Fragmentary Record · No Chronicle Survives
Assembled from harbour talk, a coachman's testimony, a shepherd's story nobody believed, and the ledger of a physician who noted only that his patient lived.
The rescued Inquisitor did not die. This much is certain, because the men who wanted him dead spent the season behaving as though something had gone badly wrong. The cure, the harbour version goes, was beyond any doctor and any witch — and was worked all the same, by a personage of the Church who should not have been able to work it, in exchange for a plant fetched from a place guarded by things of living stone. Having worked it, that personage observed that the city was becoming warm for his kind, and was gone before the week was out, whistling.
[ — a page is missing here — ]
A shepherd in the hills swore that on the night of the full moon he saw two men out in the open dark, far from any road — one shaking like a sick animal, the other holding him by the shoulders, hour after hour, until dawn. He was laughed out of the taproom. The old soldier holding the young lord's shoulders would not have laughed, but he has since become difficult to ask.
A coachman attests that the Montaigne ambassador departed the city in the company of a lady of quality who was "much troubled," and that the things the ambassador murmured to her as she boarded were of a character the coachman declined to repeat for less than a second bottle. She did not look back. The company kept her seat empty at table for a time, which the servants found strange, as no one would say her name.
The Ussuran giant went north the same season, the bear walking beside his horse like a dog. Harbour talk says he had simply had enough of Castille, which harbour talk finds the most reasonable decision recorded in this entire chronicle.
[ — the record ends here; the season closes on a smaller, quieter company — ]
What Followed