Harold had one boot off and was working the other free of a week's worth of caked mud when the door came open without a knock. Josh was three steps into the room before the latch finished swinging.
"There he is," Josh said, arms already spreading. "The dead man walks. We heard you broke, by the way, full collapse, screaming and everything — the TOC damn near lost it when the report arrived. They almost dispatched the ready Maniple to your location. Those scales from the thresher king are amazing, by the way."
Harold got the boot loose and dropped it, a clod of dried marsh cracking off against the floorboards. "Good to see you too, Josh," he said, to nobody. "Welcome home, Harold. We missed you. Place hasn't been the same without you." He set the freed foot down. "I've pined away without you. Did you get injured?"
"Should I be jealous?" Beth came in behind her husband, leaned on the doorframe, and looked over Harold. "God, You smell like a bog died on you."
Harold closed his eyes and sighed. "Thank you, Beth. It’s good to see you too."
"You’re not getting a hug until you visit the bathhouse or clean up." She didn't move from the frame. "Babe, don't hug him or you aren't getting one either."
Josh, mid-lunge, course-corrected into a sort of clap on Harold's shoulder that left a print on the filthy undershirt, and he looked down at his own hand. "Okay, that's — yeah, that's a lot of—. What is that?"
"Veridia had a collapsed irrigation canal we helped clean up before we left this morning." Harold peeled the undershirt over his head and dropped it on top of the boot, and the room's cold air chilled the sweat that had dried on him from the run.
"I heard they were having issues with that project with the soft soil over there." Josh was already drifting toward the window, then the desk, picking up a stoppered vial and turning it to the light. "Oh, hey, these look new. Is this the — what's the green one, is this the burn salve or the other blue one?"
Harold, already frustrated, spoke out. "Put that down before you find out."
Caldwell arrived next, and the gold coin was already rolling across his knuckles before he'd cleared the threshold. "Lord Calder. Good to have you breathing. Bout time you got back, I’ve got some figures I need you to look over." He took in the room, the discarded gear, the basin Harold had been reaching for. "When you've got a moment — only when you've got a moment — the thresher haul arrived, and I have figures you are going to enjoy a great deal. Have you checked the forum yet? A lot of chatter about you."
"He just walked in the door, Caldwell," Beth said.
"And I said when he has a moment." The coin kept rolling. "I'm a patient man. I've waited a couple of weeks. I can wait twenty minutes until he’s done and I’m the first one he sees."
Mark came in behind him, arms crossed. He looked at the heap of gear on the floor. "You lost weight, looking cut up, though. Heard you passed out screaming. What’s up with that?"
"I went on a trip. Wish you could have come.”
"You were only gone a few days. How did you lose that much weight?" Evan was last through, fingers already drumming a roll against the doorframe, and he stopped at the sight of Harold standing there in trousers and gooseflesh. "Oh, good, we're doing this naked. Summer sucks here. Real triumphant homecoming, though, very Roman the way you walked through the town. Not sure I want to greet you the Greek way, though. Though…wait…did the Romans do that too?"
"Nah, he’s only half naked; we gotta wait till the bathhouse for all of that," Josh said.
"Thank you for the precision, Josh. Figures you were the first one in here."
Harold looked at the five of them filling up a room, at the basin of water that would let him clean up, and scrubbed a hand down his face, leaving a streak of clean across the grime. "All of you. Out."
"We just got here; I’m here for a show," Josh said. He snapped his fingers at Evan. “Go get me a beer.”
"I have been in those clothes since a massive lizard in another world tried to carve me into pieces. I have not been clean since before the trial, and I would like to meet the rest of you as a person and not like this." Harold pointed at the door, and the gesture had enough of his aura in it that even Josh paused. "Caldwell, twenty minutes downstairs, bring your figures. The rest of you — I love you, I'm thrilled, except Josh. But get out."
"I knew he wanted me to stay," Josh said to Beth.
"He said get out," Beth said, exasperated, and she got a fist in the back of Josh's vest and steered him toward the hall. "Twenty minutes. We made you stew, and I’ll have a beer ready for you." She paused in the doorway. "I’m glad you’re home."
They filed out trailing argument, Evan still drumming, and Harold stood in the suddenly empty room with both hands braced on the edge of the basin and let his head hang for a moment over the water before he started washing the trial off of him..
The door opened again.
"My lord, Caldwell asked me to bring the assay ledger up before he—" Adeline had the book open across both forearms and her eyes on the top page, and she got four words further into the sentence before she got the rest of the way into the room and looked up.
She stopped.
The ledger came up against her chest like a shield, and the composure normally held her escaped. A flush climbed her neck and took her face whole. "I— the figures, he wanted you to have the— I didn't know you were— "
"It's fine," Harold sighed. “Get out, please, so I can change.”
"It's not, I'll—" She was already turning, already most of the way back through the door. "I'll leave it with— I'll come back. When you're. Later. Harold." The door slammed shut.
The second basin of hot water came up while Harold was still working the trial out of the back of his neck, and the boy who carried it set it down, took the dirty one away, and didn't complain about having to bring multiple basins of hot water. Harold went slow, scrubbing until the cloth came away gray instead of black, and when the third basin arrived, he used that too. The keep could wait, and the hall could wait.
By the time he was ready to get dressed, he found new clothes in his wardrobe — soft trousers, an open-laced shirt, the soft boots he kept for walking the keep — better than half the afternoon was gone, and the bag he slung across his back had something he was eager to handle.
The hall smelled like stew before he reached the doors.
Caswell had his boots up on the bench and a bowl balanced on his chest, and he lifted his spoon a few inches in salute without getting up. "There he is. Took you long enough, mate — Brennig bet me you wouldn’t come down."
"I did not." Brennig sat at the end of the table with a mug, humming something low under his breath, and he tipped it an inch toward Harold without breaking off. "I said you would take your time. We all earned some downtime."
Beth crossed the room before Harold had both feet through the door, and the hug she gave him was earnest, both arms wrapped around him and a kiss on the cheek. "You smell human again." Then, low enough that it stayed between them: "Glad you're back." She leaned away to look at him properly. "You've lost weight. You sleeping?"
Harold let out a breath and held her by the shoulder a moment. "Good to see you too, Beth." He shook his head. "Not much."
She nodded, though he could see the worry in her eyes. Then Josh got his arms around both of them and squeezed hard enough to lift Harold half an inch off the floor. "My wife kisses you again, I'm burying you in the canal."
"Don't break him," Beth said. "He's already underweight."
Margaret came in behind them without her ledger, and she stopped a few feet off and looked at Harold for a long moment, and the composure she wore like a uniform came apart at the corners of her mouth. "You look like yourself again. Good." She pointed a finger at him, level with his chest. "I trust you kept Hale on a leash out there. I know exactly how that man behaves the moment no one's in a position to tell him no."
"Hale's fine." Harold's mouth pulled. "I don't think he took a single hit the whole trial. He spent most of it actually being useful." He looked her over and saw the line of her shoulders came down a fraction, and she nodded once, and the uniform look settled back over her face, though warmer now. "It's good to have you back, Lord Harold. I have a great deal to catch you up on."
"I have no doubt. It’s going to have to wait a day, though." He picked up a bowl of stew off the table, and habit took it halfway to the side counter where he could set it down and deal with it later. Then he stopped, looked at it, and brought it back. He ate standing up and slowed down, enjoying the moment. The second spoonful quickly followed the first.
The beer had already been poured and was waiting for him. He took a sip and savored it, letting the sweet fluid drown the trial from his throat, and he took a second pull that emptied a third of the mug.
He set it down and looked at Josh. "Did you drink all the beer I left down here?"
"Noooo." Josh dragged the word out about three syllables past where it needed to go. "There's some left."
Harold looked at him and raised an eyebrow.
"There is! There's, like — there's another keg. Two, maybe. When are you going to make some more?" Josh's hands came up. "I rationed it, but you didn’t leave much."
"Josh, I left almost 5 small kegs down there. How did you ration?"
"I drank responsibly is what I'm saying."
Harold rolled his eyes and pointed the spoon at him. "Grab some people and bring it up, all of it. We're about to have visitors, and they're going to want a drink."
"Visitors." Caswell's boots came off the bench. "What visitors? You didn't say anything about— Wait, are you bringing that short little bugger here now?"
Harold reached over his shoulder, opened the bag, and brought out the Gemheart Stone.
The room went still, and the stone sat in his palm, catching the hall light and throwing it back in colors the eye chased and lost — a deep vein of something alive running through its heart — and even Brennig stopped humming, even though he had seen it before.
"What is that—" Josh started.
"In a minute." Harold carried it across the hall to the reliquary sunk into the wall, four knights standing guard around the clock. The Cascading Seal, the new relic Vera recovered, rested on its shelf beside the Verdant Mushroom. The knights came to attention as he reached them. He set the Gemheart Stone into the empty cradle and stepped back, and the notification opened in front of him.
RELIC Acquired- Gemheart Stone
— Allows the lord to grant the Gem Imbuer Path.
— Allows citizens with a stone perk to sense gemstones hidden within stone. Increased range with the amount and quality of mana.
Harold read it twice. He'd never heard of a Path that worked with gemstones, and he'd never heard of anything that affected what an imbuer could do. A dwarven relic, then — it had the fingerprints of the deep folk all over it, and they'd be the ones to wring the most out of it.
That left him one decision, and he pretended to even contemplate it: summon Bram Ironhold and hand the stone back to their clan, or keep it.
He looked at it in the cradle a moment longer, then reached in and took it back out. He liked the grumpy bastard, and that was that.
"So what is it?" Josh was already up and circling, head tilting, hands not quite reaching for it. "Because I can feel — okay, I don't know how to describe it, but there's a — hmm. I can feel that. Like a hum behind my teeth."
Beth came up beside him with the same thing working across her face. "I can too."
Harold closed his hand around the stone, and for the first time since the trial, he couldn't wait for this next part. "Let's step outside for this part."
He walked out through the open doors into the summer air, the hall emptying behind him, and he brought up the quest log and found the line that had been sitting there since the stone touched his hand.
Summon the Gemheart Clan — Complete?
He selected complete, and the sky cracked. A line of light split the air over the hill below the keep, and a chime rolled out across the whole of the Landing, high and clear, and then the world slammed — a thousand bodies arriving at once, dwarves on the slope and the road and the cobbles below, packs and picks and beards and steel, blinking in their new home.
Bram Ironhold stood in front of Harold, eyes bright and fevered, grin splitting his beard wide, a thousand of his people on the hill at his back.
"By Dûrgrim’s beard, you actually got it, lad?"