Jess sat on the roof of the Silver Unicorn Inn, staring up at the night sky, her eyes easily picking out the constellations that she had first been shown by Gorion from the heights of the watchtower at Candlekeep. The Hunter. The Dragon. The Weeping Maiden. The legends associated with each of them unspooled in her memory, and she felt some wonder that the stars and the stories could remain unchanged when virtually every other aspect of her life had been altered almost beyond recognition.

Including herself.

She felt the vibration as someone stepped onto the roof from the window behind her, smiled as a slight scuffling and muffled curse announced that Khalid had slipped on the slate tiles of the moderately inclined slope. A moment later, the half elf joined her, seating himself gingerly.

"I'd leave the rooftop work to Imoen, if I were you," she advised him.

"She's welcome to it," he agreed with a grimace. "I'll take the ground under my feet any d-day." He looked up at the stars for a long moment. "We m-missed you at dinner."

Jess shrugged. "Wasn't hungry." She paused, then asked hesitantly, "Jaheira – she's all right, isn't she?" After they had regrouped, the druid's scorching had proven to be the worst of the injuries sustained. They had seemed relatively mild at the time, but Jess had not seen her since they had moved from the vermin-infested inn where they had been staying to their present location, one of the best establishments in Baldur's Gate. She sighed with relief as Khalid nodded.

"She's f-fine," he said, then gave her a sly sideways glance before adding, "She even came up with a spell to regrow her hair."

Jess groaned, dropping her head onto her knees, but he chuckled quietly and patted her shoulder. "It's all right," he assured her. "You made the best k-kind of mistake: one where no one got seriously hurt."

"The best kind of mistake is one that doesn't get made," she disagreed with him.

"If you're not making any mistakes, you're n-not trying," he advised her seriously. "The important thing is to learn from the mistakes that you make." He paused, then asked, "So, what did you learn tonight?"

She snorted, shaking her head. "That I have no business being a leader." She cut him off as he started to reply. "Khalid, someone could have died tonight! Jaheira could have been killed because I was thinking of other things when I should have been paying attention to what Minsc was getting!"

"Perhaps Minsc is a greater liability than asset, then," Khalid suggested in an off-hand tone. "There are other warriors to be found in Baldur's Gate, more stable. Perhaps one of them would be better suited to our quest?"

She gave him an incredulous look, but his expression was unreadable. "It wasn't his fault!" she protested. "He may need some supervision, but he's got a heart of gold. And he's a damn good fighter; finding someone who can use a sword and a bow as well as he can would be hard. Besides," she continued, "if we lose him, we'll lose Dynaheir, as well. Do you really want me to have to find another spellcaster as well as a fighter?"

"No," Khalid admitted with a smile, "but I wanted to see how you would respond to the suggestion. You answered the way a leader would, analyzing his strengths and weaknesses and looking at the larger picture as well as what was right in front of you. Nice job." As often happened when he was teaching her, his stutter had vanished entirely.

She glared at him. "I hate it when you do that," she grumbled. "I don't know why I'm leading, anyway. Either you or Jaheira would do a better job."

"Gorion wanted us to teach you," he replied simply. "A good leader can also follow when necessary, but one who only knows how to follow will be lost when there is no one to lead. Jaheira and I may not always be with you."

"That's not going to happen anytime soon, is it?" Jess asked, feeling a twinge of alarm. If Jaheira were angry enough about tonight's debacle...

"Not willingly, no," he assured her, then sighed, his face somber and eyes distant, "but it's a chancy life that we lead, and not all partings are willing." Realizing that the conversation had taken a melancholy turn, he changed the subject. "Did the sewer cleaners have any idea what all those b-bodies were doing there?"

Jess nodded. "I spoke to the foreman. He said that they had heavy rains a few days before we got here. The sewers flooded, and the place we were in was a low spot, so stuff tends to collect there, anyway. With the floods, all the dead bodies got washed out of the tunnels and fetched up there, against one of the grates. Perfect breeding place for carrion crawlers."

Khalid looked dubious. "There were a l-lot of bodies down there."

"There've been more," Jess told him. "The foreman said they've been pulling two or three a day out of the sewers, and those are just the ones that they find. The Iron Throne has been busy."

Khalid's normally mild grey eyes took on a steely glint. "We're going to have to do something about that," he said without a trace of a stutter.

"If we can," Jess said with a sigh, thinking back to the fiasco of a few hours ago.

"We will," he promised her, getting carefully to his feet and laying a reassuring hand on her shoulder. "I'd suggest t-taking tomorrow off, though. I think we'd all benefit from sleeping in on comfortable beds."

"Sounds good to me," she agreed, thinking with some anticipation of the deep featherbed in her own room. "You go on in," she told him. "I'm going to stay out here a while longer."

He nodded silently and made it to the window with a minimum of slipping. Jess watched until he was through the window, then returned her gaze to the stars, thinking of unwilling partings and hearing the legends of the past unfolding in her mind in Gorion's familiar and much missed voice.