1376 — Uktar

It was her fifth morning on the southern coast of Thay. Or fourth. Or sixth. She hadn't felt like counting. A cold sea mist had rolled in on the early morning tide. She nestled deeper into the hollow, fingering the top of the gifted bag of provisions without opening it.

"We're setting sail for Altumbel this afternoon," said Saira, once more aloft in the branches of the tree. The young Sakuru woman had explained something about a curse that would not let her walk on the earth, but Elanee had not paid attention to the details. The explanation had receded into background noise, one with the sea and the gulls. "Now, Altumbel's a fine place to visit if you like steamed mussels on butter-root pancakes for breakfast, lunch and dinner." She paused reflectively. "Which I do. No meddling Red Wizards there either. And what are your plans? This is my last visit. After today you will have to go into the city for your food."

Black eyes shot a doubtful look down at Elanee. The doubt was justified. Elanee felt no desire to go into the city, not even to see the spectacular docks that Saira had described to her at length.

"I expect I'll think of something," said Elanee to avoid admitting that she had no plans, and nor did she want any. Salt mist condensed into droplets on her forehead. She wiped them away.

"You should come with us," urged Saira. "Cimbaratos and his champion took ship for the south two days ago, so you do not need to worry about them. We have to get more passengers with land legs for the next stretch. And you wouldn't have to marry Jamil if you didn't want him." She brightened. "But you could try and drown him again. We all enjoyed that very much."

Elanee leant her back against the trunk wearily. She was aware that if they had met at another time, she would have liked the irrepressible Saira, and considered the offer of passage on her family's magnificent barge an enticing one. In another life, one in which she had never set eyes on a certain knight in the depths of the Sword Mountains, she might even have married Jamil to gain Saira as a sister, and a permanent place in an existence that was different in every way to her decades in the Circle. Stagnant decades. She saw that now. As stagnant as the Mere itself.

"Thank you," Elanee said, "but no. I will stay here a little longer."

Frowning in apparent concern, Saira opened her mouth, then closed it again. She must have read the fixed answer in Elanee's face. She shook her head. If Elanee had been any smaller, she thought Saira might have tried to scoop her up, and fly back to the refuge of the barge with her caught in her talons.

"We'll be returning by Escalant in spring with a hold full of coldrock wine, chalk, and mirefish bone. If you're still here, you can join us then. Rashemen as the snow melts and the wildflowers bloom all at once is a sight worth waiting for."

"I'm sure it is," said Elanee.

"Take care of yourself. Orsho's stand by the fishing fleet is the best place for fresh goldgram on this side of the stars. You should try it."

Saira changed. An eagle glared down at her from the branch where the young woman had been declining. It clacked its beak at her. "Far'n da," said Elanee. "Go well."

As the white tail feathers and black wings turned into a distant speck, the muffled sparks of relief and the sorrow of abandonment flared in her chest, then died for lack of fuel. She tilted her head back against the bark, and closed her eyes.

And now what? The thought kept trying to thrust its way into her consciousness. She shut her mind against it. After a month of exhausting, desperate travelling, nursing her hope as she had once nursed the injured Naloch, she had reached the end of her journey, and found that the whole undertaking had been pointless. The act of a naïve, stupid elf who preferred over-the-top gestures to reason. She could have stayed in the Keep, and waited for Sand to trace the missing Knight Captain. That would have brought her the same knowledge, and sooner.

He chose to stay in the portal. Did he realise what it would mean? Had he thought it was the only means to defeat the King of Shadows? Perhaps Lila and Jerro had lied about telling him to get out. But her she did not believe that they had. Not now that her fever and a little of her anger had faded. Why did you make that choice, Casavir? Was the darkness there so much preferable to life? But she had left him before he had left her.

It would be less brutal if she could bring herself to hate him. Remembering his deep, soft voice, and small kindnesses that no one else noticed, she knew that she never could.

The next morning, she tried to slip into a reverie, the first time she had allowed herself that luxury since leaving the Sword Coast. Instead of rest, she found herself in an uneasy waking dream, wandering through the Merdelain as decaying hands reached towards her from dark pools, first imploring, then lunging. She escaped at last to the reality of the beach, the tree with its honeyed aroma and sweet red fruit, and the onset of another night.

Yet another morning, and she woke to discover change. She was no longer alone. Not completely, anyway. About two hundred yards east along the beach, a small campfire was crackling, sending cheerful sparks into the grey sky. A little kettle sat on a stand in its centre. No one was watching the fire, but there had to be someone in its vicinity. A large pack lay near the fire.

After days of nothing to see but the beach, the sea, and the line of distant barges waiting for the harbour to open, the campfire and its unknown owner yanked at her interest. She felt as if she were watching a rumbling volcano, or the mouth of a geyser, so powerful was its grip on her attention.

When the kettle began to whistle, the fire-maker returned. It was a half-elf. She skidded down the side of a dune, not looking at Elanee, and proceeded to remove the kettle from its stand and pour boiling water into a beaker, still not looking at Elanee.

The hollow Elanee occupied was not deep; still, it might have helped conceal her. Since the stranger had a pair of scimitars strapped over her back, that could be a piece of good luck.

As the woman sipped at her tea, and prepared breakfast in a pan, oatmeal and dried fruit, Elanee watched her assiduously, fascinated by the little spot of familiarity on the sprawling Thayvian coast. For the first time since crossing the Vast, she felt homesick. Homesick for what, though? For the Merdelain, full of corpses and secrets? For the loud, confusing Sunken Flagon? Or the Keep, where big lungs and a thick skin were required just to have a whisper of influence?

The half-elf ate her oatmeal direct from the pan, though she was delicate enough to use a separate horn spoon, and not the wooden spatula that she had stirred the mixture with. Her hair was a rich brown like new chestnut shells. She wore it pulled back in a ponytail. A long nettle-green overcoat covered most of her body, but fell open at the front to show a triangle of leather armour.

Elanee realised she was becoming fixated on the pan of oatmeal, and forced herself to look away. That didn't stop the warm smell of it reaching her though.

For the whole morning, the woman sat cross-legged by the fire, unpacking, cleaning, then repacking her equipment. Once she walked down to the tideline and watched the passing of the boats, hands in her pockets, her stance relaxed.

When a blue-grey gull landed at her feet, she evinced no surprise. Crouching, she took something from within her coat, and bound it to the gull's leg. Then the bird flew away to the west, catching the rush of air between sea and land. A druid. The half-elf must be a druid. She did not dress like one, and something in the woman's bearing reminded her more of Kana than of anyone she knew from the Mere.

After preparing lunch – onions fried with beetroot, pepper-leaf and anise, alongside a hunk of bread she'd brought with her – the woman settled down again by the fire, passing the time by whittling the end of a stick with her penknife, only stopping now and then to add a log to the blaze from the pile on her right. What kind of druid is she? She looks too hard for Chauntea, and too calm for Malar…

The sun had set over Escalant, and the cold was pricking at Elanee's finger tips when the stranger started to assemble the ingredients for her evening meal: there were mushrooms, white cheese, herbs, a little spice box like the ones Sand and Neeshka always packed, and other things that she couldn't identify.

As the woman rested a frying pan on the cooking stand, Elanee couldn't bear it any longer. She inched over to the fire with slow, tremulous steps. Her feet made no noise in the sand, so she took care to approach the woman directly, in full view of the fire, to avoid giving her a shock.

"Excuse me, amé?" The woman glanced up. Firelight glowed in her dark eyes.

"You took your time. What is it that finally drew you over from your tree? I thought you were determined to grow roots and graft yourself to it."

She spoke with a clipped accent that seemed half-familiar to Elanee, though she could not place its land of origin with any certainty. The half-elf looked youthful, save that the lines at the corners of her eyes ran deep. No one would mistake her for a greenhorn in anything.

Elanee looked at the pan in which oil was already bubbling, and licked her lips.

"Spit it out, child." Unless the woman was much, much older than she appeared, Elanee was sure she was younger than her by decades.

"Could I please share your meal tonight? I can pay for it." In her mind's eye, Neeshka put her hands in her face and shook her head in despair. Elanee's only currency was gemstones and gold rings: this would be the most expensive farmer's supper ever bought.

The woman tipped a small quantity of spice powder into the oil, and at once a warm, almost floral scent mingled with the woodsmoke. It smelled unlike anything used in Neverwinter's cookshops.

"Not necessary. I was expecting you to break at lunchtime, and in consequence made far too much. If you don't eat this, I'll have to feed it to the gulls." She added the mushrooms. "Sit."

Elanee sat. She waited in silence as the woman stirred the pan, adding a pinch of this and a handful of that in quick succession. When she considered it done, she lifted it from the stand and laid it on the beach next to Elanee, throwing a spoon on top of the mixture before returning to her pack. From a round-bottomed bottle, she poured amber wine into two beakers. Elanee received one with cautious gratitude; the woman nursed the other between her hands, watching her from the other side of the fire.

"Don't you want some?" Elanee asked.

"Not tonight. Eat."

She did, and it was very good. The first hot meal she'd eaten in weeks. Each bite of the spiced cheese and vegetables tasted hyper-real, complex and life-giving, like crawling out of a long, black tunnel to be met by open country and gentle sunshine.

The wine was good too. She rarely touched intoxicating drinks; seeing their effects on humans in Duncan's tavern made her uninclined to indulge in the habit herself. But she was thirsty, and this wine had a clear, sharp flavour that cut through the richness of the melted cheese. She sipped at it slowly, holding each drop on her tongue for as long as she could, and tried to let the intense stare of her host slide off her. When her beaker was half-empty, and she was thinking of an excuse to disappear permanently into the thickening night, the woman spoke.

"I have been looking for you. You are not the easiest person to find, and even I struggled to trace your route from Mulsantir to Escalant. If Okku had not told me of your conversation, I might still be counting balls of wool on the Thaymount quays."

Elanee gripped the beaker more tightly. She wasn't at all sure that she liked the idea of being followed, of being unwittingly observed. In the past, she had done her share of tracking for the Circle, and later for Lila: when the role was reversed, it forecast trouble.

"Why? Why would you want to look for me?" Why would anyone want to look for her? She had killed her own people, and her dearest friend had gone from her. There was no one left to care.

The half-elf raised her eyebrows. Then, casually, she took something from her pocket, planted it in the sand, and covered it over. A little of the wine was poured over the spot, and she pressed her hand down on it, as if in blessing.

Nothing changed in the air. There was no flash of light. Yet when the woman removed her hand, there was a small brown shoot under it. And the shoot was putting out green stubs that turned into leaves as Elanee watched, and the leaves had rounded lobes along their edges. Her heart skipped. She put down the beaker of wine before she could spill it.

Meanwhile, the infant oak tree was still growing. Already, it was four inches high, and its single sprout was dividing into clear branches.

"Silvanus," said Elanee. She gulped. "Silvanus sent you." For her? Her deity was not known for involving himself directly in the lives of his followers. She had never heard His voice.

The other druid shrugged. "In his way. Certainly, it was Silvanus who put it in my mind to speak to the Queen of the Nakkié by Ashane, and He did that not only because He wanted me to admire her new necklace." She paused. "You impressed her."

Elanee was tempted to smile. She had liked the nakki, and was surprised – but glad – to discover that the regard was not one-sided. "Is she really a queen?"

"As much as any. Not a queen in land, but in folk." The woman added as an afterthought, and ironic edge to her voice, "And in attitude."

The oak tree's branches were stretching and putting out twigs. Some of them reached the druid's chestnut hair, and she was forced to scoot closer to Elanee to get away from them.

It was too late to apologise and flee. The oak tree was Silvanus's emblem. He had sent this woman to her, and she could not scorn His will, no more than she could have been insensible to the power and strength of Okku.

"Who are you? You don't look like any of the Rashemi I saw." The people of Mulsantir had been white-skinned for the most part, and with cloud-shaded eyes and black hair.

"My name is Jaheira. And I was born and raised on the Sword Coast – like you."

Jaheira. She recognised the name. Where had she heard it before? Oh yes…Naevan returning from a long journey, his face bright, his mind full of stories of strange lands to the south and plans to go there again as soon as the weather was favourable…

"You're that Jaheira? Didn't you overthrow a shadow druid in Amn, and kill an evil wizard in the Forest of Tethir?" It felt almost as if the sorceress and dragon from her novels had come to life, and wandered up to say hello and introduce themselves. One of Jaheira's eyebrows twitched.

"Perhaps. I do not discuss it." Abruptly, she stood up, grabbing the pan and the spoon from where they lay. "These need washing," she explained before disappearing with both over the brow of the dune. Elanee was left blinking. The young oak rustled its leaves, as if in sympathy. Naevan's description of Jaheira's adventures in the south might have elided a few of the details. Or a lot of the details.

When Jaheira returned, she deposited the clean pack, but then continued standing, her face in darkness.

"Tell me, child, what has taken you so far from your home? And leaving destruction behind you, no less."

"Didn't the nakki tell you?" Elanee asked, now almost intimidated by the woman: by her poise, and by the black hilts of her scimitars poking over her shoulders. She frowned. "And destruction? What destruction? I left the elven hunters in the great forest alive." If they had met with some mischance after her departure, she would not rejoice, but neither would she regret their fate.

Jaheira lit a candle from the fire, and beckoned her to follow. Their journey stopped after the shortest of walks, beside the fruit tree Elanee had used for shelter. In the superfluous candlelight, she saw that its northern side was losing its bark. Green fungi poked out of the dying wood like rotten green tongues. Now, the honey-sweetness of the air around it only reminded her of the dead in the caverns of the Eyegouger Clan.

"Oh," said Elanee. She ran a hand down the wounded tree, her vision blurring with tears. "I did that?"

Jaheira gave her a sharp look. An equally sharp remark seemed to be forthcoming, but then she only pursed her lips. "Not intentionally, I am sure."

Elanee rested her hands on the tree and focused. Breathed out. Slowly, the green tongues retreated into the wood. Bark crept back up the trunk.

"Better," said Jaheira. "Though if you continue to criss-cross Faerun like a watery blight, the same thing will happen elsewhere."

Elanee ran her fingers up and down the trunk once more to check that she'd fixed all the damage. "I'll be more careful in future."

"I do not think you can be careful," said Jaheira with an exasperated huff. "Not in the state I found you. You would have to sleep in a hammock slung between lead poles every night."

"Then I will do that. I have no desire to cause harm." She began to return to the fire, then hesitated, as she saw the oak keeping watch over the basic camp. It had overtopped her own height in the short time she'd been away.

"You will not be able to harm the Father's gift." Jaheira had read her concern. The druid shadowed her steps as they crossed the beach. Dread grew in the pit of her stomach, though she could not reason why.

Sitting, she took another sip of wine. When she looked at its surface in the beaker, she realised that it was washing uneasily from side to side. Her hand felt steady until she concentrated and detected the deep tremble that had gripped all its sinews.

After refilling both beakers, Jaheira reclaimed her old place, though now she was sitting with her back against oak. "There is poison in your soul," she said. "What put it there?"

Elanee stared into the fire, finding it a merciful escape from the simmering presence of the druid. This was a messenger of Silvanus; the heroic Jaheira of Naevan's stories. She had to speak; did not want to, but must.

"I loved a man, or I thought I did," she said, not knowing where else to start, so saying the first thing that her mouth could latch onto. "And I thought he loved me, even if he never said so. And then I ͏- we – I don't know. Sometimes I think we betrayed each other. But more often I think it that it was just me who betrayed him." She looked to the south, towards the sound of the surf lipping the shore, and closed her eyes.

"What happened? What were these betrayals?" Jaheira's voice, low and dispassionate, cut across the fire. Elanee dug her fingers into the sand. Fragments of broken shell chined against her nails.

"There was a battle. A terrible battle to decide the fate of my homeland. And I ran away at the start." She tried to say more, but her throat had become stiff, unresponsive. Her mouth moved, and no sound came out. The muscles in her jaw thrummed, wanting to open in a wail of grief. She managed to swallow a mouthful of wine, and then sat slumped, fighting to retain some composure.

She didn't expect to hear the half-elf give a humourless chuckle, but the shock of it helped. She snapped her head up to see Jaheira's expression.

"I begin to see why it was me, and not one of His gentler followers that our god chose to send, in His wisdom." She clasped her hands together. Briefly, she seemed lost for words. From their short acquaintance, Elanee had not formed an impression of a woman prone to shyness or hesitancy. "The best – the very best – of people sometimes break in battle. It is not their fault, and not their shame. It is – no more correct to blame yourself for it than to blame the leaves for falling at season's change."

Elanee shook her head, not seeking or accepting comfort. "It had never happened before. I'd been through so much, and held my ground. I could have stayed…"

Jaheira pulled her back upright so that it was as straight as a measuring rod. She glanced at the stars before focusing again on Elanee. "My husband Khalid was sometimes afflicted by a deep terror in battle that he could not afterwards explain. He fought against gnolls, giant spiders, assassins, and dopplegangers without flinching. But not often, perhaps four or five times in our life together, he dropped his shield and sword and fled." She frowned, as if examining old memories in the hope of finding something new. "Often it made no sense. He would not yield a foot to a pack of werewolves, yet a single unremarkable mage once—" Tiredly, she rubbed her face, and muttered more to herself than Elanee. "A premonition. Perhaps that was it. Whatever the cause, I never loved him any less for it."

Elanee's own grief faltered, then renewed its hold on her, but now it was stretching out to this other servant of Silvanus, whose burden might be a reflection of hers. "I'm so sorry —" she said, conscious that she was just echoing the useless words the orphan of West Harbour had offered her. Amech dola reesa hanaí. The old expression in the druid tongue was better, but it was a fading language, little used in the south.

Jaheira waved a hand in dismissal. "It was some years ago." After clearing her throat, and tossing another log on the fire, she returned her gaze to Elanee. The trial was not over yet.

"So," said Jaheira, brisk practicality back in her tone, "what was his betrayal?"

Elanee felt ashamed of herself for mentioning it at all. She might as well be a little child wailing that she had not been given enough sweets for birthday, as she'd seen human infants doing on trips to market with their parents. But Jaheira's steady focus wouldn't let her escape from the question. "He chose to die — it must have seemed preferable to him than a life with me. Or any life at all." Just as Bishop had predicted.

She had said it. There. Put the bleak reality out of her heart and into the night for the first time. It wasn't Farlong or the other survivors, or even her own failures that were at the root of her deepest anger: it was him. Casavir.

"In the heat of battle," said Jaheira, "people may make decisions they regret." She gave another grim laugh. "Or in their right minds, even. Decisions that hurt their friends. It does not mean that their friendship — their love — was false. We do not always act in our own best interests." She smiled. It was a real smile, though not a very warm one. "Look at you. You could make vines and orchards spring from the ground it you chose. Animals would run down from the hills to keep you warm with their gifts of fleece and fur. Yet here you are, thin and shivering on a beach in Thay, of all places…"

Elanee wiped the tears from her cheeks with what little was left of her sleeve. "I deserve it." Exhaling sharply, she blinked. "I thought I deserved it."

Jaheira responded with a slow, thoughtful nod. "The nakki queen said that he was a paladin. You must have been close for a long time. His influence is all over you, to make you turn the whole of continent into a scourge for your back."

A swell of strange mirth made Elanee choke. That perspective was new to her. "I knew him for less than three years." A fraction of her life already, and barely a sliver of what it might be if she lived as long as others of her kind. "But yes…we were close."

To think that she had more of Casavir than memories of him was comforting. Had she influenced him too? A few days ago, she would have bitterly resisted the thought that she would never know the answer. For now, it was still not acceptable…yet, it was there. A rock in the course of a river. Boatmen could steer round, or wreck themselves upon it. They could not wish it away.

Jaheira sighed. "In my experience, those who really deserve horrible suffering never think they do. Let go of it, child. If you were so dreadful, I would be here to kill you, not cook you dinner."

They both fell silent. While Jaheira stared into the reddest part of the fire, and the sound of the waves drew nearer with the tide, Elanee drank more of the wine, and traced ornate Illefarn patterns in the sand by her knee. At length, Jaheira stirred. "Where will you go now?"

Elanee didn't dare try to palm the half-elf off with the same empty answer she'd given Saira. "I don't know." She paused. "I have no idea."

"Not back to your homeland?"

She shook her head. She never wanted to set foot in the Merdelain again. The slow-marching court could march on without her. "I've spent too long there already. I let it eat up too much of me without realising what it was doing." She scowled at the patterns she'd drawn, and erased them with a few rough swipes of her hand. "The Circle that raised me would have punished me for saying half as much."

Jaheira's eyes glinted. "More druids than you realise avoid their native ground. I am one such."

"And like cities?" What she felt for Neverwinter was complex. Still, she would never forget wandering through the great wintertide market for the first time, Lila next to her, both of them overwhelmed by the crowd, both of them gaping undisguisedly at the variety of goods on offer: toys, exotic foods, weapons, jewellery and ornaments for the house, books, scrolls, Uthgardt with cauldrons full of heated spiced ale, and gnomes selling dragonbreath pies.

"There are druids who live in cities. More and more these days, and not only because they wish to know their enemy." She sniffed. "I do not see the appeal myself. Though I suppose Immilmar is tolerable…and I approved of the orange groves at Almraiven when I last was there."

"Orange groves…" Elanee echoed. "Casavir said they used to grow oranges in Neverwinter in vast glasshouses. But the last one was destroyed in the war with Luskan." Odd. For the first time she was able to say his name without being savaged by despair, or guilt, or anger. She bit her lip. "Can someone stop being a druid?"

"I do not think so. It is not a discipline; a warrior can neglect their training, and a mage forget their spells. Once you have opened your soul to nature, you cannot close it again. Like the few who see the gods unmediated by illusion, by avatars, and return changed…a druid remains a druid until their death, and beyond."

Jaheira lifted the wine bottle and tossed it across the fire. Catching it by its neck, Elanee pulled off the stopper, and emptied the last dregs into her beaker. The moon was high above them – it had to be late. Past midnight.

"How did you go on…?" Elanee asked, though she was afraid to. "After you lost—"

"—I did not lose him," snapped Jaheira, as fast and fierce as a lunging cobra. "Khalid was not a pair of gloves that I misplaced one day. He was taken from me." Elanee flinched. "And stop looking at me as if you were a frightened rabbit. You are a favoured servant of Silvanus, child. Act the part!"

"I did not wish to cause —"

Jaheira stopped her with a look. Her manner softened in as much as she leaned back, and tilted her chin at her. "You are entitled to the question." She paused. "Revenge helped, at first. And when that was done, service. Pursuing the overmighty and arrogant. Teaching the weak to resist their persecutors. The work we might have done together, if fate had allowed."

They were both druids of Silvanus, both westerners from the Sword Coast, had both known loss. Yet as she regarded the stern half-elf, she was uncomfortably aware of how different they were from each other. A life of endless conflict had never been what she wanted. After the shadow war, she had imagined a long peace, a time of reconciliation and regrowth. That had been the good that she was fighting to realise. Not – more fighting.

Would Casavir have wanted the same? She supposed that his oaths as a paladin committed him more to an existence like Jaheira's, an errant existence composed numerous duties, quests, campaigns. I would have followed you, though. If that was what you wanted. I would have followed you at a word.

She yawned. Closed her eyes. The wine had gone to her head, and she was still weak from the self-enforced privations of her journey.

"Lie down and rest," said Jaheira. A comment that would have sounded like a gentle suggestion from Brother Ivarr had the ring of a general's instructions before battle from the druid. There was no use in asserting that she was wide awake, and prepared to talk all night if that was what Silvanus wished. Elanee gave way to the greater force.

Before drifting into sleep, she blearily watched Jaheira approach, then crouch next to her. The woman's boots were stained and battered; they had been capped with dented metal toe-guards. Her green coat was patched in numerous places.

"If you want somewhere to go, then try Rustem in Escalant. Tell him a wandering bard recommended you to him. You can trust him with everything except giving directions."

The final sentence shaded into the edge of a dream. She heard the waves, and the wind stirring the branches of a tree, and dropped into warm darkness.

Light shone through her eyelids. Something brushed her cheek, and a snort of grassy breath blew over her face. She opened her eyes just as a rough tongue licked her forehead.

Large black nose. Black eyes. Ears pointed and at right angles to the triangular head.

"Hello," she told the deer quietly. It shied away, but did not flee. "You smelled salt on my skin, didn't you? Well, I hope it wasn't a disappointment. But what are you doing on a beach?"

The answer to the question was revealed as soon as she stood up, and a score of acorns fell from her clothes. What had been a sprout less than a day since had grown into a mature oak tree, and scattered its first crop of acorns all over the sand. The deer had found the way to the coast with the rest of her herd to graze on the windfall.

Elanee couldn't help it. She laughed. The herd of deer stopped grazing in order to eye her doubtfully, as if to say that they did not see what was so amusing: acorns were a matter of profound seriousness.

She stopped laughing when she realised that Jaheira's pack was gone. No trace of the fire remained except for a few cinders. The rest had been buried under the sand. Jaheira had left as discreetly as she'd arrived. From one end to the other, the beach was deserted. The deer were her only companions.

But as she scanned the horizon, just on the off-chance that the nimble figure of the half-elf might reappear, something on the beach caught her eye. At the midpoint between her former den and the brand-new ancient oak, smooth pebbles lay in an arrangement too complex to have been created by the sea.

She walked over to inspect it. The central element was an arrow directing the viewer towards Escalant. Above and below, written in Common though in the elven script, were the words food and life. Elanee stared at the unambiguous message Jaheira had left for her.

It was cold this morning in the open. Cold, and lonely. Down by the sea's edge, last night's gentle swell had turned to foaming breakers. Try Rustem in Escalant. Tell him a wandering bard recommended you to him.

To her mild alarm, Rustem proved to be a full Red Wizard with luxurious apartments occupying the top storey of the Palatina, the customs house that overlooked the main harbour. Despite his obvious wealth and station, he offered her shelter for a ten-day without further questions, on the condition that she fulfilled some tasks for him. If the tasks he set had involved raising the undead, or tormenting slaves, activities in line with the general reputation of Thayvians, she would have walked away. Instead, he only required her to carry out minor spying missions on other Red Wizards.

The other condition for her board and lodging was that she bathed every day, wore her hair in plaits, and changed into clean clothes every morning and evening. Dressing for dinner was a Thayvian custom that had thankfully never crossed the Stars to colonise the west of Faerun. Not as far as she knew, anyway. Formal dinners with the Neverwinter aristocracy had not formed part of her experience of life in the city.

"Everyone will believe you're my concubine, and pay not the least bit of attention to you," Rustem explained cheerfully when she arrived, "but not if you look like that." She accepted his terms without suffering overmuch from them: the bath was heated, and the freshly-laundered robes were soft.

When the ten-day was up, he asked her if she would like to stay. After leaving a deliberate hesitation, so as not to appear rude, she declined the offer.

"Shame. I'll have to discover another means of keeping Taras and Zoya under observation. Since you're a handy sort of elf, you should call in on Timotheo if you find yourself passing through Velprintalar. Tell him that you chanced upon a talented minstrel, who recommends you to him warmly."

"Where is Velprintalar?" she asked.

"It's the capital of Aglarond. Westwards," said Rustem, pointing east. "Careful at the border."

She bade him farewell, and, undeterred by her former host's missing sense of direction, set out for the west, though not before leaving a gold ring by her bedside as a thank you, and to pay for the warm winter robe she took with her.

And when she reached Timotheo, the cycle began again. She stayed for a time, offered her skills in exchange for her quarters, and then moved on with a new name, location and line of introduction ready on her tongue.

In Altumbel she lodged on a smallholding with the husband of a longboat captain. One of her first tasks was to find out why, since her arrival, every morning the front doorstep of the cabin was graced by some variety of dead sea creature: an octopus with flowers tied to its tentacles, an oversized flounder, a big green-backed fish with a nightmarish array of teeth, which proved to be less than entirely dead, and bit off the end of her host's walking stick before they could lug it to the nearest creek.

Tracing the source of the unwanted gifts to Jamil of the Sakuru was easy; persuading him to stop was more of a challenge. His mind struggled to hold onto the idea that anyone could be less than delighted by the sight of the mortal remains of a minor kraken on their porch at dawn.

Her next stop on Paldir in the Pirate Isles obliged her to spend the better part of a month hanging off sea stacks and sheer granite cliffs, while making sketches of the ancient carvings she found there to sate the curiosity of a retired buccaneer.

In Turmish she rested in a hermit's cave during the day, and at night slipped out to turn back the qorrash that were venturing down from the mountains during a winter that was unusually savage for the area.

Whenever she visited a town or city, she visited the local scholars, mages, and clerics, and asked for knowledge of Casavir. No one could provide any, neither confirmation of his death, or of his life. It was as if his existence had been wiped from the planes.

Most of her hosts asked her to stay for another month, year, indefinitely. She never did.

1377 — Eleint

The remains of the Highharvestide celebrations were still being cleared from the streets of Waterdeep when she arrived at the jade-coloured front door of a stone-built townhouse, tall and narrow. The windows of the lower floors were shuttered, as was safe and practical, but further up glass sparkled in the sunlight.

Elanee tapped on the door with her knuckles, not wanting to use the huge brass knocker in case it damaged the glossy paintwork. She took a deep breath. Her last host in Daggerford had insisted on doing all the cooking, and since she was a selkie with seal-like preferences, mealtimes were not a happy experience. Elanee never wanted to eat cold kelp soup again.

The door opened. Because it was some two feet above the level of the street, the person it revealed was almost able to look back at her at eye-level. He was dressed in an unremarkable black tailcoat over a white shirt, and black hose. Silver buckles glinted on his solid leather shoes. A typical butler's outfit.

Less usually, he was three feet tall, bald, and every inch of skin that was visible was a vibrant green. His eyes were silvered and globular; they watched her with an air of habitual scepticism.

"Good morning," she said politely, as she tried both not to stare, and to work out what species he was at the same time. "Is this the house of the botanist Rosalenita?" She wasn't entirely sure what a botanist was, but that was the name she had been given.

"Perhaps," he said. His voice was lower than she had expected, and possessed an unnerving dry, rattling quality, as if his throat were made from layers of compounded parchment. "She does not entertain merchants, or adventurers." He paused; his eyes swelled in their sockets, even as the pupils narrowed to pinpricks. "But if you have rare plant specimens for sale, you may leave your card."

"My name is Elanee," she said. "A skald of the sea sends me to you with her deepest recommendations and compliments." The extent to which her hosts had systematised their code was unknown to her. Often, she wondered what would happen if she simply invented her own line of introduction. A gnomish bard sent me forth with the blessings of the Wendersnaven.

"Oh." The green creature of uncertain race sounded unimpressed. "Follow me, then."

After she stepped over the threshold, he closed the door, and slid a series of bolts into place. Turning, he shuffled down the corridor towards the back of the house. A tail, scale-covered and as green as the rest of him, dragged on the wooden floorboards in his wake.

He opened a connecting door, and natural light spilled over them, alongside a fresh, organic smell that immediately transported her back to the humid forests of eastern Turmish.

Her guide shambled ahead of her, then turned to his right. "Doctora Rosalenita. There's a Harper here. Another one."

A laugh sounded from the unseen Rosalenita. "The last Harper visited five years ago. We're hardly overrun with them."

Eager to put a face to the low, amused voice, she entered the bright room. At first, she could only stand still in wonderment. She was not in a real room at all: the walls and floor were made entirely of clear glass. It was about twenty feet high, while its floorspace seemed as large as that of the house itself. The impressive dimensions were a necessity rather than a boast: aside from a few narrow aisles, everywhere was filled with plants.

Big, shining plants with huge leaves from warmer climes than Waterdeep's, vines curling up trellises, palm trees, ferns and flowers clinging to the edges of small, artificial pools. Each pool was connected to another by a pipe, and water circulated between them in a steady trickle. The Circle would not have approved of so many southern species being removed from their soil and brought to the frosty north to endure an unnatural existence. On that thought, Elanee decided that she would approve of it – very, very strongly.

"Ah. So this must be the Harper herself." Elanee startled. The surprise of the glasshouse had driven the presence of her potential new host out of her mind. In any other place, Doctora Rosalenita would have been difficult to overlook. She was tall, and muscular, and clearly a half-orc. Her skin matched the pale bark of the palm tree she was standing under; her hair had been a dark purple, and some strands still were, but for the most part it was grey. Incisors protruding over her lips were the most obvious token of her ancestry.

"I'm not a Harper," said Elanee.

"Well, that's exactly what a Harper would say," replied Rosalenita easily. "They're supposed to be a secret society, after all."

"I mean," said Elanee, feeling strange to be talking for the first time about something none of her previous hosts had discussed, "I was sent here by them, but I'm not one of them." She paused. "At least, I do not think I am." Unless she was. Perhaps she had joined by accident the first time she eavesdropped on Red Wizard gossip for Rustem. She hadn't been in the mood to ask, then, and later everything had become routine. "Are you a Harper?"

"I don't know. What's a Harper?" Rosalenita grinned. Her teeth lent the grin unusual potency. "I play the mandola of an evening, but that's a very different instrument."

At a loss as to how to respond to the half-orc's teasing, Elanee reverted to describing the bare facts of her situation. "I've been travelling from place to place for a year now. A friend I met in Thay gave me a name, and an introduction, and since then I've been using this…web…of contacts to help me on my journey." She paused, realising that she must sound like a particularly unpleasant member of the nobility, the kind so embedded in their status that they neglected fair payment for what they received. A few had tried that in the Sunken Flagon. "And in return I've helped out with various tasks."

Rosalenita raised her brows with interest. "Tasks?"

"She looks too frail to be good for much," croaked the green…servant? "No muscle tone. I cannot see her fending off a minotaur single-handed, not even after a season of training." Elanee wondered if minotaur attacks were a frequent problem in this genteel part of Waterdeep. The people she had seen in the streets nearby had not seemed fearful. Rather the opposite: there'd been strollers, mothers with infants, a tinker going from door to door with a heavy pack, expensively dressed folk of all kinds striding towards the Castle Ward, or else being borne there in light carts drawn by donkeys.

"Whisht, Semmy. There are skills worth cultivating apart from bringing down a charging minotaur with a stick." Semmy looked unconvinced. The silvered eyes, neutralising any suggestion of warmth that his apple cheeks and snub nose might have added, watched Elanee without blinking.

"Let's go to my study. We can talk more comfortably there, and I can see if you're suited to the task I have in mind." The half-orc rubbed her hands together in enthusiasm, then, as a drizzle of soil fell to the glasshouse floor, she went to scrub them under an ornate iron pump surrounded by metal cans and long length of tubular oilhide.

"Bring us some refreshments," she called over her shoulder to Semmy, "and then have a rest. A few hours in your bath and a nettle tablet would not be amiss. Your nails are much too yellow."

Semmy gave a slow bow before shuffling back into the house, and disappearing into a room on the right. Elanee had encountered many strange creatures since leaving the Mere; the diminutive lizard butler could well be the strangest of all. As she realised that the Merdelain was just a couple of days travel north of Waterdeep by road, she shivered. But she was safe here; the murky waters couldn't reach out and claim her in this townhouse.

"This way," said Rosalenita, "I hope you like stairs." She briskly led the way to a spiral staircase in the corner of a long sitting room, which was ruled more by plants than furniture, though the tip of an armchair and the curled foot of a divan managed to protrude through the green fronds.

Despite her greying hair and thick build, Rosalenita lifted up the hem of her long patterned skirt, and ran up the four flights of stairs with the ease of a pine marten. At the top of the house, the roof and the ceiling were the same thing. On the narrow landing with low doors at either end, the half-orc was obliged to duck. Elanee followed her, back straight, the lowest roof beam still an inch above the top of her head.

It seemed a perverse decision to locate a personal study in the least accessible part of the house, where the proportions of the building were so poorly suited to those of their owner. But when she emerged into the book-lined, wood-panelled space, she understood why.

The roof had been cut away, and replaced with a vast window of glass; not a single uninterrupted sheet, but instead a convex circle put together from dozens of hexagonal panels. It wasn't ostentatiously magnificent like the gilded tapestries she'd seen in Thay, or the marble vaults in Castle Never's central hall. This had been installed with the simple purpose of directing as much natural light as possible onto the wing-backed chair, workboard and desk underneath it. Yet Elanee remembered Shandra rubbing her temples over the costs of a single pane of glass, and recognised the window's rare splendour alongside its practicality.

Rosalenita noticed her state of wonderment, and rocked on her heels in pleasure as a toothy smile spread over her face. "Built with the first ever prize money I received from the Guild of Apothecaries for my book on the herbs of north-western Zakhara. I was more adventurous in those days!"

"You've been to Zakhara?" A disciple of Oghma in Blacklake had once told her that the southern continent was just desert, and the people who lived there drank brine for lack of water. She doubted that.

"Oh yes. Four times, in fact. If you write a book about the north-west of somewhere, it's almost impossible to stop without producing volumes on the north-east, south-west, and south east to make a proper series. Don't you find?"

Elanee hoped she didn't seem very gauche. "I have never written a book, but I'm sure what you say is true."

Rosalenita gestured to a wooden chair on one side of the desk, then settled herself into the armchair after moving the workboard to one side. Following the tacit instruction, Elanee sat, hands folded in her lap, back straight. Her pack she lowered to the floor by her feet. She took in the jumble of equipment on the desk: pens, charcoal sticks, brushes, rulers and a collection of brilliant inks as varied in their colours as spring flowers.

"I write the books. Draw 'em, mostly. You don't need to. What I'm looking for is a different set of abilities."

"Yes?" If Rosalenita wanted someone to water her glasshouse of plants, she would do it, though it would not be the most interesting of her assignments. Better than mucking out stables in Erlkazar though.

"Before I can draw plants, I need to find 'em, and to find 'em, I need to get out there." She waved her hand vaguely towards the window. "Out there can be dangerous, so I'm looking for someone that can watch my back and their own at the same time. A bodyguard, to put it plainly. Now, you don't have big muscles or a battle-axe, but my last hire did, and he gave immediate notice after finding out that there really are giant spiders in the Cloakwood. None of my support has ever been up to much since Autolycus," Rosalenita complained as the door creaked open and Semmy shuffled in with a tray.

Elanee was relieved to see that it contained absolutely no kelp soup, no crabs, and no Seaweed Surprise.

"Red milk tea," said Semmy in his uncanny rustling voice, "water of anise—" he indicated two small glasses containing a liquid that was certainly not water "—and almond sweets." He put a plate of small brown biscuits in the centre of the desk after removing a sheaf of blank drawing paper. Bowing, he retreated, though only as far as the door, empty tray clutched in his small hands.

"Anyway, you speak Common like a Sword Coast native, and yet you say you've been to Thay," Rosalenita continued, stabbing an almond biscuit with the sharp end of a paintbrush, and then demolishing it in one neat bite. "That tells me you know how to look after yourself." Thinking of her long, deranged flight across Faerun, Elanee tried not to grimace. "The question is — can you look after someone else as well?"

One year ago. The castle's bailey filled with soldiers hurrying to and from their stations. Shouts and screams and trumpet calls. Green light. Rushing round the bodies after a missile strike to determine who was alive, and who was dead. Shadows creeping over the walls. She cradled the warm cup of tea between her palms.

"I am a druid and a healer," she said. "I think I can protect you from most of the hazards of the wild — though not from everything." No one could.

A new expression, not quite a frown and not quite a twitch of curiosity, flashed over Rosalenita's face.

"A fair answer. Tomorrow I plan to leave for the southern fringe of Ardeep Forest. Shall we say that if you come with me, and we both have all our arms and legs at the end of the day, we'll judge you to have passed your probation? After that, we might chance a visit to somewhere further afield. Weathercote Woods, maybe. I've always liked the name."

"That — sounds good. Do you know what are the dangers of Ardeep? I can prepare better if I know what we might encounter." Her spells could help them evade most enemies. Still, she preferred to travel with a bag of dried meadefloss and a vial of holy water in her pack, as added security.

Rosalenita waggled her fingers. "Depends. On the edges of the forest, there should be little to trouble us. Now and again one of the things from the deep woods wanders out to inspect visitors. Fey. Elves. Bears. They can be friendly or unfriendly. The undead dwarves are probably not friendly, but then, I never wait long enough to ask."

Undead dwarves. That would be new. She imagined an undead Khelgar, shuddered, and decided that a light bow with a set of fire arrows could be a useful acquisition for the trip. She'd had a few strenuous archery lessons from Bishop during her second and last summer in Crossroad Keep; those should have left her with some muscle memory.

She nodded. "I will be ready."

"Excellent!" Rosalenita picked up one of the glasses. "A toast to our success and survival! What is the proper thing to say where you're from?"

That was easy. She'd heard it echoing through the taproom and corridors of The Sunken Flagon many a time. "Long health, good life!"

"Ah, Neverwinter…" her new host sighed after they'd both drained their glasses, and Elanee had recovered from her coughing fit. The sigh was tinged with long-suffering fondness.

"The toast is meant to avert evil," said Elanee, not sure how else to respond. "Duncan, an innkeeper I knew, said that people in Neverwinter think creatures of ill-intent are drawn to happiness out of jealousy. So people mix up the words of the toasts, and shake hands with the off-hand, to confuse them…"

She trailed off, aware that she'd revealed more about herself than she'd intended. Although her past was no secret, it was a subject she preferred to avoid.

"I know the mad ways of you northern folk too well," said Rosalenita. "I had have friends up there, and had more before all the wars. Try and remember when you're out and about in Waterdeep: if you see a map of the streets, it's not your lawful duty to burn it down."

She thought the botanist was joking: the corners of her eyes were turned up. Elanee smiled hesitantly. "What do Waterdhavians say for a toast?"

"According to Volo, 'break the glasses!' I don't often go to the taverns myself – my appearance, even in the stew of the docks, can cause…scenes – but from what I remember 'you're buying the next round' is the popular choice."

She smiled again with more confidence. After helping herself to an almond biscuit, she nibbled on it, adjusting to the idea that it might not only be in the wilds that the botanist needed protecting. Half-orcs were not popular in the human-dominated cities of the Sword Coast.

The conversation continued until it was nearly midday. Rosalenita showed her some of her books, and described the complex history of their creation. The research, the laborious creation of notes and sketches, the occasional loss of both to storms or malicious action, the assembly of neat proofs, and then, most difficult of all, the negotiations with a printing press, and efforts to ensure they did their job competently, to convince the master of print that 'burdock' and 'hemlock' were not essentially the same thing, namely plants.

Elanee listened in fascination. She'd had no idea how much work had been involved in the production of the smartly bound volumes on the shelves of the Blacklake Library.

As they left the study, Rosalenita being eager to take her on a tour of the house and garden, Semmy's silvered eyes rolled up to meet hers.

"I do not like druids," he rattled.

Elanee paused. "Some of them are not worth liking," she told him honestly.

The straightforward reply muted any further complaints, though he still shuffled after them, a determined, silent shadow, until on the second floor Rosalenita broke away from contemplation of a heart-leaved creeper to order him off to rest.

While preparing for bed that evening in the bedroom at the top of the house that she had chosen for the sake of its view over the sea and setting sun, she removed the enchanted bag from her pack. The tiny, cleverly-worked piece of fabric from the Sakuru had accompanied her all the way from Thay to the Sword Coast. The diamond, emeralds and rings had long been spent, and many like them: as payment, gifts, bribes, exchanges. All gone. The hag's eye she had kept, though she didn't know why. It had never done anything of use except squat at the bottom of the bag.

She looked at it again now as it lay in the middle of her palm. The clammy eyelid snapped shut, then opened slowly, revealing whites more full of snaking red lines than she remembered, each one throbbing angrily. If the eye had controlled a fist, she was sure it would have hit her.

"I didn't steal you from your owner," she reminded it. "And if I'd given you to that necromancer in Elturel for the fortune he promised, he would have dissected you. Or added you to his soup."

The eye didn't blink again. Some of the red lines were subsumed under the white gloss.

There was a narrow shelf above the bed; she placed it there, and alongside it arranged the few other mementos she'd gathered on her westward, earthbound progress. A bracelet of obsidian beads and bison hairs made by a little boy in thanks. A polished tagua nut on a chain. An obscure three-line poem scribbled on a scrap of cloth by one of her less predictable hosts, then pressed into her hand as she left.

She drew back the fern-pattered coverlet, and lay down. The bed was low, barely above floor level, and the mattress deep and soft. The room had been cleaned recently; the thick varnish on the old wooden boards shone darkly in the last of the sunlight. The plain white plaster on the walls still showed the imprints of the trowels used to apply it, as it had in the living quarters of Crossroad Keep.

As she hovered on the verge of her reverie, she thought of Casavir. I would give up this homely place and warm bed in a heartbeat, and go alone to the mountains, if I thought I would find you there. The Sword Mountains – Casavir's mountains – began only a few miles north of where she lay. But she had no more reason to believe he was there than that he was anywhere else.

The reverie span gradually apart, and she slept. She dreamed that she was dozing amidst long grasses that smelled of summer. The sky above her was silver, though scratched with crimson lines, bleeding clouds of violet and mauve. She knew that there was a road nearby; the sound of a horse's hooves striking a hard surface told her so. They became gradually louder, galloping, impatient.

Alarmed, her sense of ease receding, she started to move, to crawl towards the hoofbeats. Her hands trying to push against the meadow's earth found empty air instead.

Her eyes snapped open; she rolled back into the bed, pulling her suddenly cold arms deep beneath the bedding.

On the shelf at the foot of the bed, the hag's eye blinked at her. A glimmer of violet light sputtered in the centre of the black pupil.

"Are you trying to tell me something?" Elanee asked. "Or toying with me?" The glimmer vanished. The eye returned to its dead, petrified state.

Sighing, she turned on her side so that she faced the wall, and could not see the deeper shadows in the corners of the room, or the hag's eye, the uncomfortable gift of a former hero of Neverwinter. Whatever the dream's meaning, an attempt to understand it would have to wait till later. She closed her eyes. Focused on the softness of the pillow. The smell of thyme.

They started out early the next morning in an open cart that Rosalenita had hired for the journey to Ardeep, delaying only long enough to eat, and for a courier to exchange one set of letters for another. After dumping a large pack into the hold, the botanist swung herself up to the driver's seat, and took the reins with the confidence of routine.

"I ask for the same one every time," she said, radiant good humour shining through every line in her skin, though there weren't many of those. At breakfast she had created a map of the forest they would be visiting with the assistance of her boiled egg and soldiers, and recounted a few of her notable finds there as she pointed at this or that piece of toast. "These horses know the roads around Waterdeep like the back of their hooves, and they know to ignore my instructions and find their way through. We get along very well together."

Elanee laid her own supplies, as well as her new bow and arrows, alongside Rosalenita's pack, then climbed in after them. "Is Semmy not coming?"

"Oh no. He needs to supervise the assistants. A couple of young lads come round to do the watering every day, and some pruning and lifting and so on. There's too much to manage on our own. But Semmy himself looks after the new specimens in the quarantine room, and the bloodthorn in the isolation chamber, of course." Elanee had seen the bloodthorn on her tour of the garden, its thorny tendrils shifting restlessly within a cage of especially designed grey double-layered glass. It was as tall as she was.

"Isn't that dangerous for him?"

Rosalenita shook the reins; the horses pricked up their ears. While the animals considered what to do next, the half-orc had ample time to answer. "The bloodthorn isn't interested in him at all. It treats him like a magical watering can. Now, if you or I went near it, it'd be trying to spike us before we'd got the door open. But Semmy can even harvest the berries. We sent some to the Guild – the apothecaries, that is – and the initial results are promising. That's what they always say though. I think it just means that they haven't lost 'em yet."

The horses decided to move, having decided that their driver's suggestion had merit. Their initial smart pace slowed as they reached the busier commercial streets between the docks and the old city. Not frustrated at all, Rosalenita passed the time by pointing out the important buildings and sites, or at least where they would be if the day were less cloudy, and fewer new blocks of apartments obstructed the view. Mount Waterdeep dominated everything effortlessly.

"There's a library?" Elanee asked as the horses joined the jam of traffic by the Southern Gate.

"Several. The largest is run by Oghma's people near the castle, but there are others in each ward. Mostly in the temples." The botanist turned on her narrow perch, and smirked, so that the tips of her lower incisors almost drew level with her eyes. The horses continued to inch forward, wholly indifferent to the lack of oversight. "When I published the first of the Zakharan books, I took a copy to the temple of Oghma in person, wanting to donate it. They wouldn't accept it. Sent me home and said that if they'd wanted my book, I'd have been told. And said a lot more nonsense about mountains, blood feuds and stealing cattle." The smirk broadened into a smile. "That was thirty-five years ago. Now the monks are on a waiting list for every new book. And I make the press charge 'em twice the usual price."

The cart jerked forward. Rosalenita gripped her seat with cat-like reflexes, or else she could have been thrown into the road. The queue was picking up speed again. As soon as the pace steadied, the botanist swivelled round once more, unconcerned by her precarious position. She straightened her felt hat, dyed the colour of blueberries, and smoothed her skirt.

"So, libraries. My favourite is the Seaholt. That's in the docks, as you can guess from the name. The Guild of Watermen run it together with the church of Valkur. Their collection changes all the time, and it's all haphazard – the contents of a peddler's sack. Three score peddlers' sacks. You can find a printed novel next to a handwritten memoir next to a scroll of cartography in verse. My last visit, I went looking for books of herb-knowledge, and I found one next to the golden statue of a gnome, pissing. Flotsam and jetsam is the Seaholt, but we love it anyway. Even Semmy's not immune."

Elanee felt a broad smile spread over her face. Rosalenita's enthusiasm made the sailor's library sound like a greater wonder than any building she had yet seen. Purer than Rustem's custom house, and more welcoming than the Hall of Wonders. A library stocked by the tide…

The clip-clop of the horses' hooves accelerated once they had been waved through the gate, and their cart trundled onto the highway that could take them to Daggerford, Baldur's Gate and beyond…even to the fabled, deadly Calimport on the Shining Sea.

The road was kept in good condition so close to the city. A journey that might have thrown her all over the floor of the cart was instead as smooth as weathered driftwood. There were many pedestrians walking, hobbling or striding along on the outer side of the gutters. Most of them alone. Yesterday, she had been one herself. She felt a small shadow flit across her mind as she realised how much she appreciated not being among them.

Their vehicle was a humble one compared to most of those entering and leaving Waterdeep. Yet, by sitting on the cart's rear shelf, she could make sure that she was at eye-level with the high lords and merchants that trotted past on their sleek hot-bloods. Not bad for a little elf from the Merdelain. She didn't aspire to their riches; nevertheless, she had no wish to trudge along at the height of their riding crops.

Sir Nevalle had told Casavir in her hearing that Waterdeep was the closest thing on the Sword Coast to Neverwinter before Lord Nasher's rule. His tone would have been full of disapproval even if he hadn't already been white with quiet rage after an encounter with Jerro. She thought it was the lords, and not the libraries, that Nevalle objected to.

Disdaining safety, Rosalenita kept turning round to talk to her. But she was correct about the horses; the pair of calm mares, their manes plaited with ribbons and tiny bells in the local custom, knew exactly what to do.

The morning was overcast, and she could feel the damp in the air with every breath she took. No thick fogs hung over the ridges, or floated in from the Sea of Swords to the west. It still reminded her far too much of the days before that last battle. She wondered if the other survivors were looking at the heavy grey clouds today, and thinking of it too?

She pushed those thoughts away. Inhaling deeply, she made herself appreciate the change in the atmosphere. The smoke and overpowering smells of urban life were behind her, and being blown further away by the breeze. Ardeep Forest was already visible, ensconced on its plateau like a green fortress. If she focused, she could almost taste the resin and leaf-mould on the tip of her tongue.

"A lot of Neverwinter folk live in Waterdeep now," said Rosalenita. "Between the docks and the traders. That area's starting to be called Neverdeep and the Neverwinter Ward after all the newcomers in the last few years. Nice people, mostly, though now that there's a bit of peace in the north, some of them may decide to go home."

"Perhaps," replied Elanee. "Have things improved so much? I haven't heard any news recently." She'd heard no news at all for months.

"The broadsides say that some of the big trading houses are opening outposts there." She transferred the reins to one hand so that she could scratch her chin in a thoughtful manner. "Coin is flowing in, and patrols are keeping the roads safer than they've been for years. But there's still Luskan. My correspondent in Port Llast won't even go into the Duskwood now…prefers not to cross the border. And he used to send me marvellous specimens…" She shook her head in regret. "And then there are my cousins in the mountains…"

Elanee worked out what the botanist meant before she could echo 'cousins?' Her parents had died in orc raids from the Sword Mountains. She herself had spent one memorable cold spring raiding the orc caves around the pass at Old Owl Well. Her stomach tightened in discomfort; she resolved never to tell Rosalenita about either paragraph in her history.

But the half-orc glanced at her face, cheek muscles twitching as she registered something that Elanee had not realised was visible. "Distant cousins," she clarified. "My father's clan live in the Larch Hills a day's journey to the north-east. They send me venison occasionally." She paused. "Normally when they want something. Families."

"It must be nice to have one. A family." Elanee wasn't entirely sure about that herself, but her bland remark was better than asking questions on the subject of her relatives. Have your distant cousins murdered many farmers recently? Allied themselves with dark forces to spread corruption over the land?

"The venison's useful, I grant you. I traded the last load to a travelling surgeon in exchange for a bag of seeds and nuts from the Moonshaes. Ah – look!" She pointed at a solitary standing stone on a low knoll that lay half-way between the road and the sea-cliffs. "Brychan's Bed. Means we're nearly there. I dunno who Brychan was, but if I see him in a life after this one, I'll thank him for leaving such a fine way-marker as his memorial."

Roselenita adjusted her position on the narrow driver's seat. Watching the lonely gravestone draw near then shrink behind them, Elanee felt a little sad. She imagined the worn grey stone facing off against centuries of rain, storms, ice and still existing, the name of its charge still known despite everything. Some people aren't remembered with barrows over the Sea of Swords. Some people aren't even given a refuge for their soul, if their soul survives.

"Do you think you'll go back to Neverwinter?" Rosalenita asked suddenly, catching her off-guard. "One day?"

"No," she answered without needing to think about it. Her feelings on that matter hadn't changed since her conversation with the agent of Silvanus, Jaheira. "Too much happened there."

A grassy track bent left away from the highway. With a flick of her wrists, Rosalenita directed the horses to turn left. They obeyed without demur, pulling the cart in a smooth half-circle, during which they kept up the same comfortable pace.

"Aye," said Rosalenita, sounding out the word slowly, as if she was chewing it. "A lot of the folk from Neverwinter will think the same as you. Mayhap."

The track wound through a rough country of thickets and stones. There were no plough marks in the ground or tumble-down sheep hides to suggest that this area had ever been farmed. Even so, it might have been once. If the world were the prey of two beasts, one tame and one wild, then on the Sword Coast, unlike Thay, it was the wild one that often had the bloodier jaws.

Underneath the plateau, the track came to an abrupt terminus. After stopping unprompted, the horses began to munch on the lush grasses that sprouted on the slope.

"We're here?" Elanee asked. Slender trees with white bark and golden leaves guarded the edges of the forest. Fasm herbés in the old tongue. Ghost Kings to the humans round Neverwinter.

"Indeed we are," said Rosalenita. She climbed down from the driver's seat with obvious relief, and at once began a series of stretches to loosen her back and arm muscles. Impressively, for she was not young, she also bent to touch her toes several times without straining. How long do half-orcs live? As long as humans? And, for that matter, how long do orcs live?

In preference to such ill-mannered questions, she asked one that she hoped her host would be interested in. "What do you call those trees on the ridge there?"

"The white ones? I call 'em Tree Gebó Eleven Sleep Hundá Ardeep. Tree means it's a tree. Gebó tells you it doesn't bear fruit. Eleven is the shape of the leaves – serrated and tapering to a fine point with veins that mirror each other on either side of the central line. Sleep means it loses its leaves in autumn. Hundá tells you what family it's in, and Ardeep tells you the exact species – which in this case I took from the name of the place I first saw it growing."

Elanee digested the answer slowly, and hoped she didn't look too stunned. "And that?" she asked, pointing to an oak tree that was growing apart from the forest, lording it over its own small territory.

"Tree Othala Two Sleep Ainos Father. I took the second and fifth elements from old Illuskan – didn't want 'em getting mixed up with anything else, or messing things up by association."

"So…you have invented your own names for the trees?" And made them extremely complicated. The huge undertaking baffled her. Was it part of an unusual magical system? But mages did not normally create names to gain power over others; they discovered them.

"I have invented a system of classification for all trees, shrubs and plants," said Rosalenita with undisguised pride. "Most of my colleagues in the field are happy recording the popular names in Common and Elvish, and making a few sketches. Or, worse, they feed some leaves to a rabbit and, if it survives, and sometimes if not, claim to have discovered a new treatment for marsh fever.

"My system shows the interconnectedness of all things, and the uniqueness of each thing, and at the same time, in just the last two elements. And the more I publish and diagrammatise my findings, the closer my system is to being accepted. If only because there is nothing to stop it: none of 'em in the guilds have designed an alternative. Not even thought of one."

Rosalenita shouldered her pack, and pulled her hat down firmly over the tips of her ears. Hastily, Elanee retrieved her bag, as well as her bow and arrows. She checked that her knife was fixed securely to her belt, and, her final act before leaving the cart, pulled off her boots and stockings.

When she landed on the damp grass, the soles of her feet prickled with energy. She felt very alive in that moment. Straightening, she closed her eyes, and enjoyed the story of the air: the layers of earth, and wood, and leaf. Silvanus, keeper of forests, look kindly on our task.

Opening her eyes, she saw the botanist watching her, brows raised in curiosity. Elanee nodded. "Ready."

They set off, following a narrow path up to the plateau. Rosalenita led the way. The hem of her long skirt quickly became coated in burs, and caught here and there on the bending teasel heads. Elanee herself was dressed in cotton hose under a simple tunic. Burs would not adhere to her unless she wanted them to.

Combing her fingers through the long grasses and autumn-touched plants, she felt their presence, felt their sap and the tangle of roots below the soil. But there was something else too. Something familiar. Something horrible.

"What are you looking for?" Elanee asked.

"Shrub Othala Wake Thirty-Three Ainos-fimtag Unknown." Elanee looked at her. "Wineberry."

"Ah."

"Or something like it. A ranger sent me a drawing of one – the fruit and leaves were correct, but there were no spines on its stems. A wineberry should be almost as spiky as our friend the bloodthorn."

"Perhaps the ranger isn't very good at drawing."

"It happens," said Rosalenita. Elanee couldn't see her face, but thought the botanist might be wincing. "I once travelled all the way to Icewing Dale in winter —"

Elanee didn't find out what had happened in Icewind Dale. The feeling of something wrong grew stronger. Then she saw a shape at the foot of a young elm. The shape was distinct from the trunk, large and bulky.

"Stay as close behind me as you can," she hissed to Rosalenita as she passed her. Darting forwards, she notched an arrow to her bow. The metal tip pulsed with trapped fire. In this forest, she would have to be careful. The damp weather lessened the risk of a conflagration, but she wanted to take no risks in such an ancient woodland.

As she neared the body, she kept scanning the trees in a wide sweep. She strained her ears. Nothing.

It had been an ogre. His skin was a bloodless yellow-white now, though the mane of black and cobalt hair suggested that it might have been different when he lived. Apart from a grey woollen robe and an gold feather pendant, his only other visible possession was a scimitar in a battered sheath.

Who he was concerned her far less than the manner of his death. Shadows had attacked her near Berdusk, and beside the Deepwash. But to encounter their handiwork again on the Sword Coast, a short flight from the Merdelain, sent an unpleasant shock vibrating through her. She dropped her bow, and reached into her bag for her store of meadefloss. Her hands shook as she pressed a dried root into the ice-cold palm.

"Och, Jirikan lad," said Rosalenita behind her in a resonant mutter. "It wasn't supposed to happen like this. Who did you go and annoy now?" Jirikan would easily have been ten feet tall. Horns like a stag's sprouted from the crown of his head, and he was broad-shouldered, though the muscles of his forearms looked undeveloped. She wondered what the half-orc meant by 'annoy'.

"I don't think he annoyed anyone," she said. "Shadows killed him. He was alive and breathing. They don't need another reason." She paused, a suspicion already half-formed. Turning away from the dead ogre, she faced the half-orc, who was squeezing a handkerchief spasmodically in apparent distress. "What wasn't supposed to happen?"

With an awkward glance at her, Rosalenita knelt down beside the body. She touched the forehead, spread her handkerchief over the face – it was only large enough to cover the upper half – and, the formalities over, drew a scroll from the ogre's pocket. She passed it straight to Elanee.

The wax seal was already broken. Unfurling it, she read:

Jirikan,

Will be near your grove at about noon today. The usual? But don't push too hard. My instincts tell me that this one can be dangerous.

One four-course meal at The Sun and Stars and bottle of ginger brandy in payment.

Yrs

Rosalenita Stoneskeld

"The usual?" Elanee asked when she'd reached the final neat pen-stroke.

Rosalenita looked bashful, though not very. "If a mechaniker designed a winged suit, he'd be well-advised to test it on a moderately-sized stepladder first before hurling himself off the Colossus of Uruk." She frowned. "I saw someone do that once. I can say with complete certainty that he never did it again."

"So you've been asking Jirikan to – what? Jump out at your prospective bodyguards?" Elanee couldn't decide if she was annoyed or amused. Her aversion towards the shadows was edging her towards annoyance.

"And roar. And shake his mane. And shoot sparks at 'em. He wasn't a talented mage, but he had a knack for short bursts of teleportation. Watching him pop up in five different places in short succession could be a little unnerving if you didn't know him."

Elanee had encountered only one ogre mage before: Ghellu of Riverguard Keep. He'd been worse than a little unnerving. Utterly self-centred, corrupt, and ruthless were all apt descriptions in his case. "What if Jirikan had decided to really attack, instead of pretending to?"

The botantist looked puzzled at the idea. "Oh, he'd never do that. He mostly liked to sit around in his hut eating barley-cream porridge and sketching plans for all the new palaces he'd build after conquering Waterdeep."

They both stared at the corpse. "Waterdeep has walls, watchtowers…" Elanee began.

"…and the griffons, and the blackstaffs, the City Guard and City Watch," Rosalenita completed helpfully.

"Did he really…?"

"I doubt it." Rosalenita lifted the thick arms, crossing them over the huge torso. She seemed dainty in comparison. "You're sure it was shadows?"

"Yes. I can feel their presence. It's faint, but…unmistakeable." That discomfort, the sense of having a tiny malicious thorn embedded in a fingertip, invisible and unextractable yet present for all that, was something she'd almost got used to during the tense summer of seventy-six. This was a much weaker iteration of the same. "The lack of colour in the skin is another sign. Also, you sent the letter this morning, so he can't have been here long. Yet he's cold and white – more a statue than a body."

"Shadows." Rosalenita bared her teeth in a grimace. "Horrible things. We should leave. As soon as we meet a patrol, we can tell them what happened, and I'll contact my friends in the rangers to make sure Jirikan is buried."

"Cremated," said Elanee. "It's best if his body is cremated. Outside the forest so the fire doesn't spread."

The woods were still. A few birds hopped from branch to branch, but did not call. Two squirrels watched her anxiously from their dreys. The stands of dogwood and aspen should be purring with activity. They weren't.

"You've encountered them before?" So Rosalenita had marked her familiarity with the old enemy. Hopefully she wouldn't connect it at once to the war, and the Mere.

"Yes." Elanee picked up her bow and quiver of arrows. She tucked a meadefloss root into her belt, and held out another to the botanist.

"You want me to poison the local birdlife?" It was impressive that the half-orc had identified the plant from a single glimpse of the root alone. Elanee wasn't sure that she'd have been able to do as much. Meadefloss roots were not distinctive, in her view.

"No. It's the other property that's important. Shadows despise it." Or it despised shadows. She didn't know why the unremarkable plant was so harmful to them – only that it was.

"I'll have to note that down," said Rosalenita, eyes sparking with interest. "Have you tested it?"

"Yes," said Elanee, keeping her face blank. "Many times." She sheathed and unsheathed her knife to make sure the draw was fluid. A nervous habit, more than anything. She had never survived a battle because of a knife, though that put her in the minority among her erstwhile companions. "With your permission, I would rather not wait for a patrol. I think I can destroy the shadows that killed the og— That killed your friend. But you would have to come with me. You'd be too vulnerable here, or in that cart."

Rosalenita did not answer immediately. She looked at the remains of Jirikan, then made eye contact with Elanee. Balance scales hung suspended in her steady gaze. Then, she nodded. "Good. Which way?"

Elanee focused. Around them, the threads of corruption were woven thin, barely palpable. She took a few small steps past Jirikan, testing the earth as her bare soles pressed on it. The trees were older in this direction, the canopy more complete. She both saw and felt the darkness grow.

She imagined Jirikan sitting at the foot of the elm, waiting for the sound of voices that would alert him to the approach of the botanist and her unproven new bodyguard. Most likely, he had noticed nothing as the shadows flowed through the forest behind him.

"This way," said Elanee. Although she had no option but to take Rosalenita with her, she did regret the woman's heavy build and thick leather boots. It was very clear that she had not spent decades learning how to move across the land as silently as a spirit. Today it might not matter so much. Shadows didn't hunt by sound. And, in justice to her, she seemed as untroubled by the brambles and low branches as Elanee.

The darkness tingling on the edge of her senses grew as they walked, but not so much that she considered turning back. Half a mile further, and bright daylight shone through the trees ahead of them.

She signalled to Rosalenita to stop, and put a finger to her lips. A discreet spell of camouflage coated the half-orc's tan skin and bright Waterdhavian clothes with the colours of Ardeep: fern green, bark brown, shadow black. She held up her hand and mouthed stay here. The presence was concentrated right ahead of them.

Creeping from tree to tree, she stopped at the source of the light: a gully, three or four yards wide and more than fifty long split this part of the forest in two. Ash and beech on her side, pines on the other. From her position, she could not see into the gully, nor guess how deep it was.

She held still. Listened. Heard her own heartbeat. Rosalenita's calm breaths a short way behind her. Mice and squirrels even further back. And ahead of her – she was sure that was where the sound was coming from – more breathing. Just one person, she thought.

Lying flat, bow loosely gripped in her right hand, she snaked forward. The same camouflage she'd used on Rosalenita spread over her.

There was someone in the gully. Because of the heavy mask he wore over his face, she wasn't sure if he was human or not. The black robe he had on was barely intact enough to count as an item of clothing. There were more tears in it than there was fabric.

A shadow priest. One much the worse for wear. A survivor of Garius's army. It has to be. He had made a feeble sort of camp at the bottom of the sandstone cleft. A brazier stood near him unlit, and a bedroll lay open on a ledge. He was sitting on a rocky outcrop, shoulders forward, the base of his mask resting on his knuckles.

A barley-defined shadow kept lunging towards his hand; he swatted it away. For the present, the shadow's behaviour seemed playful, almost affectionate, like a cat seeking attention from its owner. Yet she had no difficulty in imagining the lunges turning serious, the cat becoming a jaguar. There were more shadows down there; she could feel them. However, they remained invisible, sunk in crevices and shrunken under patched of gorse.

Now she had a dilemma. If she captured him, or he surrendered, she would have to take him back to Waterdeep. There he would most likely be immediately executed. The city's tolerance would not extend to shadow priests. But she could not let him go: he was responsible for at least one death here, probably more, and the memory of what his brethren had done in the caves of the Sword Mountains still sickened her.

She looked at him again, at his scrawny arms and the red scratches on his calves. Honour was another of those concepts that had no traction in the Circle. Even Elder Naevan never discussed it. But it was a word she needed at that moment, since only it could explain the gall in her throat as she prepared to shoot a man unawares, an act of necessary evil.

She hesitated. She was the stronger party here. She knew it. Experience and power were on her side. The forest itself was on her side: Ardeep wanted this disease eradicated before it could multiply.

Standing, her camouflage displaced by a simple ward against negative energy, she aimed her bow. Draw with the shoulder, drawled Bishop, not the arm.

"Name yourself!" she shouted to the priest, who still hadn't noticed her. Let your bow arm relax. You're holding a stick on a string, not a werewolf.

He saw her now. Five more shadows melted from the walls of the gully. They surged towards its end. She ignored them. They were inconsequential. This was the only chance she was prepared to grant the priest.

He staggered to his feet, opened his hand, and began an incantation. The arrow struck him in the thigh. He fell back against the rockface, twisting, the remains of his robe already alight.

Her fingers fumbled on the fletching of the next arrow. Mastering them, she aimed. Sight down your knuckles. Ignore the arrow point – that's a distraction.

She fired. This arrow flew fair. His arm spasmed towards the shaft embedded in his chest. Then he collapsed. The arrow held him away from the ground briefly, while he made no effort to arrest his fall, but then it snapped under his weight. His shadow servants broke off their hunt, first wavering, then dissolving. Not bad. Another year and I could make a real archer of you.

Elanee let the bow fall. Down in the gully, the priest's face-forward drop had extinguished most of the flames, but a few pieces of his robe were still smouldering.

Not very deep under the bedrock, she sensed a thin stream trickling through a water-cut channel. She reached out to it. Sandstone cracked. A block, dislodged from the channel roof, blocked the current. Water pressed up through rock that had suddenly become weak, eroded. The new spring emerged just a foot above the body of the dead man, and its flow wiped out the incipient blaze.

The sweet smell of resin drifted towards her from the pines. In the sky, a little patch of blue asserted itself amongst the grey, and the first real sunlight of the day shone on the gully.

"You're welcome," she murmured to the forest. Her work here wasn't over. Shadow priests could never be counted on to stay dead. After scrambling down to the corpse's level, she removed the mask to reveal a malnourished half-elf, bald and unshaven, then searched his robe and few possessions for clues to his identity.

There was nothing. She hoped that there were no parents, no family somewhere in the north waiting for news of the fate of their lost one. Certainty was cleaner, even if it came in a scroll sealed with black wax.

The meadefloss root was still secure in her belt. She removed it, and broke it in two. One half she placed in the corpse's mouth – an unpleasant task, especially since she had to be on guard against the whites of the eyes turning black, and the dead hands seizing her.

The water from the new spring had started to form a shallow pool a little way along the gully. A whispered plea from her, and it began to boil. She dropped the remainder of the root into the natural cauldron, so that its odour, pungent and latrine-adjacent, would spread and drive out any last traces of the taint that had lodged there.

"Is he dead?" Rosalenita called from above her. The camouflage spell was still active; a rose-coloured tint was flowering here and there amongst the shades of green to reflect her proximity to sandstone.

"Yes. He was a shadow priest. He must have summoned the shadows that killed Jirikan. Perhaps the priest thought he'd have food or valuables worth taking."

"Or Jirikan got too nosy for his own good. That would have been like him." The botanist sighed. Removing her felt hat, she let the breeze run through her plaited hair. "You've done everyone a service today. Autolycus himself couldn't have managed things better." She paused. "Shall we go home?"

Elanee wanted to say yes. Ardeep was beautiful without doubt. Two deaths had dulled any urge to stay and explore. If the undead dwarves Rosalenita had mentioned chose this moment to make an appearance, Elanee knew she wouldn't choose half-measures: they'd have lightning called down on them before they could complete their first groan.

"What about your wineberry?"

Rosalenita gave one of her toothy grins. "I've been looking for it for twenty years. The man who told me about it has grandchildren now. He still insists he saw it though…and that his eyesight has always been flawless."

As Elanee climbed out of the gully, the botanist offered her a hand. Despite being carefully trimmed and varnished, the nails had a more than passing resemblance to claws. She gripped it firmly, and allowed herself to be swung back onto the soil, almost tripping over her bow and quiver as she regained her balance.

They had worked well today. Nevertheless, she thought she might sell them on, and learn to use a new weapon from scratch with an instructor who didn't remind her of Bishop.

Rosalenita had taken both her own and Elanee's pack with her, so they were spared the need to revisit the corpse of Jirikan. Instead, they made a wide curve around the spot, leaving the woods not far from where they had entered them. The horses were still grazing peacefully by the cart.

"Rosalenita?" Elanee asked once they were back on the road.

"Yes?" The woman's mood wasn't as buoyant as it had been on the journey out. For obvious reasons.

"Who was Autolycus?" At first, she had thought the botanist was in the habit of invoking an orcish god. Yet the name didn't sound orcish, and there had been no religious icons visible in the Waterdeep townhouse.

"Well, there's a tale…" Rosalenita wrapped the driver's lines around a cleat, and abandoned all pretence of directing the horses. It was obvious that they knew where their stables were. She slid awkwardly around on the narrow seat until her feet could wedge themselves against the rim of the hold.

She didn't appear to need encouragement, but Elanee asked her anyway. "Will you tell it?"

Rosalenita smiled. "We're a fair whiles out of Waterdeep. I reckon there's time. Are you settled there?" she asked, slipping into the role of storyteller with ease.

Elanee wrapped her arms round her legs, and leant her back against the rear wall. "Yes."

"Autolycus was a halfling, and a very shifty type originally. I met him not long after returning from my final trip to Zakhara. Waterdeep dispatched me and a few others to search for a particular rare orchid. A rival group was involved with ties to Athkatla, and among their number was a halfling with an interest in secrets, stealth, and telling tall stories about himself.

"After a few difficulties – we were each the only survivors of our expeditions – I offered him a job. He became my first bodyguard. And very good he was at it too. I never had to worry about giant spiders while he was around.

"His one flaw was that he could be too enthusiastic. A few years after we started working together, we heard a rumour that a midnight rose was about to flower on the northern edge of the Mere of Dead Men. You know the place?"

Her mouth went dry. Her heart raced. "Yes." Deflecting further questions with her own, she quickly asked, "A midnight rose? What's that?"

Her question was still a genuine one. She had no idea what the flower might be, and she had thought she knew everything that grew in the Merdelain.

"A very rare plant. They're said to bloom once in a hundred years, and only open their petals at night. After a few hours, the seeds disperse, the petals shrivel and blow away, and the stem and roots die. I can't give you a proper botanical description since I've never seen one. Not even a glimpse."

"You didn't find the one in the Mere in time?" Her impression of Rosalenita's character led her to think that the woman would have walked naked through a forest of bloodthorn for a chance to see something so rare and strange. It still astounded her that she had never heard of this midnight rose. Perhaps those druids who knew of it had wanted to keep the miracle to themselves.

Rosalenita shook her head, lips turned down at the corners like a forlorn mastiff. "That place is never safe, but it was lethal that year. All sorts of rumours were pouring out – about shadows, revenants, demon princes, and lines of scarlet fire burning for months on end in the peat beds. An entire fort of soldiers too close to the border were supposed to have been wiped out. I was desperate to see the midnight rose, but not ready to commit suicide to do it."

"Autolycus went anyway?" she guessed, and didn't add into the first Shadow War. She could still remember that time when she chose to. The Circle had been lucky: Naevan had not been away in the south so often then, and had driven all the initiates and disciples to the most remote locations in their territory.

Despite that, there'd been many dawn alarms, when a flame in the distance forced them to move on at speed. South to north. North to east. East back to north. The threat appeared at random, seemed able to spring up anywhere without needing supply lines or paths through the mire. Still a child by elven standards, and an infant in the judgement of the Circle, she had found the dashes to safety and the tales of monsters exciting rather than fearful.

"Autolycus went anyway," Rosalenita confirmed. "Of course, he had to. The ability to resist that kind of temptation wasn't in his nature. His own daring tripped him up."

Elanee wanted to hear what happened, and wanted not to know. Stories needed to have endings, like novels, but this Autolycus had been a real person, and a friend of her host. A halfling, moreover an outsider, would be well-advised to stay out of the Merdelain as a general rule. Druids and some Harbourfolk knew the paths, the hazards. Foreigners didn't. To have ventured in during the first war…

"He spent the better part of a day paddling through brackish water in one of the little boats – coracles – they use up there. Made it through clouds of midges. Cracked a water-horse over the head with his paddle. And not long after sunset, he found it. Saw it just as it was opening its petals. As big as the cart you're sitting in, it was." Rosalenita leaned forward, eyes wide, brows arched with the drama of the moment. "And silver, like a reflection of the moon. Not a rose at all, more like a giant lily or iris. Autolycus was fetching his sketchbook – even a reprobate like him wouldn't have interrupted its flowering - when his luck ran out."

Wheels rattled. Elanee looked up to see a coach-and-six pass them on the other side of the highway. Although there was abundant space, the driver flicked his whip towards Rosalenita, and swore at her for not watching her horses. The tip of the leather thong clipped the cart an inch away from her wrist. She didn't flinch.

After the coach came a wagon packed with several generations of one human family. They had all noticed the row with the coachman, and gawped at Rosalenita as if she was an exhibit in a zoo. The half-orc responded only with a cheerful wave for the children, who gawped wider. One started to wave back uncertainly.

As the noise of the vehicles faded, she adjusted her skirt. "Now, where were we? Ah…yes. Well, Autolycus was standing right at the foot of the midnight so-called rose when he realised he wasn't going to be alone for much longer. First, he saw the fires. Then he heard the demons coming. Then he saw 'em. As if that wasn't enough, he spotted shadows and other nasty things moving round in the dark on his other side. I don't like to suggest that he was ever less than a true buccaneer in spirit, but at that point I think he panicked. Can you guess what he did?"

Demons on the right. Shadows on the left. And in the Merdelain. You could throw yourself into the water, and hope that they don't find you, and pray that there's nothing in the water already waiting for you to deliver yourself to it. You could climb a tree, though most of the trees in the northern Merdelain were small and spindly. Or…

"He jumped into the flower?"

Rosalenita blinked with both eyes in acknowledgement of her deduction. "He did. The gamble worked, in a way. The demons and shadows didn't find him…" She paused. A storyteller's pause to invite comment and pleas to continue.

"Go on," Elanee urged her.

"I found him next morning with the help of a few rangers. Could have done it without 'em since the site was obvious by then. Coracle smashed on a bank. Sketchbook trodden into the mud. A kind of brown ooze where some demon had got the worst of a fight. Bits of bone and ash everywhere.

"And in the middle of all that was a grey mound – like someone hadn't washed their underwear for a hundred years, trailed it through a bog, then left it in a heap for their wife to tidy up. It was all that was left of the flower. I pulled the rotten petals away one at a time." She mimed the actions, fingers gently unpeeling invisible layers. "Till finally there he was. Semmy. Fast asleep."

Elanee stared. She hadn't expected that. "Semmy? Your butler?"

"Steward and general house manager, more precisely." The botanist's lip quirked in pleasure at the effect of the dénouement on her audience. "Semmy is short for Semi-Autolycus, you see. His idea. His sense of humour took a turn for the worse after his transfiguration." Rosalenita became more serious. "And after his family in Riatavin dropped him. I told him he could be Ultra-Autolycus, or Archo-Autolycus, but he wouldn't have it."

"And he's been with you ever since?"

"Of course. Though it was touch and go in the first weeks until I got the formula for his bath right." She paused again. This time it was a real pause, not a dramatic one. She seemed to be struggling to find the right words. "It's not always easy for him, being like that. He says he remembers everything, but the memories feel as if they belong to someone else. I thought he could be given back his old shape, for a while. Nothing worked."

Hopeless quests to get help to a friend. Hopeless, failed quests. She knew all about those, though the small lizard-like Semmy could hardly be more different to Casavir.

As the walls and towers of Waterdeep loomed ahead of them, Rosalenita made sufficient concessions to convention to face forwards and take the reins. A little coaxing persuaded the horses to divert from their preferred route to their stables, and pull the cart on as far as the isolated street on the south-western slope of Mount Waterdeep where Rosalenita's townhouse and jungle of plants had their berth. Below them was one more street of houses before the land ended in a ragged cliff, the Sea of Swords sloshing at its base. It hardly felt like being in a city at all.

Semmy rattled a greeting at Rosalenita before complaining about the state of her skirt and boots. He just rattled at Elanee.

That evening, she went to the far end of the garden, where old terraces and a cast iron fence marked the boundary between the wild and the tame. A briar embraced some of the fence poles, and was already sending bold shoots down into the garden. In turnabout, a tree laden with tiny oranges stood in ornamental refinement further up the slope, and the ground around it was home to plants with red flowers like birds' wings such as she had never seen before.

She sat next to the fence, and meditated as she had learned to do at Crossroad Keep. A little more sunlight fought free of the clouds. Unseasonal buds spread along the nearest rope of thorns, and a few five-petalled white flowers opened, anthers densely crowded in the centre of each like fur.

"Nice trick," said Rosalenita, who had appeared from the nearest door to the glasshouse and wandered up the garden to her, "but I'm still going to cut the brambles back before they can liberate the bloodthorn and run riot over the Sword Coast."

Elanee smiled. "It would be a change from demons and shadows, at least." She touched a leaf. The colonising shoots of bramble withdrew to the fenceposts, curling round the bars in obedience to her silent suggestion.

"We're having dinner outside tonight. It'll probably be the last chance this year. Waterdeep was named for the never-ending rain storms, you know." Elanee was fairly sure that Waterdeep was named for its harbour. "Want to join me?"

A metal table by the glasshouse had been set for three. As she looked, a boy in a purple apron brought out a tureen of stew, and deposited it carefully among the bowls and glasses already present. Semmy shuffled after him with a basket of bread rolls. They smelled fresh-baked.

Some druids would say that she should be above that kind of pleasure.

"Gladly," she said.

Rosalenita dismissed the serving boy with a smile, and the three of them took their places. It took Semmy thrice as long as either of them to sit down. A slowness in his arms and legs delayed all his movements. It was easy to see why he had stopped working as his employer's bodyguard.

The stew was excellent; the bread fragrant and soft on her tongue. Semmy, she noted, did not eat. Instead he drank from a glass of brown yeasty liquid by means of a hollow reed.

"I wasn't sure about you at first, you know," said the botanist as she idly rolled a piece of bread into a dough ball between her thumb and forefinger. "We've both had awkward experiences with druids."

Semmy's globular eyes rolled towards her. His fingers, the tips a little wider than the norm among humans and elves, tapped on the sides of his glass. "Yeeessss."

"By awkward, I mean that two of 'em in the Mere wanted to kill Semmy when they saw what the flower had done to him, and a couple more wanted to keep him prisoner as some sort of sacred totem. Luckily for us, their leader had more sense, and let us go."

Elanee looked at her two dinner companions, and decided that she couldn't feign ignorance anymore. It would have felt like a deception, and she had no wish to deceive them, whether she stayed here for another day, or another century. "The leader was Elder Naevan. He was the head of the Circle of the Mere – my Circle – for a long time. He still is in name. But there's no real Circle left now." She sipped her cordial. "I killed all the others. My friends and I did."

Rosalenita deposited her sphere of squashed bread on her plate, and immediately began making another. "I'm glad you didn't tell me that when we were driving out this morning," she drawled. "I might have felt uncomfortable."

Semmy put down his glass. For the first time, he looked more intrigued by her than suspicious.

"Why?" he croaked. Now that she knew he had been a halfling, the traces of his previous identity were obvious. The round cheeks. The dimpled chin. If you ignored the scales and green skin, and made him wear a blindfold, he could almost pass as normal.

"The shadow in the Mere corrupted them, and it made them want to do the same to everything else. I thought then that the corruption was recent, the effect of the second war, but now I believe that the Circle may have been…slowly rotting…for years. Years upon years."

Roselenita was steadily constructing a pyramid of dough balls. "Perhaps you're right. Unfortunately, in my experience, people of all sorts are able to turn bad without the help of shadows or gods or demons." She leant back in her under-scaled metal chair, and looked at her varnished claws. Then she refocused on Elanee. "This moment seems exactly right to ask: do you want a job? I warn you, the pay is terrible, the weather's mostly bad, and you'll be attacked by dire-stoats far more often than you'd ever think possible."

Elanee put a hand over her mouth to hide her smile, and then wondered why she was hiding it at all.

"Exactly how terrible is the pay?" she asked.