Now that she had inherited Setarra’s love of the ocean and need to protect her children, Faith did, after all, stick around, appointing herself the Director of Strathmill House and assuming all the duties thereof. To our collective dismay, she interpreted said duties to range from limiting the children’s sugar intake, to setting rigorous teaching standards for Ash and me to follow, to harassing nobles to hold more charity tea parties for the orphanage.

Faith also became increasingly involved in Irimina’s life and helped raise Polonia and Andrel. The latter she had charmed already with Whisper lessons; the former she won over by convincing the girl to teach orphans as a community service project for her college application. A little nervous at first, Polonia started with arithmetic lessons but soon branched out into logistics and squad tactics, all of which Spider and Azael found eminently useful in their pastry raids. Soon Polonia, who looked more and more like General Helker as she grew up, became such a familiar sight in Crow’s Foot that even the Lockport-born Lampblacks stopped twitching when they bumped into her on the street.

They were still relieved when she got accepted to Doskvol Academy and scaled back her teaching to alternate weekends, though.

Meanwhile, Ash took advantage of the leadership vacuum in the Church of Ecstasy to mobilize the forbidden god cults. They had already looted churches across Doskvol the night we assassinated Preceptor Dunvil, but now Ash had a better sense of what artifacts the Church possessed. Using that knowledge, he organized targeted assaults that enabled the cults to make off with many ritual implements, which strengthened their bargaining power with the new Preceptor when she arrived from Imperial City.

Ash continued to spend most of his time at Strathmill House, of course, teaching classes under the watchful eye of our new Director (who nixed some of his more, shall we say, ambitious lesson plans). He did periodically waver between guiding the orphans towards more legitimate careers versus helping them become more effective scoundrels – but he usually concluded that the skills he was teaching them would be useful whether they became ward bosses or robber barons.

Apart from that, he spent his free time reveling in the Church’s disarray and helping to further the plans of That Which Hungers, which, of course, always hungered for more.

As planned, I became a full-time fencing instructor at the Red Sash Sword Academy. After Sleipnir and I bounced between the railcar and the orphanage for a couple months, I tallied up my stash, investigated the housing market in Crow’s Foot, and got Ash to help me buy a townhouse a block from Strathmill House. Now that I was no longer sleeping on a discarded mattress pad on a rickety bunk in a derelict railcar, Bazso started dropping by again. I considered telling him what and where my traps were, but he seemed so amused every time he accidentally triggered one that I left him to them. He even helped me devise some new ones to confuse Sigmund, who, apart from a short stint in Silkshore, couldn’t visit nearly as often.

Since Ixis had kept his promise and the Patriarch allowed my brother to stay, Sigmund supplanted Elstera Avrathi as the head of House Anixis’ Doskvolian spy ring. Just to keep him on his toes, I popped up in his study from time to time – although once he shocked me rightback by smuggling Mother, Father, my wet nurse Isha, and our dog Starlight into his townhouse. Isha and Starlight were the most demonstrative, of course, but I thought our parents were proud of what I’d accomplished

And Mother was actually nice to Bazso.

I supposed it helped that both Sigmund and I vouched for him.

As for Grandfather, Ash, Faith, and I investigated thoroughly, but the sword really was just a sword now. At first, I felt as if I’d lost a safety net that I hadn’t even realized I relied on, but I consoled myself that there was a bigger (black crystal) one in U’Duasha that was always waiting for me. In the meantime, I kept the sword close by in case it ever started speaking again.

However, Ixis would never return, for as long as the location of the Eye of Kotar remained known.