Chapter 5 Sage
Sage
The audition began as a jest—a way for Sage to put off the plentiful work of preparing for their journey for a few more moments.
Araphi can’t seriously intend to sign on now that she’s realized her mistake, but she had come all this way.
So why not pretend to flirt with the beautiful and obnoxious party girl who pretends to flirt back?
There’s nothing make-believe about Araphi’s talent, though.
She commands the room. Her face is as animated as any stage actress in Harrow, finely carved features shifting to match the lyrics of a ridiculous song about a pair of young lovers stumbling through the countryside one night, searching for a place to lie together.
They flaunt their sexual talents in the first place they come upon, the temple of a minor devil—talents that Araphi narrates in great detail.
The pair wake the next morning to find themselves cursed: one with a dairy intolerance, and the other with a tongue turned to cheese.
Standard tavern nonsense that draws cheers as lewd as the lyrics from the crowded room.
But every time Araphi’s eyes catch Sage’s, it feels like a private serenade. Like Araphi’s voice, sweet and smoky at once, is a secret whispered into the shell of Sage’s ear.
The spell fades away as soon as the ballad ends.
Probably it was part spellwork; songs sung by bards—real bards, and not just traveling players—are essentially prayers to one of Harrow’s gods or devils of art and revelry.
If they’re pleased, they send their particular magic back in return.
A talented bard can cast spells with their music, pouring their intentions into the melody and letting the gifted magic flow through them.
Perhaps Araphi Clauneck isn’t pretending, after all. Not about being a bard, at least.
She leaves the stage, and Sage bends over a scrap of parchment and begins to draw—in part to avoid meeting Araphi’s gaze as she approaches.
“Well, what do you think?” Araphi asks, sounding breathless and pleased.
Remy speaks before Sage can. “You can play, Phi,” he admits. “But I fail to see how that’ll help us in the woods, much as I love a good campfire sing-along.”
“Hang on.” Sage surprises herself by protesting.
“Bards are more than that. They put a pretty face on a party of rough strangers,” she reminds him, resolutely not looking at Araphi’s unfortunately pretty face as she does.
“A bard can charm our way out of fights before one begins. And it never hurts to have a little extra magic on our team, if fight we must. Besides, isn’t this my party? ”
He turns on her then, studying Sage as a ranger might watch their prey, waiting patiently until their arrow has a clear path. She lifts her chin and stares him down in turn, refusing to squirm under examination.
At last, Remy relents with a quick, inscrutable smile. “As you say.”
“Correct me if I’m mistaken, Sage,” Araphi interrupts them, “but it sounds as though you want me to join your party, after all.”
“I am…sufficiently impressed to explain the adventure you definitely knew you were auditioning for.” She slides the map of Harrow she’s hastily drawn on a scrap of parchment across the table for Araphi to see.
Sage points to the spot on the parchment where two twisting rivers nearly kiss in the Northlands.
“Our party—thus far myself, Remy, our healer, our fighter, and our spellcaster—will be traveling here, to the Swallow. At least, that’s one of the names it seems to go by.
It’s a rare natural canal that connects the Willowthorn and Halhazy rivers where they run parallel, right before the Halhazy turns east.”
Araphi frowns down upon the parchment, inspecting Sage’s drawing. “Why are there party hats in the Northlands?”
“What? No, those are mountains.”
“But what about the pom-poms?”
“Those are trees.”
“Well, if you’re going to draw trees they really should look more like—”
Remy interrupts their bickering with the speech he gave Sage days ago.
“There’ve been only three accounts of the Swallow’s existence that I could find, unearthed from the corners of the kingdom through my client’s resources and my own talents.
The first is centuries old—the story of a priest who went on a pilgrimage to the Graywood with his scribe companion.
They’d been traveling the kingdom together with the purpose of researching and recording Harrow’s forgotten gods and devils in one collected tome, chasing whispers and legends as they went.
They were searching the valley of the Kald Mountains for a temple, rumored by Northlanders to be newly built on a riverbank to guard the grave of a great creature at the river’s bottom.
They came across what appeared to be a shallow creek, unrecorded on any map of the kingdom.
In those days, much of the Northlands was uncharted.
It still is. The priest and the scribe found a temple along its shore, but they’d been warned by the Northlander who pointed them toward the temple not to approach directly.
With deadly solemnity, the keepers practiced what they saw as their divine mission to protect the grave.
The water was dark with plant matter and sediment, shaded by thick trees overhead, but it was just a narrow thing you could practically straddle with a boot on each bank.
When the scribe tried to peer in to see the bottom, she slipped on the mossy rocks and vanished into the water at once.
The priest waited, expecting her to climb out seconds later, but she never did.
So he ran alongside the riverbank, bursting through the brush, hoping she’d been swept downstream and could be fished out. No dice.
“Weeks later, the priest stumbled out of the forest clutching the scribe’s scrolls, weakened near to death by hunger and the elements.
He was given shelter at Briarwall—then just a fledgling military outpost, meant to be warding against monsters that might stray from the woods—until he recovered and returned home to an isolated monastery, where he now lived alone.
The scrolls ended up in the monastery cellars, concluding with the priest’s bitter notes, as he’d decided in his grief that the gods of the past were best left alone.
“The second account is from a young soldier posted at Briarwall. After the priest told his story to her company, she took a small squadron into the woods to explore this uncharted canal and, if possible, to scout for artifacts—bones and tokens and such that sometimes remain at the graves of great creatures and spirits, with potent magical properties of their own. The soldiers suspected that the temple was built to guard more than a gravesite, but rather some powerful cache that was left behind. They had no orders to do so, no sanction from Harrow’s ruler at the time, and so there’s no record of the mission in the Golden Court; their notes were found collecting dust in Briarwall’s archive of military logs.
One member of the company was a strong swimmer, born on one of the Upper Islands.
When they found the stream, they tied an unbreakable rope around his waist, intending for him to dive to the bottom.
They weren’t expecting him to go more than a few body lengths, but a current seized the rope and nearly tore it from their hands, with half a dozen soldiers holding on, and a second was knocked in after the swimmer.
By the time the rest of the squadron caught their footing and pulled out the rope, the knot had slipped loose, and they never found either of their lost companions. ”
“The third account is from Shearwater.” Sage picks up the tale, naming the large port city on the east coast of Harrow, and the main point of travel between their kingdom and Perpignan.
“Not on a scroll, but in a song, and just months ago. A sailor who came to the city from a remote village in the Graywood was drinking with a bard-for-hire, and shared an old ballad from home before he shipped out again. Supposedly a cautionary rhyme for children, which the bard turned into a tavern song about a secluded people living in the mountains long before the rest of Harrow was settled, in a village built around a temple. Legend had it that the death of a great creature had caused a rare earthquake that shifted the land, forming a canal between two larger rivers. Though it looked small and shallow, it was as wide and fast-flowing as what we now call the Willowthorn, only flipped sideways at the confluence, so that the bottom plunged hundreds of feet deep all at once. The rocks on the banks were slick with moss and spray, and if you slipped, a lightning-quick current dragged you under in a blink, perhaps to be spat out where the Halhazy poured into the Serpentine Sea miles and miles away. If you emerged at all. But centuries later, the legends were little more than story, and the people kept losing children and livestock to the stream, which is why they gave it the name: It swallowed anyone who fell in, and none climbed out again. The people lost faith and moved the whole village to protect themselves, rather than the grave. The temple keepers would not abandon their post, so they remained alone on the edge of the Swallow, guarding a long-forgotten grave. Nobody knows who the sailor was, but the bard’s song was noticed and recorded—”
“By me,” Remy finishes with a self-satisfied grin, “who brought it to our current client. It was the last piece of the puzzle we needed for them to commission the adventure.”
Araphi’s eyes have grown wide as saucers. “A river that no one has survived. We’re not going into it, are we?”
“Certainly you’re not,” Sage assures her.
“And what precisely is at the bottom?”
Sage turns to Remy, eager to hear the answer he hasn’t deigned to share with her.
“More about that once we’re on the road, eh?” Remy looks about the Pearl and the Grit. “Too many ears in here, attached to drunkards though they may be.”