Chapter 4 The Aftermath

• Nicholette didn't need to say a word when she and Beatrice came back to the ballroom. Her plan was to discreetly call her father to a secluded corner and report the chase and subsequent incident with the food storage, but as the door opened and she peered inside, heads turned one by one and the silence took the crowd as an ocean wave. She then noticed the gigantic flaw in a plan she could have devised better, had she not been so impulsive. Having battled a powerful creature, fallen from two floors and thrashed a structure while entangled with the enemy, Nicholette looked anything but a discreet elegant hostess.
• Her hair looked like it had been in a hurricane, her dress was shredded to strips, revealing some of her shapely legs (but not much else, fortunately) and she still held on to the steel sword retrieved from the debris of the building that she intended to return to the guard she “borrowed” it from, if she could recognize him. On top of that, the violent exercise and the adrenaline of seeing her first real life werewolf left her sweaty and flushed.
• She looked messy, to say the least.
• “What happened to you?” Asked Amaranta, her sister, the person who was nearer the door and also the first one to have the presence of mind to ask anything. The rest of the ballroom was stumped.
• “A wer…” Nicholette began, but Beatrice quickly stepped forward, nudging against her pupil.
• “Ah, we were in a ruckus with a thief!” Beatrice's voice covered Nicholette's. “Would you believe someone dared to infiltrate the wait staff in order to steal silverware? Nicholette, with the gust of youth and wanting to show her beautiful training, chased the robber to the courtyard. Heroic as she was, he got away! It was a shame she only came to this sword after he had cleared the building or we’d be scrubbing his blood off the floor. But what a fight she put up! It was a rather large man, very muscular, not very fast, or he would have gotten away with his weight worth of silver. It has all been returned to the kitchen of course…”
• And Beatrice kept on telling the tale of how this great thief could have robbed the House of Veritas blind, but being the secure place it was, he hadn't gone unnoticed. Lady Veritas grabbed the heroine of the hour by the arm and dragged her out of the ballroom, perhaps to try and have her carefully groomed elegance restored.
• “Nicholette! As I live and breathe, what could have possessed you to fight a common thief and not call the guards?”
• “Mother, stop!”
• They were in the corridor now, away from any prying ears.
• “It was a werewolf. We were invaded and there could be more among the guests!”
• Lady Veritas face went pale, and she bobbed as if she would faint. Nicholette held her mother, but she didn't fall.
• “Where's the werewolf? Did you kill it??”
• “No, Mother, I failed. It got away.”
• “You could have died! My baby…” Lady Veritas held her daughter close, feeling the tears erupting from her chest.
• “I'm ok, I'm ok. We have to alert my father!”
• Lady Veritas dried the single tear that stubbornly managed to escape and thought for a moment, visualizing the map of the building they were in and tallying up their forces.
• “We have to be quick. What are the escape routes from here… Ah, yes. And the soldiers… Ok, let’s do this as your father would. I'm going inside and I'll tell Beatrice to discreetly gather all the Huntresses that came to the party. She will start to search all the corridors and all the rooms. Then I'll tell your father what happened. You'll run to the barracks right now and alert Captain Theobald of the invasion. Explain everything and tell him to have at least five soldiers in the west exit, the northeast exit and the south exit. That should cover any escapes. The rest of the soldiers are to go to the ballroom immediately and keep an eye on everyone suspicious. We'll slowly ask every guest to leave.”
• Nicholette agreed and ran down the corridor, while her mother, all smiles, walked among the guests, casually explaining that Nicholette was a fierce warrior but soon would change her clothes. She reached Beatrice, surrounded by some people still eager to hear details about the adventure they just had, which she dispensed like candy, lying through her teeth.
• Eventually, Lady Veritas managed to peel Beatrice off of her audience and instructed her to gather her Huntresses, stressing the part where she should be discreet. Lady Veritas could quite clearly picture Beatrice sticking fingers in her mouth and whistling very loudly in the middle of the room and screaming some order as ‘Huntresses! Assemble!’.
• Next, Lady Veritas relayed the events of the evening to Lord Veritas, also surrounded by his fellows, who were querying him rather aggressively as to how it was that a petty thief had passed right under his or his guard's noses. This incident would harshly damage the Veritas House's reputation as the security of Erbe.
• The plan Lady Veritas hastily threw together went smoothly. Soon soldier after soldier entered the ballroom, swords sheathed, but alert to any and all sudden moves. At the same time, the Huntresses under Beatrice's command roamed every cellar, every bedroom, every storage and every passage of the fort the Veritas' called home, all of them still dressed in their finest, bearing weapons from the House’s armory. It was the fanciest, most elegant troop to be seen.
• Fashionable as they were, they completed their search empty-handed. There were no werewolves hidden anywhere in the building.
• At the same time, the merchants, the nobles, the politicians and the otherwise affluent strolled out of the Veritas’ keep, commenting under their breath on their host's rude choice of cutting the evening so suddenly short. It would be the talk of the town for the next weeks, but Lord Veritas calculated that it would be politically less bad for him to be seen as a rude host rather than an incompetent guard. He was responsible for every life in the city, after all, and that security came with the price tag of making some judgment calls.
• The choice of being discreet also came with the inconvenience that the chances of finding any more werewolves disguised in the crowd of guests turned to zero, as everyone was ushered out.
• Holding tightly the crimson cape of the House of Fenris in his crisp fingers, Lord Veritas watched the people file out of the ballroom with the anger boiling inside of him. One of them –or even more– were wild atrocious beasts ready to pounce and there was nothing he could do to identify and kill them. He felt they would be laughing at him around the fire in their crude camps tonight, telling their younglings how they had desecrated the honor of the very responsible for the security of all of Erbe.
• The monsters.
• Lord Veritas knew what would happen next. In a few days, the Captain of the guard of the House would come into his office and announce that he had escorted the leaders of the House of Fenris in for questioning. Lord Veritas would make a show of it by kicking the doors open and throwing that cape on the table and demand explanations. He would then threaten to bar the House of Fenris from ever entering Erbe or having any business in town unless they told him the truth. With tears in their eyes, the Fenris’ would swear they didn't harbor any werewolf or had noticed that any article of clothes was missing and so –please have mercy on us poor small craftsmen– we had nothing to do with that incident. It would probably be true and Lord Veritas would be left with nothing but disgust for that wretched race and a thirst for vengeance. He would conduct such questioning just the same as to leave no stone unturned, but he knew it was useless.
• There was no reasoning with animals. The hunt remained.
• His sweet and brave Nicholette had shown courage, but no strategic thinking. The way she chased the beast without alerting the guards and then barging in the ballroom with her dress torn were all poor battle choices. She dove head first in danger without considering what the best moves would be. Luckily, faithful Beatrice was by her side and nothing worse had happened. He would have to talk to the two of them, but not that night.
• The first thing he would do was to visit the kitchen with a bag of gold and try to keep that story as quiet as possible. He was not above bribery and he knew that the best battles are the ones nobody fought. He wasn't up to fight the rumor that a werewolf had been in his home.
• What a night it turned out to be.