Disclaimer: I wish I owned something in this world, but - alas for me - I own nothing. Definitely not Neverwinter Nights. I could claim that I own Ingrid, but Ingrid always disagrees.

6. Crossroad Keep

Ingrid hardly expects to be recognized – grey hair, foreign clothes and all. The garrison has changed completely, and among the steady stream of citizens though the gates their party does not even look too out of the ordinary. Ingrid takes in the renovations, the new houses on the hill below the fortress, the loud noise of the market in the courtyard. The keep is growing into a busy town, and soon it will grow into a city. They rent rooms at the Phoenix Tail and no one blinks an eye at Gann's blue skin and Kharin's fangs. Good. Her motherland does not disappoint.

Ingrid lingers in the inn's common room nursing a mug of hot cider and tells the others they can go get some food and do their shopping without her. She wants to listen to the conversations. To her disappointment, people talk about farmwork, hunting, fishing, torn shoes, lost keys, and not about missing paladins or past battles. This is good, she reminds herself, this is peace. For a minute she entertains this wild hope that the tragedies might be over, that she will hear their names in the routine gossip. That Casavir is somewhere in the keep, or on the walls, and he may enter the tavern in a minute and all her apprehension will look ridiculous.

A tall man in a sky-blue cloak enters the inn, and Ingrid's heart flutters like a trapped bird in a child's hands.

This is not her tall man in a blue cloak. Some sickening foreboding melts down into a heavy lead ball and weighs down on her stomach.

Ingrid finishes her cider in one gulp, leaves a coin on the table and exits the room. She cannot afford to entertain her illusions. If they are dead, they are dead. Why should a priestess who talked to gods even be scared of death?

Because gods are cruel and mean bastards, her inner voice offers helpfully.

It is Khelgar who runs the keep, his cloak with the embroidered sigil of Neverwinter gives out that he is one of the Nine. He is so happy to see her that he keeps laughing and crying at the same time. We lost all hope, lass. We kept looking, but no goddamn gargoyles anywhere, and not even a rumour of a silver sword. Daeghun sifted through half the coast with his own hands, lass. Where the hell have you been for three years?

Kana happens to walk by the reception room with a load of papers, and after a brief stunned moment she marches to them in a confident military stride, drops the papers on the desk and surprises Ingrid with a ribsmashing hug. Welcome back, my lady. The keep is yours, adds Khelgar, I will write Nasher right away and go get drunk. Feel free to join me.

She shakes her head and asks them about the others. She learns that Neeshka and Khelgar were chasing the gargoyles that carried her out of the collapsing fortress and the two of them were almost on the surface. Neeshka is in Neverwinter. Sand had polymorphed into a stone golem and was later dug out by the search party, he occupies the mage's tower here at the keep. Elanee was not lucky, she was crushed on the way. They found her body and buried her in the small grove within the castle walls. She saw Grobnar die, didn't she. Zdzaeve died her mortal death and goes on in her astral realm; Sand contacted her to learn of Ingrid's fate, but she did not know much except that the Sword of Gith was in the mortal plane.

This leaves one person, and Ingrid thinks she can discern the answer from the way Khelgar is shifting from foot to foot nervously, and Kana is not looking her in the eye.

Casavir?

Khelgar shakes his head.

"No one knows, lass. He was caught under a rock, shouted for me to get you, then the ceiling behind us crumbled and blocked the way out for him. We took the ruins apart three weeks later, as soon as I was back to my feet, but nothing. Someone got there before us. No body in the ruins, no paladin anywhere. I had been hoping the same gargoyles had him, but they didn't, did they?"

The first thought that shoots though her mind is that he must be alive. All the thoughts that follow are much, much worse. Not now, she tells herself stubbornly, not in the presence of those who already worry about you.

It is late. Kana sends a boy to the inn to tell her fellow travellers that Ingrid will meet them in the morning. Sand turns up. They share a meal. She tells them a short version of her three years. They keep giving her small touches of support as if they want to check she is real. At last, it is time to go to bed, and Ingrid refuses the nicer guest rooms in the new part of the castle. She is desperate to return, to feel that she has returned, and the feeling is strangely absent.

Her and Casavir's chambers have been left untouched, locked and barred from any intrusion. She enters the room – they left it early that bleak morning almost three years ago. They had had little sleep, talking and clinging to each other as if they knew they would never be in this room again. Her things and his things are all in their places. Her worn castle cloak is draped over the chair by the tiny desk where she wrote some hasty last-minute notes to the villages' mayors about some small business that had seemed important before. His camp bedding is rolled over neatly in the corner – they were not planning to rest in the place where the Tome of Ilkatzar was going to take them. Her clothes – the wine-red tunic, the grey trousers – are hanging in the wardrobe. Their bed is covered with a blanket, and the blanket is dusty.

Ingrid sits down and smells the dust. She opens the chest by the bed, picks up a shirt – it is his – and presses it to her face. It does not even smell of anything except dust and old age and graveyards. The three years suddenly catch up with her, and she starts to cry.

She never even remembers to build the fire in the fireplace. She cries until she is spent and falls asleep in the cold, desolate room.

In the morning, when Ingrid gathers her companions, old and new ones, in the tavern room, Sir Nevalle arrives. He looks around, raises an eyebrow – Ingrid can clearly see the question "Is that an orc?" in the slight amusement on his face – and chooses to sit down at the table as if he has always belonged. Perhaps he does now.

Introductions are made, questions are answered, brief accounts of the past events are told. Ingrid cannot really believe that both the war with the King of Shadows and the Spirit-Eater curse now seem unimportant to her. Accomplished, sealed and distant. She explains to them that she does not plan to run the keep or command armies. Her only goal is to find her husband – she uses this word in public for the first time and she can see Nevalle's surprise – dead or alive. Khelgar is slightly disappointed, but he manages to conceal it. He really has come a long way with this reluctant leadership.

They all look at Nevalle, with various concerns of how politics can again interfere. Nevalle shrugs and says that nothing changes the fact that she is landed nobility and the keep is hers, but the times are peaceful, the town flourishes, the trading companies fight for a stand in the marketplace, and it may be wise to return to the good old scheme where the Lady of Crossroad Keep and the Captain of Crossroad Keep are two different people.