The Price of a Purse

Opening

The gold was already on the ground when it stopped being enough.

Halia Thornton had done the talking, and the talking had gone badly in the way only successful negotiations can — every concession the party made only widened the appetite across the table. So it kept coming. The money from Zuktind's bag of holding. The money on his person. The backpack that held the party's emergency funds, poured out into the dirt of the Zhentarim camp with everything else. Yeltsu's coin followed. And when a purse of gold still would not answer for seven dead men, Zuktind gave up the bag of holding itself, and traded the Wand of Magic Missiles across the pile to keep the mercenaries' hands off the rest of the party's magic.

That was the shape of it when the sergeant remembered her dead and asked for a life instead.

Zuktind's face had gone dark by then. He had stopped negotiating like a merchant. Kill one of us, he told them, and the rest leave for a safer town — and you will never find our money again. He meant it as a wall. They heard it as a promise. Commander Varric took the point exactly as intended and one degree worse: a group that could be bled once could be bled again. Have your pockets full, they told him, when we come back. And they said when, not if.

The camp around them was a mercenaries' camp with its grief still fresh — tents packed close, too many soldiers standing when soldiers should have been sitting, and off past the fires the bare posts of a cage that had held prisoners for three days. Sergeant Nala wanted Zuktind's life for the men he had killed. The counter came fast: the six Zhentarim the party had captured, for the captives the Zhentarim held. Varric agreed and left the table satisfied. Nala left it certain the well could be visited again.

"Well, Dragonkin," a voice called after them as they gathered themselves. "It was good doing business with you. Don't go flushing out your treasure to anybody else — I don't want competition. Now go on. You have a purse to fill."

Zuktind gave them a single nod, and nothing else.

Leaving the Camp

They walked out with Sir Papas and the two children, and it was Yeltsu who surprised himself.

He was four feet of scale and teeth and a face built to frighten, and he knew it — knew that a snake-person looming out of a mercenary camp was not what a scared child needed to see. So he made himself smaller in the only way he could. Zuktind lifted one of the children up under his arm to carry them easier; Yeltsu took the other one's hand, gentle as he could manage, and told them not to be afraid. You're safe with me.

The children looked up at the both of them the way you look at a story that turned out to be true. You're the heroes of Phandalin, aren't you? We knew you'd come. Papas told us you would.

"Thank you, Sir Papas," Zuktind said. Behind the children the old gnome walked stiff and slow, carrying the marks of three days in a cage the way a man carries a debt he intends to forget.

"They didn't treat you too badly, did they?"

"I've had worse," Sir Papas said. "Nothing I couldn't handle." And then, because he was Sir Papas and had held out three days for exactly this answer: "So what was decided?"

The Road Back

The road back to Phandalin ran toward a town that no longer looked like one — roofs gone to char, gaps in the streets where houses had stood. Zuktind laid the truth out plainly as they walked. They had not won a guarantee. They had bought a pause. The Zhentarim would return, and they would return specifically for this group, and they would expect the same again — a sum that had been fueled by a double dragon hoard. There was no replicating that in three or four months.

So there was only one thing to do, Zuktind said. Fortify the town.

Yeltsu agreed with the goal and worried about the method. "And on the side," he said, "try to earn some money."

But Zuktind had already run the arithmetic to its unhappy end. Half-built walls were worse than no walls — the Zhentarim would ride back, see the incomplete fortifications, understand exactly what the party was doing, and answer it with anger. It was one or the other: fortify fully, or don't fortify at all and simply keep paying. And they could not do both. "If we do both," he said, "we will not complete both."

There was, he allowed, one way to fortify in a single stroke. Return to Celestia. Make the journey to Bahamut. Earn the god's favor — which, as he had told them before, sometimes meant a trial by combat, strength offered as proof of resolve. And if they proved themselves, they could ask the Platinum Dragon for one thing: protection for Phandalin.

The commander's voice was still in his ears — you think a god would care to protect this little town? — and Zuktind answered the memory as much as the party. This little town was the hub of a war. In Tiamat's campaign against the material plane and Bahamut's fight to hold it, Phandalin might look at a glance like a pawn. It was not. Waterdeep was a rook, a bishop, one piece among many. Phandalin was the queen on the board — because the party made their stand here, and because the townsfolk stood with them.

Yeltsu let the speech land, then held his ground on the practical point. Whichever plan they chose, they should be earning money regardless — a reserve, in case the Zhentarim came back before any of it was ready. He was only thinking of the possibility, he said. That was all.

Rathenfall walked the whole road and said nothing. Whatever he was turning over, he turned it in silence, and the others let the silence be his.

The Town Square

Phandalin was already knitting itself back together when they reached the square.

There were no dying to save — the old healer had seen to every serious wound before they arrived, and what remained was scratches, small hurts, the ordinary aftermath of a town that had been invaded and lived. So the magic that came next was for morale as much as flesh. Yeltsu walked to the center of the square, planted himself among the townsfolk, and spent his last third-level slot on a Mass Healing Word — six people caught in a wash of restoring light, not for the party, not for himself, for them. Beside him Telno raised her own and cast the same, and between the two of them twelve people felt the god's hand pass over their small wounds at once.

The old man came over to them both, plainly impressed. "That's powerful magic you have there," he said. "I'm glad the god blessed you with it."

"I'm glad to be able to use it to help people," Yeltsu told him — and left unsaid, to himself, that it had been the last of it. For anyone else who bled today, it would have to be ordinary healing words now.

The Manor Basement

Zuktind went to the manor with Rusty at his heel and did not stop to grieve the rooms.

Tresendar had been broken into and burned through, and he walked past all of it — the ruined furnishings, the char, the state of the halls — straight down toward the basement, calling a name into the dark. Eri Naktar. Eri, are you all right? His father's apprentice, the metallic dragonkin alchemist who had come to Phandalin with Telno, would have been in his lab when the attack fell.

He was. The lab was mostly intact — a stone-lined room down where the manor's old bones met the Redbrand tunnels, spared the worst of the fire. Eri was fine.

Zuktind's first idea, born of hope more than sense, was that alchemy might undo the damage above — potions to reverse burnt wood, adhesives better than nails. Eri answered him with the patience of a professional explaining a craft to a man who fought with a mace. Potions are drunk. Wood cannot drink. There was no salve for a burned beam.

But there was work he could do. Zuktind emptied the backpack of the things they had carried for so long: three owlbear gizzard stones, two vials of owlbear blood, two vials of owlbear fat, and the head. Components hauled across a campaign, waiting for hands skilled enough to use them. We've been holding these for father, Zuktind said. Do you think you could make something of them, like he could? Eri turned them over and named what he thought he could manage — potions of hill giant strength, a potion of heroism, and healing salves the town could use. It would take a few days. Zuktind told him the town was hurt; healing would help.

He kept the pelt and the twenty talons back. Feathers and fur both, an owlbear had, and something in that struck him — an exotic cloak, the kind of thing that might lend a little charisma to whoever wore it. He thought first of Yeltsu, but Yeltsu's three attunement slots were already spoken for: the Belt of Dwarvenkind, the Ring of Free Action, the Harmonica of Echoing Whispers. His own were not. Ten levels of the artificer's craft had earned him a fourth slot and the knack to make an uncommon item in a quarter the time and half the cost — about three days at eight hours a day, and eighty-five gold once the pelt's own value came off the price. Gold he did not have. Gold he would have to borrow. He would make the cloak for himself, then.

"Be safe," he told Eri as he left. "May Bahamut be with you." Above him, through the manor's broken windows, the Zhentarim camp was already coming down.

Rebuilding

Zuktind went back out to the square to lift stone with everyone else, and found the town had decided, without ceremony, to survive.

There was no crowd of the wounded anymore — only people bent to the work of putting things back. Sister Garaele conferred with the healer and another old traveler beside him. Daran Edermath moved among the ruins with food, asking who needed what. The warrior woman and the smith who had come with the strangers were clearing the burned houses, and the smith was strong past reckoning, tossing aside logs and blocks of stone as though they weighed nothing at all. Zuktind put his own shoulder to it and helped.

Harbin Wester found him at the work. "I hear you gave up all your gold."

"Your safety is worth more than any treasure in the material plane," Zuktind told him. And when Harbin said the truth of it — that the Zhentarim would leave, but they would come back — Zuktind gave him the whole improbable story rather than a comfortable lie. Celestia. Tyr, who had shown them Phandalin's plight and stayed their journey to Bahamut. The audience with the Platinum Dragon they had postponed rather than turn their backs on the town. The plan, if mortal walls proved too slow, to ask a god for protection in return for everything Phandalin had given them.

It was more than a tavern keeper's world was built to hold. Harbin looked at him, confused, and muttered the shape of something like faith — the gods are good, I guess — and let it go, because there was soup to be made for the people. Zuktind offered to help; he knew how to cook. Harbin took him toward the inn, though he and Molly likely had it well in hand, and smoke soon rose from the chimney over a town that was, for all its scars, together. Strangers had come and seen them in need and stayed to help. The coming months would be hard. They would be hard together.

As night fell the Zhentarim finished striking their camp. They buried the men who had died in the battle, filled their carts, mounted their horses, and rode out into the dark — gone, and promising to come again.

The strangers did not go with them. The smith, Aldrik, wanted to stay and help rebuild; Daran welcomed him. Old Merrick said he would be glad to keep company with Sister Garaele — there was much he could learn from her. And the warrior woman, asked by the others whether they were leaving, conceded at last: they might as well stay, and help.

Closing

The people of Phandalin had put their pride back together out of what the raiders had left them, and that was most of what they had. The gold was gone. The winter ahead looked lean.

But they were still here, and they were together, and they had learned that even strangers would cross into a dying town to help it — that the party had come when they were summoned and had not weighed their treasure against the lives in the square. Zuktind said it plainly, standing in the settling dark: fortification took time and money the party no longer had. That left one road. Bahamut, and the hope that a god would listen.

And for that, they would need Telno to conduct the ritual at the shrine.

The Zhentarim were a day's ride gone. The bag of holding could be remade later, once they were far enough away that its absence wouldn't call them straight back. There was soup on the fire, and a town clearing its own wreckage, and a journey to a mountain in the heavens waiting to be resumed.

They had bought a pause. Now they had to earn what came after it.