Not long ago - a half-year, perhaps - Myrkentown's north gate had been surrounded by a rude sprawl of of primitive dwellings. Tents and shanties, ramshackle shelters without order or forethought, clustered like flotsam against the town wall; home to those too impoverished even for the town's poor districts - refugees from Derry, for the most part, their numbers swelled after the eventual fall of Wrexham. An eyesore, a blight, shabby and stinking and pestilent and thus - in every particular - anathema to the Lady Rhaena.
This being the case, the Foundation had turned its considerable resources to addressing the problem, working a change upon the refugee settlement even as the Lady herself wrought more insidious changes upon Myrken society. The Foundation's coffers funded the purchase of timber and craftsmen, and over the long, hot summer the tents and lean-tos were cleared away, replaced with something altogether more lovely.
Now neat little rows of timber-frame cottages line the road between the town gates and the fork where Trapper's Folly joins the North Passage down. Simple dwellings that might be called charming with their whitewashed walls and shingle roofs. Each has its own little patch of ground - nothing so grand as to be considered a garden, but perhaps enough for a few vegetables or a splash of flowers - with a tidy picket fence dividing it from its neighbours. There are signs of pride here and there - a scrap of bright fabric at a window, a touch of paint to distinguish one house from those to either side. Mere months ago people here had next to nothing; now, thanks to the Lady, they at least have a place.
Squire to the Lady's knight, Cherny knows these houses well. He spent a good part of the summer here, helping carpenters and joiners in their work, fetching buckets of nails or stacks of shingles, working alongside hired labourers and the refugees themselves, learning bits and pieces of a half-dozen trades. He knows the people, has picked up the scraps of their stories they've deigned to share, has listened to countless variations on a common theme of loss, hunger, displacement, their homes lost, abandoned or stolen from them.
Jenifry Toll is one such example: a lady for all that she now lives in greatly reduced circumstances; a widow, her husband a captain of cavalry - a decent man of respectable breeding, among the first to ride against the Thessil invaders, and to die in fire and horror; a mother, fiercely protective of her three children, still haunted by the loss of her youngest in the years of occupation.
Cherny has come to know her, in the weeks that he has been visiting her home; he has learned to respect her quiet dignity, her insistence upon seeing things done correctly, her determination to see her children raised well, no matter what. He has come to appreciate her character, and in particular the principles which led to her taking in Sir Elliot Gahald in the aftermath of the Lady's fall, and doing her best to tend to his wounds. To the squire she has explained that she is indebted to the knight and his Lady for everything her family now has - a house, a home, a place - and it is thus only proper that she do what she can to help the knight, now that he needs it.
Cherny, in turn, has done the best he can to see that she and her family are not made to pay for that kindness, even as his visits became more frequent, bringing medicines for the ailing knight and food for his hosts; he has taken care to vary his routes, the time of day in which he arrives and departs; he has done his best to see that he goes unnoticed and unremarked to and from the little house. But he is still just a boy, and even with the advice of Rememdium healers and town apothecaries there are limits to what he can do for Sir Gahald in his sickness.
Now, at last, he has sought help; he has gambled not only with the life of the knight, but the lives of the small and broken family who have harboured him in the weeks of unrest in which the Lady's servants have been strung from trees in the name of reckoning. A calculated risk, but a risk nonetheless.
Three hours he's been given to make the knight ready to move, and has worried over every minute since. He's done what little he can to prepare: the knight's vibrant armour, now battered and broken, gathered into a sack with his other effects; Sera Toll and her children have gone to visit a neighbour for the afternoon, leaving knight and squire alone to wait. The younger boy fidgets restlessly, dark gaze turning to the door at every rattle of wheels or clatter of hooves on the road outside.
"N-not long now, ser." A whispered assurance offered for the fifth or six time since the Tolls departed, as much to break the tense silence as to reassure Sir Gahald. "Things'll b-be alright. You'll s-see."