The woman starts laughing. Lorcan screams and the blood starts flowing.
“Here.”
Farideh sat up, drawing the powers of the Hells up in her surprise, but it was just Tam who kneeled beside her bedroll, holding a steaming tin cup. She eyed the priest of Selune a moment, ready for him to transform into a devil or a cultist or something worse.
“It’s just tea,” he said gently. “It will help you sleep.”
She shook her head. “I have to take watch next.”
“I’ll spell you,” he said, pressing the cup into her hands. The steam that wafted off the liquid’s surface smelled floral and bitter …
Draw the rune, Lorcan says. She looks up at him, his wicked smile, his black, black eyes. The horns that mimic hers and the skin, red as hot irons. Say laesurach.
The word burns her mouth, a surge of Hellish powers courses up through the soles of her feet, thrilling every limb, and sets her tongue ablaze. It pours out the rod, out the cloudy quartz crystal at its point, as she traces the shape of the Infernal rune. The ground opens under the erinyes hooves, a lake of lava, a fountain of magma. The mouth of a volcano that devours the devil women, swallows them whole.
The erinyes scream and they shatter into wasps …
She gulped the tea, trying to wash the phantom taste of the burning erinyes from her mouth. It was scalding hot and as bitter as it smelled, and it only made the image of Lorcan having his tongue torn out echo through her thoughts. Tam raised his eyebrows.
“We don’t burn easily,” she reminded him quietly. “That goes for tea too.”
“I forget,” he apologized. “My experience with tieflings has been … largely academic.”
She turned the mug in her hands. “You had it ready,” she noted.
“You’re not the only one having trouble sleeping.” He returned to his spot beside the fire, which still burned high, and the clutter of belongings strewn beside him-curling sheets of parchment, a stylus and ink, his haversack spilling all manner of bottles and pouches, and a great, fat tome.
Farideh frowned and moved to sit beside the fire as well. “I don’t mean to be rude,” she said after a moment, “but you can’t keep much of a watch this close to the light. And while you write your …” She glanced at the sheets. Netherese scouts sighted, expect larger numbers in surrounding wood … “Letters,” she decided.
The corner of Tam’s mouth, crooked by a small scar, twitched into a smile. “I would have said ‘sermons.’ ”
Farideh flushed. The Selunite priest didn’t seem like a spy, but neither did he seem all that much like a priest. The spiked chain he carried was fit for someone far more barbaric, and his gentle, paternal demeanor lay at odds with the sure and secretive nature he displayed at times. He knew, she was sure, that she knew he was not only a priest, but it didn’t seem to matter. When he spoke, she couldn’t shake the sensation that he was secretly laughing at her.
She looked over at the bulk of Mehen, her dragonborn foster father, sleeping solidly just out of the fire’s light, closest to the bounty they escorted to Waterdeep. If Mehen of all people trusted the priest, then surely she ought to too.
“I laid a circle,” Tam said, shuffling the curling parchments beside him into a neater pile. “Setting a watch is largely a formality with that. Finish your tea.”
Farideh sipped the brew, eyeing the faint shimmer of runes that crept over the forest floor in an arc twenty feet wide. Tam’s haversack lay open and an array of bottled powders, inks, and incenses lay on the ground beside a thick book-the remnants of the ritual that had made the circle.
“Does it keep us in?” she asked. “Or keep things out?”
“This one keeps things out. Anything fiendish, in particular.” She blushed a little harder. If Tam would have preferred she not know he was a spy, Farideh would rather he still assumed she was not a warlock.
Tam settled back, his knees folded in a fashion Farideh wouldn’t have expected a man his age to find comfortable. The Planes knew Mehen couldn’t manage, and the human had years on him.
“Will you tell me what you’re dreaming of?” he asked.
… the erinyes are a thunderstorm, unstoppable and rolling toward them out of nothing. Their hooves crack the cobbles, shatter the rune. Their crowns of horns threaten to spear the moon. Their swords are fire. Their swords are hungry …
Lorcan ignores them, leans close, his mouth on the edge of her ear. He runs the tips of his fingers up her spine-Draw the rune, he says, say laesurach.
Farideh shifted. “I don’t think you’ll appreciate it.”
“It’s Neverwinter, isn’t it?” When she looked away, he added. “There’s nothing to be ashamed of. It’s common, you know, a madness that chases after ordeals and upsets.”
“I don’t have the battle-shock,” she said tersely. “That wasn’t my first combat.”
Tam shrugged. “No. But will you tell me the other times you crossed swords with someone, or something, were as bad?”
Farideh didn’t answer. She’d killed the erinyes at her very feet with the eruption of lava. She’d watched an army of them march on Neverwinter. She’d seen Lorcan captured by hellwasps. She’d found Havilar possessed by a devil and ready to kill her-the same devil who’d sent Mehen, under a charm, to kill her. She knew there were devils looking for her-and looking for Havilar, as soon as Lorcan stopped keeping her a secret.
You wanted this, Lorcan says, pulling her closer. She looks down at her hands, at the rune-carved rod that’s suddenly there. She did. She does. She raises her arm as she had so long ago in the crumbled village, lets Lorcan’s burning hands mold her fingers-smaller two wrapped around the implement, longer two extended, thumb curled over-and draws her hand down to point directly at the rune he had drawn in the frost and lichen that coats the street.
Draw the rune, darling, he says, say laesurach.
In the shadows, something watches. When she tries to catch it, the darkness just stares back, a great dark eye that fills every nook, every alley.
You cannot run, the woman’s voice. All the planes are looking for you. The erinyes’ hooves crack the cobbles and shatter the rune back into the frost …
“When I was your age,” Tam said, “maybe a little older, I ran with a band of adventurers. Six of us, thick as thieves. One summer, we were headed down into the wilds of Akanul, looking for a ruin we’d heard rumors of-a Chondathan palace. It took us into the path of a Netherese scouting party.
“They killed every one of my friends,” he said as mildly as such a thing could be said. “I fell to an arrow in the initial attack and rolled into a briar, out of sight. But I watched the shadar-kai draw my comrades’ deaths out to gain every thrill they could. The shade that commanded the party picking through our gear as if at the market, while my friends screamed and screamed, and died. The clerics of the Lady of Loss standing over it all, just watching. I lay there, with only the Moonmaiden for company, until they’d gone on their way and I could crawl out and find my way back to a town.” He kept watching the fire. “I thought I’d seen a lot of things, but that … you can imagine.”
“I’m sorry,” Farideh said after a moment.
“I dreamed of it for months,” he said. “Nearly a year. Still do, sometimes, especially when my days are running rough. You choose a certain kind of life-or it chooses you-and eventually you’ll run into your Shadovar. Your Neverwinter.” He prodded the fire, sending a swirl of embers into the smoke. “The tea will help. Buries the dreams for a bit.”
“Thank you for that,” she said. “But I’m sure I’ll be fine.”
Tam sighed softly. “Do you know how long you’ll stay in Waterdeep?”