For all he felt like drawing his blade against time itself, beating the years into submission like a vicious beast, Clanless Mehen had learned a little better. He would master this. He would savor what he had. He would give his daughters what they needed first.
“Up!” he barked, as if they’d never left. “Keep the line straight!”
The sun dropped low, setting the sky between Waterdeep’s crowded buildings afire and casting long shadows over the Harper inn’s open yard. He had certainly not wanted to set them practicing in the yard-not now-but while he could keep them near and quiet the first day, this afternoon Havilar had taken up her returned glaive with a single-mindedness that brooked no compromise. Mehen was so grateful Farideh had followed when he beckoned so they could all be together.
Even though Havilar clearly didn’t want her there. Maybe didn’t even want him there.
Seven and a half broken-hearted years had passed for Mehen, but his girls had lost only days. The relief that buoyed him up smothered any sort of anger he might have been able to muster at them-at Farideh-wasn’t there for Havilar. Farideh kept herself tucked in the shadows of unneeded equipment, knowing better than to offer to spar with Havi.
Havilar’s blade came up hard, the point striking the dummy and tearing through the batting, lodging in the grain of the wood beneath. She yanked at it. It wouldn’t budge.
“Here,” Mehen said gently, laying a hand on Havilar’s back. This, too, he thought: there was no word for the pure, wordless joy of feeling her solid and live beside him. He jerked the weapon free of the dummy and handed it back to her. “Maybe we should-”
Havilar didn’t wait for him. She sprang back and threw herself at the dummy again, striking out with the butt of the glaive, the shaft, the blade.
“Havi, you’re going to hurt your-”
She screeched and the glaive struck the side of the dummy. The weapon jolted right out of her hands, the strike too hard for her weakened grip. She glowered at it, panting.
“You need to go slow,” Mehen said.
“I don’t need help!” she shouted. She glowered at Farideh. “And I don’t need an audience.” Her sister seemed to collapse further into herself.
“Enough!” Mehen roared. He held up a hand, but Havilar turned from him and his heart ached. “All right. How about you take some time for yourself? We’ll go in, you vent some old breath. Just promise me,” he said, setting a hand on her back once more, “you’ll be careful. You’ll get your skills back, I promise. But not today. No matter how hard you hit that dummy.”
Havilar nodded, not looking up at him, and he fought the urge to hug her tight. She would be inflexible as steel and rage against every moment of it, and neither of them would be soothed. “Come in, in an hour or so,” he said instead.
Mehen left then, though every part of him fought it. But he knew Havilar-and while seven and a half years ago her problems might have been minor enough for him to insist she listen, to roar at her until she obeyed, to send her to bed straightaway, now. .
Havilar needed to be alone. He was sure of that, even if he was sure it would kill him to walk away from her.
Farideh stood as he approached and fell into step beside him, staring at her boots as she walked. His stubborn, challenging, resourceful Farideh, and all the steel had gone out of her as if someone had drawn it like a sword from a sheath.
Mehen wrapped an arm around her and held her close. “It will be all right. She’s grieving.”
Farideh leaned against him, but said nothing. Mehen walked with her, leading them to the little library the Harpers kept here. They sat together on a bench.
“Will you tell me what happened?” he asked quietly.
Farideh shut her eyes and pressed her mouth shut. “I told you to go to Cormyr,” she said after a moment. “And then everything went wrong.”
“Fari,” he said, almost a sigh. “Please. There aren’t words for how glad I am that you are alive.” He pulled her close again, rubbed his chin ridge over the top of her head, before he choked up too. “There isn’t room for anything else. Whatever came before doesn’t matter,” he said firmly.
She shook her head, buried against his neck. “It should.”
“No,” he said. “You matter. Your sister matters.”
She made a broken little sound, half a sob, half a bitter laugh. “I almost wish you were angry,” she said. “I was ready for angry.”
Mehen shut his eyes and cursed to himself, held his daughter tighter.
“I made a deal with a devil,” she said after a moment. “It was supposed to protect us. It didn’t work.”
“Oh, Fari.” Would it have happened if Mehen had killed Lorcan in the first place? If he’d marched Farideh to the nearest priest and made her renounce the pact? He’d had reasons at the time-but they were so far away, he didn’t trust them, not when his daughters were so broken. “I should have helped you get rid of him.”
“Not him.” Farideh pulled out of Mehen’s embrace. “Not Lorcan.” She swallowed and scrunched her eyes shut once more, as if flinching away from a swell of emotion. “Lorcan’s gone. I think he’s gone forever.”
Well there’s the dragon’s hoard, Mehen thought, pulling her near again. If they had to tangle with such a terrible tragedy, at least that good came of it.
But at the same time, he felt his daughter’s grief acutely, and he had to admit, the cambion deserved a little mourning. After all, he’d saved Mehen once too.
“It’s all right,” he said.
“No,” she said, “it isn’t. I made that stupid deal, and then she hid us for all that time, and I didn’t even have time to find a way to keep Havi safe. I thought I had plenty of time to figure it out.”
“Safe from what?”
Farideh laughed. “I found out who our birth parents were,” she said, as if she were mocking her own efforts. “Or what they were. They were warlocks too-horrible, wicked ones. And their ancestor is one of the worst warlocks, one so bad that devils seek her descendants. They’re going to come looking for Havilar, I know it.” She buried her face against his shoulder again. “And all I’ve done is made it worse. I gave those devils a hundred things to offer her, and now they can find her just fine.”
“And you told me,” Mehen said, “and do you think I will let your sister do something so foolish?”
“Right,” Farideh said dully. “I’m the foolish one when you get down to it.”
Mehen hushed her, and stroked her hair. When he had found the girls by the gates of Arush Vayem, plenty of people had warned Clanless Mehen that he knew nothing of raising children, nothing of girls, and nothing at all about tieflings. But he’d been stubborn, even then, and sure that these were a gift, a reparation for what life had snatched away from him when he stood firm against his clan and was exiled. Day by day, month by month, year by year, he had struggled against the fact that they were right, every one of them-he had to learn every single thing about raising his girls.
It was, oddly, the village midwife who set him right. He clashed with Criella over the girls more often than not, and she’d been quiet while others told him to leave those babies in the snow before he let Beshaba herself walk in the gates. But when the girls were three and Mehen was certain he had made the wrongest choice he ever could have, Criella was the one who said, “You’re not the first to think you have fallen into the mire. This has nothing at all to do with what they are, or what you are. Girls, boys, tieflings, dragonborn-no one knows what they’re doing, raising children. You guess, you mimic, you listen to your gut, and you learn as you go. And you fix what you do wrong.”
At the moment, there was no one to learn from, no one to ape. There was nothing Clanless Mehen had learned in all the years he’d raised his twins, or all the years he’d thought them lost, that would relieve the grief in either daughter’s heart or close the gulf between them. There was nothing he could do to unmake the thousand choices that had led up to this, nor break the threads that tied his precious girls to a fate handed down by some ancient villain. There was no part of him that knew, it seemed, what to do. Listening to his gut would bring all the wrong results-and he couldn’t bear to do anything that might drive the twins away or apart.