“I’m sayin’ you can’t just throw more wood on the fire whenever you feel like it!” Sull bellowed. His cheeks flushed bright red, matching his frizzy hair and sideburns. In his hand, he clutched a skillet with three fillets of white fish swimming in butter and spices. A giant of a man, he towered over the smaller, scarecrow-like figure that faced him over the blaze.
“I’ve always understood the purpose of a fire is to keep its maker warm, frighten away forest vermin, and to cook meals,” said the thin man calmly. “It’s much less effective if you let the blaze die out, wouldn’t you say?”
Icelin grinned and felt some of the tension ease out of her, though Ruen Morleth was hardly the sort of man to inspire such a reaction on first glance. Tall, and so thin as to appear brittle, he was dressed in black and wore a dirty leather hat on his head that looked perpetually like it was about to fall apart. Beneath the hat’s brim, his eyes were red-brown, the muddy color seeping oddly into his pupils. This was the only outward sign of his affliction, a spellscar of his own, which carried its own unfathomable burden.
The two men had been Icelin’s companions on the road since she’d left Waterdeep several months ago. What would the innkeeper have thought if she’d brought the pair with her to buy supplies? Which would have been the more remarked on: Sull, a former Waterdhavian butcher, who wore his apron to bed so he’d have his meat cleaver and mallet within easy reach? Or Ruen, the former monk, current thief and con artist, with the most unsocial, taciturn, and blunt disposition of anyone Icelin had ever met?
“Don’t mind me, gentlemen,” she called out as she entered the circle of firelight. “I’m not some roving brigand come to rob you and steal your virtues, I’m just the wench returned with the supplies-the heavy supplies, I might add.”
Sull turned, and his furious expression melted into a welcoming grin. “Did you get the seasonin’s, lass?” he asked eagerly.
“They were out of mint.” Icelin dropped the sack at his feet and waved the shopping list under his nose. “And table linens! Are you completely mad? The innkeeper almost had a fit.”
“What?” Sull put the skillet down next to the fire and flaked off a bite of fish with his knife. “I thought we could have a fancy dinner is all. Travelin’ folk can’t have a few home comforts while they’re out in the world?”
“Such as a warm fire?” Ruen muttered.
Sull shot him a deadly look. “I turn my back for one breath, and you get the flames so hot, they dried the fish to a crisp. You won’t be able to taste none of the flavors now. Look what he did.” He swung the skillet under Icelin’s nose.
Steam hit her in the face, and Icelin breathed in the scent of melted butter, lemon, and ground pepper. Her stomach rumbled, reminding her she hadn’t eaten anything since that cold morningfeast they’d had at dawn. “Yes, it’s an atrocity, a horror. Put some on a plate immediately,” she said, swallowing a sigh of longing. She glanced at Ruen and smiled, though she felt the expression was a bit forced. “What, no greeting from you, Morleth-and after I got that extra blanket you asked for?”
“I heard you coming,” Ruen remarked, taking the fish Sull angrily slapped on his plate. He handed it to Icelin. “Likely so did the rest of the forest. You should learn to walk more quietly.”
“Ah, there now, I knew you’d missed me.” Icelin took the plate and tried to ignore the way her stomach clenched when Ruen made sure not to let his hands touch hers in the exchange. At least he occasionally took his gloves off in her presence. He’d only recently begun doing that.
Not that she blamed him for the instinctive retreat. Ruen had spent his entire life keeping himself apart from other people because of his spellscar. The same force that gave Icelin a perfect memory and made her magic go wild had warped Ruen’s form in an entirely different way. Skin-to-skin contact allowed Ruen to know how long the person he touched had to live. It wasn’t an exact knowledge. The few times he’d discussed it, Ruen described the sensation as a general feeling of cold and foreboding that increased the nearer the person was to death. He hated it, not just the feeling of impending death, but also the idea of having knowledge that only the gods should possess. Thus, he preferred isolation and was careful never to touch anyone close to him.
Around Icelin, his caution bordered on the ridiculous, at least in her opinion.
“Did you finish scouting the ruins?” Icelin asked in an effort to distract herself from the path her thoughts had taken.
Ruen nodded. “There are at least three intact passages that go deep into the ground. Dwarvish runes cover the walls, and there is evidence of a temple to Haela Brightaxe. Her flaming sword is among the symbols. I didn’t go any deeper, but so far, the information we bought is good. The Arcane Script Sphere may be hidden somewhere in the ruins.”
“Assuming it wasn’t stolen or reclaimed by the dwarves,” Icelin said. “I didn’t detect any strong magic emanating from the temple.”
“If it’s a stabilizing conduit for the Art, then perhaps it doesn’t give off powerful magic,” Ruen said. “In that case, it’s a good sign.”
“Yes, but it doesn’t necessarily mean the sphere will stabilize magic within a human being,” Icelin pointed out, not for the first time. Ruen’s expression darkened, and Icelin suppressed a sigh.
What was supposed to have been a grand adventure had turned into a two-month-old argument between them. When Icelin had left Waterdeep in Ruen and Sull’s company, she’d thought she was going to see the world, to live an adventurer’s life the way her parents had before her. Instead, almost as soon as they’d left the city, Ruen had become absorbed in this search for knowledge of spellscars. He hoped to find a cure for Icelin’s affliction. Again, Icelin couldn’t fault him for his intentions, and she knew that time was not on their side. But in the past two months, the search had taken on such urgency in Ruen’s mind that he rose from his sleep every morning and drifted off in the evening with nothing but the same thought. He’d pressed them hard and fast, traveling down the Sword Coast at a breakneck pace, following rumors and information purchased with coin they couldn’t always spare.
Then, a tenday ago, they’d found a lead: rumors of an artifact kept by the dwarves called the Arcane Script Sphere, a conduit for arcane magic that had existed since before the time of the Spellplague. The trail led them to Tethyr, to the ruined dwarven temple. Supposedly, this was the artifact’s last known location.
“Hurry and finish,” Ruen said curtly, interrupting Icelin’s thoughts. He rose and dumped the rest of his fish into the fire. He hadn’t been eating enough either, a fact that drove Sull-a dedicated cook-crazy. “We need to get to sleep, so we can start early tomorrow.”
“Where are you going, then?” Sull asked when Ruen strode away from the fire.
“I want to check the entrance to the ruins again. I won’t be long.”
“Stubborn, bull-headed, annoying man,” Icelin muttered, just loud enough for Ruen to hear as he walked away. He ignored her, so she turned to Sull. “He’s going to drive himself into the grave if he’s not careful. Can’t you talk to him, Sull?”
The butcher flushed but not from anger this time. Icelin recognized that cornered expression. Sull never liked to get in the middle of their arguments. He always said it was a dangerous place to be. “He means well, lass,” Sull said, “even if he does go about it all wrong sometimes.”
“He burned your fish,” Icelin reminded him, though he really had done no such thing. Why couldn’t Sull take her side when she needed him?
“He’s in a hurry,” Sull said, his gaze following Ruen’s path through the trees. “When you’re young, you don’t notice the way time’s passin’, but when you get older …” He cleared his throat and glanced at her with an uneasy expression. “When you get older, you look ahead of you less and less. You look behind instead, and when you weigh the two together, you realize how much time’s been wasted.”