Ambrus returned after Ara came with soup. After some clowning and capering, it came close enough to let Solaufein rub its long ears and stroke its thick coat.

The drow marveled at the animal's strong, dense musculature and large, powerful feet and wondered at the cleric's use for such a beast. It seemed like a jester by nature, but it had good, well-honed instincts. It had smelled him all over, sniffed his wounds, and kept out of his reach before ascertaining his friendliness. Maybe it was a companion or for protection? Did she travel?

His lower body on the floor and forelegs propped on the edge of the bed, Ambrus laid his head across Solaufein's thighs with a gentleness not to be expected of a beast so large. Then he glanced at the soup bowl and discarded bread and back meaningfully a dozen times.

Solaufein grinned. "Scavenger. I was told not to feed you," he said.

The dog let out a soft, wounded whine and shifted its whole body to push its head further in the direction of the bowl.

The drow laughed and combed his fingers through the dense, red fur at the beast's broad throat. "Maybe if you can show me what you can do."

Ambrus sat up attentively and then sprang away and turned a wild circle, his tail flailing like a banner lost in the wind.

Solaufein reached for the bread. "Then sit for me."

Ambrus did so, almost with the attitude of one who seemed bored with his task.

"Down."

The dog slid forward, his belly meeting the floor, his haunches gathered close and ready to spring back up.

"Speak."

Ambrus answered with a bark that Solaufein felt echo in his chest and then the dog followed with a series of guttural whines and pitchy yipping that bordered on singing.

He couldn't help but laugh and he threw the dog a corner of the bread roll.

Ambrus got back to his feet and then blinked away. He reappeared again just as quickly and Solaufein frowned at him.

Then the dog blinked away again. And reappeared. And then he blinked again.

"What are you doing?" Solaufein asked.

The dog paused a moment and then blinked three more times in rapid succession.

It was in the middle of another round of this nonsense—four rapid blinks—that the drow began to laugh. "I see!" he said and he tore off a larger piece of bread. "You can count!"

The dog caught the bread and gnashed it between its teeth greedily.

Voices in the hall, alerted Solaufein and he turned his head.

He hadn't heard anything beyond the door at all except footsteps, which always seemed to speed up when they passed his door. This change was distinct.

Ambrus had finished his bread and was listening as well, his head tipped and his ears turning incrementally in an attempt to pick up the sounds at the best angle.

"The Council will want to see him."

"They will. When he is hale."

Ara's cutting calm was unmistakable even through the mortar and brick of the walls that separated them.

"It would have been better if you had just left him to bleed. No one wants him here."

"You do not speak for everyone, Bren."

"Now, listen here, wisewoman—"

"Yes, mock my title all you want—I am not as old as Obedai. Nevertheless, I was serving the Hordes of Krisk Tarog when you were just the drunken glimmer in your grandfather's eye. I will take you over my knee if I must, Marshal."

Solaufein wondered if Ara spoke to this Krisk Tarog with the same flippant boredom. Or if this Bren spoke to everyone with such snide derision.

"He's obviously eating," the voice of the other, the Marshal, growled back. "Get him up and present him to the Council in two days or you'll answer for it."

"Was that a threat?—" It was and Solaufein pushed the blankets away from his lap and reached for Ambrus for support as he began the shaky process of getting out of bed. "Do not play that game with me, Marshal. So, when I hear the same from one of the Councilors, I will see to just that. Now, I bid you good night."

"Just wait a minute! I will speak to this drow tonight."

"You will not."

"Look, you glassy-eyed, knife-eared know-it-all, it is my job to protect this bunged hole and see to it that I know everything about everyone that comes and goes. I know he's pretty, but there's more than one cure for a wet cunt if that's your problem."

"Enough."

It had taken more of Solaufein than he thought it would to stand and open the door, but listening to the man was akin to having ones ears throttled by the shrieks of umber hulks mid-orgy in the breeding season—which was to say, more unpleasant than even the mental image that sentence conjured. And no, this wasn't how he preferred to go to his first battle on the surface—barely able to stand, holding a bed sheet around his hips with one hand, and an old hunting knife turned herb-menace in the other—but he could not let this just go on.

He supposed it didn't say very many good things about him and his preconceived notions and prejudices that it just figured Bren was a human. On a similarly unflattering note, it also meant something to him that while Bren was taller than him, it was by mere inches. He had always had the advantage of being one of the tallest among his peers in Ust Natha, which gave him more heft and muscle and that meant a lot as a warrior.

And, given his evident surprise, Bren also took note. Clearly, there was an image he had in his head of what a drow was meant to look like and it was not being met. Either he had it engrained that all elves were willowy and frail or drow were meant to be something else entirely more absurd all together, in which case he would be disappointed no matter what drow had come.

Bren himself was little more than a bearded, but otherwise bald wall of meat and muscle, probably born of stock meant to take orders and maybe the first arrow on the front line. That he had any sort of authority had to be an accident or oversight.

"Where I come from, you would have your tongue cut out for speaking to a female like that," Solaufein said, nodding to Ara though his eyes were on Bren. "And that would just be the beginning."

"I did not think your kind were so chivalrous," Bren sneered back.

The drow tipped his head. "What is chivalrous? This is not a word among the drow." He shook his head. "In the Underdark you would be punished for not knowing your place—somewhere above the kobolds kept to amuse the spiders but lower than the body servants the mistresses leave chained to the bedposts."

The human looked to Ara. "This is the filth you saved!"

Solaufein snorted. "Surrounded by such paragons as yourself she will no doubt come to see her error."

Bren looked like he wanted to answer or even step forward and act, but Ambrus appeared then in the hall and insinuated himself between everyone present to lean his heavy weight against Ara's legs, effectively barricading her from both men. His attention was pointedly fixed on Bren.

The presence of such a large and intimidating figure as the dog put a stop to whatever physical confrontation the human had in mind.

Ara patted the dog affectionately and rubbed his ears. Then she looked up and her demeanor grew cold again as she gave the men each a flat stare. "If you two are quite done, I am tired. Bren, if I see you again before the Council calls for me I will personally feed you to a Marilith. Solaufein—room."

Bren turned a few shades of red and drew in a sharp breath, winding up to retort, but then reconsidered and stormed off without a word. This indicated to Solaufein that Ara was perfectly capable of summoning such a demon or that Bren at least believed she was and he was not sure if this was a comforting notion or not.

When he was certain Bren was gone, he turned away as well.

Inside the room, he all but collapsed back into bed, the effort of standing upright for so long after so many days in bed and without food or water having exhausted what little energy he had. He needed to get up and start training and working his muscles again immediately as this was completely unacceptable for a warrior of his caliber.

Ara helped him untangle himself from the sheet while maintaining some modicum of modesty and then situated the blankets for him again, though it was unnecessary.

A muscle was pulled taut in her jaw and he could tell there was something on her mind just by the tension that brewed between them.

"Out with it," he said.

She glanced at him. "You baited him," she said, scolding. "I was hoping that, given how civilized you were behaving before, you were above that kind of behavior."

Solaufein scoffed. "You should have crushed his skull for what he said to you."

"You are on the surface now, Solaufein," she pressed. "We do not solve our conflicts here by killing each other—as expedient as that would be. This is true even in the Hordelands."

He huffed. "What are the Hordelands? And what is this place?"

She sighed and took a seat on a wooden stool, folding her skirts around herself and wrapping her hands in her sleeves. "Without maps to look at it will all make little sense to someone of the Underdark if you did not know your relation to the surface."

Solaufein frowned and considered this. Suldanessellar had been very close to Ust Natha and it had been where on the surface? He had heard the name before a dozen times when spying on Phaere and Mother Ardulace. Tenthar? No, that wasn't right. Tentyr? Tentry? Tethyr. He glanced at her and then looked away. "Where I come from does not matter."

"I suppose it doesn't," she agreed. Was she disappointed he had not told her? Did she care? It was impossible to say. "The Hordelands are a vast territory, also known as the Endless Wastes, but that makes them sound uninhabitable, when you will find that the tribes and the travelers here do just fine." She gestured to the space around them. "Where we are is known as the Copper Hold, a fortified sanctuary of sorts and a trading post. We number a little more than five hundred together, not counting the travelers within our walls at any given time."

"A sanctuary?"

She shrugged. "Monks of some order or another came down from one of their mountains and built this place centuries ago. They meant it as a place to honor their god by offering aid to everyone who came to them. Back then, it was just the sanctuary, what the Keep is now, and the walls. But the last of the monks died ages ago. Now, there is the library, what we are above, and the market and the smiths and the homes both in and outside the walls."

"It sounds idyllic," Solaufein murmured. "Why do you have a militia?"

"We have some petty crime and we try to maintain the same spirit of opened arms that the monks founded this place with so as not to offend the god it was originally dedicated to, but there are always people that do mean harm." Ara shrugged again. "However, Bren's job is less important than he would like, which annoys him. It is one of his objections to me. I hold more power with the Council, though I am an outsider."

"Because you are an elf?" the drow asked. "I cannot help but get the impression that he was bothered by little more than my otherness than anything to do with what a drow is."

She shrugged. "Bren's little-mindedness is nothing new to me and it should not trouble you. There are dwarves that trade here regularly from the mountains, human tribes that are all unique in their ways, and elves of this region that make our differences pale by comparison and I do not think that any of them will take exception to you. Those that think like him are uncommon here. This land is not kind and allies, no matter how grudging, are necessary to survive. When people decide to hate one another in the Hordelands, their troubles are typically rooted in much deeper troubles than how their ears or flesh differ in shape and color."

Solaufein hummed a bit. "That is reassuring I suppose."

Ara nodded and considered him for a moment. "You did not need to defend me," she said at length.

He shrugged.

"Why?"

Solaufein shrugged again. "A reflex, maybe. It is nothing less than what I would be expected to do for a female of my house," he said.

"I would not think a drow female would require defending."

He smirked wryly. "No, a drow female would not and she would punish a male for defending her. But it would be less harsh than the punishment for not speaking up in such a circumstance."

She sighed. "I forget sometimes how complicated drow society can be," she murmured.

Ara stood and Solaufein watched her as she set about cleaning up her worktable and putting things away.

It was just when he began to drift off, little by little, that he heard her humming again and it roused him back to consciousness.

"I never meant to fall by you unseen and far off I can hear you singing," she whispered, her voice lilting gently. "It comes swiftly now, sweeping me away, and it's been too long since I have seen your smile. Then everything fades and I am gone, but far off I can hear you sing."

"A singing priestess," he murmured. "You are just full of surprising talents."

She glanced back at him. "A critical drow—in many ways you are not all that surprising. Predictability can be a comfort."

He laughed at that.

Ara reached overhead and retrieved a candleholder set with a single candle burned down nearly to its base, which she brought to his bedside and set atop the low table at his right. "You look exhausted," she said. "I will leave you now so you can get your rest. Ambrus?"

The dog had settled down beside the bed, facing the doorway, and lifted his head to regard the woman.

She smiled. "It looks like you have made a friend. If you mind him terribly, I can take him with me."

Solaufein shook his head. "He can stay."

Ara nodded and gestured to the candle. "If you need something in the night, you can blow on the wick to light it," she said. "I will be back in the morning. If you need something before then, send Ambrus for me. Ambrus?"

The dog gave what appeared to be a sharp nod of understanding and she rubbed his ears affectionately before turning away to the door.

"Good night, Solaufein."

"Aluve."


Ara did not come in the morning. Or, at least Solaufein did not see her. A fidgety boy with knobby knees and ears too big for his head—barely more than a child even by human standards, Solaufein imagined—came instead.

It was the sound of him clumsily tripping over Ambrus and the dog's offended yelp that woke the drow.

The boy wrung his hands as he stumbled to attention. "Ah, the Lady is busy this morning—Razari's baby came early. She told me to have a bath drawn for you. It's, um, down the hall."

Solaufein gestured to the footlocker. "Pants."

The boy blinked uncomprehendingly.

The drow huffed. "Unless I am to parade down the hall naked, get me some clothes, dalhar."

The boy scrambled to answer and Solaufein took the offered clothing without a word.

"She is a midwife then?" he asked.

The boy was nosing around some of the components on Ara's worktable and turned sharply back around to look at Solaufein. "Ah, uh, yes. The Lady helps with all the births here. She, uh, does the blessin's and namin's too. And marriages. Well, basically any time you need a hand waved and the gods called up, that's what the Lady does."

The boy led him down the hallway—more stone walls with little to make them distinct—and to another door.

Inside was also a bedroom but this more comfortably situated and furnished for a guest or a resident with a wardrobe and two windows rather than the meager slot he had been allotted before. Clearly, the other room was meant for patients in a critical state, which justified the nearness of Ara's tools. She might have had a dozen such workplaces for all he knew.

But the only thing that really interested him was in the far corner of the room. There was a metal tub behind a screen with steam still rising from the surface of the water and beside it a stool piled with towels and fresh soaps.

Drow were decadent, ruthless, corrupted people, but they were also people who valued personal hygiene. Lavish soaps, perfumes distilled from exotic surface flowers, bath salts mixed with herbs to pamper their flesh and soften scars, and oils for their hair to make braiding and beading it easier were all common enough. And while warriors, for the most part, might have forewent some of the scented treatments for the sake of avoiding detection on missions, neither gender was excluded from these rituals. For the males it was a matter of pleasing any female that might call on them and females simply sought to please themselves.

At that moment, however, Solaufein was just glad to see soap and hot water.

He dismissed the boy and wasted no time stripping and settling into the tub. Goddess, it was bliss to his abused muscles and to his surprised, it didn't hurt what was left of the wounds…

Solaufein ran a hand over his abdomen as he thought of the marks and then huffed in amusement when nothing but skin met his touch. It said something of the woman, either of her abilities or something else, that she could work without disturbing his rest.

Reminding himself to thank her for it, he dropped back to soak his hair with water and then reached for what appeared to be the shampoo.

Though he certainly did not feel clean, he found that there was no dried blood to clear away. He imagined Ara must have tried to bathe him in bed when he was unconscious. It was an interesting thought—a priestess powerful enough to counteract the effects of a poison concocted by one of Lloth's Handmaidens all by herself bathing her own patients.

It was either ferocious meticulousness or humility unimaginable to a drow.

He stood to wash his body, lathering the soap and then bending to rinse when he was finished.

When he was done, he wrung out his hair and stepped from the tub, dripping on the floor until he procured a towel from the stack on the stool.

He was in the middle of toweling his hair when he heard a scuffle in the hallway laid over by Ara's voice, though it was difficult to tell since she was shouting.

"Kela! Kela!"

He understood when the door suddenly bumped open—he hadn't really thought to lock it—and a young girl fell backward into the room and landed on her rump. She looked back at Solaufein and, though she turned an unflattering shade of red, she couldn't entirely stop herself from giggling. Then she was hauled upright by Ara and shoved outside to join a gaggle of other tittering, notably less shameful girls the same age and the whole lot was shoveled down the hallway.

Ara returned a minute later and kicked the door shut behind her with a huff. She looked tired, though she moved with no lack of energy in a colorless, unadorned dress of plain cloth cut wide at the shoulders with sleeves pinned at the elbow and a skirt split on each side to the hip, revealing the slip beneath—work clothes meant to allow movement and plain to make washing them easy.

To Solaufein, she looked more like a slave in rags than a servant of any god. But now that she finally stood in the light, he could not help but note that her hair was not black but a fairly striking dark blue. He wondered if other moon elves shared such coloring.

He had arranged himself on the stool with a towel in his lap, still combing out his hair. "So…?" he began. "How did the birth go?"

"Too soon," she said, still scowling at the door. "The week will tell."

He nodded and glanced at the door. "So, will I have an audience every time I bathe?" he wondered.

She rolled her eyes. "Those were Obedai's apprentices—like herding distracted kittens," she snorted. "I said that you would not face much overt scrutiny here, but that does not mean you are not a thing of curiosity and the apprentices read too many badly written novels."

Solaufein snorted in amusement and watched her as she crossed the room to check the bed and the wardrobe, as if going over the boy's work of that morning. "And you? What is your excuse for wandering freely in and out during my ablutions?"

"You are my patient," she answered dismissively. "And you have nothing I have not already seen hanging twixt the legs of every man-thing that can swing it around and boast about it length, girth, or otherwise."

For Solaufein, it felt good to laugh at something genuinely funny after so long pretending to find humor in anything others in Ust Natha found it in.

"Here."

He looked up and saw that Ara was offering a file and a small knife to tend his nails. He accepted them with a nod. "Have you a tie for my hair?"

"Mm, I keep mine trimmed, as you see," she noted, combing her short locks with her fingers. "But I have some twine somewhere.

Solaufein nodded and considered the length for a moment. It was not really practical any more, was it? He had never spent as much time on his appearance as some of his brothers had and he had no status here to maintain that his hair could speak toward. In the Underdark every little detail was needed to make the correct impression, but the surface seemed much more about words than the subtle cues and body language of down below.

He fingered the ends as Ara returned from some drawer or cabinet with a bit of twine for him.

"What is it?"

He hated to ask, but he knew he might just as soon end up scalping himself if he made the attempt on his own. "If you would, I think it might be practical to cut some of this."

The woman considered him a moment and then circled around behind him. He straightened when she swept his hair back over his shoulders and ran her fingers through its length, measuring out how it fell down his back, nearly to his tailbone. "There certainly is a lot of it," she agreed. She hummed and her fingers curled around and fooled a bit unnecessarily with the varying lengths of his hair as she fanned the white locks out over his back. Then she pressed two fingertips into a spot just between his shoulders. "How about there?"

It would be strange, certainly. But not so short that he could not at least tie it back. "Do it."

Ara turned away, presumably to retrieve shears from somewhere within the room. She was back a moment later and began to tie off sections of his hair to make less of a mess when she cut it.

"You never told me how you found me," Solaufein said after a while, occupied with trimming and cleaning his nails.

The question had been circling his mind. Surely his portal had not landed him inside the keep, which was presumably protected by some kind of magic. Had she just stumbled on him? It was almost too great a stroke of chance to believe.

"Does it matter?"

He shrugged. "I suppose not."

She worked for a bit, cutting sections of hair and then combing the length out to make sure she did not miss any stray pieces. She was nearly finished before she spoke again. "It was night and I was in the middle of my reverie," she began. "I had a vision."

Solaufein frowned. "A dream?"

Ara appeared at his side, four cut tails of his hair gathered in her hands, which she set aside with the towel he had used before to dry it. "I do not dream when I reverie."

He raked his fingers through his hair. It seemed to end too soon and his head felt too light and foreign on his shoulders. "What did you see?"

"I was outside, in the moonlight, out on one of the plains not far from here. Then a star landed at my feet. When I knelt to touch it, I realized it was bleeding." She paused a moment, as if remembering. Then she looked at him. "When I woke, my heart was racing and I knew it was not a dream. So I dressed and I took a horse and Ambrus and I went. Ambrus indicated that he smelled something nearly a mile before we reached you and led me the rest of the way." She shook her head. "You were in a horrible state."

She walked around him again and gently began to smooth his hair back into a low club and tie it.

He frowned, still picking at his nails. "Do you often have visions?"

"Never." She shrugged. "I am thankful to whoever sent it, though. It seems to have worked."

Solaufein looked at her, surprised. "So… you do not think it was necessarily your god?" he asked.

The priestess shrugged. "I do not know who watches your path. As a cleric I am open to divine energy and sometimes that means energies other than my goddess'." She patted his shoulder. "Get dressed. I will introduce you to Obedai and then show you the village."


Kela (Elven)- Leave.

Dalhar (Drowic)- Child

If my elvish is incorrect blame the fact that I have a shoddy tel'quessir translator tool. The song Ara sings I got from the Google and it was cited on a forum as a Harper ballad.