Art Pact 19 - Exposition Time!

"Now is the time for some exposition," she said.

It was true. We'd been walking through the hills for weeks by that point, stopping in small towns and villages where we could, but sometimes camping in whatever shelter we could find from the choppy September wind. The wind in the Corvus valley rolls off the mountains to the west, powered by the combination of sun and shade on the east faces of the range, then gathering speed as it rushes down through the foothills, gathering in the valley to shoot southeast onto the plains like a bow from an arrow. Those villages on the plain at the mouth of the valleys are known as the "knockdown towns" in the local tongue, because of the frequency with which autumn and winter storms (powered perhaps by a similar mechanism, but twice as powerful) destroy the simpler structures. The old families of villagers respond by building a unique form of house - a triangular prism, of which the north-west half is constructed entirely of earth, a thick banked slope that guides the wind over and around the other part of the building, the living quarters which nestle in the lee of the protective embankments.

It was in one of those embankments (or rather, in the soil which was dug up to construct it) that the Colomain Stone was discovered, passing through several hands (by trade or murder) before finally finding its way into the hands of the Northern Dowager. The Dowager of the North was a formidable woman, the widow of both a duke and a king (the one first, before his execution at the hands of the other). She received the Colomain Stone by the method of murder, although not one committed either at her commission or one she knew about. The murder had occurred in a coach house off the Great Southern Road, when during the night an assassin hired by no-one knows who administered poison to a sleeping merchant and then broke into the dead man's room while he was quietly dying in the corner. The coach house, The Grey Swan, was renowned far and wide for such midnight fatalities, being built just south of the border between the South and North kingdoms, and constructed in such a way that it offered a thousand hiding places for any cutpurse, murderer or spy who needed to make an end to an enemy.

It had been built that way for a reason - the original architect had intended it to be a rather light and airy summer house for one of the Northern dukes (at a time when the relations between the two kingdoms were so pacific as to make them almost a single domain ruled over by two families). This duke, however, had the misfortune to live through the beginning of the more troubled relations that continued until the present time, and became increasingly obsessed with his own security and that of his family, particularly the idea that armies from the South might march up the Great Road with almost no resistance until they came to his chateau, making it either the ideal first conquest or (should the Northern King decide to field an army quickly enough), the ideal place to billet a resistance force. These respective armies, although bent on different things, would mean only one thing as far as the Duke was concerned: the ruin of his four daughters.

The daughters of the Duke had been brought up in the city, and it was to their immense displeasure that they learned of the new house that had been built for their family in the middle of nowhere just as the eldest among them was entering her most eligible year. They lodged innumerable complaints with their mother, who alas lacked enough influence with her spouse to get him to reconsider (and in fact as well as influence lacked motivation, since however much nagging she received from her daughters and however sympathetically she listened to their complaints she was privately in agreement that there was overmuch in the way of temptation in the city, and that a favourable marriage was very unlikely to result from the kind of dalliances popular amongst the noble party set who made their home there).

These complaints nonetheless continued, and soon enough made their way to the ears of one of the local officials, a silver-tongued rogue who had come into his position of power in the army's logistics operation by virtue of some rather underhanded dealing in examination papers during which he had double-crossed another prospective candidate, causing him to...

"Uh... What was I saying?" I asked her. She looked at me blankly.

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