Still in Pyrewood

Still in Pyrewood

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]

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.

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 worgenthe Scourge broke Dalaran, Arugal went home to Gilneas, and when the dead reached its walls too, he summoned worgen to hold the line. They^↑1 did not hold it. They turned first on the mages who had summoned them, then on the town below, and the curseon the soldiers who had loosed them, ran through Silverpine Forest, and overwhelmed the keep above a logging town, killing the lord who held it. Arugal took the worgen in as his own and shut himself inside what the keep became: Shadowfang Keep. The curse he^↑1 meant for an enemy settled instead over Pyrewood’s own peoplethe people below^↑1 — a thing they now carry, rather than a thing that was done to them once and finished.

I 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 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. 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 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 manners to come at me from the front.

You have no standing order here. Mezzlos told me this flatly, somewhere past the fourth time the ground and I renewed our acquaintance. He was not wrong, and did not mean it kindly, and I did not take it as one. 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 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 the two hand-ins tonight, and beneath them the cost of having my robe mended, twice over, by a seamstress who asked no more about a dead man’s linen arriving in ribbons than any tradesman asks about his custom. It was a tailor’s trade that undid me and a seamstress’s that put me back together, and I decline to make more of that than it deserves. 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.