The Chronicle

They ended Session One on their knees, and began the next the same way. Thomas's head still lay on the flagstones where it had fallen, jaw slack, lifeless. Mithras was in the room — less seen than felt, a pressure at the back of the neck; when Tomisława tried to lift her eyes to his face there was a light coming off it like the sun through closed lids, and looking too long cost her real pain. He told Richard de Worde that he trusted him, and would see the coterie rewarded handsomely for their service. The matter ahead is of great import — not only to me, but to all Avalon. Then, almost as an afterthought, he healed them: every hurt of the ship and the beach closed at a word. He turned, and the room dimmed to a comfortable, shadowed dark.

Left alone with the coterie and the body, Richard de Worde — Mithras's spymaster, half his face slumped and melted, one eye lost beneath it — laid out what only he and the prince had known until now. Constantinople has fallen; war rages across the nations; whoever endures stands to shape Cainite society for a long age. Mithras is mighty, but he is one Cainite, and the Rose Treaty he granted in mercy has left the rebel Dukes circling. We cannot afford leaks in the ship, he said, and looked at Thomas. The task: certain courts across Avalon are believed to hold relics — objects that, in ambitious hands, or worse the Tremere's, could be turned against the prince. He could give them locations and little else — what the relics are, even de Worde does not know. Secure them for Mithras where loyalty allows; where it does not, abscond with them or destroy them — and never let any of it lead back to London.

Their cover is their unimportance: young official envoys, beneath notice. First stop, Shrewsbury, in the fief of Gloucester — Gloucester itself held by the loyal Duchess Saren, Shrewsbury by an honourable old warrior named Ostler Blackwell, also loyal to the prince. A soft opening, de Worde implied, precisely because the names after it are not. When it is done they are to go to the scriptorium at Oxford and ask to see a homily about the Pheasant; someone will find them there, take their report, and give them the next name. Eustace pressed — this seems almost too simple, a test — and got a spymaster's smile: the road tests all of us. We are hoping it is simple. We are hoping it is discreet.

Downstairs, in a salon of their own, the coterie turned to the practicalities of the road: a mobile haven of four strong wagons dressed up between them — a layer of grave-soil under slatted boards in Tomisława's, a well-fed horse drawing Méabh's — with the coterie's shared means spent on luxury and armour, the retinue standing in for watchmen.

Tomisława used the London nights to fish. A round of careful conversation turned up the Tremere's political weakness — no status, no numbers, wholly dependent on more powerful patrons who merely tolerate them — and she began drafting letters she would not see answered for months, including one, clan and nature concealed, to a magus of House Tytalus, whose long feud with the Tremere she means to turn to use. Eustace, for his part, went looking not for Kindred but for the Fae — a friend of that country by his descent from Marconius, and by inclination — for a different reading of the road ahead.

Six nights out of London at a good pace: the road as far as Gloucester, and then a day or two where the road simply stops and the last of the way is heavy wood — the Forest of Arden — before the land opens onto Shrewsbury. A fortified town on the Welsh march, a battle-outpost with unfriendly neighbours, lately and uneasily quiet. Arriving, Méabh would not leave Scéalán with the wagons but brought the wolf in at her heel, against every etiquette of a lord's hall — and in a keep where every Cainite is known to the rest and nothing is hidden, the Beast in it marked her, and gave a little of her Gangrel blood away.

Inside the keep they were given rooms and a briefing. Every Cainite in the domain knows of the others, so there was nothing to hide: their host Ostler Blackwell, who truly rules here; Lord Gareth Arundel, whose family's castle this nominally is, ghouled and being tested for the Embrace; Gareth's mother the Lady Henrietta, mortal and entirely aware; a Welsh guest named Dylan, Cainite and commoner both; and, unseen, a Brother Larkin, a monk who keeps an abbey in the town. When the briefing came to Gareth's promised Embrace, Tomisława laid a hand on the Graf's shoulder — she may touch him; he may not touch her — and felt the small, suppressed flinch the subject still costs him; she clocked it, and let it pass. Then she took the moment to school Méabh in etiquette — how a Welsh commoner is of no account twice over, and how, being their host's guest, he is nonetheless owed the minimum courtesy — and Méabh, once she grasped that a lesson was underway, nodded with great seriousness.

They were announced into the great hall — the Graf at Tomisława's side, Méabh behind, Eustace under his own old title — where the court waited around a long table, a fire kept at a careful distance, the walls hung with tapestries of the Arden, of nature, and of some grand mythic battle full of lion-and-dragon things. Well-dressed mortals rose as they entered: some for show, some for the table.

Blackwell welcomed them on the prince's behalf, apologised for the want of a proper feast — you have caught us at a moment — and offered his triumphs in its place. Kuncze, one of the Graf's men, was set to spar him so he could narrate a siege he had once broken by riding out at night rather than waiting for the walls to fall; the old lord was genuinely good, and pleased the bout lasted exactly as long as the telling. Whether to feed at all was its own tightrope — refuse the offered vessels and slight the host's hospitality, take too freely and slight his means — so they partook with care. Tomisława took a lady-in-waiting's wrist to her lips, briefly, for the form of it, and murmured to Méabh — who was feeding messily and trying to cover it — the night's first commandment of court: whenever it is free to do so, always indulge a great man's vanity.

Worked up an appetite, Blackwell asked leave to feed on the man he had just fought, and drank rather more than he meant to before catching himself. Asked where she was from, Tomisława gave the forests of the East, and turned the question to Andrzej, her tracker, who told a plainly terrifying story — monstrous things in the trees, meticulously avoided — in the flat voice of a man describing a rake left in the grass. Blackwell, who knows a real hunter when he hears one, leaned in. Méabh, bored by the war-stories, came sharply awake at the discovery that this lord was more predator than general.

Dylan prodded him toward the story he had left unfinished. Blackwell pointed down a wall of hunting-trophies to one very large, very empty mount. He had taken a stag once, the greatest head anyone had seen — and the head had vanished from its place. Stolen, he assumed; he questioned his people hard. Weeks on, deep in the woods, he found it again — the same head, as if it had climbed down and walked out to spite him. He killed the stag a second time, took the head himself, and woke the next night to find it gone and the beast alive in the trees. Each time it seemed angrier. Have you ever met a stag that fought back? This one did. It had cost him some of his best dogs, and a houndmaster, and still hangs on no wall. If they doubted him, they were welcome to come and see — and so entertainment and feast were folded into one: a hunt, together, in a night or two. The Graf was delighted.

Gareth could not stop staring at Eustace, and finally asked outright whether he was Cainite — a grown man who has never seen one, kept ghouled and made to wait years for a gift he plainly aches for. Learning that Eustace had been Embraced as a child — a pre-adolescent, frozen years short of manhood — I was just too special, he offered — Gareth turned the knife the other way: he would not want to be stuck like that, he said, and what manner of sire makes a child of a man? He named Eustace's maker a real bastard of a sire, and Eustace, stung for once, could only answer that to point such a thing out was rude. Around them the room turned uneasy — the shadows moving wrong at Eustace's back, the cold fae strangeness of his blood pressing at the edges of the candlelight.

Off to one side, Dylan had crouched into a wordless conversation with Scéalán, trading small animal sounds; Méabh, raising her blood to listen in, warmed to the one soul in the hall who spoke her language — and let him tell her, cheekily, that the wolf preferred his company.

Gareth, who takes the Graf for a mortal on the same road he is — kept close and readied for the Embrace — drew Tomisława onto the making of vampires: what it is to be sired, and what she is to her own sire. She gave him more than she gives most: I would not subject the Graf to the cruelty I suffered. A line about her own making, and a promise about her husband's, left to stand without further explanation.

It was out of that conversation, and not the quarrel with Eustace, that her clan came up. Asked, she offered the truth she rarely does: I may be the only one of my kind for many leagues — but I am Tzimisce. Blackwell, mid-draught on a hunter, stopped and looked up; Dylan's brow rose; the name landed. The old lord found the careful way to circle the ugly question, and she spared him having to ask it: I do not partake in the crafting of flesh, if that is what you are wondering. He apologised for the near-offence all the same.

Between all this, the useful thread. Asking after Brother Larkin, Tomisława drew out the shape of the place. Lady Henrietta, who had watched the whole evening in near-silence, cleared her throat and told the story properly: Saint Winifred, a Welsh maiden beheaded by the suitor Caradog for refusing him and choosing the veil; a spring risen where her head fell; her head rejoined and her life restored by her great-uncle Saint Beuno, who called the earth up to swallow the murderer. Winifred lived to old age, and her relics turned the town's once-unconsecrated abbey into a thriving one — a pilgrim site, if a hard one to reach, since the Romans never built a road that way.

Which is where it tightened. The road has lately been made safe by the Order of Absolution — the same knightly order the coterie met burning on a beach a week ago — who guard pilgrims and, pointedly, protect relics. Brother Larkin is a zealot for them and has been pressing Blackwell to garrison them at Shrewsbury; the lord has not agreed, and they have not been seen here in months. A domain with a rumoured relic, an abbey full of holy bone, and an order that hunts the red-masked man they lied about: Tomisława asked to see the abbey, and Henrietta agreed to lead them there herself, after the hunt. She will need a heavy veil to go.

Eustace was not finished with Gareth's slight, nor with the host who had let it pass. He drew himself up on his family's name — genuine, and prominent — and called the thing what it was: a lord disrespecting a guest under his own roof. It became, in the end, a duel — charm and standing against the old lord's pride — and Eustace critted it, six successes, and was maddeningly, unanswerably right. Blackwell wanted to turn it into blood; everyone in the room could see the predator behind his eyes weigh it. But a sword drawn on a snide boy only makes the boy's point, and Blackwell cares, above almost anything, for his dignitas. He swallowed it. The shadows stretched long across the floor as he bent, and the lord bowed, and apologised to his own court for a lapse of etiquette — meaning the shape of it, if not the substance.

Before the night broke up, Méabh drew Eustace aside. Sometimes a dog does need to be shown what it did, she allowed — but he had also just shown a hall of hunters that he can bite, and they will count him a threat now. Was he fast enough, she asked; strong enough? Then be clever enough to find refuge. She turned it over the way she turns everything over, in rabbits: the clever, hunted things that endure by being unremarkable and quick to ground — indispensable and dispensable at once, all of them alike, alive precisely because no one can tell one from the next. In every dealing that night, she told him, he had played the rabbit.

Eustace would not have it. He is no rabbit, he said — and neither is she; and when she asked whether he thought rabbits so poor a thing, he answered that he would rather be something singular. He named himself a stoat: small, yes, but a killer, and wearing a pelt worth far more than anyone expects. Méabh looked genuinely pleased. She would not climb into a trap in his place — her own survival comes first — but if he ever went looking for wolves, she and Scéalán would be there. Very well, then — little stoat, she said, and rose to her full height, and told Scéalán on the way out to be mindful of him.

Eustace woke first, to thunder above and screaming men, rain pooling pink through the deck seams and a hatch banging open onto lethal daylight. Bronisława already had her mistress's lid off and gave him a look of pure resignation. A raider came down the steps; Eustace caught his gaze and mesmerized him back up the stairs, rationalized so cleanly the man thought it his own idea. Méabh and Tomisława woke next — Méabh whispering Gaelic at Scéalán to defend her, Tomisława asking for a water barrel.

She opened her wrist, plunged her hand in, and burned three aggravated for a third of a mile of koldunic sight — saw their ship beached, a second hull alongside, their own sail burning — then critted Elemental Grasp and pulled the raider ship off her hull on a swell, stranding the rest. She stayed in the barrel for the fight, narrating. The rest was Oscar's: woken early and hard out of torpor, Blood Surge and Claymore, he took the last raider's torch-arm off at the shoulder and drained him with Brutal Feed, ending fed to zero and cheerful. Above, the raiders scattered; armored cavalry came down the hill.

A flashback to the nights before the crash: nothing to do in a box but talk, one topic each. Oscar asked about mortal family and got least of anyone — Tomisława confirmed only a nobleman husband; Méabh slid into myth; Oscar went quiet: I was a knight. I took off. Tomisława asked whether Méabh's tradition worked fire and got a blank look, and was deeply disappointed. Eustace asked about breeding and sized everyone up — filed Méabh a fraud (was your wolf a noble too?) and Tomisława, after both critted, as genuinely noble and permanently queen of the swamp. On God, Oscar warned Méabh to be careful who she tells: people must believe the narrative for it to have power.

The sun went down; the mast kept burning. A lid came off a box nobody had accounted for and Ludan sat up in it — wooden mask, carved mustache, red hair, a box of dead rodents, aboard the whole voyage unseen. Eustace couldn't get eye contact through the mask and worked out Nosferatu on politics. Facing the fire, Eustace and Oscar both frenzied and went over the side; Ludan yelled fucking Catholics and followed; Méabh ran. Tomisława did not frenzy — she stood on the burning deck and studied the flames, fascinated, with Bronisława beside her. She and Méabh read the riders' heraldry: the Order of Absolution.

Down the coast, Oscar hauled Eustace bodily through the surf by the scruff — didn't they teach you to swim in Hell, demon child — the shadows thickening as Eustace seethed. On the beach Ludan gave Oscar a fox-carved coin (in Cambridge, ask for a bolt of red) and Eustace a knife, and vanished into the woods.

Tomisława elected to present rather than hide — veiled, claiming an illness of the sight, led by the hand by Bronisława. Guarin of Jersey lifted his visor, apologised for the butchery, and produced a boarding ramp, offering to host her "cousin and herself." Up the hill rode mounted knights and one nun, Mary, Sister of Sorrow. Tomisława's attempt to conceal Ludan went to a bestial failure and her hunger rose. Oscar read Guarin as sincere and his ornate armour as under-worn; Méabh read sigils in it belonging to no school she knows. They rode to a barn in Suffolk.

Hungry, holding a lie together, Tomisława took Bronisława by the wrist and asked Méabh to stop her once she'd had a sip. She could not stop; Méabh was not strong enough. Oscar broke the latch of her jaw the way you would with a dog, pried her off, and held her through a full hunger frenzy while she thrashed and wept and begged — in front of Eustace. She named the shame herself. Méabh fetched Mary, who walked in knowing exactly what she faced, laid a hand on Tomisława's forehead, gave three willpower and an end to it — and bled from beneath her habit doing it. Then Guarin undid a gauntlet and offered his wrist: I have blood to spare. She drank, down to hunger 1.

Guarin asked their business; Tomisława gave him the husband in London — which cost her nothing, as she'd said it before the bond. It was Oscar who added, unprompted, that they work for Mithras. Then Guarin admitted the Order had not come for bandits: they were hunting a red-haired man, possibly masked. He handed the questioning to Mary — we believe he has something very important — and the coterie said nothing.

Called in by Thomas in London — with Richard de Worde present, which was new. The spymaster's questions were gentle and were not gentle. They gave him Ludan; he accepted it as coincidence. Tomisława said her husband knew, and had been at court the whole time; Richard said we've had eyes on him. Then a door opened and the room filled with light like sunlight that did not burn. Everyone knelt. Metal met meat, and the head of Thomas arrived in their peripheral vision. Rise, said Mithras. Richard claimed the fault — the rat was Thomas, the envoy revealed nothing. Our enemies have revealed themselves. And these ones can be trusted? — Proceed. Then, mildly: Now this means we can start the real work.

Four young Cainites bound together in the service of Mithras, Prince of London, and sent out as his envoy — the errand-runners trusted to fetch what no hired mortal can be trusted with. Dangerous, low-status work most Kindred do not survive to profit from, and for that reason one of the few ladders a hungry neonate can climb. Tomisława did not choose the other three; she chose Mithras, and was overwhelmed by him — the first time she understood beings of his stature existed. When he said jump, she asked how high.

The arrangement going in: two high-clan aristocrats at the top, two displaced exiles beneath them, and Méabh moving across the seam. Tomisława z Białowieży, Tzimisce koldun of the Road of Kings — the occult and infrastructural core. Eustace the Kiasyd, fae-touched Lasombra of Marconius's line, Road of Kings — her one true peer, by armistice. Méabh, Lhiannan hiding as high-clan kin, Road of the Beast — guide, liar, and the coterie's hinge, whom Tomisława holds out-of-category. Oscar "Disgraced" Castro Avis, fallen Brujah knight of Lisbon, Road of Humanity — the muscle, and the group's reluctant conscience, whom Tomisława files as her inferior for having thrown his rank away.

The framing mission: carry a small chest — one they knew better than to open — to a band of Cainites in Norway, learn what could be learned, make a good impression, and above all travel in secret. What was there: Cainites with the trappings of Vikings, mostly Gangrel, holding hard against a Christianity that has been closing around them. They work the old ways — magic through the land, worked with it. Their mortals know what they are and are fed from directly, throat to mouth, often dosed with something that makes the blood strange, a shaman presiding; and women hold more power among them than in the courts of Europe.

For Tomisława, a place where earth-drawn blood sorcery is unremarkable and a woman with authority is no curiosity — she had a better time there than she is likely to have in London. The others fared worse on a telling gradient: Oscar found them charming and hollow, Eustace found their reverence for cleverness more interesting than expected, and Méabh — closest to them in kind — closed up completely.

The coterie is off the rails and setting its own pace; travel is on them now, and the road — not the courtroom — is the dangerous part. Players' wishes: Oscar's wants the tragic, depressive side rather than the bastard; Eustace's wants to complicate him beyond the petulant ambassador-child and untangle something with Méabh; Méabh's is a long game, with any hint of her sire the priority; Tomisława's is fire and the Veins of the Earth. The GM is building a non-Christian throughline for every character. Two weeks. The 31st.