You Can Just Leave

We never reached Henrik's door. Where one guard stood on each corner, now there were six, and then Izek came round the corner, eight feet of him, with an arm as big as a man. "The baron wants to see youse."

The Baron received us in a back office while festival floats went past the windows, his wife at his shoulder with a grin that never moved. "A little bird told me that you have been doing vigilante activities in my town." Then came the offer: bring evidence that Lady Wachter consorts with the devil, and we would be deputies now and have her house later. People sent to the Reformation Center, run by "the twins", come out "thinking more appropriately, or they don't come out at all." He sealed us each a writ in wax, let Sirius go up alone to meet his son Victor, and as we left, had Izek take hold of Fëanor. "He will not be harmed. And if you behave, he will be returned to you."

Sirius had been upstairs thirty-five minutes and remembered about five. "You know when you remember you were talking to someone in a dream and then you sort of wake up? Sort of like that."

The bowyer next door to the Coffin Works told us Henrik had lately had coffins delivered, which struck him as very odd. Henrik wore dirty workman's boots, so he was not our man with the nice shoes, and Sirius's divine sense counted six undead on the floor above. In a side alley, when Drew stopped bargaining and simply told him the truth, Henrik broke. Ernst, Lady Wachter's man, had threatened him into collecting the bones from the crypt and handing them over, and the next day six coffins arrived with orders never to open them. "I either get killed by them or killed by her or killed by her men."

Back at the inn, a second note lay on our floor: "Trust is hard. Want to prove yourselves." Urwin denied everything until one of us said "But we never told you the cake was poisoned," and then he turned into a raven the size of a man. His Great Uncle Frederick was the raven-man Roger's band killed. "We are the Ravens of Barovia." The bones in the church keep every lesser undead thing out of Vallaki. And Ernst? "Don't think of him as a person. Think of him as an appendage." To one of us who looked troubled, Urwin offered some free advice: "There is more to Barovia than Vallaki. You can just leave."

Lily took a note to Wachterhaus asking the lady to meet us at the church. "Have you turned on me, Lily?" Twice a wave of sleep came over her, and twice she shook it off and ran. "Technically," she told us, "I did not fail my mission."

At half past seven the lady threw open her doors for an evening of canapés, fifty delighted citizens in her dining room. Lily went in first, and the rest of us followed. "Here I am, amongst all these people. They love me," the lady told Sirius. And then: "Your services are no longer required." Across the room Ernst leaned on the wall. "I think the message was received loud and clear."

We stopped there, all four of us inside Wachterhaus among her guests, with Lily slipped away into the crowd.