<div align="center">(https://i.imgur.com/k7FFteW.jpg)</div><br/>On the 15th of July in the Barovian year 750, the<em>Mercy </em>arrived from the grey limbo between here and there unto the mist-shrouded northernmost port of Martira Bay. In the company of motley ships festooned in silk awnings and unfamiliar flags, bearing woodworking unknown and the stink of uncatalogued beasts, nigh one dozen queasy and world-weary women set foot on the muddy heap of the Jagged Coast, teary with goodbyes, shaking with relief. Home, even from so seedy a place, was a road which could be envisioned from here.<br/><br/>The sect of Ezra in this muggy clime, Zoe dimly recalled, was schismed by a prophet named Bastion Raines and the apocryphal Fourth Book of Ezra, equally bleak and militant as its author. For all who joined hands in sisterhood pleading the sect safe deliverance to Port-A-Lucine, what lay ahead were a further two weeks under puritanical threat of antediluvian absolution, for a full month relentless in trials and travails. For Eloise, whose catatonic state persisted despite all therapy, this fellowship was forged.<br/><br/>It did not truly surprise any of them, then, to learn that Danae Vine-Lott would leave them to this journey and retake the sea in Doctor Heinfroth's vessel. It had always been known, had it not? All it had taken to realize was to stand on that muddy dock and see the sky for the stars, to recognize that mademoiselle Vine-Lott was ever a wolf pursuing and now, at the end of the harrowing flight, there was no more need for her teeth.<br/><br/>Margaret Hotspur bid her stay strong, in breathless embrace, bid her stay true to herself. And Zoe Lambert, whose unsteady body poured into Mlle. Vine-Lott's strength, praised her courage and persistence leaving no woman behind from the wreck of the<em>Charlotte. </em>Michelle Dupin prescribed a happy meeting soon, within the safe harbor of Port-A-Lucine, where all could look back on those days with happy hearts.<br/><br/>But the tarokka dealt a different hand: the Traitor, the Berserker, the Donjon, the Mists, the Innocent.<br/><br/>The lay of Martira Bay given by Doctor Heinfroth, after peering into the secret heart of Captain Vine-Lott, was quite different from the experience afforded most pilgrims to that seamy port. There would be a secret police, the<em>Kargat, </em>to aid and abet the traffic of neurotic gentlewomen to the island of Dominia from the<em>Mercy's </em>first landing. There would be a Lady Kazandra, her ringlets raven black, to give succor and brothel from the sprawling Cosmopolis Club in the port's East District. There would be a vampire lily white, pale flesh a fertile ground for crimson rose tattoos, to organize the bloodthirsty crime of Martira Bay and part its bloody tide around Captain Vine-Lott's mission.<br/><br/>There would be three patients due for Dominia, in Captain Vine-Lott's own time.