Downshadow (31 page)

“She’s far too good for me,” Kalen said. “For any of us.”

“And I’m what—a perfect fit?” She flicked her tongue at him. “You disgust me.”

“No,” Kalen said, “I don’t.”

“Oh?” Fayne crossed her arms—Myrin’s arms—and regarded him with an adorable pout.

She took out her wand again and broke the illusion. Her half-elf form reappeared, wavered over something darker, then settled. It was brief, but it made him wonder …

“Why, O wise knight of shadows,” she said, “why don’t I hate you?”

“Because you’re like me,” Kalen said. “A lover of darkness.”

Fayne stared at him another moment, anger and challenge in her eyes. Every bit of him burned—wanted him to lunge forward and grasp her, wrench the blanket from her body, throw the paladin aside and free the thief at his heart.

“I should go,” she said finally. “You and I… she’s the one for you, Kalen, not I. She is better for you.” Fayne made to leave, but Kalen stopped her. This time, his grip was firm.

“I know well what’s better for me,” Kalen said. “And I want you instead.”

Fayne blinked at him, wordless.

“Show me.” Kalen ran his fingers along her cheek. “I want to see your face.”

He saw the shift in her stance, could almost feel every hair on her body rise. He felt her bristle, the way a lion might just before ir pounces. “But you do see my face,” she said, her tone dangerous. “I stand here before you, no illusions.”

“That’s a lie,” Kalen said. “I’ve taken my mask off for you—take yours off for me.”

He still held her by the wrist. Could he feel the blood thundering in her veins, or was he imagining it? His grip lessened.

“Run,” Kalen said, “or take off your mask. Choose.”

“Kalen, you can’t—” she said. “Please. I’m frightened.”

Perhaps I am cruel, Kalen thought. But Gedrin had taught him the value of pain, with that clout on the ear. Pain reveals who we truly are.

“You want it to be real, then choose.” He shook his head. “I won’t ask again.”

Trembling, Fayne looked at him for three deep breaths. He was sure—so sure—that she would run. But then she drew her wand from her belr with a steady hand. He saw the tension in her body, practically felr her insides roiling and tossing like a rickety boat in a god-born storm, but she stayed calm.

She was like the thief he had been, he thought.

“Very well,” she said.

She passed the wand in front of her face and a false Fayne slid away like a heavy robe, leaving her naked before him. Her true face took form—her skin and hair and body. All her lies vanished, and she was truly herself. Regardless of her shape, she was just a woman standing before a man.

Kalen said nothing, only looked at her.

Finally, Fayne looked away. “Am I…” she asked, her voice broken. “Am I really so repulsive?” t She tried to run, but he caught her arm once more. “Your name,” Kalen said. “I want your name.”

Fayne’s eyes were wet but defiant. “Ellyne,” she said. “Ellyne, for sorrow.” Her fists clenched. “That’s my name, damn you.”

“No.” Kalen looked down at her, his mouth set firm. “No, it isn’t.”

Fayne’s knees quaked. “Yes, it—”

Then he kissed her, cutting off her words.

He kissed her deeper.

The blanket slipped down to the floor and her warm body pressed against him.

Cellica must have dozed at her work. She awoke at the table, needle and thread in hand, to the sound of muffled sobs. The tallhouse rooms were not large—only a central chamber five paces across that served for dining and sitting, and two smaller rooms for slumber. Cellica’s room, from whence the sobbing came, was small by human standards, adequate for a halfling. It boasted a window—Kalen, in one of his rare thoughtful moments, had cut it out of the wall.

Myrin was crying, she realized. But why? “Kalen,” she murmured.

Cellica slipped down from the chair and padded over to Kalen’s door. She peered through the keyhole, much as she expected Myrin musr have—

She looked just long enough to see Kalen’s back, a pair of feminine arms wrapped around it, and knew instantly what had happened. She pulled away and her face turned into an angry frown. “Kalen, you stupid, stupid—”

She hurried to her chamber. Sure enough, Myrin was clad in her red gown again, though it was now much rumpled. She sar in the corner, compacted as small as she could manage, and bit her knuckles. She smelled of honeysuckle—Cellica’s favorire and only perfume.

“Oh, peach, peach,” Cellica said. She crossed to Myrin and embraced her. “It’s not your fault. You know that, right?”

Myrin sobbed harder and leaned her head against Cellica’s chest. Where their skin touched, Cellica felt a tickle of magic.

It.wasn’t difficult for the halfling to connect events. Behind the closed door, Myrin had doffed the more practical attire they’d receive4 at the Menagerie in favor of the red gown, which she’d asked Cellica to mend and clean earlier that day. Armed with that—and Cellica

would confess readily that she looked a true beauty—and a bit of Cellica’s perfume, she’d padded out to Kalen’s room. fBut Fayne had pounced on Kalen first.

Cellica cursed the man. How could he be so blind? Myrin had been throwing herself at him ever since that morn when they met. No wonder nothing had ever come of Kalen and Araezra. Cellica was surprised Rayse still spoke to the dumb brute.

“There, lass, there.” Cellica stroked the girl’s hair. “Kalen’s just an idiot.”

Myrin wrenched away. “No, he’s not!” she said. “You know he isn’t. Shut up!”

The halfling blinked, stunned by her outburst, and leaned away. She tried to speak, but a compulsion in Myrin’s words had stolen her speech.

My voice, Cellica thought. She took my voice?

The girl’s anger turned to a sob. “He doesn’t love me,” Myrin said. “I thought maybe he followed me from the ball because he loved me, but… but…” She sniffed and wiped her cheeks. “He followed because it was his duty, because he was guarding me. That’s all.”

“But that’s not true,” Cellica said. “I’ve never seen him look—”

“Go away,” Myrin said. “Take your false hopes and just go away!”

Cellica found herself rising to her feet without thinking. Her conscious mind wanted to stay and talk, but her body obeyed without her consent.

It was the voice. Cellica’s own command, but from Myrin’s lips. How was this possible?

“Go away and go to sleep,” Myrin said. “Here.” She handed Cellica the blanket.

The halfling closed her door softly, leaving Myrin alone in her chamber. She wandered, increasingly sleepy, into the kitchen and main room. She felt so tired, as though she had run fifty leagues that day. Just a little—

She slumped down on the floor and was snoring before her chin hit her chest.

“Mother!” Fayne gasped, waking with a start, that one word on her lips.

Merely a nightmare, she assured herself with some disgust. She’d been sleeping again.

Fayne leaned back, her naked body glistening with sweat, while the world drifted back. A sparse tallhouse chamber. A plain bed. A man sleeping beside her, head nestled in her lap. Her tail curled around him like a purring cat, restlessly flicking back and forth.

Who was this man, and why did she smile when she thought of him?

She remembered the dream. An elf woman screamed and tore at herself to fight off a horror that existed only in her mind. A gold-skinned bladesinger without a heart moaned on the rough, slick floor. Fayne’s own mother, dark and beautiful and dead, lay impaled at her feet. The cold, bone wand in Fayne’s tiny hand sent pain through her arm and into her soul.

And the girl—Fayne had seen the girl wreathed in blue flames. The girl flickered into being just as Fayne’s mother’s magic burned her from the inside out.

She looked down at the muscled, scarred man who embraced her naked thighs and slept. Kalen, she remembered.

Then ir all returned, chasing the nightmares away once more. She whisrled in relief.

Gods, she hated sleeping. So barbaric. It limited more pleasant activities, anyway.

Fayne slipped out of Kalen’s embrace and left him on the bed alone. She smiled at him for a moment before shaking her head. “Belt up, lass,” she chided. “You’re going all giggly.”

She emptied the chamber pot out the wall chute—again, a barbaric necessity—and sat on the cold floor for a moment, collecting herself. Then she rose and stretched.

The moonlight that leaked through the window would not last long—dawn was coming, and she had best take her leave soon. She opened the shutters and put her face out into the cool Waterdeep night. She breathed deep the refreshing breezes off the sea and let loose a

peaceful, contented sigh. Then she shut herself back inside.

She reclaimed her clothes—plain leathers, slightly shabby and wofn. They weren’t the ones she remembered wearing there, but she was used to that feeling. When most of one’s wardrobe was illusory, one’s basic clothes often varied.

Illusion …

She realized something and crossed quickly to Kalen’s mirror, which hung on the wall over a small basin. The water was tepid when she trailed her fingers through it, but the mitror was more important. •

Her true face blinked back at her.

“Gods,” she murmured, caressing her pale skin. “Did I really sleep in this?”

She ran her fingers across the scar along her cheek—pushed back the rosy pink hair that obscured it. The scar, from a crossbow bolt, ached, as it always did that time of night.

“This just won’t do,” she said. “Can’t go scaring children, now can we?”

She made to draw her wand from her belt, then stopped. That was for cosmetic changes. Her true body—she really needed to hide that.

She invoked her disguising ritual with the aid of her amulet. Her flesh shifted like putty. The pink hair turned back to her familiar half-elf red, her sharp features smoothed, her ears shrank and rounded slightly, and her wings and tail vanished.

“Now, then,” she said.

Over this she slid an illusion, one that suited her. Simply because she felt like it, she made herself look like her mother: a beautiful sun elf with eyes like tar pits and lips like rubies. A gauzy black gown spun itself out of the air around her thin limbs.

It was exactly as Fayne remembered her mother, in the few years they’d had together before the crossbow bolt that had given Fayne the scar on her cheek.

Fayne crossed to the door, opened it as silently as she could, and stepped into the outer chamber. She heard Cellica snoring and saw a sleeping bundle slumped in the center of the room. Fayne smiled gently.

Then she heard a whisper of leather on wood, and she looked just in time to see Rath rushing her out of the shadows. She did not have time to speak.

Once again, Cellica awakened to what sounded like Myrin weeping. “Gods,” she murmured, brushing away the stickiness of sleep. She’d had such vivid and bawdy dreams, too.

The first light of early dawn crept through the windows. An hour would yet pass before the sun peered over the horizon. The city lay quiet.

Cellica heard shuffling sounds and stifled sobs from her own bedchamber.

Thinking of Kalen, she lifted her crossbow from the table. Mayhap she’d shoot him for being such an idiot and sleeping with the wrong woman.

She paused to look again through the keyhole into Kalen’s chamber. She braced herself for what she w&uld see, but he was alone and unmoving on the bed.

Blushing a little, Cellica tiptoed toward her room. She heard a stifled moan, then something ctashing down, like a chair, and the hairs on her neck rose.

The halfling slid the door open a crack and stopped dead.

On the bed, illuminated by the moon, was a struggling Myrin in a nightgown, two hands tying a cloth around her mouth to gag her. Those hands belonged to a black-robed dwarf—the one they had seen in Lorien Dawnbringer’s chamber: Rath. Half his face was a burned wreck, but she knew him.

“Don’t move,” Cellica said, mustering as much command voice as she could.

The scarred face blinked at her, holding Myrin on the bed with one hand. “Child …”

“I’m not a child.” Cellica aimed at his face. “And if you think this is a toy, you’re damn wrong.” Her hands trembled. “Kalen!” she cried-“Kalen!” He would hear that, she hoped—unless his wall suddenly blocked all sound, or some such nonsense.

“Calm yourself, wee one,” the dwarf said. “I am unarmed.”

As if that mattered, Cellica thought. From what Kalen had told her, he could kill them both with his bare hands, if only he could move. Her voice had trapped him.

“Don’t call me wee, orc-piss,” Cellica snapped. “Take her gag off.”

“I wouldn’t,” Rath said. As he could not otherwise move, his eyes turned to Myrin. “This girl is dangerous.”

“Do it!” Cellica hissed. “And where s Fayne?” She raised the crossbow higher. “What have you done with Fayne, you blackguard?”

“Cellica,” came a voice.

A shadow loomed out of the corner, and Cellica turned to find—her.

Of all the nightmares she might have imagined, she never would have expected this one. A specter from her past—from before she and Kalen had gone to Westgate, from when she had been slave to a demon cult. One she had never told him about, and one who had haunted her every nightmare through all the years in Luskan and since.

The golden elf lady with the eyes of darkness.

“You,” Cellica said, terrified.

The woman paused, considering. Then, finally, she smiled. “Me.”

A dagger flashed and pain bit into Cellica’s stomach. Her legs died and she slumped to the floor. The world faded. She heard only Myrin’s muffled voice crying her name.

Ralen must have been weary—and indeed, he hadn’t slept until shortly before dawn. He awoke near highsun—rested, thirsty, and ravenous.

He was mildly surprised Cellica hadn’t awakened him— perhaps with an ewer of water, as was her habit. In a way, he was disappointed he wasn’t waking up dripping wet. He would have seized Cellica’s pitcher and drank the rest of its contents, he was so thirsty.

Kalen felt around the bed next to him, but Fayne was gone. In truth, he wasn’t surprised. A woman like that couldn’t be kept abed all night and half a day. And had she stayed, she certainly would have awakened him in the morning—he knew that for a certainty.