"You want us to bring you what?" Arrow interjected.
"That will do, Arrow," said Jaheira repressively. "I am the party leader. Run along with Khalid and let me handle this."
"Bandit scalps," repeated Officer Vai. "The whole scalp, intact. That's very important."
"You mean like a scalp on your head?" Arrow said, swaying slightly and pointing to her own. Jaheira tried again to shoo her away. Unfortunately, the ranger was better at holding her ground than holding her ale, and she would not be shifted. "Right, so let's just recap. If I am understanding your proposition correctly, you want us to rip off hair and skin from the bandits' dead bodies and bring them to you right here in this tavern?"
"Indeed," replied Vai.
"What are you, some kind of psychopath?" Arrow slurred.
Officer Vai was standing, arms folded over her Flaming Fist insignia glaring at Arowan. Behind her Jaheira was pinching the bridge of her nose while Rasaad and Xan looked on with pained expressions. Fortunately, most of the officer's contingent were lodging elsewhere, but a handful of mercenaries were looking up from their ales with increasingly unfriendly eyes.
"I can tell you are feeling better Arrow," said Jaheira through gritted teeth. "I cannot imagine how our group has managed to cope these last few days without your unique approach to diplomacy."
Khalid gave them a thumbs up from the bar and started up the stairs with Imoen, beckoning the rest of them to follow, but Arrow wasn't finished.
"This creep is hanging around a public house offering gold in exchange for bits of peoples' skins!" she howled in outrage, "I'm sorry, am I the only one here who is not ok with this?"
"This 'creep' happens to be an officer of the Flaming Fist," said Vai curtly, "I realise it's a bloody business but I require this as proof that the bandits have been killed."
"All this proves is that somebody has been killed," corrected Arrow, jabbing her tankard in the angry officer's face. A wave of beer hit the rim and splashed onto Vai's boots. "But it doesn't prove that the dead somebody was a bandit! Tell me, genius, what's to stop a bandit from killing me, flaying off my scalp, bringing it to you and getting paid for it?"
"If it was your scalp?" retorted Vai. "Y'know, I reckon I'd be ok with that."
"Xan! Rasaad!" Jaheira barked as Officer Vai started to finger the hilt of her sword, "Take Arowan upstairs right now! Use force if necessary!"
Xan wished fervently that he had bought a second Hold Person scroll to use on Arrow before she got them into a full-blown tavern brawl with the Flaming Fist. As it was Rasaad came to the party's rescue. He seized the intoxicated girl and hoisted her bodily over his shoulder. Jaheira nodded approvingly.
"Forgive me Arowan," he said, though Arrow was still hollering at Officer Vai and did not appear to have noticed. "This is for your own good."
"The woman needs locking up!" the ranger howled as Rasaad carried her firmly to the upper floor of the Jovial Juggler. "Bandit scalps! She's either a ghoul or an imbecile! Probably both!"
Rasaad sped up, leaving Jaheira to apologise profusely and offer to buy the mercenaries a round. At the top of the stairs, Imoen was holding a door open and the monk ran through it with Arrow, placing her carefully into a wooden chair. Somehow during the climb, she had managed to cling onto her beer, hardly spilling any. He gently tried to relieve her of it, but her fingers tightened like a vice.
With hindsight letting her drink while Imoen told them about the curse may not have been wise. As soon as they had settled at a table in the Jovial Juggler, Imoen had tried to explain to Arrow and the rest of the party what the deal was with Gorion, the geas and Freya. It was a lot to process and the ranger decided to process it with copious amounts of alcohol. She had just reached the point where Jaheira felt it might be best to get the girl away from the bar, when Officer Vai accosted them with her offer to buy bandit scalps.
Arrow was swaying in her chair now, clutching the beer possessively and eyeing Imoen with a bleary gaze.
"So, we were all invisible to each other?" she asked sceptically in a drunken drawl. "How would that even work? Candlekeep wasn't that big. Wouldn't we be walking into each other all the time?"
"No, no, no! You weren't invisible, it was a memory spell!" said Imoen, exasperated. "You could absolutely see each other, but Gorion made it so that you'd forget the instant you looked away."
Arrow groaned and rocked back in her chair. According to Imoen everything she had ever believed about herself was utterly untrue. Gorion had rescued her along with a dozen other orphans from being sacrificed in a temple of Bhaal by their own mothers. Knowing that Candlekeep would never take in as many as twelve children at once, and certain that the cultists would return for them eventually, he had protected them with a complex series of spells. Chief among them was an enchantment which tricked everybody, including the children themselves, into believing that they were all one person.
"A memory spell? Wasn't that d- dangerous?" asked Khalid.
"Of course! Very!" nodded Imoen.
"Why?" asked Arrow curiously, dropping her chair back onto all four legs.
"Ok," said Imoen. She had a feeling she would need to explain all of this again once Arrow was sober. "Say you are outside with your bow and arrows doing target practise in the yard, yeah? Then Draxle comes along. She looks up and sees you shooting but immediately forgets you exist. You see her walk between you and the target but then you forget that she exists. Then…" she mimed drawing back a bowstring and shooting her. "Gorion created me partly to prevent those kinds of accidents."
"How? According to you there were loads of us, and it's not like you can be everywhere at once."
"Actually in a way I can," said Imoen carefully. "Gorion took a tiny piece from each of your souls and wove them together to make me. I link you together subconsciously."
"He made you. Out of me?" repeated Arrow for the fifth time that evening.
"Yes, you and also Freya and Draxle and Afoxe. All of you. A small piece of your souls lives in me."
This was the part which was creeping Arrow out the most. She leaned over and prodded Imoen with her finger. The girl was warm and squishy and looked very decidedly human. There was nothing, apart from her pink hair, to suggest that there was anything unnatural about her.
"So… so you're not real?" asked Arrow.
"I AM REAL!" the girl screeched.
For some reason Arrow's question seemed to infuriate Imoen. She slammed down her drink and got up, striding across the room. For a moment the others thought she might actually be about to hit Arrow, but then Khalid got up and put a comforting hand on her arm. This gesture seemed to calm her down a bit, but she didn't stop pacing and waving her arms.
"That's what Gorion thought too!" she fumed, "I'm not 'real' so he could treat me however he liked! Putting that strangling curse on me and telling his friends," she waved a hand at Khalid and Jaheira, "That he only had one ward. He never threw me a party like he did for the rest of you, not until Draxle noticed and started insisting!"
Jaheira and Khalid were grimacing. They had been great friends of Gorion and were clearly not comfortable with hearing him talked about in this way. Khalid suggested gently that perhaps he'd had good reasons for what he'd done, while Jaheira pointed out sharply that missing a birthday party was hardly the worst thing that had ever happened to a child. This only enraged Imoen further.
"That's just an example! These things matter to children!" she insisted angrily. "It isn't the party itself, it's the fact that he made it so obvious that he didn't care. He threw a big one for the others, you all had it on the same day every year."
"That's why he always made me have a party!" exclaimed Arrow. They stared at her. "Sorry, it's just, I have so many memories that are different now… Gorion would throw this stupid lavish party for me every year, even though he knew that I hated parties and I always begged him not to. He must have been doing it for the sake of the others."
"You weren't the only one who hated Gorion's parties," sighed Imoen, "Thorg detested them too, but Freya and Draxle loved them and they were his little princesses. I reckon he'd have painted the whole castle pink for the occasion if one of them had asked him to. You all had to go though, otherwise it would have created too many incompatible memories. He kept you apart as much as he could most of the time. Assigned you to different jobs and different tutors. But he couldn't have everyone in Candlekeep buzzing about the party for days afterwards while half his wards had no idea what they were talking about. Even his spells wouldn't have been enough to compensate for that."
"So, either none of us had a party, or all of us did," said Arrow.
"Not all of us," snapped Imoen, "He didn't include me. He could have. It wouldn't have been any extra effort, but he made a point of always leaving me out! It's like he was punishing me for something. He never bothered to hire me tutors like he did for the rest of you, I had to teach myself! You want to know why I'm a lousy thief? That's why! I didn't even want to be a thief, I wanted to be a mage, but according to Gorion fake-people aren't worth educating. Unless he wanted me to do something he didn't even respond when I spoke to him. Not unless one of you lot was there watching."
"I had no idea Imoen. I'm sorry," said Arrow quietly.
Khalid exchanged a look with his wife. He was fiddling with his sword like he always did when he was feeling anxious or guilty about something, and he seemed profoundly uncomfortable. When Imoen mentioned that she felt like Gorion was 'punishing' her, he opened his mouth as if to say something, but Jaheira shook her head a fraction and he shut it again.
"You say the two of you weren't that close? Well if that's true you were the only one!" Imoen ranted on. The others got the impression that she had wanted to get this off her chest for a long time. "He was 'Daddy' to all the rest of you, and he loved you like you were his own kids. But not me! Oh no! I was just a spell, this… this thing he made. I didn't matter because I wasn't real."
She stopped striding up and down the room and sat down abruptly, putting her face in her hands.
"Well I do have a soul," she cried defiantly, "Even if it's only a patchwork one. I was real, and it hurt!"
She started to cry again. Arrow was a very awkward hugger, so she was relieved when Khalid got there first. He crouched by the chair and Imoen buried her head into his chest and sobbed.
"Wh- what you have to understand about that is-" he began gently.
"It's getting late," said Jaheira abruptly, cutting him off. "Time for bed."
She and Arrow led Imoen back to their room and the druid left them alone. The ranger hovered awkwardly, not sure what to do or say. She still had so many questions. There was a lot about this that she still did not understand, nevertheless she shared some of Imoen's anger toward Gorion. She understood why he had not been able to make her real origins public. A child who might act as a magnet for disgruntled Bhaal cultists would be unlikely to be welcome in Candlekeep or anywhere else. Yet he could have made up any story to explain her… their… origins. Why would he go around telling people that her mother was his lover, that she had been assaulted and then died giving birth to her? The idea had plagued her for years. It was so cruel. Why not just say he had found her in a basket on his doorstep?
"Gorion was… Gorion was…" Arrow mumbled. Tiredness and beer were making her lose her train of thought. "Gorion was a jerk. You shouldn't worry what he thought. He chopped up kids' souls to make a chimera. Who does that?"
"Well, like I said, that was partly so that you wouldn't accidentally hurt each other. You can't intentionally injure each other either. Not even if you wanted to. Gorion seemed to think that some of you might decide to kill each other when you came of age, if you ever became fully aware of each other's existence. I don't know why he thought that was likely, but your souls are tied now so you can't. I don't totally understand how it works. I didn't know about the dreams."
"Did Gorion?" asked Arrow.
"Probably," said Imoen. "I guess it depends if all of you have them. If you did I assume one of you would have told him about them. After all, I was the only one under a geas. The rest of you could talk about whatever you liked." She scowled again. Arrow hadn't meant to bring up another sore point and hastily changed the subject away from Gorion.
"So, you're saying that while I'm having these dreams about Freya's life, somewhere out there she might be dreaming scenes from mine?" asked Arrow. She did not mention Eric. From the moment she had discovered her dreams involved real people she had been trying not to think about him. It was too disturbing.
"Could be," Imoen shrugged.
They changed out of their clothes and settled under the blankets. Arrow noticed that Imoen had taken to lifting a candle to new bedsheets and inspecting them carefully before allowing them to touch her. Apparently she had learnt a valuable life lesson from Mulahey's lice.
"I wish he hadn't done it," sighed Arrow. Imoen looked stricken. "Stopped us from knowing about each other I mean," she corrected herself hastily, "I don't mean I wish he hadn't made you!"
"It worked though didn't it?" said Imoen fairly. "Think about it. The assassin who came for you only managed to kill one ward when he took out Gorion. I was watching from the cliffs, but I was too far away to help. Without the memory charm he would have butchered you all."
"He didn't even try to attack me," Arrow remembered. "I was shooting at him the whole time, but he just ignored me, like I wasn't even there."
"You were all too weak to hurt him," Imoen replied. "If your shots had pierced him it would have broken the charm, at least temporarily. He wouldn't have just stood there and let you kill him. But as it was, they didn't, so the memory spell held and he just forgot each arrow as it bounced off him. He forgot the other wards, like Freya, who did what Gorion told them and ran. Then the rest of you salvaged what you could from his body."
"I thought it was so weird that all he'd brought with him was a ring and that belt. I guess the others took the rest of his stuff," mused Arrow. Despite what Imoen said, she privately thought that making Imoen to protect them had not worked particularly well. After all, all but three of them had died within weeks of leaving Candlekeep. Something about it felt wrong. Lopping off pieces of someone's soul was a very odd way to go about protecting them. Then another thought struck her. "Who was it? You said he killed one of us. Who?" A look of pain flashed over Imoen's face and she started to tear up again.
"Didn't you dream about it? I thought you had nightmares about all their deaths?" she asked.
"I think only if I'm asleep when it actually happens," answered Arrow.
"His name is… was… Afoxe," Imoen sniffed. "A six foot paladin-initiate in full plate mail. Hull used to say he was built like a brick privy. Difficult sort of bloke to ignore. He went straight for Gorion's murderer with his broad sword. Of course, the man had just killed Gorion, compared to that Afoxe was easy meat. He struck his head off with one blow. Then his body just sort of disintegrated."
"I… I'm sorry," said Arrow. She had paid little attention to the bodies surrounding Gorion but Imoen was right, the people in her dreams always turned to dust when they died. That explained why none of them ever came back once they'd been killed. There were no bodies to take to the temple for revival. Presumably this applied to her too. She would have to be careful.
Arrow could not remember ever dreaming about anyone fitting poor Afoxe's description. His first taste of real battle must have been his last. It was a surreal idea. All those years she had been living in parallel with a boy she had never met, and now she never would.
Footsteps were shuffling outside their door accompanied by angry whispers. Khalid and Jaheira were having an argument. That in itself was unusual, normally the fighter simply acquiesced to whatever his wife said. Sitting up on the bed across from her, Imoen was also straining to catch their words, but all that she could make out was that they were disagreeing over whether or not to tell the girls something. Arrow shook her drunken head. Probably something to do with their secret society. Maybe since they were Harpers and they were friends with Gorion, he might have been one too. She didn't really care.
Before she blew out the candle she showed the bounty notice to Imoen. It had tried to change back to Freya's face and name, but the magic seemed to have confused it, and got it stuck half way between the two. The picture was now an unattractive mismatch of Freya and Arrow's features with the letters of their names blended into an illegible jumble.
"It looks like Gorion's spells are weakening," Arrow observed. "Maybe now that he's dead, and we are spread out so far from Candlekeep."
"They were meant to last a lot longer than this," replied Imoen thoughtfully. "If you had all gone into hiding with the Harpers like Gorion wanted it would have been a very long time before your attackers realised that there was more than one of you. Freya must have smacked the hornet's nest big time to break Gorion's charm and draw the Iron Throne's attention. I reckon she'll be pissed off enough to do that though. Freya was a real Daddy's girl. She and Gorion adored each other. If I know her at all, she'll hunt his killers to the Nine Hells and back."
She reached over and snuffed out the candle, but Arrow had one last question.
"Why did you follow me?" she asked. "When you had twelve wards to choose from?"
"Seven," corrected Imoen. "Only seven. Some of you died in childhood. Afoxe had just been killed and Eric left Candlekeep months before to apprentice with some red wizard in Thay. Gorion begged him not to go but, Eric being Eric, he wouldn't be told." She sighed. "Ironically they ended up having a big fight about it and Gorion actually threw him out. Maybe he was right to go after all. Only three of you are still breathing and he's one of them."
Arrow said nothing. Given Imoen's devastation at the deaths of her other childhood companions, she had decided to spare her the full details of Eric's current predicament for the time being. It didn't look as though the young man had ever made it as far as Thay, or if he had his apprenticeship there had been brief. Now he was a prisoner, confined to fighting pits and forced to entertain his evil patrons in ways that turned her stomach to think about.
"Freya ran when her Dad told her to," Imoen continued, "She'll be beating herself up about that. So did Draxle and a couple of the others. I tried to find them afterwards, but I couldn't. When I got back from looking for them only you and Thorg were still hanging around and you said yes, and he said no so… you got to keep me! Yay!"
Arrow nodded in the dark. That figured. Imoen was travelling with her because there was nobody else available. Obviously, she wouldn't have been her first choice. It wasn't like they were really that close in Candlekeep.
"Can we find Freya?" asked Imoen hopefully. "Use your dreams to figure out where she is?"
"I suppose so," said Arrow, unenthusiastically. "She'll probably be in Candlekeep or Baldur's Gate."
The ranger stared into the black rafters listening to the sound of trade carts outside and the squeaks and scuffles of rodents. She didn't like Beregost much, and she imagined Baldur's Gate would be much the same only bigger, smellier and even more crowded. On the other hand, anything seemed preferable to returning to Candlekeep. She didn't feel like taking either path though. Perhaps she was being selfish, but she was just starting to carve herself out a place in the world with her little group. She was not sure that she fancied being supplanted by a sexier, stronger, more heroic version of herself.
Of course, her situation could be a lot worse. Perhaps to remind her not to be ungrateful, that night the gods sent her a dream about Eric.
Mercifully it was only the pits this time and not that dreadful brothel corridor with the strange smells. The drow had pitched him against a giant troll. Over and over Eric slayed it but it wouldn't stay dead. It kept regenerating, getting up and charging after him again. Maybe it was just her imagination, but she got the impression that Eric was toying with it by intentionally letting it heal to prolong the entertainment for the punters. His odds were certainly better now. According to the chalk board they were taking bets at two to one in his favour. Arrow suspected they were only going to get higher. Finally, the boy put the wretched creature out of its misery, by roasting it whole in a great ball of fire.
"That was a bit dull, they liked the mushrooms better," the voice of Eric's advisor sailed up from the pits. Arrow now recognised that voice as belonging to the courtesan, Bubbles. She scanned the audience for the Hooded Man. With a rush of adrenaline, she saw him seated in a private booth near the drow entertainer. With the match over, he got up and handed a hefty looking purse to the drow, whispering something in his ear. Eric had seen him too. His already pale face turned deathly white and he backed away a few steps.
A bird was singing. Arrow woke up to pale pre-dawn light creeping under her window. Although she had a splitting headache she got up, crept downstairs and helped herself to a glass of water at the bar. It would be a few hours before she actually needed to wake up but there was no way she would risk going back to sleep again. Not if Eric was about to have another session with that nightmare wizard. She vividly recalled the pain from the last time the Hooded Man had cut into Eric's mind, and since there was nothing she could do to help, she would stay awake until it was over so as not to share the experience.
