Still in Pyrewood

Still in Pyrewood

I had quests waiting here. That part, at least, needs no explaining. [Picture description: A misty dawn view of Pyrewood Village below Shadowfang Keep, pines lit gold from behind, a cart standing empty in the foreground]

I had quests waiting in Pyrewood Village, and I finished them — that is plainly why I went. What I can give no account of is why I was still there afterward, the way a tongue keeps going back to a tooth that has already stopped aching.

When Dalaran burned, Arugal fled south to the keep above a logging town and called worgen out of the Emerald Dream to hold a line against the Scourge. The worgen did not hold it. They turned first on the mages who had summoned them, then on the town below, and the curse meant for an enemy settled instead over Pyrewood’s own people — a thing they now carry, rather than a thing that was done to them once and finished.

Dalar Dawnweaver had sent me for the last of it: six shackles taken off the cursed dead, so that Arugal’s own magic might be turned back on him and Silverpine made a little safer in the Dark Lady’s name. What he wanted with six shackles specifically, he did not say, and some questions are not worth the trouble of asking.^↑1

Whatever waited there, I did not face it alone, though not always with the same company — more than one pairing of our own kind crossed my path there that night. One of them never let a cursed villager’s hex finish taking hold before closing the distance himself, as though patience were a tax he resented paying twice. Another was dead before I was and halfway back to fetch me before my own soul had properly left my body — a service I had not requested and have not yet found the correct tone in which to decline.

There is a particular comedy, I am told, in pulling one cursed villager cleanly from a crowd and watching it bolt rather than fight. I counted it a mercy and said so. It returned a minute later with the better part of its household.

It was not the mob that undid me, in the end. It was a tailor. A tailor, formerly of this village, now in service to a dead worgen lord, put a knife between my ribs from an angle a tradesman has no business knowing, and I went down to a backstab delivered by a man who, in life, hemmed trousers. I have killed captains. I have been finished, on this one evening, by a tailor’s knife and an elder’s temper and a watch of three that came at me together, and I confess the tailor is the one I resent. The others at least had the decency to be soldiers about it.

You have no standing order here. Mezzlos told me, flatly, somewhere past the second death. He was not wrong, and he did not mean it as a kindness, and I did not take it as one. A warlock’s familiar keeps a ledger of what is owed him; he does not keep one of what a man owes himself, and has no opinion on why a dead thing with its errand finished would choose to keep dying in the same wood for no order anyone had given it.

The sixth shackle came in late, past the hour I had any further business in Pyrewood. I did not leave. My companions did not ask me to stay, which is, I have come to notice, rather more persuasive than if they had.

I have entered one figure in the book tonight, and underlined it, in the place where I usually put the thing that mattered: the cost of having my robes mended, twice over, by a seamstress who did not ask why a dead man’s cloth kept arriving in pieces. It is the only accounting I have of the evening. The rest I am leaving where it sits, unexplained.