Callista met Sir Aren's bewildered glare unrepentantly before pushing off from the rail, turning her back on both the bloated corpses and the green embers still flickering among the waves.
Brooding had always irritated her, and the more blameless the one doing it the more it irked her. Oh, she could guess easily enough the reasons the paladin thought he had – the man spoke with the soft-edged accent of the northern kingdoms and was several years older than she, old enough to have either fought a desperate retreat during the Scourge invasion or to feel guilt for his luck at dwelling abroad during his homeland's annihilation. It didn't take an archmage to figure out why he might stare at a shipful of Lordaeron dead with that hollowness in his eyes.
She pulled her cloak tighter around her shoulders as she threaded her way past sailors heaving rotten bodies unceremoniously over the side.
Not that that excused him martyring himself over having survived. This was why she couldn't stand paladins; anyone who felt the need to borrow someone else's guilt that way clearly hadn't done enough living of his own. While not nearly on the level of the demons and human cultists who'd created the plague, Callista had still done a number of unpleasant things she didn't really regret, and the idea that there might be someone, somewhere, feeling sorry over them when she herself felt no such thing deeply annoyed her in a way she couldn't explain. She'd never liked sharing, even her mistakes.
A tattered cloak of fog still hung chill over the ship, and the sweat that beaded her face from both the effort of her conjuration and its fierce heat added another layer of damp. She wanted to go inside to dry off, but the gaggle of passengers they'd shooed below deck during the battle had regained its collective nerve and now clogged up the stairwell in whispering knots.
Instead she moved off to the side, leaning against the smooth wooden planks of the forecastle wall and pulling her hands into her sleeves for warmth. All of the bodies had been cleared from the ship, either chucked overboard or wrapped in sailcloth for proper burial at sea, and the only lingering reminders of the battle were the blood and black ichor stains on the deck. As she watched, a pair of sailors arrived with a tub of soapy water they sloshed over the mess, washing most of it away and attacking the rest with coarse brushes.
She was only half surprised when Sir Aren turned from his contemplation of the drifting undead and strode in her direction. The guilt that had burdened his features earlier had lifted, replaced by weary resolve, and Callista stopped leaning against the wall and stood up straighter at his approach. Probably he'd found something to say about her earlier remark. If he was looking for an apology, he'd do better to talk to someone else.
He stopped in front of her, a red smear on his cheek where he must have inadvertently scratched with his blood-coated fingers.
There was an awkward pause as she waited for him to speak first.
"I just wanted to…thank you," he said finally.
Callista, who had expected an attempt at scolding, was thrown off-guard. She flicked her gaze over his face, searching for sarcasm, but of course she found none. "For what?" she asked, suspicious anyway.
"For not hesitating when I asked you to burn that ship. I'm sorry if I was short with you afterwards. I didn't expect…" He trailed off, spreading his bloody hands, and there was bitter self-mockery in the way his mouth twitched.
Callista had no trouble finishing his sentence. He didn't expect to run into the hideous ghouls of his own countrymen so far from Lordaeron's ruins, and he didn't expect that captain to take such umbrage at their method of destruction. She swatted away a brief glimmer of pity, glad there were few things in her own past that could ambush her that way.
"I'm not sensitive," she said with a shrug. "And I meant what I said. I would've done it anyway."
It was true – although necromancy and demonic summoning both fell under the broad heading of fel magic, Callista had little tolerance for perverters of death or their macabre creations. A warlock's power could be turned against mortals, but its real aim was mastery over demons. Necromancy, on the other hand…necromancy was a weapon against the uncorrupted living, and those who would turn mortal kin into rotting slaves were the basest of traitors. Callista hated them with the passion of someone intimate with enslavement herself.
"Even so," Sir Aren said with a faint smile.
There was another pause before he spoke again. Passengers chattered around them, but the fog blurred the voices into a grey murmur and threw a veil across faces, making their crowded surroundings strangely lonely.
"I've been thinking about what you said. About how you were…why you're here."
Looking at him for the first time without irritation or adrenaline to color her vision, she could see that the years had not been kind to the paladin. More lines creased the corners of his light brown eyes than a man so young ought to have earned, and there was a weariness in them that she suspected was permanent.
"And?" she said.
"And I want you to look at something."
Callista cocked her head. "What kind of something?"
His slight smile broadened at her obvious interest. "A journal. Follow me."
Curiosity piqued, she fell into step beside him as he strode through the restless crowd around the forecastle stairs. Some of the bolder passengers had moved to the rail, leaning over it to point out the lingering patches of green flame to their companions, and Callista made a face, glad there'd been few witnesses to the spell that had lit them. She wasn't ashamed of what she was, but she could do without people edging around her as though she might sprout horns at any moment.
She followed Sir Aren down the steps and through the dim corridor that led to his quarters, their progress aided in no small part by the way other passengers flinched out of the way at the sight of the paladin's bloodied hands.
He unlocked the door and held it open chivalrously for her to enter before him. As he did, he seemed to notice the clotted smears for the first time and frowned, nudging the door shut again with his boot.
"Not yours?" Callista asked, arching a brow at the blood.
"What? No," he said, glancing around until his gaze fell on a basin of water next to a washcloth and straight razor. "I was helping the wounded. I didn't realize how much had stuck."
"Blood will do that," Callista remarked.
He shot her a strange look, but didn't comment. Instead he moved to the basin and began scrubbing the gore from his hands, pink ribbons swirling into the water. "The papers I wanted you to see are on my desk. The black folder with the silver embossing."
She crossed the short distance to the desk and shrugged her damp cloak onto the back of the chair before it, the same chair she'd taken on her last (much less amicable) visit to Sir Aren's quarters. Lanterns hung on hooks on either side of the porthole behind the desk, providing far better illumination than the fog-shrouded sun.
She settled into the chair, appreciating the warm friendliness of the light after the debacle in the mist above decks, and pulled the folder he'd indicated closer. It was a sturdy leather item, and the silver embossing traced out the rayed sun of the Argent Dawn in its center, with another, more obscure sigil in the upper right corner. Callista's eyes widened as she saw it. This was part of Sir Aren's own briefing, information provided to senior officers – it wasn't forbidden for him to share it with members of his command, but she was surprised he'd show it to her.
Hands clean and dried now, Sir Aren slid into the chair on the other side of the desk and smiled wryly at her expression. "Yes, I know you're not of the Dawn. I'm bending the rules. Are you surprised?"
She was, actually, but when she thought about it she supposed it made sense. Something was wrong with this mission he'd been assigned, and they were the only two aboard this ship who might figure out what. Maybe he didn't care much for her, but clearly he took his duty to his own soldiers seriously, and it was worth dealing with a warlock if he could better protect them from whatever hidden dangers lay ahead.
She looked up from the folder and mirrored his smile with an impish twist. "Not unpleasantly. It's good for you. People who follow the rules lead uninteresting lives."
"Some would consider that a blessing." His eyes were very nearly amber in the lamplight, the guardedness cloaked now with good humor.
The paladin was, she decided, rather nice-looking when he smiled. If you liked the wounded type. Callista preferred arrogant and slightly dangerous herself, but she was surprised there'd been no fluttery priestesses waving him off at the pier. She snorted, opening the folder and inspecting the first water-stained piece of parchment within. "Unless they're uninteresting because they're so short…"
"I suppose if you want to be cynical about it…"
"I generally do." The document beneath her fingers was thick with a precise script, and a faint breath of the arcane rose from the ink. A mage's text, to be sure. The first entry was dated the spring of five years ago. "Whose records are these?"
"A mage named Michael Fairbanks. He accompanied the settlers of Jorn's Rest as chronicler and, I suppose, protection, of sorts. Every six months he'd send copies of his logs back to Stormwind for inclusion in the royal annals, but about two and a half years ago, they just…stopped. There's been no contact with anyone in the village since."
Intrigued despite herself, Callista thumbed through the carefully-penned pages. There weren't actually very many, for almost three years of records. "Is this all of it?"
Sir Aren shook his head. "Just a selection. Fairbanks wrote tomes once they arrived, most of it mundane – births, deaths, crops planted and so on. These are the entries we thought were significant."
She nodded, flipping back to the first page and shifting to settle herself more comfortably. It was a pity they hadn't included the rest of the volume, if only for contrast. Still, that wasn't the only thing that seemed odd about this. "Two and a half years? It took that long for Stormwind to realize something was wrong?"
Sir Aren's gaze flicked away from hers for a moment, and something like anger clouded his face before quickly clearing. "Stormwind's governers have many concerns. I'm sure they alerted us as soon as their suspicions were raised."
Callista repressed a cynical snort. A diplomatic way of saying that this group of settlers wasn't important enough for anyone with authority to care what happened to them. Until now. That alone might be worth examining.
Sir Aren stood, pushing in his chair and resting his hands on the back of it. "I'm going to go check on the others. Take as long as you like."
Already absorbed in the battered text before her, she only vaguely noted the sound of the door closing behind him.
Three weeks past the festival of Noblegarden
Two years since the Battle of Mount Hyjal
Edward left us today, returning with the crew of Sarren's Tears to Stormwind. Truth be told, I'm surprised he made it this far. His arguments with his brother had become more vicious of late, and I don't think anyone was sorry to see him go.
Before he left, he told us running so far was cowardice, that we should settle in Elwynn and try to rejoin normal life. Maybe it is cowardice, but no one who wasn't there for that last hellish flight through the passes should get to judge. Once you've seen one city rise in terror around you, all of them are suspect.
There are no human cities north of Hyjal. Maybe this will be better.
Sarren's Tears put us ashore on the coast not far east of Winterfall Village. The beach was too rocky to allow a proper landing, so we and all our supplies (including the horses) were rowed out on skiffs. The water was far colder than might be expected for this latitude, and snow shrouded the beach above the tideline. There must be enchantment involved in this, but if so, it's magic so ancient and sunk into the land around us that I can sense nothing. A strange place, Winterspring. I would study it longer, but we need to cross the valley before the fiercest snows close the passes to the west.
We hope to reach the village of Winterfall before dark. We'll rest there a day before continuing on to Everlook, where we can resupply before entering the true wilderness.
The next full entry was dated a week later.
We traded our horses in Everlook for a shaggy breed of oxen inured to the cold. Katrin seems to think we came off worse in the exchange, but such are the hazards of dealing with the goblin cartels. The beasts seem well-suited to our journey, at least. We hitched them in teams of two to the wagons carrying our supplies and those few children too young to walk, ten in all, and so far they have pulled steadily and without complaint despite the biting wind.
Winterspring is beautiful, but it's a beauty without warmth, in every sense of the word. Ice sheathes the landscape in glittering crystal, and even the shadows are crisp and hard. I've heard it never thaws, certainly never long enough to plant crops – without the perpetual flow of supplies through the goblin trade routes, I do not believe mortal settlement would be possible in this place. Perhaps I'll bring that up the next time Father Calahan begins another of his interminable sermons on the evils of gold-lust.
I am writing this from our camp three days out of Everlook. The mountains that are our destination loom high over the horizon, even at night, their snowy heights sliver with moonlight. The northern flanks face Moonglade and are supposed to be more temperate. Or so I dearly hope, since that is where we mean to settle. Far enough away from any other human town to satisfy even Rodolfus, who's been even more dour than usual since his brother left us at the coast.
It was generous of the night elves to grant us leave to settle on their borders, though I'm not foolish enough to think that sympathy was their only motivation. The forest to the west – called Felwood now, and whatever its original Darnassian name might have been is unknown to me – suffered greatly in the battle at Mount Hyjal and is now feared to be irrevocably corrupt. It pleases the Sentinels, I think, that our settlement should provide another outpost to keep watch on the evil festering there. Or, should that fail, an anvil to blunt any future attack, since the demons would surely seek to destroy us before moving on the uncorrupted forests.
But then, perhaps I am too cynical.
Several entries seemed to be missing between the last and the one that followed.
The trail has begun to climb towards the passes, and as the forest around us thaws, our journey has, conversely, only become more dangerous. The river ice is rotten, and broke beneath two of our wagons today as we tried to cross. No one was killed, luckily, but several sacks of seed washed overboard and sank before they could be recovered. We'll feel the loss when it comes time to plant. There were a number of injuries, too, the worst of which occurred when Marshall James' finger was crushed between the two wagons as the current swept them together. The damage proved too severe for Father Calahan to mend, and he was forced to amputate it at the first digit.
Alas, the loss only makes him typical among our party. Nearly fifty men and women, former citizens of Lordaeron all, and the assortment of old wounds among us is a study in life's resiliency in the face of violence. Or I suppose it would be, if one tended towards optimism. One might also call it a lesson in life's indifference towards the living. I am disinclined to choose between them, myself.
However one finds meaning in the fact, we are a broken, damaged lot, and not all our wounds are borne on the outside. Tamara Swift vanished on a hunting expedition two days past, and there is some doubt as to whether it was an accident, though none has been so bold as to voice the accusation against her brother publicly. The blood between those two soured even before they joined this expedition. Some bitter feud they never spoke of, and the truth of it seems less likely to out now than ever. There isn't enough evidence to say for sure that Martin Swift did anything untoward that day, but his step has lightened significantly since we moved on from the site of his sister's disappearance. In response, Rodolfus has ordered that no one leave sight of the caravan in groups of less than three, but that will do little to kill the suspicions that have sprung up like foul weeds.
Game trails cross our path more frequently now, and at night the wolves howl.
Callista wrinkled her nose, turning the page and smoothing it down with her palm. Twisting Nether, what a nasty bunch. Judging by what she'd read so far, that whole village seemed to be a nothing but a collection of half-mad war victims who hated each other – was it really any surprise they'd all vanished? They'd probably murdered themselves. Of course, her perception could be skewed by which passages the Argent Dawn had chosen to include in this briefing, and she wished again that they'd provided the whole journal.
The next entry was dated four days past the fall equinox, two and a half years since the last piece of narrative. By Callista's reckoning, that meant it was probably one of the last logs to make it back to Stormwind before all contact was lost. The final items in what appeared to be a list of crops preceded it – 200 bushels of corn and 100 of squash.
The last of the harvest was brought in today on the Mercer's farm. The soil here is fertile, rich with loam from the recently-cleared forest, and we will have plenty of food to last through the winter. A festival was held today to celebrate, and I am writing this by the light of the sparks drifting from the bonfire in the village square. Dancers whirl at the edge of the flame's glow, too flushed to feel the chill, and though there's no reason I shouldn't be among them my heart isn't in it.
I've had as much part in the founding of this village as anyone here – clearing land, tilling fields, warding livestock against wild beasts – but I've yet to feel as though I've truly come home. Though I've known my fellow villagers for almost three years now, I still often feel like a stranger, and even the sun-dappled forest that surrounds us sometimes seems unfriendly to my eyes.
Yes, even the forest. Sometimes especially that. Ever since my...misadventure. The product of depressed and overwrought nerves, probably, but alarming all the same. Being unable to explain it by alchemy or magic, I hate to ascribe to it too much importance, but for the sake of completeness I will recount it here anyway.
Not two days ago, now, I'd been wandering the forest in search of autumn herbs, in a clearing not far from the village bounds. I'd been poking through the brush, content (or what passes for it these days), when a sudden terror descended on me. There was no cause or reason; my wild glances revealed that I was still alone in the clearing. I couldn't gather my magic, couldn't even flee; it was as though some vast and malevolent intelligence, passive in slumber, had suddenly cracked one depthless eye and looked right at me. Not just looked, but saw, and I was flattened beneath the force of its malice.
Then, just as quickly as the feeling had come upon me, it was gone. The clearing was bright with sunlight and birdsong and unchanged.
A wholly irrational fear, and I have no means of explaining it except through some error in my own senses.
The desire to leave and try again elsewhere is growing within me. I'd have left this summer, I think, when the passes north were clear, but I feel I still owe these people too much to abandon them. There are no other mages here, after all, and may not be for some time.
My mind travels back to Edward's last words to us on that frozen shore, when he called us all cowards. Maybe we were. Maybe I still am. I've been running so long – ever since that first neighbor's corpse shambled into the street more than half a decade past – that I'm not sure I remember what it feels like to stand still. The flaw, I suspect, is not the in village of Jorn's Rest, but in me, which is why I will stay. I want a life that's more than a long series of flights with no sanctuary. If I can't find it here, I have little hope for elsewhere.
Eight weeks later.
6 days past Winter Veil
Nights are cold and dark, and the days are hardly better. A blizzard has raged around the village for three days now, drifting snow up higher than the shuttered windows. Only the dimmest sliver of bluish light filters through them even at midday. The wind has much less trouble finding entrance, much to my discomfort, and shrieks through every crack. I spent much of the first day stuffing those I could find with rags.
It's been over a week since I last saw a human face besides my own. Rodolfus, standing near the altar of our small cathedral. Smiling, not unkindly. I'd confided in him, finally, all that I felt. That terrible moment in the woods, and all the lesser ones since. The conviction that whatever this place had belonged to before we claimed it – even if it was only to itself – did not forgive our intrusion. Some of the more barbaric races believe that even trees and stones have spirits, and can rise up in anger against their enemies. Maybe it's true, and maybe we are the enemy.
Rodolfus listened with careful patience, as is his wont, but in the end was unmoved. No one else has these feelings, and even all the animals are content enough. "Michael, my friend," he said with a brotherly hand on my shoulder, "I think you're lonely."
Lonely.
Yes, I suppose I am.
--
8 days past Winter Veil
The storm has stopped, but the village still lies buried. Or at least I imagine it does. When I tried the door this morning it opened onto a solid wall of snow, white and sparkling in the light of my small candle. I could excavate myself if I chose, of course, send the whole drift glittering skywards with the most trivial of spells…but I do not choose.
I like it in here, I have decided. No neighbors hardly better than strangers, no sinister eyes to bludgeon me with their attention. With the wind still, it's quiet. I think I will stay.
--
11 days past Winter Veil
They dug me out today. I resented this less than I might have because the food was beginning to run short. The snow lies in drifts up to the village eaves, and with the thick blanket of it still on the rooftops Jorn's Rest resembles nothing so much as a circle of white barrows. Restless barrows, from which the inhabitants have emerged to pester me with questions. They want to know why I didn't dig myself out, why no one saw me for days before the storm. They're cross, and my indifference made them crosser. I don't like it out there, the sky stares down at me like a cruel blue eye and I won't answer their questions. I would rather go back inside. I'm beginning to think they suspect I conjured that blizzard, which is ridiculous, of course. I don't have the power. I never have, not even before –
Not even before.
I evaded them eventually, however. I am writing this from back inside my cabin. I sealed the door and windows with a shell of enchanted ice, and let's see them dig me out of that! Ha. Rodolfus wanted me to go with them up into the mountains. One of the hunting parties found something there, after the storm, and they said it was strange.
Not strange enough for me. Or rather, too strange. I won't go with them. It's worse in the mountains, always worse. Like that time in forest. Not for us. Not for
The narrative cut off in the middle of the sentence. Not in a scrawl, as though the author had been dragged away by some horror summoned by his own words, but neatly, as though he'd simply lost interest. Which, considering the fact that the mage had clearly become deranged, Callista did not think unlikely.
She shut the chronicle, fanning the animal scent of leather into the air, and narrowed her eyes as she digested what she'd just read. The mage was completely mad, obviously. Had there been anything strange in his writings beyond that?
The lanterns hung on either side of the porthole creaked and swayed gently with the ship, nudging the soft shadows into motion. The warm ordinariness of her surroundings made it easy to dismiss the cold pall of despair that so colored the mage's narrative.
Sir Aren had entered the room quietly some minutes ago, and now sat on his neatly-made bed rubbing oil into the blade of a plain-looking longsword. He looked up at the sound of her pushing her chair back across the planks. "Well?" he said, laying the sword carefully across the cloth in his lap. "What do you think?"
"Beyond the obvious?" She wrinkled her nose skeptically, lacing her fingers together to stretch before leaning back in her chair and looking at him. There was a raw kind of sensitivity about Sir Aren that made it difficult for Callista to imagine him wielding a blade, hacking through enemies as though they were nothing more than unfeeling meat, but his ease with the weapon in his hands gave the lie to that. "A sad enough story, but I don't see the mystery in it."
He frowned in disagreement. "But what they found in the cave – "
"Could have been anything. The man was mad, Aren. Sir Aren," she corrected herself. "It could have been a ghost, a demon, a shiny rock – he never even saw it for himself. I think the most important fact is the obvious one. That village's mage – its only mage, unless he was lying, and I don't think he was – was mad as an imp on an altarstone. Cause enough for disaster, don't you think?"
"You think he killed them?" Sir Aren asked, brow rising in disbelief.
Callista shrugged. "It's possible, though that's not what I was getting at. That settlement was near Felwood. Do really you think the Legion would've left it intact for long? Without sorcery to fend them off, it was only a matter of time."
He shook his head, unconvinced. "Those fiends rarely leave the forest in force, even now. None of the earlier chronicles mentioned seeing even a single demon."
"The mortal armies weren't the only ones who had to rebuild after Hyjal," she countered with a humorless smile. "And it's hardly surprising they've never razed any night elven outposts – they're all fortified by now, aren't they? The Legion's battles against the elves rarely went well, anyway, and not all of them are too stupid to remember it. A lone, unguarded human settlement, however…"
"Unguarded? Most of those villagers were veterans, Callista. Survivors. Almost all of them could wield a blade."
"Better than a company of felguards?"
"There are no companies of felguards in Felwood," he said in exasperation. "Plenty of demons, yes, but as far as we can tell they've all gone feral. They attack each other as often as they do us!"
For a moment Callista just stared, torn between disbelief, pity and black amusement, until she resolved her dilemma with a peal of laughter, swiveling sideways in her chair to better eye him. "Oh, do they now?" she said, choking back her inappropriate mirth. "Whoever your spies are, shoot them."
She'd managed to annoy him again; the set of his broad shoulders had become distinctly stubborn. "What are you saying?"
She opened her mouth to snap something derisive but hesitated instead, thinking about that for a moment. What was she saying? Obviously the Alliance (or at least the part of it represented by Sir Aren) had little idea what it was really dealing with in Felwood. Patriotism (what smidgeon of it she'd ever had) dictated she remedy that, but the fact of the matter was, at the moment she was far more irritated with the Alliance than she was with at least one of the dreadlords in Jaedenar. Granted, he had clawed up her arm and caused her a fair bit of hungover explaining the next morning, but from a demon that treatment was practically affectionate. Sort of. Okay, maybe not, but it was still preferable to blackmail.
At the same time, she was becoming fond of Sir Aren and his company (except for, perhaps, that night elf), and the idea of them strolling obliviously into the forest to get shredded by the Shadow Council caused her a nasty stab of guilt.
Repressing a sigh of annoyance directed mostly at herself, she met his gaze with her own purged of the offending amusement. "I'm saying, the Legion there is more formidable than you seem to think. I've been to Felwood. There are true commanders there now, bringing their forces in line."
The guardedness was back in his posture when he looked at her, there in the stiffness of his back and the way his fingers curled unconsciously around the hilt of the sword in his lap. "What were you – " He cut himself off with a shake of his head. "No, don't tell me, I don't want to know. What kind of commanders? More satyrs? Doomguards?"
No, he didn't want to know, because then he might not be able to trust her, and he had no choice but to trust her, did he? "If it makes you feel better, I was only there after plaguebloom and I didn't go very far in," she said, offering him the lie out of sympathy. "I just talked to other warlocks who had. And yes, there are satyrs and doomguards there, but if the rumors are true, they answer to a dreadlord. That's why you should leave it alone."
He seemed to study the glistening blade on his lap before meeting her eyes again. "And you believe these rumors?"
Oh, did she ever. "Yes."
He nodded, and she was annoyed to see neither surprise nor faltering in his eyes, only resignation. "We'd heard…whispers…but we didn't want to believe it without harder evidence. There'd never been very many, even during the war, and we'd made an effort to destroy them all. We thought we'd done it, too. Except for that Forsaken witch's pet."
Yes, Varimathras. Callista drew little distinction between the free-willed undead and those of the Scourge, but she had a great deal of professional respect for anyone who could put a leash on a creature like Nerothos, whether the woman was still breathing or not. With effort, she swallowed the impulse to scoff at anyone who thought they'd killed every Legion dreadlord on Azeroth. She had no doubt the fiends would be delighted to hear it. "I get the impression they're not easy creatures to corner," she said, not entirely managing to keep the dryness from her tone.
Luckily, the paladin seemed to notice nothing odd about it. "No, they're not," he agreed. "Even so, our orders stand. We can't 'leave it alone,' though we'll be as careful as we can." He paused, watching her, and she knew, with an uncomfortable feeling, what he was about to ask even before he said it. "I know you've been badly done by, and I'm sorry. But we could really use your help."
She started shaking her head before he'd finished his sentence. "No, you can't. There's nothing I could do for you against a dreadlord. No warlock I know could."
It was probably even true. Oh, if he caught them all skulking through Felwood, Nerothos might let her go (after he finished sneering and coercing a favor or two out of her), but she doubted very much that his tolerance would extend to a gaggle of paladins. Besides, there was no guarantee that Nerothos would even be the creature they met. There was more than one dreadlord in that forest, and it was likely they'd be hacked to pieces by felguards before they saw any of them anyway.
"We're not going there to kill a dreadlord, Callista," he said. He leaned forward over the sword resting on his lap, holding her gaze with his own. The man could really look depressingly sincere when he wanted to. "We just want to search and stay beneath notice."
The twinge of sympathy his guileless expression stirred in her was quickly snuffed by a defensive flare of contempt. Sensing they'd reached an impasse and annoyed at his continued attempts to persuade her, Callista stood with an impatient scrape of chair legs, gathering her cloak over one arm. "If you want to stay beneath notice, then do your searching somewhere else."
"We can't. You know we can't." His voice was quiet, but there was iron in it. The voice of a man who had his orders and intended to follow them, eyes wide open and without illusion, straight into the abyss.
Callista scowled. Twisting Nether, the only thing worse than a paladin who was an honor-less hypocrite was one who wasn't. The more earnest and resigned he sounded, the more she suffered an unholy urge to grab him by the collar of his tunic and shake. Not that it would likely help; the man was almost twice as broad in the shoulder as she was. Maybe she could summon her voidwalker and they could both shake. Sir Aren still probably wouldn't be convinced, but at least she would feel better.
Striding to the door, she pulled it open and paused, studying the now wary-looking paladin with her most scathing expression. "Then you've got all the help I can give you."
Not waiting for a reply, she kicked the door shut behind her hard enough to rattle the locks of the rooms on either side, and blinked as the head of every passenger in the corridor (including both Redbranch brothers) swiveled to stare at the slam.
Alright. Perhaps that had been slightly over-dramatic.