A recap for the party. Read this before we begin again.
You were five thieves in borrowed rags at the top of Lady Wachter’s stairs, and you opened the doors anyway. Behind the first: a portrait of a whole family, and on the bed beneath it a man with coins on his eyes who died ten years ago and looks like he died this morning. Gentle Repose, cast and re-cast, ten days at a time, for a decade — and one bed in that room, slept in on both sides. In the closet, a chest that put a poisoned needle in Lily and gave up no bones at all. What it gave up instead was a book in a language none of you read, and a letter. From the devil. To the lady of the house.
You met the sons, who are lovely and dim and told you twice over that Mama’s room is verboten. You met a sickroom where a man lies comatose with two holes in his throat. And behind the moaning door you found Ireena — Ireena, whom you never told anything — keeping vigil over a catatonic girl and calling her jailer a saint. So Drew told her the truth. All of it, at last. And Ireena looked at the pile of your terrible knowledge and answered with a gift: the secret room off the library. Where the bones of St. Andral lay on a tarpaulin, plain as grass.
Then the lady of the house came up her own stairs, saw you, and said two words — the bones — and the house came apart. Sirius aimed her own sons at their father’s deathbed to buy a door. Drew smashed a window and hauled the future through it. A knight went out one window, a paladin out another bellowing blasphemy for the whole ward to hear, and a rogue became a small child so convincingly that Ernst Larnak shoved her aside on his way to the crime. The fiend raven, knifed once from the shadows, settled onto Lady Wachter’s shoulder and stayed there. Their final form.
And at the ruined church, you won. Understand that, because it may need to carry you: you won. The bones went home to the sub-altar with a forlorn old priest’s hands on them, and holy warmth rolled out through the roofless wreck like the building exhaling. Father Lucian thanked you and did not say it was a bit late, out loud.
The bill came fast. Izek arrived towing Fëanor — you can have most of him back — two days gone from his memory, nothing left but a nice boy, boy height, very boy-like. You know that boy. Izek thanked you for your help against “the masked men,” because officially there were never any vampires, there have never been vampires in Vallaki — and then he carried your letter, your one piece of proof, away to the Baron it happens to flatter. By nightfall the criers had it: festival moved to tomorrow. Attendance mandatory for every soul. Bring your sick. Bring your grieving. All will be well. Lady Wachter will hang — on your testimony. And Henrik the coffin maker has gone into the Reformation Center in your place.
Barovia noticed you in the night. You are level five now. Muriel left at dawn — too rich for her blood, and fair enough. Sirius answered the town’s starvation and mud with a gleaming celestial horse named Clancy, and Fëanor, who once got a book token from the Morning Lord, is managing his envy.
Now it is midday, and it is raining like judgment. Children dressed as flowers trudge past a ten-foot wicker sun. The Baron stands with his torch and calls death meaningless, calls the survivors worthy, calls you his five fine examples of heroism — they will attest. And Lady Wachter rises on the fountain’s lip with the counter-sermon: his sunlight as fake as his smile, the dead scorned, the vampires real, his son the thing that broke her daughter — they will attest. They will back me up.
Two tyrants. One scaffold. An empty wicker ball, for now. And every soaked, bereaved, furious soul in Vallaki turning — slowly — to look at you.
The square is waiting. Decide who you are before it stops waiting. We resume mid-breath.