Talons Note: Founding Talonfall

Note

Sent	Hammer 6, 1489
From	Corwyth Skarn
To	Keyleth
Carried	Tied to a hawk's leg, written small on bark-paper; Nettle and four others were already in the treeline

The note that stood up Talonfall — from Corwyth Skarn to Keyleth on her elevation to Scaled Bane, received at Nuts Deep during the fortnight's downtime, Hammer 1489.

Provenance

Nettle and four others were already camped in the treeline north of Nuts Deep when the company came back from Elturel in the second week of the downtime. They had been there two days and had not announced themselves. The letter came separately, tied to a hawk's leg, written small on bark-paper to keep the weight down.

The note

Keyleth,

Nettle and the others will have been sitting in your treeline for some days by the time this reaches you. She does not announce herself and she will not come inside your walls, and you will save yourself a season if you stop trying to make her. Everything else about her is an improvement on that.

Five people, then. Nettle runs them and answers to me. The other four go where you send them, and the Talons will add a fifth when your name carries further than it does now, and a sixth after that. I have known it to reach a sixth twice.

There are three things you can ask of them, and I want to set out all three properly rather than have you learn the shape of it by getting it wrong.

The first is watching. Put one of them somewhere and they will tell you what moves through it — a road, a pass, a valley you do not like the look of. You will know a thing is coming before it arrives, which is worth more than most people credit until the one time it saves them. You hear the wind before you see the wolf. Most of what this order does is watching, and nobody has ever thanked us for a season of it.

The second is guiding. They will walk your people through country that would otherwise take something from you. Nothing has ever jumped a party on a road a Talon walked first, and I have been checking that claim for forty years in the hope of catching it out.

The third is the cull, and it is the one you will reach for. Name a thing and they will go and end it. A young wyrm, a brood, a nest of dragonkin that has got above itself. Nothing older or larger than that — I am setting it down in writing so there is no argument about what I meant when the moment comes and you want there to have been more latitude in it.

Understand what a cull actually costs. It is weeks, not days. The tracking is the long part; the killing is quick, or else it has already gone wrong. While they are hunting they are not watching anything and not guiding anyone, so do not ask them for two things in the same month and expect both. They will bring back the carcass, or as much of it as will travel — I am told your company has a use for that, which I approve of. Waste is its own kind of insult.

Moving them costs you time and you should reckon it in advance. Hours to cross a town. Three to five days to cross a region. Ten days to cross the coast, and longer once the passes close. On the road they see nothing and do nothing, so decide where they ought to be and then leave them there.

One posting I made on my own account, which you may reverse without argument from me. When your Harpers' account of the burnings came south, Brannoc Yew asked me for those sites before I had finished reading it through. His people are Yewbank, out of the Misty Forest, and their winter ground lay close enough to Thornwild Court that it was his grandmother's people who walked in afterward and buried what there was to bury. They were told it had been a dragon's rampage and that nobody could put a name to the dragon, and that is what the Yewbank have believed for eighty-six years. He has now been told it was one of eight, and that all eight were deliberate. He has been cutting the names into his stave since the account reached us and I do not believe he has slept much. A man with that much reason to look closely ought to be the one walking the ground. If you want him elsewhere, move him.

The last part I would rather not write down, but you are owed it before you give your first order.

I have buried twenty-one of my own in forty years. Nineteen of those were culls. Watching wears people out slowly and you see it coming; the cull takes them all at once and you find out by way of a report that does not arrive. Both facts are true, and only one of them will feel real to you when you are standing somewhere with a problem in front of you and five people who will go if you ask.

So do not count antlers before the rut. Send word to me when you are minded to use them hard, and I will tell you honestly whether I think they will come back.

You have done well by this order. Veylan's ease was owed and you paid it.

— Corwyth Skarn

See also

• Correspondence — the campaign's letters, gathered
• Talonfall — the cell it stood up, where the note is also kept
• Talons of Veylan · Corwyth Skarn · Keyleth