The Novice Who Asked Too Many Questions

Before Northshire, there was a stone.

Everyone in Stormwind knows the stone. It was thrown in Cathedral Square, in the riots, when the Stonemasons Guild came to ask the House of Nobles for the wages owed to the men who had rebuilt the city out of the Horde’s ashes. The nobles had debts of their own and no wish to hear about anyone else’s. The guild was ordered disbanded. The masons did not go quietly. Somewhere in the shouting a stone flew, and Queen Tiffin Wrynn, who had come down to calm them, fell and did not get up.

The chronicler is not here to tell you who threw it. Nobody knows. That has never stopped anyone.

Andric was an acolyte of the Cathedral of Light then, a big-shouldered young man with soft hands and a habit of asking why. In the days after the riot the cathedral’s infirmary filled with guardsmen, and Andric bound their heads and splinted their arms and was praised for it. Then he walked down to the Old Town, to the cellars where masons with broken ribs were hiding from the King’s grief, and did the same for them.

The praise stopped.

Friends found other tables at supper. A priest he had admired told him, kindly, that the Light was not a lantern for traitors. Andric asked where in the teachings that was written. That was his other habit. He had never been able to take the Light on anyone’s word, not even the cathedral’s, and the cathedral had begun to notice.

Here is the heresy, as plainly as he ever said it: he believed the Light is one, and the peoples of Azeroth are one family under it. Human and dwarf and gnome and night elf, yes. But also the orc in the internment camp, the tauren on the far plains, the troll, the walking dead of Lordaeron. Lamps of one flame, he called them. He said it in a city where every family has a grave the Horde dug for them, and he was surprised when it went badly.

Nobody expelled him. Stormwind is more polite than that. He was simply reassigned to Northshire Abbey, as a novice, to begin again. The letter called it a fresh start. Andric called it the same, and meant something different by it. If no one would answer his questions, he would go and find the answers himself.

Which is how a man with very large opinions came to Northshire Valley in the dusk and was handed a list of kobolds.

Marshal McBride wanted the Northshire kobolds thinned. Eagan Peltskinner wanted wolf meat. Brother Paxton wanted his library back, because the kobolds had been stealing books they cannot read and chewing the ones they could not carry. Andric fetched the books, delivered a Hallowed Letter to the abbey’s priest trainer, learned to lay Power Word: Fortitude on another man’s shoulders, and took up herbs and skinning, because faith does not feed a novice.

Echo Ridge Mine killed him twice.

The chronicler records this without judgment. The kobolds of Echo Ridge have been killing novices since before the abbey had a roof. Andric came back each time, a little wiser and considerably dustier, cleared the workers and the laborers, and helped Kelsey Fargo recover a sack of “picture” books from a kobold called Shinyfinder Narf, who, it turns out, likes the pictures.

Then came the red bandanas.

Deputy Willem needed twelve of them, taken from the Defias thugs who had crept into Northshire’s vineyards, and a bounty on their captain, Garrick Padfoot. Andric brought them all. The chronicler would like to report that he did it gladly. The Defias are what the Stonemasons Guild became after the city stopped listening: some of the men Andric once bandaged in those cellars may well have sons under those bandanas. He did the work. He was quiet afterwards. He helped Milly Osworth bring in her stolen harvest and carried her Grape Manifest to Brother Neals, which is the kind of errand a man does when he does not want to think.

By nightfall he was in Goldshire, delivering McBride’s documents to Marshal Dughan and taking a room at the Lion’s Pride Inn. An adventurer named Sam Sarsaparilla taught him to sit by a fire properly and sent him around Goldshire to learn the rest: how to make a camp chair from a hide, how to cook wolf meat, how to wet a fishing line in Crystal Lake. Then Priestess Josetta gave him his test.

It was not a test of scripture. A citizen had seen a wounded guard near the lake. His name was Roberts. Find him, Josetta said. Heal him. Fortify him. Come back.

Andric found him, and healed him, and came back, and Josetta gave him the Friar’s Robes of the Light, the church’s first outward sign that it approves of a priest.

The chronicler finds this funny in the way only the Light is funny. The cathedral sent him away for healing the wrong men. The abbey made him a priest for healing the right one.

Andric has not decided which lesson is true. Fargodeep Mine and its candles wait for him. So do the books Brother Paxton has not yet recovered, and a question nobody in Elwynn wants to answer.