Richard Baker - Swordmage

Kara Hulmaster smiled broadly when she caught sight of him and quickly crossed the room to throw her arms around him in a rib-cracking hug. “Geran! You’re here!” she laughed. She was not much more than about five-and-a-half feet in height, but she had wide, strong shoulders and an acrobat’s compact build, and when she squeezed, Geran had a hard time taking a good breath. “It’s been years!”

“Too long, I know,” he admitted. He returned her embrace and then stepped back to look at her. Her hair was paler than he remembered, bleached by long months spent outside beneath the sun every year, and laugh lines gathered at the corners of her eyes. Kara had the squarish face and fine, narrow nose of the Hulmasters, but her strikingly luminous eyes glowed an eerie azure with the spellscar she had inherited from her father. The serpentlike blue mark entwined her lower left arm and covered the back of her left hand, beautiful and sinister at the same time. Two or three generations past, someone in her father’s line had come in contact with the virulent, unchecked Spellplague and had been changed by it. As far as Geran knew, Kara’s father had never even known it himself-the Spellplague was capricious that way. Certainly Harmach Grigor never would have permitted his sister Terena to marry a man known to carry the defect of a spellscar. But no one had known the danger until Kara’s spellscar had manifested early in her thirteenth year.

“I heard about Jarad,” he told her. “I’ve come to pay my respects and look after anything that needs looking after.”

“I should’ve known you’d come home,” Kara said with a sigh. “I’m sorry, Geran. I wish you were here for a happier reason.” She glanced over to the table and noticed Hamil with Kirr and Natali. “Who’s your friend?”

“My apologies. Kara, this is Hamil Alderheart. Hamil, this is my cousin, Kara Hulmaster.”

Hamil slid off the bench, took Kara’s hand, and kissed it lightly. “I’m pleased to make your acquaintance, Lady Kara,” he said. If he was startled by her spellscar, he was careful not to show it. “Geran has told me a lot about you, but his reports simply don’t do you justice. I am your servant.”

Kara raised an eyebrow. “Why thank you, Master Alderheart.”

Geran rolled his eyes. Hamil had never met a handsome woman he didn’t try to charm, regardless of race or station. It was simply Hamil’s nature. Geran had even known Hamil to court human women before, although the halfling preferred ladies not much more than five feet or so in height; Kara was really a little too tall for him. The swordmage cleared his throat and said, “Kara, I heard you were checking up on the border posts when we arrived. Is everything well?”

Kara shrugged. “It’s been surprisingly quiet. I spent three days prowling around the watchtowers, and I didn’t see or hear anything. Usually the tribes send out their scouts and hunters as soon as the snows melt. In any event, until the harmach names a new captain for the Shieldsworn, I’m standing in, so I wanted to take a good look for myself.”

“I’ve been doing some of that too over the last couple days. The town isn’t what I remember.”

“A lot’s changed in the last few years.” Kara started to say more but thought better of it. Instead, she asked, “So what are you doing today?”

“I’m going to drive out to Keldon Head and visit Jarad’s grave. I should’ve done it yesterday.”

Kara gave him a small nod. “I’ll ride with you, if you like. I can show you where it is.”

“I’ll be glad for your company,” Geran told her. He quickly finished his breakfast and said his goodbyes to Natali and Kirr. Then he, Hamil, and Kara threw on cloaks and headed down to the stable.

They harnessed a pair of horses to an old two-wheeled buggy they found in the musty carriage house. Hamil scrambled onto the quarter-bench behind Geran and Kara, since it would have been a tight fit with all three of them in the single full seat. Kara took the reins and drove out under Griffonwatch’s gates into the bright morning. It was another cold and cloudless day, with a brisk westerly breeze raising whitecaps on the Moonsea. The clip-clop of hooves on stone and jingle of the harness preceded them as they rode down the causeway winding around Griffonwatch’s crag.

Geran watched the town clatter past as Kara followed the same route he’d taken the previous day. The town seemed just as full as before. “What are all these people doing here?” he wondered aloud. “Is there a gold strike I haven’t heard about? A war somewhere that people are fleeing from? It must be something.”

Kara glanced sharply at him. “Mostly it’s the timber concessions,” she said. “My stepbrother’s idea. A few years ago he urged Harmach Grigor to rent logging rights in the Hulmaster forestland to foreign merchants. All the Moonsea cities are desperate for wood, especially since Myth Drannor put the woods of the Elven Court under its protection.”

“We deal in timber sometimes down in the Vast,” Hamil observed. “It doesn’t hurt that Sembia’s demand is driving up the prices everywhere.” Geran looked back to Hamil, and the halfling shrugged. “While you were strolling around the town, I spent my day talking to the clerks and superintendents of the merchant yards. I was curious about whether the Red Sails ought to do some business up this way. Sembia is ten times as big as the whole Moonsea together and just as hungry for wood-shades or no shades. We should think about it.”

“Which costers are here now?” Geran asked Kara.

“House Verunas of Mulmaster, the Double Moon Coster, House Jannarsk of Phlan, and a few others moved into town to handle the trade in timber,” said Kara. “They shipped in poor laborers from the larger cities to cut timber, drive wagons, work in the yards and on the docks. And of course those laborers bring others with them, tailors and grocers, smiths and wainwrights, brewers and cooks… In the last year or two the harmach’s let out some mining concessions too, and the big merchant houses and costers are taking advantage of those as fast as they can.”

“They seem to be doing well,” Hamil observed. “The harmach must be making a fortune on his rents.”

Kara shook her head. “Not as much as you might think. To pay off old debts the harmach borrowed heavily from the merchant guilds, and he had to rent out the concessions for a pittance by way of payment. The foreign merchants are keeping the better part of what they’re cutting down in our forests and digging out of our ground. Except, of course, for the so-called ‘licensing fees’ Sergen and his Merchant Council capture from the whole business.”

They came to the Burned Bridge and drove over the rickety wooden decking. It was covered by a dilapidated roof, and the hoofbeats echoed in the shadows of the bridge. Geran scratched at his jaw, thinking. He didn’t like the idea of using Hulmaster land in such a way, especially if the harmach saw little return on the rights he rented out, but it wasn’t really his place to say if it was a good idea or not. “What’s Sergen’s connection to the Merchant Council?”

“He’s the keeper of duties-the harmach’s representative on the council. Uncle Grigor put him in charge of releasing concessions, negotiating their prices, and administering the resulting trade.”

So your cousin decides which properties will be up for bidding, who can purchase a concession, how much they’ll pay the harmach, and how much they’ll pay the council he presides over? Hamil observed silently. If he were a corrupt man, that would be an awful temptation. I’m sure that isn’t the case, though.

Geran glanced back at his friend but didn’t reply. He was not at all sure that Sergen wasn’t corruptible. A younger, more vigorous harmach might have been vigilant enough to check any ignoble impulses someone in Sergen’s position could fall prey to… but Grigor was not a young man anymore, and it seemed he relied on Sergen to look after his interests for him.