Marja took no notice of the sodden guildmaster. Her eyes were the size of dinner plates, set on the gleaming figure of her husband. Her lips squeezed into a small, crimson singularity of a smile, occasionally leaking squeaks of anticipation.
Ortson reflected on Marja’s change of heart as he mopped the wine off his face. The queen had opposed Johan’s plan until the king idly mentioned that it was like something out of a storybook. The remark had affected an immediate change on the queen’s demeanor. At first she fell into a sort of dreamy trance, walking through the palace with heavy-lidded eyes and a bewitched smile. As Johan’s announcement of the plan approached, the queen returned to reality, or at least to a reality tangent to Ortson’s, and insisted on participating in the production. Now she waited in the wings of the throne room with the other staff and stagehands, waiting for her cue.
Ortson startled. Her cue!
“And those I love mean everything to me!” Johan ad-libbed. The king’s tone sounded like he had left the safety of the script behind several sentences ago, and was now unhappy to find he had doubled back on himself. The guildmaster coughed and waved to the queen’s attendants, who loosed their grips on the queen’s arms.
“Joooohaaaaaan!” Marja shrieked, bouncing up the stairs like an excited lapdog. She launched like a cannonball at the king as she crested the dais and crashed into his arms. “My love! You cannot! It’s too da-a-angerous!”
“I must!” Johan’s face showed evident relief that the show had reunited with the script. “The kingdom needs me—needs us—to be strong, my love!”
“But what will I do without you?” Ortson pantomimed along with the queen’s lines as he refilled his chalice. “How can I endure our time apart? For so many years I was without love, without hope…”
“This one’s for Handor’s memory, then,” muttered Ortson, raising his cup in toast. Now that the queen’s monologue had started, it was likely to be his last drink for a while. The queen’s melodramatic praises of her husband and bemoaning of her suffering turned the guildmaster’s stomach, but he couldn’t call them lies. Marja believed her own tripe with all the blind fervor of a mad cultist. Her ravings were just as intolerable as a mad cultist’s as well, so Ortson turned his attention elsewhere.
His eyes were drawn to the Golden Dawn, and not for the first time he found himself wondering who they were. Weaver never faulted Johan for not wanting to share a stage with Ingerson, but even so, the guild was full of talented heroes who would line up to fight at the king’s side. Instead, Johan had dredged up a bunch of base-dwellers, claimed they were chosen by Tandos, and strong-armed Ortson into bypassing most of the guild’s protocols and procedures to get them in the party.
He’d protested, of course. Stood on his principles, or at least hopped on them long enough to make a brief show. But then he’d met the Golden Dawn, seen the silent menace in their smiles. They may not have been killers by profession, but Ortson would have bet that they could have won international amateur competitions. They all looked unsettling, but none more so than the mage…
The Dawn’s raven-haired noctomancer turned to look at Ortson as though he’d spoken her name. The guildmaster almost jumped off his stool and turned back to the king and queen, who had nearly finished their lines.
“I just don’t know how I can live without you!” Marja pantomimed a sob through a wide smile.
“Nor I you,” said Johan. He plucked a silk handkerchief from the queen’s dress. “Grant me this kerchief as a token of our love, a boon on my perilous journey. I swear I would give my dying breath to return it to you.”
Ortson’s brow knit. The king was off script again, though he had to admit it was a good addition. The crowd whispered appreciatively, and the queen herself seemed elated at the king’s oath.
“And return it to you I will!” Johan’s words seemed to be for Marja, but he was staring at a point in the ceiling so intently that the queen and several nobles turned to see who was sitting in the rafters. “My party and I will slay the foul beast! I will come back with a dragon’s head and a dragon’s hoard! Ha haaaa! For this is the greatest threat of our lifetime, and the chance to stave it off will be a quest of the ages, a saga for bards to sing of!”
“A bloody disaster, any way you look at it,” said Duine Poldo.
“Uh, right…” said the town crier.
Poldo looked down at the royal proclamation, printed in thick letters on a sheet of cheap parchment. The town crier had a thick stack of them to hand out to travelers along the road from Waerth to Mistkeep.
“And this was announced just this morning?” Poldo said.
“Uh… y-y-yes. News arrived by sprite just after lunch.” The town crier’s lip flapped for a bit, as though he was trying to drink from a stream without using his hands. “S-sir, th-there’s a—”
“I’m aware,” said Poldo. The announcement included an outdated woodcut of King Johan, as well as an advertisement for The Furkin’s Firkin, a tavern up the road that presumably owned a printing press and employed an independent town crier.
Town criers had once been official employees of city-states and kingdoms, but after the downfall of Boss Wool and a corrupt ring of nobles in Scoria, the citizens of the Freedlands began to embrace the idea that a press operating at the beck and call of the powerful cannot be trusted. Enterprising journalists had recognized the value of independent voices in public discourse, and so founded a wide network of small presses and town criers’ associations across the land. Of course, if there is value in anything, enterprising businesses will try to conglomerate with it, and soon thereafter large corporations began buying up the new companies. Now there were just a few big names in town crying—the Town Crier Network, the Collaborative Guild of Journalists, and the salacious Wolf’s Howl all came to mind. The remaining independent town criers were employed by small presses based in remote villages, popular inns, and one particularly enterprising brothel in Chrate. Most of these small shops lacked the resources to cover anything more complex than disputes between local merchants or stories of unusual farm animals. As such, they paid to have most of their news brought in via sprite from the bigger town crier networks. Now a town crier anywhere on Arth could tell you what happened in Andarun yesterday.
This particular town crier, however, was currently focused on the here and now. Or more accurately, he was focused on the Troll looming high above him and what it might do in the next thirty seconds. “It… It’s a Troll, sir,” he squeaked, frozen to the spot.
“Quite aware,” Poldo said. He gave the lad a handful of silver pieces and a nod that served as permission to scamper away.
Thane, for his part, had stooped to read the proclamation over the Gnome’s shoulder. “Why would it be a disaster for the king to slay the dragon? I mean, for anyone besides the dragon.”
“There’s no certainty that he will slay it, for one thing,” Poldo said. “The king is battle-hardened by all accounts, but I don’t recall that his companions have completed any major quests. And a dragon! Heroes today fight drakes and dragon-kin, yes, but nobody has fought a proper dragon for centuries. Legends say that a flap of a true dragon’s wings can blow men from their feet. A swipe of a black dragon’s tail can level houses, and a blast from a red dragon’s flaming breath can melt clear through stone.”
“Yes, well, legends,” said Thane. “According to legends, I should eat rocks and naughty children, and my breath can kill a village.”
“I’d believe it after you ate that garlic stew the other night,” quipped Poldo. “But then, the Wood Gnomes’ breath was just as deadly.”
“The garlic? It was the beans I regretted,” rumbled the Troll. The bushes around them buzzed with the tiny laughter of the hidden Wood Gnomes.
“Quite,” chuckled Poldo, who had been banished to the far side of the camp after the ill-conceived meal.
“But that just proves my point,” said Thane. “The myth is that I belch out poisonous fumes, and the truth is I use too much garlic and beans in my stew. You can’t trust legends.”
“Not fully,” conceded Poldo. “But the same legends say you can hide yourself as a rock, and that you’re a fierce combatant, and nobody would dispute that. There is some truth in every story, and the Agekeepers say there’s much in the stories of dragons’ might.”
A Wood Gnome clambered up to Poldo’s shoulder and chirruped a question.
“Oh yes, though I don’t remember most of the histories. I recall that the last true dragon on record was when Queen Jorgette of Ruskan sent a small army of adventurers after a young dragon in Faespar back in the Sixth Age. A much smaller army returned with its head.” Poldo turned back to the flyer in his hands. “Sending six heroes into an ancient dragon’s lair… well, I’d be surprised if the guild doesn’t declare them all statistically dead as soon as they set foot in the dungeon. And if the king dies, that leaves ruling to Marja. That would be an undesirable situation by all accounts—including Marja’s, I’d wager.”
“True. But what if the king has found a way to win?” said Thane, helping the Gnome clamber up into the seat of his backpack.
“Even worse,” said Poldo dourly. “People didn’t invest in the Dragon of Wynspar expecting to actually see its hoard. They invested for the exact opposite reason!”
Thane’s face scrunched up as he started down the road. “That doesn’t make any sense.”
“It’s counterintuitive,” said Poldo.
“What does that mean?”
