The Road to Neverwinter

Opening

The letter had no face. Zuktind turned it over in his hands and found only what he had found the night before — blank parchment, sealed with a plain glob of wax, no sigil pressed into it, nothing to say who had sent it or to whom it was owed. Bahamut had not called the council himself. Even to summon the metallic dragons to talk, the great worm had said, would be to lay a hand over their necks he had no wish to lay. So instead he had given them this: a letter for Tamarand, the King of Justice, the one who could rightly convene what Bahamut would not.

And then one of the seven worms, wearing a man's shape, had asked the question that undid them — did they even know where Tamarand was? They had not. They still did not. There was a name to chase now, a cartographer in Neverwinter called Mira Ashveil, who might know the way to a king. It was a thin thread to hang the world on. It was the only thread they had.

Zuktind put the letter away and turned to the business of leaving.

The Cover for a Cartographer

There were choices to settle before the horses were saddled, and Zuktind worked through them aloud, the way he worked through everything. The road party was decided: himself, Yeltsu, Rathenfall, and — after weighing the two clerics — Telno, his own sister, the steadier of the pair, with Lissandra along beside her. Rusty the construct would go where Zuktind went, as ever. Aurora, though, would stay. She had grown up in Phandalin's streets and knew every one of them; if the town were struck while they were gone, she could do more good behind its palisade than on a road to a far city.

But it was Neverwinter itself that worried him. Phandalin was small enough to speak plainly in. Neverwinter was not. It was a great city, and the cult could be anywhere in it — leaning at a window, sitting a table away, listening outside a cartographer's shop and gone before anyone knew to look. They could not simply walk in and ask Mira Ashveil where the King of Justice might be found. To say a thing so bare aloud would bring the cult's door down on hers.

So Zuktind laid out a quieter method, and the others turned it with him. They would carry a cover — a commission, a plausible errand for a civilized dragonkin. His own homeland, the Great North, was poorly mapped; asking a cartographer to chart it was the most natural request in the world. Aloud they would talk of coastlines and trade roads. On parchment, passed across the table in silence for her eyes alone, they would ask what they truly needed to know. Anyone listening from the street would hear a dragonkin fussing over maps of home. Yeltsu turned the idea over, half-tempted to let her actually draw the Great North while they were at it — two birds, one coin — but Zuktind held the line: the cover was the point, and coin was for the answer, not the map.

What Grows in Their Absence

Before the road, Yeltsu went to the greenhouse one last time. Someone had to keep it while they were away — the plants would not wait on a war.

He handed it to two pairs of hands. Aurora, who would already be holding the town, and Erin Nectar, the apprentice alchemist who had come north in the company of Zuktind's sister; between them they could work the beds, harvest what ripened, and turn it into potions worth having. Both were glad of it, eager even, the way growers are around something new and strange.

One plant, though, Yeltsu named apart. The Mirebloom — the single rare shoot they had coaxed into the soil — was not to be cut for potions. Its seeds were to be gathered, and gathered carefully, so that one plant might become many. He said it plainly, and said it twice, and both caretakers understood the weight of the one seed in a bed of common green.

A Day in the Kitchen

Zuktind did the sum of the road in rations and did not like the answer. Neverwinter was only the first leg. After it came whatever price Mira Ashveil would set, and the errand behind the price, and then the hunt for Tamarand, and then the convincing of him, and then wherever the King of Justice called his council. It would be a long time before any of them saw Phandalin's palisade again. He wanted forty rations a head, and no one at the table had close to that.

So he went to the kitchen at Tresendar Manor and did not leave it for a day. He could cook — it was a thing his people prized — and the manor's kitchen was large, with hands enough to help, and he set the whole of it to the task. Oats and honey pressed into bars, dried meat, jerky, seed-cakes, and beneath it all the hard, imperishable brick of hardtack, the bread that never spoils because it can barely be eaten at all — salt and flour baked into a stone, for the days when everything better is gone. By the time the last of it was wrapped the afternoon light had gone long and gold across the flour-dusted boards, and the kitchen staff, who had not planned to feed an army, were as tired as he was. Everyone had forty rations. The road could have them now.

Telno's Readiness

Telno had grown into something steadier than she had been. Between the cooking and the leaving, Zuktind went over what his sister carried into danger — the prayers she had ready, the reach of the small mercies she could work, the way she guarded herself. Where once she had thrown only the great healing words, now she kept the lesser ones close too, and the quiet cantrip that lets a dying man be steadied from across a room. She traded a warding word she rarely used for a blessing she would, and sharpened her reflexes for the moment a fight begins before anyone is ready. It was not much to look at. It would matter later, on a road none of them had walked yet.

Farewells

When the horses were finally saddled, Zuktind made his goodbyes carefully — warm, and worded so no listener could learn much from them. To Sildar, to the townsfolk, he said the sorts of things men say who mean to be gone a while but mean also to come back: take care, we'll miss you, hold the walls. Sildar told him plainly he had gotten used to having them near, that they brought a kind of security to the place. Zuktind wished he could stay. But the world's safety was on the table now too, he said, and no one could guard Phandalin and the world in the same hour.

Halia of the Miners Exchange caught them as they mounted, asking if there was any word she could carry for them, anything they needed off the road. Neverwinter, Zuktind allowed — important business there, the first leg of a longer journey; he would not say more, not even in Phandalin, not this close to the open ground beyond the palisade where an ear might be pressed. Halia frowned at that, half-amused, and kicked a little grass into the air. If the cult had ears out in the mud, she said, then they must have very good ones, and everyone had best learn to whisper. She wished them fortune all the same. Then the dragonkin put his horse to the road north, and Rusty went clanking along behind.

The Fire on the Hill

They had not gone far up the Triboar trail when Yeltsu caught it — a thread of smoke rising off a wooded hill, where the woods gave a clean view back toward the town. Someone was camped up there. Someone had chosen a spot to watch from.

It smelled wrong to all of them at once. There had been scouts before, men who had cased Phandalin's defenses and slipped away, and the party turned off the road to see whose fire this was. Rathenfall took the lead through the trees — the best of them at reading ground — and for a while the trail slipped away in the undergrowth before he found it again: bootprints too evenly spaced, the weight carried forward on light heels, a broken branch, the marks of men taught to move quietly on purpose rather than men who had learned it chasing game. He looked closer still and grew certain. These were not hunters. They had been building a perimeter. They had been watching the tree line.

The party crept in under cover. Rathenfall held back among the trunks — hidden, watching from the dark — while Telno and Lissandra stepped out into the clearing, and four men rose to their feet around a modest fire, a spit turning over two dressed rabbits, snares laid out nearby as if they'd been mended. Easy, the men said. We're hunting. Didn't know the ground was spoken for. Nothing remarkable. Poachers, maybe.

Except everything in the clearing lied. Yeltsu marked it as he looked: the rabbits were not browning though the fire had clearly burned a while; the snares held no soil, laid for show and never set; the packs were lashed military-tight; and the camp, for all it hid among the trees, kept a clean and deliberate line of sight straight back to Phandalin.

Zuktind made his choice in the open, the way he made all of them. He put his musket away behind his back before he stepped out — so they would see he meant no harm — raised his hands square, and came to stand beside his sister, calling Rusty out of the trees to show himself too. If you mean no harm, we mean no harm, he said. We're sorry to have disturbed you. Yeltsu came out after him. The talker held his script. They were only hunters, he said. Just here teaching the boys.

Turning Point — The Performance Ends

Zuktind pressed, gently, item by item. Why weren't the rabbits browned? Freshly skinned, came the answer. A fine view of Phandalin, for a hunting spot. It seemed a good place to camp. Those snares weren't set to catch anything. Hadn't gotten around to moving them yet. And this ease with a perimeter, this precision — the talker allowed, easily, that he'd been a soldier once, that this was how he'd learned. He wanted to know where the questioning was headed, friend. Zuktind was no thief and no robber, was he? No, Zuktind said. He was not. But thieves and robbers who had drilled themselves into something like an army had struck Phandalin before, and had been seen scouting its walls of late, and then there had been smoke on this hill.

It was Yeltsu who ended it. Not with an accusation — with something almost pleasant, laid out straight and kind: the military kit, the rabbits that wouldn't cook, the snares set for no one, the strange perfect vantage, all of it looking so much like men scouting a town rather than men hunting in it. Are you certain, he asked, warmly, absolutely certain, that you'd have us believe you're only poachers?

The warmth went out of the talker's face.

From the first, Yeltsu realized, the man had been reading from a script — and now he simply stopped. He did not flush with anger. The others did not move. He looked at Yeltsu the way one professional looks at another when the pretense is spent and neither side is fool enough to be the first to reach for a blade. We are hunters, he said again. But the conviction was gone from it. He was not even trying anymore. They all knew what they were, and they all knew that the others knew, and the words went on being spoken into that shared and useless silence.

Detained

Zuktind drew the musket then. Hands up. And — Rathenfall, we need you out here. His companion came out of the trees at last, terse as ever, and Rusty moved around behind the men to close the ring.

There was a moment while the talker did the arithmetic — the barrel, the numbers, the odds. Then he raised his hands slowly, nodded once to the others, and three more sets of hands went up after his. No one reached for anything. They were professionals, and they knew the difference between a standoff they could win and one that would only get them killed for nothing. Yeltsu and Rathenfall bound all four while Zuktind kept the gun trained. They slung the men over the horses' backs and turned for Phandalin, all the intelligence these watchers had gathered riding home tied and silent instead of loose on the road.

The Question of Justice

They came back to town sooner than anyone expected, and Zuktind called out his apology for the fright before he explained — four scouts, taken in the woods, watching the town from a hill. It was a matter for Sildar, and to Sildar they brought them.

What followed was not the clean handoff Zuktind had wanted. He had hoped Phandalin's own people might judge these men; it was what they had tried to do with Glasstaff, he reminded Sildar, whom they had wanted tried by the town he had wronged rather than by the distant Lord's Alliance they'd feared would go easy on him. Let the direct victims decide the fate of those who terrorize them — that was his conviction, plainly held.

Sildar took it apart with hard, patient questions. Phandalin had no jail to hold four men for any length of time. And what, exactly, was the crime? They had sat in the woods. They had lit a fire. They had lied about being poachers. None of that was clean enough to hang a man on; surveillance on open forest land was a fine at worst, and there was no proving these four were cult scouts, because these four would never say so. Sildar named the town as it truly was — Harbin Wester, who had hidden in his house when the Redbrands ran the streets; miners who were good men but had never once seen what a spy operation looked like; a garrison Rathenfall had trained but that was not, in truth, ready for this. The Lord's Alliance, whatever Zuktind thought of its distant lawyers, at least had the means.

Zuktind gave ground, but not his principle — his people, he said, did not respect authority until they had seen the strength behind it, and he had seen Phandalin's strength with his own eyes while the Alliance was still only a name. Still, he yielded on the practical thing. They would take the four to Neverwinter, where there were walls to hold men and courts to try them. Sildar sat down and wrote a letter to the Lord's Alliance — the camp, the perimeter, the professional bearing of the men, all of it set down — so that even if these four walked free, the Alliance would have the operation on record. And he lent two horses to carry the prisoners, on Zuktind's sworn oath to bring them back. He noted, without quite saying it, that it was a long road to Neverwinter, and that men so certainly guilty might not survive the whole of it. Zuktind answered that it was not his place to judge who lived or died; they would try to keep the men alive, so that real justice might have them.

The High Road

The Triboar trail gave onto the high road, and the high road carried real weight of traffic. Merchant caravans loaded down with goods, a column of soldiers in unfamiliar colors, families on foot with everything they owned balanced on handcarts — all of it moving the same direction, all of it converging toward the coast. No one looked at anyone else. The road only grew fuller the farther north they went.

By the second day they could smell it before they could see it — cold smoke and salt, and something frying in oil a long way off. Then the land flattened toward the water and the walls rose against the sky, rebuilt pale stone, stark and new, and the banner of Neverwinter in deep blue and silver hung visible from a mile out. The road widened as it neared the city, gathering the travelers into it. Three days out from Phandalin, with two borrowed horses and four bound men, the party rode down toward the gates.

The Gates of Neverwinter

The gates stood wide, and a long line moved through them with the patience of a thing done ten thousand times. Guards in Neverwinter's purple and gold checked papers, unbothered by a merchant somewhere ahead arguing his case; the line simply moved. When the party's turn came, the guard asked the three questions — names, origin, purpose.

Zuktind gave two purposes. First, to present criminals to the Lord's Alliance and the courts of Neverwinter for judgment — and he held up Sildar's letter, drafted in Phandalin, detailing what the four had done. Second, and more personal, to meet a cartographer: his sister and he, he said with a nod toward Telno, wished to have the Great North properly mapped at last, by someone more able than whoever had left them a map they could barely read.

The guard's hand came up off his paper. For the first time he lifted his head and truly looked — at the dragonkin, tall in front of him; at the four men bound over the horses; at Rathenfall, at Telno, at Yeltsu — and he seemed, for a breath, unsettled by the size of what had arrived at his gate. Zuktind apologized for alarming him. The guard took the letter, and whether he could read it or not he called for his sergeant, who read it properly. The sergeant weighed the prisoners, weighed Zuktind's unusual musket, and gave his direction: follow the road to the garrison intake on Coppervane Street, where someone could sort the Alliance paperwork. He handed the letter back and nodded to a guard who looked no way pleased about the errand she'd just been handed.

Closing

They passed through. Behind them the guard was already bent over his ledger, already talking to the next group in line, the gate's slow machinery grinding on without a pause for them. Ahead lay a city larger than any of them had reckoned on — its purpose still a cartographer they had never met, its streets full of ears they could not see.

Dragonkin and cleric, prisoners and companions, Rusty clanking at the rear, they rode in under the pale stone walls. And Neverwinter, indifferent and vast, began to close over them.