Tarsakh, 11
Dearest Harcourt,
I write as one of the least martial alchemists on the surface of Faerun, however, let me assure you: do not fear skeletons. The common-or-garden variety are hardly more dangerous than a swarm of rats, and are easier to outrun. If your skeletons were ten foot tall, scythe wielding, fully sentient examples of the species, I would be hastening to your side now instead of writing you a long letter; but I assume you would not have neglected to mention it were this the case. Skeletons favour projectile weapons, since in close combat they fall apart very easily, and occasionally really do hoist themselves on their own petard - a sight to be seen. If you find yourself in an area with a skeletal infestation, use a magical or physical shield. The arrow heads they typically use are rusted, and rarely kill on impact, but have frequently resulted in seriously unpleasant cases of lockjaw.
Despite all that, please don't get any ideas about going down into the tunnels beneath Candlekeep to clean out the skeletons yourself. Although a minor threat in isolation, skeletons almost always prove to be the symptom of a larger problem. No doubt a necromancer, or a lich, or a shadow priest or some other tedious parasite has set up shop in your cellars. You have at least one archmage on a permanent contract at the library. If she starts talking about 'letting the young people have a go' or 'passing on the reins to the next generation' with that benign air of total ineffectuality that many successful adventurers cultivate in their retirement, take matters into your own hands by posting a notice outside the walls advertising a small monetary reward for the first mercenary group to successfully eliminate the threat. Don't trouble the guards with the matter. They'd be useless. They always are. And remember to put in the word 'successfully', otherwise you may have urchins turning up at your door claiming the gold owed to their deceased alleged 'father'.
I feel that I am coming to the end of my investigation. In truth, it was never a real investigation. There was no crime; no law courts; no due procedure or loop-holes to exploit. The head prosecutor has been dead for ten years, and her soul must have been consumed by the fires of Kossuth long ago.
Your full description of Candlekeep and the surrounding meadow-lands and coast in your last letter pleased me immensely. I look forward to seeing them all for myself in a few days' time with you as my guide. I have always been a city elf; nothing could have been more tiresome to me than a six hundred line elegy on the marvellous qualities of the bellis perennis when viewed through a spyglass in the light of the setting sun; I have never desired to ride into battle on the back of a white stag; nights forcibly spent star-gazing have served chiefly to make me sick and bad-tempered in the morning. Now, I fear the long-scorned rustic instincts of my race are beginning to surface. My experiences of yesterday only confirmed that.
The landscape of the Merdelain was not what I expected. Did you ever go there before the defeat of the King of Shadows? If you did, you would recall it as an uninviting place. Warm, fetid air that barely disturbed the tendrils of sick willow trees with sudden gusts of cold wind that chilled the condensation on your skin. No bird song. No firm ground, even on the paths. No clear day or night – merely a yellow-brown mist. Strange lights like lanterns that shook and swung across the most treacherous stretches of black mud. And, when I was there, a large quantity of unburied corpses, as well as shadows and other things that wanted to kill me. All this is to say nothing of the mentality of the people mad enough to live there. Or die there, as they mostly did.
As I rode up to the gates – the very new, very solid gates – of West Harbour yesterday morning, about me I saw rushes, blue skies and even a wind-pump draining a patch of marsh to make more land available to farmers. I did not have to stop and dig my horse out of a muddy pit. I was not attacked by lizard-men with spears and nets. It felt as if civilization was finally coming to the Mere of Dead Men.
The Past met me at the gates, as much like a scarecrow with an unusually lavish taste in clothes as ever. She did not seem diminished by the absence of the shard in her chest. That surprises me whenever I see her – I anticipate some kind of physical manifestation of the loss, and yet there's nothing.
"Well met, Glorious Leader," I said.
"And you too, Swamp Elf," she said, in reference to an abominable story told at my expense by the last headman of the village. He died in the war.
She began chatting at once as she led my horse to the stables, barely stopping for breath, and managed to remember a multitude of details about my life that I could scarcely recall telling her. She asked after you, and said that Aldanon was lost without you. I mean to cast no aspersions on your secretarial abilities, my dear Harcourt, but I think he was often lost with you. Lost is simply what he is. She asked about Athkatla, about the journey, about my views of the political situation in Neverwinter, about the Council of Six, about the new shop, and took me on a speedy tour of the rebuilt, extended town.
After a while, I began to wonder if she'd ever let me ask about Qara. She seemed so single-mindedly interested in the present and future. We walked around the town walls and along the steep banks of the Lost River – since the collapse of the last Illefarn palace, no longer lost and flowing in a broad deep welt along the channel of the old brook. The village – or town rather – was a bustling place, though I recognised none of the faces I saw there. The only things unchanged from before were the scar in the grass where the silver sword was broken, and a splintered birch tree, which lost all its leaves and half its branches ten years ago, when I summoned lightning down upon a shadow reaver.
At length, probably noticing that I was struggling to keep up and could not possibly listen to any more about town planning and the challenges of swamp architecture (the challenge is that the architecture sinks), she invited me to her home. As I crossed the threshold, my skin tingled. I held my nose and repressed a sneeze. The house was warded to the point that it would separate itself from the Prime if any more magical protection were added to it. One can only hope that no poor neighbour should ever nip in to borrow some milk and sugar. They would be scraping fat from the ceiling for days.
"This belonged to the Starling family. Bevil – Sergeant Bevil, you know? - lent it to me until we manage to get a house built that isn't immediately taken over by refugees. He doesn't want to come back. Understandably."
She led me to an arm-chair near a pile of books, and vanished into the next room. I sat down, felt something rather hard and angular move under me, and found that I'd rested my posterior on a toy wooden bear painted in iridescent rainbow colours. I put it on top of the books.
When she returned with a bottle of wine and two glasses, her mood had visibly and audibly softened. I recognised that she would be more open now to the kind of conversation I wanted to have. "It's difficult to be in this house. But there are other priorities. I would have taken you to see the school, but West Harbour doesn't have one yet. You see what I mean? There are over fifty children living here already, and they have their lessons out of doors."
I sniffed the wine. It smelled of grapes and alcohol. For the sake of my reputation as an alchemist, I try to give the impression that I can tell the difference between vintages. In fact, I could drink red vinegar and be none the wiser."Dear girl, you spoil me. What is it? Not a Tethyr 80?"
"Not far off. It's a Cormyr 50." She knew as much about time and geography as I did about wine. "I never thought I'd see you in West Harbour. It's been how long since we last saw each other? Three years?"
"Longer."
"Ah, unbelievable."
"I confess myself surprised that you settled here. You were always very vocal about hating the mere – and the people - if I recall correctly."
"You do recall correctly. I hated them But I loved them too. Even if I realized it rather too late." She sat herself cross-legged on a bench by the wall. We drank our wine in silence for a few moments. Gradually, her shoulders relaxed, until, with her glass half empty, she exhaled, and closed her eyes. When she opened them again, they were clear, and focussed intently on me.
"Well, Sand, I'm very happy to see you. But I think you wouldn't come up here after declining my invitations for three years if there wasn't a particular reason. Nevalle hasn't got a task for me, has he?"
"Nevalle's a tavern mercenary in the Dales, or he was when I last heard of him."
She whistled in surprise. "I almost feel sorry for him. But it's hard to feel sorry for Nevalle, isn't it? I've met warmer lizard-men." It was just such off-hand yet, in the opinion of a humble freelance alchemist, entirely just and accurate comments that made me like her when we first met.
"It's Qara that I came to ask about."
"Qara? Really?" I should have considered in advance how best to frame the topic. "I thought you loathed her."
"I did. But -"
And so I gave her the short version of my inquiries so far. She held her peace and listened as I spoke, not saying a word until I'd finished.
"I'm glad you went to see Qara's mother. I meant to do it myself when I got back from Mulsantir, and then kept on finding reasons not to go. Visiting Casavir's sister was awful enough, but at least I could tell her that he'd won the war for us at the cost of his life. What did you make of her?"
"Harmless. Well-intentioned. Probably a beauty in her youth, albeit a beautiful doormat."
"Would you say she loved her daughter?"
"Yes. Unconditionally." I answered at once. "Perhaps the only person that did. She can't have been an easy person to love."
"I hardly knew her." Lila laughed at my incredulity, and clarified with less respect for the dead and more honesty, "I couldn't stand her, and never had the patience to really talk to her. And I talked to everyone. Whether they wanted to talk or not. So yes, she wasn't very loveable. But she was eighteen. She might have improved."
"Do you know why she stayed with you – with us?"
"No."
"No?"
"No."
I waited. And waited some more.
"I think she was a very lonely young girl when we met her. And she liked being part of something. Shandra looked after her for a while, took her out on missions that let her fireball everything that moved and get praise and rewards for it." She took another sip of wine, and uncrossed and recrossed her legs. I thought she had finished, but as I was opening my mouth, she continued. "But she never seemed to know how to make friends – she thought if she was the most aggressive, the most powerful, the most victorious, then we would love her. And the more she did that, the more we – I pulled away. And the more she pushed. Does that sound right to you?"
"It sounds plausible."
"Plausible meaning plausibly true or is it plausible deniability you're thinking of?" she asked, smiling.
"My impressions were," I said, choosing my words carefully so as not to alienate the old friend who was busy refilling my glass with a very expensive wine that no one at the Neverwinter Court or the Host Tower would ever have allowed within a mile of me, "that she mostly slipped out of view. You were fighting a war. We were all preoccupied with our own affairs. Grobnar obsessing over the blade golem, Neeshka and Khelgar putting the finishing touches on their circus act, Bishop -" planning how to betray us "-brooding about fictional slights."
Lila had also invested much time in her own ill-tempered, murderous, human project during the final year of the war. That had paid off for them both in the end, though I wondered if it was at Qara's expense. I didn't say that aloud, of course.
"Is that your way of saying that I should have taken more care of her?" Lila asked without heat.
"We, dear girl."
"But she chose to be there. And for a long time, she did good work when I let her. How could I know she would switch sides at a big evil skeleton's say-so? She would have lived if she'd fought for us."
I tilted my head, and raised an eyebrow, with my face, I hoped, radiating angelic scepticism.
"Oy! Stop it. I invented that look to use on Ammon during our arguments at the Keep. It never worked on him then, and it won't work on me now."
"I'm not trying to pressure you into admitting responsibility for someone else's actions, Lila." Isn't it? I thought. Isn't that just what I'm doing?
"I do admit responsibility. I always have. For so many things. And I need something to eat," she said abruptly, and left. She game back with a bowl of sesame rice balls, and offered them to me with exaggerated politeness.
"I only like the peanut-flavour ones."
"You can't get them now. They're too tied up with the Shadow Enclave. There've been boycotts up and down the Sword Coast."
"Peanuts are a tool of Netherese oppression?"
"Apparently." Farlong laid the bowl aside without touching the contents "My son likes the sesame ones more anyway." It was quite uncomfortable to envision her as a mother, when I'd seen her doing a drunken jig on a table in her uncle's tavern. You humans move through the stages of life so quickly.
"How old is he?"
"Two. And a half." She shifted uneasily. I watched her, curious to see what was brewing. Then the words burst out: "I think she saved my life."
This was new.
"You only think? Wouldn't you know?"
"I'm not the right person to ask." Once again, I had to struggle to keep up. This time, not with her pace, or her age, but with the path her thoughts were taking.
"Who then, if not you? Elminster perhaps? The Seven Singing Goblins of Calimport?"
"Ammon." Not my favourite person. Nor yours, Harcourt, and for good reason. "I was barely conscious by the end of the fight – the fight with the King of Shadows. And half-blind. But I can remember something happening as we tried to escape, and Ammon was there and saw it all."
"Do you think he'd tell me?"
"Why don't you ask him? He's downriver supervising the work at the harbour – it's being dredged so that we can accommodate vessels larger than a gnomish coracle and once it's finished we can -" She must have seen my eyes glazing over. "Anyway, he'll be back this evening. Or we could walk there to meet him." I winced. "Or I could ask him on your behalf," she concluded.
I realized that I really was fond of the girl. My reluctance to see him wasn't because I was afraid of Jerro or because I disliked him, though both were true; it was rather that standing in his vicinity, one always feels oneself to be the prey of a multitude of unseen, unblinking eyes.
"Thank you, Knight Captain," I said, with total sincerity.
"None of that!" she muttered, blinking in embarrassment, and I suspect, some pleasure.
We spent the next few hours talking about less sombre matters. I declined her offer of a room for the night, using you as my excuse. Before bidding me farewell, she said: "She was too young, you know. Too young to die. But to me, she was just one among many. And there are others that I miss more – every day."
The guards at the gate saluted me, and one asked for my autograph. They may have mistaken me for my third cousin twice removed, the infamous Elaith of Waterdeep. We're said to have the same ears. The likeness is reportedly quite remarkable.
And then I rode away from West Harbour on the newly paved road; banks of rushes swayed in the breeze, and some kind of fenland bird chirped at me as it fluttered through a pale blue sky. I may have briefly conceded to myself that it would not be such a humiliating fate, to be a swamp elf, though if you remind me of this when I next see you, I will deny it utterly.
Your faithful
Sand