Bonie traipses the grounds opposite of where Sinjun and his men gather around their bonfire, cooking steaks cut from the slain panther that the party dragged back to Fort Nechar from the rocky foothills of the Somber Vale. Storm clouds loom ominously to the northeast, in the direction of Hundelstone, a promise of late summer rains sure to fall in the days ahead.
More ominous still is the solitary figure that stands before her, eyes fixated on those same clouds as she utters a low, droning incantation to the Lord of the Dead. Bonie waits several minutes without approaching Dabria for fear that she might startle the woman, whose back is to her and the other, distant occupants of the courtyard. When silence finally ensues, Bonie nearly ventures to speak, but Dabria speaks first.
“Kelemvor has long foretold that we'd find safety here among you,” she says to the open air without turning around. “Until now.”
“Beg pardon?” Bonie answers curiously, moving to circle the woman without encroaching her space. At Dabria's feet lay a scattering of trinkets: bones and sticks, or some such. Bonie pays them little mind, all too familiar with such oddities at the hands of Zeb.
“Our sanctuary here is fleeting,” Dabria answers cryptically.
“The rains will arrive before long,” Bonie reasons. “Ye'd not want to be caught out amid bad weather, if ye can avoid it.”
“The shelter of these walls will not stymie the wrath that befalls within.”
Bonie stamps one foot haughtily into the dry earth. “Why tell me this, then, if you think we mean to betray ye?”
Dabria's dark eyes bore into her unnaturally. “I do not fear you.”
Unsettled, Bonie turns and paces back toward the keep. “You speak as the keravela do,” she mutters, under her breath, as she departs.
On this night, like many others, the company finds themselves gathered around the hearth, embers crackling and sending up tiny orange incandescent wisps with each pop. Bonie is conspicuously absent—she has been restless as of late, more than her typical agitation summoning a persistent furrow in her brow, its arrival coinciding with Sinjun and his band of travelers. More than likely she is with one or both of the Tunterhorn brothers, stalking the perimeter of the keep. We are each deep in our own thoughts, the silence interrupted only by the occasional stir of the coals or by a loud laugh or call from Sinjun’s men outside the walls of the inner keep.
ReplyDelete“I don’t like her,” Selben interjects, breaking the silence abruptly though his remark seems aimed at no one in particular. “She creeps me out, she smells like grave dirt.” The irony seems lost on him as the young mage fiddles with one of his bone effigies, this one bound in sinews and scraps of fur.
I manage to piece together the target of his sudden and likely irrational ire. “Why’s that?” I ask. “She seems nice enough. They all do, in their own way.”
“She messes with powers she knows nothing about,” he says, the remark somewhat surprising to me. The comment startles me, and I’m not sure how to respond, immediately. For the first time, it dawns on me then that Selben is my apprentice no more—he is near my equal in matters arcane, many of his recent studies beyond my own ability to master, divergent from my own talents. I recognize then that Selben is a young, skittish, though powerful wielder of the arcane, one to be respected and one who has earned the right to speak his mind.
I raise an eye to Vonn, curious to see if the necromancer Berigaard’s apprentice shares in Selben’s trepidation about this acolyte of Kelemvor, Dabria. Finding no answer in the sorcerer’s eyes, I respond. “Should we be worried?” I ask, still unsure how concerned to be at Selben’s statement.
Selben stands, making to depart the group for the sanctuary of one of the watchtowers. He turns back to regard us after a few steps, the youthful energy in his eyes in stark contrast to the words that follow. “We should kill them,” he responds flatly. “All of them. Bury them in the cold ground and leave this place. Her presence brings…attention.”
Unwilling or unable to elaborate further, Selben turns away, shutting the door to the tower behind him.