Sabishisa-ya
hana-no atari-no
asunarou
On the topic of loneliness: a cypress among flowers.
This is loneliness: Between the cherries in bloom, the tall, proud cypress.
Excellence breeds loneliness.
Pride breeds unhappiness.
The Rule of Threes: thrice-cursed, thrice-damned, thrice-tormented: with a murderer of a father, a wilful humanitarian of a sister, a bard of a bird.
Three-way is the falsehood of the liar’s tongue: to the people, it speaks of false power. To the lover, it sings of false passion. To the sibling, it promises—
This has ceased to amuse me, Altair. Have you seen anything?
No, master. I have not.
Then keep looking. And fetch game for dinner.
-----
Imnesvale in the Umar Hills is everything Imoen promised it would be: an insipid hole of nine wooden, thatched houses squatted roughly around a central square with a well in it, all of it under constant siege by the forces of the dark fir and elm forest. The path which led the party here, into this small clearing in the heart of this valley was, in places, so narrow that it was on the verge of disappearing completely.
There are meadows on the tops of the hills surrounding the vale, their guide told Mazzy and Altar confirmed to Sarevok; on the hilltops, on these pastures, at this time of the year all the herders and their herds should be. But they are not; instead, they are all here, the mooing and baaing crowd, and their assorted animals.
A meeting is taking place as they enter the gloomy village; torches and bonfires are lit everywhere, casting flickering shadows on the faces of the arguing people.
“—‘fore the wolves have gobbled me flock entire!” a male voice whines.
“Aye, Mayor!” a female adds, “What be you and yours doin’ t’solve this crisis, ey?”
The squat man leading the congregation coughs with the discomfort of weakness. “Calm down, people, calm down! Forsooth, you all know, I sent Delon for help to Trademeet—”
“And help has arrived,” a halfling interrupts him boldly; having captured the mob’s attention, she adds, “I am Mazzy Fentan, a valiant servant of good and righteousness. And these are my party. Delon found us on the way to the city.”
Now, the boy runs towards the mayor and clinches to him like a leech to a supple body. “She is, Pop! She is. They tell stories about ‘er an’ all…”
The man liberates himself from his son’s grip and looks around the assembled faces. “Aye, people! Ye ‘eard ‘im. Go back t’your houses. I must speak to the Lady Mazzy ‘ere.”
Nalia stirs as the grumbling crowd starts to dissolve, taking the halfling with it. “That would be our cue to scatter ourselves, too, I think,” she says, too hesitantly for one used to being second in command. “Mazzy will go talk to the mayor. We should find a place to spend the night.” She looks around the sorry excuse for a village with a distaste which might, perhaps, be rivalling his own, and sighs, “The people here must be really poor, to live in such squalor.”
“‘ere, miss, that be not polite much!” a squeaky voice pipes in. “This is my home!”
The redhead, unattractively, blushes. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to offend.”
“It’s all right,” the gangly, pimply boy who accosted them says. “Name’s Willet. Jeb’s son, Daar’s brother and this here Vince’s stable boy.”
“Vincenzo’s, boy,” the heavyset man who has followed the boy corrects; judging from the thick gold, ruby-set chain on his neck, he is the village’s richest citizen. “You may have use of my stables, and the Lady Mazzy will stay with me, of course. The rest of you—”
“‘ere, lemme take ‘em,” the boy offers. “Ye’ll be ‘avin’ Jacobs’ house,” he turns to the party, “The Widow Jacobs be ano’er one of ‘em the ogres caught. Like me Mom.”
Sarevok frowns: at last, some hint regarding Imnesvale’s problems. “Ogres?” Aerie asks, meanwhile, looking at Kriemhild; but her voice is drowned by Vincenzo’s as the corpulent man grows purple and roars out, instantly forgetting his prim-and-proper accent, “Ogres, boy? Cease yer yappin’! Not the ogres: the Witch, I be tellin’ you, Umar ‘erself!”
The barbarian stirs. “What is that that Minsc hears? An evil witch?! Witches are not evil, Boo says!”
“And Boo is right, my good man!” a third villager’s voice bellows almost on par with Minsc’s as the man joins the previous two. “The Witch’s naught but Vince’s prattlin’! The culprit’s neither no Umar nor any ogre, but ‘e wolves! Nelleck,” the man drops in passing, hardly quieter, “Vince’s good-for-nothing brother.”
Sarevok exchanges a privately exasperated look with Imoen to decide which one of them should step in; fortunately, Nalia finally remembers her apparent function as Mazzy’s lieutenant. “Yes,” she says, a bit too loudly, over the incipient masculine squabble, “Can you show us to that house? Please?”
-----
Seven families inhabit the nine houses; the eighth building is a trading post. The ninth stands empty, and that used to be the Widow Jacobs’ hut.
It is small, dark and cramped, and both the Rashemi and he have to bend in half under the low ceiling.
“I— I don’t feel well here,” Aerie sighs as the six of them file into the hut, crowding it completely. “I-I will sleep outside, I think.”
“Then Minsc and Boo will sleep outside, too,” Minsc states; and then, more affirms than states, “Minsc will not let the ogres capture his witch. And Boo says that this place will give Minsc a pain in the neck,” he adds, thoughtfully.
A feminine half-orc voice adds, slowly, “I sleep out.” Kriemhild has finally let Imoen convince her to use the personal pronoun which does not exist in the female orcish. “Here—” she stutters, clearly at a loss of words.
“Enra?” he growls at her in her previous tongue. “What?”
“This one wishes to excuse, husband, but how does one say ‘home-inside-mountain’?” she asks, nervously, in the selfsame one.
“Cave,” he says in human, because this is the only approximation he can find. “It reminds her of her home cave. I will also stay outside,” he adds, amused, completely aware that whatever scared off the village simpletons cannot possibly be more dangerous than he is; and that this place is, indeed, a pain in the neck.
“But we can’t all leave!” Nalia protests, eyeing the gathered faces, and, for some reason, him in particular, with outrage. “It will look wrong! They prepared it especially for us.”
Imoen grins. “But you’re staying in, Nalia.” Then, seeing Nalia’s drooping face, she adds, sighing, “All right. So am I.” Then, she perks up. “Actually, it’ll be great! I’ll—”
-----
Threefold is the weakness.
Clever. I admit. The sword, the sibling, the servant.
Thank you, master. Have you found a thing?
No. I have not.
There is a way. There always is a way. It is in the nature of the Planes. An exception, always; with this one exception.
Sitting with his wife, his sister, and his sister’s cat, behind the Widow Jacobs’ cottage, on the small meadow where they prepared the temporary lodgings; listening to Imoen talk with Kriemhild and Minsc and supplying, absent-mindedly, ever so often a word or another when communication fails utterly—he is reading in the night, in the yellow, warm, flickering light of the fire and the brightly burning torches.
Willet and Delon took the party for a walk around the village once they were settled. The visits started from Willet’s father, Jeb. Lilah, Jeb’s wife and Willet’s mother, was kidnapped, but the men could not tell anything about how that happened. She was picking herbs; she disappeared.
Willet also has an elder brother, Daar; wiggling his eyebrows in a way presumably intended to improve the chat’s mirthless mood, Willet said, “Daar ‘ere ‘as the hots for Colette. The Cowlie’s lass, Colette is.”
“There is a Cowled Wizard here?” Nalia asked; “Aye. Name’s Jermien,” Willet replied; and now, Nalia has gone to meet the Cowled Wizard.
Then, they met the Hendricks, Enna and Erlick, with a flock of chickens; the Shepherds, Groos and Dale and Dale’s wife Margie and Kaatje and Atta; a family in mourning, because both Groos’ wife and son were gone, and on the verge of breakdown, because neither Dale’s wife nor either of his children was.
From these, only Kaatje supplied any new information. “I saw somethin’ weird near Merella’s hut,” she said in the mouse-like squeak of a seven-year-old girl who is faced with the intent interest of six utter strangers, and a cat. “When I was ‘ere with the sheep. Only it was invisible.”
Her mother laughed nervously. “Girl ‘as imagination, she does,” she said. “Seein’ invisible things! What else will she come up with, ey?!”
“How did you see it?” Imoen asked, ignoring the woman.
“I saw the shadow movin’,” the girl replied. She was rather enraged that no one believed her, and refused to say anything else.
Her testimony was corroborated by that of the local drunk’s, Travor’s, now squatting with Vincenzo and Nelleck. “Aye,” he said, “Shadows. Movin’ shadows wi’out bodies. Comin’ closer t’the village at night… ‘at is why Vince lets me now stay with him.”
“What’e’er he ‘inks he sees, it is not important,” Vince said over the plum vodka they all drank to toast to the success of the endeavour and eternal friendship. “Wouldn’ wan’ the Witch to get ‘im.”
“Boo wants to know who Merella is,” Minsc said when they entered the next hut, and met Johanna, Ander, and their three sons whose only sister has vanished without a trace; and Sarevok, for a moment, considered the man closer, because he had just come to the same conclusion: the Mayor’s wife was called Mistress Eina, and the last house remaining was the trading post. Who was Merella, then?
“Merella is a ranger… a protector of this forest,” Ander replied.
“Or was,” Johanna added glumly. “If the wolves got ‘er…”
“Or that stranger,” Ander finished. “We never learnt what ‘e was about, now did we?”
“What stranger?” Imoen asked, frowning and expressing the sentiments of the entire company.
“Oh, he came an’ gone, some four days ago, ‘bout, askin’ for ‘er” Ander shrugged. “After the business started. Tall an’ dark, an’ weird ‘imself. Didn’ talk much. Didn’ wanna go take care o’ the orcs, either—” Kriemhild, thankfully, was hidden in the shadows of the party.
They learnt nothing new; and they lost Aerie in the trading post, to a fellow elf, by the name of Elence Fielding; a gnome, Min Minling, from a nearby village of the Understone; and a human from the south, Beherant Diir.
-----
Imoen is now brown-haired, because she washed off the carrot hair dye, but had not found the pink one in Trademeet. She laughs in the background, smacking Pangur slightly on the nose to keep the cat away from the Rashemi’s rodent. The Jittery Bit, as Altair called the hamster in a sudden, disgraceful influx of prosaic predatory frustration after Sarevok forbid her touch Boo, is scurrying around nervously. Kriemhild says something; her accent is improving.
He turns a page.
Ulraunt’s reading: During the days of the Avatars, the Lord of Murder will spawn a score of mortal progeny. These offspring will be aligned good and evil, but chaos will flow through them all. When the Beast's bastard children come of age, they will bring havoc to the lands of the Sword Coast. One of these children must rise above the rest and claim their father's legacy. This inheritor will shape the history of the Sword Coast for centuries to come.
Tethtoril’s reading: The spawn of the Lord of Murder are fated to come into their inheritance through bloodshed and misery. It is the hope of their father that only one shall remain alive to inherit his legacy. I foresee that the children of Bhaal shall kill each other in a bloody massacre.
Another page.
Canto I, variations:
The Lord of Murder shall perish, but in his doom he shall spawn a score of mortal progeny. Chaos will be sown from their passage. So sayeth the wise Alaundo.
The Lord of Murder shall perish, but in his wake he shall leave a score of mortal progeny. Chaos shall be sown in their footsteps. So sayeth the wise Alaundo.
The Lord of Murder shall perish, but in his death he shall spawn a score of mortal progeny. Chaos shall be sown in their footsteps. So sayeth the wise Alaundo.
Another page.
The rivers of the Sword Coast shall run with blood.
He closes the dog-eared diary; it is useless to him. He has read it many times since retrieving it from Mae’Var’s guild; and had known every word of it by heart before. There is always one child, whatever the phrasing or the reading of the prophecy. One child must rise to claim the legacy. One shall remain alive. One.
He intends to be that one; he wonders vaguely why the father should hope that the child remains alive; this is not what he is trying to discover now.
Imoen looks at him, and smiles. Sarevok smirks back, and opens at random the second leather-bound set of parchments, those he once considered less important.
As the Beast’s spawn gather in Saradush, the end is nigh.
Where did this come from?
He stares at the single verse for a moment, until he remembers: several years ago, back in Sembia, just before they left it for Baldur’s Gate, Rieltar and Winski and Tamoko and he; he already had the armour and the sword. A dark cellar, not unlike Irenicus’ cellars; but he was young yet, and, in spite of his entire training, not nearly as inventive as the one who had been an elf. There were no likes of mist horrors to make the priestess fear in spite of her fearlessness, no charms to make her speak in spite of her intent to remain silent; the cruelty was very physical. And very unsophisticated.
It was because of a near-catastrophe which followed the next one of those sessions that he learnt that information gained through torture was, half of the time, useless; and even later, when he met Semaj, Semaj the artist, Semaj who had once been a Zhent, and who had studied under a turncoat drow, and who would, in the end, be flayed alive— Even then, he distrusted the last words of dying men and women.
But this… This is interesting. Saradush.
“What, brother?”
Imoen sidles up to him, and he realises that he committed the gross, and inexplicable, indiscretion of speaking out his thoughts. “Saradush, sister,” he repeats. “It is a city, in Tethyr. My foster father once bought himself a Tethyrian title, to lend himself prestige. Saradush is the first city of that county.”
Imoen frowns. “And why remember that, now? Pining for the lost title? Count Anchev— It sounds absolutely terrible, you know,” she laughs. “Almost as bad as Duke.”
He stretches on the ground, letting her and her cat pounce on him like two leaping lynxes, and admits, laughing, “Yes, I do.”
-----
Hare.
It is still sunset over the hills, though it is night already in the valley.
Altair hovers, high on the sky; spots the prey; plunges in one massive swoop, one mad, killing rush of air around her and blood inside her and the terrible exertion of muscles and the sheer exhilaration of mind, the sheer exhilaration of death and kill and murder pumping through her veins. He loves her.
But she doesn’t catch the unwise hare. It hears her, and it starts to run, and it runs for the safety of its burrow, but its burrow is on the edge of the elm and fir forest, and there is a shadow encroaching upon the red, sunset-lit hilltop meadows from the forest, and there are shadows in the shadow; moving shadows. A pack of wolves lent shape of pure shadow.
Halt, Altair! he yells at the golden eagle, now a golden arrow who loves the hunt and the chase and the challenge and wants to catch the hare before the wolves do; the wolves are standing on the border of the shadow and the light, panting, woofing, snarling, waiting; the hare, mad from the fear of the eagle, runs straight at them. Altair! I command you!
The eagle halts, just several steps behind the hare, just several steps in front of the wolves’ fangs; she cries woefully and, with two flaps of her powerful wings, rises back into the security of heights as below, on the ground, the wolves of shadow catch her prey and rip it into pieces.
Soon, they disappear in the forest, and there are only traces of their feast: shreds of grey fur and red blood droplets on the ground.
The shadows encroach on the hilltops.
Return to me, Altair, he commands, not amused. Now.
-----
“I have to go buy some food,” he announces, lifting Imoen’s cat from his chest. Imoen lifts her head and shakes it groggily; she must have fallen asleep. “Wha’?” she asks, wiping a trickle of bloodless saliva.
“Sleep, little sister,” he orders; in the background, a barbarian is still playing with a hamster. His wife, left to her own devices, is watching Minsc wordlessly, with an occasional spark of mild interest in her black eyes as she follows the rodent.
“Kriemhild,” he asks her as he leaves Imoen and stands up, “Do you want to come with me?”
She does not understand the question, and even less from him; and so, he repeats, in the orc tongue, “Attend me.”
As they do, and he finds out that with him, when they are alone, Kriemhild will only speak orc, as an orc wife to an orc husband—he watches her; Imoen did wonders with her, but the fundamental truth remains unaltered. His wife repulses him, and, he suspects, the average man, as a woman. He likes her; she killed for him, after all; but the thought that this here should be a female adult—
He snorts. Once, in his childhood, he had been a whore—though by the end rarely whoring, and instead robbing, and killing, his rich customers; that was how he became a thug in Rieltar’s service, after all, after the man decided that a golden-eyed prepubescent capable of overpowering a fit, trained adult man was a body worth fostering. But a whore he had been; and it is an easy truth that, however repulsive he, or anyone, might find Kriemhild free, with enough money he would have accepted her then, as someone would accept her now; she is bound to find her pleasure, one way or another, once they leave each other’s presence and she understands that she is free to seek it—
Imoen should have left her with the druids.
“Arrth,” he tells the half-orc as she finishes the tale of how she evaded the attempt to separate her from his side, “Good;” and she blushes, timidly and hideously.
“S-sir?” he hears as he crosses the muddy yard around the well. “C-can I have a moment of y-your time?”
It is Johanna’s and Ander’s eldest, with his younger brothers in tow. “Yes?” he barks at them, “What is it?”
They back off when they see his face, and, with a curt nod, he returns to his previous path; in the corner of his eye, he can see the boys nudging each other as they follow him. “‘e’s ‘ere to ‘elp us,” the youngest one whispers to the eldest.
“S-sir,” the eldest boy starts again, and Sarevok looks at him again; at which point, the boy’s nerves give up. He yells, “I can’t do it! Run!” and the boys are, indeed, off to a running start.
This definitely improves Sarevok’s humour. “Kriemhild,” he growls lightly at his wife. “Don’t kill,” he warns in orcish as, before them, the three Andersons’ escape attempt is cut in the bud by a massive, screeching and crying bird emerging from the shadows just before their faces.
The youngest slid in the mud from the excitement of the run, and now looks with sheer terror at Kriemhild’s bared teeth and the bone club in her hands; if only she were wearing her bone-laced armour now, he would have probably— No; even without the armour, the smell of urine is, suddenly, strong in the air. The other boys huddle next to their brother, cornered on one side by Altair, and on the other side by Sarevok himself.
“Now,” the man says, with folded arms, watching the torch-lit tableau with unhidden amusement, “Can you tell me why you saw it fit to waste my time?”
“Er,” the eldest Anderson replies unintelligibly, and, suddenly, Sarevok decides to give the boys a memory they will never forget; indeed, they will tell their children about. One move, and the Edge of Chaos is in his hand; one more, and the wide-eyed boy is in the other one, dangling over the ground held by the front of his shirt. “Well?”
“‘ere, mister, we jus’ wanna ‘elp!” the middle brother yells out, seeing the danger threatening his elder brother. That one nods fervently as the youngest cries, “Yea! Jus’ give us swords an’—”
Sarevok drops the eldest fool down on the ground, unkindly, sheathes the Edge of Chaos, and calls Altair to his hand; Kriemhild also relaxes and hides her club. “Jus’ give you swords,” he growls softly, not looking at the boys, but at his eagle, who now rubs her head against his palm; but, nonetheless, mimicking the peasant’s accent. “It took more than ten years of my life to learn how to use one properly,” he adds. “And I started younger than you.” And unlike you, am a born killer, he might add further; but does not.
Instead, he says, “Come here tomorrow at dawn—or whatever passes for dawn in this hollow,” he corrects himself, letting the boys see his utter distaste for their home. “Fetch your friends and parents, if they would come. And some heavy sticks. My wife and I shall teach you.”
-----
“What do you mean, you will not sell me these chickens?!” he thunders now at the old man, Erlin Hendrick, who backs off a step, over the threshold, back into his hut.
His good mood has, by now, completely vanished. “I,” he adds, “will pay you well. As soon as we solve this quibble and leave, you will be able to go and buy however many chickens you want from the next village, old man. But I must have raw meat to feed my bird, and she cannot hunt at night.”
“These chickens ain’t for sale,” the stubborn old fool repeats.
“Not for a thousand gold?” Sarevok asks sardonically, and finally sees the man’s face alter. “I mus’ speak t’my wife,” Erlin Hendrick mutters, and withdraws into the hut.
“Wh-what is happening?” a girlish voice interrupts his thoughts: if he kills Erlin and Enna, he should hide their bodies to put down their deaths to whatever is plaguing Imnesvale— Kriemhild is looking at Aerie with dislike almost equal to Altair’s sympathy.
A bird with clipped wings.
Sarevok frowns, because he does not understand what Altair means through this particular riddle; but he does not reply, neither to Altair not to Aerie, because Erlin Hendrick returns.
“‘ere, mister,” he says. “Ye be kiddin’ me not? A thousan’ gold?”
“Yes,” Sarevok replies, suddenly amused; the deal is as good as made already, and he laughs at what Rieltar’s face would now be if the man had been resurrected just to witness it. The chickens are ten, each worth less than a gold-piece; it is not a good attitude to business to squander one’s resources so.
Why is he remembering Rieltar again?
“Hells and damnation,” he adds for good measure, slipping into a merchant’s accent, just to see if he still remembers it, “I’ll even pay you in small change, gold and silver, old man; there can’t be many gem traders here—”
At that, Erlin Hendrick pales, wavers and asks, with dry lips and in a dry whisper, “Wh-what do you know, foreigner?”
Sarevok scowls, and replies without answering, and in his own voice again, “Much. Not all. The chickens?”
The old man sighs, eyes him, Kriemhild, Aerie and Altair, and says, “You’d better come wi’ me inside, you do.”
-----
There is a gem hidden in one of the chickens, Erlin Hendrick says as they all sit around the table inside his fire-lit hut, and his pale wife is clutching his hand and looking at him intently and with pursed lips. The daughter of the Hendricks had been an adventurer in life, and her friends sent her parents the stone when she died; it is their last memento of her, and they hid it to protect it from thieves. Whatever thieves might find their way to Imnesvale.
“An’ we have no way t’sell it, t’give ‘er a right burial,” Erlin finishes his sob story; Aerie is moved by it. “W-we w-will help you,” she declares, looking with her big, blue, determined eyes to Sarevok and Kriemhild for support, and finding none.
Sarevok watches the old man, who cowers under his gaze, and, having waited long enough, says, “Gut the chicken, old man. We will see the gem.”
Thank you, master.
Outside the hut, Altair, for a short while, eyes the chicken’s entrails as carefully as a haruspex would, before embarking on the spread; inside the hut, he is watching the jewel. Small, oval, polished, and a rich golden colour, it sparkles in harmony with the fire and the light of his eyes. It is a cabochon, and the parallel orange spangles in the colourless matrix betray its identity to him at once: sunstone trash.
“A thousand gold, as agreed, not one piece more,” Sarevok says carefully, and the old man, full of apprehension at how his treasure would be accepted by this forceful stranger, straightens proudly. “I can pay you three hundred in gold now, Hendrick, and the rest in gems; or three hundred now, and the rest tomorrow.”
It is easy to squander other people’s money, boy, Rieltar’s ghost admonishes through the years, and Sarevok cheerfully recalls the man’s bulging eyes after one of Sarevok’s doppelgangers garrotted his foster father.
The deal is concluded shortly; the nine remaining birds would be delivered tomorrow, in return for the rest of the sum— “We will ‘ave somethin’ to put up a decen’ grave stone for ‘er,” Erlin mutters with tear-filled, ancient eyes which, he is still not aware, sicken his guest. “Do you want ‘em plucked, sir?” Enna Hendrick finally speaks out, salvaging the dignity of the situation, as the elf, the half-orc and the half-human are leaving the hut. “No. I want them alive as long as possible. The pernickety bird will not touch carrion,” Sarevok replies, after a moment’s consideration, absently juggling the sunstone feldspar between his fingers. Kriemhild follows the play of torchlight on it with interest.
“It was a good th-thing you did there, Sarevok,” the pretty elven blonde on his other arm says thoughtfully as soon as the door has closed behind them. “The stone, i-it’s worthless, is it not?”
“Yes, it is,” he replies curtly, hiding his property. Aerie, from his vantage point, is a bit of fluffy, feather-like golden hair between two pointed ear-tips. “You are an Ilmatari, elf, are you not? I heard your prayer for tears when we travelled to this hole.”
“Yes,” the pretty, pregnant Aerie frowns, unsuspecting, “I pray to the Broken God, at times.”
“Then tell me, elf,” he asks amiably, “Is that why you wish to bring up your child as a fatherless bastard? To prove your perseverance to your god at your spawn’s cost?”
Aerie is now confused. “N-no—” she stutters; but already, keeping in mind both his fathers, he lies reasonably, cruelly, probing, trying to solve Altair’s riddle, “A child needs both parents, wingless bird.”
And, at that, suddenly, Aerie’s large eyes fill with tears, and her lower lip starts to tremble, and, overall, she begins to look not unlike a wet—yes, a wet wingless bird, a wet chicken; but before she stutters out anything, Mazzy and Nalia run into them; or, rather, they run into Nalia and Mazzy, who are quarrelling.
“I don’t see why, Mazzy!” Nalia is whispering furiously. “Why should you know that I went to see him?”
Mazzy does not reply; instead, she looks up, and up, and up, and says, with disgust bordering on hatred, “Anchev.”
It is the second word the halfling directed at him since they met, he thinks, amused.
-----
Master?
Go to the cat, if you wish, he tells his eagle as Nalia approaches him around the fire.
“Can we talk for a moment? Alone?”
The voice is slightly hesitant; the entreaty, he expected.
“I believe we can,” he replies lazily. “In the hut?”
The party are now sitting all together around a fire, eating, as, not few steps from them, loom the forest and its shadows. Mazzy learnt a lot during her long conference with the mayor. Tomorrow, they will set off to find the wolves and the ogres, and to Merella’s hut. Mazzy knows about the stranger, too, though little more than they do: his name was Valygar, and he told Minister Lloyd, the mayor, that he used to be Merella’s friend.
They are watched as they leave the circle of people around the fire; by Mazzy, suspiciously; by Kriemhild, too, though she hides it better; by Aerie, in a confused and, perhaps, slightly betrayed manner; by Imoen, with an expression frozen midway between laughter, admiration and reproach. Only Minsc and Boo calmly continue the conversation.
“Well?” he asks when Nalia and he are alone, in the darkness of the hut, lit only by the summoned lights; and, suddenly, the redhead loses half of her confidence; she has second thoughts about the tête-à-tête.
“You made Aerie cry,” she starts, sitting down, looking up at him.
“Yes, I did,” he agrees easily, folding his arms.
“Why?”
An odd question. “I felt like it.”
Nalia casts at him a fierce, furious look. “You felt like hurting my friend? Your sister’s friend? Just like that?”
“No. However, nor do I see a reason to justify my actions to you, my lady Duchess d’Arnise.”
Nalia freezes. “Imoen told you,” she says at length, slowly.
For a moment, he wonders whether not to ask Imoen for the solution to Altair’s riddle, before rejecting the option completely; then, he shrugs. “She did not need to. You carry your mark on your palm and in your modes, duchess. You hide refinement, instead of aspiring to it. You are no petty thief who stumbled upon a prize and decided to make her life out of pretence.”
“No,” Nalia agrees, though she clutches her signet ring, unconsciously, as if she wanted to take it off, and could not. “You hide yourself well, too,” she adds, with mock nonchalance. “Who are you, really? I watched you. You pose as a high-born turned an outlaw, and you have your role almost down pat—”
He smiles. “Careful, my lady Duchess. You are slipping into the vernacular. This foul habit may prove a hindrance when you return to the society. And you are planning to return to it, are you not?”
“You did not answer my question,” Nalia says.
“I am a god’s bastard. As is my sister. Where this places us during seating arrangements presents, I must admit, a fairly intriguing problem of protocol— But you already knew that, duchess,” he finishes. “You did not answer mine.”
“You already know the answer,” Nalia says; and, for a moment, it almost looks as if they would discuss their business like civilised people. But Nalia halts again.
“You want my help,” he therefore says brusquely, bored, cutting through the boil. “You fled when some scheme of your family’s brought persecution on your head, and met Mazzy— How long ago? A year?”
It should be a year. “A year and a half,” Nalia mutters.
He nods. “Since that time, you have learnt all you wanted on the road—magic, certainly, and, possibly, a measure of self-sufficiency. You collected a small fortune; not half your yearly income in the usual circumstances; but enough. And now, you want to take back your life; by force, if necessary. You may have heard that the Cowled Wizards have been in disarray since the massacre of their principals not a month ago, and you may be planning to become one of them to strengthen your position—”
His lazy, haphazard guess is correct; Nalia is now looking at him with eyes wide with pure shock, and so, he finishes calmly, “Nonetheless, your chief goal is to recover your duchy. For that, troops will not suffice; you need backing. And you do not know who rules Athkatla now.” Imoen must have slipped out something, after all, he thinks. One does not usually seek political influence from an outlaw.
Suddenly, Nalia hisses out, “I want that slime Isaea to die.”
Then, rather shocked, she covers her mouth; and he must re-evaluate her and consider what grievous error in judgment he committed in assessing her character. It is not advice, but assassination my lady Duchess d’Arnise desires.
An Isaea, Isaea Roenall, is well known to Aran Linvail; they have concluded many a satisfying transaction even during Sarevok’s short stay with the Shadowmaster. Nalia’s epithet describes him, given her perspective, rather adequately. It may be he.
“He killed my father, because we, Father and I, wanted to cut his engagement with me,” she adds, hurriedly, as though he cared a fraction of what she does for her scruples or motives. “And now, he rules my land and my people in my stead. What must he be doing to them?” She shakes her head. “He never cared about the people. That was why—”
She stops, and says instead, “You are right. I want your help, although,” pursed lips, “I wasn’t planning to talk about it just yet.” A lowered head. “There are some people who might help me… Father’s old friends. They may provide patronage… Support my claim to the land. But I’d rather do all that with the Hold under my control. I thought that Mazzy would help, but—” A desperate shrug.
He stores in mind the precious nugget of confirmation of Nalia’s estrangement from the halfling, and probes, “You require mercenaries.”
“Mercenaries, a commander…” Another shrug. “I’m not sure myself what I need, and that is the worst thing. Someone with experience,” she admits candidly; and then, looks at him, slightly unsurely, “I will pay you, of course.”
He wonders if that carrot-haired noble is even aware into what a prime target for blackmail she is making herself; and then, whether she will ever come into her own, or if she ends up another’s—his, perhaps—pawn— For now, mildly interested, he considers the matter. “Do you know anything about the forces stationed in your hold?”
She looks up at him, confused. “I think I gave you the wrong idea,” she says, laughing nervously. “Isaea let the Hold be overrun by yuan-ti. He does not visit it at all. He rules from his city estate, where he keeps my aunt hostage, in case I return, I suppose… He managed to rescue her from the snakes, very daringly and heroically, and at almost the last moment, I think,” she adds with the heaviest sarcasm he has ever heard from anyone who is not Aran or Imoen. “I don’t know for sure, though. I wasn’t in Amn when that happened.”
At that, he must laugh. “In short, my lady Duchess, you want military action not half a day’s travel from your capital, coupled with the assassination of the vice-commander of the Athkatlan city guard, and the abduction of said vice-commander’s unresisting guest. And, in return for this, you are willing to grant asylum to a dangerous criminal and an outlaw. Is that correct?”
Nalia blinks several times, in the quick succession of shock, before saying, with only slight surprise, “Yes. Actually, this is it. This is precisely what I want. Also, the horses,” she adds, in a glorious non sequitur, “Grasshopper and Buffy… Deneb,” she explains when he frowns.
“No,” he refuses calmly. “The horses are my sister’s and mine. The rest,” he lets her wait a beat, “can be arranged.”
Nalia beams. “Yes!” she lets out a small cry of happiness; then, recovering ducal mien, political shrewdness and, in part, his respect, she corrects herself, almost instantly, “Yes. That is good. That is very, very good.”
He watches her with amusement. “I will consider the issue in detail during our stay here,” he offers, unfolding his arms and moving slightly; his muscles long for rest, because, as the party travelled to Imnesvale, he walked a large part of the eight hours’ walk. He has almost recovered his previous stamina, twenty days after five months of incarceration; Imoen was also satisfied with her performance— There is the question whether Nalia told the little sister about her plans; and, if not, whether he should, or if he should leave this for her to find out on her own: a small revenge for leaving him in the dark about his travel companions.
“Yes,” Nalia is agreeing, meanwhile; and then, as though she guessed his thoughts, she adds, “But can I ask you something? Leave Aerie in peace. She has been hurt a lot… It’s a wonder she holds as well as she does.”
The Lady Duchess d’Arnise is trying to be firm and polite at the same time, and is failing at both, especially when she misreads his reaction to the request, and adds, “I saw the looks you were giving her. The same as you were giving me,” she finishes resentfully.
“And the same as you were giving me, my lady Duchess,” he points out, halting half-way; even so, Nalia is quite scandalised, equally by her own vulgar comportment and his vulgar open mention of it. She wavers in her reply; he adds, languidly, “I am a married man, Nalia.”
The redhead shoots him a mordant look; and so, lightly, he moves on, straight to the finish. “I left a man in Athkatla, and a boy in Trademeet—though, I believe, Imoen left more of an impression on that one than I did… I also believe,” he finishes lightly, “that I am currently recovering from a love. But my sister is, to the best of my knowledge, free.”
Now, Nalia is three-way torn: between making an extremely pointed comment, not acknowledging a suggestion with as much as a ladylike word, and quite berating herself for ever thinking that a vulgar forgery, an ersatz and a pretence, can ever substitute for the genuine article—
He leaves her no time to decide how she wants to treat him; as he crosses the threshold of the hut, he stops for a moment, and, without turning back, without much feeling, says, “Imoen could do with some gratuitous company. I do not believe she had much of it in her life. Not recently. I do not know—” He shrugs. “Just ask her.”
-----
He falls asleep, guarded from the shadows of the dark forest by his temporary company, unaware that in Athkatla, Anomen Delryn is leaving the headquarters of the Radiant Heart.
