An Audience with Fenn aer Jaize

When the crew of the Almsgiver interrogated Kartal – a member of the robber gang who attacked Kassandra – he revealed that he was acting as a spy in the employ of Fenn aer Jaize, the queen of Praidi. Fenn’s kingdom and that of her ally, Queen Agnes of the Marshpen Basin, have long been at odds with the class of old-blood Marshpen aristocracy who occupy the Thocrairi Moors in the western Basin, at the heart of Demor Lant. These nobles have for generations possessed sizable holdings of open land throughout the Moors, and the tenants who settled there to farm those holdings make up most of the Moors’ current inhabitants. In recent years, the nobles have begun selling their land in parcels to land speculators operating out of the military town of Fort Hauv, using the funds to replace their original tenant workforce with a new class of indentured servants, or villeins. This has resulted in the large-scale displacement of the tenant farmers, who are forced to watch their homelands sold off to strangers from the south—an act of corruption Fenn and Agnes do not take kindly to.

Kartal had been embedded with the robber gang for about a year, plying his trade in the forests surrounding Nereth’s main road. He and his cohorts would abduct refugees who traveled through and hand them into indentured servitude with the landed gentry of the Thocrairi Moors. Kartal’s role as double agent was to limit violence against the refugees as much as possible, enlist them for the cause whenever he could, and leverage his position to discover the gentry’s weak point. So far he has managed to gain the trust of his liaison with the gentry – whom he and his gang meet up with once a month at a chosen rendezvous point – as well as embed a number of refugees as operatives in stately homes; these include Emily Chestnut, Peter Hadrien, Sadar Couravel, and Connemara Thimblethwaite.

Kartal’s motive for resisting the gentry, and for keeping that resistance secret, is a personal one: his family are among the tenant farmers at risk of losing their land to the speculators. If the nature of Kartal’s job were made known to anyone on the Moors, his family would be evicted immediately, if not killed outright.

Following these revelations, Kartal brought the crew north to meet with Queen Fenn on her own turf, at a semiannual court audience. The party’s previous discovery of the workshop of Pavrym and the various historical artifacts contained therein convinced Fenn that she owed them some cooperation. She produced writs of pardon for each of them, in hopes of putting off the penalty on their heads for the deaths of Commander Argon and Captain Cargill, and gave them as much information as she could about the circumstances surrounding the trafficking and the people who perpetuate it.

“The most egregious of these powermongers,” she said, “is Admiral Jennet Davis-Clough—one of the major leaders in the House of the Admiralty, based in the Vrinish Settlements. Some time ago, she was granted a parcel of land on the Moors, as were several other individuals in the House. These included the Surgeon General of Greymouth Wharf and several landed members of the nobility whose old names had occupied the moors for some time.”

"Not all of those who have vested interests in the moors live there year round. For most, it’s a country home. Many of the most wealthy have their permanent settlements in Greymouth Wharf or Freeburg or Marredon.”

Fenn then explained that there was “a bit of an incident with the admiralty house” fairly recently. “To hear them tell it,” she said, “a ship in Tefyrthana's charitable fleet was afflicted with plague and sunk off the coast of Nereth. This prompted the closure of the bay of Furness, which was one of the only shipping routes left available for refugees. This means that – well, there's a bit of a policy crisis, and we've had some protests, but moreover…all the refugees from other continents are now being funneled through Nereth.”

The party members responded that they had first-hand knowledge of the Almsgiver’s voyage and shipwreck, and that there was no plague on board. In their opinion, the “sinking” of the Almsgiver was an attempt by Captain Cargill to get rid of Gwen for good.

Fenn looked very unsure how to continue. "One of the commanding officers of that vessel,” she said slowly, “was brutally murdered in the city of Freeburg not very long ago. You wouldn't happen to know anything about that?"

The party denied their involvement.

"This is very unfortunate,” said Fenn. “It means that any information that you might have had regarding ... a conspiracy, or action in bad faith, is rendered moot."

The queen would prefer that the noble classes of the Moors be disgraced and deposed, not done away with through violence. Though it annoys her to bother with subterfuge, she suspects that were she simply to have the gentry assassinated, they would become symbols of martyrdom, and their sons succeed to their positions – likely gaining political advantage rather than losing it.

The party asked whether there were any other characters Fenn had knowledge of whose names might be helpful to them. Fenn said there was one. “Each ship in the fleet,” she said, “is required to have on board at least one, if not dozens, of officers of the Demorian constabulary. The officer on that particular voyage was Marshal Ellison. It was Marshal Ellison who reported the sinking of the vessel and on whose confidence the order to close the Bay of Furness was passed. If there were some connection between the landed gentry and what you claim to a be a systemically perpetrated lie, which in theory has cost multiple innocent lives...that would be immense."

The last thing Fenn told the party was that there was an individual at the evening’s audience who could get them to the Thocrairi Moors quickly: a talented young mage named Tallow.