Anomen saw Patricia’s face light up like a candelabra as the Waukeenar handed her a thick sheaf of letters. He’d gone by Minna’s himself earlier, but her shop had been unaccountably closed. Her neighbor had said the milliner had had to go to a funeral, and would probably be away all day. It would be tomorrow before he could hope to hear from Moira.

Quickly Patricia smoothed her face into its customary mask, but not before the Watcher asked, “Good news, I take it, Lady Patricia?”

She smiled. “I hope so. There’s a letter from Mama Delaine, one from the Dukes, one from Aldeth Sashenstar, and beyond all my expectations, one from Ajantis. I’d not thought the post from Waterdeep ran so quickly.”

“He probably sent it via one of the Order’s messengers,” replied Anomen. Why did he feel a bit uncomfortable at her pleasure in hearing from an old friend?

Patricia nodded absently, staring at the last letter, whose direction was written in a cramped hand. “Now who--- oh, it’s Yeslick, bless his heart! I wonder how his search for his relatives is going? The Dukes must have forwarded this one on from the Gate for me.”

Anomen found his heart unexpectedly sinking at this. “Who’s Yeslick?” he asked sharply.

She looked up, seemingly unaware of his tone. “Why, Yeslick is another old companion, who left us before the whole brouhaha with Sarevok---” her voice wavered suddenly at the name, and she finished in a flat voice, “--- completed itself.”

She twitched her shoulders slightly, as if to shake off a bad memory, and continued, “Yeslick’s clan once ran a mine in the Cloakwood, but they were flooded out by an unfortunate miscalculation in their delving. He decided to go and look for some cousins who belonged to some other clan--- Worldthrone, I think--- after we finished our expedition to Durlag’s Keep.”

“He’s a dwarf, then?” asked Anomen, his spirits rebounding.

“Yes, and a kinder soul you’ll never find. One of the nicest men I’ve ever met. He proves every ‘grumpy dwarf’ stereotype wrong. Well,” she continued cheerfully, “the priest says my other things have already been delivered to the Coronet, and I’ve drawn a few hundred gold for our immediate needs, so as soon as you’ve finished with your own banker we can be on our way to rejoin the others.”

Anomen nodded. Celmar was not in his office, so one of the clerks took care of depositing most of the Watcher’s share of Nalia’s gift. As he came back out into the sunshine, he noticed that Patricia was deep into one of her letters where she sat waiting on one of the benches in Government Park. The sunlight bounced off the wide-brimmed straw hat she’d bought from one of the street vendors earlier. If it hadn’t been dyed a dark blue, she might have been mistaken for a Gondswoman.

She looked up as she heard his steps coming across the cobbled path. “All finished?”

He nodded assent. “I see you decided not to wait until we got back to the Coronet, milady.”

She said lightly, “I hoped my mother had sent me a recipe I was asking for. She did, so if you don’t mind, I’d like to purchase the ingredients on our way back.”

“Some delicacy you wish to tempt us with, then?” he replied in the same tone. To his astonishment, he found himself actually bantering with the woman, without any more sense of awkwardness than with his sister.

“Hardly,” she laughed. “Unless you find goose grease, citronella, and a few other such items particularly toothsome. No, Delaine has a recipe for a sunburn preventative that Imoen and I have always used during the summer. The sun is so much stronger here that unless I wear unbearably heavy layers of clothes, I’ll be the same color as a boiled lobster in short order without it! Besides, this lotion also discourages mosquitoes and biting flies.”

“That would be reason enough alone to use it, milady. I cannot abide those little singing monsters. They are not supposed to be so numerous in the hills, but during that hot summer I spent with the Order fighting the Hillgnasher giants, I sometimes felt like a pincushion after a night on guard. We had no netting to duck under out on the perimeter.”

“Giants?” replied Patricia with interest. “Now that’s one sort of creature I’ve not yet encountered. I take it these were hill giants, as their name implies?”

“Aye, and as stupid and brutish as all the tales report. There were more than thirty of them, and I had a hand in the deaths of twenty.” Anomen found himself spilling out his memories of those miserable months of humid heat as he had never done to anyone, not even Moira. His sister simply didn’t have the experience to understand all the privations of the battlefield the way this quiet woman next to him did. He knew that he could speak to Patricia of the inevitable horrors of war without shocking her sensibilities. After all, he’d spent the last few days watching her eliminate one monster after another. Her sword and his mace had both dripped with the vermilion and viridian blood of evil creatures as they fought to stem the tide of chaos. The relief of speaking of his misery at last was immense.

It wasn’t the conflicts with the enemy that had nearly driven him mad, nor the sweltering weather or the insects, but a fellow squire. Carefully he forbore naming names, mindful that it was better that he make no accusation, especially now that the time for his Test was closing in. But he allowed himself the sweet luxury of finally telling someone about the hazing he’d undergone.

It had been the first summer after Sir Ryan had belted him as a squire. He was the lowest and least among those selected to go on the mission, and so it fell to him to do most of the unpleasant jobs that weren’t parceled out to civilian retainers. The senior squire in the group took a dislike to the Watcher, and he’d made Anomen’s life miserable. The priest felt himself flushing red with anger as he recalled those days. He’d always found it easy to obey every regulation to the letter. His armor and other equipment meant twice as much to him as they did to most novices, considering the struggles he had undergone to acquire them, and he prided himself on his care of them.

The nightmare had begun when the senior squire had substituted a jar of the yellow-tinted armor polish used by middle-rank priests of Torm for his own uncolored pot. As he’d been accomplishing the chore solely by the light of a pine torch, he couldn’t see the difference until morning. Now, in and of itself this might have been just an ordinary bit of ragging, causing him to have to spend extra time in the morning re-doing the job before muster, but with no worse consequence, except for a bit of extra bad luck. It happened that the woman set for the dawn watch came down with a sharp fever, and so as junior member of the expedition, Anomen found himself rousted out to cover her duty. He put on his armor largely by feel, and was placed far enough out on the perimeter to keep his night vision sharp. It wouldn’t have made any difference anyway; he could not leave his post until he was relieved. Thus, it came about that Lady Kanisa, the second-in-command and a particularly strict Tormtar, found him in completely inappropriate regalia when she made her morning rounds.

As is the way in every military organization, she had come down hard on the senior squire once she’d finished bawling out Anomen. Instead of accepting his part in the debacle, the man had come to blame Anomen for his troubles, and the Watcher hadn’t a moment’s peace in camp for weeks afterwards. The squire invented useless errands to send him on, short-sheeted his cot, grilled him on the Order’s tenets and jeered at his answers, made him redo tasks that he had completed flawlessly, and generally made sure that he never had a moment’s leisure. If he had dared, Anomen thought the squire would even have forbidden him to take the time for his prescribed prayers. It was only when the squire himself came down with a severe illness that the persecution ended.

Anomen told all this to Patricia in a rush, as if a dam had burst. He felt the poison of all the hatred he’d held back slowly leaching away. He found that he’d seated himself on the bench next to her, turned to face those green-brown eyes that looked as calm and steady as a forest of ancient trees. She nodded slowly, considering his words. He glanced down then, and saw to his surprise that her hands were clenched so tight the knuckles were white.

“I can see why your memories of that campaign are so painful,” she said softly, looking away from him. “I wondered why you seemed to suffer so after that interrupted conversation we had about the Order a few days ago. I have little love for bullies myself, and now I see that the words I spoke must have sounded cruelly akin to those of that squire. Tell me,” turning back to face him, “did that man actually pass his Test?”

“Yes,” answered Anomen. “I could not tell of his deeds. At the time I simply prayed that Helm would bring his deeds to light in due course. I must say I was surprised that he was granted knighthood, but I cannot know what penance he may have made to Tyr for the injustice he perpetrated.”

Patricia mused a moment more. “You said you entered the Order late, having come from the Temple novitiate. That means you were a bit older than most when you were squired, correct?”

“Yes,” he agreed. “I’ve been forced to take the longer and harder road, since my father would not sponsor me. I was eighteen, not fourteen, when Sir Ryan gave me my belt.” He wondered why she asked. It should be obvious that he was no stripling; in fact, she already knew he was a year older than herself.

“Then you were probably closer to that squire’s own age than you knew,” came the surprising response. “I mean, you’re unusually strong, Anomen, anyone who’s seen you wield your mace knows that. Nearly as strong as Minsc, who’s frankly almost too powerful for his own good. Did it ever occur to you that he might just have been jealous?”

He stared at her. Jealousy had quite simply never entered his head as a motivation. “But--- but why would he envy me? I had far less rank than he did.”

She sighed. “Anomen, you really don’t see it, do you? Look, if you’d been fourteen or fifteen, there’s no way your physical prowess would have caught up to his own. You’d have been behind him developmentally. Instead, you interrupted what he was probably hoping would be his big chance to prove himself before the senior members of the Order. You were the newest recruit, but because of your similarity in age and your Temple training, plus the fact that the gods granted you great strength, you were probably his equal or superior on the field. The boy was most likely afraid you’d make him look bad, and did what he could to keep you out of sight as much as possible.”

“I know the memories hurt, Anomen, but maybe it would help if you looked on it as a sort of backhanded compliment. He thought you were good enough to be serious competition.”

Anomen sat there stunned. This was a whole new way of viewing the situation. He suddenly found himself chuckling. “Only you, Lady Patricia, only you could have found some way to get me to pity that man! Tell me, do you always try so hard to exonerate people?”

She smiled back at him, but he noticed a certain ruefulness in the expression. “On the whole, I’ve found that life is too short to waste much of it on hating people. I’ve better ways to spend my time. Hatred’s a seed that produces naught but a bitter crop.”

Anomen arose, making a low bow to the girl on the bench. “Well, Lady Patricia, shall we go in search of the goose grease for this salve of which you speak so highly?”

“Certainly, Lord Anomen,” she assented. “I look dreadful with a tan, and we must by all means spare you from any further attacks by the evil mosquitoes. I want no more memories stirred up by their singing in your ears!” She glanced at him, and for a moment he caught a glint of mischief behind her mask. “I don’t promise not to tint the lotion yellow, though!”