Those godsdamned gods, going and ascending barely before you've pushed your way out of your mother and besmirching your perfectly good name forevermore. At least I was young enough to pick up a serviceable nickname without too much fuss.

- Cyric of Kelemvor, called Cyr the Searing, Doomguide, 1380 DR

RICKY

(Black sun, jawless skull)

3 Mirtul

Ricky had arrived in Baldur's Gate last night, set to seek his fortune. That morning he'd woken up with the whispers of Kel and Ariel spinning in his head, and that afternoon he nearly found his fortune on a bus bumper. He was rescued from this ignoble end to the saga of his life by a gallant knight in shining pigtails and what he'd at first mistaken for an Ilmatari school uniform. Once on the other side of the street he wondered briefly if he should try a swoon, but this particular knight seemed to be one of those duty-bound types, with all the natural chivalry of an herb rack that hadn't any chives, and the look on her face implied that while it was her duty to save him it was certainly not her duty to accept his grateful offering of sex afterward. Not that he was particularly turned on by Ilmatari schoolgirls. Or pigtails.

"That was fast," he said in lieu of any such offering, and stood up.

She blinked at him.

"Thought I was a goner."

"Well," she said with a hint of a smile, "you're not."

Ricky's first guess was that she was about his age. He would have guessed younger if she weren't (as he quickly noticed) taller than him. He would have guessed older if it weren't for the stockings (people still wore stockings?) impossibly straight as though she'd glued them to the backs of her knees. If it weren't for her pleated skirt and matching blazer. If it weren't for her pigtails, for the figurative love of Ilmater.

"So how old are you?"

"Pardon?"

Yes, she said pardon. Like some weird hybridization of schoolgirl and schoolmarm. "Oh," he said, putting his hands in his pockets and quickly jerking one out to catch the file under his arm, "what I'm going to say next, see, depends on whether you're legal or not."

It was really a stupid joke, he just wanted to see if she'd blush or if she'd slap him, but her laugh was surprisingly husky and made him hope she was legal. "That's relative, isn't it?"

"In which case, seventeen."

"Eighteen."

"You're very well-preserved."

She looked conspicuously downward. "So are you."

"Point. Say, do you get it as much as I do?"

"That would depend on how much you get it, wouldn't it?"

"Yeah, it would." He tapped his chin. "I figure maybe once a week, more in foreign climes."

"Not bad."

"That's what I tell myself at night."

She laughed again. "So, is this a foreign clime for you?"

"Oh yeah. I'm from down south. About a yard shy of Nashkel."

"Oh. I was going to ask if your dad forgot something for the office." She nodded at the file. "Unless he's a serious commuter."

"Oh. Oh no. The thing is, well, I lied."

"About what?"

"About coming from the south."

"That's a quick retraction."

"Yeah, well. Actually I'm from the Sword Coast Home for Little Windwalkers. This," he brandished the file, "contains the secrets of my past."


As it turned out, the secrets of his past consisted of basically "we don't know anything about the secrets of your past." He rather hoped Ilmatari Schoolgirl, Ginger Bloodhawk, didn't remember to ask for follow-up. That is if they ever spoke to each other again.

Except there was an exception, and that was a copy of the Found Child certificate, dated from Flamerule of 2582, under the "working name" of Devaric Caradoon. He'd noticed from a plaque he passed on the way into Little Windwalkers that one of the founding members was a Bronica Caradoon. Conclusions were easily drawn, though he quickly dismissed the one that he was actually Bronica Caradoon's secret child since, according to the plaque, she'd died a hundred and fifty years ago.

The waiter was starting to give him the fisheye, so Ricky threw everything back into the folder, finished off the last refill of soda, paid, and left. He was a block away before realizing he forgot to tip, and counted it as no loss.

Devaric Caradoon. It shortened to Ricky also, so would work nicely. Ricky Caradoon, had a nice ring to it. He'd never been particularly attached to Erik Rizzo, though until he got round to doing up the paperwork for an official change he had no objection to it. That was the name his might-as-well-call-them-parents-in-absence-of-biological-parents had given him, and he got along with them all right these days. Funny thing, that. He hadn't actually left home until he'd started getting along better.

Of course, if he'd left before that he wouldn't have left with so much in the bank for his money cards, or a loan card that billed home "for emergencies" when all three of them knew what Ricky could be capable of classifying as an emergency and how little attention the other two tended to devote to the bills, or contact information for friendly aunts and uncles and cousins up and down the coast and as far afield as Silverymoon and Athkatla. Not that he'd any intention of using the last, but it was a nice thought. Oh yes, and they'd made sure he packed Good clothes, button-down shirts and carefully ironed slacks, so that the staff could try to pretend this particular little windwalker made good and was maybe headed to Peldvale or Waterdeep or Candlekeep in the fall.

Ricky debated with himself over the advantages of staying with the Good clothes, decided that if he kept them on tomorrow he'd just look like an amateur stuffed-up accountant fleeing financial scandal, and so changed back into a purple band shirt and black denims in the hotel room (he'd noticed he always seemed to look like someone like that so why try to deny it?). He had another night charged at the hotel, and decided he might as well use it. There was a theater across the street where he went to watch a few movies that were awkward going to with parents. Before flopping out on the bed, he set the alarm on the clock radio.

He dreamed about a girl with dark hair who grabbed hold of him and outraced light and sound. He dreamed about a dragon. He dreamed the dragon came this close to biting off Kel's head before it dissolved and Ariel laughed and laughed her hair in braids. "What do you want?" he asked, and she said "What any woman wants from her man." And then he'd stabbed her and the knife was in pink pieces wreathed in smoke and Kel said "Ariel" and he had no right to say that because he was such an incredible asshole so he stabbed him, too, with a jagged piece of the knife, and Kel smiled and talked about what a great time it was, what a great life. "You never deserved her," he said. "You don't even deserve that skank. Fucking nearly got us killed for the Ring of Winter you greedy son of a bitch."

Kel said still smiling "Fucking actually killed me."

He dreamed his real mother sang to him, his real mother the artist he'd gradually constructed over the years, with poetry published in little magazines and a library bound in leather with ribbon bookmarks, and the song was so very profound he couldn't understand a word of it.


4 Mirtul

He found Ginger Bloodhawk's phone number in the pocket of his Good pants. He decided that was the safest place for it, and he called her and asked her to change her contact name from Rizzo to Caradoon. Starting small, that was the ticket.

She called back as he was heading down the street. He didn't finish realizing what the vibrating thing was (he'd set it there for the theater and not changed it back), getting out the phone, and fumbling with it before she'd left a message. The message said "What makes you think I programmed you into my phone, anyway?"

"Huh," he asked the air, "what did make me think that?"

A long dark braid and a laugh.

Maybe this was the beginnings of a fetish. When he was thirty-forty and either rich and correspondingly dissolute or poor and correspondingly dissolute maybe he would pay pretty girls to tie him up with their braided hair and be witty and laugh at their own jokes, which would be all right with him because they'd be good jokes.

Before heading north, he'd run Weave searches for advice on hitching rides, excluding the advice that just said not to. Ricky made his way to what had been described as a plum spot near an onramp onto Route 7, up the coast, which meant he had higher chances of finding someone who wouldn't assume he would up and stab them on the road. He'd written up a sign that said Waterdeep, Scenic Route OK. There was a bench and a metal pole that he guessed used to hold the sign for a bus stop. The seat looked bolted to the sidewalk; maybe the city couldn't bother to take it out. This was fine with Ricky. He sat on it, plugged in his ear buds, and turned his H-Shell to a suitable Break Enchantment screamfest before lifting up the sign and settling in.

By the time a junker with Tethyr plates pulled over, the H-Shell had shuffled its way to the last song of Thirdborn Sun's first topside album. It would've been poetically perfect if it were a drow who leaned over and cranked down the passenger-side window halfway – in real life, it was a plain old elf, except he had what looked like tattoos on his face. There were also tattoos on his arms, snaking down in interweaving lattices from under the sleeves of his dark brown tee, but Ricky's first thought, Wow how did he hold still for that, concerned the angular face with its lattices and leaves, also partly concealed by a muss of hair. Then he realized it was probably face paint. All dolled up from a Living Sword Coast get-together or something.

"The scenic route, huh?" said the elf. All told he looked about as shifty a sort as Ricky.

Ricky pressed the stop button and cut off Thirdborn Sun in the middle of the chorus. "Well if you're in some kind of hurry that's okay too. It's just I'm not in any."

"Oh. I'm not, as it happens."

"That's good, right?"

He shrugged. His eyes were tilted almonds and before seeing them Ricky hadn't known that shade of browny-blue was possible. "Sure. Good. You can pay for your own hotel, food, etcetera."

"Sure."

They'd been a talk-silent hour up the Coast Way when Ricky got used to the car's jolting and figured that if he hadn't been asked by now he wasn't going to be asked. He turned off Shades of Saerloon and ventured, somewhat awkwardly, "Ricky Caradoon."

His eye moved incrementally toward Ricky for a moment. "Marius Aelrindel."

"Nice to meet you," said Ricky, and turned Shades back on to try and drown out his embarrassment.

Last night Ricky had stayed up later than he'd meant to at first. He was pretty sure there'd been advice about falling asleep in strange cars but right then he didn't care. He dreamed he was on horseback. At least he dreamed that until, in the dream, Kel's blow to his own back catapulted him to the ground.

"Ah," said Kel with a grin, "this is the life."

"Sure, Kel," said Ricky. "Whatever. Hey Kel, you think I'm going crazy?"

"You stabbed me, 'Ricky,'" said Kel. "What in Pandemonium do you think I'll say to that?"

When he woke up the H-Shell was out of power, and Aelrindel hadn't stabbed him or strangled him or shoved him into the trunk for future homicidal purposes. Aelrindel looked for a moment like he was about to ask who Kel was, but he didn't, and Ricky didn't bring it up.