A/N: Quotes from real writers are plagiarised fro—I mean, borrowed with modification by characters; the game's description of weaponry is used; Mai Bhago is the name of a Sikh heroine borrowed for a brief mention; Ibn Jumay is also a real name borrowed.
—
"There is no excuse for ignorance of Nature. You brought this upon yourself, wizard, and it will not harm you to endure the consequences for a day," Jaheira said. Montaron hadn't provided much help in persuading Xzar to put down the ivy; and the wizard's face and hands demonstrated it.
The bustle of the Friendly Arm Inn cheered Prudence less than it would have done under normal circumstances. Explaining the bloodied human mass on the steps to the guards, defending themselves against the Inn's codes, worrying if it would happen again—fell short of optimistic imagination of exploring the wider world beyond Candlekeep, of meeting the illusionist gnome adventurer or hearing more of the tale of the barkskin-casting wizard of Baldur's Gate.
"I think you should try to heal him," Prudence repeated. 'Tis almost a slight on Gorion, but I see it too. She had been in the wrong to threaten them; but...
"'Tis not so simple as that, child," Jaheira said. "Prayers must be meditated upon in advance; specified remedies sought—"
"It's not that I don't know that—" She'd lived next to a temple of Oghma; druidic castings were similar in principle, despite the sometimes great differences in domain and philosophy. "Xzar, you'll hurt yourself if you keep doing that. If you give me your hand, I'll try." Choosing a wizard's hands to heal was pragmatic; it temporarily stopped him scratching at his face, too. She felt perhaps enough capacity for prayer left to her to make an attempt.
"—Stop touching me!" He quickly drew back, as if he had seen something to suddenly class her as a threat.
"I suppose the choice of companions should be your own." Jaheira gave a very expressive sigh, and turned in her seat to face her husband.
"Everyone d-deserves a chance, dear."
It was part pride, likely enough, that led Prudence to continue suasion. "I won't if you don't want me to, Xzar. I can heal you, if you like—I couldn't try to harm you with this if I wanted to."
That, somehow, captured his attention. Xzar leaned forward, his green eyes narrowed. "But when you reach into other people's bodies, blood still travelling or not it doesn't matter—destruction is always easier than creation. They like inflicting rather than curing, most of them. How many times have you seen the red hands coming for you?"
Inflicting wounds rather than healing; the clerical theory was all too simple, that healing powers could easily be applied to deliberately break and warp instead of mend, closer and far more intimate than a sword's attack or an arcane damage spell. And it was something she was grateful to her gods that she lacked the choice to do by intent. "I don't. I can't distort my healing."
"Fascinating. Almost as many sharp objects upon you as Monty, and yet you swear not to hurt when you touch." He sounded mocking, but she supposed he made a point, and he was allowing her—
She made the casting, seeking calmness and precision to flow through her ungloved hands. The plant's secretions bonded with tissue and forced an ill reaction; she encouraged that to mend. There was little time she could sustain the prayer, but she saw some of the angry blisters fading, the swelling eased. A film of oil was drawn to the surface of their hands, inactive.
"Slightly improved." Xzar flexed his long fingers. "That would be my spells rendered easier to cast...against the rabbits chasing your neck?"
"You'd have to go to the temple for further healing. I ought to visit it in any case," she said. She could see Imoen, safely near to Khalid, aiming a dart at a marked board on the wall, and Montaron, talking with two other halflings in the inn's darkest corner, a tankard of ale before him.
Garl Glittergold was a gnomish deity of righteousness and a sense of humour, she'd read at Candlekeep; she'd looked forward to paying her respects to his temple before the assassination attempt.
"If I must," Xzar replied.
The Friendly Arm's temple was a small stone building detached from the fortress, far more richly accoutred within than the inn's main rooms; the shrine's furnishings strongly featured gems and gold, and where it did not metallic surfaces were polished to a near-sunlike sheen. Marble shelves lying beyond were filled with near threefold the number of potions and remedies than the monks of Candlekeep had needed to store.
"Glittergold guide you on your travels." The gnomish priestess said the words of her greeting. Silver-haired and crossing her temple's elaborate tiles with a nimble step despite her stooped back, she smiled up at them, and Prudence found reassurance in the holy atmosphere of the place.
A glimmering white flash seemed to pass behind her eyes when she looked at Prudence. "I see you're another errand-fetcher to those above. I am Gellana Mirrorshade."
"A good day to you, ma'am," Prudence said. "We wished to ask if..."
"The poison ivy near the steps?" Gellana said dryly, looking up at Xzar. "Usually it's the children who get into it. I keep reminding Bentley, trim it back, tell the guards to pick up a scythe or two and put their backs into it, but I'd almost swear it's cursed. That'll be fifteen gold for a prayer, or ten gold for salve."
"Thank you. Prayer, I suppose." It would be discourteous to be stingy upon travelling companions. Prudence reached to the pouch of coin carefully strapped to her leg, her savings from Candlekeep chores and a portion of the gold they had from those who had attacked them. "We'd also like an antidote potion, and two potions of healing." She could afford little, but it was wiser to purchase items to aid them in their quest. "I should like to pay my respects to Glittergold."
"Your patronage is welcomed. Sit down, young man," she told Xzar forcefully. "You're a good deal taller than I. And you don't want to know the state of your aura."
"You might not. I care less than I care for either your god or for those shameless illusions you peddle; all the glowing jewels that pretend to hide the way death smells underneath this place—"
"Xzar!" It was a distinctly unseemly circumstance for him to lapse into ramblings. "On his behalf, I—apologise, Mistress Mirrorshade."
"Oh. Does all that matter to you?" he said in Gellana's direction. "Of course it does. I suppose that changes things?"
"It's certainly not the most tactful language we've had in here." Gellana scowled. "But we heal all sorts. Don't make me cast Silence upon you." She stepped toward him.
"There really are dead things that belonged here." He blinked slowly, leaning back languidly against one of the gold-polished stools. "You'd find them under the furnishings if you tried."
"You wouldn't, more likely," Prudence said. "The temple's walls don't match the main building; it must have been constructed after they—I'm sorry, I don't know the full story, Mistress Mirrorshade?" She'd noticed the architectural difference, and a temple would have to be new-built to be sacred to a different god.
"Took the fortress from priests of Bhaal, yes," Gellana said; a shadow seemed to cross her face. "I tore down what was here and laid some of these stones with my own two hands. It's bad for the health to brood too much over dead things," she finished pointedly.
Xzar passed a hand along his cleared chin. "Quite the injury, hmm? Delightful."
"I'd also like to make this small tithe," Prudence said. It was part of her duties; eight gold pieces, not a great sum compared to wealthier adventurers, spared in part from those she'd helped to kill.
"A welcome gift," Gellana said.
"Quixotic altruistic gestures that carefully apportion a small sum? There's no point to that," Xzar said, enthusiastic again. "If you must fling the plunder away, grant the entirety of it to the winds themselves; turn it into a grand gesture rather than the predictable mean; go to the extreme and fashion this insufferable charity to something at least interesting—"
"And you're not carrying any coin, are you?" Prudence said.
"—No; it disappears from my pockets even when I don't intend to pass it away," Xzar said. "Does that interfere with my point? It shouldn't, in purest logic."
"So I see he can be lucid at times," Gellana said dryly. "Garl's blessings and that general line whilst you continue your travels, young woman."
The temple door closed quietly behind them. Prudence sighed. She was supposed to behave with propriety within temples, and especially those of gods as much a force for good as Garl.
"I shouldn't try to take you anywhere, should I?" she said.
"Only take me to Nashkel. Accompany me, rather," Xzar said. "It was my idea first."
Nashkel; a benevolent cause. "There are—times and places for that sort of thing," she said. "Were you divining on purpose?"
"For the inexistent remains of paradoxically-dead gods of murder? Hardly. It's only that I notice when there are bones in the earth. And the people serving drinks are under some sort of illusion. But at least it's warm here. Though that can be bad for decay."
So she could imagine. "Here. You ought to keep a potion ready." The other two potions she'd give to Imoen; she herself and Jaheira could both heal, and Khalid and Montaron had armour to protect them.
Xzar carefully placed it in his belt. "Repaying my good intentions so soon? I cannot say that I don't question your own—Garl is not the only god I fail to trust. It's closer to all of them."
"Well." Telling a priestess that inside her temple had certainly not been the time and place. "Almost everyone refuses to worship at least some of the gods, unless they're in that odd branch of the AO cult. You're entitled to your opinion."
"Gods are either useless or unnecessarily interfering or want other people to hurt you no matter who you are and I'd rather be powerful enough to get rid of them all and have my studies in peace. I can't imagine you agree with that little piece of blasphemy." That seemed to be a smirk.
Bullying anyone into any kind of belief is a greater wrong than provoking inter—deliberately acrimonious debate. She'd read similar sentiments to Xzar's in Candlekeep's library.
"Of course not. I believe that the gods I choose to follow stand for justice, righteousness, and helping people—that sort of thing," Prudence said. "They aid us. But I've read books that arrived at the same conclusions without consulting the gods. Reason is enough to arrive at the same principles, no matter what you believe or don't believe, and the freethinkers I've read have been—clear-headed about it." She couldn't quite restrain an apologetic glance in the direction of the skies.
"Is there any as dangerous as a persecuting priest-ridden king; as a savage inquisitor; as a whimsical devotee, a morose bigot?" he quoted at her.
"Inquisitors aren't savage; I could have been one—" she replied. "Justice is necessary to the maintenance of every association; the distinction between good and evil does not depend upon arbitrary conventions or systems—" She added the disjointed quotes.
"I haven't read the whole of Holbach. Destruction is the mandate of the world? Gods kill magic itself in petty squabbles—"
Helm and Mystra in the Time of Troubles—and was that a partial quote from Donatien? Reading that in full would have been distinctly unsuitable for a paladin. "Helm had a duty," she said. Many scholars of Candlekeep had disapproved greatly of the act; but by the accounts of it she had read, the circumstances had granted neither he nor Mystra an alternative. "Just because the gods have conflicting responsibilities at times—and personalities—doesn't negate the good they do."
"He murdered Mystra and—actually, I could sometimes see through the chaos. Shattered glass; painstakingly place the shards in the right order and one can still reflect the gaze through them—or turn a magnifier to the ripping threads, cast through the designs of the filaments changing on the broken spinning wheel. Sometimes I wonder if even without a steward, our knowledge could still account for the secret patterns there—but I was a boy spinning cantrips then." He wove a pale green globe into the air, casting it from hand to hand in elaborate paths.
The Time of Troubles had not touched Candlekeep as strongly as other places; Prudence could remember some of her father's concerns and that of the other mages, which had made considerably more sense than these ramblings. "Wild magic, Xzar? Also, if the guards see you do that—"
He glared. "Wild? Not ever. I read and study," he said. The globe vanished. "Enough to know a little of your entities; even if my kind of knowledge triumphs. The mind is its own place—mine seems to be, in any case—and what it deduces of the intrinsic collapse of all order, structure and charity—"
"Whether or not it's folly to have faith in gods, and it's not, the works of those who lack it come to the opposite conclusion through rational means."
"Very well—I suppose it is all delightful phases of defiance, far too soonly followed by let's-pretend-we-have-to-be-nice-anyway; and in the rare rebel, it turns out to be let-us-commit-acts-of-increasingly-repetitive-depravity; never the culmination of an urge to truly expand the borders of knowledge. They all arrive at the wrong conclusions," Xzar said.
Her turn to allow a smile to show on her face. "That's a very good point you've just conceded. They converge on the point that human reason and kindness lead to—"
"Argument from authority! And you know what they say those gods did to those terribly daring theorists after they became components in the earth...or do you? Of course, I know ways of avoiding that." They'd suddenly—veered off topic.
"Nobody knows those planes," Prudence said. The wisest of clerics, in close communion with their gods, had some idea of what would await them personally; but Candlekeep's library had a mass of contradictory texts on the subject, most of which she had not read. The better path was to live life. "We don't need to talk about that sort of thing; I don't think knowing what happens after's...the right sort of knowledge for humans. The writers chose their arguments while they lived, and some of their works are still valuable to those of us who serve the gods."
"Then you set boundaries upon your knowledge after all," Xzar said. "I think I'll append to that some most sneering comment on what that says of your mind."
"There's the minor detail of comprehension, you know," she answered him. "There's only so much humans—humanoids—can understand while still remaining themselves. What happens on those planes is a matter of those planes, and in fairness—"
"And I said, I don't happen to care about it—it's a convenient knot to pick at your arguments," he said, cutting her off. "After all, where would a paladin be without painful attacks against all those who fail to match stern and arbitrary measurements?"
"Not arbitrary, as you concede the literature demonstrates. Not stern, or stern only to those who choose the discipline; and compassion besides justice."
"Compassion," he echoed; the tattoos around his mouth moved into an odd grin. "But they'll hurt you because they're bored; or they'll hurt you because they can; or for a spell component in a hurry..."
"Whoever they are—" And was it a feeling of protectiveness, for the ragged and skinny necromancer? "Not everyone's like that," she said.
He only kicked at the grass. "You're horribly wrong, and you'll find that out when you've been wandering longer, and you really don't understand how it works at all. Please don't assume you win that round, but at least you tell funny stories."
"How long have you been wandering?" she asked. It couldn't have been that long, although he was more tanned than Imoen.
"It's been a long walk. At last we're but a few days from Nashkel, if we insist on sunlight. Infravision would be nice—never mind. I'll need more coal dust and bat fur."
"Then you ought to be able to purchase that from Bentley. Perhaps a ranged weapon while you're at it?"
—
Three humans in the group, and banditry on the roads; for the sake of fewer delays, to march to Beregost while the daylight lasted.
The journey began slightly before dawn: Imoen bouncing around and flaunting her ability for permanent cheer; Jaheira and Khalid treating it as completely routine; Xzar sighing, pouting and not at all coherent; Montaron grudgingly carrying some of the wizard's supplies and making repeated mention of the vision of three damned humans and the benefits of the cover of night. The dew on the grass and the soft colours of the sunrise were gently pleasant, at first; and then the late morning descended into heavy marching under warm weather.
"There is a quest, Prudence," Jaheira told her. "A dwarven cleric from the Inn, Unshey, has alleged an ogre with a belt fetish lurking nearby, who thieved from her a valuable girdle. I think we may do her that favour if we come across his trail."
"Useless waste of time!" Montaron snarled. "How valuable, ye say?"
"Your greed is disgusting." Jaheira gave him one of those looks; which seemed to not faze Montaron in the least.
"Landrin the gnome also wanted us to clear her house of a spider infestation once we reach Beregost," Prudence said; Jaheira wasn't the only one who paid attention. "Do you know exactly where the ogre attacked?"
"She's a d-druid," Khalid said proudly. "My wife can find anything in the woods."
"I shall do so," Jaheira said; she quickened her pace to move ahead of the party, disappearing as smoothly and confidently between the trees as Imoen could hide between the shadows of the library shelves.
"—Khalid, what's that shiny elven ring you have? The one you wear on your little finger." Imoen pointed to his gloved hand, where Prudence vaguely remembered seeing a slim golden twist at the inn.
"This?" He bared his hand; the intricate styling about the tiny green chip in the centre indeed resembled the sort of thing worn by elven visitors to Candlekeep, though it was far less ostentatious than the wealth displayed by many of those who came. "It's only an old k-keepsake, Imoen. It was my mother's once."
"Yeah, that's not t' way to do it, kid," Montaron muttered, rolling his eyes in the direction of the heavens.
"How sweetly sentimental," Xzar said quietly.
"That's really nice," Imoen said. "Was she elvish?"
"Yes, my m-mother was an elf and my father a human merchant," Khalid said. "All a very long time ago, and quite far from here, of course."
"Lots of travelling and having great adventures, since then?" Imoen said.
"Well, I wouldn't call it that," Khalid said. "Jaheira and I simply—do what we can, here and there, from time to time." Prudence knew Gorion had been a Harper; she thought she had also seen a glint of a silver pin concealed by Jaheira's sleeves, but if they did not wish it publicly mentioned she would not.
"Aww, no drinking with Elminster or shaking the hands of all four Grand Dukes?" Imoen said.
"No, I'm afraid not—" Khalid said. Xzar suddenly cried out:
"Elminster! Mustn't mention him. Mustn't say the name. Using the names calls on the rabbits. Things cast on true names and true powers if he comes infernal song and attack and outrageous power no chances bad rabbits the rabbits are bad—"
"He's not here and even if he—" Prudence said. Given Elminster's achievements, speaking of him in this fashion was...ominous. "And you said the name yourself!" she added for the sake of some logic, in case it helped.
"Off on one of his spells again. Calm down, ye mad fool!" Montaron said. Xzar's hands windmilled about as if he was about to cast a spell. She'd seen him intelligent, fascinating; but when like this... Prudence echoed Montaron's suggestion to calm down, offering Xzar a hand, but he ignored her.
Khalid watched him; "You seem rather d-disturbed," he said. "Certainly you need h-help."
"Ridiculous and demeaning; no help anyone offering it is either lying or trying to sell the Boareskyr Bridge—" But it seemed Khalid's gentle tone of voice wasn't without effect.
"Elminster is no m-meddler unless 'tis needed, nor is he danger to those without ill intent...or those burdened by illness. Have you m-met him, wizard?" Khalid finished.
Xzar's voice changed again. "Why, my good half-elf. Indeed I've not knowingly so much as seen fragment of hide or hair of him ever; and I'm a wizard too." He brushed down his robes, and indeed imitated the stance of an archmage.
Imoen shook her head. "Creepy," she whispered; and took a step closer to Khalid. "...Travelled to lots of places, huh, Khalid? I've been more places than Pru myself, even if I don't remember most of 'em. Up and down the Dales, at least once or twice." Before Winthrop and Gorion had brought her to Candlekeep.
"Is that so?" Khalid looked at both girls. "B-before Gorion settled down, Prudence, I do remember that he took you to our wedding in Gulthmere, though you may have no memory of it. He carried you in a sling over his back; you were very w-well behaved."
"—No, I don't," Prudence said; it must have been long before Candlekeep.
"N-nearly—you would have been almost a year old, I belive Gorion said. Watching everything very carefully and raising your head to look about you. Of course, you're a good deal taller now..."
"Interesting," Imoen said. "Back home, we've only got those engravings with the bearskin rug—"
"Okay, Im. That's enough reminiscing—"
"You ought to be quieter in Nature's home," Jaheira said; and emerging through the trees brushed a selection of small twigs from her hair. "Anything could have heard you."
"S-sorry, dear. Only—idly remembering. We should not brood overmuch," Khalid said.
"Yeah. Ye'll make me bloody sick," Montaron said; Jaheira glared at him.
"The ogre is ahead, in any case," she announced. She looked at Prudence; "Child, what do you suggest?"
Jaheira's critical glance now firmly rested on her; Prudence could imagine it was well within her and Khalid's experience to defeat the ogre on their own. She answered the question to play to the test, taking comfort in Khalid's more sympathetic expression. "I'll walk up and politely ask the ogre to return the belts, of course," she said; Montaron cackled. She ignored him. "And then, if necessary: you wait in the trees nearby; Jaheira can cast an entanglement spell, and you can use missile weapons at a safe distance. I ought to be capable of a distraction for long enough." Her armour would protect her, and she was probably fast enough to evade for some little time.
"I would eliminate the first step," Jaheira said dryly, "but I suppose 'tis the path you have chosen in life."
"I know Gorion was p-proud of your actions," Khalid said. Encouragement indeed.
Negotiation; diplomacy; peaceful solutions first. Every creature deserves the benefit of the doubt if possible. Prudence did not try to conceal the sound of her footfalls, indeed stepping with deliberate noise; then her companions behind would be less likely heard. (If this were a tragic saga she would turn around to find nobody there—) She scolded herself against general foolish use of imagination.
It was—accounts of ogres varied usually between seven and twelve feet, and ogres themselves were no more monolithic than any other species. Eight, she would have guessed. A foul smell filled the air from it; she could see several belts draped around it, four worn as bracelets and one a necklace.
It saw her. "Puny human! Give your belt."
If she'd had a chance, she might have tried to think of some witty and ironic line: The first quest of a paladin: ending a dire case of belt banditry! But it was there and looming, carrying a large and well-spiked morningstar with ominous dark stains spread across it. Not unlike the ogres who had attacked, on that night; her throat felt suddenly dry and words leached out of her head.
Don't you dare run away again.
"Er—g—h—I've been told those belts you're wearing don't belong to you," she said suddenly, "so if that's true please return them and perhaps a settlement can be arr—"
"Too large words! Grind and eat bones then steal belt," the ogre said; and then he attacked, and it hurt. She hadn't been quite fast enough; the blow had shaken her body, and she fell on her back on the grass. But she was moving still; much-laboured-upon instinct had her roll to the side, away from the second hit to the ground beside her. She brought her shield forward; she couldn't fully counter a blow from an enemy so much stronger without shattering her shield-arm, but if she deflected at the right moment—
Arrows began to fly above her head; Jaheira's commanding voice raised the spell. It was not particularly heroic—an ogre outnumbered six to one. Perhaps it qualified as an act benefiting...all future owners of belts passing this way? She stepped back, gradually yielding as little ground as possible. It growled; she swept her scimitar through the air and actually managed to scratch its harsh skin, before she then ducked under the large morningstar it wielded. Vines wrapped securely around its feet, and her friends' aim found its way. An arrow sprouted rather horribly from the ogre's eye when it fell.
"Gotcha good!" Imoen's voice rang out. "Rescued you from the nasty ogre, Pru!"
"Thanks." Perhaps she should have tried a simpler vocabulary in her attempt at negotiation—but judging by the ogre's threats and the shade of the dried blood on its morningstar, this particular one had hurt people...
"Those two are enchanted, the rest aren't." Xzar came to stand over the corpse, pointing to the belts. "Also I want the teeth and maybe some fluids."
"A necromancer. I would wish I was surprised," Jaheira said.
"If you meant that as an insult, then please don't; and Xzar, if you only said that to annoy her, then don't do that," Prudence said.
She peeled the bracelet-belts off the ogre; the task had to be done, Montaron was right that it was better they hold the property than the next traveller (and return it to its rightful owners if they could be found). The ogre's form seemed to ripple slightly when she removed the magical pair, confirming Xzar's words. The belt worn as a necklace was difficult to detach; she used her dagger to strip away its silver buckle, feeling slightly guilty. They needed equipment.
"Completely no idea—" Xzar flung the first belt aside, one with a bright yellow buckle. He squinted at the second, quickly rotating it between his hands. "I don't have the true spell to hand, but this one I think I see a pattern. It's a sort of grey-brown-bright aura, smooth, a bit jagged in places, warm and protective—people always think warm is protective, but did you know that a frog in water that turns gradually warmer and warmer doesn't hop out and boils to death—actually, that's a lie, they do hop out—"
"An affront to Nature and cruelty to animals," Jaheira said.
"The secret purpose of the story is warning and metaphor and bedtime—and this one's solid but soft, like an iron wall covered with thick sweet syrupy stuff, small pointy things get lost and tangled as if in a labyrinth. But hard things would completely smash the pig-iron underneath. I'd use a slide-under spell or a flashy substantial area-effect if it was spells, never a quick painful spell, except it's not spells it's directed at, it's the sort of weapons that you look at with your real eyes." He shook his head fiercely; and opened his eyes fully to look at Prudence again. "I hope that all makes it very clear."
"So it's a shield against... Not subtle weapons or large weapons, but against sharp weapons?" Prudence tried to translate.
"Unshey specified a Girdle of Piercing," Jaheira said. "Three simple words, wizard."
"This one's really pretty, can I have it?" Imoen had picked up the yellow one; and she was already reaching to buckle it around herself. "Nice colour—ow! Ow ow ow!"
"Imoen! You do not touch, wear, or do anything with any unknown magical objects!" Jaheira's staff had suddenly knocked Imoen to the ground, scattering the belt away from her. "Do you know nothing, child? That belt could have a terrible curse on it!"
"You will not hit my sister." Prudence's voice sounded like a hiss to her; and from some instinct she had raised her scimitar against Jaheira.
"She put herself in danger. We accompany you to protect you both—however prone you may be to these violent surges," Jaheira said.
"And d-do—do not threaten my wife or I'll do—something!" Khalid said.
Prudence paused. The first time, she'd meant to intimidate an assassin; she'd not thought of herself as especially quick-tempered, and yet she was here—something like dark rage ran through her, and this was her sister. "It's not my intent to threaten you. I—" She carefully stepped back, attempting to clear her head.
"Yeah. OwIdidn'treallyneedmyribsoranything. Dunno what yer doing, sis—" Imoen said.
"You could have called to her—" Prudence said. She sheathed her blade, trying not to reconsider the action. Antagonising Gorion's friends in such a way would be wrong; although she'd already done it... "Let's—neither of us—try that again."
Jaheira sniffed. "I accept your apology. We ought to move on," she said.
"When I'm done here," Xzar called, waving cheerfully at them; he'd made a cut in the ogre's arm with his dagger, and seemed to be draining its fluids into a silver vial he held.
Jaheira spoke volumes with a sigh.
"But you didn't apologise," Xzar whispered to Prudence as they carried on through the forest. No; she couldn't have said, I'm sorry for objecting to you hitting Imoen. A disproportionate response to Imoen getting hurt would have to involve—probably some depraved means of torture involving three randomly selected household objects. But it was better that Jaheira continued to make the assumption.
The path they trod was surrounded by dense growth, the leaves bearing the brightness of the month. A spider—of small variety rather than the usual type featuring in adventurers' lorebooks, its body the size of her little finger—had slipped from its web to the top of her chainmail, probably when she'd brushed against a branch. She plucked it carefully away, returning it to a tree.
"Would you like more? I could find more," Xzar offered; somehow he'd snatched a second spider from the thickly entwined branches, holding it twisting in the air.
"Not at all necessary. Put it back." She'd no fears of the creatures; and if these were the same variety that had occasionally invaded Imoen's bedroom at Candlekeep, they weren't dangerous to humans.
"What if I need it for a spell component?" Its legs continued to rapidly move, twitching against his fingers. "Scream of spider-down-the-neck-of-holy-paladin?"
"I'd be disinclined to follow that plan," she said.
"Ye'd bloody scream, wizard," Montaron said. "Can ye be silent? Much the same to ye, tinwoman." Prudence saw herself included in his glare.
"'Tis quite true," Xzar agreed amiably; the spider escaped from him, retreating to a branch. "Preserve the echoes of one's own terror as a spell component; release it upon the Weave in place of more customary verbal expression. The results can be intriguing—"
"Th' druid's twitching and I reckon I smell hobgoblin," Montaron said.
"Correct enough, halfling," Jaheira said, a scowl to equal Montaron's own set on her face. "There are older tracks here." She pointed to what looked to Prudence like slightly disturbed ground. "Be prepared."
They found that four hobgoblin bodies lay upon the ground of a clearing; tracks of a caravan led into the woods. Two hobgoblins had been killed by arrows, it seemed, the other two wounded by some edged weapon; flies crawled over the corpses, which seemed not dead for more than days. They hadn't taken time to bury the gibberlings and hobgoblins they'd killed before, Prudence remembered.
"It is good that some travellers are not helpless," Jaheira said. "The creatures are often organised well; a lone and somewhat mentally disturbed ogre is one matter, but hobgoblins require different—"
"We came across five of them on our way to the inn," Prudence said, knowing that a better paladin would have politely asked Jaheira for her strategic thoughts.
"Yeah, Pru stabbed one of 'em in the back really nicely—" Imoen began; which wasn't precisely a fair description of what she'd done, and caused another of those glances from Jaheira.
"Ain't no need to boast of it," Montaron said.
"Right, yeah." Imoen screwed up her face in an expression probably intended to recollect the arts of stealth and a general appearance of untrustworthiness.
"I see. I am trained in your weapon as part of my druidic arts, child," Jaheira said to Prudence. "I ought soon to see what I have to teach you."
"Then I'd appreciate a chance to spar."
Quite probably she was about to regret that, Prudence thought; the rest of the party still sat over the midmeal taken in the heat of the early afternoon, and she faced Jaheira and her husband in a quiet space between the trees. No; she could quote Oghma's maxim that no chance for learning ought to be a regret, and it happened to be one she agreed with.
Jaheira brandished her weapon, drawn from her pack; "Start and I'll see if you're teachable," she said. She carried no shield; only the sword in her right hand, a green-hilted scimitar of apparently ordinary metal below the cloth with which they had both bound their blades.
"I also trained in the scimitar, when I grew up," Khalid said, "but now I much prefer a longsword. Do you have Calishite relatives, Prudence? I suppose Gorion said little about your family—b-before he adopted you, I mean."
"Gorion told me my mother was from Silverymoon. I just prefer the balance; more weight to it than the standard longsword," Prudence replied. She lacked the strength to wield the heavy two-handed blades to proper effect, no matter how hard she worked; she preferred a shield's defence and an attack of moderate power. "Do you know much about her?" Gorion had been her parent in every way that mattered, and had seemed reluctant to talk of the past.
"I know little, I am sorry," Khalid said. "We were travelling far from Gorion at the time he took you in."
"To the lesson, child," Jaheira chided. "Begin when you are ready;—you ought to be ready by now." The druid's stance seemed casual, almost careless; but she watched, and her tawny eyes seemed to glitter.
Prudence would have preferred to begin by a defense against her to understand what Jaheira was capable of, but to be given the initiative to seize was an advantage. She stepped forward into a standard feint, prepared to follow it with a strong attack; and the fight began.
Three times disarmed, bruised, and sent to the ground barely before she'd a chance to start. Jaheira didn't seem to be holding back on her hits. Prudence rose again to her feet; perhaps she'd almost begun to understand what the Harper was doing, or perhaps that was an utter delusion. She picked up her shield and weapon once again.
"Your footwork is really quite good," Khalid said. "In my h-homeland, I recall studying the manual of a master called Mai Bhago..."
"Maya Begio, in Common?" Prudence said; she had read the translation upon Sir Rolland's orders, fortunate to have Candlekeep's resources to follow. A useful book; but as far as theory went into practice upon this occasion— "She's very good..."
Jaheira tsked in impatience. A woman who sought efficiency, both in her fights and in general; precision, her blade quick to slip past defences. She was probably faster through refusal to carry a shield, and Prudence considered laying down her own; but she preferred the style, and the point of training was to prepare for real battles.
They stepped toward each other again. "Khalid, would you check on Imoen?" Jaheira said, somewhat distractedly; she slashed at Prudence's right, the edge of her shield.
Patterns— She'd blocked that one. Prudence stepped back carefully; try to last as long as she could. Understand the rhyme and reason and anyone was possible to defeat; even the Warders' Will the Strong never timed his first-quarter lunges quite right and that was where one could move inside his reach and finish it—
"Grass is made of blades; and stars shoot!" Jaheira said. "Nature's servants do not hesitate; yet you fight like a milksop."
Jaheira herself fought—extremely well; like a druid, Prudence supposed. Adventured with her father those years ago. Straightfoward and strong in style, as if she refused to feint as a matter of principle; Jaheira attacked with a low cut quickly followed by a high, as she'd done before, and this time Prudence blocked instead of being clouted forcefully on the side of her head—
Jaheira seemed to give a slight nod. Emboldened, Prudence stepped forward; she lowered the shield slightly, and Jaheira came with a high strike. Prudence responded by raising her shield, catching Jaheira's blade on its edge and bringing her arm up. That, finally, was a chance for a quick thrust, and she'd managed to hit Jaheira for the first time with the flat of her wrapped blade—
And then found herself disarmed again by Jaheira's twist out of the stance, the quickly-following blow to the ribs having her drop to her knees.
"Is that temper of yours subdued, then?" Jaheira said, standing back as Prudence picked herself up again. "Gorion mentioned no violent surges in his correspondence; but it seems we have observed that side of you. I cannot see how you lay claim to your profession."
There was...a proverb. Prudence moved forward, steadily, thinking through Jaheira's strategies; if one considered her testing, again. A sober man in the celestial realms with friends is a saint. An angry man, a drunken man, a grief-stricken man: these show the depths to which he will fall. She conceded no ground to Jaheira, but found herself defending again.
"You're feeble and cowardly in style—if you must you may call it cautious, but it will see you dead—when you are not indulging in unnatural fits of temper and keeping ill company. Paladins are too often an affront to the Balance; are you an affront to them?"
A person who lost control lost the fight. It wasn't right to abuse that in other contexts. But in the Watchers she and Bors had clashed in personality and his attitude to women, and when a spar had turned to verbal taunts her cruelty on his inarticulation had turned him red-faced, hurt, and easy to outmanoeuvre— What would she have chosen to say to provoke Jaheira? Disrespecting nature and druidry; praising necromancy; insulting her husband—which would certainly be wrong for several reasons— Rage might be strong, but failed to last. She hadn't liked, Prudence told herself, that—lack of control.
She hit forward with her shield; that briefly had Jaheira step back. She tried to attack quickly; Jaheira had been correct, in truth. Sword-and-shield held advantage in protection and prompt initiative was the right strategy. Jaheira returned in a powerful riposte. She was stronger, though Prudence had the longer reach; Jaheira stood only up to her shoulders. In presence she certainly didn't give that impression.
Patterns, again. Jaheira was fast and intimidating and did not indulge in elaborate feints; did not conceal that her blade was about to strike home. Prudence blocked her, moving the shield as quickly as she could, and when she saw opportunity struck in return. Jaheira hit her on the upper arm—"In a true battle that would disable you, of course—" and she returned a blow to the thigh, feinting and hitting back. She was starting to—learn something, Prudence thought; she was still mastered by Jaheira's skill, but holding the ground...
And then Jaheira whispered something. Vines started to grow to wrap Prudence's ankles as they had the ogre's, and she started in surprise.
"As if this would never happen in a real fight," Jaheira said scornfully; she stepped forward. The strike Prudence blocked with shield. She needed to free herself; she sliced quickly through the vines on her right ankle, trying to protect against the fierce attack. Jaheira's whispers began again—disrupt a caster, always the rule— Prudence leaned forward and wove past the druid in her casting distraction; the blow connected with her side. The chant finished prematurely, and Jaheira moved aggressively to land another bruise.
"An instant later, and had that been a spell of lightning you should have been a pile of ash and blackened armour upon the forest floor," Jaheira said. "Do not leave yourself open to counterattack; keep a stride forward—" Prudence shielded; the vines around her boots had retreated to the ground. Jaheira's pace only seemed to increase, aggressively fighting in her justified confidence. Prudence worked to keep up, observing her. A longer fight, this one; Prudence felt herself panting, and tried to control her breathing. It did not suit what she was to give up; continue onwards and learn, push for the exhilaration to come— Thrust quart; recover in guard; push the attack in seconde; though Jaheira was unpredictable compared to those formal lessons.
Jaheira signalled when it was over, seemingly tireless still. "Not ill done," she said simply. "I'd not sacrifice angle for speed on those low strikes, though." She carefully unbound her weapon and sheathed it. She chanted, her hand glowing a light blue, and passed it over herself; Prudence did the same to the most tender of her own bruises.
"We finished washing up," Imoen said; she and Khalid had appeared behind them. "She wasn't too rough with you, right, Jaheira?" she laughed. "Pru, Khalid's been telling me about the red dragon they fought this one time, with Mr G., a really big one with magic powers breathing real fire and everything—"
A red dragon. Certainly...impressive. There was so much that Gorion had never talked about, Prudence thought again.
"Khalid, dear," Jaheira said.
"Y-yes, Jaheira?"
His wife sighed again. "I will continue to guide us. We will keep the pace."
The way Jaheira led them was quiet enough, punctuated only once by a stray small group of gibberlings. The horizon was patterned with the red of the sinking sun when they walked past Beregost's threshold, and the sky had begun to darken. It seemed a busy town; many yet carried out their business through the streets, and the faint sound of singing from some tavern blended with the noise of the closing marketplace.
Landrin's house, to the south-east of town, was sealed, fenced, and derelict, the grass starting to seem scraggly and the walls dirtied. The windows were boarded and nailed in place. Its desertion by its spell-experimenting owner had been just over a tenday past.
"So this is the site of the infestation? We will clear it on the morrow, after I have requested spells to drain poison," Jaheira said. "Had you mentioned this earlier, Prudence, I should have asked the Oak Father at my vigils of yesterday's sundown. The venom of a giant spider is often deadly to the novice adventurer."
Quite a pointed hint at the end there, though Jaheira was right that she ought to have thought ahead. "I think we can deal with a few spiders, Jaheira—" Prudence began. In the darkness beyond the boarded-up and magically warded windows, something black shifted. A lot of something black, apparently. Large hairy legs so close together that the house seemed almost fit to rupture from them; it seemed that if anything Landrin had understated the consequences of her magical accident...
"I could only be sure of making the casting twice. That would be once for you, once for Imoen," Jaheira said—another snipe, apparently, at Montaron and Xzar. "If that proves insufficient: it would be a shame to lose Gorion's child to a mere spider."
"I think much c-c-clearer and fight much better after r-rest, myself," Khalid said. "But the road to Nashkel will be longer, when we set out upon it..."
Finish this small task, and then have the spellcasters study afresh for the next part of the journey. "Any area-effect spells, Xzar?" Prudence said.
"No, I won't rescue that kitten from the tree no matter what you say! I have my standards and Nashkel is where—" Xzar shook his head wildly. "Oh, those. A trap of fatty grease oozed from the aching muscles of the ogre. I call the spider bodies when you fetch them."
That sounded a valid enough strategy. "Good. What do you think, Jaheira? Slow them down, and we ought to be able to surround the garden and pick most of them off at ranged distance. If we get in too much trouble, Imoen has a potion." Much of Landrin's fencing seemed intact enough to hold spiders within.
"As you insist," Jaheira said, not without a sigh. "An Entanglement would be appropriate."
"A light, Xzar?" Prudence said. It grew dark; far easier to aim with a light source at hand.
"Just studying the tattered walls meantimes," he said. "My sorts of lock, not Montaron's. Flaking away like six-day dead skin; the legs scratching at the mage's barriers within; perhaps some fascinating effect of poison penetrating the chosen Weave-fabric—and make these mundane demands, and I could do no other."
Xzar cast a magelight into the air; a green ball flew from his hands and took residence some distance above their heads, upon which it altered itself to the shape of a large, ethereal skull. Landrin's garden shone with the unnatural light.
"Ye'll make us popular as always, I can tell," Montaron muttered.
Xzar continued spellcasting; the grease that came into being was a white-brown substance that spread itself across the grass. Landrin had told her the codephrase to bring down her wards; which, it seemed Xzar had said, were dying already. Prudence said it aloud, her crossbow ready; and the spiders came. They burst from the failing door and windows in a thick mass of green and black.
Jaheira's entanglement reached around the greasetrap to tangle their legs. The first flow of the creatures had been as fierce as if a dam over some strong-flowing river had suddenly collapsed, and more came following from the house, crawling over the bodies of the other spiders; they slowly advanced. Prudence had already fired her crossbow twice into their midst, aiming for the reflection of magelight into their eight eyes. She loaded another bolt as quickly as she could; it would be harder to miss than hit given the number of the creatures, though a giant spider was more vulnerable about the eyes than in the thick-skinned carapace. At least, according to lore. The spider she aimed at was stopped in its crawl; it fell violently back, replaced by more clambering over its body. Six sets of ranged weapons set about the field, keeping back the tide of spiders; she could imagine the positioning in her mind's eye as though she flew above the town. The objective: simply to contain and put down Landrin's spiders. Three more bolts; a crossbow wasn't the fastest of weapons, but efficient in damage-dealing. She kept loosing her attacks until the spiders had begun to escape the grease; they came to her, fangs chittering, and she exchanged her crossbow for shield and blade.
Try not to get poisoned, she could imagine, was the main point. The spiders were fast, she learned quickly; a bite scraped along her mail, those large fangs. She hit at it with her shield, followed by a slice into its head; they couldn't be allowed to pass into the town. The giant spiders were above half her height, bulky and wide-legged; and still many of them remained. (She would not run away.) Imoen and Xzar, behind the most well-reinforced part of the fence, continued to loose missiles in the way of the spiders; Jaheira was nearest to her, throwing back the sorely wounded creatures with her staff. Prudence kept to her stance, carefully balanced; struck at the central spider-flesh. Blood—cool, dark blood—fell over her; the spiders came, and she thought she could fight these. At first she focused only on killing those before her—spiders, a non-existent moral dilemma for a paladin, simple predators; slash widely enough to keep them back, use the shield against the dangerous venom. When she looked to Khalid and Jaheira, she saw that more bodies had fallen about them; and Montaron, too fast to allow them to bite, stabbing easily into the underbelly of one, leaving corpses piled around him, slipping and weaving between their circles.
She fought for awareness of the battle; slice there, catch near the central eyes, and it fell back; let the venom take her shield instead of flesh. Another near hit; she did not wish to prove Jaheira's negative appraisal. A sharp leg scraped her shin bloody before she knocked it back by her shield. An arrow—that would be Imoen—flew into its head. The crowd of spiders was falling, at last. Khalid and Jaheira stood next to each other; Montaron, rooted in the grease, stabbed viciously at one with still-twitching limbs. The dark bodies littered the ground.
"A-any...any left in the house, dear?" Khalid pried a spider's limb from his mail. "I do s-so...hate these. So many legs."
They marched through Landrin's deserted home; the wooden shelves were splintered and broken, fragments of glass and pottery spilled across the floor. Khalid gingerly turned over the fallen bed to find the stained pair of old boots the gnome had wanted, fortunately intact aside from one jagged hole torn through them. A few smaller spiders still quivered in the corners, until the group dealt with them as the others.
Xzar carefully scraped a dark substance from an overturned workbench into a vial from his belt.
"Wizard?" Jaheira said. "I know I will regret asking, but: what are you doing?"
"Samples of this fascinating process. Normal common garden or household spiders alchemically transmuted into these venomous beasts with eyes that see in the dark—'tis much like the hidden mirror at the end of the hole of the rabbits that takes the fifth sign in the ascendant and the trammelled runes in the second aspect—"
"Oh, I see," Jaheira said, conveying by her tone that she, along with all reasonable people, could not in the least and would lack all inclination to do so. "I cannot possibly imagine how allowing the likes of you to research these odd experiments could cause harm."
"You don't? Goody! I keep telling Monty, you people are nice. Even if you're fond of yelling, my lady druid." Prudence was not sure whether the sarcasm was deliberately ignored; Xzar seemed to quickly finish taking his scrapings, and knelt down to feel along the floor. Jaheira's expression turned particularly thunderous.
"Don't dare to call me your lady, creature, and I warn you that—"
"Here's the wine," Prudence said. She'd found one bottle that had escaped with only a superficial crack in its glass; Cloudberry Confection No Turnips Allowed seemed to be written across the label in small, elaborate script. "That's all we were asked to do. We can go now." And attempt to be civil to each other.
"Leaving those as such?" Jaheira pointed to the spider bodies in the garden. "I can hasten Nature's reclaiming of their bodies to benefit the soil. A natural use."
Indeed; they hadn't exactly managed to beautify Beregost by their activities. "Thank you, that's good." Prudence looked at the spider bodies that also remained on the inside of the house; grotesque and bleeding. "If you have the orison for water creation, maybe indoors as well..."
"We are adventurers, not kitchenmaids," Jaheira said stiffly. "Now, if you'll get out of the way, necromancer..."
Xzar screamed; he fell backwards to the ground, clutching his left hand to the chest. Prudence instinctively reached for her weapon, but there wasn't anything visible—
"Mousetrap!" he howled. The wire and wood in his hands had twisted and bent his fingers; Prudence winced at the look of it. The device was almost the size of Winthrop's rattraps. Xzar gestured quickly, though, in the direction of a dark corner of the ceiling; white light flashed between his injury and a small spider perched there. The spider's body fell as a husk to the floor. He flexed a healed hand. "Have the kindness not to begin before I'm done gathering spell components, will you?" he said to Jaheira.
"Unnatural and—"
Prudence broke into the impending squabble. "He helped fight, he can take what he needs," she said. "As long as it's only what you need, Xzar. Balance of nature."
"I do need it." He moved to the top of Landrin's doorstep, where lay one of the larger spiders, relatively intact and pierced by crossbow bolts in its midsection. "Monstrous spiders have excellent night vision. That's rather important."
"Ewww," Imoen said emphatically, leaning upon Landrin's fencing; Prudence stood next to her, waiting for Xzar to finish. His cuts into the spiders' bodies were efficient, as precise as any she'd been taught how to make.
A garden full of dead spiders and a necromancer further dismembering selected samples. "I know. But it's—adventuring. I'm sorry, Immy, you could've been safe back at Candlekeep, even though you've helped a lot..." She didn't want to drag Imoen into anything that would hurt her.
"Yeah, no," Imoen said. "I don't want to go back, and I don't want to stop knowing that cutting up spiders is completely disgusting."
"Fair enough," Prudence said. "But what Jaheira and I do—I'm more a fighter than a healer, but it's also necromancy, technically, and back home at the Temple—"
"I know. You sliced up innocent little smothered frogs to learn about bodyparts," Imoen said. Prudence had done her share of service at Oghma's temple, helping the priests and learning about the healing arts before she'd gained the ability to cast herself.
"Not only frogs, even. You remember Master Ibn-Jumay's will?" Prudence said.
"The weird one—right, yeah, and I want a second eww on that," Imoen said. A cleric of Oghma, the author of a hundred treatises upon healing, and Faerun's foremost expert upon catalepsy, the Master had left written instructions on what he had wished done with his own body before his burial; Prudence had watched the dissection. Most clerics did not do such things because of the obvious problems, but Ibn-Jumay had willed it so in the name of enabling others to learn about healing. It is right to be sickened by blood and pain, especially that caused by evil acts—but to be useful in the field, a paladin must know when to suppress that compulsion—she had read. One's senses became accustomed to such things. She had not found it unusually difficult to kill her first gibberling, three years ago.
"It's not pleasant, but—that's not the standard of judgement," Prudence said.
"Nah. There'll be other reasons, I reckon," Imoen said simply.
Xzar finished his plundering, and at last Jaheira began her chant underneath the magelight; the earth itself rose at her command, shaking such that Prudence was relieved to be standing some distance away. The spiders' bodies sunk into the soil, enveloped by its upheaval about them. When the dirt closed over their remnants the grass atop it seemed to have grown slightly taller and thicker. That would have to be quite a powerful casting, Prudence thought; she saw Montaron's head turned to Jaheira, watching her.
"About time we're done with the blasted charity," he said, though he knew that Landrin had offered pay. "If'n we waste any more time, the next den of spiders may just live long enough." They walked through the streets, crossing town for their night's accommodation.
Imoen stretched her arms in the air. "Looks a nice town, those parts of it without spiders. How many inns here again?"
"Four; and Khalid and I can vouch for Feldepost's," Jaheira said, pointing to the lighted dwelling ahead of them. "You would be well advised to rest while you can, Imoen. There will be more than a few spiders to fight."
A small child plucked at Prudence's cloak, just where they neared the doorway to the inn's welcome. "Please, miss, are you an adventurer? My Bubbles is up in that tree and won't come down..."
The cat's mew above them sounded loudly in the night.
No gratitude, children these days!, Prudence thought; and felt dismayed at sounding like one of the older monks already. The little girl had taken her cat quickly and rushed to the sound of a parent's calling, with not so much as a thanks for its retrieval.
"See? Toldja cats are mean," said Imoen, who had refused the tree-climbing adventure despite her unbested talents in that domain. Prudence gingerly touched the laid-open scratches that felt as if they covered half her face in her own blood. 'Bubbles' had defended its skyward position with a spitting, clawing fury that would not have seemed out of place upon some fiery and hellish creature of evil. With spider blood soaked into her clothing, twigs in her hair, sleeves scraped by bark and a face like this, Prudence could imagine how disreputable she must look; but she would not use healing powers divinely granted to serve the forces of good upon cat scratches. She would not. She reclaimed her chainmail, pulling it again over her clothing.
"Hold still," Jaheira said, taking her arm; and touched her face with a blue-glowing hand. "There."
"Thank you," she said; but Jaheira had matched ahead again, leading the way to the inn's door. The torches and hearth shone brightly, indoors, sending flickering reflections on the bottles behind the bar and upon the polished frames of the engravings set upon the walls; Prudence's eyes adjusted to the light.
There was a burly man, seated on a wooden bench near to the entrance; he stood, and spoke loudly. "'Ere there now! I don't like your type in here!" He carried a flail in his belt—one usable for threshing, and his weathered clothing suggested a farmer.
They were quite tired, and the tavern seemed far from full. "There seems enough bar for us all," Prudence said.
"Our type being—" Jaheira said; Montaron spoke almost at the same time as her, "'An' our type, that'd be—"
Oh— she realised; that was bad—
"Adventurers," a second man said. "Ye ought to leave him alone. Marl's had enough to drink."
"Oh, that makes it perfectly fine then, an' I'm bloody Elminster's pointy hat," Montaron said. "Pint of ale. Mad wizard gets milk."
"It's you—freakish adventurers," Marl said; he lurched forward, near to Prudence. "I'm sick of all you freakish adventurers going out, consorting with gods know what, and dragging your trouble back into my home town! What do you say to that?"
"That you've—probably had enough to drink, like your friend said, sir," Prudence said. "We're just trying to do what we think's right." As if a few tasks and running away from Gorion's murderer counted for much, for her; but Jaheira and Khalid had served their cause for some time.
"Ya think it's right?" Marl wheeled around to stare at her with rheumy eyes, jabbing his forefinger at her shoulder. "Messing up the local economy with treasure robbed from some grave? Upset the balance of nature?—"
"That we do not do," Jaheira said; Marl ignored her.
"You flash your fancy magic around—" Fortunately Xzar seemed not to hear that. "Swagger around in shiny armour and wave your swords? Pretend you clerics can heal everything?" Letting the farmer have his tirade did no harm, Prudence thought; his gestures pointed at her rather than went to the flail at his waist. "And because of it maybe somebody's son thinks it's fun, and goes out and gets himself killed? Someone ought to pound you to the ground—take it out of your hide—"
Somebody's son thinks it's fun, and goes out and gets himself killed— Marl's hands were reaching to his flail, now. "You lost your son?" Prudence said. There wouldn't be a fight if she could do anything about it. "I'm sorry. I—"
"He was a good boy 'til your kind came through town! Filled his head with nonsense they did and took him off away to a dungeon somewhere, and the next I hear of him he's dead—" He was quite a tall man, heavily built, dark-haired and with weathered lines crossing his cheeks.
"He's going to attack you, mummy," Xzar said.
"—My father was killed by evil adventurers three days ago," she said. Her hands were raised well away from her scabbard, to the universal gesture of calm down and settle this peaceably. "I know how—"
Marl stopped his reach for the weapon, gesturing at her instead. "Your father? 'Tis close enough to the natural course that way—" he lost his son, she could forgive him that for a death so far from natural— "But Kennair 'twas my only son; didn't get anything to mourn over—" Marl was raging, shambling; Prudence could feel no fear of him.
"Kennair was his name? He must have been brave, to choose to go," Prudence said.
"'Twas your fool stories of monsters and gold that took him! He'd have stayed were it not for bastards like you." Marl faced her, his voice shaking; one always sought to fix blame for losses—
"My father might have lived if he hadn't protected me. Did Kennair want—to help the Realms?"
"He wanted to stay home! He wanted to take over the farm and settle down—maybe apprentice with Thunderhammer over the winter. He never wanted to adventure."
"Didn't he?" Prudence said. "Sometimes the Realms call and you go. It's not just because of stories; if you feel that there's a need for you— My father did it because he wanted to learn more, and because he wanted to work for balance."
"That boy was a firebrand if ever there was, Marl," his friend said. "Yer blaming these folk fer what couldn't be helped..."
"No! He was settling down! He wanted...he wanted..." Marl cried out.
"What did he want?" Prudence said, as gently as she could.
"That new plow he bought last year," Marl's friend said. "He got the gold by helping clear kobolds near Ulgoth's Beard. He wanted to make a difference, make the Realms a bit safer. Just like these folk, most likely."
"He could have just stayed home," Marl said. His friend helped him to sit down. "By Chauntea, if he'd stayed home, Dunkin, he'd have lived..."
Prudence waited with him; this was not the sort of wound she could heal with a quick breath of a prayer. "Your son sounds a good man, taken too soon. Doing what he was meant. If you know you're made to go, you can't stay at home forever." She'd wished to leave Candlekeep for more than a year beforehand; but it was Gorion's own word that had her stay...
"And then you're dead in a few days." A few hours, for Gorion. "What kind of fool thing is that?" he wept.
"Because even if you die—" And Candlekeep had rather an accurate compendium of paladin's mortality statistics. "You're doing what you have to do. Trying to keep the Realms safe for other people. Protecting what you care about—"
Run, daughter, Gorion had said—
"I'd hope and pray that he'd no regrets, on what he wanted to do," she said. "If you'll suffer my company, I'll buy a round; let me toast Kennair's memory with you."
Marl watched her; as if gauging her understanding. "'Twould be fitting enough, I suppose," he said finally. "Kennair Nethalin! Rest ye well."
"Aye. And to others fallen," Dunkin said.
Kennair Nethalin; Gorion. To Rolland and Tamas, old and in natural rest; Ibn-Jumay. That they had no regrets, on what they wanted to do in life.
She raised her head, when Dunkin aided his friend to depart; caught Jaheira's glance.
"If you are done encouraging farmers to cry," Jaheira said, "then you and Imoen are at the second door on the right, up the stairs. I suppose it was best to avoid conflict; as anyone could see."
"Certainly." She hadn't quite finished her drink; two were enough to bring her to—some melancholy. Winthrop had also stocked this kind of apple cider, though the taste of this brew differed; far less sweet. Imoen, she'd last seen talking to that incredibly handsome stout man, then stepping neatly away to the corners of the inn's shadows; and Xzar, carefully and methodically crumbling fragments of the inn's onion-and-mushroom pastry into a series of small piles on the side of a tray. She watched Jaheira move upstairs, her husband's arm linked through hers. The dancing fire to the front of the room was beginning to fade.
"I saw you," Xzar interrupted her absent thoughts. "They call it enchantment if it's from a wizard and not a divine. If not for words stopping him in his tracks, he would have taken up the flail; priestly charming against the will."
"It wasn't enchantment at all," she said, having the feeling they were about to switch rhetorical sides in defence of verbiage. Kennair Nethalin: she had learned from Marl that he had been slightly taller than Khalid, with his mother's red hair and a strong hand with a hammer. "Taking the time to listen to people, convince them—it's better than using magic and lasts longer." Something of the poison of Gorion's death had been drained from her, through speaking of it. She turned to the wizard;
"I know the spell," he said, "and this one time while we were travelling through the woods higher north near the camp I charmed a skunk and..."
"Does this story end the way I think it's going to end?"
"...And Montaron shot it down with a crossbow bolt while I was calling it near. A shame. It's a reasonably complicated spell, when one doesn't have the ability to pretend that talking itself works."
"How can you say it doesn't? If you can avoid a fight by talking the problem through—" and Marl drawing a flail in his grief, six armed adventurers in his local tavern, that would have been a horrendous recipe for disaster— "So be it, unless it's something one has to face sooner or later. An easy thing to try, and more pleasant."
"No—I've got it." Xzar looked down at the black patterns inked across his fingernails. "People pay surprising attention to offensive magic in their approximate direction. As for you I've heard voices that reminded me far more of cheese-graters; despite scrapes and scratches probably very few humans accuse you of troll blood in the family tree; and you're tall enough that Monty wouldn't complain about people not paying attention. 'Tis unsurprising that such works for you, but do not pretend it universal. The rabbits really don't like that."
Aside from the last sentence; "Dare I point out what you're doing at the moment?" she said. "Most people are capable of at least trying to negotiate first, and I doubt I've significant advantage. Ought I pretend I've a tumour of the pharyngos, or start stooping, if I want to convince you?"
He sighed. "No more than you ought to cut away my link to the Weave by subtle turns of a sword's edge," he said simply. "It's a simple fact of advantages; which both, mostly, translate in the end to different ways to know how to kill things."
"That's not what I'm supposed to be; and I hope you realise that," Prudence said. "Paladins fight, but we're not killers."
"Ha!—" He laughed, the tone slightly too high. "No, you're going about trying to make people feel safe. Make good people feel safe," he repeated. "In between those fascinating rabbity shapes on the dark walls behind—"
"—Yes, the first part of that's much closer. Um. Have you ever seen a healer who...concentrates on psychological health? I met one or two who came through Candlekeep; some of them are even nice..."
"Oh. You think you want to help me, mother—" he added, a sudden venom forced into the epithet, glaring as fiercely as Jaheira or Montaron.
"I'm hardly that—" she flung back at him, hoping to drag him into something resembling reality—
He paused a moment. "Sword; armour; muscles; contemporary," he said more slowly. "Understood, Rue."
The herb of regret; an improvement upon Imoen's Pru or Prune, at least.
"If you thought that if it was Montaron who led and I who followed, you were wrong," he said, speaking in a swift, low voice; "Monty has a wonderfully practical mind as you seem to occasionally appreciate, and fights and reminds me of mundane caretaking; but it is I who decide where we travel and what our larger path will be and the strategies that drive us, issuing most instructions about what we are obliged to do; and if you believed me somehow unaware of what I am then that is also a lie; I know and own my mind and I would not have myself and all creation and invention destroyed; Xzar take the potion and rest you're normal but that's not true and I'd remain seeing through and betwixt and between it all by choice; and I can read and I've magic to hurt others and if it's pity spared then there's none I need or want; and if that is the substance of your help I should fight to resist being changed and taken. Is that approximately coherent, or ought I to explain in terms I've tried really hard to make as sanity-dependent as possible?"
"Coherent in—a few parts," Prudence said, fighting the temptation to return with an irritated monologue of her own. "You're intelligent—" Unconventionally so; but— "It's your choice, Xzar."
He was quiet again for a few moments; reassured, perhaps. "I almost wish I didn't believe you when you say that," he said. "But, truthfully, if I didn't see so much that you law-shackled types completely miss—then we'd hardly have anything to chat about, would we?"
Truthfully—he was probably right about that. And why not? He was troubled, but he was independent to choose what he wished to be; and becoming drawn into these arguments within their quest was—an interesting challenge.
A woman was removing plates and tankards from the tables, quite loudly.
"—And spider eyes won't pickle themselves," Xzar said.
"Nor will armour clean itself. Good night." And best to check on Imoen...