A man had to be doubly careful with his integrity when he shared the road with the Black Network, paid their tolls and bribes, and knew that every coin in his purse had passed through their hands at least once before it came to him. That was the first lesson that Ansoain had taught him. Druhallen thought he'd kept the lesson close to his heart all these years, but he kept the myrrh, too, and he believed his foster son.
3
30 Eleasias, the Year of the Banner (1368 DR) Parnast
A storm kicked up that night. While Druhallen tried to sleep, wind howled from the east, from Anauroch. It blew for three days, hot as an open fire pit and sharp with grit. Parnasters, both native and Zhentarim, expertly covered their faces like the Bedine and told their suffering visitors: "This is nothing," "Wait another ten days," and "You should have been here last year-we didn't see the sun for twenty days!"
Dru didn't want to imagine a twenty-day dust-storm. Rozt'a, Galimer, and Tiep had replaced the family he'd once had. He'd die for them, if circumstances demanded, but after three endless days cooped up with a sulky youth and a married couple his thoughts had begun to tilt toward murder.
Then the wind backed and died. When Druhallen awoke before their fourth Parnast dawn, silence had replaced the incessant rasping of Anauroch grit on the walls and roof. The air smelled fresh and felt cool. He imagined bathing in a cold stream, rinsing away the yellow dust that stiffened his hair and tightened his skin. Moving quietly, so as not to disturb his sleeping companions, Dru pulled on his boots and inscribed words he couldn't see on a wax tablet which he left on his blanket.
Gone for a walk. Back before noon.
Bodies stirred in the bed Rozt'a and Galimer shared. Rozt'a was almost certainly awake. She held herself a bodyguard first, a wife second. Given a chance, she'd have spread her blankets in front of the door and slept there alone. Dru didn't give her the chance and blocked the door with his own body each night.
"I need air," he reassured her softly. "Don't worry."
Odds were she'd be lying on his blankets, in his place, before he took ten steps from the door.
Druhallen wasn't the only one out early, welcoming the changed weather. Laughter surrounded the stables and the charterhouse kitchen. The gate in the narrow side of the palisade was already open. Gatehouse guards hailed Dru as he approached.
He wished them a good day. On a morning like this, with the promise of fair weather brightening the east, Dru could have wished the Red Wizards a good day had a circle of them popped into sight-which, thank all the gods, they didn't.
Ignoring the Dawn Pass Trail, Dru chose to follow the north-wending footpath Parnasters used to tend their fields. A forest-Weathercote Wood-rose beyond the fields. The true Parnasters-the twenty-odd families that had farmed here before the Zhentarim arrived and would continue to do so long after the last Network scheme had fizzled-spoke reverently of their forest. In the charterhouse commons where Dru and other travelers took their meals, the Parnasters said that a visiting wizard should walk as far as the brook bridge at least once before he left the village.
Weathercote Wood was a place marked on better maps. Knowledgeable cartographers agreed it was an enchanted place, though no legends were associated with it, no dragons or treasure, no cursed castles or fallen cities, just the labeclass="underline" "Herein lies magic." Weathercote's greatest mystery was its lack of mystery.
That was fine with Druhallen. He was more interested in the brook than in mystery.
A mounted patrol caught up with him before the palisade was gone from sight. As they passed, they warned him to beware of goblins whose hunger, after three days of eating dust, might be stronger than their cowardice. Most of the riders were Zhentarim in black leather, chain, and carrying crossbows, but a few were Parnasters carrying scythes and pitchforks.
The truth was, Lord Amarandaris had himself a serious goblin problem. Displaced from their homes by some upheaval in the Greypeak Mountains, they were starving, desperate, and just civilized enough to recognize that a village meant food. The native Parnasters were a charitable folk, which had only made things worse. They'd fed and sheltered the first arrivals. Then a second wave arrived, and a third-all expecting the same good treatment and turning surly when the villagers hesitated.
Or so said Tiep's friend Manya, who'd visited their room twice during the storm and whose fears were fast becoming hatreds. She worried what would happen after the Leafall when the weather got wintery and Lord Amarandaris hied himself down to distant Darkhold.
If he were smart, Amarandaris was worried, too.
Druhallen wasn't worried about goblins. He'd pulled a serviceable staff from the firewood pile on his way through the palisade. Goblins, even a pack of them, weren't likely to attack a grown man carrying any sort of weapon, not with bowmen riding the fields. And if the scrawny beggars were so foolish, Dru had the pinch of ash wedged beneath his thumbnail. A few breaths of a gloomy enchantment would quench their fury.
He was well beyond the village but not yet in sight of the Wood when he met a Parnaster coming toward him. The man was bent with age and leading a donkey that all but disappeared beneath a load of kindling.
"Be you bound for the Wood?" the codger asked.
"For the brook."
"Good for the brook! But I'd not be crossing the bridge today, not being a wizard and not seeing a path on t'other side. Maybe not then, neither, depending on the light. Being a wizard, maybe I would, no matter the light. But not without a path. Being a wizard, the Wood's not safe without a path."
Dru understood the words but not their meaning. "I'll mind the path and the light," he assured the codger and kept going.
Beyond the fields the path became a track through wild-flower meadows. Dru thought about the wood-gatherer. If the codger's words had any meaning, then men who weren't wizards shouldn't enter the Wood and those who were should stick to the path. But the codger hadn't gathered his kindling on the meadow side of the brook, which left Dru wondering about the Parnasters themselves.
As far as he knew, the Dawn Pass Trail was as old as men and had always skirted the Greypeaks. It had connected the ancient Netheril Empire, now lost beneath the Anauroch sands, with the Sea of Swords to the west and the Moonsea to the south. Whenever Parnast had been founded, it would have seemed reasonable for the village to have grown up where the trail divided rather than a half-day's journey to the west. It would have been typical of the Zhentarim to re-found the village at that more useful place once they'd come to dominate the area. Gods knew, the Zhentarim weren't averse to uprooting villages for their own convenience.
Sememmon might possess the least brutal reputation among the Zhentarim princes, but that was damning the master of Darkhold with faint praise. Amarandaris would burn the village and march the survivors to oblivion, if Sememmon twitched in that direction. It was that threat of annihilation that gave most Zhentarim villages their bitter, weary atmosphere-an atmosphere notably absent in Parnast. It was as if the Parnasters tolerated the Zhentarim, rather than the other way around.
What would have enabled a few farmers to bind the Black Network to good behavior?
The path cleared a hilltop. Weathercote Wood burst into sight, a lush wall of greenery on the far side of a brook which this late in summer scarcely needed a bridge. On the Parnast side the bridge came down in a gravel-filled ditch. On the Weathercote side, there was untrampled grass and nary a hint of a path.
The light, apparently, was wrong.
Bathing was impossible in the shrunken brook, but Druhallen could, and did, kneel in the delightfully frigid water. With no one watching, he splashed himself until he was soaked to the skin. During the past three days he'd sworn that he'd never complain about cold again, but it wasn't long-not more than a quarter-hour-before he was shivering and headed back to the patch of sunlight where he'd left his boots, belt, and folding box.