In the shining city of Four Feasts and Three Axes, Baerwyn Steelfire teased her brother. From anyone outside the family, her words might have been deadly insults, to be answered in the dueling circles that dotted the city, but from her to her elder brother, they were mere teasing. Well, not mere teasing. There was a point to it. The Steelfire family was respected and respectable, but their mines were almost played out. It was why more and more of their family had gone into the service of the city as warriors of late.
And it was why she knew they had to go on this expedition, if they were to turn the fortunes of their family around. They had never been rich, their family mine had produced coal, not gold, silver, or even iron, but all the others had needed their coal to work the other metals. But with their mine playing out and the new coal source found within the claim of the King, they had to either find the wealth to buy it, or become hired hands, rather than owners. Some tiny, distant, disobedient part of her suggested they could do something besides be coal miners, or warriors, but that was not a part of herself she listened to.
To go on the expedition, she needed to convince Kithryk. Not because she needed his permission, she was an adult...if barely, by dwarvish standards. But because Kithryk was widely known as a skilled warrior and competent commander, who had participated in more than twenty patrols into the Underdark and led four of them, successfully. Given the relatively isolated nature of the city, trading only with a handful of outlying holds, a rock gnome settlement, and a strangely rich group of kobolds, few could claim as much experience.
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Him going along would allow them to bring along at least five or six family members, even if their skill with an ax was less than their skill with a pick. And since shares for the proceeds would be distributed per person and rank, if this mission succeeded—when it succeeded, they would have enough money to buy the mine, she was sure of it. The great skald and adventurer Urthkin Silverlute had found the old rune maps that indicated where the lost trading post between the city and the surface had been before the earthquake that cut off those roads. And he had then personally scouted a new path upwards. He had had to retreat when within sight of the trading post, as the cavern before him had been filled with oozes, too many for him to defeat on his own.
And so she was teasing her brother to get him to agree. It wasn’t going to work. Today. But the last day to sign up wasn’t for two weeks. That was plenty of time to break stone. Whether it would be enough to break her brother was a different question.
