Still in Pyrewood

Still in Pyrewood

I had quests waiting here. That part, at least, needs no explaining.Nothing in this picture looked like it would take four attempts. [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.Dalar Dawnweaver had sent me for six shackles off Arugal’s cursed dead, and Master Apothecary Faranell, by an errand some days older, had sent me for the journal of Apothecary Berard. Both errands wanted Pyrewood Village that evening, which I mention only because I had expected to finish one before starting the other, and left with neither expectation honoured.^↑1

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.

Whatever waited there, I did not face it alone, though not always with the same company — more than one pairingI did not go in alone, though I had not asked for company and would not have known how to arrange it if I had. Two others 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 —fell in with me somewhere past the first gate, neither waiting to be introduced nor, as it turned out, to be thanked. I counted this a convenience rather than a comfort, and intend to go on believing that for as long as it remains convincing.

I judge a thing by its station, as a rule, and have found the habit serviceable in every other wood I have walked through. The dead of this village do not observe it. A tailor, in life, is not a man one watches, and I did not watch him — a fact I will return to, since the evening insisted on it.

We go again. Mezzlos announced this the way other men announce the weather, without any sense it might be worth discussing. We went again, and again. A cursed villager, pulled clean from a crowd, turned and ran rather than fought, and I counted it a mercy and said so aloud. It returned inside the minute with the better part of its household, and the three of us ran from a laundry line’s worth of the previously cursed and newly furious, which I am prepared to call comedy from a sufficient distance and have not yet achieved that distance.

One of six. I had not yet decided to mind. [Picture description: Percy standing before Son of Arugal on a cracked stone road, the quest log open at one of six shackles recovered]

Son of Arugal’s own temper put me down first, which at least had the decency to announce itself. One of my two companions had me upright again before the ground had finished being unkind to me, 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 A Pyrewood Elder’s whole retinue did the same to me a second time, more thoroughly.

Somewhere between the two I came by Apothecary Berard’s journal. The curse had left him not dead but empty — an apothecary once, kept now at the village inn for no purpose anyone troubled to give him, until I arrived to make use of him for one. I did not read what the journal held. A dead man carrying another dead man’s unread journal through a wood full of the previously living struck me as sufficient irony for one evening without my adding to it.

The tailor found me between the Elder and whatever came after. I had marked him, on sight, as no more dangerous than the trade he had died practising, and turned to deal with something I had judged worse. He put a knife in from an angle no tradesman has any 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 otherswho hemmed trousers in life. I have killed captains; on this occasion I was finished by a hem-stitcher, and I confess he is the death I resent — the Elder and the rest at least had the decency to be soldiers about it.manners to come at me from the front.

You have no standing order here. Mezzlos told me,me this flatly, somewhere past the second death.fourth time the ground and I renewed our acquaintance. He was not wrong, and he did not mean it as a kindness,kindly, 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.I gave him no answer. I went again instead, which I notice is the only answer I gave anyone that evening to anything.

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.and Berard’s journal came in within two minutes of each other, well past the hour either errand had any further claim on me. Dalar Dawnweaver had one more use for me before I left — the worgen-cursed, it seems, want their own belongings back from one another, which strikes me as a pitiable sort of theft rather than a crime — and I have taken the errand without entering it in the book. Some accounts are better left for a night when I have decided what I think of them.

I have entered one figure in the book tonight, and underlined it, in the place where I usually put the thing that mattered:the two hand-ins tonight, and beneath them the cost of having my robes mended,armour repaired, twice over, by a seamstresssmith who did not ask why a dead man’s clothplate kept arriving in pieces. It is the only accounting I have of the evening. The rest I am leaving where it sits, unexplained.For once it is not the repair I have underlined.

My companions did not ask me to stay for either hand-in. I stayed anyway. I have come to notice that the absence of a request is, from the right two people, rather more persuasive than the presence of one.