He came back, she told herself, singing the words to the rhythm of her blade.
A quieter voice in the back of her mind kept reminding her, the way Jarren can’t.
In a matter of moments the demons were all dead or dispersed, and Shara leaned on her blade beside Quarhaun. Her exhaustion couldn’t keep the grin from her face, and Quarhaun returned the smile, a little sheepishly. Their eyes met for a moment, which did nothing to calm her pounding heart.
One of the lizardfolk nudged Quarhaun’s arm and he looked away, reluctantly, to answer some question in their sibilant language, pointing to the demonic corpses that littered the hall.
“Ow,” Uldane said.
Shara turned to find the halfling, pale and frowning, slumped against the wall behind her. He was picking at the torn scraps of leather armor that had covered his chest, pulling strips of it from a bloody wound.
“Nine Hells, what happened to you?” Shara said, dropping to her knees beside him.
“You missed it!” Uldane said, the beginnings of his smile turning into a wince of pain. “One of the demons had me in its mouth and it was shaking me back and forth, and I stabbed it in the eye!” He drew a ragged breath and forced a smile to his face. “Do you have any idea how hard it was to get it in the eye when it was shaking me like that?”
“I can imagine,” Shara said. She tried to keep the concern from showing on her face as she helped him pull the armor away from his wound. His cut had the same angry red swelling along the edges that her wounds had. “I don’t know how I could have missed it.”
“You were busy protecting Quarhaun.” His voice was matter-of-fact, but there was an edge of disapproval in his eyes.
Shara frowned. “We need to put both of you in heavier armor. I’m not sure I can keep every enemy away from the two of you.”
“I don’t like wearing heavy armor,” Uldane said. “It slows me down.”
“I know, Uldane.” Shara brushed a long braid of dark hair out of his face. “I’ve got a potion in my pack that should take care of this wound. It’s not as bad as it looks.”
“It feels even worse than it looks.”
“I’ll be right back.” She stood and picked her way through the demon corpses back to the room where she and the halfling had holed up. Quarhaun was waiting for her at the door.
“You came back,” she said quietly.
“That was the plan, right? Kill them all?”
“You risked your life to save us.” The words had a hard time escaping past the lump in her throat. “That was foolish. You said it yourself.”
“You did it for me.” Quarhaun touched her chin softly with his gloved hand, and a shiver went through her. “And if you did it, it must be worth doing.”
Her thoughts a jumble, she squeezed past him into the room and grabbed her pack. “And you found friends,” she said.
“A hunting party. They were following our tracks into the ruins, actually. I convinced them to help me kill the demons.”
“How did you do that?”
Quarhaun shrugged. “By convincing them we could, I guess. They fear the demons and hate them for thinning the prey. I showed them an opportunity to give up one hunt in order to get better hunting in the future.”
“Give up one … they were hunting us?”
“Prey is scarce in the fens.”
Shara found the potion she needed and stepped back to the door. “Quarhaun … thank you.”
The drow scowled, speechless.
Shara went back in the hall to find Quarhaun’s lizardfolk friends crouching there, their glassy eyes fixed on her, and she wondered if they were assessing her ability to fight back if they decided to make a meal of her. She looked down the hall and saw one of them crouched beside Uldane, prodding at his wound with a feather-bedecked length of bone.
“Hey! What are you doing?”
The lizardfolk turned its head slowly and its eyes fluttered open to stare at her. It opened its mouth and hissed something low and rumbling.
“Quarhaun!” she called. “What’s it saying?”
“Shara,” Uldane said. “Don’t worry. I think it’s helping.”
Shara stepped closer and saw that the color had returned to Uldane’s face. She dropped to her knees and took his hand. “I’m sorry,” she said to the lizardfolk. “Please go on.”
Quarhaun spoke in the lizardfolk’s hissing tongue and the healer or shaman or whatever it was turned its attention-and its bone totem-back to Uldane. The halfling winced and squeezed her hand, but the wound began to knit itself closed and the angry red color faded from his skin. Uldane’s bright eyes opened again and a smile spread across his face.
“What an interesting feeling!” he announced, trying to sit up. “I felt like I was swimming.”
Shara looked at her friend’s chest. Water soaked his clothes and had washed the blood away from the wound, which was still a bit pink but otherwise completely healed.
“Looks like you were,” Shara said, smiling at the halfling.
“Oh! I’m all wet.” He looked up at the lizardfolk. “How did you do that?”
Quarhaun hissed a few words, and the shaman responded in kind.
“He says the water spirits healed you. He just brought them where they needed to be.”
Uldane sprang to his feet, all the pain of his injury forgotten. “Ooh! Do you think I could learn to do that, Shara?”
Shara just smiled and wished that she could learn to recover so quickly and so completely from her wounded heart.
“We should leave this place,” Quarhaun announced. “The demons might come back in greater numbers.”
“You’re right,” Shara said. “We should hit them before they can regroup.”
“Hit them?”
“Of course.”
“Shara,” Uldane said, “just a few minutes ago you were saying you didn’t want to die here. You want to have your revenge on Vestapalk before you die, right?”
“I have no intention of dying,” Shara said. “We’re stronger than ever, and the demons are on the run. We need to root them out of here.”
Quarhaun caught her gaze with his blank white eyes. “Why?”
Shara’s face flushed and her words were heated and fast. “You’ve seen them. Whatever has changed Vestapalk, whatever he tried to do to you-that same substance is here. It made these demons. They’re all part of the same … the same disease. For all we know, Vestapalk could be here, somewhere in these ruins, spreading his plague from here.”
Quarhaun held her gaze for a long moment until she looked away, uneasy.
“You are quite a warrior,” he said at last.
“What does that mean?”
“It’s not our way, you see? Among the drow, women hold sacred positions, ordained by the Spider Queen. They’re the matron mothers and priests, generals at times, but not warriors. I’ve never known a woman like you.”
“Does that mean we’re going to explore these ruins some more?” Uldane asked.
“I suppose it does,” Quarhaun said.
“Well, that’s a bright side to it. I wonder how far down the tunnels go? It can’t be too far, or they’d be full of water, wouldn’t they?”
“It depends. Sometimes stone tunnels jut up all the way from the Underdark, solid and dry even when they touch the surface in swampy areas like this.”
“Really?”
“It’s rare, but it does happen.”
“I’d like to see that.”
Shara let Uldane pester Quarhaun with questions as she tried to sort through the feelings the drow’s words had stirred up in her. It’s natural that he’d respect a skilled warrior like me, she told herself. And the fact that I’m a woman makes me … a curiosity. That’s all.
And the way he touched my chin … the memory of it brought echoes of the shivers it had sent through her. Who knows what that means to a drow like him? Maybe it’s a warrior’s sign of respect.