“Once more and we’ll have to part for good.” Farideh took another long drink of the water, dimly recalling heaving over-sweet and burning liquor onto the frozen ground several times. “Thank you,” she said. “For getting me down here. And for coming in after us. I suppose I did need saving. This once.”
He smiled. “I think that one should count double.”
“Well good,” she said, smiling herself. “You don’t have so many to make up for then.”
Dahl snorted. “Your count’s off. The shadar-kai, the arcanist-”
“The arcanist was. .” She hunted for the right word. “Mutual.”
“The watercourse,” Dahl said pointedly.
“The erinyes,” she returned. “The Zhentarim.”
“At the revel?” he said. “Where I was-” He stopped and turned from her, looking down at the flask again. Farideh could almost hear him thinking, Where I was saving you, because I’ d led you into danger.
“The revel is a draw,” she said lightly. “Mutual again.”
Dahl was silent a long moment, still staring at the flask. “I wasn’t in your visions.”
Farideh had no sense of how she ought to reply to that. “No,” she said finally. “Should you have been?”
“You were in mine.”
Farideh’s felt the muscles at the small of her back tighten, her tail trying to twitch with nerves. Things had been so easy a moment ago-was he really going to criticize her for leaving him out of visions she had no control over?
“I’ll try harder next time,” she said a little tartly.
“Gods, that’s not what I meant,” Dahl said. “I just. .” He hesitated a moment, staring at the lantern. “I haven’t been all that fair to you over the years. You said something once that got under my skin, made me think I knew how to fix. .” He trailed off again. “I thought maybe I could undo my fall.”
“Oh,” Farideh said when he had been silent another interminable moment. “Did it work out?”
“Do I look like a paladin?” Dahl asked. “It wasn’t so. But so many things happened, made me think you’d said it to vex me or to help me or to doom me to searching for the wrong thing. I thought,” he said with a bitter laugh, “that you might have literally been sent by Oghma in a more desperate moment.”
Farideh thought of the vision of Dahl in Proskur, of the strange man with a voice like a prayer. She thought of the sight of Dahl’s soul.
“And all that time,” he went on, “I realize now, I made you into this. . symbol of my fall. This symbol of the restoration I couldn’t stlarning find.” He dragged his hands through his hair. “And frankly, seeing your memories-even if Tharra twisted them-made it perfectly clear. . I’ve made all that up. I was no one to you. You weren’t an angel. You weren’t a devil. You weren’t an enemy or a source of answers. You were just some girl I knew once.” He looked at her again, his gray eyes faintly bloodshot. “I’m sorry for that, even if it didn’t make a damned bit of difference to you at the time. I think I might have been a scorchkettle the last few days because of it.”
Farideh looked down at the waterskin in her lap. It was so uncharacteristic of the Dahl she remembered that she couldn’t help but feel she was suddenly sitting in the dark with an absolute stranger.
“I haven’t been all that gentle with you either.” She wanted to ask what he’d seen of her, what the visions had shown him. What was important enough between them to answer the sort of question Oota and Tharra would have asked. “Please don’t tell me you’ve been sitting down here waiting to tell me that instead of planning.”
“No,” Dahl said. “I didn’t drink as much as you did, but I’ve had my own hangover to sleep off.” He rubbed his forehead. “And I didn’t want you to wake up alone in a hole in the ground, so I stayed. So what did you find?”
Farideh shut her eyes and leaned her head as far back against the wall as her horns would allow. “It’s not good.”
She told him about the other camps, about the tower and the wall. About the carnage it had taken to bring the tower down in the vision. “And there’s another complication,” she said, not wanting to say it, but not daring to leave it out, “the devil I mentioned? Sairché? She’s not the only one involved.”
“Lorcan?” Dahl said dryly.
That burning kiss momentarily rose up in her thoughts. . chased by the odd moment pressed against the bars of the cage with Dahl. She pulled her knees a little closer. Better to never bring that up.
“I mean,” she said firmly, “a devil set against us. Gods, it’s complicated. It’s like they’re playing a game. Lorcan’s sister and this other devil. They were supposed to make this camp and gather the powers of the Chosen for Asmodeus. Only they don’t want to succeed, but they don’t want to fail either.” She shook her head. “The other devil has an agent in the camp. Whoever that is, they have the means to make the gathering happen-we need to find them and stop them before they manage.” And do it in such a fashion that the other devil was blamed, not Lorcan, she thought.
“Gods’ books,” Dahl swore. “Do you have any idea of who the agent might be?”
“None,” Farideh said. “Apparently the other devil’s been coy. But they’re almost certainly among the prisoners. They wouldn’t be drawing a lot of attention to themselves. They’re probably quiet, not trying to stir things up. If you’ve told people about our plans to escape, they might have stopped them.”
Dahl’s expression hardened. “Tharra.”
Farideh’s memories of the previous night cleared. “Oh gods. She’s a Harper though.”
“She says she is,” Dahl said. He shook his head. “I never checked. I never even thought-” He broke off with another curse and turned the flask in his hands once more. “We need to talk to her. Before Oota decides to make an example.”
“Tell me what you’ve planned while we walk.” Farideh stood and her stomach threatened to invert itself again. She leaned against the packed earth wall. Dahl stood as well, frowning.
“If you need longer-”
“We don’t have longer,” Farideh reminded him. “Tharra’s devil is going to tell her any day now to carry out the gathering-if he doesn’t try to sabotage us first. Rhand only expects me to be gone three days. We need to move and a sour stomach doesn’t change that.”
Dahl’s expression was grim, but at least he didn’t insist on holding her up as she shouldered her bag and pulled her cloak on once more. He rolled the flask between his hands.
“Will you do something for me?” he blurted. He thrust the flask at her. “Take it? I can’t. .” He looked away. “I can’t quite bring myself to throw it out. But I know better than to drink it. Not now.”
“What is it?” Farideh started to open the flask, but Dahl clasped a hand over hers.
“Don’t,” he said. “It’s the shadar-kai drink, the one they use in the wizard’s finest. I took it on the way out of the fortress.”
Farideh looked at him, puzzled, and he scowled under her scrutiny.
“I haven’t drunk it,” he said tersely. “I’m. . just about fifty ales dry at this point, and I would really like something to dull this edge, and this is just about the only thing I’ve found. But we all know what it does on the way down.”
“And you can’t pour it out?” she asked.
Dahl looked away. “Will you just take it away? Please.”
She tucked the flask into her pocket. She’d pour it out later, away from Dahl. “Tell me what you’ve planned,” she said again.
They slipped through the dark tunnels and up pounded dirt stairs, while he numbered their assets-the weapons they’d stolen, the Chosen they’d retained. The potential aid of the enclave of elves on the farther end of the camp. “You break the cages on their fingers, they might just kiss you on the mouth,” he said.
Farideh flushed deeply. “I’ll settle for having the assistance of more wizards. It’s not going to be easy getting the tower down.”