Author's Note: Minor revisions.

Chapter 3…Unwelcome Visitors

Necessity had trained Carona to sleep lightly, so when the front door flew open, she woke at once. She stood deep in the shadows, dagger in her hand, before the feet pounding up the staircase made it to her room.

"Oh gods, where are they?" Bevil asked and behind him, Amie shouted, "Master Daeghun! Carona!" Her staff glowed with mage light. Their faces looked pale and frightened in its harsh glare. Bevil wore his chain shirt, an heirloom from his grandfather, and held his sword naked in his hand.

"What has happened?" Carona asked. She stepped into the light. Startled, Amie gasped and took a step back.

"We're under attack," Bevil said. "They're right behind us."

Bevil flushed and looked away as Carona scrambled into her clothes. She pulled on her leather tunic, her belt and her soft boots. She laced her boots and left the rest of the lacing for later.

"Who is behind you? Bandits?" she asked.

"I don't know!" Bevil tightened his grip on his weapon. "I don't know what they are—they're not human and they're not lizard men."

"What?"

"They have torches—they're breaking into houses—let's go!"

"Where's Daeghun?" Amie asked as they clattered down the stairs. "He isn't here?"

"Apparently not," Carona said. "He doesn't really sleep, you know. He could be anywhere."

"Gods," Amie said. "He should have been here to warn us. We need him to defend the village."

Before they even made it out of the house, three of the raiders burst the door open. Bevil was right; they weren't human. They were dwarves of a type Carona had never seen before, with darkened faces and malicious eyes. Bevil rushed forward, brandishing his sword. There was no time for tactics and little time for maneuvering but the dwarves were poorly armed with clubs and short blades. Thin quilted tunics were their only armor. The same fear that made Amie freeze on the stairs made Bevil ferocious. The fight was over in moments.

Amie stifled one quick sob with her hand over her mouth, while Carona quickly checked the bodies. They had no valuables nor was there any clue as to why they were here or where they had come from. Judging by how they were outfitted, they must have expected little opposition—which was strange, considering West Harbor's reputation.

"I'm fine, I'm fine," Amie said as Bevil tried to comfort her.

"How many are out there?" Carona asked.

"I don't know!" Bevil snapped. He had fought well enough but his voice rose with fear and tension.

"Let's go find out," Carona said. "But listen. Amie, you stay close to Bevil. You might not see me, but I'll be there too. We won't let anything happen to you."

As it turned out, she was wrong.

Amie was dead. Lewy was dead. Others had died as well but those were the only two Carona cared about. And Carona found herself gliding through the moonlit Mere, searching peat-stinking ancient ruins for a bit of silver her father had hidden away after the last attack on West Harbor—a bit of silver that Daeghun was convinced was the cause of this attack. Why these denizens from another plane had waited twenty years to come hunting for their relic was a mystery, but perhaps time passed differently for planes-dwellers. Perhaps twenty years was but an eye blink to them.

Daeghun had insisted she take Bevil with her, but Carona refused. Bevil was distraught over Amie's death and Daeghun's cold matter-of-fact orders had enraged the young farmer. For a moment, she thought placid, dutiful Bevil would hit him. For a moment, Bevil's white and furious face reminded her so strongly of his brother Lorne that an icy hand from the grave reached up to clutch at her heart.

"I can do this myself," Carona told her father, in a tone that matched his own. "Just tell me what you need done and I will do it." Daeghun gave her a long assessing stare and then he nodded in agreement.

There were ruins scattered throughout the Mere—traces of the lost Illefarn Empire, Daeghun had told her once. Centuries, nay millennia later, the stonework was amazingly intact in places, particularly in those areas that had been built under the ground. If any treasure had survived the loss of the original inhabitants, it had long since been carried away by adventurers. Of course, that had not dimmed the enthusiasm of the West Harbor youth, most of whom had gone treasure-seeking in the more accessible ruins.

She, Bevil and Amie had skipped chores to explore these very ruins in their twelfth summer. Amie, always a bit clumsy, twisted her knee clambering over loose rocks. Carona ran back to the village and dragged Lorne out of the middle of spring planting to help. Later, after Amie had been carted out of the ruins on the back of the Starling ox and delivered to Tarmas, Lorne gave Carona and Bevil both a good strapping. How she'd hated him for that humiliation.

A tribe of lizardfolk had settled into the ruins some years ago, according to Daeghun, but keen as their senses supposedly were, Carona had little trouble eluding them, at least until she entered the chamber where the shard was hidden. Unfortunately this was now a shrine to one of the lizardfolk's gods. Although the lizardfolk towered over her, they let her pass when she told them she was here at Daeghun's bidding. The ranger was well known to them and they were reluctant to take any action that would provoke the people of West Harbor to hostility. It took little more than a few vague promises to convince their leader to let her empty Daeghun's hidden cache and go in peace. Pressed between rival tribes on one side and barely tolerant Harbormen on the other, their shaman had little choice.

But the shaman hissed when Carona pried out the loose stone Daeghun had described in such detail and removed the small leather-wrapped bundle hidden behind it.

"Cursed!" the shaman cried but Carona hardly heard him. When she opened the bundle and took the shard in her hand, a shock ran through her, strong enough to make her cry out. Sheer magical energy lit her nerves on fire. Her legs trembled beneath her. She should have been frightened yet she wasn't. Impossibly, there was something familiar about this feeling. Could I have dreamed about this moment, she wondered, knowing that made no sense. Daeghun himself had said that the shard had lay hidden here over twenty years. To think that it had been waiting for her touch was perhaps a delusion brought on by the shocks of the evening.

The lizardfolk could have rushed her and killed her in her moment of weakness but they didn't. They backed away but their shaman glared at Carona and gripped his ornate dagger as if he longed to plunge it into her flesh.

"Did you think to hide this abomination here where the stone magic cloaks it? Go, warm-blood, and take your gods-cursed relic with you. If you return, we will kill you and throw your body into the marsh."

While she was in the ruins, the bodies had been piled into a wagon to await burial in the morning. Carona wondered if there were enough able-bodied souls to dig the graves or if the survivors would go against custom and burn them on a funeral pyre. After the demon attack twenty years ago, there had been too many bodies to bury and that was why her mother—and Daeghun's wife Shayla—had no grave to mark them by.

She could still smell the stench of Amie's burnt hair. Fortunately her body was lying face down so she did not have to see again the charred ruin that had once been the face of the prettiest girl in West Harbor.

The wounded had been taken into the shelter of the Starling's barn. That was where she found Daeghun. Her father finished checking a woman's bandage and then drew her outside, away from the moans and from Brother Merring's hoarse whispered prayers.

"You have brought the shard," he said. "Let me see it." There was dried blood on Daeghun's hands. He carefully unwrapped the shard. It glittered on his palm with a light of its own. Daeghun's expression was grimmer than usual. Just as carefully, he wrapped it up again.

"What is this thing?" Carona asked. "Where did it come from?"

"It is from the battle where your mother died."

"Yes but what is it? Did it belong to the demons? Is it truly cursed then?"

"Cursed?" Daeghun asked. Carona told him of the shaman's reaction.

"And when I touched it, I felt power flow through me like mage fire."

"Strange," Daeghun said. "I feel nothing." The moonlight and shadows had bleached all the life from his face. "Perhaps something has awakened it."

"Awakened it? It's a piece of metal." Obviously it was more than that and questions hovered at Carona's lips. But Daeghun was still thinking.

"The bladelings—that mage—they were searching for the shard and something led them to this village. Perhaps you are feeling the result of their scrying spells or whatever magic they are using to track it."

"But—" Daeghun's look silenced her. He stood still a long moment, thinking, and then he returned the wrapped bundle to Carona. Even through the leather, Carona could feel a low thrum of power. It felt good.

"We need a mage's advice on this, and one more skilled than Tarmas. You must take this shard to Neverwinter. Take it to my brother. He has the other shard. He can help you find a mage you both can trust."

"Hold now, you're going too fast for me. There's another shard? And you have a brother? In Neverwinter? What is this all about, Daeghun? What does it have to do with my mother's death? And why must I do this?"

"You know this human city and you will fare better there than I," Daeghun said. "My brother owns a tavern in the Docks district of Neverwinter. It is called the Sunken Flagon."

Carona was not particularly familiar with the Docks district. That was a part of town she preferred to avoid. The thought of stolid, unemotional Daeghun having a brother who was a tavern keeper in the roughest part of Neverwinter boggled her mind. No wonder she had never heard of the place; it was no doubt dismally inhospitable.

"If you mention my name to the harbormaster in Highcliff, he will help you find a ship to take you to the city. That will be the swiftest route and the one most likely to elude the bladelings' scrying spells or pursuit."

"So you think they will still be looking for the shard. And me."

"I believe it likely. You must take the shard away quickly, Carona. The village cannot withstand another attack like this one."

Carona tucked the shard into her inner tunic pocket. She didn't know how the shard had become her responsibility, but she'd wanted an excuse to leave West Harbor. Now she had one.