Chapter 16

After a quick recounting of the first session, we jumped into the game with the three adventurers heading straight for Headswoman Pelli’s home where they had stayed two nights prior. They found the Headswoman there having a meeting with two of the other elders of the town, a pair of old grandmothers who represented other families that had sent two generations of men off to the war against the Dark Tyrant in the east.

It didn’t take long for the girls to get the jist of what had happened. The afternoon after they had left the day before, a large group of the ruffians who had been frequenting the town Inn had come into town and been asking questions about eight travellers on the road matching the girls’ description. The ruffians claimed their innocent friends, a group of hunters, had been viciously attacked near the King’s Way and they were looking for the ‘vile bitches.’ No one in town believed them, based on their dress and the thuggish way they acted and demanded things, but that didn’t mean secrets were kept. One or more people in town had spilled the beans about the girls’ visit, and what had been seen.

“Eight?” Elyse asked in confusion. “Did someone else come through town?”

“Nought but you and them,” Pelli said with a shrug.

“Musta been someone spinnin’ tales,” Grandmother Florence said. She was the oldest of the three women and smacked her lips in disgust after she spoke.

“Pelli said you killed some ‘o them sumbitches out in the woods,” Grandmother Yellowdove added. She was a halfling woman, so her age didn’t show quite as heavily on her since her folk kept their youthful appearance for much longer. “Any chance one or two got away?”

“A crossbowman,” Olivia grimaced. “Almost took my head off, and shot Jade in the ass, then disappeared into the forest.”

“It was my thigh,” Jade sighed in exasperation.

“Well, that’s the fibber then,” Grandmother Yellowdove said with a nod. “Went back and had to tell ‘is friends why ‘is other friends was dead, and made up a story about there bein’ more ‘o you so they didn’t sound like the coward they is.”

“Men,” Renee said with a sigh and a roll of her eyes. Then Elyse giggled and flashed me a grin.

The bandits, or ruffians, or whoever they were had occupied the tavern for the night, and everything had been tense until, late in the evening, a piercing animal howl had cut through the countryside. The girls all looked at each other upon hearing that, connecting it to their fight with the big magical wolf and its death howl. The boss of the ruffians had gotten enraged when he heard it, and he ordered the firing of the Inn and pulling down of the Chun-Shi Tree since it was a local landmark that the girls had been seen admiring. Then he’d broken into the Town Hall and destroyed every piece of furniture with his own hands and found the lockbox with the small amount of taxes that Pelli collected to have ready for the actual tax collectors who would come out in the name of the Duke.

In the morning the ruffians had left the town. Pelli and the Grandmothers felt a little thankful that no one had gotten kidnapped or something, but the destruction of the Inn and the ruin of the Town Hall were severe economic blows to the town. The loss of the ‘big apple tree’ was a cultural loss - they didn’t know anything about the legend of Chun-Shi, but every wedding in the village for generations had been conducted under the boughs of that tree.

After a brief discussion, the girls convinced Pelli to call a meeting of Town Elders so that they could make their pitch to hunt down the bandits as the official sheriffs of the town.

They stayed with Pelli again in her home that night, and Olivia asked questions about the other Elders they hadn’t met and found out that three older men on the council of seven were likely to cause the most problems; two of them were patriarchs of the largest farming families and had been appeasing the bandits for a couple of years, and the third was the local Hedge Priest, an elderly dwarf who claimed to have been part of the founding of the village. The Dwarf also happened to worship Grace, a deity whose followers were often known for turning the other cheek and forgiving others rather than seeking vengeance - often to their own detriment. Those three could swing very well swing the seventh member of the Elders, the devil-born Elf Margaretta. She was apparently a hermit, and a bit of a witch, who had come to the village several human generations ago and gone through a turbulent time due to her fiendish features, bearing curled horns sprouting from her brow and permanent scorch marks on her fingers as markers of the pact that some ancestor of hers made with a creature of the Hells.