Chapter 77: The Unasked-For Mantle
The feast had been a turning point, but not the kind they'd expected. Word, it seemed, travelled faster than healing. The story of the "Ink-Mage and the Quiet Soldier" who had faced the Pale Sea and won did not stay within Stillwater's battered walls. It rippled out along coastal paths and trader's gossip, growing in the telling.
Within a fortnight of the celebration, the first outsiders arrived.
They came hesitantly at first, a bedraggled shepherd from the northern cliffs whose flock was plagued by "stone-wool" a wasting disease that turned their fleece brittle. He stood hat in hand in the Anchor's yard, his eyes darting between Elara and Kaelen as if expecting them to glow. "They said you mended the sea itself," he mumbled. "My ewes…"
