“You wished to speak with me, Lord Zoreth? Is there some problem that requires my attention?”
“No, I was merely overwhelmed with desire for the pleasure of your company,” Dag said coldly. “What is occurring in Tyr’s temple? The place is teaming with paladins!”
“They prepare to march on Thornhold,” Sir Gareth responded, forthrightly enough. “Surely you did not think that your victory would long remain unchallenged.”
“Let them try. They will not find it as easy to get into the fortress as we did. Unless of course,” Dag added, “you gave them the same information you gave me.”
The knight’s blue eyes widened with a sharp, sudden flash of fear. “I did not, but there might be others among the order to whom Hronulf entrusted this knowledge.”
Dag didn’t really care—he brought up the matter just to tweak the older man. If the gathering paladin army had this knowledge, it would do them little good. The tunnels beneath the fortress had been so altered that men could wander about for tendays without finding the old passages.
“There is another matter of which we much speak,” Dag continued. “I have a daughter. Though her existence has been kept secret for more than nine years, she is now widely sought. What do you know of her?”
“Sir?” inquired the knight, puzzlement on his reflected face. “Why should I know anything?”
It was not a lie—Dag had yet to catch the fallen paladin utter a direct untruth—but it was a blatant evasion. This irritated the priest.
“I run short of time and patience,” Dag said through gritted teeth. “Hear me well. The girl was abducted from her foster home by a single man, even though her foster father was an elf of considerable skill at arms. The Zhentarim are not known for such acts of foolish bravery That leaves who?”
Sir Gareth bowed his head. “I have earned your suspicions, Lord Zoreth. My part in the raid on your childhood village—”
“Is past history,” Dag cut in coldly. “I have no intention of making you suffer for past misdeeds, but I assure you, your continued existence depends upon your ability to serve me quickly and well. Is that quite clear?”
“Pellucid, my lord,” the knight agreed.
“A straight answer, then. Did you or did you not have a part in abducting my daughter?”
“Alas, the answer to that is not so simple as your question suggests,” the knight said, his face deeply troubled. “My order was indeed responsible, so some of this lies at my door.”
Dag sniffed at the self-serving “confession,” but found in these words welcome news. “My men tracked Cara’s abductor. He was headed to Waterdeep. I want his name, and soon thereafter, I want his heart on a skewer.”
“There are many paladins in Waterdeep,” Sir Gareth hedged. “Tell me more of your daughter, so that I might make discrete inquiries. I myself never saw the girl.”
That seemed a reasonable request. “She is nine years of age, but small and slight, so that she looks to be no more than six or seven. Her hair is brown, as are her eyes. There is a touch of elf blood in her. Her ears are slightly pointed, her eyes are large and tilt up at the corners, and her fingers are very tiny and thin.” As soon as the last words were out, Dag rued them. He did not want to draw any attention to the girl’s hands—and the extremely valuable ring she wore.
“And my sister,” Dag added hastily. “What word on her?”
“I sent her to Thornhold, as you directed. Did she never arrive?”
Dag decided that was a question best left unanswered. “I want the woman and the child found and turned over to me. Find a way to circumvent the other knights. Is that quite clear?”
The knight lifted two fingers to his brow in an archaic salute. “I am pledged to honor the children of Samular’s bloodline. All will be done as you say.”
Dag shook his head in disgust and released the enchantment. Sir Gareth’s face faded abruptly from the globe—but not before Dag caught a satisfying glimpse of the anguish inflicted by the spell’s release.
He despised the old knight. He hated all paladins, and particularly those who, like his own father, took vows as Knights of Samular, but this man simply galled him. Sir Gareth Cormaeril had once been a mighty knight, his father’s friend and comrade. He had saved Hronulf’s life once and had received the wound that shrunk his sword arm and ended his career in battle. But there was a weakness in the man, a weakness of will and heart that Dag particularly despised. He himself had triumphed over physical weakness—why should another man see in it an excuse to give up all he once was?
That was precisely what Sir Gareth had done. He had fallen prey to Malchior’s cunning snares, abusing his new role as exchequer of the order when his younger brother, a rogue and a gambler, ran afoul of Zhentarim-owned pleasure houses. Malchior had assumed the young lord’s debts, and Gareth had quietly “borrowed” money to repay the Zhentish priest rather than risk personal or family scandal. That was the beginning. From there, it had become increasingly easy to purchase the man’s soul, a few words at a time.
It amazed Dag that Sir Gareth did not yet seem to realize this.
What Dag was, he had chosen to be. He had great power, granted him by a mad god and wielded in ways that a man like Sir Gareth could never conceive. And he intended to get more of the same, by much the same methods—or worse, if such path came to him. What he did, he chose. What he was, he acknowledged. There was a basic honesty in this that Sir Gareth could not begin to comprehend or duplicate.
As Dag tucked the globe away, an ironic smile touched his lips as he noted that, in this matter at least, he possessed more virtue than a man lauded as one of Tyr’s great knights.
* * * * *
To Bronwyn, the three days of the return voyage went all too quickly. She spent many hours with little Cara, answering her seemingly endless supply of questions. The little girl had a deep curiosity about the world, and her yearning to see far places was written on her small face as she listened to Bronwyn’s tales.
True, Cara had other things to occupy her time. She played with the five dwarf children, holding her own surprisingly well in tussles and arguments with the much stronger and stockier dwarves. Ebenezer also took a special interest in the girl, and he spent hours telling her stories of his adventures, answering her questions. He even carved a toy for her, a small wooden doll with slightly pointed ears. The limbs were jointed and connected with strings so that the doll could be moved about. Bronwyn, who caught him at work stitching together bits of sailcloth for clothes, commented on the delicate work—and immediately wished she hadn’t. The dwarf gave her a bit of advice on the merits of minding her own affairs, in the form of a tongue-lashing that almost, but not quite, covered his embarrassment at being caught red-handed and soft-hearted.
To her surprise, Bronwyn found that she enjoyed being with Cara. She’d never had any experience with children, not even when she herself had been a child, but she enjoyed the girl’s curiosity, approved of her stubbornness, and admired her resilience. By the time the outer islands that protected Waterdeep’s harbor came into sight, Bronwyn decided that if she were ever to have a daughter, she would be more than happy if the girl took after Cara.
But Cara had a family—a father, who was almost certainly kin to Bronwyn. The need to find him, for both of them, was growing in Bronwyn like a fever.
Cara, unfortunately, was little help. She remembered her father only as “Doon,” and the description she gave of him was what might be expected of any eight-year-old half-elf. He was a grownup. He had dark hair. He was big.
It was not much to go on.
She did have a great deal to say about the man who had stolen her away from the only home she had ever known. He had a sword, which he had used to kill both of her foster parents. He was a tall man, with light blond hair cut short. He rode a white horse and wore a white tunic with a blue design on it. At Bronwyn’s bidding, Cara tried to sketch it, but the childish scrawl was far from enlightening. They rode for a long time and stopped at a beautiful house. After that, Cara remembered nothing. She had fallen asleep and awakened in the hold of the ship with an aching head and a fiercely empty stomach. Bronwyn, who listened to this with silent rage, realized that the child had been drugged. She vowed to fmd who had done this and make certain that they would send no more children to the life that she herself had endured.