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Queenside Castling, 6


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#1 Guest_Ananke_*

Posted 19 November 2007 - 03:48 PM

(6)

“Oloth plynn dos, Irenicus! You promised that there would be no delay!”

The dark face on the other side of the mirror would be beautiful, were it not currently twisted into an unpleasant snarl; the blue-eyed wizard holds its gaze easily. “Be patient, Matron Mother Ardulace. All our plans will come to fruition in the proper time. Now, let us discuss the deployment of the troops again—”

-----


Oloth plynn dos. Darkness take you. The shades attack.

Anath, the wolf guide, is dead, torn into shreds by her former pack; the party is now a ring of four fighters, Minsc, to his right Mazzy, to her right Sarevok, to his right Kriemhild, with her bone club, the femur of an olden orc shaman who promised to avenge his family, who had fallen to the undead: two long weapons, two short, all chasing the shadows flickering on the fringes of the circle lit by the conjured lights.

Inside the ring of fighters, two familiars and three spell-casters: Aerie, pleading to Baervan Wildwanderer to enhance the concert of the fighters’ efforts; Nalia and Imoen throwing flame arrows, Melf’s meteors and magic missiles through the gaps over and under the fighters’ shoulders.

“It’s not working!” Imoen yells over the snarling of the shadow wolves, the sounds of weapons tearing through the curtains of ethereal bodies, the occasional sizzle of magic, the sudden feel of harmony: for each shadow felled, another appears, stealthily, from the silence of the oily darkness beyond, shrieking as it strikes forth and reveals its presence.

“Wait! I have an idea,” Nalia replies; and soon, as Aerie begins an elven chant, they start casting spells of protection against fire.

To Sarevok, fighting on the fringes of the ring, in the shadow, all this is secondary; all that counts is the pure exhilaration of the effort, of kill, of murder, the summary attention, the presence of the mind demanded from the successful fighter, the here-and-now, the moment; perfection. A wolf leaps at his throat, and encounters the Edge of Chaos in its path; another strikes low, and Kriemhild crushes what little material there remains of its skull; a third attacks Mazzy, and does not reach her, because Sarevok reaches it first—

“RRAAAGH!” the barbarian yells; Kriemhild snarls an orc curse in accord. “For Arvoreen!” Mazzy Fentan adds; and Sarevok laughs, happily, in a long, low, menacing laughter, as he tears through yet another wolf of shadow; or, possibly, two. It is hard to tell. No one is keeping count.

But the fighters’ efforts are, ultimately, futile; and then, at last, Nalia and Imoen finish their casting.

Two rings of sunfire roar in chorus through the shadow, taking with them the shades; and, for a moment, everything is suddenly cold, silent and dead again. This will not last long.

There is something in the distance.

“The proverbial light in the darkness,” Sarevok comments.

“I vote we go for it,” Nalia replies. “We are lost anyway.”

“I agree. Dark is good for sneaking up on evil. But light there must be to avoid stepping into it!” Minsc nods; then, looking at Kriemhild, he adds, with profound contemplation, “Boo says that the lady warrior has healthy lungs. Your roar was almost worthy of a berserker of the Ice Dragon Lodge!”

It is fortunate that Kriemhild’s dominion of the common tongue is still limited, he thinks, without mirth.

-----


Holding onto each other, watching closely where they step, lest they step into a trap, they move through the quivering, oppressive shadows towards the small, yellow light. Soon, the shadows of trees cede pass, and the gravel of the still path under the party’s feet gives way to stone slabs, shattered and broken; there should be plants growing in the cracks, but they have withered without the light and within the shadow which seeps out life. There are the shadows of columns, fountains and pilasters all around them— It is deathly cold.

All is shadow; stalk the heart of shadow
All flows; with time, be healed and be destroyed…


This is a druid funeral chant, Altair, he thinks, surprised. How do you know it?

You heard it on Faldorn’s grave, master, the eagle replies. The small yellow light has grown, and now it resolves into the figure of a man, yellow, brilliant, glimmering and gaunt; he is old, tired and bent in half under the weight of his years and his beard. And there is power about him; or the vestiges of power.

“You come,” he wheezes. “At last, you come. Come closer. I cannot see you.”

“Be you the Shade Lord?” Mazzy Fentan asks, though more of formality rather than genuine conviction.

“He is a god, Fentan,” Sarevok replies: the aftertaste of might around the avatar is dreadfully strong— “Or he used to be a god, Mazzy,” Imoen corrects suddenly.

“A god?” Mazzy asks. “An avatar?” Nalia corrects. “Used to be?” Aerie, having accepted the previous two fairly easily, finishes. “Yes,” Sarevok replies, unable to tear his eyes off the yellow spectre. “He is only a ghost of his former power now.”

The old man, yellow, brilliant and wasted, looks up to him, eye into eye. “Ah,” he wheezes, in a leaden voice heavy with the worry of ages, “The Child. The next one. The contender. Sun gods are always in demand, lad,” he cackles.

“I think that Lathander might have something to say about it,” Imoen mutters; but Sarevok feels that he must catch the moment before it passes, that there is something important in it. “And my sister?” he asks forcibly. “A moon goddess? A huntress? A Mielikki? A human Sehanine Moonbow?”

“Siblings,” the dead god cackles, “have a powerful pull over human imagination, lad…” And the moment is lost; for the avatar says, suddenly, “The stone. Give it to me.”

“The stone?”

“I-I think, Sarevok, that he might mean the stone f-from the village,” Aerie says, and Mazzy Fentan looks at them both, frowning.

“Give it to me, lad,” the avatar urges. “You are too weak still, and I have been too weak for centuries already, but you will not do what you must do without it.”

“What must he do?” Mazzy and Nalia ask suspiciously at the same time as Sarevok demands, frostily, “What must I do, god?”

“Butt-kicking time! The wolves are coming back!” the Rashemi, terribly jarring, interferes as Kriemhild snarls and raises her club and her dragon shield to defend herself; “Give it to me, lad,” the avatar of the nameless, forgotten god repeats hungrily.

Sarevok, reluctantly, pulls out his sunstone; in the distance, there is a howl: another flight of the shadow wolves is, indeed, gathering. He hands over the stone; there is a brief flash of yellow light. “Cleanse the altar, Child,” the avatar whispers sadly, “Give me my children back, that I may give them peace;” and he is gone; and the stone shines brightly, piercing through the shadows and repelling the shades.

-----


“A god,” Mazzy Fentan, with her sword and her bow which are both Arvoreen’s gifts, tells him in her grim, unsmiling manner, “Do dead gods talk to you often, Anchev?”

“Every night,” he replies, truthfully, because he discovered that, as with a great lot of other people, truth is a good tactic where Mazzy Fentan is concerned; it confuses her, at times— In the background, Imoen snorts.

The party is now gathered on top of a flight of stairs, in the portico before the temple’s massive portal; the front courtyard, now full of howling wolf shades, lies beneath and behind them. The sunstone in his hand, however brightly shining, turns darkness into bleakness only some thirty steps in each direction, and the spot of light is smaller yet, ten steps at most: Mazzy ordered that none stray from it, not even Imoen, to scout.

He looks down on the halfling. “Fentan, whatever you might think, this is not a common occurrence in my life, either. But think of it. The Rashemi—” Minsc, miraculously, turns towards him from where he is inspecting Kriemhild’s dragon helm; Sarevok feels a passing jolt of possessive anger— “He dreamt of that spirit of his—”

“Mairyn,” Minsc interrupts him. “You speak of Mairyn. Boo says: Speak of the forest with more respect!”

“Mairyn,” Sarevok nods, ignoring the admonition, “He is from some nature-worshipping tribe, is he not? He is familiar with nature, and that is why he saw its spirit, while none of us did,” he finishes smugly: the meeting unsettled him more than he would care to admit; he thought he had grown used to speaking with dead gods— “It may be that the avatar simply could speak to me, and not to you, for instance.”

“Because our perception associated you two?” Imoen interjects, and he looks at the little sister; where did she learn words like these? When? “Yes, sister,” he replies, with a shrug; looking around the assembled faces, he finishes, desperately, “I believe that we should concentrate on what the god said, instead.”

“He wants us to cleanse an altar,” Mazzy says, suspicious and unconvinced by his weak argument. “His altar?”

“Corthala’s note said that the area was sealed off after some kind of ritual. A sacrilege, perhaps?” Nalia adds, with lips squeezed in thought.

“I-I wonder where he is now,” Aerie muses as Imoen says, “Those children of his he mentioned…”

Mutual lack of understanding follows; meanwhile, Sarevok considers, “Perhaps the temple was sealed with some worshippers still inside. And if the original…” A nod to Nalia, “sacrilege was never atoned for—” He shrugs, again, with sudden irritation. “Conjecture. All conjecture. Let’s move on,” he says; and then, belatedly, remembers that he is neither the first nor the second in command here. “Lady Fentan?”

The halfling is furious, though she hides it well. “Yes,” she says, “Anchev is right. Let us set forth.”

-----


He must speak to his wife; or, better said, not must, for, hand-picked, intelligent, dangerous and forcibly loyal, she follows him silently and unquestioningly, though she does question others, and in the human tongue. But he has, perhaps, neglected her; and Minsc—Minsc who roars and bellows, and walks clad in armour made of a bear hide, and, for all his hamsters, has no refinement— Minsc is a cretin. And, though Sarevok has planned to release the half-orc since she murdered for him and survived the deed, Kriemhild is, in the end, his wife. His halarn.

Halarn: bondswoman, wife, daughter, the one to whom you have the right, he recalls absently as they walk, before shedding his thoughts: they have entered the maze which remains of the old temple.

It would not be a maze, perhaps, save for the overwhelming darkness— There are crumbling walls; crumbling ceilings, sometimes open to the sky. There are bones and there is gravel crunching under the party’s feet, and the still coldness of the grave in the dry, sterile air. Loss.

Loss: there are paintings on the walls, of the sun and of darkness, the sun falling to the darkness; paintings, and statues, and books of delicate parchment, some lying open on the ground, as if those carrying them had simply dropped them, centuries ago. He picks up one; it is illegible to him. Then, under his touch, it crumbles.

Shadows flicker; Imoen, with her cat firmly on her shoulder, shoots out a fire arrow; Aerie is constantly murmuring to her gods, in one tongue, in the next, in the other, a litany of jumbled words in three languages, asking, pleading, begging to protect the party from the undead; steps resound in a multitude of harmonics and echoes. The party move; constantly keeping to that same instinctive formation, the fighters outside, the wizards inside, never spreading far away from the light of the sunstone, now carried by Aerie.

The Shade Lord, whatever he is, must know that the party are here, Sarevok thinks, listening to the steady beating of his eagle’s heart. He must. Is it the power of the light within the sunstone that is keeping him away? The temple, he thinks coolly, is enormous. It is not his fear, for he sees no reason to be afraid; not perception affecting his reality: he has counted his steps— Though, perhaps, that is part of the game; as is their perceived safety. It is an interesting issue. And the bloodlessness of the kidnappings proves that the Shade Lord enjoys playing with one’s mind.

Skeletons rise around the party, silently; large, armed skeletons of those who must have once been the temple guardians— Kriemhild yells out an orc battle cry, and that breaks the spell. They fight.

-----


They come to the dead end of the marble corridor. There is a hole in the ground, and there is a steel grate and a lock in it, still strong in the air which harbours no rust.

“Solitary confinement, for the heretics, in the darkness,” Sarevok decides: the god they met had been, after all, a sun god. There are rails over the hole: the faithful would have pulled the nearby statue over the condemned to leave them without light— “An oubliette,” he adds, remembering his impression of the Trademeet city prison.

“Boo wants to know what an oubliette is,” Minsc volunteers, and Sarevok frowns. The hamster has never expressed an interest in factual knowledge before.

“It is a place where people are put to be forgotten about, Minsc,” Nalia supplies. “In the Hold, we…” She falls silent, suddenly; realising perhaps that it is an inglorious fact from her family’s history which she is about to reveal.

“We go in?” Kriemhild asks in the silence, finally, looking now at Sarevok, now at Mazzy.

Mazzy thinks. “We have the key.” With her foot, she moves delicately one of the skeletons they have just destroyed; there is a key there, in the pieces of its armour and the tattered folds of its robe. “And, since we are here, why not? I’ll lead. Anchev, Minsc, Aerie, you’d better stay up.” She hesitates for a moment, before adding, “You too, Nalia.”

Nalia narrows her eyes, and starts to reply something, angrily, before reconsidering; Imoen folds her cloak, kneels by the grate, and begins to drop some oil into the lock. Then, Mazzy, together with the shorter wizard of the two, the shortest fighter bar herself, and the wizard’s cat, descends into the dark pit.

As she does, Nalia takes the sunstone from Aerie and puts it, carefully, on the edge of the pit; and there are heavy steps from the corridor down which the party has just come.

“Three or four,” Sarevok comments; moving, together with the barbarian, to the fore. Nalia sighs. “At that speed, I’ll use up all my magic before we reach that Shade Lord,” she says. Aerie laughs, before, Altair tells him, she starts to plead to the Forest Gnome to make her skin tough as bark.

What emerges from the darkness are two skeletons of warriors, armed with long, heavy swords; then, one further, with a bow. And also, behind them, a giant, ill-defined mass of fused ivory with scythe-like arms; not at all a skeleton, and completely inhuman.

“It’s a bone golem, I think,” Nalia says, impressed. “I’ve never seen one, but I read descriptions—”

“Later, duchess, with pleasure,” he replies, pleasantly, eyeing his opponents, satisfied that he thought to protect himself against enchanted weapons. The skeleton archer shoots, at Minsc, but the arrow does not pierce the barbarian’s thick hide armour. Instead, it enrages him.

“ARRGH!” Minsc cries. “Minsc is no pincushion! And nor is Boo!”

And the wild, joyful spectacle of fighting begins again.

-----


Out.

Master?!

Out of my way.

The coldness of the gelid arrow starts to spread through the biceps of his right arm; he snarls, raises the stone skin again; right on time. One of the scythe arms of the bone golem lands on the left shoulder and momentarily stays there, unable to cut through the spell—

Minsc takes a massive swipe; the arm falls to the ground. “Ooh, that was smart!” Minsc laughs in his thick Rashemi accent. He is bleeding from two or three cuts, and there are two arrows sticking out of his flesh, too.

Another arrow, at Nalia; shot true, by it passes by Nalia nonetheless: Nalia is wearing her Trademeet-woven short azure cape, and, in it, after all, one never knows where or who Nalia is: her image is blurred, distorted and shifting randomly. The arrow flies on; hits Aerie’s winged armour of Aerdrie Faenya’s faith; disappears— Aerie is pleading for some yet other favour; Nalia has stopped her spell-casting: her magic proved useless against the fused, hardened mass of bone; instead, she is shooting arrows herself, from a small bow, taking her time to try and find the weak points in the ivory—

Sarevok takes another swing, and hacks at the bone golem with the entire humanly might he possesses, at the opening left by the barbarian’s edge; at last, as another frigid arrow rebounds from his stone skin, as the supporting, comforting power of the Crying God heals him, and Minsc, and Altair, who was caught in passing by the scythe’s very edge—

—cracks begin to show in the bone, and the Edge of Chaos penetrates deeply, and the golem splits in two, and falls down, and Minsc hacks off its other arm; and, at last, the golem is still. The archer skeleton is easy to dispose of, now.

“At last,” Imoen says from inside the hole, in a bored tone underscored with a fair amount of fear and apprehension. “Help me out, little brother. Quickly.”

That he does, as Aerie and Nalia start to Minsc and start pulling out the arrows and, in Aerie’s case, murmuring another Ilmatari prayer. Still bleeding, with the arrow spreading its frost through his blood, he reaches into the pit, and helps Imoen and Pangur out; and then, Mazzy Fentan. The one next up should be Kriemhild; instead, his wife passes to him the body of a man.

“He’s alive,” Imoen says to his inquiring look as Mazzy orders, in the background, “Aerie! Leave Minsc and come here!”

Sarevok helps his wife out, and, as Nalia finally pulls out the two arrows from Minsc’s flesh, and Imoen the one in Sarevok’s shoulder, and as the two men drink healing potions—Aerie says, “W-we need a fire. He is chilled, a-and the shadows touched him. I-I can try to heal him—”

“Minsc knows that my witch can heal the stranger!” the Rashemi roars, and finds himself at the receiving end of Mazzy Fentan’s unsmiling look. “We know it, too, Minsc,” she says. “Be silent. Aerie? What else do we need?”

Minsc’s face droops; Nalia and Imoen are already gathering books and pulling out wood blocks from Sarevok’s bag of holding. The elf considers. “Nothing. O-only time?”

“How long?”

Aerie shrugs and shakes her vixen-like head. “I-I don’t know. He’s been here very long…”

The fire is soon lit, and they put the man’s body beside it on and under two pieces of thick cloth. Aerie sits by the unconscious man, and starts upon another prayer to Ilmater, this time asking her god to save him from the brink of exhaustion. The rest of the party gather as far away as possible from her, within the limits of the sunstone’s shining, to let her work in undisturbed peace.

“Well,” Mazzy Fentan says, “Whether he is Valygar Corthala or not, perhaps he will have something to tell us.”

“For example, why he is still alive,” Imoen mutters; “Yes,” Nalia replies, frowning, “I’ve wondered that, myself…”

They wait.

-----


He had only a glimpse of the man when Kriemhild passed the unconscious body to him, and that, if the villagers be believed, would mean that that there is, indeed, Valygar Corthala: tall, and dark—dark-skinned, even, as though he came from somewhere in the south, even though Nalia told Imoen and him that there once existed Corthalas of Amn—

Tall, dark, handsome, dressed in fine, though rather worn armour, with a katana at his side and the calluses of constant martial exercise on his hands: an interesting man, and he has not even spoken yet, save in writing. Sarevok takes the lacquered saya lying on the temple floor, and tries to pull the sword out of it, carefully, with proper respect; the way an enchanted katana, possessed of its own spirit, ought to be unsheathed. It will not budge. Interesting.

“It will not leave the sheath for anyone but its owner,” Mazzy Fentan, watching his actions curiously, remarks.

“I know, halfling,” he replies. Around them, Aerie is still sitting by the unconscious man; Nalia and Imoen have withdrawn to as remote as possible a corner of their own, and are sharing little laughs, touches and battle strategies. Minsc is feeding Boo, Altair and Pangur are watching the hamster intently, and Kriemhild’s attention is divided between Minsc and him. “What do you think about what happened earlier?” he asks. “About our divine caller?”

Mazzy is quite surprised, and equally suspicious. “Why do you ask?”

“I am curious. Imoen is busy. And you have given me no reason to disrespect your opinion, Fentan,” he replies lightly, putting the sheath and the sheathed sword away, next to the man’s long bow.

“I am flattered,” she says curtly, because she is not. “I wonder if this meeting taught you anything. For example, that even gods die, Anchev.”

“So they do. If they lose their believers,” he replies. That is why, perhaps, it is so important that the siblings be exterminated efficiently, and without error: the issue has to do with the power of human belief; with retaining the belief and the power after the ascension, very easy to achieve after a memorable war and a bloodbath, far less so without it— How can one believe in a god of murder who has failed to assassinate his own blood kin? “Or if they are killed, like my father. But, ordinarily, it is more difficult to kill a god than to kill a halfling.”

“You are right. My life will be shorter than yours, if you ever manage to— to fulfil that vile plan,” Mazzy says, and her hand twitches as she must rethink whether not to attack him now, before he begins to turn his words into actions, again. “But it will be a much better life than yours,” she adds with stubborn conviction. “My good deeds—”

He must laugh. “Your good deeds will have no lasting consequences, Fentan. They will be gone with the people on whom you bestowed them. One war, one uprising—or one change of generations—and it will be gone. All gone. All forgotten.”

“They will last long enough!” Mazzy Fentan snaps suddenly. Then, she shakes her head, “You bought that thing, from that farmer,” she points at the sunstone glowing on the floor; and suddenly, he has found proof that Mazzy Fentan does follow his exploits as he is with her party; not that he expected otherwise. “I don’t know why you did that, but you made him happy,” she argues, “And that should be enough. A good deed is its own reward!” she finishes fervently, with all the irritating conviction of a missionary and a zealot.

There is a silence; then, placidly, “Indeed. We have light,” he remarks, for he finds the coincidence between the god’s appearance and the stone’s rather convenient; but Mazzy offers no insight. “We are still alive,” she retorts instead with the bitter, grim self-reproach of one berating self for not having realised beforehand something which beforehand realised could not be; and so, he asks, “Have I proven sufficiently that I am not planning to override your command, halfling?”

Mazzy, predictably, looks at him with sheer disbelief. “Is everything for you about power, Anchev?”

He smiles, and strikes back, “Yes. But, my lady Fentan, you, too, want more of life than simply benevolent deeds; buying stones from farmers. You are a,” a proper tinge of irony, “valiant servant of goodness, after all. I heard your sister speak of you—”

Suddenly, Mazzy is furious, again. “You spoke to my sister? Of course you would.”

“—when she spoke with my sister about employment with you,” he finishes calmly, and Mazzy deflates. “Pala… is a very traditional halfling,” she says.

“Yes,” he agrees. “I have no reason to respect her opinion.”

Mazzy eyes him darkly for a moment. “This is none of your business, Anchev,” she suddenly concludes. “And Pala is a much… much more precious person than you are. You have no right to pass judgment on her.” Then, she gets to her feet and, hostile, walks away.

-----


The elf gets to her feet and exchanges small words with Mazzy; Mazzy takes her place by the fire and the sleeping, recovering man; Aerie lays herself to sleep.

In the background, Nalia and Imoen grow, suddenly, much quieter, whispering instead of laughing to avoid disturbing their friend’s reverie; in the end, they, too, must fall asleep in the deathly cold; certainly so do, by the fire, the familiars, perhaps tired of following the hamster.

Boo’s human has been whispering loudly to Sarevok’s wife, “Soon, my dajemma will end! Then, all honour and glory will be Minsc and Boo’s, and the disgrace of Dynaheir’s death will be forgotten, though her name most certainly will be not! But now, I must protect my witch.”

“Aerie is weak,” Kriemhild has replied, with all the contempt of bitter envy.

“I agree. That is why I must protect her!” Minsc is now saying. “The warrior lady is strong, and needs no protection! But, Boo says to tell you, if Kriemhild ever needs help in kicking some b-behinds, you know where Minsc is! Minsc and Boo will do all they can do to help,” he flashes a large smile and looks at the half-orc with a dog’s faithful eyes.

Kriemhild, meanwhile, catches Sarevok’s own amused gaze, and tells Minsc, “I must am going. The husband is needing me,” she adds; there is some apparent confusion about the modes, though, equally apparently, the existence of progression has been discovered.

Minsc sighs sadly in the background; Kriemhild almost does not pay attention to him as she hurries to her husband.

“What happened earlier, with the ogres?” that one asks her, in her first tongue, because she begged to be excused, but she could not formulate her thoughts properly in the human one—

A brief trace of sheer horror. “This one begs to be excused, esteemed husband, but the husband,” further fear, confusion and anger, “obeys the gnat—the halfling.” She uses the human word, eventually.

“Yes,” he confirms for her sake, “The halfling must be obeyed. You did fine. What happened?”

A long tale follows, about how Mazzy Fentan and Kriemhild entered the ogres’ forest camp. The halfling demanded to be brought before Madulf; the halfling spoke to Madulf. “What did Fentan say?” curious, he interrupts.

Kriemhild considers for a moment, and, eventually, admits reluctantly, “This is the nature of war. By protecting others, you save yourselves.” Sarevok smiles, briefly.

“Then, the halfling and this one fetched the ruler of the Imnesvale weakskin clan, and ceasefire was discussed,” Kriemhild finishes. “Tzerr’an halarn?” he asks, “You, wife?”

“This one disciplined.” She probably broke a skull or two, he does not smile. “And,” another brief moment of badly hidden anger, “complied with the gnat’s wish, and assisted in translation.”

“Fine,” he assures again the hunched, tusked, lupine-eared figure. “What— How—” He finds himself at a loss of words: there are ideas which are hard to translate into orc. “This horde? What are the thoughts?”

Kriemhild’s black eyes glitter maliciously as she lies to him, exaggerating her contempt and odium for her husband’s sake, “These… are women. Enemy,” she adds, and she must have Aerie in mind: the word for ‘elf’ and ‘enemy’ is the same in orc. “Unwise warrior,” she finishes, in the circumspect language of an orc female speaking of an orc male—

“This one will follow the husband,” she ends, hiding her discontent at him and at his weakness; the hierarchy of her world is upset, and he will not be strong for her, that she may be a slave, but a slave to a powerful man. She is not at peace; and she can neither advise nor criticise; and he has put her in a very delicate position by bidding both— She is seething.

He smiles, briefly, again; and orders, “Sleep, my wife.”

Then, as, wrapped in her scarlet dragon cloak, she sets herself to fulfilling the order, and he is left to himself, and he takes another long look around the impromptu camp: at animals and at people, asleep, coupled or alone; at Mazzy Fentan, who has turned her back on him as she watches over the sick man; at the cold, bleak feel of loss and loneliness— Then, for a passing moment, he wishes he had a sparring partner with him; but soon, he smirks, and opens his diaries and his spell-book instead. The mien will not affect him. It has been his own choice which brought him here; here, as—save to Irenicus—everywhere.

They wait.




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