When Elise dragged Leon and Maia off to bathe, Leon didn’t even question it. He was looking forward to being with his fire-haired lover again even though neither he nor Maia were in moods to physically express that. The three simply enjoyed the time they had together, with Leon and Maia crammed together in a small wooden tub and Elise quietly rubbing their shoulders in turn, listening to them tell the story of their time in the Forest of Black and White.

For her part, Valeria went to another room to wait her turn to use the tub. For all that Leon and Maia had come around to the idea of including her into their family, having her join them in this was a little too much too soon.

It took a while to finish up, during which time Elise said hardly anything, simply listening to all that had happened to them. When they were done, though, she spared no words in expressing just how grateful she was that they had returned and how foolish they’d both been not to turn around after the first fight with the ice wraiths. She laid it on thick, too, asking them what they thought would happen to her if neither of them—or even if only one of them—had returned.

The two were appropriately chastened, but after they had finished cleaning up, Elise pulled them both into a tight hug and told them how glad she was that they were back.

As they returned to Torfinn’s hall and Valeria took her turn to bathe, Elise told Leon and Maia about how she’d spent the last week. By the end of her and Torfinn’s negotiations, she had committed Heaven’s Eye to making at least five trips into the Northern Vales to purchase silkgrass from the Brown Bear Tribe per year, moving much of the dangerous responsibility of crossing the Frozen Mountains from the Valemen’s shoulders.

However, the exact method by which Heaven’s Eye would buy that silkgrass wound up being a sore point for Torfinn. He wanted them to purchase exclusively through him so that he could keep the price of silkgrass high. Elise, however, wasn’t going to just allow that to happen without resistance, and so she fought tooth and nail to keep Torfinn from having that monopoly.

As Leon heard about this, he felt like he could understand why Torfinn was so mentally exhausted that he’d been smoking when Leon had returned a couple hours ago; when Elise got it in her mind to do something, it would take nothing short of a miracle to get her to change her mind.

In the end, Elise had managed to negotiate Torfinn down some: two of the trips north, Heaven’s Eye would be allowed to purchase silkgrass directly from the Valemen, while the remaining three trips they would deal with Torfinn exclusively. Still, this meant an enormous amount of silver was going to pour into the Vales, for Heaven’s Eye could move quite a bit more silkgrass than the Valemen could when they organized their trading missions to the south. Even a single fifth-tier mage from the south could pack quite a bit of silkgrass into their soul realm, while the Valemen had only Torfinn at that level of power, so they had to carry all of their silkgrass on their person as they moved through the Frozen Mountains.

Even with those concessions, though, both the Brown Bear Tribe and Heaven’s Eye stood to make a tremendous amount of money. Leon had only ever seen rich nobles in the Bull Kingdom wearing silkgrass, and from the few times he’d seen the price of a single bolt of the material, he couldn’t envision a scenario where this endeavor wouldn’t be immensely lucrative for everyone involved.

When they arrived back at Torfinn’s hall, the Brown Bear Chief wasted no time ensuring that Leon, Maia, and Valeria all had places to rest for however long they wished to stay. Leon didn’t want to immediately leave, but he still wasn’t planning on staying for a long time. He could tell that Elise had grown somewhat bored of the rustic Vale Town, the week she’d spent here having been more than enough to take in what few sights there were to see, while he, Maia, and Valeria were coming off a stressful week in the east. More importantly, Justin, while stable and not in any danger of having his condition worsen, still needed some more attentive medical care than any of them could provide. The only thing that had Leon and Valeria not insisting that they leave immediately or have Leon fly Justin south on the back of Anzu was that they wanted to give him at least another day or two of rest before they made the trek south.

So, after Leon told this to Torfinn, the Valeman Chief practically shouted in celebration as he joined Leon at one of the tables, loudly declaring that there would be a feast that night not only to celebrate Leon’s return, but also to mark the end of negotiations with Heaven’s Eye.

Leon didn’t say it out loud, but he took that second reason to be more the end of negotiations with Elise, rather than Heaven’s Eye. He hoped that he’d remember to ask Torfinn about those negotiations, for Elise hadn’t made them seem all that onerous when she’d told him and Maia about her week.

And so, while the party atmosphere wasn’t much to Leon’s tastes, he and his companions spent some time relaxing in Torfinn’s hall regaling the Brown Bears with a few edited tales of their adventures in the Forest of Black and White, telling them all about the banshees and ice wraiths that they’d killed, and how they’d survived an attack by a Gorgon, and that those they’d been sent to find had all been dead when they’d arrived. Most notably, however, Leon didn’t tell Torfinn or anyone else in the hall that Justin was responsible for Artorias’ death; neither did he tell them that Justin wasn’t responsible, however. Instead, he simply implied that they’d found Justin injured in the east and decided to help him.

Torfinn, of course, asked a few pointed questions about the man, but Leon side-stepped them as much as he could. After a little while, Torfinn got the message and dropped the subject.

The rest of the night proceeded fairly well, with Torfinn giving Leon a more accurate picture of the state of the vale. There weren’t any major problems, though his thanes were earning their keep ensuring that the refugees who’d fled Hakon Fire-Beard and decided to stay with the Brown Bears despite Hakon’s defeat weren’t making trouble, and that the rest of the Brown Bears and their subordinate tribes in turn weren’t making trouble for these refugees.

After a while, as the weaker of the Valemen in the hall began to succumb to drink, they began to tell war-stories and various other glorious deeds, though to Leon’s completely sober mind, few of these stories even approached anything that might resemble reality. However, being honest and truthful wasn’t really the point; these Valemen were drunk and bored, and telling these kinds of highly exaggerated or even outright fictitious stories were their favorite pastime.

Leon even got into the groove a little, telling a few stories of how he’d defeated Hakon Fire-Beard, won the allegiance of a tribe of stone giants, fought valiantly against the endless hordes from the Talfar plains, slayed vampires and werewolves, and ensured the victory of Prince August in the civil war. He never outright lied as he told these stories—he struggled enough with hyping himself up as more than he was—but he very much focused on his own deeds, letting those of others go unsaid.

After a while, Leon and his companions tired of the feasting even though Torfinn and his Valemen seemed like they were just getting started. They left for bed, with Leon, Elise, and Maia all making for their room, while Valeria separated to go make sure her father was resting well in his guest room. She indicated that she’d be sleeping in Justin’s room, so there was no need to wait for her. Leon wasn’t entirely sure what she’d meant by that, but he was happy getting some alone time with Maia and Elise, even though they all went to bed without doing much more than kiss and snuggle.

The next morning, they were rather rudely awoken by the sound of one of Torfinn’s thanes returning to the hall. The longhouse as a whole wasn’t in any way enchanted, and while its construction was sturdy, sound still carried quite far within. As a result, Leon, after blinking awake, knew that Freyja had come back.

Out of Torfinn’s handful of thanes, Leon would’ve said that he had the most complicated relationship with Freyja. She’d hit on him quite a bit when he was younger, though he’d never taken it too seriously. Consequently, though, she was both the friendliest and the most dreaded of the thanes to Leon. He just knew that she’d get quite a kick out of seeing him with both Elise and Maia, and probably from Valeria, too. As he slowly dressed, he had a strong feeling that he was about to be exasperated, frustrated, and embarrassed all at once as soon as he walked back out into the hall.

Fortunately, while it wasn’t too early, Elise and Maia were still asleep in bed, despite having been curled up on both of his sides only a few minutes before. This gave him some time alone to deal with Freyja, though how he was going to do that, he didn’t know. All he knew was that he was both excited and more than a little apprehensive about seeing this person from his childhood once more.

As he strode out into the hall, Leon saw her. She was much the same, with long blond hair, classically attractive features, and a prominent, though not disfiguring scar on her face. Her aura was still that of a fourth-tier mage, though he hadn’t expected otherwise. The Valemen rarely asked for help when it came to advancing through the tiers of magic, even though with the promise of silkgrass, they probably could’ve enticed a few fairly high-level mages to come north and teach them.

However, the Valemen as a whole were too insular and independent for that. They generally didn’t want southern influence in their vales, even if getting some southern help to advance their magical power might aid in that—such help would never come without strings attached, after all.

Leon and Freyja’s reunion went about as well as he could’ve expected it to. She, of course, made a big deal over how much he’d grown, and she teased him quite a bit. That teasing only grew in intensity when Maia and Elise finally came out into the hall for breakfast, but it soon died down when Elise and Maia started to get defensive.

Once that was over with, Leon and Freyja caught up as much as they could. Freyja told him about how bored she’d been herding refugees and keeping the peace, while Leon told her about his life in the south. She was suitably impressed, though Leon could tell that she wasn’t too enthusiastic about listening to stories of the Bull Kingdom. She was a Valewoman through and through, with little care for the south or its conflicts outside of story fodder.

After a while, Valeria joined them in the hall, and soon after that, Leon and his three companions bid Freyja and Torfinn goodbye for the day while they went out into Vale Town. There wasn’t much to see or do, but by the time they returned to the longhouse in the early afternoon, they had had some fun and gotten a better feel for the small city than Elise had gotten when she’d seen it with no one but her Heaven’s Eye escort.

They also returned with more than a few bolts of silkgrass, which Elise fully intended to design into clothes suitable for all of them. Apparently, Leon’s decidedly spartan tastes was starting to rub her the wrong way, and Maia was no better. She didn’t mind them dressing how they pleased most of the time, but she couldn’t stand that Leon only had formal outfit, while Maia had none despite having been with them for so long.

At that point, Leon told her of the remaining snow lion’s fur he’d picked up at his old home. The snow lion he’d killed had been large enough that even after a significant portion of its hide had been turned into his treasured coat, there was still enough left to make something fashionable for Elise, Maia, and maybe even Valeria. What that would be Leon left up to Elise to decide; he was many things, but clothing design was far beyond his capabilities.

The remainder of their time in Vale Town came and went quickly. Torfinn made their stay comfortable and made them feel more than welcome to stay longer, but as Justin healed, Leon and Valeria wanted to get him south. To that end, after staying with Torfinn for three days, Leon led his small group of companions and the Heaven’s Eye escort out of Vale Town and back south.

They would not, however, be returning the way they came. Instead of making for one of the more well-trodden routes, Leon led them towards the prison that Xaphan had languished in for so long. The demon was hardly happy, but Leon wanted to get another look at the enchantments that filled the place. He also wanted the power crystal there, but he’d been thinking about it and was starting to second-guess that desire. He’d learned a lot about the Thunderbird Clan from his voyage back into the Forest of Black and White, and the more time he took to process that information, the more he was starting to wonder if this was the route he wanted to take, or if he wanted to be more self-reliant and eschew the Clan.

It was starting to look less and less like something he wanted to revive. More personally, he was starting to think about himself and his power, and how much of what he’d managed to accomplish was due to himself or to the accident of his birth.

Leon wasn’t able to come to any conclusions, though, especially with Valeria and Justin and their unresolved relationship still so close at hand, and so trudged onward, leading his small band into the mountains to where he knew the prison to be.