“Away!” Araezra shrieked, falling to her knees at Talanna’s side. “It’s your fault! Away!”
Shadowbane put up a hand to silence her.
Araezra recoiled as though slapped. How dare he—how dare he treat her like a child! She remembered Talanna’s adamantine dagger in her hand and she lunged forward, driving it toward Shadowbane. He twisted his arm around hers, ignoring the wound along his forearm, and dealt her wrist a slap with his other hand. The dagger clattered to the street.
Then he twisted Araezra’s arm, driving her to her knees. His eyes gleamed down at her. He could break her wrist without resistance.
Instead, to Araezra’s surprise, he let go. She scrabbled back a pace, cradling her wrist. It didn’t seem broken, or even to have suffered serious harm.
Shadowbane bent over Talanna, spreading his hands wide.
“What are you doing?” Araezra demanded. She drew Shadowbane’s sword—the only weapon she had left—but the hilt burned her hand and she dropped the blade to the ground. It lay, smoldering bright silver, on the cobblestones.
Shadowbane laid his hands upon Talanna’s unmoving chest.
Araezra watched, stunned, as white light flared within his fingers and spread into Talanna. The red-haired woman’s eyes fluttered and she curled into a pained ball, coughing.
Shadowbane rose and faced Araezra. She tried to meet his eyes, but he looked away—toward his sword. She stepped protectively before it, daring him to attack.
The man hesitated only a moment, then leaped away into the night.
“Gods, Tal!” Araezra knelt beside her friend and hugged her.
“Geh … almost … almost made it, eh?” Talanna said. “That jump?”
Then her eyes closed and she moaned, consciousness leaving her.
They were beneath the eaves of the Knight ’n Shadow, Araezra realized. She saw folk standing in the street around them, surprise and concern on their faces.
In particular, a half-elf lady with red hair caught Araezra’s eye. She was dressed elegantly in a crimson half-cloak over a gold-chased green doublet, and was staring at them intently. Of all the onlookers, she was the only one who didn’t look up. Araezra found her gray eyes unnerving. The woman turned away and disappeared into the tavern.
Araezra cradled Talanna tightly. “Help!” she cried. “Someone help!”
A chill rain began to fall.
NINE
Cellica was stirring the simmer stew from the eve before, reflecting that it might require a few more herbs, when she heard a thump near her tallhouse window.
Leaving the long wooden ladle in the pot on the fire, she turned toward the sound and saw the latch on the window rise—pushed up by a blade slipped between the shutters. She touched the crossbow-shaped medallion at her throat and waited silently.
The blade teased the latch up, bit by bit, until finally it scraped open. Then the shutter pushed inward and a man in a torn gray cloak tumbled through with a crash. He had clearly been leaning on the window from without, as though injured or weak.
Releasing the nervous breath she had held, Cellica rushed to his side, heedless of the rain blowing inside.
“Are you hurt?” she asked. She ran her hands over his chest and scowled at the knives standing out of his shoulder and his left arm. They stuck mostly in leather, she saw, but there was blood, too. “What passed?”
“You locked the window,” Shadowbane said. “I couldn’t—” He coughed harshly.
“It was raining. I guess I didn’t think,” said the halfling. “Curse it, you used your healing on someone else—you fool. How many times have I told you? If you need it, you need it.” She grasped his helm. “Here. Let me—”
Without meaning it, she let compulsion slip into her voice, but he resisted her influence. He shoved her hands away, then wrenched the helm off by himself. Cellica glimpsed a little blood in the mouth guard before he cast the helmet away to crash, with several loud bangs, off the wall and floor. It rolled to the corner and stopped.
“I can’t—I just can’t.” Shadowbane put his hands to his face as though he would weep. “I made a mistake, Cele. I didn’t … I didn’t mean anyone to be hurt.”
“Aye.” Cellica didn’t know what had taken place, but she recognized the despair in his voice. “I’m sure you did what you could, Kalen.”
His colorless eyes gazed at her, wet. He started coughing and retching then, and she could barely hold him up. He’d pushed himself, she knew—running and fighting and leaping. Magic boots or no, strengthening spellscar or no, a man was not meant to push so hard.
“Rest, now,” Cellica said. “All’s well. All’s well.”
She could feel his body relax as it bent to her will. Whatever god had blessed her voice with a touch of command, she thanked the fates.
As Kalen coughed and trembled, she held him as she had since they had been children on Luskan’s cruel streets. When he’d been hurt or she’d woken with night terrors, they’d embraced each other like this—brother and sister, though not by blood.
After a while, Cellica spoke again. “You don’t have to do this,” she whispered.
He shook his head and limped to the table. “We’ll talk come morn,” he said.
“It is morn,” Cellica said. He sighed. “Highsun, then.”
Cellica gently tugged the knives free and unbuckled Kalen’s armor. His thick chest and shoulders swarmed with scars from years of this sort of activity. He wore as much blood as sweat.
“These are bad,” Cellica said. “I could fetch a priest, and—”
“No,” Kalen said. “Only needle and thread.”
She shivered. Of course he wouldn’t want magical healing. He wanted the scars to remind him—as though he deserved them. One scar for every drop of innocent blood. Cellica shivered.
Cellica worried at how Kalen didn’t seem to feel the needle or thread as she stitched his wounds. He only winced when she touched the deepest bruises.
“You’re so stubborn,” Cellica said. “Haven’t you atoned enough?”
Kalen started to reply, but his words became a coughing fit. He spat blood into his hand.
“You shouldn’t worry.” He coughed more blood. “Not much longer, I think.” He took a mashed scroll from his pocket and handed it over. “Throw this out, aye?”
Cellica took the scroll—which smelled of both perfume and sweat—and frowned. “You shouldn’t push yourself like this,” she said. “Your body will only fade faster, you know.”
“I know.” He coughed. “I felt it hard tonight.” He winced, but not from the needle.
“What if Rayse calls today?” Cellica asked. She snipped off the thread with her teeth.
He stared at the table a long breath. Such pain marked his face—so many shadows that the halfling knew were only his own.
His eyes closed and he sighed. “She won’t,” he said finally.
Cellica thought she glimpsed another shadow near the window that couldn’t have been his, but it vanished when she looked more closely.
Trick of the dawn light, she thought.
TEN
Rath’s eyes narrowed.
That was the only sign of unease he allowed himself—a slight squint—at her appearance. Otherwise, sitting back in his booth at the Knight ’n Shadow after a night of drinking, an open bottle of brandy before him, the dwarf might have seemed perfectly at ease. No one could see the conflict inside him, which he drank to pacify.
“You,” Rath said.
“Me,” she replied.
The red-haired half-elf slid casually onto the bench across from him. She was quite fetchingly attired in flattering black breeches and a green doublet trimmed in gold, puffed at the throat and wrists. The lady threw her legs—long, sinuous, smooth legs—across the edge of the table and leaned back on her right hand. Her left hand, still in view, danced along her knee. Her deep gray eyes appraised him wryly.
Rath couldn’t deny a stir in his loins. Strange that she would affect him
so. The curve of her hips, the lines of her face—perhaps that was simply her way. Mayhap it was the drink.
The dwarf silently inclined the bottle of brandy toward her.
“No, my thanks,” she said with a sweet smile.
He poured himself another. “You’re taking an awful risk coming to me.”
“What can I say? I’m brave.” Fayne waved to the serving lass for wine. “All passes well in Downshadow, I trust?” Rath only stared at her silently.
When the wine came in a chipped bowl, Fayne raised it to her lips and drank it down greedily, more like a beast than a woman. Rath liked that, too.
“Aye?” Fayne blushed and adjusted her seat. “You’re wondering about me?”
“Weighing you.” Rath ran his hand across his grizzled chin. He hadn’t shaved, he realized, and took his hand away. To look anything but impeccable filled him with self-loathing. “Judging, specifically, whether you purposely arranged matters for me to meet Shadowbane. It seems very much in character.”
Fayne put a hand to her throat. “My dear,” she said. “Certainly not. Why, I would never so much as go near that foul creature, even for a thousand dragons. The very idea!” She gasped in mock offense, then went back to smiling. “And have no fear of any tension between us, either: Ours was a legitimate disagreement regarding coin. We are both professionals—I bear no grudges, and I trust you do not either.”
Though she smiled broadly, her eyes betrayed nothing.
Rath shrugged. He drained the last of the brandy from the bottle and waved for another.
“You ought take care with such strong drink,” Fayne said. “Or does your dwarf stomach ward you from its ill effects?”
Ill effects, Rath mused. It would be worse if he did not drink.
The second bottle came, and he snatched it from the tavern wench with a scowl.
He hated this—hated his occasional and inconsolable desire for drink. It reminded him of his dwarf blood, and that heritage was one of the things he most hated about himself. Also failure and his urges. He hated that he could not master himself.
The need for drink had first come before he had shaved his beard and fled his homeland for the monastery hidden deep in the mountain. Training among the monks had suppressed this desire to connect with his hated blood—for a time, at least. He had drunk himself to a stupor just before he killed the masters of the monastery, took their most sacred of swords, and fled to Waterdeep. And for a while, with the blood he spilled almost as easily as breathing, he had not felt the urges.
Until this night—until that thrice-cursed Shadowbane.
Was this the third time he would drink to excess?
“Rough eve?” Fayne asked, pointing to the empty bottles—three of them.
Hard as it was—and it was hard, indeed—Rath set the bottle back on the table and pulled his gaze away from it. He still thought about it—craved the sweet fire on his tongue and in his belly, dulling his base impulses—but she could not see his mind.
“What do you know of it, girl?” Rath asked. “I am a master at my art—I have never been defeated, or I would be dead.” He was saying too much. It was the liquor in his stomach, saturating his blood and making him weak. Making him into a dwarf, when he should be free.
“And yet,” Fayne said, “you look like a man who bears a vendetta. Against a foe who left you alive, perhaps?”
Rath would dance to her steps no more. “What do you want?”
“The question,” Fayne said,” is more correctly, do I know what you want?”
The dwarf waved. “I want nothing.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t be so sure.” Fayne took a slip of parchment from the scrip satchel she had set on the table and showed it to him. It had a single long word on it. A name.
He read the parchment and his eyes narrowed. “You know this man?” he asked. “Not just know of him, but you know him?”
“Indeed!” She nodded. “It’s only a matter of time before I have his face, too—and I’m sure that would be worth something to you.” She reached across the table and laid her fingers across his wrist. “And perhaps I can think of a few other things, aye?”
Rath looked at her hand on his arm. His face remained expressionless.
“I had thought,” he said, “that your inclinations did not match mine.” He nodded to the serving lass, who was delivering a heavy tray of tankards to a group of half-orcs. “From your kiss with yon wench of yesterday.”
“You noticed,” Fayne said. “Would you like to see it again—perhaps in a more intimate setting? Waterdeep is the city of coin, after all.”
“You mean—” Rath grimaced. “How disgusting.”
“You’d be surprised,” she said. “Call me … free of mind. I can do many things—even dwarves.” She winked. ‘“Especially dwarves.”
Rath curled his lip. “Offer me coin, or begone—I’ll have nothing else of you.”
Fayne pouted. “What a pity.”
Rath drank his brandy down and poured another. Fayne took out a second parchment, this with two words written on it, and passed it across the table. He looked at the name.
“Interesting,” he said. “The first shall be my reward for this?Why?”
“This is personal,” she said. “Someone I’ve hated for a long, long time.” Her face and voice were deadly serious. “You are a professional—I do not think you could understand that.”
It was Rath’s turn to smile—yet it might have been the brandy. “You’d be surprised at what I would understand.” He chuckled. “I am very familiar with hatred.”
Fayne paused at that. “Mmm,” she said. “Well. I shall deliver your payment—as noted on that parchment—upon completion. Aught else?”
As quickly as a snake might lunge, Rath reached across the table and seized the lace at her collar, wrenching her face close to his own. Fayne went pale.
“You are afraid,” he whispered. “Why?”
Fayne blinked. Her face was calm, but her eyes were fearful. “Release me,” she said. “Release me, or—”
“Or you will strike me?” Rath smiled. “I could kill you in a heartbeat.”
To demonstrate, Rath gave her face a flick with his fingers, splitting open her upper lip. She didn’t wince, and he almost respected her for that. Almost.
He laid his other hand around her neck. “Answer my question.”
The woman licked where he had broken her lip. “Dreams,” she said.
Rath relaxed his grip. “Dreams?”
“A girl—a girl in blue fire.” Her eyes narrowed and her lip curled. “Know one?”
The dwarf sighed and released her to flop back to the bench. He leaned back, drained.
Fayne sucked her broken lip. “So you’ve caught me,” she said. “I suppose I dream of wenches after all—but that isn’t a fault, aye?” Discomfited as she was, she winked.
Rath understood something about her then: how she used allurement to fight anxiety. He smiled wryly. So he wasn’t the only one who demeaned himself in moments of weakness.
He pulled his hand away. “Within three nights,” he said, and gestured for her to depart.
If Fayne had gone then, it would have been well, but instead her eyes held him fast. She reached casually across and plucked up his hand. She rubbed it against her cheek, teasing her lips along his thumb. His arm tingled, and his hand looked blasphemously dark against her skin.
Long after she left the table, her touch lingered.
Rath folded the parchment upon which she’d named his mark and slid it into his black robe. He raised the brandy to his trembling lips, but the cool liquid tasted like ash on his tongue. He threw the bottle aside with a hiss.
Even drink did him no good now. She had ruined it for him.
He needed a woman, he knew, but not her. Not that faceless creature.
His sharp eyes fell on the serving lass. She had smallish breasts—well enough—and a strong, rounded backside. He wouldn’t enjoy it, he knew, but he had no choice. He wou
ldn’t go so far as to say he wanted her, but he knew that he needed her.
Needed to drive his demons away—to forget.
“Girl,” he said across the tavern, and she stiffened. He raised the mostly empty bottle of brandy. “Come. Drink with me.”
He laid gold on the table.
ELEVEN
Shadovar assassin hides among corrupt merchants!” cried a boy for the Daily Luck, hawking his broadsheet on the Street of Silks as evening fell. “Watch denies all rumors!”
“Shadovar spy rumors stupid!” called a rival broadcrier, a bob-haired girl crying the Merchant’s Friend. She stuck out her tongue at the Luck boy. “Daily Luck prints idiocy!” “Does not!” cried the boy. “Does so!”
A disgruntled Watchman came upon the two and hissed them onto the next street. They ran from him, laughing, hand in hand, and—Kalen thought—likely fell to kissing as soon as they were out of sight. Younglings. He shook his head and smiled ruefully.
“I swear to the gods, Kalen,” said Bors. “If you keep on delaying us for words with which to woo yon strumpet—when hard coin will damn well do—I shall declare her the Lady Dren.”
Kalen surveyed the chapbooks just inside the shop. “Leleera likes to read.”
“I suppose we all have our bedchamber pleasures,” Bors said.
“Kindly don’t share.”
Bors grinned.
Kalen coughed into his hand, though it was mostly feigned. The weakness had subsided since yestereve, but he could still feel numbness throughout his body. As on any other day.
They had stopped on the way up the Street of Silks at a shop called the Curious Past, at which Kalen was a frequent customer. The business—which after more than a century was growing to be an ancient treasure in its own right—sold oddities, antiques, and chapbooks about the old world. Kalen scanned the titles of the books stacked on the table as the anxious vendor looked on.
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