Cevis
Session 1 — Sunday D&D Group
He took the work because a man in a bad inn in Reme put coin on the table and did not ask what he had done before, and because Corian said something on that first night that Cevis has not mentioned since: I was a household man myself. I know what it looks like when somebody’s good at a job and doesn’t want to discuss it. It was meant kindly. It was also exactly right, and being seen that accurately by a stranger is not a comfortable thing.
What he did afterward, he did every single night without being asked. A hundred feet out from whatever ground they had stopped on, a full circle in the dark, and back. The first night it found tracks — hooved, wrong-gaited, two sets with the small one stepping inside the large one’s prints — and old bones cracked open for marrow, and a carrion smell far fresher than the bones. The second night it found the thing itself: a yearling Leucrotta lying flat ten feet inside the treeline with its eyes fixed on the gap anyone would walk through to reach a crying child. He was close enough to smell it and it never knew he was there. The third night it found three Stirges asleep in a split dead oak, and they died in the tree without ever waking, which is not glorious and kept four people whole. He has never once been the reason a fight started well by accident.
At the farmhouse it was different, because that trap was not laid for the country — it was laid for them. He put arrows into Vortigern’s men from wherever the light was worst and finished the night with blood on him that mostly was not his. Talon spent the fight invisible and it was not Cevis who solved that problem, which he noticed. There are things his eyes do not do.
He is richer than he has ever been. He is also carrying an old debt he has told nobody the size of, walking toward a dead wizard’s keep with an employer who has just confessed that he hired four strangers because he was frightened to walk a road alone — and who offered, over the body of his enemy, to let any of them take the money and go. Cevis has a plan for when things go wrong. He has not yet decided whether that offer is one of them.