“Well I do hope that works out for you,” he said snidely. “Good luck finding her without Sairché’s help.” He spread his wings and flapped into the air. “Don’t you run away!” Havilar shouted. “She’s in this because of you, don’t you karshoji run away!”
“Havi,” Brin said. “Let him go.”
Lorcan didn’t wait to hear what followed, what entreaties, what insults, what outbursts. He was done. There was nothing Havilar or Brin could say to change that. Done with warlocks. Done with Brimstone Angels. Done with Farideh . . .
Are you in love with my sister?
And he had nineteen new magical rings to distract him from that. But he had gone only far enough to lose sight of Havilar and Brin’s fire, when the air in front of him peeled open like a rotten wound. Lorcan dropped back as three enormous insects with bladed arms darted out of it, surrounding him.
Shit and ashes, he thought, hanging in the air. Hellwasps.
The leader dropped down to the level of Lorcan’s face, tilting its head as it considered him. “You are Lorcan,” it said. “Son of Invadiah.”
“None other,” he said, wondering if he jammed his fingers into as many rings as he could whether he’d find the one that took him away from Glasya’s monstrous messengers before he found the one that turned him to stone—or worse.
The hellwasp clicked its mandibles. “Her Highness wishes to speak to you.” Its bladed legs extended toward Lorcan. “You will come.”
Havilar watched as the night sky swallowed Lorcan and with him her last scrap of hope of finding Farideh. She clutched her glaive, hardly daring to move. “It’s better this way,” Brin said behind her. “I promise.”
She whirled on him. “How? How is this possibly better?”
“Havi,” he all but sighed. “With Lorcan? This was never going to end well.”
“He said he could find Farideh, and—”
“And he lied,” Brin said. “Can’t you see that?”
“He didn’t lie,” Havilar said. “He doesn’t lie—Farideh said so.”
“He was playing you all along, to get back at his sister.”
“He wouldn’t do that.”
“Damn it, Havi! He just did!” Havilar took a step back, and Brin shook his head. “Look, the Harpers will go after her. They’ll get her back, I promise. Let’s just go home, all right?”
Havilar’s chest tightened around her heart. She’d been right the first time: she didn’t really know him anymore. “I don’t have a home,” she said fiercely. “I have a sister. And no matter what miserable nonsense she’s put me through, if something happens to her . . .” Her voice caught and she clapped a hand to her mouth. She swallowed the fear and the tears. “I’m not going back. Not without Farideh. You’ll have to knock me out and sling me over a horse to make me, and best of luck with that. So go back alone if you have to.”
Brin looked at her for a long moment, as if he wanted to say something but couldn’t. As if he wanted to say a whole swarm of somethings, Havilar thought, and was swallowing them instead. Finally he sighed. “All right. Then let’s get moving. We have too much ground to cover in too little time.”
Havilar held her glaive closer. “You . . . you’ll come with me?” He smiled wanly. “I already said I would. Besides, as much as I’m sure Mehen will threaten to beat me senseless for not stopping you, I know he’ll do it if I let you go on alone. And you know as well as I do I’m not slinging you over any horse. Let’s go.”
“But the sun’s gone down,” Havilar said. “You’re not supposed to ride in the dark.”
“Trust me,” Brin said. “I’ll break camp. You get the horses ready. There’s a jar in my saddlebag, about the size of a walnut, and a pouch of herbs. Smear the unguent on their fetlocks and haunches, and get a pinch of the herbs in behind the bit. And tie Lorcan’s horse to mine,” he added, packing up their bedrolls. “We’ll see if it can keep up.”
She did as he said, still smarting from Brin’s outburst, still puzzled by his reversal. When the horses were saddled again, she rubbed the greasy paste into their muscles.
“My hands feel like bees,” she said to Brin as he loaded their gear onto Lorcan’s horse. She flexed her fingers—they were definitely buzzing. He laughed to himself, and for a moment he looked so familiar she wanted to fall into his arms.
“It’s the unguent,” he said, grinning. “Has a kick to it.”
The horses pranced as if they’d been shut up tight all day—not exhausted after miles and miles of traveling. Alusair started off before Havilar had even settled herself in the saddle.
“South,” Brin told her, turning his and Lorcan’s horses to the road.
Havilar bristled. “I’m not going back to Waterdeep.”
“No,” Brin said. “We’re going to an inn.”
The herbs, Brin explained, were for darkvision. The unguent, for speed. The horses would be no good to anyone for a tenday or so, but they’d recover.
“Just hold on tight,” he advised.
There was enough moon for Havilar to see, vaguely, where they were going, but it was still dark enough that barreling up the road felt like she imagined flying would—utterly thrilling.
At first. After a few hours, she was only sore and sleepy and tired of riding. When the walls around the inn appeared on the edge of the moor, she nearly sighed in relief. Brin talked to the guards at the gate, who—despite the hour and the sour looks they gave Havilar—let them in. The horses had slowed down, plodding through the muddy field between the gate and the inn. They seemed almost grateful when Brin handed them over to a stabler in exchange for a small purse of coins.
“Won’t we need them?” Havilar asked.
“Not for a tenday at least,” Brin reminded her. “Come on.” They hiked up the short hill to the sprawling inn at its peak.
“ ‘The Bargewright Inn,’ ” Havilar said. “Is that a joke?” Brin chuckled and held the door open for her.
“Havilar.” She looked back—he was rubbing the base of his throat.
“What?”
Brin shook his head, smiling pleasantly. “I didn’t say anything.”
She looked around the taproom, still full of travelers—most sleeping on the floor, but more than a few still drinking even at the late hour. “What are we doing here?”
“Come on,” he said, crossing the taproom and heading straight for the tiredlooking innkeeper, stacking flagons behind the bar. “Goodman Bargewright?”
“Aye,” the man said. “What’s your pleasure?”
“I need a room,” Brin said. “Your best room.”
A room. Havilar’s breath caught and a flush spread across her cheeks. “One with a fireplace,” Brin added.
The innkeeper looked at him, brow furrowed. “I have one,” he said slowly. “But the chimney’s blocked up.”
Brin smiled and shrugged. “Might be fine. It’s plenty hot down here.” He pulled on his collar, as if to let in the air . . . and flashed the dark edges of a tattoo inked across the left side of his chest. Havilar wondered how far it went, and realized she was very likely about to find out.
The innkeeper’s eyebrows rose a fraction. He rummaged beneath the bar and pulled out a tarnished-looking key. “Through the door on the left, near the end of the hall. Can’t miss it.”
“Many thanks,” Brin said, sliding the man a pair of gold coins.
“Any news I should worry about?” the man asked, pocketing the coins.
“Nothing new,” Brin said. “We haven’t passed a soul on the road.”
Havilar frowned. That wasn’t true at all. She started to correct Brin, but he grabbed her hand and squeezed it, and she stopped. She squeezed his hand back.
“Though I meant to ask in Beliard after a cousin of mine who was passing this way, out of Noanar’s Hold,” he said. “Called Laird Harldrake?”
The innkeeper nodded thoughtfully. “Haven’t heard tell of him. But, I’ve heard no news out of Noanar’s Hold since Marpenoth. Good or ill.”
He picked up another flagon and dried it carefully. “ ’Course, I never do hear bad news out of Noanar’s Hold. Get a little fuss from the farther reaches, mind.”
“Hmph,” Brin said. “Well many thanks. We should leave quite early tomorrow.” The innkeeper nodded again and told Brin to be careful. Havilar flushed—a blur of shyness and anger. Did he mean her? What else would he mean?
“What was all that about cousins?” she asked Brin, as they passed down the hall.
“I’ll tell you in a bit,” he said, peering at the frame of each door they passed.
“I didn’t know you had cousins in the North,” she said, looking at the doors herself. They all looked the same, but it was better than worrying. She’d been trying very hard not to think about the last time they’d shared a bed, the last time he’d had his arms around her. She tried not to get her hopes up too quickly, to be brave and above all, careful.
And here was Brin, being the not-careful one. And all at once she found it thrilling and awful. She wasn’t supposed to be the careful one, after all.
“Brin,” she started, “I don’t know if—”
“Ah!” he cried, his fingers on a particularly battered doorframe. He looked back the way they’d come, and then down the hall again. “This one.”
“Brin,” she tried again. “Can we . . . can we talk first?”
“In a moment,” he said, unlocking the door. “Come on.”
Her stomach flipped as she stepped inside. The “best” room looked like every other inn room Havilar had ever seen, clean and shabby and sparse. A bed, a table, a chair, a window, a little fireplace that Brin had crawled half-into . . .
She frowned. “What are you doing?”
Clink. Thunk.
Brin scuttled back and Havilar saw a hole where the fire would have sat . . . a hole with the edge of a ladder peeking up out of the darkness. He smiled at her. “There we are.”
Havilar peered down into the darkness. A faint, greenish light hinted at the bottom of the ladder, fifteen feet down. Brin dumped their packs and weapons down the hole, then gestured for Havilar to go ahead.
She stepped down onto the wet stone ground, scanning the dark passage as Brin fixed the stone back into the fireplace.
“If this were a chapbook,” she said, slipping her glaive and harness back on, “this ends with you being killed by some madman, and me running screaming through a hundred tunnels.”
“Don’t be silly,” Brin said, coming to stand beside her. “You and I could handle some madman.” He took up his pack and strode ahead, toward the greenish light. “This is a secret portal the Harpers have made use of for ages. If there were a madman down here, we’d have heard of it.”
“Oh,” she said, holding tightly to her haversack’s straps. “So before, with the innkeeper, that was all Harper code-talk.”
“Right,” he said. “Don’t repeat any of that, would you? I was just asking if the portal’s behaving and such. Letting him know we’re not running from anyone.”
“Oh.”
“Sorry,” he said. “I should have told you what was going on.”
“It’s fine,” she said, even though it wasn’t.
The portal sat in a dead end of the cave, a flickering green pool in the floor. Beside it, a woman waited, the perfect picture of a chapbook witch. Wild eyes flicked over Brin and Havilar through a snarl of steel-gray hair. Purple motes of light swam around her gnarled fingers as she pointed at them. “You got a key?” she demanded.
Brin handed over the tarnished key the innkeeper had given him. She turned it over, sniffed it once, then fixed an eye on Havilar. “What’re you? Some kinda demon?”
Havilar stiffened. “A tiefling.”
“Huh.” The woman spat. “If you say so. Where you going?”
“Noanar’s Hold,” Brin said.
The woman sent the purple motes into the portal with a whispery trail of magic. “You could walk there cheaper, you know?” she said, once the portal glowed bright and ready.
“Next time,” Brin said, clearly unfazed by the portalkeeper. He held out a hand to Havilar. “Ready?”
Havilar stared at his outstretched hand. “If this were a chapbook, this would be the part where the portal eats us, you know.” The woman guffawed, and Havilar scowled at her.
Brin took hold of her hand, smiling again. “Then how would they sell more chapbooks about us?” he said, teasing. She flushed all over again, not sure of what to say, and instead of guessing, Havilar stepped into the pool of green light.
Passing through the portal felt almost like riding through the dark had— lightless, rapid, death defying. There was no wind to blow through her hair as they traveled through the fabric of the planes, and a peculiar scent like wintergreen and old wine filled her nostrils. The air around her—if it was air—was no temperature at all. Not hot, not cold, not even there.
She only felt Brin’s hand, holding tight to hers.
And then suddenly they were stepping out into the world again, through a stone doorway and into a root cellar that made the previous cave look cheery. Havilar stumbled, narrowly avoiding a thick patch of cobwebs, heavy with dead bugs. Brin, still holding her hand, pulled her back on balance.
“Thanks,” she murmured, embarrassed at her clumsiness. That wasn’t going to impress him either. She took her hand back. “How do we get out?”
“Cellar door,” Brin said, pointing to a crack of grayish light off to their left. The portal’s shifting green light flared briefly, painting his face in stark shadows. “Not better than a room at the inn, but much closer . . .” He trailed off. “Wait, did you think, back there, that I meant . . .”
“I didn’t think anything,” Havilar said.
“Gods, I’m sorry.”
She pressed through the maze of old crates and barrels. “I said it’s fine.”
“Havi . . . we should talk. When you’re ready, I mean.”
No, she thought. No, no, no. If they talked now, he’d only tell her what she didn’t want to hear. If they talked now, she wouldn’t even know what to tell him she wanted. I don’t really know me anymore, she realized.
“Later,” she said. “Definitely not down here.” She moved through the darkness toward the angled doors and heaved them open. Outside the sun was just beginning to tint the sky gray and blue. A handful of stone buildings peeked out from the edge of a forest so thick and dark that Havilar wondered if there were any way to walk through it at all. A shattered keep stood behind them, spilling stones down a rise toward the river, while new timber held new masonry in place.
Brin came to stand beside her and pointed over the forest, toward the tips of two mountains peeking over the trees. “There,” he said. “That’s where we’re heading.”
Gray morning light rushed into the cell Dahl spent the night in, wrenching his pupils wide. He flinched as the headache that had been pounding harder and harder since his flask ran dry surged up behind his eyeballs.
“Get up,” a man said. “Oota says she’ll see you now.”
When Dahl didn’t get up fast enough, the man—a big human fellow— hauled him to his feet and out the door. A second man—a half-orc—wrapped a rope around Dahl’s wrists, tying them behind his back.
They didn’t go far—down the road a ways, every step guarded by a third man and a woman sweeping the cross-paths. A door opened, and the men pushed him through it. He blinked as his eyes readjusted to the gloom.
It looked as if the villagers had torn down one of the huts to make a courtyard, and what thatch they could reclaim had been built over the space, sheltering it from the weather. Dahl was dropped in the middle of the muddy space, facing a hut whose front wall was missing and a mountain of a man standing there.
Not a man, he corrected himself. A half-orc. A half-orc woman in men’s clothing, her dark hair cropped short, her bosom crushed into a hide chestplate. She was taller than Dahl by a head and a half and outweighed him, surely, by himself again. One parent’s blood had claimed
her brutish features, her massive frame. But the cleverness in the single black eye that watched him struggle to his feet was something a human would gladly claim.
A shiver ran down Dahl’s back: Oota, and she was no one to trifle with, he was certain of that. A gesture and the big man untied Dahl—he knew as well as Oota did that it would be suicide to try anything.
“People tell me,” Oota said, “you’ve been asking how to find me. People tell me,” she continued stepping down from her dais, “you’ve been asking a lot of questions. Stirring people up. Making them worry.” She stopped in front of him. “I don’t like my people to worry.”
“You make it sound as if I were specifically harassing your folk,” Dahl said, “when I was asking everybody I found. Half-orcs, humans, elves . . .” His throbbing eyes had settled enough to see that in the dimmer corners where the firelight didn’t touch, there were scores more watching—humans and half-orcs . . . and dwarves, and half-elves, a tiefling, a pair of dragonborn. All Oota’s charges. Dahl cursed.
“You rule this place?” Dahl asked, trying again.
“I run it,” Oota said. “The parts that matter. There’s a difference.” She stooped so that their faces were nearly level—still too far for him to reach— and said softly, “One which you should appreciate, whoever you are. If I ruled this place, I’d have executed you already.”
She straightened. “First Tharra tells me she clashed with a man about your height and description, wearing one of the guard’s uniforms. Tells me I need eyes and hands ready, because someone else has a fool idea about serving the wizard and it might cost us in the end.”
“Are you going to wait for my end of it?” Dahl asked.
Oota chuckled. “What is it you think we’re doing here, son?”
Dahl tried to think of an answer. None made any more sense than “a farm for Chosen.” He saw Tharra ease in a side door, Oota’s guardsmen watching. He was caught—another mission falling apart. Time to be honest, he thought, and see what happens.
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