At last, atop the tower,
The red queen stood on high.
Below her, all the kingdom,
Above her, only sky.
The dire marauding lion,
That near her borders drew,
She took aim at its vile heart
And skewered it right through.--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Cuinn, Leandra, and the children make their way slowly back to Islien. Cuinn does her best to hunt and forage enough to feed them; confused, they ask if Cuinn or Leandra are now their matron, and Cuinn explains that no one is their master except themselves now.
Back in Islien, they begin looking for Kelros White-Eye. Eventually the trail leads to one of the richer areas of Islien, where the former mercenary is employed as a steward of a minor noble house. Cuinn asks the other guards to see him, stating that she's an old comrade-- Brida of the Sons of Iron Mountain. Kelros comes to see her, and asks her why she isn't who she claims; Cuinn replies she was sent by her employers, a noble house, to reclaim certain stolen items that may have passed through his possession-- a ring and a cloak, sold to him thirty years earlier by the camp follower Sally. Kelros becomes nervous and claims he doesn't know of any such items; Cuinn can sense he is lying, but he refuses to impart more information, and they leave.
Cuinn decides that a more forceful interrogation is needed. She waits until night, sets Leandra as guard, and breaks into the manor house by climbing a tree, deftly leaping onto the roof, and picking the lock on a second-story window. She briefly searches the top floor before finding Kelros asleep. She holds her seax to his throat, covers his mouth, and repeats her query. He is terrified and panicks, wetting the bed; she lets him calm down. Eventually he tells her that he sold the items to a merchant, Velberic, known as a fence for stolen items, twenty-five years earlier. She advises him to go back to sleep and forget the conversation took place, and returns the way she came.
They get a good night's sleep at their inn, and search for Velberic's shop in the morning. It seems to be the main general store in town, run by a cheerful young man who is evidently the son of Velberic the elder. When Cuinn mentions she is attempting to track down some missing family heirlooms, the young man indicates that unlike his father, he deals only in honest merchandise. Cuinn describes the items and he retrieves an immense ledger; apparently Velberic extensively documented his illicit merchandise. After a lengthy search, he finds the record, leaves, and reappears with a small box. The cloak is gone, but the box contains the ring. Cuinn takes it and examines it-- it is a gold ring with two inscriptions: "Duty Above All", and "To Raesa, With Love". Her suspicions are confirmed-- she is, evidently, a Valmyrri. She attempts to pay the young man the rather hefty sum he wants for it, but Leandra manages to haggle him down, even getting him to throw in some lovely Islien woodworking souvenirs for the Fulcairns back home.
Cuinn decides to take the ring to the Valmyrri estates in Islien. Moerel and Duriand Valmyrri are in Islien, but Anuvier, the youngest brother, is overseeing the estate. Cuinn shows him the ring and asks who Raesa is. Anuvier, astonished, explains that Raesa is his aunt, who was abducted thirty years ago by a rival noble lord. Cuinn decides she needs to be honest with him, and explains that the woman she thought was her mother found her in the woods near a young deceased woman holding the ring. Immediately Cuinn asks if his uncle is still alive. He beckons her to come with him, and they ride to a small farmhouse in the Islien countryside (where, unbeknownst to her, the Valmyrri family first arrived from Wilder's Gorge hundreds of years earlier). There, he introduces her to an older man with silver-streaked auburn hair-- her father, Elias Valmyrri. The resemblance between the two is obvious to all present-- they embrace, and they both weep openly. The tale eventually comes out-- the rival lord abducted Raesa while she was with child, but she escaped, and died giving birth alone in the woods. Elias caught the enemy lord and slew him, but neither Raesa nor their child were ever found again.
Cuinn bids him to come to Stormpoint-- along with Leandra and a dozen orphaned children-- that they might make up for the thirty years together that they had been denied.
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