Wayne was in no hurry on this trip.
Though Rebecca seemed anxious the entire way, Wayne arranged the journey at his own pace. He had the party stop at every town along the route.
At each stop, he would send soldiers disguised as travelers or mercenaries to mingle with the crowds and spread the news that "Founding Grand Duke Gwayne Seawright has returned from the dead" and "Duke Gwayne will be arriving in Sunspear soon."
He would also pay local bards, ruffians, and ne'er-do-wells to propagate versions of the story that were similar in substance but far more outlandish, the funding from Viscount Andrew was more than enough to cover all of this.
Wayne had initially worried that since neither he nor Rebecca had any experience dealing with the local underworld, they might run into difficulties. But Ser Byron proved to have extraordinary capabilities in this area.
The middle-aged knight might not have been the strongest fighter among his peers, but his ability to deal with society's shadier elements was jaw-droppingly impressive. Within no time of arriving in a town, he'd have established connections with the local "rats," and before the soldiers had even begun spreading their message, all manner of underground rumors about the Southern Marches were already circulating through the lower strata of society...
Wayne recalled Byron's background. According to Rebecca, Byron wasn't a proper noble's son but a former traveling sellsword who had been taken in by the previous Viscount Seawright after some incident and elevated to knighthood. Evidently, this former sellsword's old skills hadn't rusted one bit.
The other person who proved enormously helpful came as no surprise. Amber was predictably masterful at dealing with thugs and riffraff. Whether you called it professional excellence or outstanding job performance...
Wayne had given the half-elf a small sum to bribe the local lowlifes, and when she came back from the errand, she had more money than she'd started with...
This behavior naturally drew fierce condemnation from the well-bred Rebecca, and to maintain his lofty image in front of his descendant, Wayne had no choice but to press down on Amber's head and make her promise to return all the stolen money and never do it again.
This left Amber deeply wounded, as though her very life's purpose had been denied.
Wayne figured that getting this disgrace to Elfkind to develop a normal moral compass was probably a lost cause.
Beyond letting the rumors ferment, Wayne's other reason for this leisurely pace wasn't so easy to articulate. he needed to understand this world better.
Not because the inherited memories were seven hundred years out of date, but because he fundamentally wasn't from this world at all. The images he'd seen from the sky could only serve as maps. The inherited memories lacked sufficient immersion and flexibility, a point he'd realized after several failed attempts to search them, thwarted by not knowing the right "keywords." For the current Wayne, the most urgent need was simply to learn about this world.
The process went reasonably well.
He saw the impoverished, backward villages of Andraste's south and the bustling, prosperous cities of its center. He saw mountain wilderness and human-built fortress strongholds. And all of it was gradually merging with the overhead maps stored in his memory.
By cross-referencing certain details, he confirmed that the "latest" overhead map in his mind wasn't too outdated. It was probably a record from about ten years ago, the last glimpse he'd gotten while hanging in the sky.
For a world that moved at this pace, a ten-year-old map worked perfectly fine.
As for whether problems might arise in Gulltown during their extended absence, Wayne wasn't as worried as Rebecca. He trusted Hestia's abilities and was fairly certain Viscount Andrew would honor the terms of their deal, not because he believed in the viscount's character, but because he believed that self-interest would bind the man firmly to House Seawright.
Before leaving the south, he'd arranged for Ser Philip to spread all those rumors, which served a dual purpose beyond publicizing Gwayne Seawright's resurrection.
They also made the surviving Seawright subjects a focus of public attention, leaving Viscount Andrew with no choice but to keep feeding those refugees, all the way until Gwayne Seawright returned from the capital and everything was settled.
No matter how long the road, every journey has its end. Two months after leaving the southern region, the towering walls of Sunspear finally appeared before Wayne's group.
This was a city built on a plain, its scale utterly incomparable to the poor little towns of the south. White walls and orderly expanses of bright blue rooftops were the city's defining features, earning it the twin epithets "The Holy White City" and "The Blue-Crowned Jewel."
Since the founding High King Charles Martell had led his people to till these plains and pile earth into walls seven hundred years ago, the city had undergone countless expansions and renovations. The original earthen walls had long since vanished, surviving only as a few commemorative remnants in the old quarter.
The newly constructed walls of massive stone blocks were a full ten times larger than the original, built from hard stone quarried in the northern Bedrock Ridge and the eastern territories. The joints between stones were sealed with molten copper and lead, and embedded within those thick, sturdy walls at hundred-meter intervals were crystals blessed by earth elementals, ensuring the walls would never crack or crumble. The sheer extravagance would have been beyond the wildest dreams of the pioneers who had first settled here.
Wayne stood beneath Sunspear's walls, gazing up at the stone bricks gleaming in the sunlight, and found that his mind held absolutely no corresponding details.
This city bore no resemblance whatsoever to the little town in Gwayne Seawright's memories.
With legitimate travel documents and verifiable noble credentials, the group entered the city without any trouble.
The High King who ruled all of Andraste, His Majesty High King Denethor II, was waiting in his palace, the Silver Keep, for these visitors from the south, and especially for a certain very special guest from seven hundred years ago.
In fact, he had been waiting for a great many days. He was practically developing a nervous breakdown.
The old ancestor was an absolute menace. This generation's king would like to formally state that this was not how the game was supposed to be played. Secret dispatches from all across the south, intelligence reports from every town along the route from south to north, they had never stopped coming.
Official reports from various officials combined with underground gossip collected from the populace could have been stacked over a meter high on his desk, containing at least a hundred different versions of the story, not counting dialect variants. And regardless of which version, the central theme was always the same. the old ancestor had suddenly thrown open his coffin, gathered up his descendants, and was heading straight for the capital. But while these reports kept arriving day after day, the ancestor himself...
Why wasn't he showing up?!
The contingency plans drawn up after first receiving Viscount Andrew's confidential letter had long since been abandoned. The countermeasures discussed with his trusted advisors had each been rendered useless, one by one, as the ancestor sauntered along, sightseeing and making a spectacle of himself at every stop.
By now, Gwayne Seawright's return was common knowledge. Well, given the era's information-transmission speeds..."common knowledge" was an exaggeration, but at the very least, every merchant and minor noble with the means to gather intelligence knew about it.
Which left High King Denethor II with very limited options.
Sit in the Silver Keep. Receive the returned legendary duke publicly and above-board. Converse with him publicly and above-board. Then send this living ancestor on his way publicly and above-board.
At the very minimum, every step that might draw public scrutiny had to be conducted in the open.
But Wayne wasn't ready to let the High King off the hook just yet, or rather, the first phase of his plan had succeeded, and now he wanted to test the High King's attitude and the attitudes of those around him. So instead of discreetly directing the convoy straight to the Silver Keep, he ordered all soldiers to unfurl the banners they'd prepared inside the carriages shortly after entering the city.
The banners bore House Seawright crest alongside the Andraste royal sigil of sword and shield. The two emblems displayed side by side were an exact reproduction, drawn from Wayne's memories, of the standard Gwayne Seawright had flown during his lifetime as Grand Duke of the Southern Marches.
Even with only twelve rank-and-file soldiers, they were going to march like a proper honor guard.
House Seawright had indeed grown weak. But even weakened to this extent, this house, which had carved out a kingdom alongside the founding king and built its legacy on martial prowess, still retained one last scrap of pride. defend the people and the land, never yield on the battlefield. Rebecca, only seventeen, capable of nothing but Fireball, was arguably the weakest lord in Seawright history, hopeless in both governance and combat, and her head had possibly been pinched as a child. Yet she had led the family's last soldiers in a desperate stand at the castle, buying time for the last civilians to escape. What she'd relied on was that inherited honor.
And so House Seawright held the poorest, weakest fief in the south, yet had still produced the south's finest warriors.
Even if those warriors now numbered barely more than a dozen.
The soldiers raised their banners high, riding in two columns on horseback. Looking at the crests fluttering above them, they too seemed to catch the spirit, lifting their heads proudly. Behind them, Rebecca and Wayne had dismounted from the carriage and now rode alongside the soldiers on horseback.
Byron led the way at the front. This sellsword-turned-knight did his utmost to adopt a posture befitting a true noble, so as not to disgrace the family he served. But Wayne rode up beside him and said quietly.
"Relax. Forget the etiquette and posture. When we first marched to this spot all those years ago, some of us were carrying logging axes on our backs."
At the very rear of the procession, inside the carriage that should have carried Wayne and Rebecca, the current occupants were the thief and a dozing little maidservant.
"Nobles really are a diseased species, aren't they?" Amber poked her head out to look at the procession, then turned back and jabbed Betty's arm. "They've got a perfectly good carriage and they'd rather go ride horses and show off. Something wrong with their heads."
Betty's head kept bobbing, it looked like she was nodding in agreement, but then a tiny snot bubble appeared at her nose.
Amber blinked at Betty, then noticed the frying pan resting at her side. A mischievous impulse seized her. She deployed her world-class thieving skills, silently creeping toward the pan...
Betty snatched the frying pan up and clutched it to her chest, eyes wide, staring at the stunned Amber. "No! My lord said this is mine!"
Amber: "...?"