Erastus 24 (Riddleport, Morning)

I

showed Ameiko the play Kikonu had been writing, or rather, the drafts of it that I had grabbed. I couldn’t take all of it—there were stacks and stacks and stacks of revisions—but what I had was certainly enough.

“I have seen some very bad plays, some of them spectacularly bad, but this? This exists in a world of its own.”

“It gets more unhinged with each revision, doesn’t it? Not that it had a great starting point.”

“If I had to endure watching this over and over, it might drive me to murder, too.”

I plan on keeping it. For the memories.

OK, that is not very Shelynite of me, I admit, but Kikonu’s motives were far from pure, here.

While most of my companions don’t have close family waiting for them, both Anavaru and I do. Am I supposed to just disappear for several months, with no word as to where we are going? I can’t do that to them. Sending a letter is an option, of course, but not one that I’d feel particularly good about. Mom and dad already had a hard enough time with what we did. And what we are about to do? I just can’t leave that way. I just can’t. Besides, how smart would it be to put this in a letter? Knowing what we know?

Fortunately for the two of us, Ameiko also has responsibilities back in Sandpoint that she can’t just abandon. Both the inn and her home need to be put under stewardship if not outright sold, and she can’t do that from here. Since time is likely not on our side, she has hired a wizard here in Riddleport to teleport us back. Ana and I will travel on to Magnimar from there to see our families, then meet Ameiko in Sandpoint for the return trip on the 26th.

The wizard, a personable and handsome Taldan named Thadeus, agreed to this arrangement, and he didn’t even overcharge us. Not that his services were cheap, of course, but I think he simply found the proposal interesting enough to actually want to do it. Later, Ameiko opined to me privately that “the opportunity to travel with three young women probably had something to do with that.” I suppose. Maybe.

He needs about half an hour to prepare, so we are waiting in his sitting room while he packs and does whatever else it is wizards do before teleporting people across Varisia. As soon as he is ready, we leave.

(Sandpoint, Late Morning)

A

na secured passage for us on the noon coach to Magnimar. While she was doing that and tying off a couple of loose ends in Sandpoint, I ran an errand of my own.

Sheriff Hemlock was in his office when I arrived. He looked very surprised to see me.

“Kali! I heard some ridiculous rumor that Ameiko had talked you and your friends into going to Brinewall. On Sandru’s caravan, no less. Thank—”

I dropped a small stack of books and papers onto his desk with a light thunk. The top one read, “A History of the Brinewall Colony” in my handwriting.

The trip to Riddleport had taken four days, and I spent nearly all of it writing. So much so that my wrist was still aching. No one else may have cared about what happened to Brinewall after we left, but I did.

He stared at me.

“You’re kidding.”

“No.”

He picked up the top booklet, one of my blank journals which I had repurposed for this task, and started flipping through it.

“The part you want is at the end.”

“Tell me,” he replied as he jumped to the back and worked his way through the blank pages at the end to where my handwriting had stopped. He then flipped through them one at a time, briefly scanning each.

This is where I had to be careful. I was deliberately vague in my writings and needed to do the same here.

“We don’t have all the answers, but we know Brinewall was attacked, first the town and then the keep. Foreigners were involved, along with outsiders in the literal sense. The corbies came later, though we don’t know exactly when.”

I pointed to the stack of papers. “Everything we found is here. Letters, records, maps of the keep. I reconstructed what I could and marked the places that may still be dangerous.”

He started to ask a question, but I cut him off.

“I don’t have much time. I’m leaving soon. I’m telling you this because someone needs to know. Someone who can do something about it. Brinewall stands empty again. Sooner or later, people will reoccupy it. I want them to be the right people.”

I didn’t want to stay any longer. I didn’t want to have to answer questions. I’d already told one half-truth, and if I didn’t leave now I’d have to do worse.

“I have to go. I’m sorry. I know this a lot to dump on you and leave, but I also know it’s in good hands.”

I walked out without listening to his reply.

Erastus 24 (Lost Coast Road, Night)

T

hadeus, Anavaru, and I talked for much of the journey, but eventually the conversation turned to wizardry, and Ana lost interest.

Thadeus had been a Cyphermage once—the Cyphergate is the defining feature in Riddleport—and during the trip he showed me an unusual spell that lets you share a language only among those included when it’s cast. He offered to let me copy it from his spellbook in exchange for something from mine.

“I’ll take you up on that. I…I don’t know if I have anything you’d want, though.”

“You might be surprised. I see few adventuring wizards and my needs are often completely different. May I?”

Adventuring?

I pulled out my spellbook and handed it to him. It was uncomfortable to watch another wizard look through it. I felt like I was being judged based on my spell choices. He would occasionally nod or make little sounds to himself like “Mmm hmm” and “Mmm,” which wasn’t helping.

He stopped when he reached one of the last spells in my book.

“Huh.”

I looked over. “What?”

“Nothing.” He looked back through several pages, then forward again. “I was just noticing that you don’t have many spells that hurt people.”

“I have some.”

“You have one.”

“That’s some.”

He smiled. “Fair enough.” He returned to the last page and said, “And this one certainly makes up for it.”

I knew which one he meant. A rain of stones over a wide area was not exactly precise.

“We’re going to be doing more traveling,” I said. “I need to be able to contribute. Especially outdoors.”

He considered that for a moment, then nodded. “Well, Kali, I think we can work out a trade arrangement here.”

We spent the first couple of hours tonight copying each other’s spells under the Lover’s Moon. There’s probably a cosmic joke in there somewhere.

Erastus 25 (Sandpoint, Evening)

I

t’s been a long day.

We arrived in Magnimar just after noon and made arrangements to meet at 6 pm in the Seerspring Garden for the teleport back to Sandpoint. I knew my parents would be working, so I headed for their business office in Dockway. It was not the best place to have this conversation, but what choice did I have? A rhetorical question, obviously. None at all.

I wanted to get this over with, so I walked quickly and made only one stop on the way there: a bookstore to purchase two identical copies of a modest gazetteer on The Inner Sea. I would need those first. They were innocuous enough to not arouse suspicion, and a cursory scan of the text turned up enough of the right sort of words that I was confident they would serve their purpose.

Nothing really fazes mom, and it’s something I’ve always admired about her. She was meeting with someone I didn’t recognize, a short, balding, middle-aged man, when I entered. She looked up, made eye contact with me, and then very casually said to him, “My next appointment is here. Can we pick this up again at a later time?”

“Of course! Of course! I’m sorry. If I had known…I’ll come back tomorrow morning.”

Everyone always apologizes to mom, whether it is their fault or not.

She left a clerk in charge up front and guided me back to their office where dad was working on something at his desk. He is a bit easier to surprise, but amazingly he held his composure until mom shut the door behind us.

And then I received the two biggest and longest hugs from them in recent memory. We all wiped away some tears.

A lot of people think mom isn’t very…affectionate? Maternal? But she really is. She just doesn’t show that side of herself in public. There’s mom, and then there’s the person she wants you to see.

Our conversation is a jumble in my head. It started about how I expected, asking how I was, if everyone was OK, what happened, and of course, how I was back nearly two weeks early. I avoided the details at first, just reassuring them that, yes, we were all OK and had made it back from Brinewall without lasting injury, and then settled in to tell the whole story. All of it.

I cast the spell I learned from Thadeus. Was I being paranoid? Maybe. My original intention was to have this entire conversation in Vudrani, but opportunity had landed in my lap, and I was not going to pass it up. This was much safer for all of us.

Both mom and dad looked concerned—very concerned—as I started, but I said, “For privacy,” and they understood. And you could feel the tone shift in the room. I must have looked very serious at that moment.

“This spell will only last about forty minutes. Dad, you were right when you said I hide things from you. I…”

I stopped. There was no point in explaining it.

“No more secrets.”

And I told them. Everything. It took nearly half an hour with their questions, but I told them. When I got to the Seal, they both turned pale. I remember thinking to myself, Living through it wasn’t much fun, either.

They were silent for a long time, just looking at each other. And then dad nodded ever so slightly, and mom did, too. I wish I knew how they did that.

Finally, dad asked, “And you are going with her.”

It wasn’t really a question.

“Yes.”

Mom looked down at her hands. “Across the Crown of the World.”

“Yes.”

“To Minkai.”

“Yes.”

Another one of those looks passed between them.

Dad sighed. “I suppose asking you not to go would be pointless.”

“I…don’t know,” I said. “You could ask.”

That earned the faintest smile from mom.

“But you would still go,” she said.

I looked at both of them and said, “Yes.”

Mom took my hand. “Then I am glad you came here and told us.”

There was more they wanted to talk about here, a lot more, but I only had a few minutes left in the spell, and I needed to get this next part out. So I cut them off. It hurt to do that, but I had to.

“I need a way to send messages to you that others can’t read. At least, until I’m able to master the spells to do it directly.”

I pulled out the books and taught him the code: triplets of numbers, representing page, paragraph, and word number. It would take me forever to write, and I would be limited by the text, but they could decode it quickly and easily. It was not very sophisticated, but the meaning could not be revealed with magic, and you’d have to know what it was and which book to use (the one I’d chosen wouldn’t stand out as being unusual for either of us) to do it by hand. And the numbers could be disguised in a phony business letter, or just sent as cryptic jumbles. It really didn’t matter how. Sure, it was simple and stupid, but it would do. And we wouldn’t need it for long, I hoped.

They left work early, and we spent the rest of the afternoon together. We talked a lot, of course, though I was careful with the details. There were more questions. More worry. More reassurance where I had it. It was not easy to do. We also shopped together, purchasing a couple of books on the Linnorm Kingdoms including a small gazetteer that didn’t look terribly out of date, a stack of maps ranging from the practical (for the caravan) to the fanciful (for myself and Koya, as keepsake memories), and so on. We had an early dinner in Naos. And then…it was time to say good-bye.

There is never enough time.

I think I can count the number of times I’ve seen mom and dad cry on one hand.

Erastus 26 (Riddleport, Evening)

I

decided Alex was right, so I visited Sefa this morning. When was I going to have another opportunity?

I took a page out of my parents’ book and dressed to the hilt. Why not? I was derided by this family because of my heritage, so naturally I flaunted it. I chose my best sari, a deep red with gold accents and a 9-foot drape, over a matching choli.

I have no idea who the woman was that opened the door. I just announced myself as if I didn’t care (which was easy, because I didn’t).

“Miss Kali Nassim of Magnimar, requesting an audience with Mrs. Sefa Scarnetti.”

The key is to be gracious and polite, no matter how many scowls it earns you. The worse you are treated, the more formal you become. Watching Titus glare at me as Sefa showed me to her wing of the manor was the highlight of my day.

After gently ribbing me for being overdressed for just a casual visit (“I felt like making an entrance,” to which she replied with a giggle, “You most certainly did that.”), we talked for a couple of hours. For me, it was, for the first time in over a month, a regular conversation about nothing of consequence: motherhood in general, her baby specifically, living in Sandpoint, and more than a little reminiscing. Between that and watching her with her son, and then holding him myself, it was one of those moments that almost had me re-examining my life choices.

Almost. I had chosen my path, and I was happy with it, but I could certainly appreciate hers.

There was something I’d wanted to ask her for a very long time. Several times during our conversation I almost did, only to let the moment pass. It shouldn’t have been this difficult. It was just a question.

Eventually, I worked up the nerve.

“Sefa, can I ask you something personal? You don’t have to answer.”

“Of course you can.”

“What made you decide you liked me?”

She blinked at me, clearly not expecting the question. Then she looked away for a moment, thinking.

“I don’t know if I ‘decided’.”

“You must have.”

“I suppose…I just stopped believing what everyone else said about you.”

It was such a simple answer. For years, I’d wondered what Sefa had seen in me that everyone else hadn’t. Some quality that made me worth taking a chance on, perhaps, or something I’d done that changed her mind. But that wasn’t what she was saying at all.

“Our friendship…it changed my life. I wanted you to know that.”

“Thank you, Kali. That means a lot to me.” She smiled. “And I suppose I have you to thank for Alex.” 

I kept this same outfit on for the remainder of the day. I felt like returning to Riddleport in style.