Elroy shouldered the office door open with his hip and gestured the man through with a flourish.
"Prisoner delivered, my lord. Alive, fed, and complaining about the coffee."
"I did not complain about the coffee," the man said.
"Ah, ah, ah, you made a face. You wasted the Lord's coffee."
Harold set his mug down and looked past both of them to the man standing in the middle of the room.
He was tall, standing at an angle of the door that let him see into the room from its corners. Blond, going grey at the temples, cropped close, with a large beard threaded with beads. He wore the well-made clothing a cut above what they could probably make with the Landing. He held his hands loose at his sides, his shoulders square, and his eyes were on Harold, and had been since the door opened.
But the mana on him carried the weight of a tier two knight.
Path holder, Harold thought.
"Thank you, Elroy. Jenkins." Harold opened a palm toward the chair across the desk. "Please, sit."
The man sat. He took the chair straight-backed, and his weight settled onto it.
Elroy and Jenkins retreated to either side of the door. Behind Harold, Jack Churchill shifted his weight to his other foot. Parker, one step off Jack's shoulder.
Margaret sat in the corner chair by the window with her ledger open on her knee and a quill at the ready.
Harold reached across the desk.
"Harold Calder. Lord of the Landing, Count of the Basin."
The man took his hand. He had a good, firm grip. Spoke well about a man.
"Torvald Aske." A pause. "A traveler."
"A traveler." Harold said skeptically. "Coffee? Tea?"“Tea is fine, thank you.” He replied smoothly.
Harold sat back and picked up his own mug, and held it, and watched Torvald over the rim for a beat longer than was polite.
"Master Aske."
"Lord Calder."
"A traveler from Alnor, with Alnor papers." Harold tapped a finger on the folder Jenkins had set down. "As far as I can tell, these are genuine. You’re a long way from home."
Torvald inclined his head a quarter inch. "The papers are as they were issued."
"Mm." Harold set his mug down. "So a traveler with genuine Alnor papers found his way here, found my head of administration, offered his services as a clerk, and then declined to speak for a couple weeks."
"I am sorry to have caused your people the trouble."
Harold smiled and replied dryly. "For some reason I doubt that."
Elroy set a cup at Torvald's elbow without comment and retreated. Torvald picked it up and sipped it.
"Let us try this a different way." Harold rested his hands flat on the desk. "You are a path holder from the Kingdom of Alnor. I would put you in our tier two. You are a crafter, which means the path you hold is potent. That is a rare combination. You are not a common traveler, Master Aske, and this is not a common introduction. So—what is a path-holder from the Kingdom of Alnor doing in my little County? And how, exactly, did you hear of me?"
The room held very quiet.
Torvald looked at Harold for a long moment, and then he set his cup down and folded his hands on his knee.
"You are more perceptive than I was told to expect."
"I’m glad to surprise."
"Your name is known, Lord Calder. Amongst your own." He said your own with a care that read as respect. "New lords have been appearing across humanity. Most of them are not spoken of. You are. You have taken your holdings from a single settlement to a county in that same eight months. Where I come from, that is remarkable. Amongst the other new human lords, that is unheard of."
"Amongst new human lords." Harold turned his mug a quarter turn on the desk. "And how does that news reach Alnor, Master Aske, when I am fairly certain the mechanisms that would ordinarily carry it are not active?"
Torvald smiled openly. He understood what Harold was insinuating, and he chose not to hide it.
"For those of us that have spent our lives here, the system is more of a suggestion. We are classified as natives. Our crucible is over. Yours has begun."
His hands spread as he talked. "And ships talk, ports talk, travelers talk more than either. Your name has been spoken in Farholt more than once, by more than one mouth, and it has been spoken with weight. The Lord who has destroyed a nest. The fabled Potion Lord."
Not lying, Harold thought, as Margaret turned a page in her ledger, and he caught it on the edge of his vision. Not lying, and not telling it all, either. Fine. I wouldn’t either.
He sat for a second and sipped his coffee. The reputation systems were meant to unlock at the solstice, right when humanity started to really interact with the natives. Yet a path-holder from Alnor had crossed the water because Harold's name had reached him.
My returned soul? Harold thought. It was the only reason he could think of.
He drew a breath, but Torvald beat him to it.
"You recognized what a path holder was. Most lords at this stage of humanity's development would not have. Most of them do not yet know what paths are."
"Oh, I know," Harold replied dryly.
"Let me return the favor, Master Aske. Your kingdom is known to me. You have held the Rimwater Pass against the herds of Horgoroth for four centuries and turned them back every generation. Your fortresses along that pass are among the finest works of defensive architecture humanity has produced. Your merchant fleet moves more tonnage than any three larger kingdoms combined, and your admiralty projects along a massive part of the coastline. For a small kingdom, Master Aske, you throw a surprising amount of weight."
Torvald went still with his head cocked. Surprise radiated from him.
Then Torvald reached for his tea, and drank from it properly, and set it back down.
"That," he said, "is the kind of summary my king would recognize."
Torvald's eyes moved from Harold to Jack, and then back to Harold. The smile and carefree attitude were gone.
"How does a new lord in an eight-month-old county know that much about my kingdom, Lord Calder?"
"We all have our secrets, Master Aske."
"Ah." Torvald sat back an inch. "That answer."
Harold smiled and started to laugh. "That is the answer you will get until we dispense with these games."
For a long moment they held each other's eyes across the desk, and the office around them held very still. Behind Harold, Jack shifted his weight to his other foot again. Margaret turned another page, and this time she also wrote something on it, and the quill made the small dry scratch.
"So." Harold reached for his mug and this time drank from it. "Master Torvald Aske. Path holder from Farholt. A traveler with genuine papers, who declined to speak until he was in the right room, and who crossed an ocean because he heard something about me that he should not have been able to hear. Why are you here?"
Torvald's eyes narrowed at the corners.
Then he laughed. It came out short and dry, and it was the first ungoverned sound he had made since Elroy had shouldered the door open.
"I was bored, Lord Calder." He picked up his coffee. "And I am looking for a job."
Harold looked at him. Torvald looked back over the rim of his cup and drank his tea appreciatively.Harold set his mug down and looked over at Margaret.
Margaret rose, crossed to the desk, and slid a folded note to Harold, then went back to her chair.
Torvald watched her the whole way. When his eyes came back to Harold, they lingered on his face longer than before, and he held his questions.He laughed inwardly at Margaret's act and unfolded the note.
No lies so far.
He folded it again and placed it on his desk.
"Alright, Master Aske." Harold pulled open the top drawer of the desk. "Let us have some fun."
He set the coin on the desk between them.
It looked like a large copper coin and glowed a little with a red light. Torvald's eyes were wide, shock plain on his face. His right hand made a slight motion toward it, and he caught it and set the hand back on his knee.
"That is a terrain reshape token." Harold's fingers rested on the desk beside the coin. "A minor one, I believe. From the trial we cleared. I have been sitting on it a while, and I would appreciate a second opinion. If you had this in your hand, Master Aske, and you could spawn any kind of resource or shape terrain within my county — what would you do?"
Torvald did not answer at first as he stared at the coin “Ho—”"A mana spring! You have to spawn a mana spring.” He spoke hurriedly.
Torvald sat forward. "More mana means faster perk acquisition for you and every citizen who spends time in the affected area. It also means the perks earned in a high-mana area are stronger. Maybe a common perk can be upgraded to uncommon. Or maybe that common perk will give you a 4% increase instead of 3%.”
Harold sat back. He had been planning to spend the coin on the creek — to connect the Landing directly to the eastern fork of the river and cut his overland freight by a quarter. He had thought it a good use. But he hadn’t known about mana springs.
He was rethinking that opinion. Torvald continued to speak. “All but two of the mana springs are controlled by the Elves. The other two are controlled by the Mithrilmind Dwarves and the Human Huze Kingdom to the west. It’s a large part of why they are so powerful.”
"What else?"
"Lord?"
"If you could not do a mana spring. What else would you spend it on?"
Torvald slowed his answer and set his tea down properly on the desk.
"Ore is possible. Iron, copper—silver, if the coin is of strong enough grade. But an ore deposit is finite. And no reshape token I have ever heard of will move a ley line." He tilted his head. "May I ask — will it create plants?"
Harold picked the coin up between his thumb and forefinger. He closed his hand around it and thought at it.
A patch of grass, right there in the yard.
The token did nothing.
He offered it a location, then another, then let it choose its own. The token sat cold in his palm and refused.
"No," he said, and set it back down. "Guess that rules out spawning a world tree."
Torvald laughed, and it was warmer than the first laugh had been.
"A pity. It would have solved several of your problems."
Harold sighed, "Unfortunately, you are correct, Master Aske."
Harold's fingers went back to the token, and he closed his eyes for a beat, and reached inward. Mana spring. He asked the token what it would cost him.
He opened his eyes.
"A small spring," he said. "But the small spring reaches most of the basin, and it leaves me with fifty points on the coin."
Torvald was watching him closely. He had left his tea alone since Harold had picked up the token.
"Fifty," Harold said again, already asking the token the next question, eyes half on Torvald and half on the wall behind him. "Add another source of water to the creek, then I can get the crafters to stabilize the banks and deepen it. It wouldn’t be as clean as the token doing it, but it’ll do."
Water security inside the walls. A creek deep enough and wide enough for small boats, allowing more industry.
He thought briefly about the entrances to the Deep Dark and about sealing them shut with the last of the points, but dismissed the idea. He needed those entrances open. There were materials down he could not source anywhere else.
He thought, less briefly, about the network of caves the lizards had been using. Sealing those would probably stop any machinations they held within the Basin for a while. But they would just dig new ones.
Torvald was still watching him.
Harold opened his hand and let the token sit on his palm.
"Alright I like this mana spring idea but I have never heard of it before," he said.
Torvald sat back, and his eyes went to the coin and came back to Harold's face.
"I’m not surprised; you must know how secretive the Elves are, and they have been here longer than anyone.”
“Everyone keeps their mana springs as hidden and secretive as possible. We know of them but don’t have one. If you can create one, you will get very very favorable deals for Alnor.”Harold picked up his coffee and took another long sip and looked over towards Margaret who had dropped the simple servant act. She was writing something down with her quill and didn’t see him looking at her. “Margaret, any questions?”She looked up, glanced at him, then looked back at Torvald. “What is your motivation for coming to the Landing beyond looking for a job?”Torvald answered immediately. “I served under the councilor responsible for diplomacy in the Kingdom of Alnor. But I knew I would never be promoted again. I had heard of your name, and when I heard of your deeds killing the Thresher King so quickly, I decided to come here. I thought my knowledge of the surrounding powers and Gravesend itself would make me invaluable. I see now that I am not as invaluable as I had hoped.” Margaret asked another question in rapid-fire manner.“What are you hoping to gain by coming here?”Torvald looked at her hesitantly and Harold could see him trying to figure out who she was. “I’m…I’m not sure what I want. Power, wealth, influence. All of the above? Who doesn't want those things?”Margaret wrote something down quickly. “What is your path?”Torvald turned and looked at Harold askance. “No need for that question, Margaret. I know what his path is.” Torvald opened his mouth to speak. But Harold continued. “Torvold is on the true path of Accord. One of five path books the Kingdom of Alnor has and the only one they have for crafters.”This time, Torvald was frozen in shock; his fists were clenched as he stared at Harold grinning right back at him. “How could you know that?” Torvald hissed as he stood up. Then Margaret spoke up again.“One more question, Master Torvald. Do you know of a way for someone to break an oath sworn to Gravensend?”
Torvald glanced at her and looked back towards Harold. “Outside of some rare magics, it's hard to break it and never without cost. Some blood magic users can break it; most concept-based magics can, depending on the oath and its strength. You need an oathstone made from some really rare materials and a few different pathholders to create it to really make unbreakable oaths, even then it's not unbreakable. It just means death if you break it.”Margaret smiles thinly at him and nods toward him again. “Alright, Master Torvald. I think I have a job for you.”