We port at the Balakov’s lands, and Ulric disembarks first as befits his station.  Briggette follows dressed in her armor.  The rest of us follow and we head to the castle.  A Paladin of Heimdall guards the gates into the city, and greets us with the standard question regarding our intent within these walls.  He summons horses for us, and we saddle up and enter the city proper.

We make quite the impression walking through town with all four of our flags and our entourage of threatening personages.  When we approach the castle, the captain of the guard comes out and slowly and carefully greets us all according to our ranks.  He invites us in and leads us to the great hall to meet with Count Balakov and Count Hoffman, who is already in town.  Balakov greets us well; he has clearly been drinking, though he is not drunk.  They serve us giant trenchers filled with meat and gravy.  The men discuss their plans for the coming battle, and the Count has his steward make arrangements for us.  They plan to leave in two days, so we have some time to rest in town before we head out.

The next day, we spend some time in the market which is the largest we’ve seen other than the one in Nevers.  We spend our day in relative peace while we ready for battle in the near future.

We sail for four days, finally landing on the 24^th of Vintagemonth along the outskirts of Nevers.  We land a few hundred yards downshore of the main part of the invasion fleet.  None of our enemy is there to meet us, so we spend some time unloading the horses we acquired in town and properly setting ourselves ashore.

We head in the direction of the wizard’s tower, and after about forty-five minutes of hard riding, we see smoke rising from an area that corresponds to the small town we purposely avoided.  We assume that means that Hoffman has been Hoffman and raided the town.