Martjan shifts her weight and takes a breath like she's about to tell Mordred off, but instead she pauses and seems to come to a different decision.
"Kharin, wake Potmouse," she says. "We're going to serve tea and give them guest rights. You all -- come. Follow me."
She leads you through the left doorway to the servant's dining hall, a long and somewhat narrow chamber with a pine table and backless stools providing the barest essentials for civilized dining and nothing more. Kharin returns with a gangly slip of a teenage half-orc and stands guard by the kitchen door while the younger one boils water. Martjan, seated at the head of the table, idly finger-combs her hair and launches into a story.
"As I'm sure you've been told -- or maybe not, I don't know -- Edvers' conflicts with his father were the stuff of legends, at least to hear him tell it, and so on several occasions before he attained manhood, he ran away from home. One of these times, he fell in with the fisher family who dwell in Loton's Cove, ten miles or so up the coast from Sthombo. They were able to get the choicest fish, the rarest shellfish, and even do a decent enough trade in pearls because -- according to Edvers -- they had made some pact with the local merfolk clans. Anyway, to hear him tell it, they became as close as his own true family. He called Loton's Cove his 'second home by the sea.' There was an unbreakable bond there, he told me. Edvers was never one to underestimate the potency of his own charisma.
"Now, the context in which we're having this discussion is when we're less than a day out from recovering the Lapis Claw of Giurat. We know the Black Ribbon Riders are hot on our trail and that we've only got a day or two to throw them off. Edvers says listen, we can hide the Claw with my friends the fisher-folk at Loton's Cove. No-one will ever find it. No-one but us can get it back. Safe from scrying, safe from everything. I didn't entirely buy it, but he was so sure of himself. He told me he'd leave the very Eye of Vecna there for safekeeping if he ever found it."
She shrugs. Potmouse walks in with a pot of tea and a tray of dingy clay cups.
"So this is the story I told Gavrel. The honest truth of what I know and where I think Edvers would have hidden the Sphere. Only he doesn't have it yet, the family won't help him, so...I don't know. I don't know what he's doing. Plying them with riches, murdering them one at a time, weaving mindbending spells, who knows. It's not something he wants to discuss with me anymore. But he seems entirely satisfied that the Sphere is out there under the waves, somewhere. I don't think he'd mind that I'm telling you," she adds, with a quick glance at Kharin. "He seems to think you can help him somehow. Where was it you ended up after you left Hazard? Vorch? I think he's impressed that you made it back alive."
