It was truly peaceful inside the Black Raven monastery. Truly and completely peaceful.

"Such a strange thought," she said, out loud, as she took off her boots.

"What is, miss?"

"That we are completely safe here."

"Yes, miss. There's beds, and food, and absolutely no monsters. 'Tis a pity the architecture is so bland, though, but I heard some of the pots are very nice, quite ancient copperwork." The halfling jiggled the small change in his pocket distractedly.

"Knock yourself out, Nikosh," Lena said, laying back on the narrow bed. As beds go, it was quite an ascetic one - Salomeya spoke about that fact at length - but for her, it felt positively luxurious.

She let out a long sigh. She was warm, and safe, and tomorrow she'd pass some sort of monk trials, which couldn't be that hard if there were so many monks. For now, she could just relax, which was, frankly, uncanny.

Her eyes strayed to Diriel, sitting on a cot in the corner, examining his notes. He had made one tentative approach to her, right after the second dragon battle, but she had no interest in his words then. Now she thought of Aruma, who was able to forgive her lover even though she felt, no, she knew, she had been so deeply betrayed. Lena firmly felt that Dolon deserved his second chance, but...

"Lena?" It was Rizdaer. He had her boots in his hand, and a small tin of dubbin, too. He sat down on the floor and started to clean and rub her boots, the picture of a devoted servant, and as he did so he whispered to her, urgently.

"Did I hear you right? You said we are completely safe here?"

"Yes, we are. Isn't it wonderful?"

"No. It's not true. You mustn't drop your guard."

"What? Those monks are quiet, rule-abiding people, and their leader owes us."

"That may be part of their plan. Besides, we know the cambions had one agent in here. What's to say they don't have another? Acting in secret while the conspicuous tiefling absorbs everyone's attention?"

"Rizdaer, I... Look, it's a smart idea, but-"

"Stay alert. That's how you stay alive."

"But you said yourself you wanted to find a place where you could sleep without being on guard!"

"Yes. But this is not that place."

"I believe it is, Rizdaer. I really do." She slid off the bed and joined him on the floor, taking up part of his work. She had long ago given up on trying to get him to stop doing all these servile things. "Look, I know how to survive on the surface. I can tell when a place is safe."

"You only have to be wrong once."

"Not this time, then! This place, these people, are safe. We can eat and sleep and really, truly relax here."

Rizdaer put away the leatherwork and took up sharpening her dagger. "I remember when you told me to close my eyes, back in the ice mountain," he said, hesitantly.

"Exactly! You needed to drop your guard then. For your own good."

"I hated it, though." He watched her for a moment. "Lena, you seem intent on making me..." he broke off.

"Yes? Making you what?"

"I don't know. It's all a mystery to me. You're a mystery. You want something, but I don't know what. And you want me to be something, but I don't know what, either."

"Right now, I just want you to be a thoroughly rested, fed, healed, contented drow man."

"There's no such thing."

:::::

Sometime later, when Rizdaer was left alone in the room, Salomeya sidled up to him and twined his hair in her fingers.

"You can't possibly be happy with being her consolation prize," she said.

"I'm not."

"Hah! I knew you had some pride underneath all that-"

"I meant I'm not her consolation prize."

"Oh, please! Even you can't be that blind! Diriel was not obedient enough, so she turned to you, who are so eager to let her drag you around."

"The last thing she wants is to drag me around."

"And more's the pity, right? The more you try to make this into something you understand and know how to navigate, the more she recoils from you."

"And the closer she gets to either of us males, the more you want to tear him away. She likes the halfling, too. Will you make a move on him next?"

Salomeya made an impatient gesture and sprang to her feet. "Bah, I have no time for this! I have some chastity vows to undo, so you can stay here and... wallow."

But as she reached the door, she stopped, and turned around to look at the drow. He was done with his meticulous maintenance of Lena's weapons, and now he stood up, a dark, menacing figure in the serene austerity of the monastery guestroom. Even as she watched, he slowly started to take his armour off, piece by piece. She swallowed.

"By the way... when you said you were not her consolation prize, you sounded very sure."

"Yes."

"Why?"

He turned to face her, unbuckling the chestpiece. He dropped it gently to the floor and took off the rest, too, before he spoke. Salomeya couldn't help noticing how tight-fitting his shirt was, and how his body looked under it. "Would it make sense to you if I said 'Because of how eager she was for me to have wine with my chicken'?" he said.

"Hah! It just might, dear. It might. But now I really have to run."

She blew him a kiss and was gone. Rizdaer kept on undressing until he was left standing in just his black breeches and boots, and then he went to find a novice-looking monk named Sersa. She told him the monastery had a simple sort of washroom, behind the kitchens. She also offered to lead him there. He said he'd find his own way.

:::::

Lena stood on the roof, under the dark, cold sky. The air was crisp and fresh, and the valley was silent, save for the occasional woosh of the ice drakes soaring from cliff to cliff.

She had her warm boots on, and she was wrapped in the white wolf cloak, but apart from that all she wore was a short tunic of green linen. The feeling of her body unconstrained by armour and not weighted down by her pack was amazing.

She neither heard nor smelled him as he approached, she only noticed him when his hand appeared close to hers on the stony parapet. She turned to face him, and the gasp she had managed to suppress before got out after all.
Rizdaer was stripped to the waist, his wide, muscular shoulders covered only with the winter wolf scarf. His arms were bare, his neck exposed, his hands empty, and up close, he smelled slightly of soap. He was disarmed, disrobed, positively civilian. It was the first time she has ever seen him like this, and she stared for a long moment at his chest, with its sculpted shape, its wiry muscles, the smooth, dark skin gleaming in the starlight. With, here and there, the lighter patches of scars.

He had a strangely shaped one in the place of his left nipple. Lena managed to stop herself from touching it. "What's the story behind the nipple?" she asked, instead.

"The usual," he replied, with a shrug. "But at least I kept my heart."

There was something in the way he said it that made her drop her gaze and look away. She turned her eyes back to the valley below them, even as she knew he kept watching her. Straining her eyes to see in the dark, to notice anything in the featureless white below, to escape from this strange blandness of his, this bitter stoicism where she knew, or at least suspected, a storm of feeling should be.
She was about to scream just to break the silence when he finally spoke.

"Lena, you have me in a game I cannot win. You hold all the aces, you know whether I'm doomed to fail of whether I can have hope. Release me."

She swallowed. Out in the white expanse of the valley, a solitary figure trudged through the snow, about to do something that would probably have it torn apart by the ice drakes. And yet Lena envied it, in a way. It didn't have to deal with this.

"Rizdaer, it's not easy for me, either. Far from it."

"Why?"

"Because I don't know. I can't know why... why you're... pursuing me. You were taught that you didn't have a choice. You were taught that you had to..." she trailed off.

"Then we are not in a game. We are in a ghostly maze and there's no other way but to punch through." Rizdaer squared his shoulders, and took a deep breath. After another long moment, he reached for her hand. "Lena, do you find me attractive?"

As frayed as her self-control was by all the recent events, she had to fight not to burst out laughing, because no amount of explaining could ever fix that. "Yes, Rizdaer," she forced herself to say. "I find you very attractive. Do you find me attractive?"

"Yes! By the nine hells," he shouted, like a man finally giving in to long torture, "yes I do!" Then he let out a long, strained breath, and passed a hand over his face. "I feel like I just fought my way through a swarm of driders," he added.

Lena felt like she was the loveliest twinkly little fairy in the flower kingdom, but she decided to give him a moment. She turned her eyes back to the figure in the valley.

"So," he said, after a while, "why are you here? Didn't you want to be warm and safe?"

"I wanted to see what Sally was up to. That's her down there."

He turned to look. "So it is. It looks like she's stealing... something... from one of those big nests?"

"Hah. These eggs are a prized alchemy component. We'll see in the morning how dearly she paid for hers."

"Do you want me to go down there?"

"What? Absolutely not. She's on her own." Lena reached out and stroked his face gently. Yes, she said to herself, you still need to respect his boundaries, remember that. "I want you to rest. You fought through a swarm of driders, remember?"

Rizdaer covered her hand with his, and leaned into it, closing his eyes. "It was worth it," he said. "I may even try that 'rested and contented' thing."