Liam

Liam, who also gave his name as Lium, keeps the village house of Elm in the campaign Zincirsiz ("Unchained"). He is a man in his forties who wears an apron and cleans glasses behind the drinks table while his children help serve. When Jonathan River and his companions arrived, he said that the village did not usually see so many strangers in a whole year.¹²

The village house

The village house is the large building at the heart of Elm, where the villagers gather in the evenings. It is less a trading inn, with its rows of tables and bar, than a family business shared by the village. Liam's own home is upstairs; having no rooms for travellers, he offers straw beds behind curtains in the barn, where another stranger, Max, was already staying. Jonathan asked for care for the horses, durable supplies for a few weeks, good food and clean beds, and left more gold than was asked, which counted as a great deal of money in the village.³⁴⁵⁶

Behind the drinks table hangs an old imperial banner bearing the symbols of the Victory Day alliance. That evening the young villagers gathered round to ask about magic and the Archon, and the talk spread through the house; Jonathan showed them a small bolt of fire and stepped by magic from one chair to another, then regretted the display.⁷⁸⁹¹⁰

The lost girl

In the night Liam knocked hard on the barn door. A small girl was lost in the forest, he said: she had been playing with her friends near the waterfall, the others had come home one by one, and when she did not her family had raised the alarm. He seemed truly frightened. He joined the search himself, carrying a torch and an ordinary short sword, since the girl knew him and might come out to him.^1112213

On the way he told of others lost before: a child of another family who vanished in the forest and was never found, a man who disappeared two years earlier, and an old woman found dead after a fall seven years before. Then he was sent back to the village to tell the family and keep an eye on the cart and the barn, while the others went on.¹⁴¹⁵

The same day again

When the companions came back to a village that, after a moment, looked as it always had, Liam greeted Jonathan as if for the first time and welcomed Max as his guest of a week, offering the same beds in the barn. Asked about the cart, he paused, glanced through the window and said he had seen it. A test with change found newly minted coins in his drawer, though no one could tell whether they were the same coins Jonathan had paid. Nothing the companions saw showed that he was watching them or meant them harm.¹⁶¹⁷¹⁸

He explained that fires, roasting meat, drinking and children's games by the waterfall at night were the village's usual pastime, and packed food for the companions. When Max asked about buying sheep, Liam pointed him to Lena's house beside the well and the plane tree, and later was in her house helping her settle a price. There, when words of magic were spoken outside, he fell asleep with Lena and her two children. The stranger Zarama admitted to the spell and carried the sleepers so that they would seem to have dozed off naturally.^19202122

That evening, when the other children came back without her, Liam came again to Max's door with the same worry, the same words and the same answers as before, asking him and his mage friend to look for the girl lost at the waterfall. Max asked the same questions, heard the same replies, and rode off at once.²³²⁴

Spoiler: Elm's fateRevealSpoils: Zincirsiz #26 · Say what you have read

When the companions returned to Elm much later, the village had been emptied and lay rotted as though it had stood under water, and some of the dead found there had drowned. Liam was not among those recognised, and there were fewer bodies than there had been villagers; his fate is not known.²⁵