They slept at Yester Hill, beside the new oak. Around the tenth hour the clouds parted, and the sky was wrong.
Strange stars. Other moons. Windows into places no one should see: a sea of fire, a red waste, a mountain ringing with hymns. All of it behind a thin skin of mist dotted with Barovia’s false stars, and in the middle, thirteen bright stars almost in a line. The Grand Conjunction had begun.
A change of plan
The sage gem was already in hand. The windmill was easier to reach than a swamp walled in thorns. And the she-cat in the vision, the one with three kittens, was Lady Wachter. So the company turned for Vallaki, and Claudiu stayed where he was.
Van Richten and Arturi left them on the road, at the turning for the Vistani camp. Each of us has his own path, the doctor said, and some part to play in Barovia’s fate. Then the two of them walked away together.
At the west gate, Freyja told the captain the truth, more or less.
“We are here to turn ourselves in.”Freyja
The den
Haliq opened the door of Wachterhaus with white cats trying to escape around his ankles. Aleksander gave him a choice between polite and messy, and Haliq pointed them upstairs and said whatever happened was on them.
Lady Wachter knelt in a curtained den with thirteen candles on a cold hearth and mist pouring out of it, a silver medallion pressed to her forehead. In the mist Fergus saw shadows move and heard a woman’s voice under a chorus of echoes. He had heard that kind of whispering before: around the Amber Temple, in Varushka’s nightmare, and in Vladimir Horngaard’s ear.
“The oak breaks,” she murmured, “but the willow bends and so survives.”
Freyja took her hand. Aleksander tried kindness, and it did not move her. Then he took off his mask and showed her what the amber had done to his face, and told her what the sky meant: every soul in the valley, spent on Strahd’s escape.
“He has my children.”
Eliza
An emissary had come from the castle to advise her, and that same night Karl, Nikolai and Stella vanished. Ernst Larnak went looking for them, and the next morning she was handed his body, and her son’s ear. The emissary was a Vistana called Eliza. The company remembered her, from the Game of Stories at Tser Pool.
Fergus painted Lady Wachter with a little blood until she looked like a hostage. Freyja knocked on the library door. Eliza opened it, saw the bruised Burgomistress, and said they had made a grave mistake.
Bats poured out of the rafters. Aleksander’s scroll of light left Eliza half blind. She tore into Ezmerelda and drank from her. Freyja drew the Sunsword, and the bats went blind in its light, and she turned to Lady Wachter and told her what they had heard was a prophecy, and that she should cast this away and join them.
Fiona swatted a bat off her eyes. Then she started casting.
“I thought that was a metaphor,” said Freyja.
Sickened by sunlight, tripped and bloodied, Eliza burst into a cloud of bats and fled through an open window into the morning mist. Zorya slipped out of Aleksander’s hood, turned invisible, and followed.