What Goes Up Must Come Down Then Go Back Up But At The Same Time Kind Of Down

Returning to the city, battered and hungover but victorious, the Serendipitous Riddlefist – with some nudging from Locaryn – convinced the Maja to grant Sarett and himself positions as bodyguards to Lilise Peronell, so that they might ferret out the source of the purported conspiracy against the bride-to-be. Attaining such an exalted post turned out to be much easier than convincing one of the cooks in the palace to boil the skin off his Ettin head trophy, which was Difficult in the Extreme and required some judicious bending of the Truth. For a higher cause, of course. After all… Ettin skull.
 
Lilise was an accommodating if soft-spoken and lonely charge, and little of note occurred until the Pre-Wedding Banquet whose more official sounding name fell beneath our hero’s notice, trained as it was on matters of lofty intrigue and the boiling of Ettin heads. There, as Lilise took a quiet break from the festivities in her quarters, a necklace was delivered to her, a present from her betrothed, the Lord Regent. Squoan would have been remiss in his duties if he hadn’t set aside his dignity and tried it on himself first, and let it never be said that he was one to allow Pride to get in the way of Duty. But it seemed benign, so they returned to the Banquet of Indeterminate Nomenclature.
 
Where the necklace promptly tightened and began to strangle Lilise, of course. As the Maja wrested it from her daughter’s neck while screaming in agony, a black arrow exactly like those which had haunted our hero’s travels for so long flashed down from the balcony, aimed at the Maja's heart. But the Riddlefist was there to nimbly intercede and snatch it from the air! Was he rewarded for this? Was his feat of acrobatic derring-do attended by a chorus of cheers and/or applause? Of course not, this is Orhamtown. As he attended the stricken Maja in her chambers, guards burst in and arrested him for treason and conspiracy, claiming that they had found vials of poison (identical to that employed in the committing of some recent murders in Orham) within his recently borrowed Silver Ettin-Head Repository. And so he was marched to the prison beneath the Barracks, from whence he had so recently heard the lamentations of the living yet damned.
 
Where he was visited by Locaryn, who was apparently behind everything. Dejection does not describe our hero’s mood at that moment. He was plunged face-first into a miasma of dismay. She had played him like a virtuous and courageous yet somewhat unworldly fiddle!
 
Failing to gauge his mood with any accuracy, she made him an offer. She claimed that she could free not only Squoan, but his mentor, Mistress Eraiel Othcalt, who was also being held in the magical prison, if he would only give her the red geode pendant he’d won from the Wererats and had the foresight to bury near a river before entering Orham. This was simply too much, too bitter a pill to swallow. At least the Riddlefist managed to avoid using the b-word.
 
After some time, he was questioned at length – his answers amusing a Hunter spectator to no end, in addition to possibly (inadvertently) setting in motion a pogrom against Gnomes – and then tortured. Once his black robed torturer had left the room, the Hunter revealed himself to be Locaryn in a new guise. Apparently Squoan had not only underestimated her influence and duplicity, but also her raw power. She reiterated her offer. Squoan insisted that he would need to see his mentor before he made up his mind. At that, Locaryn pressed the metal collar around his neck into his flesh. It reacted to her sorcerous nature but burned him in the process, marking him as a Disciple of the Arcane and ensuring that he would be moved into a new, even less friendly area of the dungeon.
 
He found himself in a cage with his mentor and four others. Their reunion was affectionate but somewhat muted, given the circumstances. She was in bad shape and our hero knew she would not last much longer. He told her of all that had happened and asked for her counsel regarding Locaryn’s deal, but her inability to speak rendered her advice somewhat inconclusive. He was still undecided when his Nemesis returned, seeking an answer. He knew that he had to save Eraiel… but he could not yet bring himself to bow before this Creature of Whispers and Lies and so he deferred until the morrow.
 
Only one other person in the dungeon was responsive to our hero’s unfailing amiability, a teenager whose name was Orin which – Squoan was almost too quick to realize, perhaps spurred by desperation – was an anagram of Onir. Could it be that his god, that legendary righter of injustices, had come to aid him in his darkest hour?! If not, surely Onir wouldn’t resent a quick prayer directed in the teen’s general direction, just in case….
 
And it worked, maybe! For shortly thereafter, Hunters fetched Squoan and Mistress Eraiel from the depths of their near despair and dragged them before the Lord Regent who – miraculously – apologized for the miscarriage of justice! In fact – somewhat amusingly – he wanted the Serendipitous Riddlefist to don the crimson cloak and become a Hunter himself, so that he might help track down a group of rebel mages who called themselves (bwaaam) the Hunger. Our hero rejected this offer with some heat. But at least he did not tell the Lord Regent where he could stick his crimson cloak.
 
At this, Taliesse, the Ruby Queen of Rikha – making an extremely rare public appearance for the sake of Squoan’s salvation (or so it seemed? it is too soon for our hero to trust in appearances…) – spoke up, offering to take Squoan into her service so that he could pursue the Hunger as her agent rather than as a hand of the Hunters. The Gnome acquiesced, sensing that he was in her debt for his current freedom. The fact that she was quite comely played no part in his decision. Mere semblance! She also agreed to take Mistress Eraiel back to Orrick with her to treat the wounds inflicted upon her by the Hunters. While Squoan still hadn’t managed to have a proper conversation with his mentor, it was a relief to know that she would be cared for, and so he accepted that a full asking of questions and sharing of stories would have to wait until next they met.
 
Pushing his luck somewhat, he convinced the Lord Regent that the boy Orin would be invaluable in luring out the Hunger, being a young, malleable, magically inclined mind for them to mold in their image, and the Lord Regent agreed to release Orin into Squoan’s custody with his eventual freedom conditional on the boy’s proving useful to the cause. Squoan somehow managed to contain his manly (or Gnomely) squee at the thought of having a possible god in his back pocket.
 
Then he met up with Steingrimur and together they made camp in the forest outside Orham, where he could bathe in a river like a civilized Gnome and meditate and gather feathers for his moustache and just generally collect himself, which by now, after everything he’d been through, was an absolute necessity. But, in his haste, he forgot about the grand ball he’d travelled all this way to attend, and he missed his dance with the Fair Lady Alwena.
 
CALAMITY!
 
But wait… there was an afternoon dance the next day! All was not lost!
 
And what a dance it was. Stories will be told for years to come of the day the Whirlwind Gnome came and taught Orham what it means to truly boogie, his feverish feet no doubt averting a pogrom if one had ever been anything more than hypothetical because how could such grace and beauty harbour evil?! (… don’t say Locaryn.)
 
But it was also bittersweet, because as he bowed to the Fair Lady Alwena at the dance’s conclusion, Squoan felt a chapter coming to an end. She would be heading south to return to Riverbend the next morning, and the Maja – still not fully recovered from the wounds inflicted by the enchanted necklace – had agreed to take Valethanna east to Abrus to tend to her magical ailment. And Sarett was nowhere to be found, having apparently vanished after a brief visit to Squoan in prison. As our hero supped with Steingrimur at their inn that evening, falling prey to melancholy, he couldn’t help thinking that it might not be kinder for the BCFs to part ways as well, and for the gentle bear to return home to his forest, away from the strange perils of Orhamtown….
 
But at least the palace cooks hadn’t thrown out his Ettin skull. Although, to be honest, he had no idea what to do with it.