T.,

I’ve located Benton through the scrying dish; whatever is protecting Freestone has neglected to include him under its purview. There’s a house to the north of Henshaw owned by the local minister; he’s somewhere in the basement, alive. I wouldn’t inform Marvin just yet; he’s in no condition to return to the stage. A house slave at my old estate once broke a vase and tried to glue it back together to avoid the whip. Someone broke him and put him back together just as poorly. He looks fine physically, but if I tune the dish to what lies under the surface, there’s stretches of his being that are barely held together by a few strands of memory and some thaumaturgical equivalent to tar. He’s a new person now; meek and uncertain and scared. It’s not from any magical tradition I’ve ever seen; the scrying dish shakes if I look at it for too long. Even Prince Remus was never caught doing something like this.

I understand why we were tasked to get his secrets any way we could. Could you imagine what this could do in the wrong hands? Or what it could do in the right hands? The ability to change people at their core! We could ravage President Grant’s mind from the inside out and blame it on his precious liquors. We could set the Yankees against each other, send them to squabbling and leaving those c**ns undefended. We could rewrite history; we could win the war.

I have not forgotten our mission, however. I was able to glean some details from his shattered mind; there are flecks of truth remanining near the edges. Freestone has some sort of…amphibian with gigantism that defends him, but nothing else that would pose a threat. He has no other defenses; If we can deal with it, we can deal with him. I need time to recover from the scrying but I’ll have Elder track down the frog and kill it while Younger stays with me. We’ll strike on the 16th; that’ll give you time to prepare the serums to get the truth out of him. We dispose of what’s left of him on the 20th and move back south by the 22nd; I’m sure our marvelous Marvin will be pleased to have an end date.

Please keep our host happy and everyone else under control until I’ve secured our prize. I’ll be sure to sing your praises when we return to the Grand Wyrm with unprecedented knoweldge.