Gareth’s Story

As told to the Heroes of Cleenseau, in Cleenseau, February 6th, 1720, during his interrogation before his execution for banditry.

Gareth does not fully willingly tell his story, and there is a certain amount of (understandable) rushing to judgement from Viepuck’s part, so his execution moves a bit swiftly. That said, you manage to interrogate Gareth, and partially via the use of spells like Suggestion and Charm Person, learn the following:

He left Embry in the late winter of 1718, he claims, because sacrificing children was too much for him. It is not entirely clear how much this is pleading on his part, honest (if you can call it that) self-deception in the face of death, or simply lies
He fell in with some bandits in the Aine Hills (note that Robert I’s wife, Rowena Chemare, was killed by bandits in the Aine Hills, although not necessarily the same bandits), along the upper Wistel River, but frankly, did not like being ordered around and felt he could do better on his own.
In summer of 1719, he made his way over the Aveil Ridge to Veltor, where he was briefly a member of household guard of the castellan of Veltor, but as soon as he found his feet and learned a bit of the lay of the land, he left
He spent the fall and winter of 1719 in a small village of Peydon, where he he started by cheating at dice in the slow winter months and had recently started running an thievery and banditry racket in collusion with the ferryman over the Auberonne, stealing from farmers and travelers. Most of the people in Peydon knew of this racket, Gareth says, but he brags about how the the local lord’s lover and daughter were both in debt to him from the dicing, and how he’d made a few friends on the guard, and basically he felt like no one could touch him.

He is pretty open about all of the above, but then he starts to hesitate a bit and get squirrely. He continues:

It was just before Pyravela. Not many travelers but by then I didn’t need ‘em, the village gave me a drink when I asked and a warm bed, if you know what I mean. An older woman I hadn’t seen before showed up in the tavern. She was dressed in plain clothes and had a tattered and patched wolfskin cloak that she pulled around her tightly, like the place made her cold, although there was a fire blazing. She sat by the fire, and took her cloak off, and patched a part that was ripped, softly talking to herself. I didn’t pay her much mind. But towards the end of the night, after I’d had some ale, and was thinking about my bed, I felt her tapping my shoulder. I hadn’t noticed her approach.

“Young man”, she said. “Gareth, is it? You seem like a man who would like to know a secret.”

Well, what was I going to say? I nodded, and she smiled maliciously, her face wrinkling. “All I ask”, she says, “is that you use it.”

And she told me some secrets, and another villager came under my sway. She approached me again a few days later, and again a few days after that second time. Each time with better gossip and stories.

He continues:

Well, by the third time she came to me I had started to hear something of her other activities in town. Healing a sick milk cow… saving little baby Adam from the fevers… and the costs… the milk cows milk had soured. Adam no longer made a sound, like his very voice had been stolen. But she had never asked anything of me, and her juicy tidbits were so helpful. After this, the dead rose, and the village panicked. The lord’s lover had died, and three of his guards, and questions were being asked. Why hadn’t me and mine done more? Like I wanted to die trying to keep the dead down. I had enough of that sort of terror in Embry.

And so I asked her for help. She was calling herself the Midnight Lady, but I heard some people in the village just calling her the Night Witch. She smiled her scary smile, and took my arm in a familiar way, and said only: “Dearie, I thought you would never ask.”

He seems hesitant to go on, and it’s hard to get a lot of details out of him about what happened next. But it seems life in the village changed. The lord aged twenty years in a day. The villagers stayed in their homes, as much as possible, and strangers were turned away. But Gareth won’t say much more, other than that the undead didn’t bother them again. And then one day, he says:

One day, about two weeks ago, she approached me.
“There’s a small little thing I need you to do for a friend of mine”, she said.
“The war tax is being collected”, she said.
“Marguerite Deschamps will give you papers”, she said.
“When you get to Cleenseau, take half”, she said.
“Even from the lizardfolk”, she said.
“Be yourself”, she said.
“Don’t get caught”, she said.

And well, I think you know the rest. I hired some folks in Rinberg - Elizabeth was a mistake, I can see now. And I travelled here, and you know the rest.