Session 9a - What Lady Jaranta Winterule said

 I’m sorry, I wasn’t expecting visitors today. I’d given up hope of finding anybody to help me find out the cause of my father’s death. I will pay you handsomely for information.

My father, Lord Reder Winterule, was a driven man. He’d made his gold as a ship builder after the War and then spent a few years traveling. That led to an interest in strange cults. He was bent on battling something, but he wouldn’t tell us what it was. My mother and I watched him get ever more distant, travel ever more often, until he spent almost all of 1555 away from home. On the trail of some ‘awful evil,’ as he called it.

When my father wasn’t traveling, he was having meetings with people who weren’t in the ship trade. Other people with interests in these awful cults, I think. My mother didn’t like them. This was when mother started drinking.

Something happened in August of 1555. Something that sent him back to us rattled and unraveling. He didn’t have any more  meetings after that. He stopped traveling. But he wasn’t uh well. He saw a healer for a few years. He burned his books. He hardly ate. He jumped at shadows, insisted he was being watched. He was… never the same. He forbade us from asking about his travels and said more than once that ‘nothing mattered anymore.’ When mother died, in ‘62, he hardly grieved. After that, he became only more paranoid and frustrated, until he finally passed away, earlier this year, as a shadow of himself.

That was when I found the letters — letters from a man named Heny Rynge ,who had apparently worked with my father up until August of ‘55. I think he must have been one of the people father met with at the house, time and again. He wrote a few times, always asking my father to write down what had happened, what he had seen. My father never did. He never answered those letters. But he kept them, and it looks to me like he studied them carefully.

This Heny Rynge wrote a final letter.. It was sent from here  in Frostwyck. I think this man must know what happened to my father all those years ago. I want to know what my father was mixed up in and… whether I should be apologizing for him or defending him. Whether he left work unfinished. Whether I’m in any danger. 

She looks around nervously at the walls.

I’ll gladly commission you for supplies, and pay you handsomely for information on my father and the cults he was mixed up in.

I’ll admit, I once thought my father’s house was haunted. Shadows seemed to bend and warp, and odd stains appeared from nowhere. I thought I… saw things. Things in the walls.

We tried to see Heny Rynge. We went to the Temple of Valar just outside the pallisade (she points in the direction) and the head priestess, Misha Devi, turned us away. She said that Heny had taken a turn for the worse and was too disturbed to see us. Even an offer of a donation to the temple didn’t change her mind. Then there’s Heny Rynge’s mother. Lives right in the village. Terrified of witchcraft. Points to her horns. Won’t speak to me.