Vad, Mordred, and Leth follow Rolley out of the inn to the Koal family home on the west side of town. The house is large and in good repair, with a well-tended garden surrounding it. Inside, Rolley pokes at the hearth fire and makes awkward small talk about their animals and the vegetables and herbs they're growing while two girls of about twelve -- twins, from the looks of it -- peer down at you from a sleeping loft above the main room. The furnishings in the house are finely made, and there are expensive decorative objects, woven rugs, painted pottery. Over the course of your idle talk with Rolley you gather that the Koals own the town's general store, and are quite well-off.
After a little while, Harmon and his wife arrive. He sits down beside the hearth and lights a pipe, taking a few deep drags and blowing long plumes of aromatic smoke before coming to the matter at hand.
"I don't know what you've heard already, but here's how it came to me. The ranger Kligson found me and Rolley at the store and told us he'd been talking to a girl at the Toad and Skull, a young thing no more than seventeen or eighteen, who wanted him to show her to a passage through the Badgerways to Hazard. She'd told him she was being followed by some sort of...witch-cult, and she feared they'd kill her if they found her, and she'd only be safe when she got to Hazard. He thought she was talking nonsense, but that she might be in some kind of real danger.
"He said she was armed, too, so we rounded up Vicar Jon and Dalt Mecrin who were in the store at the time, for backup, and we followed Kligson to where he was set to meet back up with her and, well, such as it is, we jumped her. Took away her sword and tried to march her back here to see what her story was and what we could do to help her. I've got daughters of my own, and I don't take to letting scared young girls wander about in danger without doing what I can for them. If whoever she thought was following her didn't kill her, the Badgerways surely would.
Harmon sighs. "Well, she was faster and stronger than I had her pegged for. She hit me -- hard -- in a, a, disabling spot." Rolley lets out a snort of amusement, which Harmon quickly silences with a glance. "Gave us the slip, ran like hell. Kligson and Dalt followed her all the way to the Almeri farm, but they lost her there." He shakes his head. "Kligson went after her. Said that as best as he could figure, she'd go to the King's Cradle, which is the entrance to the Badgerways most folks have heard of and does in fact link up to an old smuggler's tunnel that bypasses the Milvil Bridge. He planned to try to get there ahead of her and talk some sense into her, try to get her to someplace actually safe. King's Cradle is about thirty-five miles from here. It's been six nights and five days and he's still not back. I'll tell you boys, I have a bad feeling about this."
Harmon gets up and cracks his neck, sighs again. "That's all I can tell you because that's all I know. Except for this one other thing. She left her pack behind when she ran off. I looked through it, there wasn't much in it. Change of clothes, food, camping gear. But the girls were snooping through it this morning. They found something else. A hidden pocket." He walks over to the wall, pulls out a brown knapsack from under a chair, reaches in and produces a small, dark gray tile. He hands it to Vad. "This is what was in the pocket. I don't know what it means, but she took some pains to hide it."
Etched on the tile is a rough drawing of an old-fashioned stone doorframe. The lintel is cracked down the middle, and just above it is a sea-creature, a hippocampus.