Esprë liked how sincere the dwarf seemed. She wanted to believe her, but it still seemed too wonderful to wrap her heart around it. She glanced at Te’oma and shivered.
“Don’t worry about your un-friend there,” Berre said. “We shouldn’t move her until she awakens, but I’ll post a guard in here with you around the clock. Ibrido!” the captain called at the curtained doorway.
A moment later, the most handsome man Esprë had ever seen slunk into the room. Tall and lean, he had the refined features of an elf, but rounded ears and wide, dark eyes marked him as human. His black, wavy hair fell to his shoulders, framing a strong face anchored by a sharp jaw.
“Yes, captain?” Ibrido said, his eyes fixed unblinking on Esprë as if they could see straight through her and the wall behind her too. His voice was deep and resonant, although it carried no trace of warmth.
“It seems the changeling is a kidnapper and our elfling here was her latest victim. Post a guard between them and report to me the moment the changeling awakes.”
“Yes, captain.” Ibrido’s gaze never wavered from Esprë.
“Her name is Te’oma,” Esprë said.
Ibrido’s eyes flickered to the changeling for a moment before returning to Esprë, but his expression never changed. “Te’oma shall not harm you,” he said to her. “On that you may rely.”
“Very good,” Berre said, turning to leave. As she reached the doorway, she looked back and said, “Get some rest, young Esprë. You’ve had a long journey, but there is hope for you yet.” With that, she left.
Esprë looked up at Ibrido, who stood staring at her like a statue. She couldn’t even tell if he was breathing. With a repressed shiver, she lowered herself into the bed and pulled the covers up to her chin, then closed her eyes and tried to go back to sleep.
After a while, she opened her eyes again, and he stood there still as ever. She turned over on her side, putting her back to him, somehow sure that Ibrido’s gaze never wavered.
20
“Tell me,” Kandler asked Lathon Halpum, after relating the tale of how he and his companions had come to be in the halfling leader’s grace, “how do you know Burch?”
The halfling leader put down his massive flagon of ale and wiped the foam from his mouth with the back of hand. “Now that is a story worth telling, my friend.”
The other conversations around the massive dining table all ground to a halt at the sound of the lathon’s voice. Until now, he’d spent most of the meal chatting with Burch like brothers, but their conversation had been private. Kandler had been fine with that for a while, but he couldn’t contain his curiosity any longer. He’d known Burch for years, and the shifter rarely spoke of his time in the Talenta Plains, much less any friendship with the most powerful of the halfling chiefs.
“You and me, we met in Cyre,” Burch said to Kandler, a savage smile on his face, “but I had a life before that.”
The shifter seemed, well, happy. Kandler didn’t think he’d seen him so relaxed since they’d left Metrol for Sharn over four years ago. The Day of Mourning weighed on Burch as much as on Kandler, and the shifter had never felt at peace in Mardakine, Kandler knew. He sympathized with his friend. Since that fateful day, he hadn’t much been himself either.
“I’d like to hear that story,” Sallah said, mischief glinting in her shamrock-green eyes.
“Later,” Kandler said, trying to avoid the subject. That tale involved Esprina too, and Kandler wanted to steer Sallah’s thoughts away from his dead wife. He felt a pang of guilt at that. He’d always been a faithful husband, and since her death he’d dedicated himself to founding Mardakine and taking care of Esprë. Thoughts of romance had not crossed his mind for years, and they seemed so alien that he felt like a schoolboy again, both giddy and nervous. “We’ll have plenty of time on the road tomorrow.”
Sallah’s smile set Kandler’s heart beating. He turned back toward the lathon, who took one last slug from his beer before launching into his story.
“I was a young lath. I’d earned my rank only three seasons before, and I was still eager to prove myself at every chance. My tribe, the Red Wolves, wandered the eastern part of the plains in those days, on the edge of the Blade Desert, in the long shadows of the Endworld Mountains. We traded sometimes with the yuan-ti of Krezent. The tribe of serpent people there mastered growing succulent desert fruits we coveted, and they enjoyed the pelts we could provide them.
“Just after a visit to Krezent, we began to lose people from our tribe. The first two were old, past their prime, and we assumed that they had gotten careless and fallen victim to some predator of the plains. Then my daughter Monja went missing. She was just shy of coming of age then, already a promising student of Balinor, the god of the hunt. If she had disappeared, then something terrible was wrong.
“I led the search party that went looking for Monja. Seven moons spun in the sky that night. Barrakas, the largest, rode low and full, the perfect, silvery hunter’s lamp.”
Burch interrupted at this point, and the lathon let him take over the story with a smile.
“Me, I’d been hunting all sorts of werecreatures for years at that point, and I was hot on the trail of one I’d been chasing for days. I’d tracked him over the Endworld Mountains from Q’barra, where he’d been terrorizing the people of Whitecliff. I think he’d been part of the black-scale lizardfolk who live around Haka’torvhak, home of the dragon-god Rhashaak.
“That’s one nasty group of souls there, and his was blacker than any of the rest. Gigantic, too, even for a yuan-ti. After he’d eaten a dozen of his own kind, more or less alive, they forced him out into the wider world so he could torture innocent folks instead.
“His name was Ss’lange, or at least it had been back when he’d had a mind of his own. After the lycanthropy took him over, most of his conversations started and ended with him tearing out someone’s throat. He needed putting down. That’s where I came in.”
“This Ss’lange,” the lathon said, taking over the narrative again, “came over the mountains looking for fresh prey, and he found it in our tribe. When he took Monja from us, I knew we only had a matter of hours before he killed her. He liked to terrify his prey before killing them. He thought it made their blood taste better.
“From the fact that the killings had started with the filling of the moons, I figured that some sort of werebeast was using us for its larder. I just didn’t know what kind, so when this monster comes barging out of the darkness,” the lathon chucked Burch in the shoulder with a rocky fist at this point, “you can guess what we thought.”
Burch flashed a toothy smile. “I was trying to warn them about Ss’lange, and they filled me with arrows instead. Luckily, halflings only loose toothpicks, or I might have been hurt.”
As the two spoke, Kandler noticed a young halfling enter the room and slip into a darkened corner. Her golden, sun-bleached hair was tied back in a loose braid woven through with stalks of grass and a single red ribbon no thicker than a child’s thumb. Her wide, blue eyes danced along with the torchlight in the tent, like sapphires set in her wide, merry, well-tanned face. She wore a short, simple tunic made of the dappled skin of a thunder lizard, a knife belted at her waist. She carried a short, plain-carved staff in one hand. A wolf’s red-haired tail hung from its tip.
The lathon smacked Burch harder this time, and the shifter laughed. “You howled loud enough when you took one of mine in your shoulder,” the halfling leader said.
“That was me trying to warn you about Ss’lange,” Burch said, laughing harder. “Halflings can’t tell one kind of howl from another.”
“Anyhow,” the lathon said, “one of his howls happens to come out in something that sounds almost like Halfling, and he’s saying, ‘Don’t hurt me!’ Well, no werebeast I ever met stopped to chat with me before, so I figure it’s worth giving him his say.”