Chronicle of the solution: The Sign of the Fair
Poisoning Tier I
The cup was drained and the culprit named, and this chronicle preserves the reasoning that stood against them.
What the file said when it was opened
Something more bitter than gall found its way to the court's table today: poison. Between remedy and venom runs a thin line, and someone at court crossed it knowingly. On the Chancellery's list stand Onufrie the Executioner, Ban Radu the Silent and Safta the Herbwife; one of these names covers a lie. Rumor walks the deed through every corner: the wharf, the tourney field and the old chapel. Take up the quill, follow the thread of the clues, and set your seal upon the verdict.
The circle closed around these names: Onufrie the Executioner, Ban Radu the Silent and Safta the Herbwife. The investigation was not permitted to step outside it, and had no need to.
The suspects
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Onufrie the Executioner
A quiet man with a loud trade. He keeps a notebook of the last words of every condemned soul.
1.92 m tall · dark eyes · no hair · right-handed
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Ban Radu the Silent
He has never uttered a needless word in his life. Sadly, nor a useful one for investigators.
1.81 m tall · grey eyes · grey hair · right-handed
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Safta the Herbwife
She gathers herbs at hours when honest folk sleep. The herbs, she says, speak then.
1.58 m tall · green eyes · greying hair · right-handed
Locations
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The wharf
Moored boats, wet ropes, and goods that prefer to arrive in the fog.
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The tourney field
Empty stands outside festival days. An excellent place for meetings that never happened.
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The old chapel
Candles, incense, and a silence in which every footstep echoes like a confession.
The testimonies on file
This much was worked with, no more and no less. Minimality is not a figure of speech: each row was taken out in turn, at trial, and without it the solution ceased to be unique.
- An honest-faced witness saw it plainly: the suspect with grey hair was at the old chapel.
- An honest-faced witness saw it plainly: the bald suspect was at the tourney field.
- Every scout reports the same about the culprit: the culprit was in the place where goods arrive in the fog.
Read the unravelling, step by step — the culprit's name is spoken from here on
The reasoning, step by step
The road is always the same: findings first, because they do not lie; testimonies after, because one of them always does.
From one word to the next, the investigation arrived here: “An honest-faced witness saw it plainly: the suspect with grey hair was at the old chapel”. A pair was tied, and the knot dragged a whole handful of impossibilities after it.
The gate register had kept a trace of its own: “An honest-faced witness saw it plainly: the bald suspect was at the tourney field”. The match was nailed down, and the rest of the row was left clean, like a page wiped with a sponge.
There followed a detail that narrowed the circle: “Every scout reports the same about the culprit: the culprit was in the place where goods arrive in the fog”. A fact fastened to the culprit cuts without naming: whoever cannot carry it leaves the circle at once.
The close of the investigation
The seal fell on a single name: Safta the Herbwife. When the deed took place, Safta the Herbwife was at the wharf. Nothing was assumed along the way; every step can be redone with a pencil on paper.
Those taken out of the circle
The grid took them out of the circle one by one, place in the story and all: Onufrie the Executioner was at the tourney field; Ban Radu the Silent was at the old chapel. It is these acquittals that made the verdict possible: without them, room for doubt would have remained.
The truth did not surface in a flash of insight but out of a run of small cuts, every one of them checkable.
Play this dossier All mysteries
This chronicle is no free retelling: it rises directly out of the dossier's logic, and every step passed through the solver which proved, before publication, that the solution is unique. behind the scenes at the Chancellery.