Three Pies for a Daughter

They bury the burgomaster at midnight, and the graveyard objects.

What follows is the quietest, saddest hour this campaign has had. A fifteen-year-old priest gives away his own father's grave, and a brother eulogises the man he's now expected to replace. Then the dead of Barovia rise in a green light and walk up the mountain toward the castle. Parriwimple is in the line. He stops, and he grins at them.

Over the wine afterwards, Doru finally says out loud what happened to him up at that castle. It's worse than anybody guessed, and the punchline is that the vampire lord thought it was funny.

Then it's back to a mansion where somebody is tapping on the windows, and out onto a road past an old gallows where Gesch sees Fiadh hanging, and touches her, before the body vanishes. Down the road, an old woman with a horse and cart wants to give three freezing travellers something warm to eat. She's kind. She's patient. The whole village has been begging for her pies for weeks. Helliax eats one and falls asleep in her wagon.

When they cut open her tarp, they find out what's been going into those pies, and how she's been getting it: three living children, three dead ones, and a mother who traded her daughter away for three pies. Morgantha sinks into the earth and escapes. The party burns the dead, takes Anya, Luka and Petru, and walks on toward Madam Eva.