The Price of Walls

Opening

The Zhentarim were gone, and Phandalin was left to count what they had taken.

They had come as cavalry first — riders who claimed they were only passing through — and then the infantry had closed around the town like a fist and demanded to know where the dragonkin was hiding. When there was no answer that satisfied them, they had taken what the townsfolk kept in their houses and burned what they could not carry. Now the raiders were somewhere over the horizon and the smoke had thinned to a grey haze that hung over the roofs, and the people who were left came out into the light to see whether anything they owned had survived the night.

In the public square, the work had already begun. Sister Gerael moved among the last of the tired; the healer went where he was needed; two warriors stood where warriors stand when the fighting is done and there is nothing left to guard against. And a broad-shouldered man named Aldrik was carrying logs on one shoulder — two, sometimes three — as though the weight were a rumor he had chosen not to believe.

Zuktind, Rathenfall, and Yeltsu had come as fast as they could. They had come too late for the siege. They meant not to be too late for the rest.

The Square

Zuktind wanted to lift. It was the plainest thing he could offer — beams to be set, damaged houses to be reframed — and he was strong enough to be of use, and so was Rathenfall, and they went looking for the man who seemed to be directing the labor.

Aldrik took the measure of them the way a builder takes the measure of a load. He would repair the smithy first, he told them, because with its tools the other rebuilds went faster — first the forge, then the homes. He had heard of a family that had lost everything; the Aldrins, farmers, their house burned with the woman Martha nearly still inside it, and now they were holding what remained of their lives together by stubbornness alone. Go there, he said. See what your strength is good for.

And then Aldrik gave them the idea that would shape the whole session, and he gave it plainly, the way a working man hands over a tool. You keep the big manor on the hill. Why leave the roofless in the cold? Gather everyone who has lost a home, and put them under yours.

Zuktind took it like a man who could not believe he had needed to be told. It was the right thing, and it had been right the entire time, and he had walked past it. They would rebuild, and they would offer the manor while the rebuilding was done.

Off at the edge of the square, one of the cross-frame barricades Aldrik had been fashioning all through the party's absence leaned against a wall — timber notched and lashed, the kind of thing a man builds when he does not expect help to arrive. He had been the only wall the town had.

The Town Hall

Yeltsu followed Aurora to the town hall, and knocked, and the boy Telsin let him in — still trailing after Sildar, still fetching and carrying, an office boy and nothing grander. Sildar was acting as town's master because someone had to, and because Harbin Wester could not. Harbin was there too, aggrieved and rattled, insisting that a burned house was the price the town made him pay for the office, while Sildar's eyes went to the ceiling and stayed there.

There was a letter to write. Neverwinter had to be told what the Zhentarim had done; the Lords' Alliance had to be made to answer for it. Yeltsu had no strength for logs, but he had a hand for ink and pen, and he offered it. He sat at the table with a shared quill and helped draft the report — and when the words came out intelligent, and wise, and as persuasive as a plea for justice could be made, Sildar read it over twice and looked at him differently. He had not known Yeltsu carried such a skill.

"It is a skill I trained while I spied on human settlements for my clan," Yeltsu explained — penmanship, the ordering of sentences, the sort of learning his people had thought foolish and which now served him better than any of them would have guessed. Sildar sealed the letter and sent it on its way.

Then Yeltsu told the truth no one wanted written down: the raiders would come back. In perhaps four months, and they would expect the party to have money waiting for them. Sildar took it with a thoughtful calm; Harbin took it as one more blow he could not endure. "We cannot endure this one more time," he said. "My house is already burned."

The warning ran straight into the question of walls. A stone wall was dreamed of and dismissed in the same breath — six years and a fortune no town could raise. What could be done was a palisade: sharpened logs around Phandalin's perimeter, four thousand feet of it, four months of labor, six thousand gold in wages and materials. Aurora heard the shape of the plan and put her purse on the table. She would front the whole cost — six hundred platinum — on one condition: that the seven of them shared it, each member of the party owing her a thousand gold in return. And she wanted a guarantee besides. Turning to Sildar, she pressed for the town to cover the debt of any member who was ever permanently unable to pay — killed, or worse — and she pressed so well that Sildar agreed. It was too good an offer to refuse, and both of them knew it. The contract was struck.

The Manor

At Tresendar Manor, Zuktind gathered the homeless and opened his door.

He had rehearsed the grand version of the speech and lost it halfway through, and had to begin again, plainer: to all of you who lost your homes in this attack, the manor is open, for as long as you need it, so that you have a roof when the rain comes. It should have been simple. It was not. Their money had been stolen, a woman told him, her voice small — who would rebuild their houses now? What did a warm bed matter if they walked back out into the ash of their old lives?

So Zuktind gave the only answer he had. He would work for free. So would Rathenfall. And the manor kept food in its stores, and any who gave their time to the rebuilding were welcome to it. The husband pushed back — three men could not rebuild a town, and if the townsfolk stopped working their fields to raise houses, who would feed them? The arithmetic was honest and it was cruel: something near eight thousand gold, six to eight weeks, and every hand in Phandalin turned to the task. There was no clever way around it. There was only the offer, and Zuktind kept making it until they took it.

He led them down into the manor's basement and gave the rooms away. The Aldrin family — the child, the woman, her husband — though when their basement room proved too cramped he moved them up to two guest rooms above. Corvin the Smith, who could work the manor's own forge until his was rebuilt, honored simply to sleep under a roof and not beneath rubble. Harbin, a room and an office both, the least urgent of them and the loudest about it. Elmar Barthen would lodge with his brother the innkeeper and needed nothing. One by one Zuktind pointed out the doors, and one by one they filed in, and Daran Edermath — quiet, useful, present in everything and never at its center — watched the whole thing with the relief of a man glad the town would hold.

The Safe Room

Then Sir Papus took Zuktind aside.

He had been shut up in a small wooden jail while the raiders held the town — a cleric of a trickster god, powerful enough, but he had been alone, and there had been other people in danger. Now, released, he had something to show. He led Zuktind through a seamless door off the armory, into a room no map called secret, and turned the armory into a vault with a sentence.

More than thirty thousand gold pieces. Half of what had been set aside to rebuild the manor, not yet paid out to the contractors, hidden here while the raiders searched the house and — this time — did not find it.

"You didn't think I would let those fuckers get it," Sir Papus said, "did you?"

The money had been at real risk; he did not pretend otherwise. They could have searched again. They could have torn the floor up. They had not — not this time. And that qualification set Zuktind thinking about the next time. There was a spell he had wanted with no use for it until now — Glyph of Warding, a thing an artificer could learn — and he could set a trap on that door that would blow an unwelcome guest to ruin and leave the manor standing. The planning ran away with itself: a glyph on each door, a glyph on the floor of the passage, a glyph over the hidden cache, each keyed to its own password so a thief would need to know them all. Yeltsu could take the spell at his next level; Lissandra might already have it. The obstacle was diamonds — two hundred gold of diamond dust for every casting, and diamonds were already wanted for other, graver work: three hundred gold of the stone kept aside against the day someone needed to be called back from death.

The Dinner

Martha commandeered the kitchen. No one had asked her to. She simply took it over — a proper stew with meat in it, fresh bread, a small apple cake barely large enough to go around — and Sir Papus hovered at her shoulder asking a hundred questions about how it would all be done, and she was in good humor, because tonight she would sleep in a feather bed. Candles were lit. The manor's long table had been built to seat guests, and for one evening it did.

It was over that table that the sharpest words of the night were said.

Zuktind, thinking aloud as he did, wondered which would better defend Phandalin — if Bahamut's favor could be won at Mount Celestia — a single friendly metallic dragon, or a chapter of paladins sworn to the god. Aldrik laughed, not unkindly, genuinely entertained. Tessa did not laugh. She struck Aldrik's arm and told him he should not either, and she turned on Zuktind with a plain and cutting scorn.

"What do you think Bahamut is — a shop? A merchant you go to and ask for what you need?" You want paladins in your town — build them a temple. Take people off the streets and make paladins of them. Create the value you're begging for. Why should a god, any god, do your work for you?

Zuktind did not mean to offend, and said so, and tried to explain — they were not asking the god to fight their fight for them; they already fought Tiamat, the same war Bahamut fought, and it had only seemed to make sense to bind their purpose to his so that the two were one. He understood, he said, that Bahamut would likely make them prove their strength in battle first. The favors would be earned, not handed down.

Old Merrick stilled the table. "Calm down, Tessa. There's no need to argue with the dragonkin." He is young, the healer said, and he believes his god will care for him, and for these people. Then he turned to Rathenfall, who had said almost nothing all evening. "What do you think? Do the gods care for small towns such as Phandalin?"

Rathenfall was quiet for a moment, the way he is quiet before a thing worth saying.

"I should hope so," he said. And then, drawing it up from somewhere plainer than eloquence: if the gods did not care, they would not have sent us. Tyr had shown them Phandalin's danger from the halls of Mount Celestia. That was why they had come.

It was in the middle of this that the misunderstanding surfaced and, surfacing, changed the shape of the room. Zuktind kept insisting these people had needed rescue — and Tessa, exasperated, made him understand at last: she, Aldrik, and Merrick were not from Phandalin at all. They had not needed saving. They had seen a town in trouble on the road, and they had come, unbidden, to help. Sister Gerael and Daran, sensing the heat rising, steered the talk toward gentler ground.

Yeltsu found the gentler ground for them. Did they want to hear, he offered, how he had once tricked a fae — and the best of it was, he had done it by being kind. In the Mere of Dead Men, hunted by something patient and strong, he had slipped alone into a house he found along the way, discovered the fae that lived there, and on leaving had chosen to warn it of the danger on their trail — a gift, freely given, taking nothing in return. And the creature, realizing it had been put in his debt without ever agreeing to it, had to repay him, and so had granted him immunity to the Rot, the swamp's deadliest disease. It had not thanked him. It had told him to go. The fae, Zuktind noted, do not like to owe.

Daran Edermath laughed at that — and then admitted, drawn out by his own daughter, that he too had tricked a fae once, long ago. "And she gave me the best gift I've ever had in return." What gift, Zuktind pressed, leaning in. "That's a story for another day," Daran said, and would not be moved — but he clasped the tale to Yeltsu's own. "Guess that means we're brothers in arms, then. Two men who defied fate and tricked tricksters." Zuktind let it go, and privately wondered — with no idea how it could be so — whether the gift the old man meant was Aurora herself.

They ate, and they rejoiced, and the apple cake went around in small pieces, and for one night the manor was full of people who were safe.

Closing — Six Weeks

They would not leave until the rebuilding could carry on without them. That was the whole of the plan, and it was enough of one. Aldrik asked to stay through the reconstruction, his companions with him — some of them, he said with a glance at Tessa, only reluctantly — and Zuktind gave them the manor's guest rooms. Then everyone slept, and the party took the long rest the world for once allowed them.

And time opened up.

Six weeks of it — the slow, unglamorous work of a town knitting itself back together. The Aldrins' farmhouse would go up first, for the harvest could not wait; Barthen's next, for the town needed its provisioner; Corvin working the manor's forge all the while. Lissandra would turn out spell scrolls. Aurora would brew her potions. Before the road called them back to Mount Celestia, they meant to visit the mines and see what the dwarves and gnomes had made in their long absence.

And Yeltsu had a project of his own. The one-of-a-kind seed the caravan herbalist Tariel Ferconi had given him — the Mirebloom, a thing that could cure disease and draw out poison, and be multiplied into more if only it could be grown — needed a home that was more than a corner of a garden. A sealed chamber. Bog-black soil kept not damp but wet, standing water at the root. Light from above but filtered through cloth or frosted glass. And cold — the hard part — a cool that would not lift, a cellar with a high ceiling. He chose the least costly greenhouse he could and set it among the trees below the manor, in the shade where a hidden thing stays hidden, and borrowed a hundred platinum from Rathenfall to begin. The explosive glowing moss from the tunnels below was floated as another crop and firmly buried — no one wanted to be the reason the manor came down a second time. Through those six weeks, Yeltsu broke the ground and laid the beds and set the first seed into the wet dark, and hoped it would take.

Somewhere out past the new-cut palisade line, the four months were already running down. The raiders knew who they were now. They had learned it the moment a purse was flashed on a road where the wrong eyes were watching — and rumor had done the rest. The party did not know that yet. They only knew there were walls to raise, and a garden to keep cold, and a god's favor still to be earned, and that the road back to Celestia would wait until Phandalin could stand on its own.