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Another autumn, another year gone. A long and bloody road we have walked, but now at last I dare to hope that it will bring us home.
Aboard ship I wrote of the breaking of the council, the end of so much of what we knew; now, in the back of a rattling wagon, with sentries and guards set around, I put pen to paper once more, to talk of what came To talk, also, of death, for he has been our constant companion through the long months, through strange lands and stranger lands.
Bereft of much of what had gone before, we clung to our unity, our strength, and it aided us. We fought our way through to the Franconian coast, and re-captured the port the Empire had been using as a staging post.
It seems dry and simple, now, set plain on paper like this. But we all paid a price, and Ackiatta paid more dearly than most, for he lost Ick, his mate and companion of many years. And yet his example shone before us as a symbol of what it was to be Jhereg. He refused to let his grief overcome him; he knew his burden was to lead our people, and he shouldered that burden willingly.
We lost Tarl and Durat to the lives of wanderers. We lost Ick to a monstrous sea-creature created by alchemy. We all-but-lost Duram, his mind and memories shattered by a ritual gone awry. And we lost Simpkin to a life on the run, taking the box which trapped the abomination Ehran far away from Silver, who wished for the return of his 'pet'.
But that was not all. Even as we prepared to set sail, others among us set out to capture a nearby ritual circle, so that Brother Gabriel might transport them to the Greenskin lands. The Phoenix Guard took the field; Gribble and Talia fought alongside the Evil Suns, and Dahannon and the Paladins of Llolth were employed to defend Lady Lion.
None returned, and we were forced to set sail without them.
It was a long and painful journey, wondering, although at last some magic of Granny's summoned the goblins' spirits to feast with us in Zalambur's halls, and they were able to assure us that our friends lived still.
It was good to see them in the flesh, when at last we met again, but by then we had other deaths to mourn. Ordellan, once warleader of the Pack, fell facing a mighty joining, whose great rending claws took him beyond all our power to heal. Others fell, too, as we fought to hold a rain-washed strip of sand, but we felt Del's loss most keenly; not for his strength, nor yet his axe, but for his heart and his unshakeable courage.
On a storm-lashed outcrop of the Empire islands, we huddled beneath canvas more suited to providing shelter from the burning sun, and struggled to hold to the strength within us.
We marched upon the Emperor's palace, struggling our way through scores of joinings, but he evaded us with the aid of the Blood Queen, and escaped the battle. So we rushed instead to the ritual circle, blood-soaked and battle-weary, and laid an ambush for him, while a group of ritualists led by Brother Gabriel struggled to hold the circle secure against the Blood Queen.
The Emperor was killed, but not before he had bewitched many with some beguiling spell, Ackiatta included, and not before General Mako of the Draken almost died, saved at the last possible moment by Knox's goblin acrobatics and by the dagger Yared. The expressions on the faces of the Emperor's guards as one of our own somersaulted through our lines, stabbed the fallen General while upside down in midair, and rolled off to safety once more, were a sight to behold, and the General was on his feet and fighting almost before they realised that it had been no ordinary dagger.
The rest was a matter of diplomacy; one by one the remaining leaders among the Greenskins came to us, to speak of deals and treaties. We returned to Franconia, where these treaties were at last settled, and peace was made with three of the four tribes, with the old Emperor's son Heiami acclaimed as Emperor, and great swathes of land ceded across the continent.
Of the Greenskins, only the Tokra refused peace. It seemed at last, that this war would be winnable.
But other matters were moving in the shadows; it seemed the time had come for the Jhereg to fight, not in daylight, stood upon a battlefield with our allies beside us, but in the darkness. The old way.
Whispers and rumour were rife; traders were found dead in their beds or by the road-side, and there was much talk of assassins, trade monopolies and contracts?
Here, too, we first became aware of the creature we came to know as the Reaver, as he stepped from the shadows with a knife sharp enough to cut through steel, poison gleaming on the blade.
We wondered, then, what rival group might muster such power, and we did not know the half of it then.
And the Vallista came to us, ancient enemies filled with anger but standing beneath a flag of truce, demanding answers we had no way of giving, news of events at home of which we had no knowledge? We knew we had not attacked them, but it seemed others had done so, in our name.
But the war with the Greenskins was not over. We could not go home to seek the truth; instead we sailed to Erin, to face the Tokra on the land they held.
A brief and largely pointless break in our voyage on some island off the coast of Lyonesse, or possibly Estragales, saw Al Gaian incompetence allow the Blood Queen to regain her crown, a coronet found, I believe, on the body of the fallen Emperor.
Siraklin the lich joined the Jhereg, much to the distress of some of our allies, and subsequently engineered the death of Lady Scythe, thus manoeuvring himself skilfully into the role of Principality of Corporeal Magic.
A Jhereg principality has his uses. Siraklin interceded with Harak on our behalf, who sent his second, Duel, to see if anything might be done to recover Duram from his unfortunate mental state. Though he had recovered much of his memory and some of his self-control in the long months since we sailed for the Greenskin lands, he was still filled with a rage that threatened to exhaust his relatively frail elven body.
Under Duel's direction, Duram came closer to death than ever. Exhausted by fighting, by running in metal armour, and by half a dozen other trials designed to push him to new strengths? For one dreadful moment we thought we would lose him entirely, as he tried and failed to neutralise the poison flooding through his veins?
We had hardly been expecting him to fail that test, to whom the uses and misuses of venom and toxin once came so naturally? We had not a healer on hand with the strength to purge the poison from him, but thankfully, one came to our call.
And so Duel's trials left Duram exhausted, but alive, and once recovered, it seemed he had regained his self-control and his memories. He would doubtless be forever changed by the months spent living with the rage of Beast, but at least he now had the sense to control his anger and the skills to keep himself on his feet in a battle.
As for the other matters, the plots were thickening. Rumours of rival trade consortiums, continued attacks from the Reaver, and the ominous presence of the Vallista envoys, waiting impatiently for their answers?
And the rats, the Swarm. Deep within the earth, beneath Gumaresh, I believe, we met the first of their kind. As their influence grew, we watched them warily, cautious in the deals we made ? yet not, in the end, cautious enough.
We left the island, and set sail for Erin.
Erin itself was dry and dusty, infested with Tokra and the strange creatures known as blood slaves. We had first encountered these upon returning to our lands; they formed and re-formed from pools of blood, and often seemed to be seeking a 'circle' of some kind.
Here we found both endings and beginnings. I shall speak first of the last chapter in the story of Ehran. Perhaps one day I shall be able to tell the whole tale, and tell it without tears, but for now, I find myself too weak not to cry.
I greeted Simpkin's return, as many did, with joy. And as Jinx prepared to lead the pack into the circle, we waited eagerly to see the end of the tale.
Ceinwen the elf joined them, her face bearing the markings of beast, an outward sign of SticksS' soul within her. On the plane of Spirit they trapped Ehran and destroyed him, but she gave her life to do so. When Simpkin carried that small, limp body from the circle she was already far beyond healing.
Ceinwen was gone. She was the first friend I had outside my childhood home, and she is gone. The Fir Cruthen helped me to understand that she had died doing the one thing I knew her heart had burned to do? But still, I will miss her.
Scouts brought news from home, none of it good, talking of corruption on the land, and battles fought in the south, but with Ceinwen dead I hardly had the heart to think on these matters. Now, in this caravan, I sit and wonder, but we will know soon enough.
Near about midnight, I found myself in the Fir Cruthen camp with friends, including Brodie and his daughter. There was business to attend to, and so I offered to take Morgan safely back to our camp. With an escort of Fir Cruthen, we made the journey safely, but as we neared our camp, we passed Grandpa Traps, heading out alone.
Stubbornly, he protested the urgency of his mission. He would not wait, and the only Jhereg in our party were myself and an unarmoured healer of the Bar Llyr, both with tasks of our own to attend to. I had given my word to Brodie that I would see his daughter safe to camp, and besides, I alone am little use as a guard.
Would that he had listened, or that our ears had been keener, and our minds less distracted with the task of getting our Fir Cruthen friends safely past Chazymyr the drow, who was caught in the grip of some Llolth-blessed killing madness. Scant yards down the path, Grandpa Traps met his end, at the hands of a rat assassin.
Worn out with grief for Ceinwen, I could not even cry. Not then. Not while Knox and his folk ferreted out the truth with angry hearts, eyes and ears keener than ever. Not that night, sleeping quiet and half-forgotten in the gap between tent and tree?
Not when Granny, youthful once more, thanks to a potion she and Traps had shared, filled with youth's energy and rage, called out to Turin of the Mithrim, as he was about to leave the circle, and bade him wait.
I cried for Grandpa when Granny stood in the circle and spoke of her loss, and I know I was not alone.
I cried for Granny as she turned to Janus, and handed Boris to him, for I knew then that she was leaving us forever.
Half-blinded by tears, we watched them leave, Trix and Traps, youthful once more, together again as they had always been, going into the unknown with goblin optimism?
So Granny was gone, the first person to take me in all those many, many months ago when the friends I thought I had deserted me. Another link to my past, broken forever.
When Ceinwen died I ran, full pelt in the pitch darkness, unheeding the myriad dangers of the night. This time I walked, with two of the Agarwaen at my side. When Ceinwen died, Max told me it was not my fate to watch everyone I loved die around me. When Granny died, I told him he had lied to me.
Worse was to come. We were mustering for war. I can only speculate that Max had taken into his care the skull of Jabreff, the device the Reaver used to teleport into our camp, and that, wrapped in grief, I had not noticed in time to argue.
But the Reaver made his first, and last, mistake that morning. Even as he cut Max down, the Jhereg acted; we had learnt the way to destroy him, and we used it.
There was little to be done for Max. He lived, but barely; he could not finish the speech he had been making, and retired instead to the shadows of the command tent to rest.
I could not leave him there alone. Though friends marched to war, I did not join them, though now I wish I had, if only in the hope that others might have been spared.
The list is long. Talia, my fellow lore-keeper; Valar, warleader of the pack, always getting me into trouble; Jinx the ragabash ritualist, quirky and clever? Jangles, who I knew not by name; Shalafi of the Coven, who I knew only barely but trusted well? At least one of the guard, for certain, several of the Bar Llyr...
The Agarwaen returned intact. I do not know if I could have lived, having lost them too. With Ceinwen and Granny both gone, they are truly all I have left.
Pine of the Jhereg wrote these words in the autumn of 1103. One day I, or one who comes after me, will comb and card these tangled threads and spin them into tales, but for now I let them be.