Both were off duty that day, and as he often did on such days, Bors had invited Kalen to his favorite festhall—the Smiling Siren. Mostly, Kalen knew, Bors did so to interrogate Kalen for intimate information about Araezra. Kalen had not seen his superior that day—she had not reported for duty—but he wasn’t about to let his worry show more than was seemly.
Kalen tried to put her out of his mind. He studied the wares laid out before him.
Though all the thirty-or-so-page books were romantic in nature, they ranged from the speculative (The Chained Man of Erlkazar, The Blood Queen of Qurth) to the historical (Return of the Shades, the First and Second of Shadows series), and from the salacious (Untold Privy Tales of Cormyr: The Laughing Sisters, The Wayward Witch Queen) to the outright naughty (Adulteries of Lady Alustra: A Confessional, Seven Sisters for Seven Nights, Torm’s Conquests; this last not a reference to the god of justice, but a lecherous adventurer of the last century).
He also found most of Arita’s Silver Fox series, up to the eighty-page eighth volume, Fox in the Anauroch. Rumors of the upcoming ninth, Fox and the Blue Fire, had been the talk of literary circles for some months.
Kalen selected one of the books and handed the vendor five silvers. He slid the book into his satchel and adjusted the thong over his shoulder. The two wore no armor while off duty, but their black greatcoats—hallmark of the Waterdeep Guard—kept vendors from cheating them.
“Well? Which is it?” Bors winked at the vendor’s giggly daughter.
“Aye?”
“Which masterpiece shall Leleera be enjoying this night, man?” asked Bors. “Aught with pirates, nay? I’ve heard the lasses swoon over pirates these days.”
“All due respect, sir,” Kalen said. “Can you even read?”
“Ha!” Bors clapped him on the back. “Well enough, then.”
As they walked to the Siren, a light rain began to fall on what had been a warm day, sending up dust from the cobblestones. It was that time of winter-turning-to-spring when the weather could not choose how to behave. Dust swirled in a breeze that came from the west.
“Sea fog tonight,” predicted Kalen.
“Ridiculous!” said Bors. He spread his hands. “You hear this, Waterdeep? Ridiculous!”
Kalen just smiled—and coughed lightly.
With the rain and the approaching eve, business slowed. The street lighters—retired Watchmen, mostly—were about their work, lifting long hooks to hang fish-oil lamps. The streets would grow crowded near the gates, which closed at dusk.
“I don’t see,” Bors said, munching an apple, “why you bother with lasses of the night, when by all accounts you could tumble a nymph like Rayse for free.”
Kalen ignored that. “How are Araezra and Talanna?” he asked quietly.
“You mean yestereve? Bah.” Bors sparked a flint and lit his tamped pipe. “Talanna fell—again, though at least this time she had the damn ring. Laid up for healing at Torm’s temple a few days, but she’ll be fine—that girl’s tougher ’n bone dragons.” He took a deep pull of pipe smoke. “I’m sure the damned Minstrel will run a tale in the morn that makes us all look hrasting fools, but no mind.”
Kalen nodded. Cellica would tell him about the broadsheets. He never read them himself—he already knew how bleak the world really was. “What of Araezra?” he asked quietly.
“Rayse …” He looked down at his hands. “She took yestereve pretty hard, as she always does. Good lass, that one, but hard on herself. Really hard. Thinks she has to be.”
Kalen sighed.
“Funny you ask about her, when we’re on our way to a festhall.” Bors clapped him on the shoulder. “Mayhap after we’re done there, you’ll want to cheer Rayse up, eh?”
Kalen ignored Bors’s jape.
They passed under the arms of the Siren—cunningly carved as a blushing, sea-skinned and foam-haired maiden whose gauzy skirts would occasionally billow in the right breeze off the bay. The entry room was cunningly sculpted and painted in a forest scene on one side, a beach on the other. Figures in various states of nakedness seemed to dance off the walls—nymphs, dryads, satyrs, and the like, also knights and maidens reclining and embracing under the boughs of trees.
The images were so lifelike that a small person could blend in by standing still, as was a favorite pastime of Sanchel, the Siren’s dwarf madam. Bors and Kalen knew her game, but she startled the Hells out of two young sellswords when she appeared—in thigh boots and a cloak of leaves—from among the trees.
“Sune smile on you.” Then, as they almost pissed themselves: “Boy, girl, or common?”
“Cuh-common,” said one of them. The other stared at her mostly exposed chest, an impressive edifice considering her stature.
“Love and beauty follow you,” said Sanchel. “If you would make your offering?”
The older of the sellswords elbowed the younger, and he drew a purse out of his belt and handed it toward Sanchel. The dwarf shook her head and pointed instead toward a statue of the goddess that stood within a fountain below the stairs. At her gesture, the boy poured the coins into the water, which instantly turned bright gold.
“The goddess is pleased. You are welcome to her hall.” Then Sanchel made a bird call and two half-clad celebrants appeared—one lad and one lass. Sanchel pointed each to one of the adventurers. A pause followed, in which the festgirl and festboy appraised the patrons critically, then they nodded and took the young men by the arms.
Sanchel prided herself on knowing the nighttime preferences of her patrons at a glance, and she was right again. The youths looked very pleased at their escorts, and allowed themselves to be led toward the common hall, which would be full of dancing, wine, and song.
Sanchel turned to Kalen and Bors with the smile she reserved for favored regulars. “Good eve, gentles—I see the Watch is treating you well?”
“Hasn’t killed us yet.” Bors eyed the murals speculatively. “I wonder …”
Kalen rolled his eyes. This was one of Bors’s favorite games, playing this role.
Sanchel feigned wariness, but her eyes laughed. She knew the game as well and—unlike Kalen—liked it. “Something displeases, honored Commander?”
“I wonder if your practices fall within the scope of the law,” Bors said. “Are all your celebrants here of their own will, and given adequate compensation for their arts?”
Sanchel rose to the challenge. “What are you suggesting, sir? All in this place serve Sune—and all want for naught. Or”—she smiled—“did you need to interview one yourself?”
“Mmm, mayhap,” said Bors with a grin. He drew out his purse and poured a few coins into the pool. The water glowed. “Clever magic—spares you checking the gold yourself, eh?”
“Just so,” said Sanchel. “And yet you pause, my lord. You are uncertain?”
Bors’s grin grew wider. “Better make it two,” he said, adding twice as many coins to the offering. “Bren and Crin, I think.”
Sanchel gave a sweet smile and whistled twice, great trilling bird songs. Kalen wondered if she could speak with birds, if given the opportunity. Two women appeared out of a hidden door in Sune’s forest—two dusky-skinned lasses with midnight hair and big, deep black eyes.
Bren and Crin looked identical, though they shared no blood. One, or perhaps both, was a shapeshifter who matched the other. Requests for “the sisters” were common enough—if costly. They smiled at Bors with their full, tempting lips.
“Does this one please you?” Sanchel asked them.
The women looked at Bors Jarthay critically, weighing him with their eyes. Their choosing was the key, Kalen thought. If they did not like the man, no offering was enough, and it would be blasphemy for Bors to coerce or even so much as scowl if they chose “nay.”
Oddly, Kalen found himself thinking of Cellica, the only sister he had ever known, and chuckled inwardly at the thought of her in such a situation. She’d probably box Bors Jarthay around the ears, or—failing that, owing to her size—off
er him a punch in a more sensitive spot.
Bren and Crin did nothing of the sort. They smiled to one another, then bowed to Bors. “This one,” they said together, “half a fool and half a hero—this one always amuses us.”
Sanchel nodded.
“Perfect,” said Bors with a low bow. Then he smiled boldly and quoted, “Beauty begs joy. The silvered glass smiles, its delight unrehearsed.”
The courtesans looked at one another dubiously. Kalen looked at Sanchel, who giggled. Apparently, she understood the private jest.
“Is something wrong, my ladies?” asked the commander, his smile faltering.
“The poesy was not so bad,” Crin said to Bren. “Was it Thann, you think?”
“Doubtless,” said Bren. “And spoken well, too.”
“But my ladies unmake me,” said Bors with a small bow. “They have heard this before.”
“Of course,” said Crin. “It is in Couplets for Courtiers, is it not? How does it go, Sister?”
Bren smiled. “Let me see. ‘Your lips curve in swift, sweet echo, but this I swear: the mirror smiled first’ … aye, Commander?”
“Aye, just so.”
“Myself, I’d have preferred aught of Thann’s ‘Gray-Mist Maiden,’” Crin murmured to herself. “‘Let years steal beauty, grace, and youth,’ or the like.”
“Ladies, I bow to your superior learning,” Bors said, bowing low.
“But which is the lady and which the mirror?” pressed Bren—or perhaps Crin. Kalen wasn’t certain any more. He wondered if he had been wrong all along.
“I should be most pleased to find out.” And with that, Bors emptied the rest of his purse into the water, which glowed brightly indeed. “Might we find a place of privacy, ladies, wherein I might—ah? Ladies?”
Bren was looking at the glowing pool. She clicked her tongue and smiled at Crin. “He would impress us with gold where his poetry fails, Sister.”
“How childish,” agreed Crin. “Hmpf!”
The women stuck out their tongues simultaneously at Bors. They brushed past him toward the commons, seemingly disinterested.
Bors’s face fell. “Wait a moment!” the commander cried, and he hurried after them.
Kalen shook his head. The commander was just another man with more coin than sense.
In truth, he did not begrudge Bors Jarthay. Kalen was a man, too, and had the desires of any man. Only the ability … Kalen sighed inwardly.
“Sir Dren,” Sanchel said. “Have your desires shifted, or is it Leleera again? She has asked for you, should you come around—as you well know.”
Kalen turned to her. “Leleera.”
“If you wish to marry her,” Sanchel said, “that can be …”
“No, no,” Kalen said. It seemed awkward to claim he and Leleera were merely friends, so he held his tongue. He dropped gold into the pool, which glowed with a radiance more subdued than Bors had wrought with his coin. “As always—an hour longer than the commander stays here. Do not let us leave together.”
“As always.” Sanchel nodded and gestured to the stairs. “Sune smile upon you.”
“Torm bless and ward you.” Kalen bowed his head. He paused. “Sanchel—know you a half-elf with red hair, gray eyes, and a quick tongue?”
“If that is your preference,” the dwarf said, “we can see if Chandra or Rikkil please you—the eyes would be difficult, but the tongue …”
“No,” Kalen said, with an embarrassed cough. “Fair eve.”
Sanchel nodded and Kalen turned up the stairs, around the image of a great redwood around which dryads pranced.
When he had gone, Sanchel inclined her head to one of the tree nymphs. “Satisfied?”
“Quite.”
The dryad pulled away from the wall. It did a pirouette, as though reveling in its sylvan body, and Sanchel frowned. This creature both frightened her and intrigued her with its whimsy.
The dryad plucked a wand of bone from her hair and circled it around her head. A silvery radiance crowned her, then descended to her ankles. Her green tresses turned to bright red curls and her green skin became the particular bronze a half-elf inherits from a gold-skinned elf parent. Her eyes became the perfect gray of burnished steel.
“Which room?” Fayne asked. “From the street, mind—not inside.”
“Second floor, third from the north,” the dwarf woman said. “When he spoke of the half-elf with gray eyes … he meant you, didn’t he?”
“Mayhap,” she said. “Or mayhap I choose a form to match what he said. It matters little, as you’ll say nothing to him—unless you don’t care if I tell the Watch certain secrets …”
“No,” Sanchel said. “Sune smile on you, little trickster.”
“Beshaba laugh in your face.”
Fayne waved her wand again, and in a blink, she vanished.
Kalen kept his eyes downcast so as not to attract attention or bother other patrons. He would have seen his fair share of attractive sights, but he wasn’t there to peruse.
He knocked at Leleera’s door and was rewarded. “Enter!” He pushed through.
The room, like most of the pleasure cells at the Smiling Siren, was spacious—sparsely but tastefully adorned to suit the desires of its owner and his or her patrons, whom the celebrant could deny as she wished. Leleera opted for a “queen’s chamber,” with a stuffed divan, a tightly wound four-poster bed, and even a golden tub. As a full priestess of Sune, she could work the relatively simple magics to fill and heat the bath.
She had a full wardrobe of attire to match the chamber—rich robes, diaphanous silk gowns, and jewelry—along with a fair assortment of martial harnesses, including a thin gold breastplate, greaves, an impractical mail hauberk, and a vast assortment of boots of varying styles and lengths. Warrior queens were popular requests, she had told Kalen—particularly a certain “Steel Princess” Alusair, of late fourteenth-century Cormyr.
The lady herself—who smiled broadly to see Kalen and rose from her divan to embrace him—looked much as a warrior queen ought, with her strong and beautiful features, confident swagger, and honey hued hair, in which she wore dyed streaks of Sune’s favored scarlet.
“Kalen!” she cried. “Just in time. I’ve almost finished Uthgardt!’
Kalen put down his satchel and sat to remove his boots. “And how goes Arita’s debut?”
“Epic,” she said. Leleera helped Kalen unbutton his doublet. “I can see why folk love it.”
The long-running series, beginning with Fox Among the Uthgardt, concerned a heroine from the old world: an eladrin woman called the Silver Fox who couldn’t help but plunge into danger with every leap. No one knew the real name of the author—the fancyname “Arita” meant “silver fox” in Elvish—and owing to the volumes’ popularity, printers didn’t inquire.
“Much wit and banter go with the swordplay, though not nearly enough lovemaking. Though”—she pulled the hauberk over his head—“I did enjoy the seduction of the chief.”
“Huh.” Kalen started unlacing his breeches.
“I suppose there’ll be more,” Leleera said, slapping his hands away so she could do it. “Uthgardt ends in the 1330s, and the Silver Fox is only a young lass. Under forty—but the fey-born age slower than humans, methinks. There are more books, yes?”
Kalen let her pull off his breeches and stood in his linen clout. Leleera looked at his scarred, slightly glistening chest, and he could almost hear her thoughts.
He shook his head. “‘Ware the rules.”
“Yes, yes.” She pouted. “How many more are there, Kalen? I want to read more!”
“I saw Anauroch in the shop today, and I believe that’s volume eight.” He stretched. “Not as many as that other series you like, but each one’s twice the normal fifty or so pages.”
Leleera wasn’t looking at his nakedness anymore, but rather at his satchel. “In the shop?” Her smile widened. “Does that mean …?”
Kalen opened his satchel and produced the book. “One with mo
re bedplay, I’m told.”
Leleera gasped. “Lascivities of a Loveable Lothario—volume twelve!” She squealed. “Oh Kalen, you naughty, naughty knight!” Leleera kissed him on the cheek and plopped down on her divan, feet in the air, to read. She began giggling freely and often.
“I take it that will be sufficient?” Kalen laid the satchel’s contents on the bed. Black leathers, a gray cloak—the clothes that fit the man.
“‘You should be flattered, lass,’” she read. “‘Many would give their lives to learn in my bed—many already have.’” She rolled on her back and clasped the book to her chest. “Perfect!”
“Good.” He adjusted his sword belt, which felt light without Vindicator. He sheathed his watchsword in the scabbard instead—it was too short, but it still fit, awkwardly.
“Sure I can’t tempt you?” Leleera asked. “We could read together.” She put her hand on his wrist and if he didn’t know better, he’d have sworn she was trying to beguile him.
“Thank you, but no.” Kalen kissed her on the forehead and crossed to the window, where he paused. “Leleera—are you … are you happy here? In this place?”
She pursed her lips. “When did you start to care about being happy?”
Kalen scowled.
“A jest, my friend,” Leleera said. “I am content in this place—I serve my goddess, doing that which brings me pleasure. I share her love with the people of this city.”
“And that is enough,” he whispered. “For you, I mean.”
“Kalen.” She caressed his cheek, but he could not feel her fingers. He saw her hand move, but felt nothing. “Is it not the same for you?”
Kalen looked away.
“You are a good man, Kalen Dren—but sometimes …” She trailed off with a sigh. Then she smiled sadly. “If you want to save someone, why not start with yourself?”
“I don’t need saving,” he said.
“We’ll see.” Leleera embraced him and pressed her lips to his. He felt only coldness.
She left him and lay down across her divan. Setting aside the Lascivities, she opened Fox Among the Uthgardt to the last few pages and began to read silently. Aloud, she murmured, “Oh, Kalen—oh, yes—ooh!”
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