"Did you expect anything different?" came a question from Morik, as if the rogue were reading her mind.
Delly gave him a sad, sour look.
"You must know by now what to expect from that one," Morik reasoned, moving to sit on the bed. Delly started to pull the covers up but remembered that it was just Morik, and he knew well enough what she looked like.
"He will never give you that which you truly desire," Morik added. "Too many burdens clouding his mind, too many remembered agonies. If he opened up to you as you hope, he'd likely kill you by mistake."
Delly looked at him as if she didn't understand. Hardly surprised, Morik merely smiled and said again, "He'll not give you that which you truly desire."
"And will Morik then?" Delly asked with open sarcasm.
The rogue laughed at the thought. "Hardly," he admitted, "but at least I tell you that openly. Except for my word, I am no honest man and want no honest woman. My life is my own, and I don't wish to be bothered with a child or a wife."
"Sounds lonely."
"Sounds free," Morik corrected with a laugh. "Ah, Delly," he said, reaching up to run a hand through her hair. "You would find life so much more enjoyable if you basked in present joys without fearing for future ones."
Delly Curtie leaned back against the headboard, considering the words and showing no practical response against them.
Morik took that as a cue and climbed into the bed beside her.
*****
"I'll give you this part, me squeaky little friend, for your offered coins," the rowdy Sheela Kree said, tapping the flat of Aegis-fang's head. She exploded into a violent movement that brought the warhammer arching over her head to smash down on the center of the table separating her from Josi Puddles.
Suddenly, Josi realized with great alarm that there was only empty air between him and the vicious pirate, for the table had collapsed to splinters across the floor.
Sheela Kree smiled wickedly and lifted Aegis-fang. With a squeak Josi sprinted for and through the door, out into the wet, salty night air. He heard the explosion behind him, the hurled hammer connecting solidly against the jamb, heard the howls of laughter from the many cutthroats within.
Josi didn't look back. In fact, by the time he stopped running he was leaning against the wall of the Cutlass, wondering how in the Nine Hells he was going to explain the situation to Arumn.
He was still gasping to regain a steady breath when he spotted Delly moving fast down the road, her shawl pulled tight around her. She would not normally be returning to the Cutlass so late, for the place was already brimming with patrons, unless she were on an errand from Arumn. Her hands were empty, except for the folds of the shawl, so Josi had little trouble figuring out where she had gone, or at least who she had gone to visit.
As she neared, the little man heard her sobs, which only confirmed that Delly had gone to see Wulfgar and that the barbarian had ripped her heart open a bit wider.
"Are ye all right?" the man asked, moving out to intercept the woman. Delly jumped in surprise, unaware that Josi had been standing there. "What pains ye?" Josi asked softly, moving closer, lifting his hands to pat Delly's shoulders and thinking that he might use this moment of pain and vulnerability to his own gain, to finally bed the woman about whom he had fantasized for years.
Delly, despite her sobs and downcast expression, abruptly pulled away from him. The look she returned was not one of lust, not even of friendship.
"He hurt ye, Delly," Josi remarked quietly and comfortingly. "He hurt ye, and I can help ye feel better."
Delly scoffed openly. "Ye're the one who set it all up, aren't ye now, Josi Puddles?" she accused. "What a happy sot ye are for chasing Wulfgar away."
Before Josi could begin to answer, the woman brushed past him and disappeared into the Cutlass, a place where Josi could not follow. He stood out in the empty street, in the dark of night, with no place to go and no friends to speak of. He blamed Wulfgar for all of it.
Josi Puddles spent that night wandering the alleyways and drinking holes of the toughest parts of Luskan. He spoke not a word to anyone through the dark hours, but instead, listened carefully, always on the alert in these dangerous parts. To his surprise he heard something important and not threatening. It was an interesting story concerning Morik the Rogue and his large barbarian friend, and a hefty contract to eliminate a certain ship's captain.
Chapter 6 ALTRUISM
"Well, Lord Dohni, I'll bow until my face blackens in the mud," one old peasant geezer said to Dohni Ganderlay in the field the next morning. All the men and gnomes who had gathered about Dohni broke into mocking laughter.
"Should I be tithing you direct now?" asked another. "A bit of this and a bit of that, the feed for the pig and the pig himself?"
"Just the back half of the pig," said the first. "You get to keep the front."
"You keep the part what eats the grain, but not the plump part that holds it for the meal," said a pointy-nosed gnome. "Don't that sound like a nobleman's thinking!"
They broke into peals of laughter again. Dohni Ganderlay tried hard, but unsuccessfully, to join in. He understood their mirth, of course. These peasants had little chance of lifting themselves up from the mud they tilled, but now, suddenly and unexpectedly, it appeared as if fortunes might have changed for the Ganderlay family, as if one of their own might climb that impossible ladder.
Dohni could have accepted their teasing, could have joined in wholeheartedly with the laughter, even adding a few witticisms of his own, except lor one uncomfortable fact, one truth that nagged at him all the sleepless night and all that morning: Meralda hadn't wanted to go. If his girl had expressed some feelings, positive feelings, for Lord Feringal, then Dohni would be one of the happiest men in all the northland. He knew the truth of it, and he could not get past his own guilt. Because of it, the teasing bit hard at him that rainy morning in the muddy field, striking at raw nerves his friends couldn't begin to understand.
"So when are you and your family taking residence in the castle, Lord Dohni?" another man asked, moving right in front of Dohni and dipping an awkward bow.
Purely on instinct, before he could even consider the move, Dohni shoved the man's shoulder, sending him sprawling to the mud. He came up laughing, as were all the others.
"Oh, but ain't he acting the part of a nobleman already!" the first old geezer cried. "Down to the mud with us all, or Lord Dohni's to stomp us flat!"
On cue, all the peasant workers fell to their knees in the mud and began genuflecting before Dohni.
Biting back his rage, reminding himself that these were his friends and that they just didn't understand, Dohni Ganderlay shuffled through their ranks and walked away, fists clenched so tightly that his knuckles were white, teeth gnashing until his jaw hurt, and a stream of mumbled curses spewing forth from his mouth.
*****
"Didn't I feel the fool," Meralda said honestly to Tori, the two girls in their room in the small stone house. Their mother had gone out for the first time in more than two weeks, so eager was she to run and tell her neighbor friends about her daughter's evening with Lord Feringal.
"But you were so beautiful in the gown," Tori argued.
Meralda managed a weak but grateful smile for her sister.
"He couldn't have stopped looking at you, I'm sure," Tori added. From her expression, the young girl seemed to be lost in a dreamland of romantic fantasies.
"Nor could his sister, Lady Priscilla, stop mudding me,"