Chapter 2…Toughing It Out

I felt like crap.

Ammon had been right. Wine didn't help.

Back in another life, I could have slept in and nursed my hangover. Here in my new life as the nominal leader of Crossroad Keep, I'm never late and I never miss a meeting because no one will ever, ever let me.

So I attended the morning briefing washed, dressed and with my hair neatly braided, thanks to the village girl Kana had hired to serve me as a combination of maid and squire. Since I didn't wear armor, her squire duties weren't too onerous. I propped my aching head on my hand, drank my tea, and winced every time someone banged a door out in the hallway or slammed his or her hand on the table to make a point. Tymora smiled. The briefing was blessedly brief.

I skipped breakfast for obvious reasons.

My morning sparring session was with Casavir, and I didn't know if I should have been grateful or sad. I was grateful that his unfailing courtesy kept him from yelling at me for my terrible performance. At this point, a raised voice could have caused me serious injury (Khelgar's bellow would have killed me). I was sad because I hated to disappoint him, and I was having real problems concentrating. Also I felt as green as a swamp beetle.

"Hold," I finally gasped. If I took one more blow I was pretty sure I would throw up. Although a good vomit might make me feel better, chances were that it would make me feel much, much worse. "I'm sorry, Casavir. I'm not feeling too good this morning." His bright blue eyes studied me with concern.

"Are you ill, my lady?"

"No, I just…" The sun chose that moment to wink around one of the stones on top of the keep wall and the sudden glare struck me like a dagger in the eye. I all but whimpered from the pain. "I'm sorry," I whispered.

He took my practice sword from my trembling hands and I turned and headed swiftly for my room. If I took a nap before my lessons with Sand, I might get back to my normal self. Unlike Casavir, Sand would not treat a display of incompetence with kindness or sympathy.

I hoped if I walked quickly and purposefully, everyone would assume I was off on important keep business and would leave me alone. That was the theory anyway. As I pushed the side door open, a smooth voice behind me made my heart leap up and choke me.

"Not on the top of your form today, Knight-Captain," Bishop said, with that sarcastic twist he always gave my title. Now I am the first to admit that I'm just some little swamp farmer with an interesting scar. That's why I have people helping me—I can't do this job alone. The fact that I'm now a Knight-Captain and member of Nasher's Nine is full of ironic humor—but that doesn't mean I enjoy having him thrust that in my face every single day.

"I guess not," I said, totally unable to come up with a witty riposte. He moved to a position where I could not pass without brushing against him and put one hand on the wall to pen me in.

"You are feeling poorly this morning, it seems. That time of the moon, is it?" He smirked.

"That would be it," I lied. "And I'm sure you know how women get, so if you value that hand, Bishop, move it and let me by."

He took his hand off the wall and used it to take me by the chin and tilt my face up to his. He had done what I asked and moved his hand. As moves went, I couldn't say this was a huge improvement. His nostrils flared as he took in my scent. Could he really tell…no, I didn't want to know.

"I see the shadows under your eyes. How long has it been since you've had a good night's sleep?" His voice had dropped low, intimate. I felt a blush heat up my cheeks. "Does the weight of your many responsibilities keep you up at night, Knight-Captain?" A beat and then he whispered in my ear. "Or is there something you need?"

Why in the Nine Hells were the bad men so perceptive and the good men so clueless?

I stared up at him. His lips turned up a little and he moved in closer. His leather armor brushed against my practice robe. The smell of well-worn leather has always made me feel safe—a throwback to my early childhood with Daeghun, no doubt. The look in Bishop's eyes made me feel anything but safe. His head came down and I felt his warm breath against my cheek. Was I about to experience my first kiss with Bishop, a man whose eyes contained nightmares?

The side door opened and I almost fell through it. Bishop was scary but there was a scarier man in the keep and he stood in the doorway. Ammon Jerro gave Bishop one of his daunting looks. Bishop gave me a smirk and sauntered back out towards the courtyard.

"Later," he said.

Ammon's tattoos glowed softly in the blessedly dim corridor.

"I thought you had decided against Bishop."

"I did," I said ruefully. "I've told him before to knock off the flirting. For a ranger, his listening skills don't seem that great."

Ammon grunted in response. I cast him a sideways glance.

"I'm sorry about last night," I said. He raised his brows. "I didn't mean to burden you with my, um, personal problem. It must seem quite petty compared to all we have to deal with."

"It does," he said flatly.

"Oh." I felt strangely crushed. "Well, sorry."

"You are very young," he said. "You are exaggerating the importance of these sorts of relationships."

"That's easy for you to say," I muttered. Considering the fact that until recently he had apparently had dozens of succubi at his beck and call, his words seemed a bit on the hypocritical side.

"And I don't know why you keep harping on about my age," I added. The more I thought about it, the grouchier I got. "I can't help how old I am. The chances aren't that great that I'll get much older, you know." He gave me a wry look in acknowledgement of this.

"Choose the paladin then. He will be a gentle lover. Like you and the rest of us with any perception, he has little expectation of surviving the coming storm."

I flushed up to my eyeballs.

"We went over this last night," I said, highly embarrassed. "And besides—what if I do and it makes him fall from grace? Bishop says…"

"Bishop doesn't know as much about paladins as he likes to think," Ammon snorted. "Still, doing anything that has the potential to weaken one of us at this point would not be prudent." He tapped his fingers on the doorframe. He was thinking about my little problem, I realized hopefully. Because all this sleeplessness was definitely weakening me and that would never do.

A tremendous crash came from the courtyard behind me. I yelped and covered my ears. From the muffled curses I gathered that one of the workers had dropped a large stone from a great height. Considering how much of my gold was spent on hoists and tackles and other paraphernalia of the building trade, you'd think they'd be more careful. Dear gods, did my head pound.

Ammon gave me a thoughtful look.

"You have an idea to help me?" I asked.

"Yes."

"You're going to summon an incubus for me tonight?" I asked hopefully. He gave me a glimmer of a smile and shook his head.

"I'm going to show you where Sand keeps his ale purgatives."

I thought about Ammon's words as the day dragged on and I realized he was right. Worrying about my love life—or lack of such—was petty, in the scheme of things. It was more important to build up the forces of the keep and work on my own skills. If I could continue to work myself into exhaustion every day, surely my dreams would go away. I just had to tough it out.

Anyway, it wasn't like I was alone in my predicament. Celibacy, either by choice or by circumstance, seemed to be the norm in our little group. In fact, with the possible exception of Bishop and Neeshka, I was pretty sure no one was doing much of anything with anyone. Unlike Neverwinter, Crossroad Keep was a small community, practically a village in itself, and you can't keep many secrets in a village. And I was having a hard time picturing my companions in a surreptitious romance.

Casavir? No. Just no. Khelgar? I'd been traveling with him for quite some time and despite his occasional boasts about Ironfist manhood, I was quite certain he was saving himself for some comely dwarven lass. Sand? Well, he was terribly discreet so I couldn't be certain, but it seemed to me that he took a more patient, elven view to these things. A decade here or there didn't seem that important to him. And Elanee didn't give me the impression that she had any more experience in these things than I did, although if that bothered her, I couldn't tell.

Zhjaeve possessed the calmness of a monk and I could not even picture her burning with unfulfilled lust. Not that I wanted to. Qara seemed more interested in herself than in anyone else and all her lust seemed reserved for destruction.

Grobnar I did not want to think about.

Neeshka. Neeshka always found a way to do what she wanted to do and she never spent much time worrying about the consequences. Why hadn't I gone to her in the first place? She wouldn't pour scorn on me for having perfectly normal, natural needs. Why had I dumped my highly embarrassing problems into Ammon's unreceptive ears? I stepped into the courtyard.

"Wolf?" I asked. "Where's Neeshka?" He and his squad of urchins were practically omniscient. It was creepy, if you thought about it very hard.

"She's at Deekin's shop," he said. "Several merchant caravans showed up today and she's looking at the new stuff." I waved my thanks and headed for the shop.

Deekin's shop was dim and cool and full of interesting smells.

"Hey, Jess!" Neeshka warbled cheerfully.

"Ooh, the Knight-Captain has come to my humble shop," Deekin twittered. No matter how many times I'd come into the little kobold's place, he always laid on the grateful fawning. I didn't notice it had any effect on his prices, however.

"Hey, I heard you were up late last night getting drunk with Ammon Jerro," she said, tilting her head and grinning. "What's the tale?" I just shook my head. I didn't want to know how these stories got around.

"Nothing," I muttered.

"Nothing? I've always thought there must be more going on with Ammon than he lets on," she said. "I mean, what was the guy doing with all those succubi in his private little haven? Huh? If all he wanted was muscle, why didn't he recruit vrocks or slaadi or something?"

Exactly what I had been wondering!

"There is no tale," I said. "I couldn't sleep and you know Ammon's up at all hours. He kept me company, that's all."

"Uh huh," she said skeptically. "And that explains the massive hangover? I heard you practically had to be carted off the practice ground this morning."

"That is a foul lie." I gave her my Knight-Captain frown, the one I copied from Kana. She put her hands on her hips. Finally I gave up. "It's a foul exaggeration, anyway. We drank a bottle of wine, okay? It was a lot stronger than I'm used to and I felt a little queasy this morning. That's all and I'm sorry the truth is so boring."

"Well, if you can't sleep, there are better cures than strong wine and better companions than crusty old warlocks."

I gave her a startled look and wondered if she and Ammon had been talking. Suddenly Neeshka started laughing.

"Oh, Jess, you should see your face! Is that your problem? Why didn't you tell me?"

"Tell you what?" I asked in a quelling voice but any quest to repress Neeshka was a lost cause.

"Why didn't you tell me that you needed to get laid?"

"Neeshka!" She just laughed harder while Deekin, who was eavesdropping, gave me an increasingly puzzled look. I really, really hoped we had reached one of those cultural gulfs and he didn't know what Neeshka meant.

"Why don't you drag that scruffy ranger up to your bedchamber?" she asked between giggles. "He's always giving you the eye. I'm sure he'd have you waking up with a smile on your lips."

"Yeah, that would be great except for the chance that I'd wake up dead," I said. "Come on, Neeshka, there's something…" I spread my hands, looking for the right word. I couldn't find it. "There's something off about that man. Do you really think he is exactly a safe option?" She shrugged, still grinning.

"Safe, no, but fun—oh, hells yes!"

"I have a job to do here," I said. "You know why I can't take those kinds of chances."

"Hmph. Well how about Casavir, then? He'd certainly be safe enough, and all that paladin goodness ought to be right down your alley. Tell him to come up to your room and give you some…private…weapons training." She waggled her eyebrows.

"You think it would be fair or right to use him like that? He's the kind of man you're supposed to fall in love with, not the kind you…you know."

Neeshka gave a condescending little laugh.

"I've seen how he looks at you. Besides, I don't think any man would object to being used that way."

I was pretty sure she was wrong about that but there was no point in arguing about it.

Neeshka looked at my face and said, "You're hopeless."

"You're probably right," I sighed. It was time for a subject change. "What have you been looking at?" There were piles of brightly colored clothes on the counter. I picked up a tunic. It was pretty but looked to be cut awfully low in the bodice. There were dresses and leggings as well, and to my astonishment, it seemed they were all of scandalous design. What were they doing here in a war camp? Who here would wear something like this?

In growing wrath, I said, "If Torio Claven ordered these sluttish outfits and charged them to the keep account, I am going to string her up by her thumbs!"

"No, no," Deekin said, alarmed. "These were brought by one of the traveling merchants on consignment. I thought the ladies of the Den might like them."

I rolled my eyes. The Den. It figured.

If Sal's bar, the Phoenix Tail, was the official tavern of the keep, then the Den was its unofficial counterpart. This area was riddled with caverns, some of which ran under the very keep itself. The tunnel that led into the keep was warded and guarded but the outlying caverns, originally a smugglers' den (hence the name) had been surreptitiously converted into a bar for those who preferred their entertainment cheap, rough and on the illicit side.

In the Den, workers (and some of the less disciplined Greycloaks, I was afraid) could gamble away their wages or seek short-term companionship of the female persuasion. For some reason (possibly the hopelessness of our cause) men outnumbered women here by about five to one and that led to certain seemingly unavoidable tensions.

The owners kept the drink prices low to draw in customers for their more profitable activities, so a lot of the patrons just came to get drunk cheaply or so Khelgar told everyone who saw him in there.

The existence of the Den was one of those secrets that everyone seemed to know. Casavir and Kana had pressured me to shut it down. Sand had suggested I tax it and with coin running through the keep like water through a mill, this was a very tempting thought. After all the arguments were done, I ended up siding with Neeshka and Ammon—best to leave it alone, since it was obviously filling a need. If we shut it down, its doppelganger would no doubt resurface somewhere new. Here we could keep an eye on the place and prevent things from getting too far out of line.

Besides Bishop had said if you make the men go too far for a wench, some of them wouldn't come back. He was probably right, damn him, and at this point, we needed every worker and every soldier we could scrape up.

"Well, okay then," I told Deekin. Neeshka held one of the shockingly brief tunics up to me.

"This is a good color for you," she said. It was the orangey-red of a lobbed fireball, right at that hot shiny moment before impact.

"No one looks good in that color except possibly a certain tiefling of my acquaintance," I said.

"Buy it for me and I'll let you borrow it tonight," she said.

"Don't tell me you came shopping and forgot your coin purse," I grumbled. "I've only heard that line a few thousand times." But I was well trained by now and my hand, totally on its own, dropped to the purse at my waist.

"You're going to need something pretty to wear tonight when I take you to the Den," Neeshka said with a sly look.

"I can't go there! Are you mad?"

"Nope. Tonight, we're going to take care of that little problem of yours. Tonight, you're going to sleep like a baby."