On the tenth of Eleint a final treaty and compromise. A quill pen that had belonged to my father filled the space on the parchment with a peacock-coloured signature in loops. Sauriram gave a nod. The Amnian ambassador took it back across the table, well-dressed in patterned cream below a foppish golden waistcoat, a large green plume in his velvet coin-tipped hat.
"With the approval of the Tessarch, this shall be signed."
"A pleasure, Ambassador. I look forward to our tea in the blue dining room."
Below the window of the Grand Duke's study, the city moved. Labourers rebuilt our docks, worked on skyships in our fleet, bought and sold and wandered free from curfew. They say there are fortunes to be made in rebuilding as much as in war; the ducal coffers stood dangerously low. But if as many as possible in the city worked to repair Sarevok's damages, recruits returning the Flaming Fist under Vai to what it had been, foreign trade arriving no longer afraid of the Duke to stimulate the economy... What I wanted was the city's healing; let it take what it wished of Skie Silvershield. I tried to walk through the streets and talk with as many as possible; much to learn and to make them believe in an accessible Duchess who truly cared. I was tired enough that those days all came to me in hard-worked fragments.
Never a repeat of Crimmor. Never again. Two years of a man's labour for every dead Amnian civilian in the final settlement; the city to be rebuilt some distance from the old Crimmor, continuing down the stream. Every year henceforth, a proclamation that ten of the families of the Grand Dukes, ten of the Flaming Fist, and ten of the ordinary citizens of the town, chosen by lottery, shall travel south to that black stain upon the landscape; shall see what was wrought there by our city; and and shall know that it must not happen again.
Were I in the place of a soldier for Sarevok should I have followed orders? Yes, probably. Imoen wouldn't have; she was defiant for all the right reasons. Shar-Teel wouldn't have wanted to obey a man. Vai and Scar and Sorrel and Laola Axehand and all those who chose to join them: hadn't, in that exact place.
The next parchment on the table was an account of a doppelganger quelling by Annaclair and other Helmites. A nest of the creatures was found in the Iron Throne's cellars; all gatherings of nobles and merchants carefully tested for presence of the creatures. A false face caused terror and fright. Claudia Besancon had suggested that oversights were needed for the merchants selling amulets supposed to protect against the creatures, and in reward for her sins she'd been that figure above magical goods in trade.
And volumes of elaborately written correspondence from Halruaa to deal with, regularly dispatched by complex magics to force themselves to attention. It was far; they would have difficulty declaring open war; should skyship battle result in skyships fallen to hostile territory their secret would be further spread. The Grand Duke who had illicitly obtained their plans and murdered their ambassador was dead already; no further penalties could be reasonably invoked. Then if we sold to Amn after all in the end, the threat should at least be disseminated. We had to make careful plans; the fight was more complex than I'd expected, but had to be done.
Imoen was probably in the temple of Mystra once more with the priests, seeking gods to deal with becoming one; being forced to become one. The told tale was that she had given up the power to stop herself from becoming a monster as Sarevok, that she had made the noble choice. But her name was still called in prayer. In the streets people in sickness pulled on her robe and begged as she passed by, and she could do nothing for them. She had dreamed of what she had done.
A meeting with the merchants' council before the Amnian ambassador's tea. Sashenstar held a grudge over that theft from him; but he was the ablest who had not been replaced by doppelganger. It was good to have merchants who challenged ducal presumptions; for the more ideas the better ones. I walked with Sauriram, who still recovered from her own fight.
"For brave deeds to save the city above and beyond any duty. Commander Vai and I acknowledge the heroism of the fallen souls, first." Scar, casualties of the Ravager, deaths of soldiers and priests and innocents and vigilantes at Sarevok's hands. Almost all wore mourning's black at the ceremony ten days after Sarevok's defeat.
"Imoen Winthrop, for seizing the Pretender's power; for returning it to live humbly as a human. To Annaclair of Helm, for courage and farsight beyond the course of duty." Polite or not, she deserved her acknowledgements. "To Viconia DeVir, that she may be recognised as a citizen of Baldur's Gate and to walk openly here at will. To Tiax, for his injuries suffered in Sarevok's temple.
"To the exile Shar-Teel, a full ducal pardon." She was still confined to bed, and would not have wanted to be present at such a ceremony in any case; Viconia took the document on her behalf. I had looked up the events surrounding her outlawing in the protected records of the Fist; knew how many bodies...
"Ajantis Ilvastarr of Waterdeep; Faldorn of Silvanus." She had turned him back to human the day after the battle; and Aquerna in the shape of a squirrel once more, for the moment on Imoen's shoulders. "Dynaheir of Rashemen and Claudia Besancon. Garrick; Sorrel..."
Perhaps the most important lesson I learned after the war was how to speak from the bottom of the lungs to sound as if you knew what you were doing. "Heroes who risked and lost their lives against the Pretender. Because they saw what was wrong; and instead of choosing to run away sought to end it..."
—
The Harpers had already left the city in their quiet, secretive way; spending a final conversation with Imoen in memory of Gorion.
"G-gorion would have been proud of your actions, Imoen."
"In the end they were motivated well," Jaheira said. "That you chose to surrender such power and that you do not seek it; he would praise that in you."
"Mmm. Thanks. You're probably as right as you think you are."
"Call on us if ever you need us," Jaheira said firmly. "Which you failed to do the first time, I must add."
"Sure. Friends?" Imoen said, and stuck out a hand; Jaheira looked thoughtfully down at it.
"One who has been called a demigoddess can no longer be called ward or child, Imoen," she said; and clasped her hand as an equal. "And fare you well, Skie," she added as an afterthought, with the phrase Led Our Imoen Astray perhaps on the edge of her tongue. Imoen slipped an arm through mine.
"Harpers are a bit of old stick-in-the-muds," she said to Khalid's and Jaheira's retreating backs, "but in the end they weren't so bad..."
"Who knows? Perhaps we'll see them again," I said. "But I have to be at the Merchants' League at the next half-hour; then the Fist compound; then to christen the second skyship at the docks..."
"And I'm...not doing anything to blacken our reputations by nicking anything, though it's a grave sacrifice," Imoen said. "Heh, it'd be pretty funny if a demigoddess and duchess turned up on the Baldur's Gate thieves' guild doorstep asking to join, wouldn't it? So much for your promise, kiddo."
"I don't know, Imoen. We could always officially incorporate the thieves' guild into the ducal government and formally oversee them," I said. "They get to make merchants of a certain income level pay insurance against thievery, and their job is to refrain from robbing those paying them off and then drive off all the unlicensed thieves... No. That'd never work."
Imoen had seen the thieves' guild, breaking in to the stone staircase to the Undercity Sarevok knew about, descending below in her small, invisible group. In Cythandria's record the guild seemed like small fry, uninvolved with most of Sarevok's plans; but cleaning that nest was somewhere on Commander Vai's list of tasks.
A small child ran in the streets; for a moment Imoen's hood flared in the wind, her red hair flying free. It was enough. "Lady Imoen!" the child called, loudly enough to capture attention; there was a Flaming Fist on the corner, turning to see. Technically Imoen and I had escaped our escort for the moment, but this one saw.
"It's my momma, Lady Imoen, I prayed all night as you said but she's still gone! Please, help me find her—"
"Bread, Lady Imoen, for the children, no food left in the house, please—"
"Heal my brother's leg, Lady Imoen, you healed my hand, I pray you to help once more—"
"Go to Dowager Saurirarm, go to Ilmater, go to Helm, go to Gond; I'm not a goddess only a girl—"
"Imoen, let me touch your sandal, only your sandal as you pass—"
"Imoen, a piece of your holy robes, please, help me—"
"Imoen, your hand for only a moment—"
We escaped; the Fist scattered people for us, or else it would have been a mob hurting her. But instead it was the child pushed away, still calling for the help she needed.
—
My father's estate was cold and empty when I found the time to return to it. Searched for doppelgangers by the Fist; left deserted, and then plundered by opportunistic thieves. Rightly, it belonged to my second cousin from Waterdeep I couldn't remember meeting once when I was a child. A merchant in his own right. One of Brilla's heavy glass vases lay broken across the vestibule. She bought them from an artist in the temple district, a Lathanderian, all bright colours of glass in swirling patterns like storms at dawn. The glass chips and splinters lay scattered across the floor, some of them above the body of a tiny, slain dog. Paintings were ruined, scratched out of their frames; even the wooden panelling taken and stripped from the walls. It wouldn't have been right to make guards protect this place when there was so much else the city needed. There was still doppelganger's blood on the floor, silvery, in some places mixed with red.
But there were cellars and doors kept as a merchant's secure space; for my father, it was largely old port that to me tasted like ashes mixed with dry sticks, instead of the secrets less scrupulous businessmen would have kept there. They'd recovered no bodies, when it was true that Brilla and my father had to be dead; I went alone down the stairs. Someone, or something, had oiled the hinges of the concealed door.
Should have brought someone... No. My responsibility, Father. Besides, it seemed most of them were already dead. Down into the old rooms, a lamp casting ghastly shadows on uncleaned walls. They'd smashed much of the containers of wine, barrels splintered and bottles broken. Then if my father wasn't already dead naturally he would be so of an apoplexy, for this... It wasn't at all funny.
Then the small booted foot, lying at the edge of the light, below the stairs. Silver-buckled. Blue stockings. A fair-haired older woman with bloodied wrists, skin flaccid and hanging over the body as if out of weight recently lost, clawlike fingers damaged and scratched, an old light blue dress ripped and ruined and soiled, a gag shoved into the mouth.
It was Brilla, and from Viconia's words, from bodies we left behind in our wake and sometimes travelled back to, I didn't think that she had been dead more than five days or so.
An old man's body, unchained. The skin more decayed than the woman's; blood blackened and pooled and a horrifying stench. Bloodstains on the front of his shirt, dark-brown-black. Beyond him bodies in familiar clothing, familiar features—Dora the chaperone and Halme the butler and Kioun the head valet and Diayla my stepmother's maid. Nothing breathed or rose.
I sat down. "Brilla? I'm sorry I didn't come earlier. I did know it wasn't really you when I threatened to kill that doppelganger. I thought you were dead. Please forgive me. I don't know what you'd have wanted and I guess you can't tell me. You were always nice to me even though I wasn't yours, and you were nice to Eddard no matter what he said to you. I'm sorry they killed you. They're probably dead now themselves. You deserved better."
Then I looked away from her.
"Father, I tried talking to you before, but you weren't listening then. Not that you're listening now. I hope you're happy in Tyr's realm with Eddard. Gorion was right about me, he told you the truth, and I don't know whether it's still true that I've got your eyes. I'll deal fairly with the estate and make sure that cousin Evander has what you'd have wanted. He was meant to be after Eddard anyway.
"I wish you'd managed to live through this. You could have gotten better and been a duke again. You'd know how to put things in order after Sarevok. You'd be used to knowing everything a duke has to do. I'm sorry I kept thinking that you didn't care because you ignored me. I know how busy you were now. And I'm sorry that I didn't try to stop Sarevok before he killed you. That part's my fault. The influence's existence wasn't my fault.
"I'm trying to fix things. More importantly, people want them fixed and help me. I suppose I'm Sauriram's figurehead, but that'll change. I know now what the Harbourmaster does all day and how to decode the Merchantry Overseers' tables, how to search the records of inter-temple disputes and distribute the city clerical services, how to run a fleet of ships out of a harbour that only ports fifty at a time, how to rebuild it and manage it for more than the ordinary ships. How we're going to coordinate our flying skyships to transport goods faster than anyone else, and it's not just because we were first to steal from Halruaa—there's some designs in the skyships from Cythandria Swandon, and some from someone called Sakul, and Claudia redesigning the spells in the hull from the bottom upwards, and Imoen and Dynaheir on the evocation weaponry. In the end they'll spread like almost all inventions. That's not a bad thing, just a temporary advantage. We don't hate mages, so we can commercially beat Amn and earn back more than enough to compensate them.
"You'd have liked to fly on a skyship, I know. You liked your ships. And you'd have wanted to know that Balduran didn't sail off the end of the world after all, although he was a slaver as well as an explorer. Maybe you'd have agreed with me that Durlyle was kind and thoughtful. I think you'd have liked Imoen, and Ajantis, and maybe even Shar-Teel, because she's a warrior. But you'd have hated to see what Sarevok did to the city.
"I can't be you, Father, but I'm trying to be more like you at the moment. Please try to forgive me trading on your name."
Nothing answered back except for water dripping from the walls.
—
Shar-Teel was in Umberlee's temple; Viconia treated her in one of the upper rooms. She wouldn't die; she'd soon be agitating to swing a sword again. All that healing could do for the one who'd struck the deathblow on Sarevok.
Tenya called a greeting of surfacer-fool who failed to worship the Bitch Queen; Jalantha Mistmyr asked for the raising of Umberlee's tributes once more. It would be best to be very tactful and respectful, and not to raise the point that skyships would be more likely governed by Shaundakul or Valkur.
"How is she, Tenya?"
"Always complaining that she knows better how to be a dark priestess! She's mean and she knows much less about entangling people with seaweed or darkness than she pretends to know," Tenya said. "I think she's a kindred spirit... Oh, the warrior? She keeps making me bring her beer."
The Umberlants keep drier rooms above the water that lines the bottom of their temple; for the few invalids they allow to be treated and for storage of the less sacred things. I could recognise the red hair of Sheelae, the cook's daughter who wanted to be a priestess—her mother was nice, and left our house long before the doppelgangers. She was a full-fledged Waveservant now, like Jalantha Mistmyr wearing the regalia of blue fishnets, green foam-edged cloak, and ropes of shells and pearls across her body. And the skeletal hand of a drowning victim at her neck. My city; people I know. I knew where they were; I'd seen Shar-Teel settled here while she still lacked consciousness, the sheets soaked with her blood.
Behind the door there were two women's voices, and I didn't trouble to knock.
Viconia was—supposed to be healing her from Sarevok's blade.
"Mrimmd'ssinss—xut morfeth uns'aa ni'fuer—" the hoarse drow language cried out. "Vith'usstan, Shar-Teel!—"
Shar-Teel's less articulate grunt followed.
You don't have to strip to cast healing spells— came the first thought.
—And why is that possible, I didn't think that was possible—
—and really didn't think I should be watching—
—
Mrimmd'ssinss - my female lover
Vith'usstan - Please engage in carnal intercourse with me
—