36Disclaimer: I own nothing. This is the last chapter. Finis vitae sed non amoris.
13. Crossroad Keep Again
They return to Crossroad Keep on a warm summer evening. The farmland is alive with reapers and the road is busy. Ingrid rides ahead of the open wagon they hired, and the golden fields, heavy with wheat and barley, gladden her peasant heart.
The first of her patrols they had met in the north sent a rider to the keep, and they are being expected. Guards cheer at the gates, people wave from balconies, Khelgar meets the arriving company in the courtyard and his whoop of greeting scares all the pigeons of the town off their roofs. And this is it. A feast and several reunions later, they excuse themselves to leave for their chambers. The normal life should be starting right at that moment, but it does not.
Casavir insists that they should go all the way upstairs to their old room in the tower. She understands him very well: he needs this closure, too. It takes them forever to climb all the steps they used to disregard. The outer door is too heavy, she must hold it while he struggles to push the key into the keyhole. Inside, the bolt is distinctly right-handed, the floor is treacherously uneven, the carpet rim is easy to trip over, the bed is painfully low, the furniture has sharp angles and stands in the way. When they are finally in bed, they barely have the strength to wish each other good night before passing out.
In the morning, a million duties are awaiting Ingrid, and there is nothing to do for Casavir. He chooses to stay in the room, he says humbly that he will unpack their bags. Unpack our bags, Ingrid thinks on her way to the main hall, how long does it take to unpack our bags? How interesting is it? She takes a horse from the stables and rides to the market to talk with the merchants of various companies, to the newly constructed town hall, to the guards' headquarters, to the smiths' alley and to the temple. Everywhere she goes, she sees them. People with ugly scars. People who limp and lean on their canes. People with burn marks on their skin. People who are missing limbs. She talks to Kana and has to shout because Kana is hard on hearing after a sound explosion in a recent bandit ambush. She notices that the town is a merciless maze. That there are stairs, hills, pillars, sudden steps, pits, ditches, open sewers. That the new town hall has forty steps for the sake of decoration, and no wall to hold on to when climbing them. That she is the one who pays for the construction of this maze.
As she leaves the temple, a dozen or so beggars hold out their hands for her alms, and she is horrified to see that most of them are cripples, that they are deadly thin, that all her golden fields are an illusion and there are people who starve under her rule. She distributes whatever money she has with her and beckons one beggar to follow her. He is around fifty, he is missing a leg, his scalp features an old gash across the right side. She sits down on the steps of the temple with him. He looks at her suspiciously first, but then relaxes. Let the noble lady sate her curiosity.
"How did you lose your leg, soldier?" Ingrid addresses him in her battle voice, and he is surprised enough to tell her the full story. Luskan war, second year. Ingrid listens to him and thinks that Casavir knew. That unlike her, he had been in a war when he had just one chance at healing a day, twenty wounded to choose from and no priests at hand. That he has seen veterans, men and women, drink themselves to death, that he has seen veterans hang themselves in country barns when their injuries made them a burden to their families. That he, an orphan of that terrible plague, had grown up in Neverwinter chapterhouse during the war, and probably was asked to restrain hundreds of soldiers while some priest was sawing their gangrenous limbs off or pulling arrows out.
And she never noticed. Oh, she noticed a lot, but these things have always been natural, part of the landscape. War after war after war washed over the coast and left these people in its wake. She had known prejudice and has fought prejudice whenever she witnessed it, but she has been ignorant of other things. The ignorance of healthy people, that should be the name for it. Ingrid feels so ashamed that her cheeks are aflame when she rides back to the castle.
She gives quick orders on the way and flies up the stairs. Casavir turns his head at the sound of the door creaking, and she sees that he has shaved. He has several cuts on his neck and along his jaw. She inhales the warm scent of his skin, nestles up against him in his arms and tells him firmly that she wants to move. That the castle suffocates her and the walls press down on her.
Her main and longest crusade is about to start.
Ingrid begins with small things to understand what works and what does not. She gets him a puppy, a lovely bitch with floppy ears and a velvet pelt, an excellent nose and too much love for this awful world. They teach the dog to stay focused and calm, to bark at stairs and pick up anything Casavir drops. A few days before Ingrid's name day he ventures to take the dog and go shopping on his own to buy a gift. He tells her about it in the evening – sheepishly, as if he expects her to get angry. She laughs and kisses him senseless.
She goes through all the new projects with Master Veedle and the old man is slowly convinced that every place except the ramparts and the defense towers should have a flat floor, every staircase should have banisters, every ditch should be covered with a metal grate, every street is to have a name and every house is to be assigned a number. Not written but cast in iron and placed at the same level on all the corners. Then she tells him that they need to think big. The way the town is growing and the land prices are rising, the town will be a city before long, and she wants him to mark the fields around the first city wall into the future streets, squares, parks and the necessary public buildings all the way up to the external wall she is planning to construct in ten or fifteen years. She also wants aqueducts, a good sewage system and roads constructed there before any buildings spring up. The new districts must have light and space and fresh air. She can see Master Veedle's eyes glint with excitement and he asks her how many yards she wants between the old wall and the new one. He almost has a heart attack when she points at the line that she has drawn on the map: three miles away.
Kharin, her orc architect, has a different task. Over the long winter, while the Lady of the Keep and her husband stay at Phoenix Tail at the foot of the castle hill, they design a project of their own house. Ingrid will have it built on the border of the future city districts. Its doors will open into a large garden shared with a temple and an orphanage. With Casavir, they run through every little detail inside and outside. Not a bath, but a shower room and a small pool with wide steady steps descending into it and two bars to hold on to. A decorative panel that runs along each wall and tells what room it is. Doors that open both ways and with no effort. Handles and handrails by every seat. Gravel paths in the garden to hear the people who walk by. One floor, with an extra half-floor at the back to address the natural incline and host a stable for several horses.
She also designs the furniture meticulously and hones her habits. If she wants Casavir to be comfortable, she needs to learn to put everything exactly in the place where it should be, no exceptions and no slack cut for tired priestesses after a night's vigil.
By late spring, Ingrid has everything planned. She has three enemies to defeat: poverty, ignorance and disease. She will not be able to hold it all on her own back, and some of her plans are expensive, but she has a plan to address this issue as well. Every other evening, there is a dinner at their inn suite, where several more people are infected with her ideas and join her campaign. Every weekend, there is a meeting where Ingrid listens to the reports of those she has put in charge of something and distributes new tasks with military precision. Several small schools are established, with the prospect of a small school in every village. Each trading company is offered a place for a public building that they can name after themselves – a bathhouse, a library, or a small infirmary. Every church that sends healers to distant villages once a month is freed from taxes, and Ingrid enters the roster herself to set an example. The Graycloaks are divided into city patrols and country patrols, and each small office gets a canteen with free meals for former soldiers and a veteran squad that is responsible for training and training only. One does not need legs to supervise archers, Ingrid answers quietly when she is asked if they should strive to employ the disabled. Valen and Jayne have had enough rest and they join the city guard. If they rise in the ranks, this will be their own progress, but for now Ingrid is glad that sometimes she will get objective, unfiltered opinion of her reforms over dinner.
In an old village closer to Neverwinter, she finds a former mansion of some noble lord whose line declined and vanished. The mansion is bought to host an institution the Sword Coast has never seen before. Ingrid funds it with her own efforts, for it is an experiment. It is a farm and a line of workshops near a large building where fifty people with grave injuries learn some trade, or reading and arithmetic, or just life with hope. Ingrid travels to the mansion monthly in a small carriage – five hours are too valuable to spend riding if she can check budgets or read letters during that time. She talks to those who are ready to go into the world. She finds some place for them, one person at a time. She often asks Casavir to travel there with her, and gradually he picks the duty up and lifts it off her shoulders.
In the autumn, they move into their new house. The garden around it has not grown yet, and many things will need improvement, but it is a start. They travel to Neverwinter to buy several horses, tame and schooled to perfection. She walks Casavir through the back of the house and shows another secret to him: if he leads a horse into the small stall in the backyard and ties the reins to the post, he can climb several very safe steps and ease himself into the saddle with no harm to his back. There are no low arcs or bridges on the roads anymore – everything is suitable for tall wagons, and this is but an extra benefit. Horses have their own eyes. He is excited to try it at once, and they ride out together. They gallop across the meadows and trot up to the castle, and though he is tired by the end of the day, it is freedom. Another bit of freedom they are winning from the cruel fate. Like the books the children from the orphanage read to him to practice their skills. Like the shopping he does with a basket tied to his maimed arm, a walking staff in his hand, his dog at his heel. Like those four weekly hours of teaching when he goes to the small school near the town hall to share what he has been taught about history. Like the small pile of wooden planks with selected poetry carved out by Gann so that every letter can be discerned by touch rather than vision.
Her husband is alive, and together they are a force of good.
Gann approaches their house one sunny afternoon. Casavir is at the orphanage, and the garden is very quiet. First the dog gives a friendly bark, then Ingrid can hear steps on the gravel path, and then Gann greets her from the low gate between the bushes. He is wearing his travel cloak, and Ingrid immediately knows that he is leaving. Forever or for a very long time. She throws the tomatoes she has been dicing on the garden table into the bowl and welcomes him warmly. Gann is full of that sweet sadness that engulfs people at the end of one chapter of their life and before the beginning of another.
"I am leaving for Thay. Sand will open up the portal tonight, and I will stay with Safiya for a couple weeks." He explains to her. "I think I will find Kaelyn. The Wall of the Faithless is still standing."
Ingrid gives his hand a squeeze. Her eyes grow distant and he knows that she is reliving the same memory. One of those few memories nobody shares but the two of them. That first time, in a dream in the hags' lair, when they encountered a man who had betrayed her, and she wept over his pain because his punishment was too cruel even for that rotten person who had caused several hundred deaths and never repented.
"Wait here."
She returns with a long wooden box and presses it into his hands. He opens the clasps and the Silver Sword of Gith is there on a simple grey cushion. It is whole and a glimmer runs across its blade when Ingrid looks into the box over his shoulder.
"I cannot wield it." He states tentatively.
"Someone may be able to. Give it to Kaelyn. Let everyone try it, let the sword choose its next owner. In the worst case, you can always send it back with Safiya."
They exchange a sad smile. Gann lingers for a moment as if he wants to say something else, but before she can give him a questioning look, he decides against it and leaves.
Ingrid sends a warm, heart-felt blessing at his back.
Gradually, over the years, she teaches her city to run itself. First, small decisions like a new monument or the design of the river bank park are delegated to committees of volunteers, then public discussions are introduced, then guilds are formed and she sits in their monthly meetings and grooms one or another promising person to guide the politics of a small circle so that decisions are effective and yet do not take forever to take. Her husband adopts her style, he is the Prefect of Veterans, after all, and soldiers are a difficult folk to convince outside the frames of formal hierarchy.
A decade later, they have their first serious argument – publicly, in front of the newly minted City Council. It has delegates from the guilds, the merchant companies, the farmers' associations, the miners, the three most influential churches and the city guard. The argument is, surprisingly, over the existence of brothels, and it ends in her calling him a prude. That night he takes every effort to prove to her that he is not, and they compromise later that they should both abstain from throwing their authority in on such topics, because, well, who would trust a priestess and a paladin to be experts in these matters?
Many more things will follow. They will fight another brief war with Luskan over several villages at the border that have seceded and pledged their loyalty to Neverwinter. The City Council will vote for the decisions she does not like, and she will stamp down on some of her progressive values to support the most vulnerable one: that people do not need a lord to make good decisions. She will barely survive an attempt of assassination that will lead Kana to discover a conspiracy among the richer nobles of Neverwinter. Lord Nasher will demand her to choose her successor and he will give up after two hours of rational argument and a shouting match to crown it. A new monk order will declare her arcane and divine practice a heresy – when Kaelyn's grandfather shows up at her trial, golden wings and all, and delivers them a message from Sehanine herself, they will condescend, but question her marital status out of spite. Ingrid and Casavir will have a spectacular public wedding to appease the monks and seal the question once and forever. Some of her proteges will disappoint her, and some others will exceed her expectations beyond hope. She will descend into the depths of blackest despair, and Casavir will try a hundred different things to bring her back from it, and his loving patience will defeat that darkness. A plague will hit the Sword Coast and the city with her renowned healthcare will be flooded by thousands of refugees, and Ingrid and Casavir will spend nights and days healing them, teaching them and demonstrating to the scared citizens that they are not afraid to catch anything from the 'dirty migrants'. Like all people who do something, they will often be blamed for not doing more. There will be a period when she is hated and called 'immoral' for standing her ground that even the worst criminals deserve life. There will be a day when he is attacked by an angry mob displeased that the schools under his care teach anatomy. There will be corner theatres that give obscene performances at their expense. There will be people who name their children after the two of them.
All this will happen many years later, but today Casavir is sitting in the sun and listening to one of his younger pupils read. Ingrid appears in the doorway to ask if they want a piece of her apple-pie, but she stops to gaze at her husband. He feels the warmth of the spring sun on his skin and raises his head to welcome it. He smiles absently, and Ingrid's whole soul lights up with that smile.
