.
Sirius went up to the attic to meet the Baron’s perfect son. Thirty-five minutes later he came down carrying five minutes of memory: a room he can’t furnish, a voice with no face, a conversation like something remembered from a dream. Someone reached into your paladin’s head, took half an hour out of it, and left him content. Stella Wachter has been like that for three years.
Henrik broke gently, poor man, in a side alley with his dirty workman’s boots — the wrong boots, no fine shoes there. Ernst had threatened him. He’d pulled the bones from the crypt himself, hours after Milivoj laid them down, and handed them to Lady Wachter’s shadow. And the next day came his payment: six coffins, delivered to a coffin maker, with instructions never to open them. Sirius felt them through the ceiling. Six. Undead. Waiting above the shop of a man too poor to sleep anywhere else. The festival is in four days, and by the Baron’s law, every soul in Vallaki must be in the streets.
Then your barman stopped pretending. In your own room, over the second impossible letter — trust is hard — Urwin Martikov let the mask fall, and then the shape: black feathers, folding like scrolled iron, a wereraven standing where the innkeep had been. Two cursed kindreds share this valley — the wolves, and the ravens. Seven hundred years the Ravens of Barovia have worked against the devil in a land where he is almost literally the land. His great uncle was the raven the last heroes killed. His clan holds the winery. His records say the bones are the city’s whole shield: while they rest in the church, no lesser dead thing can pass Vallaki’s walls. They rest there no longer.
So you sent Lily with a note, and the house swallowed her, and the lady’s voice went cold — “Have you turned on me, Lily?” — and sleep came down like a dropped curtain, twice, and twice Lily shook it off and ran, through dusk, the long deceitful way home, while Lady Wachter stood in her doorway with the fiend on her shoulder, watching, upset.
By half past seven the lady had built her answer: an impromptu feast, doors flung wide, fifty delighted citizens between you and everything you need — a fortress built of people you will not hurt. Ernst on the wall, watching. “I think the message was received loud and clear.” And the lady herself, gracious among her poppets, raven at her ear, ending it with a smile:
“Your services are no longer required.”
You withdrew into the dark to count what you have: a hostage priest, a writ from one monster to condemn another, six coffins nobody else knows about, four days, and a barman’s quiet mercy — there is more to Barovia than Vallaki; you can just leave.
Except you can’t. Because you counted again, there in the street, and you are one short.
Lily is still inside the house.