Dahl smiled. “I’ll not hold it against you.”
Tam regarded him. “Nera tells me that you’ve stacked up quite a lot of receipts in the taproom.”
Dahl made himself still. “It’s all paid for.”
“That’s not what I’m worried about. Anything troubling you?”
Dahl gave him an empty smile. “I’ve been a drunk, Tam. These days it’s just thirst.”
Tam nodded-as if he were waiting for Dahl to spill out everything he wasn’t saying. “War can make a man thirsty.”
Life can make a man thirsty, Dahl thought. “Yes,” he said. “Well.”
“How sure are you about the Dales?”
Not sure, he thought. Not sure enough. “Fairly,” Dahl said. “Brin seemed sure that Harrowdale was out of the worst of it at least. The elves won’t let Sembia break through, and Sembia seems to have better things to do. Their armies should keep well out of the northern countryside for awhile yet, and we should have fair warning before that changes.” He hoped. Gods above, he hoped.
He’d tried to get his mother to leave the farm. He’d tried to convince his brothers there were good reasons to come to Waterdeep before Sembia turned north. But without divulging his allegiances to the secretive Harpers, why would they believe him? Who was he but the runaway brother who had the gall to throw away the life he was offered for another, only to fail at it? Who was he but the son who’d left their father baffled and disappointed when he’d come home to admit he was just a secretary in Waterdeep? And then armies filled the heartlands, making Harrowdale an island of relative safety in a sea of war.
“I know you just took a break,” Tam said. “But I’m giving you another one. Let Khochen keep you company. She’s in town the rest of the tenday. We’ll come back to her reports when you’ve sorted yourself. Is Lady Hedare in?” Dahl nodded, too embarrassed at the dispensation to speak. “Send her up, get that done with.” Tam ran his fingers through his silvery hair. “You’re probably right about the barber. Find me some time, would you?”
“Of course,” Dahl said, like a good secretary would, and shut the door behind him.
In the parlor that marked the barrier between the inn’s public areas and the Harpers’ private floors, Khochen was waiting for him on a battered settee, tuning a lute. “If I apologize,” she said, “will you at least admit that did you a little good?”
“What good?” Dahl demanded. “I told Tam something he surely already knew and Vescaras something he refused to believe. Then I got singled out like an errant schoolboy and gods above only know what Vescaras is telling people about me now.”
“Nothing most likely,” Khochen said. “He’s not much of a gossip.”
But Vescaras was thinking about it. Adding it to the list of things that proved Dahl wasn’t cut out for the Harper life anymore, right below bad temper, can’t handle shock, and botched mission, let people die.
And possibly drunk now that Nera was telling everyone he ordered an ale too often, he thought grimly.
“Yet you got him to tell you why he hates me?” Dahl said. “He must be a little bit of a gossip.”
“No,” Khochen said, with a smile that was only for herself. “I’m just that good.”
Dahl sighed. “Are you going to tell me or not?”
Khochen set down the lute and leaned on her armrest. “It seems,” she said, all drama, “many months ago, someone may have gone to a revel, had a bit to drink, and snubbed a certain someone else’s sister.”
“What? Jadzia Ammakyl thinks I snubbed her? I hardly spoke to her.”
“That’s what ‘snubbed’ means,” Khochen said. “At least, she would have liked you to talk more, and she apparently made an invitation for you to come back the next day.”
“To look at her library. Which I wouldn’t bother with. It’s a pokey little-” He colored at Khochen’s smirk. “We only talked for a few minutes. About books.”
“Girl has to make an inroad where she can.”
And lovely Jadzia Ammakyl had absolutely no need to make inroads with a scruffy farmer’s son, Dahl felt sure. “You’re wrong. Vescaras is wrong.”
“Vescaras is right,” Khochen said, “although he’s mad as the wizard under the mountain to still be carrying that around. Jadzia’s forgiven and forgotten, so far as I can tell. Swarmed with suitors.”
“Of course she is,” Dahl said. “She’s rich as Waukeen’s handmaid.”
Khochen clucked her tongue and rose to stand beside him. “I have another guess,” she said. “I think you did notice. Why else would you pick the right sister-he’s got four, hasn’t he? You noticed and you choked because you are utterly convinced no one of quality is interested in you.”
“Why are you always picking at my love life like you can stir it up into something interesting?” Dahl demanded.
Khochen’s wicked grin fell away and she regarded Dahl with utter seriousness. “Because it’s the safest thing I can tease you about.”
Dahl pointedly turned toward the taproom, knowing Khochen would follow but knowing it would give him a minute to compose himself. Gods, he needed a drink. One drink.
Khochen caught up to him. “Where you got the idea that anyone in Waterdeep gives two cracked nibs about where you grew up or what god left you behind or how you’ve erred-”
“You’ve made your point.”
“My point,” she added, gentler now, which made it all worse, “is that you needn’t be so determined to make sure you’re right that everyone dislikes you as much as you believe. Whether that’s Jadzia or Lady Hedare or Vescaras.”
“Vescaras does dislike me,” he pointed out as they descended the stairs. “I don’t need your pity, all right?” He paused at the foot of the stairs and looked back at Khochen. “By the way,” he said more quietly, “are you missing any agents?”
“I lose some low-level recruits, street-eyes and such. Gangs pick them off, Zhentarim pick them up.”
Dahl shook his head. “No, I mean agents dropping off your map. No word, no sign, no bodies. Strange things.”
She frowned at him. “Not that I know of. But then that might be any of my lost ones.”
“It’s probably nothing,” he admitted.
“I’ll think about it. And,” she added, coming to stand beside him again, “might I note, if you talked to Vescaras the same way as you do me, instead of being an absolute prat, he might listen too.”
Dahl rolled his eyes and headed into the taproom. If he drank the ale quick, if he made it a small one, Nera might not notice, might not tell Tam. It wasn’t as if the High Harper could tell if he’d had just one.
“You already said he’s not a gossip,” he said. “So how am I supposed to talk to Vescaras like I do to you?”
“You could tell him your sad stories about your father.”
Dahl flushed. “Khochen, enough. I don’t need-”
But the words evaporated out of his mouth, stolen by the sight of a ghost, standing thirty feet before him, in the middle of the Harpers’ inn.
Chapter Three
27 Eleasias, the Year of the Dark Circle (1478 DR) Proskur
Farideh eyed the drinkers scattered through the taproom, marking the heavy cloaks, heavy boots, the thick skirts and padded jackets. Things were far, far worse than she’d imagined.
The cold-she’d figured it was the early morning, the higher altitude, being farther north. Maybe she shivered because she was a little ill from Sairché’s spell-she certainly didn’t feel well. But as they came down the slopes and the sun rose higher behind the clouds, the chilly air didn’t warm.
Maybe it’s just a cold snap, she thought, a strange bit of weather here and then forgotten. She said as much to Havilar. But then they’d reached Waterdeep and she saw the old snow packed against the buildings, the bits of melting ice hanging from their eaves.