u/Trader685

After speaking to the mods - I am re-posting my story - full disclosure as agreed with them is below. I am posting it as I feel it is a true Sword Coast story, steeped in the lore and the history with compelling characters that will immerse any reader in the setting.

The Weight is Silver charting rise of the House of Duskmere and of Lady Vessa Duskmere becoming one of the most powerful and influential people in the Sword Coast.

Chapter One is below for easy access and I will only post an update when a new chapter is added - so far 5 Chapters are up at this subreddit:

FULL CHAPTER LISTING: https://www.reddit.com/r/TheWeightofSilver/comments/1tf5g3h/the_weight_of_silver_a_tale_of_the_sword_coast/

This story started off as a vignette about the people in the picture below and has morphed into epic saga charting rise of the House of Duskmere and of Lady Vessa herself becoming one of the most powerful and influential people on the Sword Coast.

For full transparency the story is AI assisted in its writing else it would be impossible to get the depth of lore and world realism without excessive study of the lore which very few people have command of. The characters and storyline are my own. Even with the AI's help It takes hours of editing and story shaping to get the story to a standard that satisfies me and hopefully a wider audience.

I am well aware that many people dismiss AI assisted content as 'slop' but I assure you that the level of depth of the lore and layered nature of the story along with the richly drawn characters and one soon forgets how it was written. I ask you to read the first chapter and decide for yourself.

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The Weight of Silver - Chapter One

A tale of the Sword Coast, in the Year of Three Streams Blooded (1492 DR)

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Lady Vessa Duskmere, Halric Stone, Branwen Asher, Corin Vale, Kael Auvrenal

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I. The Walk Down from Helmsblade

The five of them came down the cracked stone of the outer bailey at dusk, with the sun bleeding red over the Sunset Mountains and the banners of House Helmsblade snapping like impatient hounds above them. The keep at their backs was old Cormyrean stonework gone bastard — a border holding granted in the chaos that followed the Sundering, when the Dragon Throne had been too distracted by Netherese ghosts and Shadovar wraiths to mind its western marches. Now, with Suzail's eye turned outward again and the High Forest stirring with things that should not be stirring, places like Helmsblade had become useful once more.

Useful, and watched.

They had been summoned for a private council. They were leaving with something heavier than any of them had brought up the hill.

Lady Vessa Duskmere walked at the centre of them, as was her habit and her right, though she would have refused either word if pressed. She was tall — taller than three of the four men around her — and the wind off the foothills lifted her black hair where it had escaped the silver clasp at her crown. Her armour was Calishite work, or made to look it: blackened plate over the chest and ribs, etched in a script that was not quite Thorass and not quite anything a scholar of Candlekeep would name for you, the metal dark as wet slate and inlaid with copper filigree that caught the dying light. Below the cuirass, the long split skirt of dyed leather and lacquered scale fell to her boots, with thigh straps that held two narrow blades reversed against the leg — a fighting style she had brought back from her years in the East, where she had served, and bled, and learned things she did not speak about.

She was thirty-four. She had been a Harper once. She was not, any longer, anything so simple.

"Say it again," she said quietly, without turning her head. "Slowly."

Behind her left shoulder, Corin Vale obliged. He was the eldest of the company, forty if he was a day, with a face that had been handsome once and had now gone craggy in the way that suited some men better than youth had. His beard was shot through with iron, his hair tied back with a leather thong, and his armour was the heaviest of the five — full plate of Damaran make, the breastplate scored across the left pauldron from a gnoll's axe at the Battle of Berdusk Ford six summers past. The scar had not been buffed out. Corin Vale considered such things to be honest.

"The seal was Lord Helmsblade's," he said. "I watched him press it. The wax was Cormyrean red, not the Helmsblade blue. That means it was witnessed by a Crown agent, Vessa. There was a Purple Dragon in the room we did not see."

"And the contents."

"Are exactly what Branwen says they are."

At Vessa's right, walking a half-pace ahead because he could never quite force himself to walk in line, was Branwen Asher. Younger than Corin by ten years, leaner, sharper-faced, with the high cheekbones and pale hair of a man whose blood ran half-Illuskan. He wore a lighter harness — black scale over a gambeson, a single shoulder of articulated plate on his sword arm, the rest left mobile. Two blades crossed at his back: a longsword for the right hand, a parrying sword for the left. He was a duellist by training, a spy by trade, and a Harper still — the only one of them who had not yet given up the silver pin, though he carried it in a hidden seam now rather than at his collar.

"Three thousand crowns," Branwen said. "Three thousand Cormyrean crowns and a writ of safe passage, in exchange for one woman in Yartar. By the second tenday of Mirtul. Or the offer voids and the bounty quadruples and is opened to the open market."

"Mirtul," said the man behind Vessa's right shoulder. "Three tendays."

This was Halric Stone, and he was the largest of them, though not the loudest. A Damaran by birth, a sellsword by necessity, a bear of a man with a beard that had gone to rust at the edges and a voice that rumbled up out of his chest like a millwheel. His armour was older than any of theirs — fluted plate that had belonged to his father, and his father's father, with the Stone family device hammered out long ago and replaced now with nothing at all, a patch of bare scarred steel over the heart. He carried a bastard sword across his back and a war-hammer at his hip, and he had killed more men than he could count and fewer than rumour gave him credit for, which is the truth of any man who has fought for coin long enough.

"Mirtul," Halric said again, as though tasting it. "And the woman is?"

Vessa stopped walking. They stopped with her, in the unconscious way of a unit that has fought together long enough that no one needs to give the order. The keep was a dark crown above them now, the last sentries on the wall reduced to shapes against the bruised sky. The stones underfoot were broken in a pattern that looked almost deliberate from above, like the cracked face of a dropped mirror.

She drew the parchment from inside her cuirass and read it again, although she had read it three times already in the lord's solar and could have recited it from memory.

"The woman in Yartar," she said, "is named in the writ as Sira of Auvrenal. Age twenty-six. Dark-haired. Last seen in the company of a Waterdhavian merchant called Olem Voss. The Crown wants her returned alive. Helmsblade will pay the three thousand on delivery."

She let the parchment hang at her side.

"That is the public name and the public price."

"And the private?" Branwen asked, though his voice had gone flat in a way that suggested he already knew.

"Her true name," said Vessa, "is Sira Auvrenal."

Halric did not understand. Corin did, and his jaw worked.

The fifth man understood too, and that was the one who had said nothing yet, and whose silence had begun to weigh on the others like a held breath.

II. The Fifth

He stood a little apart, as he always did. Kael Auvrenal — though only one person in Faerûn living still called him that, and he had not seen her in eleven years — leaned on the low wall of cut stone at the edge of the path and looked out at the failing light over the foothills, and said nothing at all.

He was thirty-one. His hair was the colour of old wheat, longer than was fashionable in the cities, tied back with a thin braid at the temple in the manner of the Uthgardt tribesmen he had run with for two winters in his early twenties — a debt repaid, a story for another night. His armour was the lightest of the five, by his own preference: a cuirass of dwarf-make under a long charcoal tabard, vambraces of beaten steel, a sword-belt that carried both a hand-and-a-half blade and, on the left hip, a shorter, older weapon with a wire-wrapped hilt and a pommel that had been worn smooth by some other hand long before his.

He had a way of going still that the others had learned to read. Halric, who had drunk with him in nine cities, said it was the stillness of a man calculating how many people in the room he could kill before they killed him. Branwen, who had worked beside him in the dark for years and trusted him further than was wise, said it was the stillness of a man trying not to remember something.

Tonight it was both.

"Auvrenal," Halric said slowly, sounding the name out as though that would help. "I know that name."

"You should," said Corin. "You drank his sister's wedding-wine in Baldur's Gate four years ago. You don't forget weddings, Hal, you've told me so a dozen times."

"Gods." Halric's face changed. He looked at Kael, and Kael did not look back. "Gods, that's Sira? Your sister Sira?"

"My half-sister," Kael said. His voice was very level. He had a voice that could be very level when he chose. "Same father. Different mothers. She was twelve when our father died. I have not seen her since the year of her wedding, which was, as Corin says, four years ago."

"And the wedding," Branwen said carefully, "was to —"

"Olem Voss." Kael turned at last. The light caught his eyes, which were grey, and very tired. "Yes. The Waterdhavian merchant. Who is named in the writ as her companion, which is Cormyrean for abductor, but who is in fact her husband of four years, and the father of her two children, and a man I have personally drunk with on three occasions and consider a decent if slightly venal soul."

A silence.

It was Vessa who spoke, finally, and she spoke to Kael alone, although the others heard.

"Why does the Dragon Throne want your sister, Kael?"

He did not answer at once. He was looking down at the stones under his boots, at the cracked pattern of them, and one of his hands had closed unconsciously around the older sword's pommel — the one with the worn grip, the one that had been someone else's first.

"Our father," he said, "served in the household of Vangerdahast for the last six years of the old wizard's tenure. He was not a mage. He was something more useful, which was a man who could be trusted to carry letters and not read them. When the Steel Regent dismissed Vangey in '69, our father came home. He brought certain papers with him."

"Which papers?" Vessa asked.

"I don't know. I never did know. He did not tell me, because I was nineteen and stupid, and he did not tell Sira, because she was twelve. He told no one. He died of a flux in the spring of 1481 and the papers vanished. We assumed he had burned them. The household assumed he had burned them. Apparently —" his mouth twisted, "— the household was wrong."

"Apparently," said Branwen, very softly, "the Crown thinks Sira has them."

"The Crown does not," said Corin. "The Crown thinks Sira knows where they are. There is a distinction. If the Crown thought Sira had them, the writ would name them and demand them. The writ names Sira and demands Sira."

"And the writ," Vessa said, "was witnessed by a Purple Dragon agent in Lord Helmsblade's solar this afternoon."

"Yes."

"Which means," she went on, her voice flat as a struck bell, "that the request did not come from Helmsblade. Helmsblade is the purse. The hand belongs to Suzail."

III. What Each of Them Heard

There is a thing that happens when five people receive the same news and each one of them hears something different, and the air between them becomes for a moment very crowded with the unsaid.

Corin heard Suzail, and remembered.

He had not been a soldier of Cormyr, but he had fought for them, briefly, as a free company captain during the Goblin War of '79 — the small ugly war the chronicles barely mention, fought in the marshes south of Wheloon while the kingdom's attention was elsewhere. He had watched a Purple Dragon officer order the execution of forty bound prisoners because feeding them on the march was inconvenient. He had said nothing, because he had been twenty-six and hungry and the contract paid in Cormyrean gold. He had carried the silence of it for fourteen years. Now Cormyr wanted him to deliver a young woman with two children to that same kind of officer in that same kind of room, and he heard the request the way a man hears a debt being called in by a creditor he had hoped was dead.

Halric heard three thousand crowns, and felt sick.

Three thousand crowns was the precise sum his sister's husband owed to a Calishite slaver-banker in Memnon, against which his sister and her two daughters stood as collateral under a contract Halric had been working for two years to dissolve. He had ridden into Helmsblade tonight with twelve hundred to his name. He had ridden in calculating, as he had been calculating for eight months, how much longer he could keep the banker patient. Three thousand crowns would not just buy his sister's freedom; it would buy her a house in Berdusk and her daughters' apprenticeships and a future. And all he had to do was help take a Waterdhavian merchant's wife from her bed in Yartar and put her in a wagon bound for Suzail. That was all. He had done worse for less.

He looked at Kael, and felt sicker.

Branwen heard Vangerdahast's papers, and went cold all the way to the bone.

Branwen was the only one of the five who knew what those papers almost certainly were, because Branwen had been a Harper long enough and well-placed enough to have heard the rumour, twice, in two different cities, from two different sources who did not know each other and were both now dead. The rumour was that Vangerdahast, in the last months before his dismissal, had compiled a private register of the bloodlines of the Cormyrean nobility — including the irregularities. The bastards. The substitutions. The quiet infidelities of two centuries of Obarskyr queens and their cousins. The register had vanished when Vangey did. If it existed and if Suzail wanted it back, then Suzail did not want it for safekeeping. Suzail wanted it because someone in the current succession was vulnerable to it, and the current king was a child of eleven, and the regency council was already at one another's throats, and a piece of paper with the wrong name on it could pull the whole kingdom into civil war within a season.

Branwen heard all of that, in the half-second after Kael said Vangerdahast, and he understood that the Harpers needed to know. Tonight. Before any of them slept.

He also understood that telling Vessa would put her in an impossible place, because Vessa was no longer a Harper, and the silver pin in Branwen's collar seam was not a thing he had ever shown her.

Vessa heard the Crown wants her returned alive, and heard the lie under it.

She had served the Zhentarim for eighteen months in her early twenties — a fact known to no one in this company except, possibly, Kael, who knew because he had been the one to pull her out — and she knew the shape of a contract that ended in a quiet death. Returned alive meant delivered alive to a place where she will die. It did not matter what was in the papers. It mattered that Sira knew, and knowing made her a thing that could not be allowed to wander Faerûn telling her story to merchants and priests and drunken Waterdhavian husbands. The Crown was not retrieving an asset. The Crown was closing a door.

And Vessa, who had been pulled out of a Zhentish counting-house at the age of twenty-three by a young swordsman with grey eyes and a worn-pommelled blade and no good reason to bother saving her, looked at that swordsman now and understood, as she had understood from the moment she first read the writ, that there was only one answer she could give.

Kael heard his sister's name, and heard nothing else for a long time.

He had not protected her when their father died. He had been nineteen, and angry, and useless, and he had taken his father's older sword and gone north to the Uthgardt because he could not bear the house. Sira had been raised by their father's sister in Baldur's Gate. He had written, sometimes. He had sent money when he had it. He had stood at her wedding, drunk too much, and left before the dancing because the bride looked too much like their mother, who had died in childbirth, and he could not breathe in that hall.

He had told himself, for eleven years, that she was safe because she was small, because she was domestic, because she was a merchant's wife in a quiet city and not a swordsman's sister in a contested march. He had told himself that the worst gift their father had left them had been the name, and that she had escaped it by taking another man's.

He had been wrong about that, too. He was beginning to suspect he had been wrong about most things.

IV. The Council on the Stones

They did not go down into the village. They sat on the broken stones at the edge of the path, in the long blue moment between sunset and full dark, and they spoke as quietly as five armoured people can speak.

"We have until the second tenday of Mirtul," Corin said. "Three tendays. Yartar is twelve days' hard ride from here, less if the weather holds in the High Moor. If we go now —"

"We are not delivering her," Vessa said.

"I did not say we were delivering her, Vessa, I was speaking to time."

"Then speak to it more clearly. We are not delivering her. We are taking her out. Her, the husband, the children, the household if there is one. We are taking them somewhere the Crown's hand does not reach, and we are doing it before the second tenday of Mirtul, because at the second tenday the bounty quadruples and goes open and every blade between Neverwinter and the Dragonmere will be hunting her."

"Where is out?" asked Halric.

"That is the harder question."

"Waterdeep," said Branwen. "The Lords will not extradite to Cormyr on a sealed writ. Voss has standing there."

"Voss has enemies there," Corin countered. "He left two trade partners ruined when he went to Yartar. Waterdeep is a hornet's nest for him personally."

"Silverymoon, then. The High Lady —"

"Silverymoon is six tendays north and we have three."

"The Underdark," said Halric, with a perfectly straight face, and Vessa snorted in spite of herself, and the moment broke a little, and they were able to think again.

It was Kael who spoke next, and he had not spoken since Vessa had said the hand belongs to Suzail.

"There is a fourth answer," he said.

They looked at him.

"We take her out," he said. "And we take the papers with her. Wherever they are. She will know, or Voss will know, or there will be a trail in the house in Yartar that will tell us. We find them. And we read them."

"Kael," said Corin.

"We read them, Corin. Whatever is in those papers, we read them, and then we decide. If they are what Branwen's face just told me they are —" his eyes flicked to Branwen, who did not flinch, although the cost of not flinching was visible — "then they are a weapon, and a weapon in the right hands is a shield, and Sira does not survive this unless somebody holds a shield over her."

"That is treason, Kael."

"It is treason," Kael agreed, "if Cormyr is the kingdom we serve. I am not a Cormyrean. Vessa is not a Cormyrean. Halric is not a Cormyrean. Branwen is whatever Branwen is this tenday. You, Corin, are the only one of us who has ever taken Cormyrean coin in earnest, and you have been telling me for two years that you regretted it."

"There is regret," said Corin softly, "and there is open rebellion against the Forest Kingdom. They are not the same country."

"No," said Kael. "They are not. But they are on the same road, and the road is shorter than you think."

Vessa said: "I am with him."

She said it before Kael had finished speaking, almost on top of him, and there was something in her voice that none of them — not even Kael — had ever quite heard before. Not loyalty, because loyalty was a word she had used up years ago. Something older and uglier and more honest. A debt being paid forward.

Branwen was the next.

He did it with his hands rather than his voice. He reached into the seam of his collar, and worked the silver pin out, and held it between his fingers in the blue light, and then he closed his fist over it and put it into his belt-pouch and said: "I am with him too. The pin is on a holiday. We will see if it comes back."

Halric looked at the three of them, and then at Corin, and then at his own hands. He thought about his sister. He thought about three thousand crowns. He thought about the look on Sira's face four years ago when she had pressed a cup of wedding-wine into his hand and called him uncle because Kael had been too drunk to introduce him properly.

"Aye," he said, "I am with him."

Corin Vale was the last. He took the longest. He sat with his old plate creaking around him and he looked up at the keep above them, at Helmsblade's banner snapping against the bruised sky, at the Crown of Cormyr that had paid him in gold he had spent and could not give back.

"You understand," he said to Kael, and only to Kael, "that if we do this thing, we do not go back. None of us. Not to Cormyr, not to the lords of the Heartlands, not to any clean contract any of us have ever known. We become outlaws, Kael. Hunted outlaws. With a child of eleven on the Dragon Throne and a regency that needs an enemy, we become exactly the enemy they need."

"Yes," said Kael.

"And you are asking it for one woman."

"I am asking it for my sister," said Kael, "and her children, and the truth of what our father carried home and died of, and the shape of the kingdom that comes after this one. Yes. I am asking it. I will not ask twice."

Corin closed his eyes. When he opened them he was not the man he had been a moment before, and they all saw it, and none of them spoke of it.

"Then I am with you," he said. "Gods help us all. I am with you."

V. The Walk Down

They rose. They did not embrace; they were not that kind of company. They checked their straps and their blades in the unconscious way of people who have decided, without saying it, that the next time they drew steel it would be in earnest.

Vessa folded the parchment and tucked it back into her cuirass, and she did not return it to Lord Helmsblade, and she did not intend to.

Branwen ran his thumb once over the seam of his collar where the pin had been, and felt the absence of it the way a man feels the absence of a tooth — with the tongue, idly, and often.

Halric drew a long breath that smelt of mountain pine and distant rain, and thought, I will find another way for my sister. There is always another way. There has to be.

Corin set his hand on the scarred place on his pauldron where the gnoll's axe had bitten him at Berdusk Ford, and made himself a small, private promise about the kind of man he would be from this night forward.

Kael Auvrenal touched the worn pommel of the older sword at his left hip — the sword that had been his father's, that had carried letters from Vangerdahast, that had hung above a hearth in a house he had not seen in eleven years — and thought of a twelve-year-old girl with dark hair pressing her face against the doorframe and watching him leave.

The wind off the Sunset Mountains lifted and cooled. Somewhere below them, in the village of Helmsblade, the first lamps were being lit.

They walked down together towards the horses, and the road, and Yartar, and the second tenday of Mirtul, and whatever the Year of Three Streams Blooded had left to do with them.

Behind them, on the broken stones of the path, a torn corner of red Cormyrean wax lay where it had fallen from Vessa's hand. The breeze rolled it once, and then again, and then carried it over the wall and down into the dark.

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To be continued:

Chapter 1a: Selene Duskwind
https://www.reddit.com/r/TheWeightofSilver/comments/1tf5sd2/the_weight_of_silver_chapter_1a_addendum_in_the/

Chapter Two:  Sedgewater Patrol
https://www.reddit.com/r/TheWeightofSilver/comments/1tf5ov5/the_patrol_on_the_sedgewater_the_weight_of_silver/

Chapter Three:  The Conversation by the Sedgewater
https://www.reddit.com/r/TheWeightofSilver/comments/1tf60c1/the_conversation_by_the_sedgewater_the_weight_of/

Chapter Four: Ruin at Mournstar
https://www.reddit.com/r/TheWeightofSilver/comments/1tf65vt/the_ruin_at_mournstar_the_weight_of_silver/

Chapter Four - contd: Ruin at Mournstar
https://www.reddit.com/r/TheWeightofSilver/comments/1tf68yp/the_ruin_at_mournstar_the_weight_of_silver/

Chapter Five: Approach to Yartar
https://www.reddit.com/r/TheWeightofSilver/comments/1tf6k9j/the_approach_to_yartar_the_weight_of_silver/

Chapter Five: Approach to Yartar - continued
https://www.reddit.com/r/TheWeightofSilver/comments/1tf6gwk/the_approach_to_yartar_the_weight_of_silver/

The Weight of Silver charts the rise of the House of Duskmere and of Lady Vessa Duskmere becoming one of the most powerful and influential people on the Sword Coast.

This is the FULL CHAPTER list as I am publishing them:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Forgotten_Realms/comments/1tcwht4/lady_vessa_duskmere_the_weight_of_silver_a_tale/
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The Drow on the Roof

The Weight of Silver — Side Chapter

Yartar. The third and fourth of Tarsakh, 1492 DR.

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Naeris Auvryndar - Freelane Drow Agent

I. Waking

Naeris Auvryndar woke in a room she did not recognise, on a cot with clean linen, with a thin wool blanket over her shoulders and a small earthen cup of water on a stool beside her head.

Her shoulder hurt. Her head hurt worse. Her wrists were not bound. The light in the room was dim — a single oil lamp on a shelf, shielded — and the air was cool and smelt very faintly of river damp and of something else, something she did not at first identify and then did, with a slow professional unease: wraithwood smoke. Bregan D'aerthe used wraithwood in their holding rooms. It clouded scrying. She had seen the same smell once before, in 1490, in Skullport.

She was a Bregan D'aerthe captive.

She lay still for some time and let that fact settle. She was alive. She had been kept alive deliberately. She was unbound, which meant she was not being interrogated with hostility. The water beside her head meant she had been observed waking before and had been tended.

She catalogued, slowly: the shoulder was a clean throw-wound, dressed properly, beginning to heal. The head was a bruise rather than a fracture. Her body was otherwise unhurt. She was in the clothes she had been wearing on the rooftop, minus her weapons and minus the small clay pot she had been working when —

When what.

She closed her eyes. She concentrated.

The memory was incomplete in the particular way memories were incomplete when a senior Bregan D'aerthe operative had been at them with a focus. She remembered the rooftop. She remembered the pot. She remembered the smoke beginning to draw. She remembered, very faintly, a movement at the edge of her vision and a small sharp pain in the shoulder. She remembered going for the bow. She remembered her wrist being taken — a hard small turn she had not been able to counter — and the bow leaving her hand. She remembered seeing the edge of a face.

The edge of a face.

She tried to bring the face into focus.

She could not. There was a place in her memory where the face should have been and there was instead a soft grey absence with the texture of Modify Memory over it. Whoever had done the work had been good. They had removed the face cleanly, without the ragged edges of an amateur's working. They had left her the rest — the rooftop, the wrist-grip, the sense of having been beaten and not killed — and had taken only the face.

Why.

The why was the interesting question.

If they had wanted her dead they would have killed her. If they had wanted her interrogated they would have bound her. If they had wanted her returned harmless to her contracts they would have wiped the whole rooftop. They had chosen, instead, to leave her with the fact of having lost — including the very specific fact of having been spared by someone who could have killed her — and to remove only the means by which she could identify the person who had spared her.

It was the cleanest possible message.

It said: we know who you are; we know what you do; you have been given your life by someone who chose to give it; we have removed the face because that person wishes it removed; you are released from the relevant contract and you owe a life.

A debt of life with no recipient.

Naeris had encountered the format twice in her career, both times in Bregan D'aerthe's hand. It was a Jarlaxle Baenre move. She knew the texture.

She sat up.

The dizziness was manageable. She drank the water. She listened. The room was silent. She stood, walked the four paces to the door, tried the latch — unlocked — and opened it onto a narrow corridor lit by a second lamp.

A drow male was sitting on a stool at the corridor's far end. She did not recognise him. He did not stand. He looked up, registered her, and gave the small nod of a man whose shift has been ended.

"Auvryndar."

"Yyrr'tarn?"

"Yes. Sszeth."

She inclined her head. They were, in the Bregan D'aerthe form, equals — she a freelancer, he a senior cell handler, neither owing the other anything in this moment.

"How long."

"Six days. You came in on the night of the twenty-seventh. Today is the third of Tarsakh."

"Six days."

"You did not lose much. We adjusted only what you have already noticed. The rest of you is intact."

"The contract."

"Closed. Your principal has been informed. You have been paid in full, less a modest forfeiture for the engagement having ended early. You will find the purse on the table behind you when you turn. The forfeiture is approximately the cost of your boarding here. We have not been petty about it."

"Whose hand."

"Mine. The work was mine. The decision about which face to remove was a request from a contact of mine, communicated to me in a Sending in the third bell of the morning of the twenty-eighth. I did the work an hour later. The contact is — not one of mine, in the institutional sense. The contact is one I owed, and the request was the favour. I am telling you this because you will work it out anyway and I would prefer you work it out from me."

Naeris looked at him for a long moment.

"You are saying the person who took me down on that roof was in a position to ask Bregan D'aerthe a favour."

"I am saying a person who knows that person was. It is not the same."

"Tymora's hand. Sszeth. Who."

"You will work it out, Auvryndar. I am not going to hand it to you. You are released. You have your purse. You have a clean shoulder. You owe a life. I would suggest that you consider the life owed to be a matter between you and the unknown party, and that you settle it however your conscience requires, and that you not pursue it through me. We will not assist in identification, but we will not interfere if you locate the party by your own means. I have been authorised to tell you that as well."

"Authorised by Jarlaxle."

"Authorised by the relevant authority."

"Sszeth. You are Bregan D'aerthe's senior in this city. There is no relevant authority above you in Yartar."

"There is one. Out."

She looked at him. She thought about pressing it. She decided against. Sszeth had been at this longer than she had and would not be moved on procedure.

She turned to the table behind her. The purse was there. It was the right weight. Beside it lay her curved blade, her hand crossbow, and the shoulder satchel she had been carrying on the roof. The clay pot was not there. She had not expected it to be.

She put the weapons on. She picked up the purse.

"Sszeth."

"Yes."

"Tell whoever your contact is — not the unknown party, the contact — that I am grateful for the clean handling. Tell them I will not pursue the unknown party with hostility. I will pursue them with — with curiosity. That is the limit of what I will say in writing. Tell them that I am Eilistraeen and we keep our debts in light, and that I will keep this one in light. They will know what that means."

"They will know."

"Good."

She walked past him down the corridor. The corridor opened, after twenty paces, into a stair, and the stair came up into a back room of a chandler's shop she half-recognised, and the shop opened into the south river quarter, and she was on the Yartar street in the morning light at the eighth bell of the third of Tarsakh, free, paid, alive, and curious.

She had four days to find a face.

II. The Shard

She had, in Yartar, three private arrangements her contracting principals did not know about. The first was a drow scribe in the temple of Eilistraee on the lower Surbrin, who kept records of every drow movement in the city for the temple's own quiet purposes. The second was a half-elven rooftop runner named Fenn who worked the chimney-tops of the merchant quarter for a Tashalan smuggler and who would speak with her for a small consideration. The third was a human woman named Mira Hawkwell who ran a small herbalist's shop on Bell Street and who had, on three previous occasions, sold Naeris information she had not been able to find anywhere else.

She went to Fenn first.

Fenn was twenty-four, half-elven, a Yartar-born girl with the quick light build and the working-rooftop calluses of a woman who had been picking pockets and running gables since she was eight. She met Naeris in the back room of a small noodle-house near the south river-step where they had met before. She drank Naeris's wine. She listened to the description.

"Short black hair. Half-elf, possibly. Kohl-lined eyes. Throws a knife from sitting. Works rooftops. Took me on the apothecary roof on the night of the twenty-seventh."

"Spared you."

"Spared me."

"Hmm."

"You know her."

"I know of her. She came in over the bridge on the morning of the twenty-fifth. She is not Yartar. She has been working the cooperage roof opposite the Voss house. I noticed her on the second day. She is good. She is very good. She did not see me."

"You would not say that lightly."

"I would not. She is — yes. Half-elven. Short black hair. The kohl is a Calishite style, two years out of fashion in Memnon, which dates her last move. She is perhaps nineteen. She works under a senior, who I have not seen, but whose hand I recognise in the placement. The senior is also not Yartar. The senior is — older work. Sword Coast, possibly former Harper, possibly former Zhent. I would not bet either way."

"You have a name."

"For the senior, no. For the apprentice — Selene. She uses Selene to her partners. Whether it is the name she was born with, I could not tell you."

"Selene."

"Yes."

"Where is she now."

"Not in Yartar. She left on the morning of the thirtieth on the south road in the company of three men and a covered cart. They went south. I lost them at the third milestone. They will be at a safe house six to eight miles south of the city, in country I do not work."

"Three Larches."

"Possibly. I have not confirmed. I would not push it, Naeris. The country south of the third milestone has a man on it who I prefer not to cross."

"Aldric Wenn."

Fenn looked at her.

"You know him."

"I know of him. Forger. Priest of Mask. Forty-something. Used to work Athkatla. Have not heard his name in five years."

"He has been here for two years quietly. He owns the Larches. The country is his. I would not go down there uninvited. He is — careful, Naeris. And he is not alone."

"Hmm."

Naeris drank her wine.

She thought.

If the apprentice was at the Larches and the senior was at the Larches and Aldric Wenn was at the Larches, then she was not going to walk into the Larches. She was going to draw the apprentice out.

She had four days. She needed an excuse the apprentice would not be able to refuse.

She paid Fenn. She left.

She spent the rest of the third of Tarsakh in the Yartar markets buying the small specific things she would need and writing — by hand, at a quiet table in the back of a tea-house — a single short note in a code Selene would only recognise if she was who Fenn said she was.

The note read, in the rooftop runners' shorthand of the western Sword Coast:

Slate gable, Bell Street chandler, fifth bell after sundown. The one who let me wake.

She paid a chandlery boy two coppers to leave a small clay shard — unmarked, undecorated, but glazed in the specific dark green of the Eilistraeen temple's outer pots — on the chimney of the cooperage opposite the Voss house, on the gutter where Selene had been lying for four days. The boy did not know what he was carrying. The boy had been told only that a courting woman wished to leave a small token for a rooftop friend. The boy thought the story romantic and overpaid.

The shard went up at the second bell of the morning of the fourth of Tarsakh.

By then Naeris had taken a room above the chandler's and was waiting.

III. Selene's Choice

Selene had not been to Yartar since the thirtieth.

She had also not slept properly in five nights, and she had been finding, in the lull at the Larches, that her hands wanted work to do and her body wanted an errand. Aldric had a list of small Yartar errands — collecting two parcels from contacts of his, dropping one note at the Brass Anchor for Sszeth, picking up a sealed package from the temple of Lathander on the Bridge — and he had been planning to send a runner.

Selene volunteered.

Aldric looked at her for a moment over his cup. He considered the volunteering. He considered Selene's face. He considered the fact that Vessa was upstairs with Iselle and could not see the volunteering.

"All right," he said. "Take a horse. Go in tonight. Do the errands at first light. Be back by sundown tomorrow. Take the south road. Stay off the merchant quarter rooftops; we have stayed quiet there for a tenday and I would not break it."

"I will not go up on the rooftops."

"Good."

She went.

She rode into Yartar at the third bell of the evening, stabled the horse at an inn near the Riverboat Quay, did the easiest of the errands — the sealed package from Lathander — at the temple's evening reception, and walked the long way back through the merchant quarter on her way to the inn for supper.

She had told Aldric she would not go up on the rooftops.

She had not told Aldric she would not look at them.

She walked past the cooperage opposite the Voss house at the fourth bell. The Voss house was dark. The yellow ribbon was still on the door, although the notary's seal had been moved. She walked past slowly, with the unhurried pace of a young woman who had nothing in particular to do, and she lifted her eyes briefly to the cooperage roof.

The shard was on the chimney.

She saw it. She did not stop. She walked on, three streets, into the Bell Street quarter, took a slow circle through the markets, doubled back twice, and at the fifth bell after sundown she went up onto the slate gable of the Bell Street chandler by a route she had scouted seven days ago and had not used.

Naeris was waiting on the gable.

The drow was sitting on the slate with her legs drawn up and her arms loose on her knees, in the careful balanced rest-posture of a woman who had been on rooftops for decades and could sit on slate the way other people sat on chairs. She had the curved blade across her lap. She had no other weapon visible. Her shoulder had been dressed afresh that morning. Her hair was loose under a thin dark scarf.

Selene came up over the parapet at twenty paces and stopped.

They looked at each other for a count of perhaps ten.

"Selene."

"Naeris."

"You came."

"I came because I wanted to. Not because I owed you. I want that to be clear."

"It is clear."

"What do you want."

"To talk. To know why you spared me. Nothing else, tonight. I am — I am not going to ask you who your principals are. I am not going to ask you what was in the Voss house. I am not going to ask you any operational thing. I have been released. I am paid. I am not on a contract. I am here because someone took me down on a roof six nights ago, and chose not to kill me, and I have a face I cannot remember and a debt I cannot place, and I would like to look at the person who is holding the other end of the debt. That is all."

Selene did not answer immediately.

She walked across the slate to a place six feet from Naeris and sat down. She put the long sword across her own lap, in the same posture. She did not draw the second blade.

"How did you find me."

"A rooftop runner I pay. She knew you by sight. She did not know your work. She liked your placement."

"And you came up here in the open. With your blade in your lap. After I beat you in a fight you would have won six times out of seven. You are very calm, drow."

"I am not very calm. I am acting calm. There is a difference."

Selene smiled despite herself. The smile went away again.

"I should not be here, Naeris."

"I know."

"My principal does not know I am here."

"I know that also. She is — she is a senior. That is the impression I have. I will not press on her."

"What do you want."

"I told you what I want. I want to know why you spared me."

"I do not know."

"That is not an answer that closes the question."

"I know it isn't. It's the only one I have. I had a clean kill. I had the blade in my hand. I was — I had been told to take you down quietly if you broke the cover. I had authorisation. I had the angle. And I —" Selene stopped. She looked across the slate at the drow. The drow was watching her with the steady gold-flecked intelligence of a woman who had been waiting six days to be told what Selene was about to tell her, and who would receive whatever she was told without flinching.

"I had killed a boy at the Sedgewater four tendays ago," Selene said. "Nineteen. He was — he had — it does not matter what he had. I put a throwing blade in his throat. I have been carrying his letter to his mother in my jacket since. And I — I had a sister-feeling about you, Naeris. I cannot explain it. It is not — it is not a thing I should have had on a rooftop in Yartar in the middle of an operation. I had it. My hand made the decision before my head did. I struck with the pommel. I do not regret it. I also do not entirely understand it. That is the most honest I can be."

Naeris was quiet for a long time.

"All right," she said. Quietly. "I will accept that as an answer."

"You will."

"Yes. It is — it is the answer I would have given if our places had been exchanged, and you had asked me. I would have phrased it more carefully. But it is the same answer. Some hands move before the head. Some of us — some of us are taught that this is a flaw, Selene. Some of us are taught that this is a discipline. I was taught the second. I would like, if you are willing, to spend an evening with you. As — as someone you do not need to be on guard against. As a woman who would like to know the woman who let her live."

Selene did not answer at once.

"Naeris. What I just told you. About the Sedgewater, about the boy. That is — that is not a thing I have told anyone."

"I will not repeat it."

"I know. That is part of why I told you. I would like — I have been wanting to tell someone for four tendays, and I have not been able to, and the person who has been there has been —" she stopped.

"Your principal," Naeris said.

"Yes."

"It is sometimes easier to tell a stranger."

"Yes."

A small silence.

"My room is downstairs," Naeris said. "Above the chandler's. I have wine. I have food. I have a fire. I have nothing else planned tonight and I have nothing else planned tomorrow, and I am four days into a debt that has no recipient, and I would like to spend at least a few hours in a place that is not a Bregan D'aerthe holding cell with a person who is not Sszeth Yyrr'tarn. Will you come down."

Selene looked at her.

She thought about Vessa. She thought about Aldric, who had told her not to go on the rooftops. She thought about the line I had a sister-feeling about you and about what she had carried into the words and what she had not. She thought about Sahar, who had been twenty-six and had taught her, in seven nights, the difference between being touched for use and being touched as itself.

She thought, with an honesty she had not yet quite extended to herself: I am nineteen, I have been on a rooftop for four nights, I am tired, I am alone in the way I have been alone for seven years, and the woman across from me has a face I almost killed and a steadiness I do not have, and I would like — I would like, for one night, to be the person I have not been since Memnon.

"Yes," she said. "I will come down."

IV. The Room

The room above the chandler's was small and warm. There was a fire in a small iron grate. There was a low table with bread and olives and a clay jug of dark Tethyrian red. There was a single window with the shutters closed and a thin curtain drawn, and a wide bed against the far wall under a wool coverlet of an ordinary Yartar weave.

Naeris lit the second lamp. She moved with the small unhurried economy of a woman who had set the room before going up to the gable and who had set it carefully. She poured the wine. She handed Selene a clay cup. She sat down on the rug in front of the fire — not the bed; the rug — and gestured for Selene to sit beside her.

Selene sat.

They drank for a few minutes without speaking. The wine was good. The bread was warm. The fire was small and clean.

Then Naeris said, quietly: "Tell me about the boy. If you would like."

Selene told her.

She told her about Joren, and about the arrow, and about Iselle's father's hand stopping in his daughter's hair, and about the letter she had taken from the boy's cuirass an hour before dawn. She told her about the ka-bird that sat in her jacket against her ribs, and about the woman in Memnon who had given it to her, and about the night of the eighth morning when Madame Yelisai had said the name of the man who had killed her. She told her — and was surprised, in the telling, that she could tell her — about the resentment she had carried for Iselle for two days, and the night by the pine fire when the resentment had stopped, and the hand in the bracken.

Naeris listened. The drow's face did not move much. Her gold-flecked eyes stayed on Selene's the whole time. She did not interrupt. She did not comfort. She listened the way the woman in Memnon had listened, on the second night, when Selene had told her about the apprentice in Athkatla — which is to say, like a person who had no agenda for the listening other than to receive it.

When Selene was finished — perhaps half an hour later, with the wine half-drunk and the fire low — Naeris said: "Thank you for telling me."

"You are welcome."

"I will tell you something in return. Not — not as a trade. As an offering."

"All right."

"My mother was killed in 1463 in a pogrom against surface drow in the Silverymoon outskirts. I was eleven. I watched it. I have spent the eighty-odd years since trying to be the kind of person whose hands move before her head, in the right direction. I am not always successful. I have killed people who did not deserve it. I have spared people who did. I have come, in my fifties — in my drow fifties, which is roughly your twenty-three — to the working understanding that the discipline of hands-before-head is not actually a discipline; it is a gift. It is a thing some people have. It cannot be taught. It can only be honoured. You have it, Selene. You have it in the Eilistraeen sense, although you have never heard of Eilistraee. I would like — when you ride away from this city and back to whatever you are riding to — I would like you to know that one drow noticed it, and was glad you had it, and would be glad to find it again in this world someday."

Selene did not know, at first, what to say.

She set her cup down.

She put her hand on Naeris's, on the rug between them. Naeris turned her palm up under Selene's and laced their fingers together. Her hand was cooler than Selene's. The pulse in the wrist was steady.

"Naeris."

"Yes."

"I have not done this since 1485."

"Done what."

"Spent a night with someone."

"Tymora."

"Yes."

"Then you will not do it tonight either, if you do not want to. I will be entirely happy to sit by this fire with you and finish this jug, and you will sleep on the bed and I will sleep on the rug, and we will say goodbye in the morning, and it will have been a good night and I will go back to my work and you will go back to yours. That is a real option. I am offering it. I am not putting any weight on either side of the choice."

"I know."

"Good."

"That is part of why I want to."

Naeris smiled — a small slow smile that took years off her face. "Selene. That is the precise sentence I was hoping you would say. That is part of why I want to."

"Why."

"Because it is the sentence Sahar would have said."

"What."

Naeris looked at her steadily.

"I knew her," she said. Quietly. "I knew Sahar al-Mirayan. Not well — but I knew her. I was in Memnon in 1483 and 1484. We met in the courtyard of the House of Lanterns three times. We had tea. We talked about — about being the kinds of women we both were. I did not know about you specifically. She did not say your name in 1483. But she described, in 1484, the kind of girl she would be willing to teach if she ever met her, and the description was — the description was a young half-elven thief with eyes that had paid too much for too many things, and a way of hearing the soft answer that she did not yet recognise as the soft answer. I have been wondering, on this rooftop for four days, whether the girl in the kohl I saw across a slate was the girl Sahar had described. I think she was. I would like — I would like to be very gentle with you tonight, Selene, in a way that has Sahar's hand in it as well as mine, because I think if she could be in a room tonight she would want to be in this one, and I think we owe her that."

Selene's eyes filled.

She did not speak for a long moment.

Then she said: "She would have liked you."

"She did."

"Naeris."

"Yes."

"Come here."

Naeris came.

V. The Night

Redacted.

VI. The Morning

Selene woke at the fifth bell of the morning. The fire was out. Naeris was awake beside her, propped on her good elbow, watching her with the same steady gold-flecked attention with which she had watched her on the gable.

"Memorising."

"What."

"Sahar said it once, the first night. She was — she said she was memorising me. So that when I went, she would have me."

"Ah."

Naeris did not deny that this was what she had been doing.

"Naeris."

"Yes."

"I have to go back."

"I know."

"I cannot — I cannot do this again. Not — not in this work. Not while I am where I am. It would not be — it would not be fair to either of us, and it would not be safe."

"I know that too."

"I am sorry."

"Do not be sorry. I asked for a night. You gave me one. I am not — Selene, I am very old. I have been this old before. I have said goodbye in this exact room before, with different women, in different cities. I am — I am better at this part than the other part. I will be all right. Will you?"

"I will be all right."

"Good."

Selene dressed slowly. Naeris stayed in the bed. The wool coverlet was pulled to her hips. She watched Selene dress with the same unhurried attention with which she had watched her undress, and Selene found, with a small private flush, that she did not mind being watched.

At the door Selene stopped.

"Naeris."

"Yes."

"Thank you. For — for telling me about Sahar."

"You are welcome."

"I do not — I do not know if I will see you again."

"You may. The Sword Coast is small. If you ever need an Eilistraeen agent who owes you a life, you have one. I will not write to you. I will not send word. But I will be — I will be findable, if you need to find me. Fenn knows my marks. Sszeth has my routes. You will not look hard."

"All right."

"Selene."

"Yes."

"Be — be useful to your principal. She is good. She is doing real work. The thing in Yartar — what your company did — was a clean operation by people who care. I have seen too few of those. Be one of those people. Stay close to her."

"I will."

"Go."

Selene went.

She walked down the chandler's stairs and out into the Yartar morning. She did the rest of Aldric's errands by the eighth bell. She rode out south on the south road by the noon bell. She was at the Three Larches by the seventh bell of the evening of the fifth of Tarsakh, with her hair still smelling faintly of woodsmoke and a Tethyrian red and another woman's skin, and Aldric — who had been on the front step with a clay cup of something — looked at her once as she rode up and did not say anything.

Iselle was at the window of the upstairs workroom. She saw Selene ride in. She saw Selene's face. She knew. She did not come down for an hour.

When she did, she did not ask.

Selene loved her, briefly and silently, for not asking.

She did not tell Vessa.

Not that night. Not the next morning. She would tell her, eventually, in the long slow way these things came out — perhaps in the autumn, perhaps not until the next winter, perhaps never. The not-telling sat in her chest as a small private warm thing alongside the ka-bird and Joren's letter, and it did not feel, for the first time in five years, like a betrayal of Vessa.

It felt, she discovered, like the first thing she had ever entirely owned.

And in a small back room above a chandler's shop on Bell Street, Naeris Auvryndar — who had been three days into a tenday's stay in Yartar and who had been planning, before the rooftop, to leave on the seventh of Tarsakh — packed her satchel slowly, paid the chandler for the room, and walked down to the Riverboat Quay to take the morning barge south. She had no contracts. She had a clean shoulder. She had a debt of life that had been settled, in the Eilistraeen way, by a woman who had given her one night of a particular kind of attention, and she had a face she now remembered, in the small dawn-light way one remembers a face one has been given back.

She would not pursue Selene Duskwind further.

She would, however, watch the Sword Coast, in the way Eilistraeeans watched, for the woman's name.

And when, in the autumn of 1494, she heard it again — in a different city, on a different roof, in a different operation — she would go.

But that was two years away.

Tonight she was on a barge, going south, and the river was quiet, and the sun was coming up over the Stone Bridge of Yartar, and Naeris Auvryndar was alive.

---

To be continued in The Reunion at the Larches.

The Weight of Silver charts the rise of the House of Duskmere and of Lady Vessa Duskmere becoming one of the most powerful and influential people on the Sword Coast.

This is the FULL CHAPTER list as I am publishing them:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Forgotten_Realms/comments/1tcwht4/lady_vessa_duskmere_the_weight_of_silver_a_tale/

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The Inspection

The Weight of Silver — Chapter Seven

Yartar. The second of Tarsakh, 1492 DR. Sundown.

---

Lady Talantha Blackrune when she served as a War Wizard for the Crown of Cormyr - now retired.

I. Talantha

She came over the Stone Bridge at sundown with seventeen riders behind her and a runner from Suzail's despatch on a foundering horse a half-mile back, and she did not stop at the Lords' Alliance gatehouse the way the writ required. She showed the seal at the gate and rode through it. The Alliance captain who had the duty did not call her back. Nobody called Talantha Blackrune back any more.

She was forty-seven. She had been a War Wizard for twenty-two years, retired for five, and had been back in the field for nineteen days. Her right arm was still in a leather brace from Mournstar — the wightclaw cut had gone deeper than she had let her column physician see, and the brace was holding the elbow together while the deeper work she had done on it herself in private finished knitting. She would need three more tendays. She did not have three more tendays.

She rode in plain dark blue War Wizard travel-leathers, with the staff of her office across the bow of her saddle and the hood of her riding cloak down. Her dark red hair was pulled back into the same soldier's braid she had worn on the moor, with the thin grey at the temple a little wider than it had been a tenday ago. She did not look at the merchant quarter as she rode through it. She had been to Yartar four times in twenty-two years and she did not like the city. It smelt of the river and of money and of a particular kind of polite criminality she had been trained, by Laspeera Inthré, to find vulgar.

She had been thinking about Laspeera for nineteen days.

The despatch the runner had been carrying caught her at the corner of Bell Street, where she had reined in to let a brewer's cart go past. The runner came up at a heaving stagger of horse and rider and held the cylinder out without speaking. Talantha took it. She broke the seal there, in the saddle, with the brewer's cart still passing, and she read it in the failing light.

Confirm bodies. Inspect ashes. Do not depart until you have stood in the Voss house and seen what is left of them with your own eyes.

Laspeera's hand. Laspeera's seal.

She rolled the despatch up, slid it inside her tunic, dismissed the runner with a single movement of the gloved hand, and rode on toward the Voss house.

She thought, as she rode: Caladnei did not write this.

She thought, also: Caladnei does not know it has been written.

These were not, by themselves, surprising thoughts. She had known for nine days that the brief she was riding under was not entirely Caladnei's. She had known it since the second night out of Suzail, when she had sat at a fire with her own apprentice and read, in private, the secondary instructions Laspeera had pressed into her hand at the gates. Caladnei is the public hand of this work. I am the private one. Where the two diverge, you will find me trustworthy. You have always known this about me.

That had been the line. You have always known this about me.

Talantha had read it three times and put it in the fire.

She had known Laspeera since 1471, the year Talantha had walked into the Wizards of War tower at the age of twenty-two with a Cormyrean common-tongue accent and a Cormyrean common-tongue education and a recommendation from a hedge-magician in Marsember who had taught her her cantrips and her first three circles. Laspeera had been twenty-nine. She had been Vangerdahast's second junior at the time. She had taken Talantha's intake interview personally. She had said, at the end of it: You are not a noble's daughter, you are not a wealthy daughter, and you have not been given anything you have not earned. I am going to teach you. You may find me hard to please. Most people do.

Most people had.

Talantha had become — over six years of formal apprenticeship and another twelve of a working partnership that had lasted through Vangerdahast's dismissal, the Steel Regent's chaos, the early Foril years, the Spellplague, and the Sundering — Laspeera's one true protégée. Caladnei had been the king's choice for Mage Royal in 1369 and had served the office honourably and had retired in 1487 because she had grown weary; Laspeera had been the better wizard and the better operative throughout, and had refused the office twice, and had remained where she was, in the half-hidden senior position of the Wizards of War where the actual work happened. Talantha had served Laspeera. Talantha had loved Laspeera. Talantha had walked away from Laspeera, in 1488, over a single conversation about a single piece of work, and had not seen her face to face since.

She had not, in the four years and three months between that conversation and her recall, expected Laspeera to write to her again.

She had been wrong about that, as about several other things.

The inspection is yours, the recall letter had said, in Laspeera's hand. You are the only Wizard of War in the field whose judgement I will trust without confirmation. Caladnei does not know I have asked for you. She believes the appointment is hers. We will leave her with that belief. I have a complicated affection for Caladnei and I would prefer not to wound her in this small way. You understand.

Talantha had understood.

She had taken the appointment because Laspeera had asked her, which was a thing Talantha was furious to discover she would still do, and because the brief — a Cormyrean apprentice's father's patrol gone missing in the High Moor, possible engagement with the targets of a Crown writ, possible loss of an apprentice — was the kind of brief Talantha had been good at in her years in service and had missed, in retirement, more than she had been willing to admit.

She had ridden out of Suzail on the eighth of Mirtul and had been doing, since the eleventh, the work of a senior War Wizard with a column at her command and a clear hunting line and the particular clean focus she had not had in five years. It had felt, briefly, like coming home.

Then the patrol had been at the Sedgewater, and Vandren had been dead and his daughter taken, and Talantha had ridden into a Netherese ruin in a storm following the company's tracks, and had lost eleven men and her own apprentice to a tarchon she had not been briefed on the possibility of, and had come out of the ruin on a stolen horse with a broken arm and a single soldier and an absolute certainty about three things.

The first was that she had been deceived about the nature of the brief. The targets the writ was supposed to be hunting were not the targets Suzail's intelligence had described. Five sellswords with a turned apprentice did not improvise their way out of a tarchon without losses Talantha would have seen in the chamber. They had not just survived; they had been competent. There was a working she had glimpsed through the broken stone — a third-circle bolt of force, casually placed — that she had not reported in her despatch home because the moment she reported it, Laspeera would know what Talantha now suspected, which was that the apprentice was not what the records said she was.

The second was that she had now, on her own initiative, decided to keep that information from Laspeera until she had a better understanding of what she was actually looking at.

The third was that the woman leading the company on the moor — the one in dark armour who had taken Talantha's outrider with a single thrown blade across forty paces of ground — was a person Talantha did not know, and Talantha had spent twenty-two years memorising the faces of the people who could do that to her men, and there should not have been a face she did not know.

She had ridden south thinking about all three.

She had reached Suzail on the twenty-fifth of Mirtul. Laspeera had received her in private, listened to her edited report, and dispatched her north again within the day with a fresh column and a runner-carried clarification: Confirm bodies. Inspect ashes.

Which meant Laspeera, also, did not believe the wasting fever.

Which meant — Talantha thought, riding now toward the Voss house in the deepening blue of Yartar's dusk — Laspeera does not believe the death notice and Laspeera also does not trust me with the reason.

That was the heart of it.

Laspeera had recalled her because she was good. Laspeera had sent her north a second time because Laspeera needed her on the inspection and not someone Laspeera owned outright. Laspeera was running two agendas: the official one she was telling Caladnei, and a private one she was telling no one. And Laspeera had decided, somewhere between the recall and now, that Talantha could not be told the second one yet.

Which left Talantha with her own private agenda, which she had not yet articulated even to herself, and which began as she rode up to the green-shuttered house on the corner with the yellow ribbon still hanging on the door and dismounted in front of it with the column drawing up behind her.

She did not enter the house. Not yet. She stood in the street and looked at it.

The Voss house. Three storeys. Pale Yartar stone. Green shutters. The yellow Helm ribbon. The notary's seal nailed to the door under the death notice. The small dark window of an attic at the third floor where, by Laspeera's intelligence, the Damaran with the bastard sword had been quartered.

She knew the Damaran's name now. Vandren had told her, in Suzail, on his deathbed.

Vandren had not been killed by the company.

That was the other thing Talantha had not put in any despatch home.

II. The House

The senior Helm cleric Telmar Arnos was waiting for her on the front step. He had been informed by a runner that a senior War Wizard would be inspecting at sundown. He had rearranged his evening. He stood at the door in the formal grey-and-silver of a temple inspection, his small brass medallion at his throat, with two assistants behind him and a key in his hand.

"War Wizard Blackrune."

"Cleric Arnos."

"You are welcome to inspect the property. The protocol of the Vigilant One requires that I be present at the inspection. I assume that does not inconvenience you."

"It does not."

He unlocked the door. He stepped back. She entered.

The house smelt, faintly, of woodsmoke and the cold ash of a recent burning. She walked the front hall first, in silence, with her eyes moving in the slow disciplined sweep Laspeera had drilled into her in 1474. The hall was clean. The hall had been cleaned — by Helm's people, after the burnings — but the cleaning had been done by clergy rather than household servants, and the difference showed. A small bowl of wilted flowers on the hall table. Footprints in the floor wax that did not match any household pattern she would recognise.

She went to the parlour. She went to the dining room. She went to the kitchen. She went, finally, to the small back parlour where Helm's protocol required the burning to be conducted, on a stone slab Telmar's people had brought in for the purpose, with the chimney drawing the smoke up and out.

The slab was there. The ash was on the slab. A small heap of grey-white ash perhaps four feet long.

Talantha looked at it for a long time.

She did not, at first, do anything magical. She simply looked. The ash was the right colour for human bone. The volume looked approximately right for one adult body, though that was the kind of judgement Talantha had been wrong about before. The slab beneath had the heat-mark of a real burning. The chimney above had soot of recent date. Telmar's people, if they were faking, had faked at a level of operational competence that was — Talantha admitted to herself privately — genuinely impressive.

She crouched beside the slab.

She put her left hand — the unbraced one — into the ash, and let it fall through her fingers.

The ash was wrong.

It was not wrong in any way she could yet name. She could not have explained it to a Helm cleric or to a column captain. It was wrong in the way a thing is wrong when you have spent twenty-two years burning bodies, recovering bodies, examining the burned and the half-burned and the badly-burned, and you have, by long habit, learned what bone-ash feels like under the fingers. The way the small unburned fragments of bone sit in it. The grit of the calcined parts. The way it clumps when there has been moisture in the body.

This ash was bone-ash. It was real. Someone had been burned on this slab.

But not a six-year-old, and not a three-year-old, and not — Talantha thought, with a kind of cold professional satisfaction — enough of a forty-two-year-old man and a thirty-eight-year-old woman. The volume was wrong. There were one set of remains here, possibly two, and they had been adult and they had probably been older than Olem Voss's reported age.

Helm's people had used real bodies. Probably from the temple's own holdings. Probably with the cleric's full knowledge, because the alternative — that a Helm priest had been deceived into a fraudulent burning — would itself have been a crime against Helm's own protocol that Telmar Arnos would not have committed.

So Telmar had cooperated.

Which meant Halric Stone had bought him.

Which meant —

Talantha stopped that line of thought. She would come back to it.

She let the rest of the ash fall through her fingers. She stood up. She wiped her hand on her thigh.

"Cleric Arnos."

"War Wizard."

"You are aware that I am about to cast in this room. Helm's protocol requires me to inform you. I am informing you."

"Acknowledged."

She cast the small careful third-circle working she had been thinking about for an hour — a Speak with Dead variant, modified by a Wizard of War technique that worked on bone-ash rather than corpses, taught to her by Laspeera in 1483. It was an unpleasant working. It did not produce a voice; it produced a series of sense-impressions of the last hour of the deceased's life, layered, partial, fading, and it required the caster to take the impressions into their own head and hold them.

She held them.

The impressions she received from the ash were, in order: a small dim cell in the temple of Helm beneath Yartar, the smell of unwashed linen, the slow approach of a soft death that had been some weeks coming, the indistinct face of a young Helm priest holding a cup, the cup, the gentle going-out of a long failing lamp.

A pauper's death. An old man.

Talantha opened her eyes.

The ash on the slab was not Olem Voss. The ash on the slab was an old beggar who had died in Helm's temple in the past tenday and had been used, with the temple's full institutional knowledge, to fake a household burning.

She stood up.

She turned to Telmar Arnos. The cleric's face was the careful unreadable face of a senior priest who had been a priest for thirty years and knew exactly when to keep that face unreadable. Talantha had seen the face before. She had seen it on Laspeera. She had seen it on Vangerdahast. She had seen it, twice, in her own mirror.

"Cleric."

"War Wizard."

"This ash is not the Voss household."

Telmar did not speak.

"You are in violation of Helm's protocol on burnings."

"I am not."

"You are in violation —"

"War Wizard. With respect. Helm's protocol on burnings requires that the burning be of a body, that the body have been deceased of a cause known to the cleric, and that the cleric's record of the burning be kept in good faith. All three requirements were met. I burned a body. The body was of an old man named Aren who died of a long-standing wasting illness in the Helm hospice on the twenty-eighth of Mirtul. The temple holds the death record. I have signed the burning record in good faith. The protocol is satisfied. Whether the notice I posted on this door named the body correctly is a separate question and is not addressed by Helm's protocol on burnings, which does not concern itself with the public identification of the deceased. That is a matter for the civic authorities. I refer you to them."

Talantha looked at him for a long moment.

"Cleric Arnos. You and I both know what you have done."

"With respect, War Wizard. You and I both know what I have not done, which is anything that violates the protocol of my god. I have burned a body of a man who needed burning. I have signed for it. I have prayed over it. The notice on the door was prepared in consultation with the household's own representative. If the household's representative misrepresented the deceased to me, that is a matter between the representative and your office, and I will be glad to identify him for you in writing. I have nothing to hide."

"Identify him."

"His name was Halric of Damara. He represented himself as a Helm-aligned lay assistant in the service of the Voss family. He produced credentials I considered satisfactory. The credentials are filed in the temple record. He paid the temple seventy crowns for the burning, of which thirty was the standard fee and forty was a donation to the hospice. He told me the family had succumbed to the wasting fever and that the family's wishes were for a quiet burning under Helm's protocol and that the bodies were already at the hospice. I sent two assistants to confirm. The assistants confirmed. Whether they were deceived is a question for them and for their consciences. I burned the body that was brought to me. I prayed for the family. I posted the notice."

"And you would tell this story under truth-magic."

"I would tell this story under any magic you cared to use, War Wizard, and I would tell it the same way each time, because each word of it is, in the precise and narrow sense in which I have spoken it, true."

Talantha looked at him for a longer moment.

She had to admire him. It was a clean operational answer, given by a man who had clearly been preparing it for several days, and it had been built — the whole thing — to be unbreakable under any working she could put on him without committing acts that would themselves be in violation of Helm's reciprocity with the Wizards of War. Halric Stone had paid him not for a fraud but for a particular technical compliance with Helm's protocol that produced a specific public result. The cleric had committed to the public result and had been, from his own god's perspective, blameless.

It was — Talantha thought — exactly the kind of operation Laspeera would have admired. It had been designed by someone who understood how the Wizards of War conducted these inspections. It had been designed by someone who had known the inspection was coming.

She filed that detail. She came back to it almost at once.

It had been designed by someone who had known the inspection was coming.

Which meant the company had known, by the morning of the twenty-fifth at the latest, that the wasting fever cover would not hold against a senior War Wizard inspecting the ashes. Which meant they had not built the cover to fool a War Wizard; they had built it to delay a War Wizard. The cover was not intended to convince Talantha. The cover was intended to take Talantha three days to disprove.

Talantha did the arithmetic in her head. The death notice had been posted on the twenty-ninth. She was inspecting on the second of Tarsakh. That was four days. Four days plus the three or four days she would need to prove the deception against the temple's testimony in a way Suzail would accept was — seven to eight days — a tenday's grace.

The family was already gone. Of course it was. They had been gone since the twenty-ninth, possibly the twenty-eighth. They were a tenday clear by now. They could be in Daerlun. They could be at sea. They could be in Selgaunt. They could be —

Talantha stopped.

Selgaunt.

That was the move. A senior operator running an extraction-by-dissolution did not move a family north into the Lords' Alliance jurisdictions, where the Alliance could be politely turned. She moved them east, into Sembia, where the Alliance had no reach and where a cousin's papers from a forgery house in Daerlun could absorb a family of four into a noble cadet line and disappear them. Selgaunt or Saerloon. Probably Selgaunt — it had three forgery houses Laspeera had been tracking for fifteen years and the one in Daerlun was the cleanest of them.

Talantha had now, in the four minutes since putting her hand into the ash, gone from the family is dead to the family is in Selgaunt under a new name with papers from Daerlun.

She looked at Telmar Arnos.

"Cleric. Thank you for your cooperation."

"You are welcome, War Wizard."

"I will not be filing a report with the Helm hierarchy about this inspection."

"That is your prerogative, War Wizard."

"It is my prerogative because the report would not produce any outcome that is useful to me, and because I would prefer your hierarchy not to know I was here. I would also prefer your assistants not to know I was here, in any way that travels beyond this house. Are we able to arrange that."

"We are able to arrange that."

"Good."

"War Wizard."

"Yes, Cleric."

"May I — if I may — offer one small unsolicited observation."

She looked at him.

"Go on."

"You came into this house a few minutes ago believing one thing. You are about to walk out of this house believing another. I do not know what either of those things is. I am a priest, not a wizard. But I have been a priest for thirty years and I have seen this happen in this room before, with other inspectors. The inspectors who are useful to their offices, in my experience, are the ones who notice the change of belief and who pause, before walking out, to ask themselves whether the new belief is the one their office wants them to walk out with. That is all. I will say nothing more. May Helm watch you, War Wizard."

Talantha looked at him for a long moment.

"Thank you, Cleric."

"You are welcome."

She walked out of the back parlour, down the hall, past the door, and into the street.

Her column was waiting.

She did not give the order to ride. She stood in the street in the failing light with her gloved left hand at her temple and her right arm in its brace at her side and she did the thing the cleric had told her to do, which was to ask herself whether the belief she was about to ride away with was the one her office wanted.

Her office, she now understood — or rather Laspeera, behind her office — wanted her to confirm the deception, ride south, report it, and wait for further instructions. Laspeera would then move her own assets into Sembia. Talantha would not be involved. The case would close in Laspeera's hands, with Laspeera's people, by Laspeera's methods, and Talantha would be retired again with thanks.

That was the brief.

It was not what Talantha was going to do.

She was going to find the apprentice. She was going to find Iselle Vandrensdaughter, who was alive, who had cast a third-circle bolt of force from a chamber she should not have been in, who was the only living witness Talantha could put her hands on, and who had — Talantha was now certain — chosen to ride with the company rather than be returned to Cormyr. That choice, in itself, was the thing Talantha most needed to understand. The brief said the apprentice was to be recovered alive. Talantha was going to recover her alive. But Talantha was going to talk to her first. In private. Without Laspeera's runners, without Caladnei's writ, without the column behind her. Just Talantha and Iselle in a room with the door closed.

Whatever Iselle knew about why this hunt was actually happening — about what Vangerdahast had hidden, about why Laspeera wanted it back, about the small private war that was being conducted under cover of a Crown writ — Iselle was going to tell her.

After that, Talantha would decide what to do.

She mounted.

"South," she said to the column captain. "We are not staying in Yartar tonight. South road. We will camp at the third milestone. I want to be on the Daerlun road by tomorrow noon."

"Yes, War Wizard."

The column moved. Talantha rode at the head of it, with the despatch from Laspeera against her ribs and the smell of bone-ash on her left hand, and the thin light of the rising moon coming up over the Greypeaks behind her, and an old Helm cleric's voice in her ear saying the inspectors who are useful to their offices are the ones who pause.

She had paused.

She was going to find the apprentice.

She was going to find her before Laspeera did.

After that, the Sword Coast was going to learn, again, why Talantha Blackrune had been Laspeera Inthré's one true protégée, and why she had walked away.

---

The Weight is Silver charts the rise of the House of Duskmere and of Lady Vessa Duskmere becoming one of the most powerful and influential people in the Sword Coast.

This is the FULL CHAPTER list as I am publishing them:

Lady Vessa Duskmere, Halric Stone, Branwen Asher, Corin Vale, Kael Auvrenal

Chapter One:  Lady Vessa Duskmere and Company
https://www.reddit.com/r/Forgotten_Realms/comments/1tbuusd/lady_vessa_duskmere_the_weight_of_silver_chapter/

Chapter 1a: Selene Duskwind
https://www.reddit.com/r/Forgotten_Realms/comments/1tcvg8h/the_weight_of_silver_chapter_1a_addendum_in_the/

Chapter Two:  Sedgewater Patrol
https://www.reddit.com/r/Forgotten_Realms/comments/1tca4ah/the_patrol_on_the_sedgewater_the_weight_of_silver/

Chapter Three:  The Conversation by the Sedgewater
https://www.reddit.com/r/Forgotten_Realms/comments/1tca9j5/the_conversation_by_the_sedgewater_the_weight_of/

Chapter Four: Ruin at Mournstar
https://www.reddit.com/r/Forgotten_Realms/comments/1tcusj4/the_ruin_at_mournstar_the_weight_of_silver/

Chapter Four - contd: Ruin at Mournstar
https://www.reddit.com/r/Forgotten_Realms/comments/1tcuv2i/the_ruin_at_mournstar_the_weight_of_silver/

Chapter Five: Approach to Yartar
https://www.reddit.com/r/Forgotten_Realms/comments/1tcuyb4/the_approach_to_yartar_the_weight_of_silver/

Chapters 5a: The Brass Anchor and 5b: The Second Night at the Larches
https://www.reddit.com/r/Forgotten_Realms/comments/1tcv233/two_scenes_before_the_quarantine_the_weight_of/

Chapter Six: The Quarantine
https://www.reddit.com/r/Forgotten_Realms/comments/1tcv5x5/the_quarantine_the_weight_of_silver_chapter_six/

Chapter Seven: The Inspection
https://www.reddit.com/r/Forgotten_Realms/comments/1td1aoq/the_inspection_the_weight_of_silver_chapter_seven/

Chapter 7a: The Drow on the Roof
https://www.reddit.com/r/Forgotten_Realms/comments/1td1lal/the_drow_on_the_roof_the_weight_of_silver_chapter/

This is an addendum to Chapter One that I had written as a small vigntte to introduce the character of Selene Duskwind who at the moment is Lady Vessa's apprentice but who develops to become her successor.

Weight is Silver is a story charting rise of the House of Duskmere and of Lady Vessa Duskmere f becoming one of the most powerful and influential people in the Sword Coast.

Chapter One: 
https://www.reddit.com/r/Forgotten_Realms/comments/1tbuusd/lady_vessa_duskmere_the_weight_of_silver_chapter/

----

In the Stable Yard at Helmsblade, the Hour Before Riding

---

Selene Duskwind - apprentice to Lady Vessa Duskmere

The horses had been brought up from the village stables an hour before dawn, and Vessa Duskmere was alone in the yard with them, which was the way she preferred most things: the work in front of her, no one's voice in her ear, the thin grey light not yet committed to being morning.

She was checking the girth on her own mare — a long-legged Calishite bay called Fennec, who hated everyone but tolerated her — when she heard the soft scrape of a boot on the cobbles that she was not supposed to hear, and went still.

The boot did not move again.

"Selene," she said, without turning, "if you are going to creep up on me, do it properly or do not bother. Coming halfway and stopping is worse than both."

A laugh, low and warm and not at all apologetic, came from the shadow of the stable door behind her.

"You always know."

"I always know because you always make the same mistake. You stop breathing when you think you are about to be seen. A person who is not there does not stop breathing. A person who stops breathing is a person hiding. Breathe, girl. Walk. Be a thing in the world."

"I am a thing in the world."

"You are a thing trying not to be one. There is a difference."

Vessa finished the buckle and turned, and Selene Duskwind stepped out of the stable's shadow into the lantern-light, and despite herself Vessa's mouth softened at the corner — the small private softening that no one in the company except, possibly, Kael had ever seen on her face, and that Kael had seen perhaps three times in eleven years.

Selene was nineteen. Vessa had taken her in at fourteen, in a back alley in Athkatla, with a baker's purse in one hand and a paring knife in the other and a baker's apprentice bleeding out behind her — though that last had not been her doing, as Vessa had eventually established; the apprentice had been bleeding before Selene arrived, and Selene had taken the purse off a dying man rather than killed him for it, which in Athkatla was the difference between a child and a problem. Vessa had decided, that night, that the difference was worth preserving.

She had paid the city watch a sum she could not afford, taken the girl out of the cells, fed her, clothed her, and asked her one question, which was: Do you want to live, or do you want to keep doing what you were doing in that alley? Selene had said, I want to live, and I want to be good at it. And Vessa had said, Those are two different answers, and we will sort out which one you meant later. They were still sorting.

Selene was half-elven on her mother's side — wood elf, by the shape of the ears and the cast of the eyes, though her colouring was her father's, whoever he had been — and the years between fourteen and nineteen had drawn her out long and narrow and hard, the way years like that will draw a person who has had to be quick more often than fed. She had cropped her hair short three winters back when a Banite priest in Berdusk had nearly caught her by it, and she had kept it that way since, a black pixie cut that fell in a sharp fringe over eyes she had taken to lining heavily with kohl in the past year, in a fashion she had picked up from a Calishite courtesan she had been romantically tangled with for a tenday in Memnon and then never spoken of again.

She wore black. She always wore black. Tonight it was studded leather over a high-collared jacket, the collar cut sharp at the throat where a thin steel choker sat against the skin — Vessa's gift on her seventeenth birthday, etched on the inner surface with a single line of Espruar that Selene had never asked her to translate. ("It says come home," Vessa had told her once, unprompted, and Selene had not said anything to that, but had not taken the choker off in two years.) A close-fitting corset over the jacket buckled in five places down the ribs, and beneath it the leather narrowed to riding leggings that disappeared into low boots. Her gloves were fingerless on the left hand for the work she did with her fingers, and full on the right for the work she did with steel.

Across her back rode a hand-and-a-half blade with a plain leather grip, drawn high so the pommel sat at her shoulder for an over-the-shoulder draw — a Sembian style, which Vessa had taught her, although Selene had refined it in her own way until it was faster than Vessa's own. In her right hand, low at her side, she carried her main weapon: a long, narrow, single-edged sword with a silvered guard wrought in the shape of a creature that was not quite a bat and not quite a moth, with a small red stone set in the centre of the crossguard where the body would have been. The blade was too narrow to be called a longsword by any honest smith, and too long to be called a rapier; it was an in-between weapon for an in-between woman, and she had named it nothing because she did not believe in naming swords. ("A sword is a tool," she had told Branwen once, "and you do not name your hammer.") Branwen had not liked her since.

At her hips, less visible: two daggers in a small-of-the-back rig, four throwing-blades in a thigh sheath, a garrotte coiled in the lining of her belt, and three small glass vials — one in each boot, one in a pouch at her collarbone — whose contents Vessa had told her never, ever to mix.

Selene crossed the yard now, quietly, but breathing this time. Vessa noted it.

"You are dressed for the road," Vessa said.

"I am."

"Your bag is in the stable."

"It is."

"You did not ask."

"I am asking now."

Vessa turned back to the mare, and made a small unnecessary adjustment to a strap that did not need adjusting, and said: "No."

The silence that followed was not the silence of a girl deflated. Selene had not been deflate-able since she was perhaps fifteen. It was the silence of someone gathering a second argument, having anticipated the loss of the first.

"You don't trust me to come," Selene said. "Or the others don't trust me to come, and you are letting them decide for you, which would be the first time in my life I have ever seen you do that."

"They don't trust you," Vessa said evenly, still not turning. "That part is true. Branwen thinks you are a knife that has not chosen its hand yet. Corin thinks you are too young. Halric thinks you are perfectly competent, which is somehow worse, because Halric has decided that means you should be in a city with a roof, drinking wine. Kael —"

"Kael likes me."

"Kael likes everyone who reminds him of someone he failed, which in his case is a category that includes most of Faerûn." Vessa's voice was dry. "Kael is not the issue."

"Then what is the issue, Vessa?"

Vessa finished with the strap. There was nothing left in the yard to do with her hands. She turned, finally, and looked at the girl — at the sharp face, the kohl-rimmed eyes, the choker, the narrow shoulders held very deliberately square — and she said, more quietly than she had meant to:

"The issue is that I taught you what I know, and what I know is how to be useful to people who do not deserve you. I taught you how to climb a wall and pick a pocket and put a man down without him knowing he was going down until the floor came up to meet him. I taught you to lie in seven languages and to read a room in five seconds and to take coin from a Zhentarim and from a Harper in the same tenday and to feel only the weight of it, not the colour. I taught you those things because I was afraid you would die without them, and because I did not know how to teach you anything else. And now I am riding north into a thing that ends one of two ways, Selene. Either we put a stolen woman and her children somewhere the Crown of Cormyr cannot reach, or we die in a ditch on the High Moor and our bodies feed crows that will not know our names. There is no third door. Do you understand me? There is no third door."

"I understand you."

"Then you understand why I will not take you."

"No," said Selene. "I understand the words. I do not understand the reason."

Vessa exhaled, slowly. It was the closest she came, in front of anyone, to losing patience.

"The reason," she said, "is that I have spent five years trying to give you a future that is not mine. And I am not going to spend the last week of mine pulling you down into it."

There was a long pause.

Selene did something then that Vessa had not seen her do before, which was to close the distance between them deliberately — not the cat's-walk closing of the work, but a plain forward step of a young woman to an older one. She stopped a foot away. She did not touch her. They had never been people who touched.

"Vessa," she said. "Listen to me. Please. Just for a minute."

Vessa listened.

"You took me out of a cell in Athkatla," Selene said. "You did not have to. I was nothing. I was a problem the watch was going to solve quietly with a length of rope, and you walked into the captain's office with — I still don't know how much it was, you've never told me — and you bought me out of it, and you did not ask me anything except the one question, which was whether I wanted to live. Do you remember what you said to me the next morning, in the room above the inn, when I asked you what I owed you?"

Vessa said nothing.

"You said: Nothing. I do not buy people. If you stay, you stay because you choose to. If you go, you go. And I stayed, Vessa. For five years, I stayed. Through Berdusk and Iriaebor and the bad winter in Elturel and the thing in Memnon that we still don't talk about. I stayed because I chose to. Not because I owed you. Not because I was afraid. Because I chose."

"I know."

"Then why are you taking the choice away from me now?"

Vessa did not answer that immediately. The mare shifted behind her. Somewhere in the keep above, a sentry's horn blew the change of the watch — a single low note, held, then released.

"Because," Vessa said, finally, "you are nineteen, and you have not yet had anything good enough to lose. And I have been to the place where you are standing, Selene, and I went through that door, and what is on the other side is a life that I have, on balance, been glad of, but it is not — it is not — a life I would have wished on a daughter."

She had not meant to say daughter. She heard it land between them. She did not take it back.

Selene's eyes — those striking, kohl-lined, half-elven eyes — held very steady.

"Vessa," she said. "I am not your daughter. But you are the closest thing I will ever have to a mother, and you know that, and I know that, and we have not said it for five years because saying it would have made it harder for both of us to do the work. I am saying it now because there is no more time not to. You are riding into a thing that ends one of two ways. I heard you. I was listening at the door of the solar last night, because of course I was, you trained me to. I know what is in the writ. I know who Sira is. I know what Branwen thinks the papers are. I know all of it."

Vessa closed her eyes briefly.

"Of course you do."

"And here is what you have not thought about," Selene went on, a little faster now, because she could feel the hinge of the conversation moving and she meant to push it. "Five armoured people on the road from Helmsblade to Yartar will be noted. Five armoured people in a city looking for a merchant's wife in a guarded house will be noted twice. You need someone who is not noted, Vessa. You need someone who can go into Yartar three days ahead of the rest of you, take a room above a fishmonger's, walk past the Voss house six times in a day without anyone remembering her face, find out where the children sleep and which servant takes the morning bread and whether there is a Cormyrean watcher on the corner already — and there will be, you know there will be — and have all of it ready for you when you ride in. You need a thief. You have been telling me for five years that I am the best thief you have ever trained. Was that a lie?"

"It was not a lie."

"Then I am useful. I am not a child you are dragging into your war. I am a tool the war needs and I am volunteering for it. Those are different things, Vessa. You taught me they were different things."

Vessa opened her eyes.

She looked at the girl — the young woman, she corrected herself; the young woman — and she saw, with the awful clarity that comes sometimes in grey light before dawn, that Selene was right. That the argument she had just made was the argument Vessa herself would have made, in her place, at her age, to a woman who had taught her exactly how to make it. That she had built this. That this was what came of building it.

"Branwen will not have you in Yartar," Vessa said.

"Branwen does not have to like it. Branwen has to work with it."

"Corin will say you are too young."

"Corin says everyone is too young. He said you were too young, three years ago. I heard him. He gets over it."

"Halric will worry."

"Halric worries about everyone. It is how he loves people. He will worry whether I am there or not."

"Kael —"

"Kael will say yes the moment you say yes, and you know that, so stop using him as a wall."

A silence. A small breath of wind moved through the yard, and lifted the edge of Selene's jacket, and dropped it.

Vessa said, very quietly: "If you come, you take orders. Mine first. Branwen's in the field, when I am not there. You do not freelance. You do not take a contract on the side. You do not lift so much as a copper from a pocket that is not on our list of people we are stealing from this tenday, because we cannot afford the heat. You do not make moral exceptions, and you do not make moral judgements. You wait, and you watch, and you do what I tell you, until I tell you otherwise. Are those terms you can keep?"

"Yes."

"Are they terms you will keep, Selene? Truthfully. Because I have known you to be many things, and one of them is a young woman who decides, in the middle of a job, that someone deserves a knife she was not asked to deliver. We cannot have that on this road. Not once. Not for any reason. Not even for a reason I would agree with. Do you understand me?"

Selene was quiet for a moment. Vessa noted, with the small distant pride that would have embarrassed her to admit, that the quiet was the right kind of quiet — the kind that meant Selene was actually weighing it, rather than rushing to swear an oath she would later resent.

"I understand you," Selene said, finally. "And yes. I will keep them. For this. For her, and her children, and you. I will keep them."

"Even in Yartar."

"Even in Yartar."

"Even if you see something on the way that you are sure I would want to know about."

"I will tell you. I will not act on it. I will tell you, and I will wait."

Vessa nodded, once.

"Get your horse," she said. "The grey gelding in the third stall. He has been ridden hard this tenday, but he will hold for the first leg. Pack light. We ride before the sun is up."

Selene's face did not change in any obvious way. But Vessa, who had read her since she was fourteen, saw the small thing happen behind her eyes — the small thing that was relief, and gratitude, and something older and harder and more frightened than either, which was the recognition of having been given a thing one had asked for and would now have to live up to.

"Yes," Selene said.

She turned to go to the stable. Then, halfway, she stopped, and turned back, and looked at Vessa across the yard in the grey light.

"Vessa."

"Yes."

"The thing on the inside of the choker. The Espruar. Come home. Did you mean it?"

Vessa looked at her for a long moment.

"Yes," she said.

"All right," said Selene. "Then I am coming home. With you. Wherever the road goes."

She went into the stable.

Vessa stood for a little while in the yard alone, with her hand on the mare's neck, and watched the grey light begin to commit, finally, to morning. She thought about the four men who would be down in the next half hour — Branwen, who would be furious for an hour and useful for the rest of the day; Corin, who would say nothing and do the necessary thing of accepting it; Halric, who would silently slip Selene a bag of dried meat from his own saddlebag and pretend he had not; Kael, who would catch Vessa's eye across the yard and tilt his head, the small wry tilt that was the closest he came, these days, to a smile.

She thought about what she had just done.

She thought she had probably just sentenced the girl to die in a ditch on the High Moor with the rest of them.

She thought, also, that the girl had been right; that she would have died in another ditch, or in a back alley in some other city, or in the slow and terrible way of people who are kept safe past the point of meaning, if Vessa had said no.

There were, after all, only two doors. There had never been a third.

She took her hand off the mare's neck, and went to wake the others.

Weight is Silver is a story charting rise of the House of Duskmere and of Lady Vessa Duskmere becoming one of the most powerful and influential people in the Sword Coast.

The Weight of Silver - Full Chapter Listing:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Forgotten_Realms/comments/1tcwht4/lady_vessa_duskmere_the_weight_of_silver_a_tale/

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The Quarantine

The Weight of Silver — Chapter Six

Yartar. The twenty-fifth through the twenty-ninth of Mirtul, 1492 DR.

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Selene Duskwind - apprentice to Lady Vessa Duskmere

I. The First Day

The Voss house stood on a corner in the merchant quarter, three storeys of pale Yartar stone with green-painted shutters and a small walled garden running behind it down to the third river-step. It had been built in the time of the Waterbaron Niour, abandoned in the troubles of the 1470s, and bought by Olem Voss for half its worth in 1488. Sira had chosen the green paint herself.

Selene came in over the rooftops at the ninth bell of the morning on the twenty-fifth, on the slate roof of the cooperage opposite, and lay flat in the gutter with Trist on the chimney behind her and Branwen's spyglass in her hand.

She had been on the rooftops since before dawn. By the ninth bell she had four watchers placed: the Cormyrean network's older man in the peddler's smock at the corner of the third street, a younger Cormyrean replacement on the Nelfin Lane bench reading a pamphlet he had not turned in twenty minutes, the drow shadow on the rooftop of the apothecary two doors down — only visible if you knew where the chimney's shadow fell wrong — and the bread-deliverer, a thin Tashalan boy of perhaps fifteen, who had passed the front door at the seventh bell with rolls and at the eighth bell on his return walk, when no return walk was required.

She had not seen a fifth. Vessa had warned her there might be a fifth. She kept watching.

Halric had brought Telmar Arnos to the house at the eighth bell. Selene had watched the senior Helm cleric arrive — a heavyset man in his fifties, in the grey-and-silver of the temple, with a small brass medallion of the Vigilant One at his throat and the careful unreadable face of a man who had been a priest long enough to know that the face was the work — and she had watched Halric standing one step behind him, bare-headed, deferential, in the borrowed grey overcloak of a temple's lay assistant. The Voss steward had opened the door. Telmar had said something. The steward had let them in.

The yellow ribbon had gone up on the door at the eighth bell and a quarter. Wasting fever, Helm's quarantine, no entry, by the Watchful. The Cormyrean watcher had moved at the ribbon. Not toward the house. Away — back into the Bone Alley to find a runner. The drow on the apothecary roof had not moved. The bread-boy had not returned.

So far, as planned.

Trist made a low sound. Movement. Selene found the angle. The runner had come back: a man in a green Lords' Alliance sash with a pair of city watchmen at his elbow. Telmar opened the door before they had finished crossing the street. Selene could not hear what was said, but she could read the shape of it — the medallion lifted, the writ produced, the watchmen straightened, the Alliance man stepped back. Helm did not negotiate. He went away.

Eleven minutes. Selene let out the breath she had been holding without quite realising.

The first piece had held.

Trist clicked his beak twice — acknowledged — and lifted off the chimney. He flew south. Halfway to the river he banked east and was gone.

Selene rolled onto her back in the gutter for a count of ten. The slate was warm against her shoulder blades. The sky over Yartar was high and pale, with a single hawk tracking somewhere above the bridge.

Then she rolled back onto her front and went back to the spyglass.

It was going to be a long four days.

II. The Anchor

Branwen had told Vessa about the meeting with Sszeth at the Larches on the morning of the twenty-fourth, in the workroom upstairs while Iselle was downstairs eating breakfast.

The conversation took less than three minutes. He told her the meeting had gone as expected. He told her Sszeth had accepted the wasting fever story. He told her Bregan D'aerthe would stand the cell down within the day. Vessa nodded once at each beat. She did not ask him for detail, and he did not give her any, and the part of him that was relieved sat alongside the part that knew, with Loomwhisper's quiet pulse against his palm, that he was lying to her — or rather that he was telling her something true in a way that would land as something else — and the parts did not, this time, fight each other.

He had decided, walking back from the Anchor the night before, that Sszeth was right.

She did not need to know, today.

She would need to know, later.

He could carry the difference between today and later for as long as that gap turned out to be.

III. Day One Extraction — the Daughter

Mira Voss was six. She had her father's dark hair and her mother's grey eyes and a habit of asking questions in a long unbroken sequence until the adult in front of her gave up.

Corin had been in the house since the night before. He had come in through the cellar passage at the third bell of the morning of the twenty-fourth, met by Olem in the lower kitchen, and had been quartered in the back attic with a window that looked over the river and a single straw mattress that he had not slept on. He had sat with Olem in the upstairs study for two hours that first night, going over the cellar map. He had met Sira for the first time at the breakfast table the next morning. She had looked at him for a long moment over her cup and said: You are the Damaran. Olem said. I trust him. I will trust you. He had said: Good. Eat. She had eaten.

Mira had been told that night by her mother that she was going on a holiday, that she would have to be very quiet, that her nurse Berra was going with her, and that her parents and her brother would follow in three days. She had asked seventeen questions. Sira had answered eleven of them. Mira had been satisfied with eleven. She had gone to bed.

At the second bell of the morning of the twenty-fifth — the first night of the quarantine — Corin came up the back stair to the nursery in his stocking feet with a small lantern hooded almost to dark. Berra was up, dressed, with two small bundles ready. Mira was sitting on the edge of her bed in her travelling cloak with her wooden horse in her hand and her eyes very wide.

"Are you the Damaran," she said.

"Yes."

"Mama said you would carry me if I was tired."

"I will."

"I am not tired yet."

"Good. Come on."

She slipped her free hand into his armoured glove. The contrast — the small warm fingers against the steel — made him close his eyes for a heartbeat, and then he opened them again and led her out.

They went down the back stair. Through the kitchen. Into the pantry. Behind the third shelf was a panel Olem had shown Corin the night before; behind the panel was a stair that went down twenty feet to a dressed-stone passage running roughly south-east under the third street. The passage was older than the house. Olem had bought the house in part because of the passage. He had had it cleaned twice in four years and he had never used it for anything but his own quiet inspections.

Corin went first with the hooded lantern. Berra came second with the bundles. Mira came third with her hand still in his, on stone that was cold to her bare feet through her boots. The passage smelt of old water and lime and something faintly sweet that Corin thought might be the river two walls away. Mira did not speak. Berra was breathing through her nose in slow controlled breaths, the way a woman breathes when she is determined not to let a child hear her be afraid.

They came out at the river-step at the second bell and a quarter.

The barge was there. Aldric had been right. A flat-bottomed grain barge with two men aboard in the rough wool of upriver bargemen, and a third man at the tiller whom Corin did not know and did not need to know. Olem had given Corin a wooden token to hand to the tiller; Corin handed it; the tiller took it without looking and put it inside his coat.

Corin handed Berra down. He handed Mira down to Berra. He stood for a count of three on the river-step in the cold air watching the small dark shape of the girl be settled under a folded oilcloth in the bow of the barge.

Mira looked back at him from under the oilcloth. She lifted a hand — a small, formal, six-year-old's wave.

Corin lifted his.

The tiller pushed off. The barge moved out into the Surbrin without lamps and was gone in under a minute, swallowed by the river dark and the slight mist that had risen between the bridge piers.

Corin stood on the step until he could no longer hear the oars.

He went back up the passage.

IV. The Watchers

Selene saw none of it. She had been told she would not. The cellar passage came out below the river-step on the wrong side from the cooperage roof, and Aldric had picked the barge timings precisely for that reason. What Selene saw, on the first night, was nothing — which was exactly what she was supposed to see.

The Cormyrean watcher had been replaced at the second bell by a third man she had not yet logged. The third man had not been on Vessa's pre-brief. Selene watched him for forty minutes, by lamp-light from his cigarette, before deciding he was a routine night replacement rather than a new piece on the board. She filed him as W-3.

The drow on the apothecary roof had moved at the third bell. Not toward the Voss house — away, southwest, toward the river. Selene's stomach did the small cold thing it did when a piece moved without instruction.

She sent Trist.

Trist came back twenty minutes later and sat on her wrist and did the small head-tilt that meant follow. Selene waited until the new watcher's cigarette went down to embers, then went over the cooperage roof, across two gables, down a drainpipe she had spotted yesterday afternoon, and through the back of the apothecary garden to the alley behind the river-step. Trist led her one street further south.

The drow was on a low warehouse roof overlooking the third river-step. He had, Selene saw with a coldness that was not entirely about the weather, set up a small clay pot on the slate beside him and was burning something in it that gave off a thin dark smoke that did not rise. The smoke was moving sideways, downward, toward the water. Detect, Selene thought. Some kind of detect. He is watching the river, not the house.

She crouched in the alley below for ten minutes. The drow did not move. The smoke went on going sideways. The barge with Mira and Berra was twenty minutes upriver by then, and Selene had to assume — had to — that whatever the smoke was tracking, it had not caught what it was looking for.

Trist clicked twice, urgently. Selene looked up.

The drow was packing the pot.

She watched him climb down the back of the warehouse and walk west, into the ferrymen's quarter, and disappear.

She got back to the cooperage roof at the fifth bell and sent Trist south to Vessa with a single tied note: Drow had a focus on the river. Did not catch us tonight. Will catch us tomorrow if we use the same step.

Trist flew. Selene lay flat on the slate and tried to slow her heart, and could not.

V. Aldric Reads the Note

Vessa read the note at the seventh bell of the morning at the Larches. She read it twice. She walked it down to the kitchen without speaking and put it on the table in front of Aldric, who was on his second cup of tea and had a half-eaten heel of bread in his left hand.

He read it. He set the bread down.

"Sszeth's not standing his cell down," she said.

"No, he is. That's not Bregan D'aerthe. Bregan D'aerthe doesn't burn focus-pots in public. That's a freelance. Or a different cell — Eilistraeen, possibly, working a side angle."

"Eilistraeen drow in Yartar."

"There've been three since 1488. I can find out which by sundown if I send to —"

"Don't. We don't have a sundown to spend on it. Move the step."

He was already pulling the city map across the table. "South step, the one below the tannery. Stinks. Nobody goes near it after dark. The barge will hate it but it's clean."

"Tell Corin tonight. By Trist."

"I'll write it now."

She was already walking out. At the door she stopped.

"Aldric."

"Yes."

"Find out anyway. By sundown tomorrow. I want a name."

"I'll find out."

She went up the stairs.

He sat for a moment with the bread in front of him, then pushed it aside, opened the notebook, and started writing.

VI. Day Two — the Younger

The second night was easier in the ways the first night had been hard, and harder in the ways the first night had been easy.

The younger Voss child was three. His name was Joren — of course it was, Selene had thought when Vessa had first told her on the road, of course it is, of course Olem and Sira had named their son a Cormyrean given name four years before a Cormyrean boy named Joren had killed Iselle's father with a bloodied arrow on a moor; the world enjoyed these small symmetries — and at three he could not be relied upon to walk a cellar passage in silence.

Sira had given him a syrup an hour before. Telmar had brought it, with the morning's quarantine inspection, in a small green bottle marked Helm's Mercy. Aldric had supplied it through a contact whose name Vessa had not asked for. Joren was asleep in Berra's arms — her sister Hessa, this time, the quieter sister; Berra was already at the holding place with Mira — by the time Corin came up the back stair at the second bell.

The new river-step was, as Aldric had said, foul. The tannery's runoff went in fifty paces upstream. The barge had moored as far down the step as possible. The tillerman had a rag tied across his nose. He took the wooden token without comment.

Hessa carried the boy down. Corin handed her into the barge. She settled into the bow with the bundles and the sleeping child. The tiller pushed off.

The barge was gone in under a minute.

Corin, on the river-step in the dark, breathed through his mouth and went back up the passage and washed his hands twice in the kitchen before going back upstairs to his attic.

Olem was waiting on the second-floor landing in his nightshirt.

"Both safe?"

"Both safe."

Olem nodded once. He did not move from the landing for a long moment. Then he turned and walked back down the corridor to the bedroom where Sira was waiting up, and Corin heard the door close, and after a few seconds he heard Sira make a small sound that he chose, deliberately, not to identify, and he went up to the attic and lay down on the straw and did not sleep.

Selene saw nothing on the rooftops. The drow had not come back. The new river-step had not been watched. The Cormyrean shifts had rotated as expected. The bread-boy had not returned for four mornings now, which Vessa had said was the strongest indicator that the Cormyrean network had received Branwen's despatch and stood down — the bread-boy was a Lords' Alliance asset, and the Alliance was no longer interested.

Trist flew south at the fifth bell with two words: quiet night.

Vessa read it at the seventh and finally — finally — went to sleep for two hours.

VII. Aldric Finds the Drow

The name Aldric came back with at sundown on the twenty-sixth was Naeris Auvryndar. Eilistraeen. Surface drow of the third generation, raised in Silverymoon, working since 1489 as an independent agent for whoever paid in coin she liked. She had taken a contract from a Sembian who was almost certainly a cut-out for someone else, and the contract was specifically track movements at the Voss house, do not engage. She had been in Yartar nine days.

"Who's the Sembian a cut-out for?"

"Two possibilities. Either a Selgaunt house that would prefer Sira's actual house didn't acquire a new cousin this Tarsakh —"

"Auldermarch."

"— or someone in Suzail who's working around Caladnei. I think the second."

Vessa stared at the map for a long moment. "Laspeera."

"Yes."

"She's not waiting for Talantha to arrive. She's already running her own line."

"Yes."

"Find out which. By tomorrow night."

"That one's harder. I can probably do it. I'll need to call in a favour I was saving."

"Call it."

He nodded and went back to his desk.

She stood at the window for some time afterward, watching the road south for nothing in particular. Iselle came up an hour later with a fresh-cast Sending ready and Vessa dictated three lines to Branwen — drow is Eilistraeen freelance, possibly Laspeera, hold to the plan, two more nights — and went down to eat something for the first time in a day and a half.

VIII. Day Three — Olem and the Strongbox

The third night was the night that went wrong.

Olem Voss was not a fighter. He was forty-two, soft in the middle, with a merchant's clever hands and a merchant's bad knees, and he had spent his adult life learning to read other people across a table and had never had cause to do anything more strenuous. The plan was that he would carry the strongbox down the passage himself, with Corin behind him, because the strongbox could not be entrusted to a tillerman and because the box was heavy enough that two people would actually be slower than one strong enough to manage it.

Olem was not strong enough to manage it. He had thought he was. He was not.

He dropped it on the cellar stairs.

The box weighed forty pounds. It was iron-banded oak. It hit the third step from the top with a sound like a hammer on an anvil, bounced once, and went down the rest of the stairs in a clattering rolling fall that took perhaps four seconds and that Selene, on the cooperage roof, heard.

She did not know what she had heard. She knew she had heard something. A heavy thing falling, somewhere close, after midnight. The Voss house. Wrong.

She came up off the gutter into a crouch.

Trist made the warning click without prompting. Selene was already moving.

In the cellar, Corin had reached the bottom of the stairs and was crouched over Olem, who was on his back on the flagstones with his right hand against his chest and his face the colour of old wax.

"The box is fine," Corin said quietly. "Stay still."

"I think — I think I —"

"Don't talk. Stay still."

It was not a heart attack. Corin had seen those. This was something else — a man who had been holding terror inside his ribcage for three days releasing it all at once when his body had failed him on the stairs. Olem was breathing too fast. His left hand was shaking. His pupils were wide.

Above them, in the kitchen, footsteps. Sira. No, Corin thought, not Sira, not now —

But it was Sira. She came down the cellar stairs in her nightdress with a candle in her hand and her hair in a loose plait and her eyes already on her husband on the flagstones. She came down the stairs the way a wife comes down stairs to a husband who has fallen, which is to say without thinking about it, and she was kneeling beside Olem before Corin could tell her not to.

"Olem —"

"I'm — I'm —"

"You're all right. Look at me. Olem. Look at me."

He looked at her.

Corin watched Sira talk her husband down from the edge of his own panic in twenty seconds, in a low even voice he had not heard her use before, and he understood — with a small professional respect that surprised him — that this was a competent woman who had been managing a household and a frightened husband for four years and that he had, until this moment, underestimated her.

He had also lost twenty seconds.

Above them, in the street, footsteps.

He did not hear them. Selene heard them. Selene was on the cooperage roof and she heard, very faintly, the sound she had been listening for since the first night and had not yet had to act on: a single set of footsteps on the cobbles below, not a watcher's pace, not a patrol's pace — the quick deliberate pace of someone who had heard something and was going to investigate it.

The footsteps were coming from the apothecary side.

The drow.

Naeris Auvryndar had come back.

Selene moved.

IX. The Roof

She made it to the apothecary roof in eleven seconds — across two gables, drainpipe, rooftop, drainpipe, rooftop — and dropped flat in the slate's shadow as Naeris came up over the parapet from the other side.

The drow did not see her. Drow night-sight was famously good but it was not perfect on a slate roof in a shadow when the moon was three nights past full and the shadow's edge was sharp. Naeris was in dark leathers, with a hand crossbow at her belt and a thin curved blade at her hip, and she had the small clay pot in her hand again.

She set the pot down on the slate. She struck a sparking-stone over it. A thin smoke began.

Selene had perhaps four seconds.

Vessa's instructions had been specific. Do not engage. Watch and report.

Vessa's instructions had also said: if a watcher is about to break the quarantine cover, you take them down. Quietly. You have my prior authorisation.

The clay pot was the cover-breaker. Whatever it was tracking, if it caught the cellar passage tonight — a falling iron-banded box, a husband and wife on flagstones, a Damaran in plate twenty paces under the third street — it would catch all of it, and Naeris would know what she had caught, and twelve hours from now Laspeera would know.

Selene had to take the drow before the smoke caught.

She had perhaps two seconds now.

She did the throw she had done at the Sedgewater. Same draw, same wrist-turn, same arc. The blade left her hand at half a second. It crossed the eight feet of slate in the time it took Naeris to look up.

Naeris was a hundred and twelve years old and had been raised in a city where the average drow died of a knife. She moved.

The blade took her in the shoulder, not the throat. She made a small sharp sound — not quite a cry — and her free hand went to the crossbow and Selene was already on her, across the slate at a sprint, with the second blade out and her left hand on the pot.

She kicked the pot off the roof. It went over the edge with the smoke still rising and shattered on the cobbles three storeys below.

Naeris had the crossbow up. Selene was inside the arc. The drow's right shoulder was useless from the throwing blade and her left hand on the bow was wrong-handed, and Selene took her wrist, hard, in the grip Vessa had drilled into her in 1489, and twisted, and the bow came out of her hand and skittered across the slate.

Naeris was going for the curved blade with the off hand.

Selene had a choice.

She had a clean kill — the second blade, into the drow's neck under the jaw, the way she had taken Joren four tendays ago. She had it. Her hand was already moving.

She pulled the strike.

She did not pull it for any reason she could have articulated in the moment. She pulled it because Naeris Auvryndar was a name Aldric had supplied — a named person, a person with a story, an Eilistraeen surface drow from Silverymoon working a contract she may not have understood the shape of — and because there was a sister waiting in the cellar three streets away and Selene was, that night, full to the throat with sisters, and her hand made the decision before her head did.

She struck with the pommel instead.

It was a hard strike, exactly placed, on the side of the drow's head behind the ear, in the spot Vessa had taught her in 1490. Naeris went down on the slate in a small loose pile and did not move.

Selene crouched over her. The drow was breathing. The pulse at the throat was good. The shoulder was bleeding but not arterial.

"Tymora's hand," Selene said quietly to the slate. "What have I done."

Trist landed on the parapet. He looked at her with the small professional disappointment of a working raven whose handler had just complicated his evening considerably.

"I know," Selene said. "I know."

She bound the shoulder with a strip from her own undershirt, working fast. She bound the drow's hands behind her with the drow's own belt. She looked at the rooftops around her and did the calculation she should have done before pulling the strike, which was: I cannot leave her here. The cobbles will be looked at by morning. The watch will find the broken pot. They will find the blood up here. They will trace it.

She would have to move the drow.

She would have to move the drow tonight, before the third bell, while the cellar passage was still in use.

She sent Trist south with three words: complication. Live drow. Coming.

She started looking for a way down off the roof with a hundred and forty pounds of unconscious half-elf-sized drow over her shoulder.

X. Vessa, At Three In The Morning

The note reached the Larches at the third bell. Aldric had been awake. He read it. He swore once, quietly, in Tethyrian. He woke Vessa.

Vessa read it sitting up in bed with her hair down and her eyes still half-closed. She read it three times. Then she looked at Aldric.

"She kept her alive."

"Yes."

"She was not supposed to keep her alive."

"No."

"She kept her alive because —"

"I don't know. Neither does she, probably. It's three in the morning, Vessa."

Vessa closed her eyes for a moment. She thought, with an absolute clarity that surprised her: Selene is twenty years old. Selene has been my apprentice for five years. Selene has just made her first major decision in the field that contradicted my orders, and the decision she made was mercy, and if I punish her for it I will have trained her into a person I do not want her to be, and if I do not punish her I will have to find a way to use what she has just brought me, which is a live Eilistraeen agent on a Laspeera contract.

"Wake Iselle," she said. "I need a Sending to Branwen."

"What are you sending."

"I am sending him to Sszeth. He owes us a favour and I am calling it tonight."

"For what."

"For a hole. A drow-shaped hole. Somewhere in this city where a live Eilistraeen agent can sit for a tenday and not be found by anyone, including herself."

Aldric looked at her for a moment. "Sszeth will do it."

"He had better."

"He will. I'll wake Iselle."

Vessa got out of bed. She dressed in three minutes. By the time she was at the kitchen table Iselle was already there, hair tangled, in a sleeping robe, with the focus already in her hand.

"Three sentences," Vessa said. "Branwen. Selene has a live Eilistraeen agent. Sszeth must take her, hold her, no questions, my favour called. Confirm by return."

Iselle cast.

She closed her eyes for the count of three of the Sending. She opened them.

"He says yes."

"Branwen says yes or Sszeth says yes."

"Branwen says Sszeth says yes. He says Sszeth was already awake. He says Sszeth says, quote, of course she did, that is a Lirandel apprentice if I have ever seen one, end quote."

Vessa laughed, once, a short startled laugh that came out of her before she could catch it. "Of course she did."

"Yes, Lady."

"All right. Tell Branwen the drow goes to Sszeth tonight. Tell him to coordinate with Selene at the south river-step at the fifth bell. Tell him Aldric will have a barge there. Tell him —"

She stopped.

She thought for a moment.

"— tell him well done."

"To Branwen?"

"To Selene. Through Branwen. Tell him to tell her well done. Use those words."

Iselle cast again.

XI. Day Three Continued — The South Step

Selene got the drow off the roof at the fourth bell, down a service stair behind the apothecary, through the yard of an empty house Aldric had marked on her map two days ago, and to the alley behind the south river-step at the fifth bell precisely. Naeris had still not woken up. Selene had hit her one more time, lightly, when she had begun to stir on the rooftop, and was not proud of the second hit but was less unhappy than she would have been if the drow had screamed.

Branwen was at the south step in plain dark clothes. He had a barge. The barge was crewed by two men Selene did not know, in the Bregan D'aerthe house style, which was no style at all — they could have been any two riverbargemen on the Surbrin, except that they were both armed under their coats in a way only Bregan D'aerthe armed.

They took the drow without comment. They laid her in the bow under an oilcloth. They pushed off.

Branwen and Selene watched the barge go.

"Vessa says well done," he said.

Selene looked at him sideways.

"She does not."

"Through me. Word for word. Tell her well done."

"Why."

"I don't know. Sszeth said of course she did, that is a Lirandel apprentice, and Vessa heard that and said well done. You'll have to ask her when we get back."

"Who's Lirandel."

"Long story."

Selene let it go. She was tired. She had been on rooftops for three nights and had now made one of the biggest decisions of her career on instinct, alone, at three in the morning, on slate, and the part of her that was nineteen years old wanted to lie down for a tenday.

"Branwen."

"Yes."

"I should have killed her."

"By the orders, yes."

"By what."

"By something else. I don't know what. Vessa will work it out. That's what she does. Go. Get back on your roof. We have one night left."

Selene went.

She got back to the cooperage roof at the seventh bell, lay flat in the gutter, and was asleep inside five minutes for the first time in three days. Trist watched the street for her.

The Voss house, three streets over, was quiet. Olem had recovered. The strongbox was in the barge. Sira was upstairs in the bedroom with one candle still lit, packing the last of the small things she would carry on the fourth night. Corin was in the attic, on the straw, finally asleep, with the bastard sword across his chest.

The third night had gone wrong.

It had not gone wrong enough.

XII. Day Four — Sira

The fourth night was the cleanest of the four, which was, Vessa would say later, mostly luck and partly the fact that everyone in the chain had now done this three times and the muscle memory had set in. The drow was gone. Naeris was in a Bregan D'aerthe holding cell somewhere under the river quarter, alive, unharmed beyond the shoulder, due to be released without her memory of the past eleven days when this was all over. Sszeth had agreed to the terms in the second Sending of the night.

The Cormyrean watcher was there but disengaged. The Alliance had stopped checking on the quarantine. The bread-boy had not been seen in five days.

At the second bell of the morning of the twenty-eighth, Corin came up the back stair to the master bedroom for the last time.

Sira was ready. She had on a plain travelling cloak over plain travelling clothes and a single small bag at her shoulder. Her hair was down. She had been crying — Corin saw it in the redness around the eyes — but she was not crying now. She had finished crying an hour ago. Olem was already in the barge upriver. The children were already at the holding place.

She looked at Corin in the doorway.

"Ready."

"Yes."

She walked past him into the corridor. She did not look back at the room. She did not look back at the house. Corin followed her down the back stair.

In the cellar she stopped, once, at the foot of the stairs where Olem had fallen the night before. She put her hand on the flagstone. She closed her eyes for perhaps two seconds. Then she opened them and walked on, into the passage, and did not stop again.

At the south river-step the barge was waiting. The tillerman was a different man this time — Aldric had rotated them all four nights, no man working two — and he took the wooden token without looking. Corin handed Sira down. She settled into the bow and pulled the oilcloth around her shoulders.

"Damaran," she said.

"Yes."

"Thank you."

"Don't thank me. Thank Vessa Duskmere."

"I will. When I see her."

"You will. Tomorrow."

She nodded. The tiller pushed off. The barge went out into the dark.

Corin stood on the river-step until the barge was out of sight, which took thirty seconds in the morning mist.

He went back up the passage.

He locked the cellar panel behind the third pantry shelf for the last time.

He left the Voss house at the third bell of the morning of the twenty-eighth by the front door, in the grey cloak of a Helm's lay assistant, with the yellow ribbon still hanging on the doorframe. He walked to the temple of Helm. He returned the cloak. He walked to the Riverboat Quay. He took a passenger barge south. He was at the Three Larches by the eighth bell of the evening.

He did not speak when he came in. He took off his armour piece by piece in the long room. Halric brought him soup. Corin ate it without tasting it. He went to bed.

Across the table, Aldric Wenn folded the day's correspondence into the morning's courier pouch, and wrote three words in his notebook: Voss family clear.

The plan had held.

XIII. The Notice

Telmar Arnos posted the death notice on the Voss door at the ninth bell of the morning of the twenty-ninth.

Helm's Watchful Mercy: the household of Olem Voss, his wife Sira, his daughter Mira, and his son Joren, have succumbed to the wasting fever in the night of the twenty-eighth. Per the protocol of the Vigilant One the bodies have been burned. The house is released from quarantine. The estate is in the hands of the notary Maelin of Yartar. May Helm watch them.

By the tenth bell the Lords' Alliance had registered the death. By the eleventh the Cormyrean watcher's handler had been notified. By the second bell of the afternoon the Yartar commercial registry had received an inquiry from Olem's principal factor, regarding the disposition of the Riverboat Quay warehouse. By the fourth bell, three of Olem's business partners had received sealed condolence letters in the writing of his clerk — a clerk who had, in fact, been replaced two days before by a young man Aldric had brought up from Daerlun who could imitate any Yartar merchant's hand within an hour.

Selene came off the cooperage roof at the eleventh bell of the morning. She walked, in plain clothes, through the merchant quarter to the Riverboat Quay, took a passenger barge south at the noon bell, and was at the Three Larches by the seventh bell of the evening.

She slept for fourteen hours.

When she woke, Iselle was sitting on the foot of her bed reading from her spellbook with a small green light at her fingertips that she was, Selene realised, making float, in a slow careful loop in the air over the bedpost — practising something Selene did not recognise.

"What grade," Selene said, before her eyes were fully open.

Iselle did not look up. "Sixth."

"You're not supposed to say it out loud."

"You asked."

"I did."

Iselle finally looked at her. The light at her fingertips went out. She smiled — a small tired pleased smile that Selene had not seen on her before.

"Vessa says well done," Iselle said.

"She's said that to me twice in five years," Selene said, and put her face back into the pillow.

But she was smiling, into the pillow, in a way she had not smiled in some time.

XIV. South

On the morning of the thirtieth of Mirtul, in a riverside tavern in Suzail, a senior agent of the regency council named Volas Ren received a sealed despatch from his Yartar liaison reporting the death of the Voss family from the wasting fever, and the closure of the file. He read it. He stamped it. He filed it. He went to lunch.

By the third bell of the afternoon the file was on Caladnei's desk. By the fourth bell it had been moved to Laspeera's. Laspeera read it twice. She did not stamp it.

She wrote three lines, in her own hand, on a fresh sheet of despatch paper, sealed it with her own seal, and gave it to her runner. The runner left Suzail at the fifth bell of the afternoon on a fast horse with three remounts on lead, riding north.

The despatch was for Talantha Blackrune, who was at that hour two days south of Yartar, on the southern road, with her new column.

The despatch said: Confirm bodies. Inspect ashes. Do not depart until you have stood in the Voss house and seen what is left of them with your own eyes.

It would reach Talantha at sundown on the second of Tarsakh.

By that hour the family would be on a sea-barge bound for Daerlun, and Vessa, at the Larches, would be reading by the kitchen fire with Aldric across the table from her, and Selene and Iselle would be teaching each other knife-throws and force-cantrips in the yard with the larches throwing long shadows across the grass, and the company would be — for the first time in seven tendays — at rest.

The rest would last six days.

---

To be continued in The Inspection.

Two Scenes Before Chapter Six: the Quarantine

The Weight of Silver — Side Chapters 5a: The Brass Anchor and 5b: The Second Night at the Larches

The Weight of Silver - Full Chapter Listing:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Forgotten_Realms/comments/1tcwht4/lady_vessa_duskmere_the_weight_of_silver_a_tale/

---

Bregan D'aerthe agent - Sszeth Yrr'tarn

Scene One: The Brass Anchor

Yartar. The riverside quarter. The night Branwen rode in.

The Brass Anchor sat on the third step of the river-stair below the Stone Bridge, and had sat there since before the Bridge had been finished, which made it older than the city of Yartar and considerably older than the polite fictions Yartar told about itself. It had been a sailors' tavern in the time of the High King's writ. It had been a Zhentarim drop in the unhappy middle century. It had been, in 1492 DR, what it had quietly always been underneath the changing signs: a place where people who needed to meet without being remembered could meet, drink the second-cheapest brandy on the shelf, and leave by either the front door or the back, whichever the night required.

Branwen had been there before. Not often. Three times, between 1488 and 1490, all of them on Bregan D'aerthe work, all of them late at night, and each of them with the same drow male sitting at the same corner table in the same brown leather coat with his hood up and his back to the wall and a clay cup in front of him that he never drank from.

He was at the table tonight.

Branwen had stabled the borrowed horse, walked along the riverside in plain clothes — the Cormyrean surcoat folded into his saddle-roll an hour after he had left the Lords' Alliance liaison's office — and crossed the front room of the Anchor without making eye contact with anyone, in the particular careful way one crossed the front room of a place like the Anchor. The bargemen at the long table did not look up. The Calishite woman at the bar did not look up. The two off-duty city gate guards by the fire did not look up. Trist, on his shoulder, did not move and did not make a sound; the raven was professional about places like this.

He sat down across from Sszeth Yrr'tarn.

Sszeth was as Branwen remembered him: tall for a drow, lean, the dark skin paled by years on the surface and the white hair cropped short under the hood in the practical Bregan D'aerthe style. The eyes — when they came up briefly to meet Branwen's and then went back down — were the deep red of arterial blood and held the same patient ironic intelligence Branwen had been working with for five years.

"Branwen," Sszeth said, in his soft Calishite-accented Common. He had been a hundred and forty years old when Branwen had met him. He was a hundred and forty-five now. "You came in over the bridge with a King's Dragon at your throat. I almost did not recognise you."

"I have been working."

"Yes. I see it. The work suits you. Sit. Drink. The brandy is bad, as ever. I have ordered you a cup."

The cup was already in front of Branwen. He picked it up. He did not drink. Sszeth, opposite, also did not drink. They had developed the habit together over four years of meetings.

"I did not expect to find you here this tenday," Branwen said.

"You did not expect me to find you here. Which is a different sentence. I have been in Yartar twelve days. I came in on the first of Mirtul. I have been waiting for you for eleven of them."

Branwen kept his face still. He had not, in fact, expected this.

"Eleven days."

"Yes. The raven you have on the eaves of the Three Hares Inn has been very patient. I have not spoken to him. I have not interfered with him. I have simply watched him watch the Voss house, and noted the times, and waited for his master to arrive. I knew you would arrive. I did not know when. I did not press."

"Sszeth," Branwen said, slowly. "How did you know about the Voss house."

Sszeth looked at him over the rim of his untouched cup.

"Branwen," he said. "It has been five years. Did you imagine I had only ever been hiring you for the jobs I told you about. I have always known about the Voss house. I have known about the Voss house for longer than the Cormyrean writ has existed. I have been sitting on the Voss house for a year and a half, waiting to see who would arrive to pull the woman out, because I knew someone eventually would. I am not your only thread to me, Branwen. I am your only thread. There is a distinction. Lirandel taught you the distinction. I assume you have remembered."

Branwen had remembered. He had not, until tonight, fully understood it.

"Then we are not having the conversation I came here to have," he said.

"We are having the conversation you came here to have, and we are also having the conversation I came here to have, and they are not in fact different conversations. I am going to make this simple for both of us, because we are both tired and the brandy is bad. Are you listening, Branwen."

"I am listening."

"Good."

Sszeth set the untouched cup aside. He folded his long fingers together on the table.

"Lirandel Mhenev brought you to me in 1487 because she was about to die and she needed to leave you with someone. I knew she was about to die before she did. I had been working with her for eleven years. She had been my friend for eleven years. Do you understand what I am saying."

Branwen sat very still.

"You — you and Lirandel —"

"We were friends, Branwen. Friends. I am not going to be specific about what kind, because she is dead and the specifics are not yours to know, but the general shape is friend. Yes. For eleven years. We worked together. We argued together. Once, in 1483, in a snowstorm in the Trollbark, we slept back-to-back under the same wolf-hide and did not freeze, and we did not speak of it afterwards, because Lirandel was a Harper and I was Bregan D'aerthe and the work did not allow for the speaking. She was my friend. She told me, the year before she died, that she had a young half-Illuskan she was training and that she was worried she was going to die before the boy was finished, and that if she did, she did not want him left alone. She asked me to find him. She told me what to say."

"You — you returned her notebook to me."

"I returned her notebook to you. I added the page at the back myself. I wrote it in her hand because I had her hand. I had been carrying letters from her for eleven years. I could write her hand the way a forger writes a hand he has been studying. The page said we share an interest in finishing what she started. That was true. The interest was you, Branwen. You were what she started. I was not — I was not recruiting you for Bregan D'aerthe. I was recruiting you because Lirandel had asked me to, and the only currency I had to recruit you with was Bregan D'aerthe work. I gave you the work because the work was the cup I had to put the wine in. The wine was — the wine was that I had promised her."

Branwen did not speak for a long time.

"Sszeth."

"Yes, Branwen."

"You should have told me this in 1487."

"Yes. I should have. I did not, because I was not yet certain you would survive the first job. By the second job I was certain, and I should have told you then, and I did not, because by then we had become — we had become something else, you and I, and I did not want to risk it by making it sentimental. That was a misjudgement on my part. I am correcting it tonight. I am correcting it tonight because I think you are about to do something complicated for someone you love, and I would prefer you do it knowing what I am, rather than guessing."

"Vessa."

"Yes. The Lady Duskmere. Whom I have never met, and whom Lirandel respected enormously, and who has been holding you over Bregan D'aerthe's heads for five years without your knowing she was holding you. She has been doing it well. She has been doing it the way a former Zhent does these things, which is correctly. I am not surprised. I expected her to use you against me eventually. I have been waiting for it. I would like to tell you, before she does, what is going to happen tonight, and what is going to happen tomorrow, and what is going to happen in three tendays when the lie I am about to be told comes apart. Is that a conversation you want to have, Branwen."

Branwen looked at him. Trist, on his shoulder, shifted once and went still again.

"Yes," Branwen said. "I want to have that conversation."

"Good. Drink your brandy. It is still bad."

Branwen drank.

Sszeth told him, in the next forty minutes, what was going to happen. He told him, first, that he knew Vessa intended to feed him a false story about the Voss family dying of the wasting fever. He told him, second, that he intended to accept the false story, and to report it to Jarlaxle, and to stand the Bregan D'aerthe cell down. He told him, third, that he intended to do so for two reasons: the first was that he owed Lirandel a debt that had not yet been paid in full and that protecting Lirandel's last apprentice was the closest available payment; the second was that Jarlaxle Baenre was, in 1492, in a delicate enough position with regard to the regency council in Suzail that not having confirmed the Voss extraction was politically more useful to him than having confirmed it. The lie, Sszeth said, would suit Jarlaxle for as long as it was still believed. When it came apart in three tendays, it would still suit Jarlaxle, because by then the Cormyrean council would have fallen further apart and Jarlaxle would have moved his pieces accordingly, and the fact that Bregan D'aerthe had been deceived would itself be a useful thing to brandish in a particular drawing-room in Menzoberranzan that Sszeth did not name. Branwen would lose nothing. Bregan D'aerthe would lose nothing. The Voss family would live. Sszeth's debt to Lirandel would be reduced by a measurable fraction.

"And what does it cost me," Branwen said, when Sszeth had finished.

"It costs you nothing tonight. It costs you, in three tendays, a single conversation with Jarlaxle, in which you will tell him the truth, and he will pretend to be surprised, and he will offer you a better arrangement going forward. You will be in a stronger position with Bregan D'aerthe, not weaker, by the end of the year. I have already pre-cleared this with him. He approved it last tenday. He is — Branwen, Jarlaxle is fond of you. He has been fond of you since the Sea of Fallen Stars job. He has asked me twice when I was going to bring you in for a proper conversation. I have been declining on your behalf, because I did not think you were ready. I think, after Yartar, you may be ready. We will see."

"And Vessa."

"Vessa will not know, tonight, that I am giving you the lie freely. You will go back to her and you will tell her that you met Sszeth Yrr'tarn at the Brass Anchor and that you fed him the wasting fever story and that he believed it. That will be true in every word and false in every meaning, and Vessa will not catch the falseness, because Vessa is using you cleanly the way Lirandel used you cleanly, and I am content to let her do it. I would rather not be the man who tells the Lady Duskmere that her plan has been working with my hand on the wheel. She has earned the lie she is telling herself about it. Do you understand."

"Yes."

"You will tell her, eventually. After this is done. Not before. Not during. She will be grateful. She will respect me more than she does now, which is — given what she does not know — already considerable. We will meet, eventually, you and Vessa and I and possibly Aldric Wenn, and we will have a long evening in a quiet inn, and we will sort out what each of us has been doing to the others for the past five years. That evening is not tonight."

"Sszeth."

"Yes."

"Thank you for telling me about Lirandel."

Sszeth was quiet for a long moment. The drow's face did not change, but something in the eyes did, briefly, and Branwen — who had been studying that face for five years — saw it.

"She was my friend, Branwen," Sszeth said. "I do not have many friends. I have many colleagues, and I have a great deal of work, and I have a Pasha in Menzoberranzan who I am going to outlive by some considerable margin. But I have very few friends. Lirandel was one. You — you have become, over five years, another. That is — you should know that. It does not change the work. It does not buy you anything I would not already give you. But you should know that I have, for the past five years, been working with you in part because I wanted to, and not only because I had promised. I would like that to be clear between us before we go into the next tenday."

"It is clear."

"Good."

Sszeth stood. He put two coins on the table — Bregan D'aerthe house silver, with a small unfamiliar mark Branwen had never been able to read — and gathered his coat.

"Tell the Lady Duskmere," he said, "that the meeting was as she expected. Tell her the lie. Be a good Harper. Drink the rest of your brandy. I will see you in three tendays in a different room."

He walked out of the Brass Anchor by the back stairs. Branwen sat for some minutes with the second cup in his hand and Trist quiet on his shoulder and the small stunned attention of a man who has just been told that the past five years of his life have had a different shape than he had thought, and the new shape was — on balance — better than the old.

He drank the brandy.

Sszeth was right. It was still bad.

He went home.

---

Scene Two: The Second Night at the Larches

The Three Larches. The night after Vessa laid out the plan.

Vessa came down the back stair of the steading at the second bell of the morning, after the others had been asleep for two hours and Iselle had been asleep for three, with the small folded letter in her hand that needed to go out by Aldric's morning courier and the slow restless awareness that she was not going to sleep tonight either, which was the third night in a row.

She had thought she would put the letter on the kitchen table and go back upstairs and try.

Aldric was at the kitchen table.

He was not asleep. He had not, by the look of him, been to bed at all. He was sitting at the long oak table in the kitchen with a single candle in a brass holder and a stack of papers in front of him in three neat piles, and a cup of something steaming at his right hand, and his old leather notebook open, and a quill in his right hand that was moving slowly down a page in lines of small precise script. He had taken off the leather jerkin and was in a plain linen shirt with the sleeves rolled to the elbow, and the lamp-light caught the lines on his face and the grey at his temple and the small white scar across his right forearm that she remembered from 1480, when a Calishite assassin in Athkatla had tried to put a knife in her and Aldric had caught the blade on the inside of his arm rather than let it go past him.

She had not, in the long evening of dinner and planning, looked at his arms.

She looked now.

He looked up.

"Vessa," he said. "Come and sit down."

"I was going to leave a letter."

"You were going to leave a letter and go back upstairs and lie in the dark for two hours and then come down again. I know, because I have known you a long time, and because I have been listening to your floorboards and they have been doing the small unhappy creak they did in 1479 in that house in Berdusk when you could not sleep. Sit down. I have made tea. I made it twenty minutes ago because I knew you would come down. Sit. Drink. Tell me about the letter."

She sat down. He poured her tea from a small earthenware pot. The tea was Calishite — black, with cardamom and a small twist of rind — and she had not drunk it in twelve years, and the smell of it as he poured it across the table did something to her chest she had not given it permission to do.

"You remembered," she said, before she could stop herself.

"I remembered the tea. Yes. It is one of the easier things to remember. The harder things took longer. I have remembered most of those too, eventually."

She did not answer that. She put the letter on the table. He took it without opening it, glanced at the seal, slid it into the topmost of the three piles in front of him without breaking his rhythm, and went back to his page.

"The Daerlun courier leaves at six," he said. "He will have it by Tarsakh's twenty-eighth at the latest. The reply will come back through Waterdeep by the third of Mirtul. I have a fast rider on the Waterdeep leg. We will have the papers on the family in nineteen days. That is — that is faster than I quoted you in the letter six weeks ago. I have improved the route since then."

"How."

"Different rider on the Waterdeep leg. A friend. Long story."

"Aldric."

"Yes."

"I have been at this table for thirty seconds and I have already noticed three things about you that I did not know about you twelve years ago. I would like to know some of the rest of it before we go into Yartar, because I am going to be sending information through your hands for the next tenday and I would like to understand who I am sending it through. Will you tell me."

He set the quill down.

He looked at her properly for the first time since she had sat down. The brown-gold eyes — which she had decided, on the road, that she was going to refer to in her own thinking as the colour of weak tea, because gold had been a word she had used twelve years ago and she had not wanted to use it again — were not the eyes of the man she had left in 1480. They were quieter. They had more in them. They had been reading her since dinner and she had been pretending not to notice.

"I will tell you," he said. "Drink your tea. It is going cold."

She drank.

He told her, in the next half-hour, what he had been doing with his life since 1480. He told it the way Aldric had always told stories — laterally, without putting the heavy things at the start, with a great deal of self-deprecation around the edges and the actual substance buried in clauses she had to listen for. But she had been listening for Aldric's clauses for fourteen years, off and on, and she heard them.

He had spent, he said, the years 1480 to 1483 doing what he had always done, which was a rolling series of contracts in three cities with too much brandy in the middle of them, and then in the autumn of 1483 he had been in a tavern in Zazesspur and a man he did not know had walked up to him with a debt note Aldric had thought was buried, and the man had said you owe my house seventeen hundred crowns, you owe my house this since 1477, I am here to collect, and Aldric had not had seventeen hundred crowns and had had no way of getting them inside the tenday the man had given him, and had — for the first time in his life — been at the end of a road he had not been able to talk his way off.

"What did you do," Vessa said.

"I took service with the Order of the Aster. Tethyr. They had a recruiting station two streets from the tavern. I had walked past it for years and laughed at it. I walked into it that afternoon. The recruiter was a man named Brother Velish. He looked at me for some time. He asked me three questions. He told me to go and have a drink and come back in the morning if I still wanted to. I went. I drank. I came back. He took me. I served three years. They paid the seventeen hundred."

"You served three years. You. You were thirty-four. You hated armour."

"I still hate armour. I wear it less often now than I did then. Yes, three years. Calim border campaigns. I was a Cleric-Brother, Trickery rite — they take Mask priests, the Aster, on the principle that the god a man serves is his own affair so long as the deeds are clean. I cleaned my deeds for them. I did infiltration, intelligence, and what they politely called unconventional evening work. I also stood in a line eleven times. I am not — I do not want you to think I came back from this a soldier. I came back from this a man who has stood in a line eleven times and would prefer not to do it again. But I can stand in one if it is required. That is — that is part of what I have been improving."

"You took the faith more seriously."

"I took the faith more seriously. Yes. There was — there was a moment, in the third year, in a campaign in the Marching Mountains, where I was in a position from which I should not have walked. A Calishite cavalry captain had a sword at the back of my neck. I was on my knees. The captain spoke a sentence in Alzhedo that I understood, which was the Lord of Shadows does not save his priests, he only watches them die. I had been thinking that exact sentence in my own head for an hour. I understood, when he said it out loud, that I had been thinking the wrong thing. The Lord of Shadows is not a god who saves his priests, that is true; but he is also not a god who lets a Calishite cavalry captain quote him in Alzhedo on a Tuesday afternoon. The captain was killed by an arrow from the brush behind me. I was not killed. I — I have thought about that for nine years, Vessa. I am not a different man for it. I am the same man with the volume turned down on certain kinds of foolishness. That is the second thing."

"Who shot the arrow."

"A Brother named Calenor. Half-elf. Tethyrian. He is now an abbot of the Aster's chapter house at Zazesspur. He is one of the people who would come, if I called him. I have not called him yet."

"How many people would come if you called them, Aldric."

He considered.

"Forty-three," he said. "At last count. From thirty-eight households. Two of those households are nobles. Three are clergy. Six are the kind of person Lords' Alliance representatives would not put in writing. Several are smugglers. One is a former pirate who is trying very hard to be something else and is making a reasonable success of it. I have spent twelve years building this. None of them know about each other. All of them owe me. Some of them owe me badly enough that I have been refusing the payment because I would prefer to keep them owing. That is — that is the third thing."

She looked at him.

She had finished her tea. He had finished his. The candle had burned down to half its length. Outside the kitchen window, the steading's yard was silver with moonlight, and she could hear, very faintly, the small night-sounds of a house full of sleeping people, and the deeper sound of the river beyond the larches.

"Aldric," she said, after a while.

"Yes, Vessa."

"I thought I was going to come down here tonight and put the letter on the table and go back upstairs."

"I know."

"I thought I was going to be, by now, a person who was over you. I have been telling myself for ten years that I was. I have been telling it convincingly enough that I had stopped listening for the answer. I have been, in the last eight hours, listening to the answer. It is — Aldric, it is not the answer I wanted."

He did not move. He had set the quill down half an hour ago and he had not picked it up again. The one hand visible on the table was open, palm down, with the small white scar of the Athkatla blade just visible at the edge of the rolled cuff.

"What is the answer," he said. Quietly.

"The answer is that I left a man in 1480 who was clever and unreliable and who I thought was probably as much as he would ever be. I am sitting tonight with a man who took the same talents and put weight under them. I did not — I did not know that was an option you were going to take. I had decided you were not. I had been wrong about that. I am — Aldric, I am angry that I was wrong about it. I am angry because if I had known, in 1485, that you had taken service with the Aster — if I had known you were cleaning your deeds, you, who would not clean a wine glass in 1479 — I would have come and found you. I would have. I had reasons not to come and find you in 1480. I had no reasons in 1485. I did not come and find you because I had decided you were a closed book, and I closed books are not read again, and I — I am a person who does not reopen books. That is a thing I had decided about myself. I think I was wrong about that too."

"Vessa."

"Yes."

"I did not write to you in 1485 because I assumed you had made your peace with leaving me."

"I had not made my peace."

"I see that now. I am sorry. I should have written."

"You should have written. Yes."

A silence.

He moved his open hand on the table, slightly, towards her. He did not close the distance. He moved it perhaps two inches, in the small ambiguous way of a man offering something that the other person could either take or not take and be no worse off either way. It was the most Aldric Wenn thing she had seen him do since dinner — twelve years older, three campaigns deeper, forty-three contacts wiser, and still incapable of putting a hand across a table without giving her every possible exit. It was the gesture she had loved him for in 1479. It still worked.

She put her hand on top of his.

The candle popped. Neither of them looked at it.

"I am not — I am not going to do anything tonight, Aldric," she said. "I am not in a position to. I have a girl upstairs whose father died last tenday and I am going to sleep two hours and check on her at the fifth bell. I have six people in this house who are going into the worst tenday of any of our careers in three days. I am — I am not going to begin a thing tonight that I do not have the room for. Do you understand."

"Yes."

"But I would like — I would like, when this is finished, for us to begin a conversation. A long one. Not — not a one-night conversation. A long careful one, with a great deal of catching up, and probably some arguments, and possibly a Mintarn brandy you have been holding for the right occasion. I would like you to know that I am asking for it. I am asking because I would like the answer to be yes, and I would like the answer to be informed by what tonight has been. Will you — will you think about it, between now and the second of Tarsakh, and tell me when this is over. Honestly."

"Vessa."

"Yes."

"My answer is yes. I do not need until the second of Tarsakh. I do not need to think about it. I have been thinking about it for twelve years. I will tell you again, when this is over, in case the answer has changed for either of us by then. But the answer, tonight, is yes."

She closed her hand over his.

They sat at the table, in the candle-light, for some minutes. They did not kiss. They did not speak further. He turned his hand over under hers, once, slowly, so that her palm was against his palm and his fingers had folded over the back of her hand, and they sat with their hands closed over each other on the long oak table where, in three days' time, they would be running a four-night extraction of a Waterdhavian merchant's wife and her two small children through a cellar passage under the third street of Yartar.

After perhaps ten minutes Vessa said, very quietly: "I should sleep."

"Yes."

"Will you sleep tonight."

"No. I have — I have things to do. The courier is at six. There are letters."

"All right."

She stood. She did not let go of his hand. He stood with her. They were the same height, as they had always been. He looked at her in the lamp-light with a face that was twelve years older and three campaigns deeper and entirely the same face she had loved, and she did not let go of his hand.

"Aldric."

"Yes."

"I am going to kiss you, once, on the cheek, and then I am going upstairs, and we are not going to discuss this with anyone in this house. Especially not Branwen. Branwen has a face on him. Do you understand."

"I understand."

She kissed him, once, lightly, on the cheek, just below the temple where the grey was. He smelt of cardamom and lamp-oil and the old leather of the notebook and, underneath those, of the same thing he had smelt of in 1479, which was not a smell she had a word for and which she had not, since 1480, smelt on any other person. Her hand stayed on his hand for a second longer than the kiss. Then she let go.

She went up the stairs.

She did not lie in the dark for two hours. She slept within ten minutes, and dreamed of nothing she would remember in the morning, and woke at the fifth bell to check on Iselle and find Iselle sleeping soundly, and stood for a moment in the door of Iselle's room and thought, with a clarity she did not entirely welcome, I am forty years old and I have been alone for ten of those years and I had stopped noticing, and the man in the kitchen has noticed for me.

She closed the door. She went to her own bed.

In the kitchen, Aldric Wenn sat back down at the long oak table and picked up his quill. His hand, when he wrote the next line in his notebook, was steady. He wrote three words: yes, still, yes. He underlined the middle one. He turned the page. He went back to work.

The candle burned down. The courier left at six. The plan moved forward.

Three days later they rode into Yartar.

---

To be continued in The Quarantine.

Chapter 5 continued from here: https://www.reddit.com/r/Forgotten_Realms/comments/1tcux6r/the_approach_to_yartar_the_weight_of_silver/

The Weight of Silver - Full Chapter Listing:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Forgotten_Realms/comments/1tcwht4/lady_vessa_duskmere_the_weight_of_silver_a_tale/

---

IV. The Plan

Vessa laid out the plan after dinner, in the long room of the Three Larches, with the fire built up against the north wall and the windows shuttered and the door barred and the company sitting on benches around a long oak table that had been used for many such conversations and would be used for many more.

Aldric Wenn was at the table, at her left hand, with his clay cup in front of him and his Mintarn brandy beside the cup and a small leather-bound notebook open in front of him in which he was, occasionally and quietly, writing single words in a hand that none of the others could read. He had not spoken since the meal had been cleared. He was, Selene had begun to understand, a man who could be remarkably quiet when the work began.

Iselle was at Vessa's right. She had eaten, slowly, with a colour returning to her cheeks that had been gone for four days. Selene was beside her — they had drifted into the seats next to each other without negotiation — and Branwen was opposite, with Corin and Halric flanking him, and Kael at the far end of the table by the door with the longbow leaned against his bench and Letterkeeper on the table in front of him with both hands resting on the scabbard, and the older sword was still warm and they had all, in the past two days, stopped pretending they did not know it.

"All right," Vessa said. "I am going to tell you the plan. I am going to tell it once, all the way through, without interruption. You will then ask questions and I will answer them. If at any point you believe a piece of the plan is wrong, you will say so, and we will discuss it, and we will change it if you are right, because the plan is not mine — the plan is ours, and I have only had six weeks longer than the rest of you to think about it. Aldric, you are hearing it for the first time tonight. You will hear things you do not yet know. You may write down whatever you wish. Are you ready."

"I am ready," said Aldric.

"Good."

She drew a breath.

"We are not going to extract Sira Voss from Yartar. That is the first thing. We are not going to ride into the city and take her from her house and ride out. The city is being watched by three separate parties — the Cormyrean network, a Bregan D'aerthe cell, and a Lords' Alliance informant on the bread route — and a forced extraction would alert all three within the hour, and we would be hunted out of the city in a column-and-pursuit pattern that we cannot survive. We are also not going to take Sira out alive and leave Olem Voss and the children behind. Olem and the children are going with us. That is not negotiable. Olem is a decent man and the children are small and we are not the kind of company that leaves the children. Are we agreed."

A pause.

"Agreed," said Corin.

"Agreed," said Halric.

The others nodded.

"Good. Then what we are going to do is this. We are going to make the Voss household disappear in plain sight. We are going to give Yartar a public, plausible, well-witnessed reason for the family to be gone, that does not involve the family fleeing or being taken. We are going to use the wasting fever that has been moving up the Dessarin Valley as our cover. The eldest Voss child — the daughter, Mira, who is six — is going to fall ill. The household is going to be quarantined by a Helm's-temple cleric whom Halric is going to engage in advance through his Berdusk contact. The cleric will be paid enough to be discreet but not enough to know what he is being discreet about. The quarantine will be real-looking. It will be at the level of inspection that the Lords' Alliance health officers will accept without entering the house, which is the only level we need. It will hold for four days. During those four days, the family will be moved out of the house through the cellar passage — which exists; Aldric has confirmed it; it runs to the river under the third street and it has been used for at least two other extractions in the past decade — and to a small barge that Aldric is going to have moored at the third river-step at midnight on each of the four nights, and the barge will take them six miles upriver to a holding place that I will tell Aldric about later. Each night a different part of the household goes. The first night: the elder daughter and her nurse. The second night: the younger child and one trusted maid. The third night: Olem himself and the strongbox. The fourth night: Sira. We move Sira last because Sira is the one the watchers are watching and any change in her routine on the first night would crack the cover. She has to be the last out. She has to be in the house, visible at the windows in the standard pattern, until the third dawn. That is the hardest part of the plan. We will come back to it."

She paused. No one had spoken.

"On the fifth day, the quarantine notice will be lifted by the cleric. The notice will say that the family has succumbed. The bodies have been burned per Helm's protocol. There will be no bodies for the Lords' Alliance to inspect, because Helm's protocol is real and it does require burning, and the Lords' Alliance will not press the cleric on it because the Lords' Alliance does not press Helm's clerics on quarantine matters. Olem Voss's debts will be paid out of his strongbox by a notary I have engaged through Aldric. His business partners will receive sealed letters. The household servants who remain will receive their wages plus a year's severance and will be told, truthfully, that their employer has died. The house itself will be put up for sale through Olem's existing factor. Within a tenday the Voss household will be a footnote in the Yartar commercial registry and the watchers will have been given exactly the public outcome they are paid to confirm. Cormyrean network: family dead, no need to pursue. Bregan D'aerthe: target dead, papers presumably with the ashes. Lords' Alliance: routine. Three parties stand down. We have bought ourselves perhaps a tenday before any of them begin to suspect, and possibly longer."

"And by then," said Branwen, "the family is —"

"By then the family is no longer the family. Sira Voss has become Sira Auldermarch, of the lesser branch of House Auldermarch of Selgaunt — a real family, with a known but obscure cadet line that I have been quietly cultivating for four years, and who will accept a cousin and her husband and her children with documents from a Daerlun forger if the documents are good and the introduction is good. The introduction is mine. I will write it on the second night. Aldric will carry the introduction and the forger's instructions to Daerlun by the fastest courier route, which is by river to Waterdeep and then by sea, and the papers will be ready by the time the family reaches Daerlun, which will be in approximately four tendays. Olem keeps his given name. The children keep theirs; we are not going to traumatise the children further. They become the Auldermarches. They live in Selgaunt. Olem reopens his trade in a smaller way, with my introduction and with capital from the strongbox we are carrying out. Sira — Sira — finds out, when we tell her, that the Crown of Cormyr believes her dead, and that she is now a Sembian merchant's wife, and that she has the rest of her life back."

Vessa stopped.

"That is the plan."

There was a long silence.

"Vessa," said Aldric, very quietly, "that is gorgeous. Tymora's left hand, that is the cleanest extraction-by-dissolution I have heard in fifteen years. Who taught you that one."

"You did. In 1479."

"Did I."

"You did. Three Calishite tax-fugitives in Athkatla. You walked them out as a Tethyrian pilgrim caravan. I was there. I was twenty. I was paying attention."

"I had forgotten."

"Of course you had."

"Vessa. I am — I am moved. Continue."

"There are roles. Branwen — you will run the false despatch. We need to give the Cormyrean network a real Crown order to stand down. Iselle is going to forge, with my supervision, a sealed despatch from the regency council to the Yartar Lords' Alliance liaison saying Sira Voss is to be left in place; she is now a long-term observation asset; any agent who acts against her household will be recalled and disciplined. The seal will be Iselle's father's command-seal, which she carries, and which is good enough at the Yartar level. You will ride into Yartar in Cormyrean colours as a junior Crown courier, deliver the despatch to the liaison, and ride back out the same day. The despatch will hold for four days at minimum. By then we will be done."

"Yes," Branwen said.

"Halric — you will run the cleric. The Helm's-temple in Yartar has a senior cleric named Telmar Arnos, a Damaran originally from Heliogabalus, whom I understand from your old contact in Berdusk owes him a debt of honour from the campaign of '79. You will engage him. He will conduct the quarantine. You will pay him from a purse I will give you tomorrow. He will not be told the family is being extracted. He will be told the family is being killed by their own household for political reasons and that the quarantine is the cover for Helm's people to get the family out alive without the killers knowing. That is — that is in Helm's writ, and Telmar will accept it without requiring more. You will be Telmar's contact for the four days of the quarantine. He will trust you, and you will not betray that trust."

"Yes," Halric said.

"Corin. You will run the cellar. You will be in the Voss house from the night before the quarantine begins. You will move the family out through the passage on each of the four nights. You will be the last person out on the fourth night with Sira. Olem will know who you are; I will write him a letter this week. Sira will not know who you are until you take her hand in the cellar on the fourth night, and she will trust you because Olem will have told her by then, and because — Corin — you have a face people trust in cellars at three in the morning."

"Yes," Corin said.

"Kael. You will run the river and the route. You will scout the barge route from the third river-step to the holding place upriver. You will scout the road from the holding place to the safe house here, and from here to Daerlun. You will sit on the holding place for four days while we move the family up there one piece at a time. You will be — you will be the country, Kael. The country is yours."

"Yes," said Kael.

"Aldric. You will run the courier work and the Daerlun forger. You will not be in Yartar yourself. You will be here, at the Larches, sending the Sendings and the courier riders. You will write the letter to House Auldermarch in Selgaunt under my dictation. You will pay the Daerlun forger from a purse I will give you tomorrow. You will be the spider, Aldric. You will sit in the middle of the web and you will pull the threads."

"With the greatest pleasure, Vessa."

"Iselle. You will be here, at the Larches. You will not be in Yartar. Talantha believes you are dead. We are going to keep you dead for as long as possible. You will run the document work — the despatches, the seals, the quarantine notices, the introduction letters, all of it — in the workroom upstairs that Aldric has prepared. You will also run the Sending relays. You are the only one of us who can cast Sending reliably at this range, and you will be casting twice a day, possibly three times. You will rest well between casts. Aldric will feed you. I will check on you."

"Yes, Lady."

"Selene."

Selene looked up.

"You will be in Yartar," Vessa said. "You will run the watchers. You will know where every set of eyes on the Voss house is at every hour of every day for the four days of the quarantine. You will work the rooftops. You will report to me twice a day through Trist — Branwen will hand Trist over to you the morning we ride into the city. If a watcher moves, you will know. If a watcher disappears, you will know. If a new watcher arrives, you will know within the hour. You will not engage. You will not take a watcher off the board. You will only watch, and report. The only exception — and this is the hard line, Selene, and I am holding it — is if a watcher is about to approach the house in a way that breaks the quarantine cover. Then you take them down. Quietly. You have my prior authorisation. Do you understand."

Selene nodded.

"Yes."

"This is the role you have been training for, Selene. For five years. This is the role. I am giving it to you with no constraints I have not just named. Do you accept it."

"I accept it."

"Good."

Vessa looked around the table. The fire in the long room cracked once. Aldric's quill moved in his notebook, briefly, and stopped.

"That is the plan," Vessa said. "Questions."

There was a long silence. Branwen broke it first.

"Bregan D'aerthe," he said, quietly.

Vessa looked at him.

"Yes," she said. "That is the part I have not addressed, and you are right to raise it. I will address it now. Branwen — you have a contact in Bregan D'aerthe. You have had this contact since 1487. His name is Sszeth Yrr'tarn. You have run four jobs for him. He will be in Yartar this tenday or next. He will look for you. He will find you. And he will offer you a job that will involve — at minimum — providing him with information about the Voss house, which he believes contains the papers Vangerdahast hid before his death."

The table did not move.

Branwen's face did not change. Aldric Wenn's quill did not move. The fire cracked again.

"You knew," Branwen said.

"I have known since 1488. Lirandel Mhenev wrote me a letter the year before she died — she was — she was a friend of mine, Branwen, longer than she was your handler, and she wrote me the year before she died about a young half-Illuskan duellist she was training who she thought would be a credit to the Harpers. She wrote me again, six tendays before she went into Mantol-Derith on her last job, with a different letter. The second letter said I have brought him into a thing I should not have brought him into, and if I do not come back, I would like you, when you find him, to take him into your hands and do better by him than I have done. I have been doing my best by you for five years, Branwen. I have not raised it because I did not need to. I am raising it now, because we are about to go into Yartar, and I will not have it sit between us when there is work to do. You are going to meet Sszeth in Yartar. He will offer you a job. You are going to take the job, Branwen. You are going to feed him exactly the information I tell you to feed him, which is going to be the same false story we are giving the Cormyrean network and the Lords' Alliance — that the family has died of the wasting fever and the papers are with the ashes. Bregan D'aerthe will stand down with the rest of them. We will lose nothing. We will gain a clean exit. And Sszeth Yrr'tarn — Sszeth — will owe us a debt, because he will report to Jarlaxle that the operation is closed, and Jarlaxle will act on the report, and when the report turns out, in three or four tendays, to have been a lie, the lie will have been yours, not mine, and Jarlaxle will respect that, because Jarlaxle is Jarlaxle, and that is the kind of thing he respects. Do you understand."

Branwen sat very still.

"You — you have planned this. You have planned for me to lie to Bregan D'aerthe."

"Yes."

"And to be discovered, eventually, by Jarlaxle Baenre."

"Yes. In three or four tendays, when the family has surfaced quietly in Selgaunt and the lie comes apart. Yes."

"And you think Jarlaxle will respect that."

"I think Jarlaxle will respect that you lied to him cleanly, in service of a job you chose, with a payoff he can verify and admire. I think he will offer you a better job afterwards. I think you will be in a better position after this than before it. I have been thinking about this for four years, Branwen. I have been holding the thought because I was waiting for the right job to use it on. This is the right job. Do you trust me."

Branwen looked at her for a long time. The fire cracked again. Loomwhisper lay across his lap. He had not touched it during the meal.

"I trust you, Vessa."

"Good."

"I am — I am furious that you have known for five years."

"I know. We will discuss that tomorrow morning if you wish. I will hear what you have to say. I will not apologise, because I would do it again, but I will hear you."

"All right."

"Anything else."

There was nothing else.

Vessa stood.

"Then sleep," she said. "The horses are stabled. The doors are barred. Aldric has put us all up here and I will check on Iselle in an hour. We ride into Yartar in four days. That is the time we have. Use it."

The company began to move from the table. Iselle, beside Selene, stood, slightly unsteady from the brandy Aldric had poured her over her objection, and Selene rose with her and offered her elbow, and Iselle took it without comment. Across the table, Aldric Wenn closed his notebook with a small final tap of the quill on the cover, and looked up at Vessa, and smiled — a tired, fond, complicated smile that had years in it — and said, very quietly:

"Vessa."

"Yes."

"Thank you for using the door."

"Thank you for leaving it unlocked."

"Always."

He stood. He walked round the table to her. He did not kiss her or touch her. He simply stood beside her for a count of three, in the small fond proximity of a person who had loved someone twelve years ago and had remained, in some quieter way, fond of them ever since, and then he walked past her to the kitchen to put the brandy bottle away.

Selene saw the look on Vessa's face as he passed her.

She filed it.

She did not say a word.

V. The Bridge

Branwen rode into Yartar at the third bell of the afternoon on the twenty-fourth of Mirtul, alone, in the Cormyrean half-plate and surcoat that Iselle had taken three nights to make convincing — the surcoat was Vandren's own, cut down by Iselle's own hands, with the King's Dragon device on the breast — and the sealed despatch in the saddlebag at his right knee, and Trist on his shoulder, and the parrying sword Loomwhisper at his left hip in the open carry of a Crown courier rather than the back-rig of a duellist.

The Stone Bridge of Yartar — six arches across the Surbrin, with the gate of the Lords' Alliance keep on the eastern side and the merchant quarter on the western — was busy in the late afternoon: barges below, carts above, a column of Alliance soldiers crossing east to west on a routine watch change, a Calishite spice merchant arguing in three languages at once with a Yartar excise clerk about the duty on cardamom. Branwen rode through it all at a calm walking pace with the pennon of a junior Crown courier flying from a small lance-rest at his right stirrup and the badge of his rank pinned visibly at his throat.

The gate guard saluted him. He returned the salute.

He rode under the gate. Trist shifted on his shoulder and made the small low caw that was the raven's signal for I see them, which meant Trist had seen the Cormyrean watcher on the corner of the third street already, exactly where Trist had been reporting him for thirteen days. Branwen, without turning his head, lifted his right hand once in the small formal acknowledgement a junior Crown courier gave to a senior network watcher he was not supposed to know was there, and the watcher — an older man in a peddler's smock who had gone very still at the sight of the King's Dragon coming over the bridge — lifted his own right hand in return.

The despatch was about to be delivered.

The plan was about to begin.

Trist, on Branwen's shoulder, made the soft hooded sound of a raven who was, in his own raven way, glad to be home.

Six miles south, at the Three Larches, Iselle of the Sedgewater sat at the upstairs window of the workroom Aldric had prepared for her and watched the road south, where Selene and Halric and Corin and Kael were riding in over the hill with the late sun behind them, and Vessa stood beside her with one hand resting lightly on her shoulder, and Aldric Wenn, in the kitchen below, was pouring himself a small cup of the Mintarn brandy and writing a single word in his notebook in a hand only he could read, and the word was begin.

---

To be continued in The Quarantine.

The Approach to Yartar

The Weight of Silver — Chapter Five

Days nine through twenty out of Helmsblade. The road north, the safe house, and the bridge.

The Weight of Silver - Full Chapter Listing:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Forgotten_Realms/comments/1tcwht4/lady_vessa_duskmere_the_weight_of_silver_a_tale/

---

Younger Aldric Wenn of the Three Larches and ex lover of Lady Vessa Duskmere

I. The Fire on the First Night

They rode ten leagues that first day out of the hilltop above Mournstar, in silence for most of it, and made camp in a fold of the moor where a small stream came down from the foothills and curved through a stand of black pine. Halric had picked the spot. He had said, looking at it: trees on three sides, water on the fourth, and the wind comes down off the slope so the smoke goes up and not out, and Kael had nodded once and taken the bow up to the rise above the camp without speaking, which was where Kael was sleeping these days.

Iselle slept early. She had ridden the whole day in a kind of glassy alertness that Vessa had been watching with a private concern, and at sundown she had eaten three mouthfuls of the stew Halric had made and then put down the bowl and said, very quietly, I think I need to lie down, and had been asleep within five minutes. Vessa had laid her own cloak over the girl on top of Iselle's and had stood for perhaps half a minute looking down at her with a face Selene had not seen Vessa wear before and could not name, and then Vessa had walked away to the picket without saying anything.

Branwen and Corin and Halric had gone to sleep an hour after that. Vessa was in her bedroll across the fire, breathing slow, although Selene was not certain she was actually asleep. Kael was on the rise.

That left Selene on watch at the fire's edge, with the long sword drawn across her thighs and her left arm — which had come back over the ride, mostly, with only a deep tired ache where the wight's nails had taken her — laid in her lap.

She heard Iselle's breathing change at the fourth bell of the night. She heard the breathing become uneven, in the small catching rhythm of a person beginning to come awake into something they did not want to be awake into, and then she heard the breathing stop, and then she heard the small wet sound of Iselle making no sound at all.

Selene got up. She went round the fire, soft-footed in the bracken. She crouched beside Iselle.

Iselle was awake, lying on her side, with her face turned into the cloak and her hands clenched in front of her chest, and she was crying without sound in the way Selene had cried twice in her life — the first time after Sahar, the second time on a rooftop in Iriaebor for a reason she had never told anyone — which was not the kind of crying that asked anything of anyone in the room. It was just a thing the body was doing because it had to, and the person doing it was holding very still inside it because moving would have made it louder, and louder would have woken the others.

Selene sat down on the bracken next to the bedroll. She did not touch her. She put her sword down across her knees so that Iselle, when she opened her eyes, would see that Selene was on watch and not on charity.

"Iselle," she said. Quietly. "It is me. Selene. I am sitting here because I heard you. I am not going to wake the others. I am not going to ask you anything. If you would like me to go away I will go away. If you would like me to sit, I will sit. You do not have to choose now."

Iselle did not move for a long moment. Then, without taking her face out of the cloak, she said in a voice almost too quiet to hear: "Sit, please."

Selene sat.

She sat for what was perhaps twenty minutes. Iselle did not stop crying for the first ten of them. Selene watched the fire across the camp. She watched the small shape of Halric's back as he slept, and the larger shape of Corin's plate piled neatly beside him, and Branwen's profile half-turned toward the fire with one hand under his cheek in the way of a man who did not, even asleep, fully relax. She watched Vessa across the fire and could not tell whether Vessa was awake or not, and after the first ten minutes she decided it did not matter.

After perhaps fifteen minutes Iselle said, still into the cloak: "Selene."

"Yes."

"Why are you sitting with me."

Selene thought about it.

"I do not know," she said, honestly. "I think — I think because last night you told me to keep moving when the cold went through, and I would have stood still and the wight would have taken me, and I would not have been the person to put the throwing blade into Joren if you had not. I think I owe you that. I think — I do not like owing people things. I think I am sitting with you because I would rather sit with you tonight than owe you tomorrow. That is — that is the honest answer, Iselle. I am not very good at the soft answer."

A small silence.

"That is the soft answer," Iselle said, into the cloak. "Selene. That is the soft answer. You are bad at telling the difference."

"Possibly."

"It is the soft answer because you used the phrase I would rather. You did not say I have to. You did not say I should. You said I would rather. That is a kindness. You have done me a kindness. It is all right. You may sit."

Selene was quiet for a moment.

"I did not — I did not want to like you," she said. "On the road. Before tonight. I want to tell you that, because it is true, and I think I need to tell you the true thing and then it stops being a thing that matters. I did not want to like you because you were going to — you were going to take a place at the fire that has been my place for five years, and I did not want to share it. That is what I felt. That is the small ugly thing. I did not act on it. I would not have. But I felt it. So you should know."

Iselle, finally, turned her face out of the cloak. Her eyes were wet and the lashes were stuck and the brown hair was tangled across her cheek, and she looked, in the firelight, exactly her age, which was twenty, and not a day more.

"Thank you for telling me," she said.

"It does not — it does not matter now. I do not feel it now. I felt it on the road before yesterday. Since the chamber I have not felt it. I wanted you to know I felt it and that I do not feel it any more. Both halves are true."

"Thank you, Selene."

"You are welcome."

A longer silence. The fire popped. Iselle reached one hand out from under the cloak and laid it palm-up on the bracken between them. She did not look at Selene when she did it. The hand sat there, open, in the small space between Iselle's bedroll and Selene's crossed knees.

Selene looked at it.

Then she put the long sword aside on the moss, and she put her own hand into Iselle's hand. Lightly. Iselle's fingers closed around hers. They were warm. There was a small tremor in them that was not coming from the cold.

They sat like that for what was probably another half-hour. Neither of them spoke. After a while Iselle's breathing went slow and steady again and Selene understood she was asleep, and Selene did not take her hand away. She sat at the edge of the bedroll with the long sword across her knees and a half-elven thief's hand in a War Wizard apprentice's fist and she watched the fire and she watched the rise where Kael was on watch, and the wind moved in the black pines, and at the fifth bell Halric came up to relieve her and saw the two hands on the moss and looked at Selene and did not say anything and went and sat across the fire with his hammer across his knees and his face turned away.

Selene slid her hand free, very slowly, so as not to wake Iselle.

She went to her own bedroll.

She slept, for the first time in three nights, without dreaming.

II. The Conversation on the Road

The reveal to Kael happened on the fourth day out of Mournstar, when Vessa sent him forward to scout the country with Branwen because the road was about to bend down through a dry valley between two granite shoulders that Kael had not ridden before, and Branwen had said quietly to Vessa over breakfast I would like to ride forward with him for that hour, if you can spare me, there is a thing I have been needing to say, and Vessa had said yes, and that was that.

They rode side by side at a walking pace, and for the first ten minutes neither of them spoke. Kael was a man who did not require talk while he was reading country, and Branwen had learned over the years to wait until Kael's attention came back from the horizon.

When it did, Kael said, without turning his head: "You have been wanting to talk to me about the sword."

"Yes."

"For two days."

"For longer than that. Since perhaps Helmsblade. I have been waiting until I could say it correctly. I am not certain I can say it correctly now. I am going to try. May I."

"Go on."

Branwen rode in silence for perhaps a count of twenty. He was, Selene had once told Vessa, the only man in the company who actually rehearsed difficult sentences before saying them, the way other people rehearsed songs. The result was that when he spoke, he was almost always saying exactly the thing he had meant to say.

"Kael," he said. "Letterkeeper is not your father's sword."

Kael was very still in the saddle.

"It is the sword your father carried for thirty-two years. That is true. It is the sword that hung over your father's hearth and that you took down off the hooks when you were nineteen. That is also true. It is the sword that is yours now by your father's gift. That is true also, and it is the part that matters most, and I will come back to it. But Kael, the blade itself — the metal, the work, the binding that is in it — that blade is not Cormyrean and it is not your father's. It is older than your house and older than mine and older than the Forest Kingdom, and I think — I am almost certain — that your father did not make it and your great-grandfather did not commission it, although someone in your line at some point mounted it in a Cormyrean hilt and carried it as Cormyrean property and that has been a useful disguise."

"Go on," Kael said. The voice was level. The hand on the reins was not.

"The blade is Netherese, Kael. Not late Netherese — not third-empire work. It is second-empire. It is from the period of the high arcanists. The metal is not steel. I do not know what it is. The marks on the tang are Loross — the same tongue the revenant spoke. The binding in the hilt is something I have only seen described in three Harper documents, and the description was always partial because the documents were copies of copies, and the originals are gone. The closest term for what your sword carries is vessel-binding. The blade was made to hold a thing. A message, possibly. An echo. A spell that needs a long carry. Something a Netherese arcanist did not want to commit to paper or to memory and so committed to a sword instead, because a sword can be inherited and a sword can be carried for centuries and a sword does not age."

Kael said: "And you think Vangerdahast."

Branwen looked at him.

"You knew."

"I have suspected for two days," Kael said. "Since the chamber. The phrase the sword spoke — when I said it for you, you went pale. You said it was Loross, the high tongue of Netheril. My father served Vangerdahast for the last six years of the old wizard's tenure, and Vangerdahast was — Vangerdahast was a Netherese scholar above any other thing he was. Everyone knew it. He spent his last decade in Suzail privately translating second-empire texts. I knew that when I was twelve; my father told me he was bringing the wizard tea at four in the morning and the wizard was reading scrolls in a tongue no one else in the Tower could read. So when you said Loross, Branwen, and the blade had warmed in my hand, and Vangerdahast had given my father a sword as a gift in 1469 — your father, take this, it is mine to give — I understood. I have not yet — I have not yet spoken it because I did not want to. But yes. I think Vangerdahast made the blade. Or had it made. Or modified it. I think my father carried it without knowing what it was. I think — and this is the part that has cost me sleep for two nights, Branwen — I think Vangerdahast gave the sword to my father not as a reward for service but as a hiding-place. A place to put a thing he could not put in writing. A place that would walk south, into a small private household of an honest man, and disappear. I think the sword has been a delivery for twenty-three years and it has finally — last week — begun to deliver."

Branwen rode in silence for perhaps half a minute.

"That is — Kael, that is exactly what I have been working toward telling you, and you have come to it ahead of me. Yes. I think that is what the blade is. I think there is a Magic Mouth in the hilt, or something like one, keyed to a phrase only certain people can speak with the right inflection. I think when the right phrase is spoken near the blade by the right voice, the Mouth will deliver Vangerdahast's last message — to whom, I do not know. About what, I do not know. But Kael, the blade is doing this now. It is waking. The chamber woke part of it. Whatever spoke the phrase that the revenant answered — that was not Vangerdahast, but it was enough of the right shape to start the blade up. You spoke the phrase yourself, in the chamber, and the blade is now warmer than it was a tenday ago and it does not fully cool any more. The blade is reading you. It is testing whether you are the carrier it has been waiting for."

"Am I."

"I do not know."

Kael was quiet for a long moment.

"Branwen," he said, "what would you do, in my place."

"I would not throw the sword away."

"No?"

"No. The sword is a problem and the sword is a tool and the sword is the only private channel back into Vangerdahast's mind that exists in this world. The papers Sira may or may not have are the wrong question. This is the right question. Your father did not carry letters Vangerdahast could not read. He carried a sword Vangerdahast could not commit to paper. The papers are — Kael, I think the papers may not even exist. I think the papers may have been the trail Vangerdahast laid to make the family seem important enough to keep intact, so that the sword would stay in the family. I think that is the real game. And if I am right, then the sword in your hand is the most valuable object on the road north of Helmsblade, and you must not throw it away, you must learn it."

"How do I learn it."

"I do not know. I have never seen one of these blades. I have only read about them. I know that they respond to attention, and they respond to blood, and they respond to language. I know that they should not be drawn in places that will recognise them — which is why the chamber went the way it did — and they should not be carried into other Netherese ruins until you have a better idea what you are dealing with. I know that the blade is fond of you. The carrier-bond runs both ways with these blades. It would not have warmed in your hand the way it did if it did not consider you its hand. That is — that is not a small thing, Kael. The blade has chosen you, the way Adishakti chose Vessa. You are bonded. You did not consent to the bond, but you did not have to — the bond is by blood, and your blood was already in it through your father."

"Vessa knows about Adishakti."

"Yes."

"Does she know about my sword."

"She suspects everything I have just told you. I have spoken with her about it twice. We did not include you in those conversations because you were grieving the chamber and we wanted to give you space. I am sorry. We — I — should have told you sooner. I am telling you now."

Kael nodded slowly. He looked down at the hilt of the older sword on his left hip. The pommel was warm under his hand; he had ridden this whole conversation with his hand on it, unconsciously.

"Branwen," he said.

"Yes."

"Thank you."

"You are welcome."

"What is the phrase."

"What."

"The phrase you said the blade was keyed to. The phrase that releases the Mouth. Do you know it."

"No. I would not tell you if I did. The phrase is to be spoken by a specific voice with a specific inflection by someone Vangerdahast wished to be the receiver. If we knew the phrase and you spoke it, the Mouth would not deliver — it would check, and find you were not the receiver, and the blade might do something I would prefer it did not do. I think we leave the phrase alone until we know who the receiver is. That is part of what we are riding for. I think — I think, Kael — that the receiver may be Sira. Or it may be Caladnei. Or it may be someone else entirely. We will know more in Yartar. We will know more after Yartar."

"All right."

They rode in silence for another mile.

Then Kael said, very quietly: "It is a good sword, Branwen. It has been a good sword for me. I have not known what it was, but I have always — I have always trusted it. I do not regret carrying it. I want to say that out loud."

"Then say it."

"I am saying it. Letterkeeper has been a good sword. I will continue to carry it. I will learn what I can of it. I will do my best by it. And I will trust you and Vessa to tell me when I am about to do something stupid with it, because I do not yet know enough to know."

"We will tell you."

"All right, then."

He took his hand off the pommel for the first time in an hour. The blade, sheathed at his hip, gave one small pulse of warmth that they both felt and that neither of them named, and then it went quiet for a while.

III. The Safe House at Three Larches

Vessa had chosen the safe house six weeks before the company had ridden out of Helmsblade.

She had chosen it the day she had read the letter from her contact in Yartar — a contact she had not seen in person in eleven years, and would not see in person on this trip either — informing her that a Cormyrean writ was being prepared in Suzail concerning a Waterdhavian merchant's wife in Yartar named Sira Voss. That had been six tendays ago. Vessa had read the letter, set it down, gone to the small chest in her room in the rented house in Helmsblade where she kept her working papers, drawn out a map of the upper Dessarin, and put her finger on a steading six miles south of Yartar where the road from the south crossed a small tributary of the Surbrin and a stand of three old larches grew on the western bank. That steading was the Three Larches. It had been a hostelry once. It had not been a hostelry in nine years.

It belonged, in 1492 DR, to a man named Aldric Wenn.

Aldric Wenn had been Vessa's lover for two years, between 1478 and 1480, when she had been twenty and he had been thirty-two, and had been, by various accounts and in various languages: a Sembian privateer's first officer, a Cormyrean caravan-master, a Waterdhavian hide-buyer, a Calishite freelance translator, a Marsemberian river-pilot, a ship's purser out of Mintar, a thief, a forger, a small-stakes smuggler, an occasional informant to the Lords' Alliance, an even more occasional informant to the Zhentarim, and — for reasons that he had once explained to Vessa at length over a bottle of bad Tethyrian red and that she had only half understood at the time — an initiated and active priest of Mask, the god of shadows and thieves, who took his god very seriously while being almost completely unable to take any other thing seriously. Aldric Wenn was a man who had not, as far as Vessa knew, ever told her his real name. She had never asked. He had told her every other thing about himself, sometimes more than once, and she had loved him for two years in the way a young woman loves a man who is genuinely interesting and genuinely unreliable, and they had parted in 1480 in a bad way that had been only seventy percent his fault and that she was now — twelve years later — willing to call mostly her own.

She had not seen him since. They had exchanged letters perhaps four times.

The Three Larches had come to him, by routes he had not specified, in 1483, and he had written to her then asking whether she might want a share in it, which she had declined, and they had not been in correspondence since 1487, when he had written her a single line in code that read if you ever need a quiet roof in the upper Dessarin, the door is unlocked, and she had filed the line and not used it.

She had used it, finally, six weeks ago.

She had written him a letter — three lines, Aldric's preferred length — saying I am riding north in Mirtul. I will be at the Larches between the eighteenth and the twentieth. I am bringing six horses and five people. I will need the upstairs and the cellar. I will pay your standard rate plus a fifty percent discomfort tariff. Please clear the property of anyone you would prefer not to involve.

He had written back, in two lines: The door is unlocked. The fee is whatever you choose to leave on the kitchen table. Bring me a bottle of the Mintarn brandy if you remember.

She had not entirely remembered, but Halric had bought a bottle of Mintarn brandy in Berdusk on the way north, and was carrying it carefully wrapped in a saddlebag, because Vessa had told him at the second night's camp, with the small wry smile that Halric had not seen her wear in two years, Halric, on the eighteenth or so we are going to be the guests of a man who saved me from a knife in 1479 and whom I have not properly thanked for it. Carry the brandy. Do not let Corin drink it.

They reached the Three Larches at the eighteenth bell on the evening of the twentieth of Mirtul.

The three larches stood on the western bank of the tributary in a rough triangle, taller than Selene had imagined trees could grow this far north. The steading itself was a long low Damaran-style hall of dressed stone with a slate roof and a paved yard and a small stable, and it had been kept up with the careful attention of a man who was not in residence often but who paid someone to attend to it when he was not. The chimney was smoking. A storm-lamp was lit by the door. A man was sitting on the kitchen step in a leather jerkin with a clay cup of something in his hand, and when he saw the riders come up the road he stood, and he set the cup down on the step, and he walked out across the paved yard with his hands open at his sides in the old soldier's gesture of no weapon, no harm, and he was smiling.

He was perhaps forty-six. He was not tall — he was Vessa's height, which was tall for a woman and ordinary for a man — and he had the build of a man who had once been wiry and had become, with age, lean in a different way, with grey at the temples and the long greying braid of a Marsemberian river-pilot still running down his back over his right shoulder. His face was deeply lined. His eyes, in the lamp-light from the door, were the colour of weak tea — a brown so light it looked almost gold — and they were bright with a particular kind of pleased mischief that Selene, who had never met this man before, recognised immediately as trouble.

"Vessa Duskmere," he said. "You are five minutes early. You have always been five minutes early. Tymora's left tit, you have not aged a day."

"Aldric."

"Not a day, Vessa. Whatever you are doing, do it twice, and then write down the recipe and sell it to a Waterdhavian. We could retire."

"I am not aging because I am working. You should try it."

"I have tried working. It did not suit me. I am back to whatever this is."

He came up to her. He took her right hand in both of his — gently, with a small ceremonial bow that was three quarters mockery and one quarter genuine — and he kissed it once, lightly, on the back of the knuckles, and he said, in a much quieter voice that was meant only for her: "It is good to see you, Vessa. It has been a long time. You are well?"

"I am well. You are well?"

"I am ridiculous. You knew I would be. Come inside. All of you, come inside. I have laid a fire and I have laid a meal and I have moved the three people who were living here last tenday to three other places I owe them favours at, and the steading is clean and the cellar is clean and the upstairs is clean and there are six bedrolls laid out in the long room with bolsters and clean linen. I have killed a pig. I have made a soup. I have baked, Vessa, with my own hands, although Halric will tell you that this is a thing I should not have done unsupervised." He had turned to Halric with a grin. "You are Halric. You have my brandy. Bless you. I have been thirsty for that brandy since 1486."

"It is good to meet you," Halric said, with the slow Damaran caution of a man who had not yet decided what to make of this.

"It is good to be met. Welcome, all of you. Come in out of the road. I will see to the horses. No, Kael — I see you, I know who you are, you have your bow and your face and you can tell me where to put your bay because you have already decided, but I am putting the horses up tonight, because Vessa has paid me an absurd sum and I will earn it. The stable is the small building on the left. The grain is in the bin. The water trough is full. I have brushed it out myself this afternoon and I have an opinion about your horses, which I will share at dinner."

"Aldric," Vessa said.

"Yes, Vessa."

"This is Iselle. She is — she is with us. She is not to be referred to in any letter or any conversation by anyone in this house in any form. Do you understand."

Aldric stopped. He looked at Iselle. He looked carefully — a long careful look that took perhaps three seconds — and then he gave Iselle a small bow of a different quality from the one he had given Vessa, which was the bow Selene understood immediately to be the bow of a priest of Mask greeting a person who had recently lost a parent and was on a road they had not expected to walk.

"I understand, Vessa," he said quietly. "Iselle. Welcome to the Three Larches. You are safe in this house tonight. You will be safe in this house tomorrow. You will be safe in this house for as long as you need to be safe in this house, and after you leave, this house will not have heard of you. You have my word on it on the Lord of Shadows. Will you come inside."

Iselle nodded. She did not speak. Aldric did not require her to.

"Inside," he said, more cheerfully, to all of them. "I will take the horses. Vessa — the brandy."

She took the bottle from Halric and put it into Aldric's hand, and Aldric kissed the bottle, on the label, with the same small ceremony, and then he handed his reins of attention to the horses and walked the bay toward the stable, talking to it in low conversational Damaran as he went.

Vessa watched him go for a moment.

Then she said, to no one in particular: "He is exactly as I left him. He is exactly as I left him. Twelve years. Tymora's hand."

"Vessa," Branwen said, very carefully, "who is that man."

"His name is Aldric Wenn," Vessa said. "He is a priest of Mask. He is a forger, a smuggler, an occasional informant to four organisations none of which know about the other three, a former lover of mine, and one of perhaps six people on the Sword Coast I would trust with my life on a night like tonight. He is also — this is the part you will need to know, Branwen — the man who is going to forge the Sembian papers we are about to use to make Sira Voss into Sira Auldermarch of Selgaunt. He has a working relationship with the forger in Daerlun whose name I gave you, and he is going to be our courier. We will not see the Daerlun forger in person. Aldric will."

"How much does he know."

"Right now he knows that I have ridden north with five companions, that one of them is a young woman who has lost her father, and that I need a quiet roof for three nights and a courier service for the next ten days. He does not know about Sira. He does not know about the writ. He does not know about the column. By the morning, after we have all eaten and slept, I will tell him as much of the rest as he needs to know to do the work. He will not ask for more. He has never asked for more. That is how he and I work."

"Vessa."

"Yes, Branwen."

"You have been planning this for six weeks."

"I have been planning this for six tendays. Yes."

"You have not mentioned him once."

"No. I have not mentioned him because he is — he is a man whose name should not be in conversation until conversation is necessary. That is part of what makes him useful. I do not say his name in inns. I do not say his name at fires. I have not said his name at all in ten years, and it has been worth not saying. He is here tonight because we need him, and because I trust him, and because — Branwen, you are going to like him by the end of breakfast tomorrow. He is one of yours, in the way that matters. He works for the people he likes, and the people he likes are usually the ones the rules have not been kind to. He will do well by us."

"All right."

"Inside, all of you. He has made soup, and apparently he has baked, and we are not going to let either of those things go cold."

They went inside.

-----

This chapter is continued here due to post length limits: https://www.reddit.com/r/Forgotten_Realms/comments/1tcuyb4/the_approach_to_yartar_the_weight_of_silver/

This is the 2nd part of Chapter 4 continued from here: https://www.reddit.com/r/Forgotten_Realms/comments/1tcusj4/the_ruin_at_mournstar_the_weight_of_silver/

The Weight of Silver - Full Chapter Listing:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Forgotten_Realms/comments/1tcwht4/lady_vessa_duskmere_the_weight_of_silver_a_tale/

----

Wight at the Ruin of Mournstar

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VI. The Fight

Iselle stepped forward.

She stepped past Vessa, past Branwen, into the open ground at the centre of the chamber, and she raised her staff in her right hand and her open spellbook in her left, and she spoke a word Selene did not understand in a voice that was not the voice she had been speaking with on the ride.

The word was clean and short. It cut through the chamber like a knife through silk.

The light at the tip of her staff went from green to white. A bar of cold white force came out of the staff in a straight line and struck the revenant in the chest.

The revenant staggered. Staggered — Selene saw, with an apprentice thief's attention to small detail, that the revenant had been moved. A Netherese arcanist three thousand years dead had been physically displaced by a third-circle force-bolt from a girl who was not yet a journeyman. The revenant did not fall. It did not even stop coming. But it had been moved.

It hissed something in Loross. It came on.

"Halric, Corin — the wights," Vessa snapped. "Branwen, with me on the revenant. Kael, the door. Hold the door. Selene — protect Iselle. Do not let the wights touch her."

Selene was moving before Vessa had finished saying it.

The half-orc wight came at Iselle from the left at a pace that was wrong for a thing that should have been slow. Selene took it in the side of the throat with her long sword — a clean cut, the kind Vessa had drilled into her on a thousand mornings, the kind that should have ended a living man — and the wight did not bleed. Its head sagged sideways at a wrong angle. It kept coming. Selene cut again, lower, into the gut, and the wight raked at her with its left hand and Selene moved sideways the way Vessa had taught her to move sideways and the wight's nails took her shoulder instead of her throat and she felt the cold of it go through her cloak and through the leather and into her skin like a knife of ice and she swore.

The cold was — bad. It was not pain. It was a thing the wight was taking from her. She felt the lift go out of her left arm.

"Down, Selene," Iselle said, behind her, in the same not-her-voice.

Selene dropped.

A second bar of white force went over Selene's head and struck the half-orc wight at point-blank range and the wight came apart — actually came apart, in pieces, on the flagstones. Selene rolled up onto her right knee with her left arm hanging.

"I am all right," she said.

"You are not," said Iselle. "Keep moving. The cold goes through. Do not stand still."

She was moving herself. Iselle was — Selene saw, with a part of her that was registering things despite the chamber — moving in a way no Cormyrean War Wizard apprentice had any business moving. She had angled herself so that her staff arm was clear and her body was between the elf-wight and the spellbook, and she was casting again, and the staff was glowing brighter, and the third word of the cantrip she had begun was something else entirely.

Across the chamber, Halric had taken the human-armour wight in the chest with the war-hammer at full swing and the wight had folded backward, and Corin had the elf-wight engaged with the bastard sword in a slow careful pattern of cuts that were keeping it off but were not killing it. Branwen and Vessa were both on the revenant — Branwen at its right, with Loomwhisper and the longsword working in the ambidextrous duellist's pattern Selene had seen him use exactly twice; Vessa at its left, with Adishakti drawn and the sister-blade in her off hand, low. The revenant was bleeding something black where they had cut it. It did not seem to be slowing.

Kael was at the chamber's southern doorway with the longbow drawn. He shot the elf-wight Corin was working from the side, three arrows in perhaps four seconds. The elf-wight took the third arrow in the eye and sat down on the flagstones and did not get up, and Corin, breathing hard, stepped over it and crossed to Halric.

The revenant raised its right hand.

Branwen saw it raise the hand. Branwen understood what the raised hand meant — Selene, watching from the floor with her left arm dead, did not — and Branwen shouted something Selene did not catch, in a tongue she did not know, and a small invisible force struck the revenant's hand at the wrist and the cantrip-spell the revenant had been gathering broke, in midair, with a sound like a glass breaking very far away.

"Counterspell," Branwen said grimly, in Common, to no one in particular. "I can do that perhaps once more before I am out. Vessa —"

"Working," Vessa said.

She drove forward. She had read something in the revenant's posture Selene could not read, and she went under its left hand at a half-crouch and put Adishakti up into the place beneath its ribcage where, in a living thing, the heart would have been. The blade went in to half its length. The revenant made a sound that was not a sound — it was a thing that bypassed the ear and arrived directly in the bones — and Vessa held the blade in place for one heartbeat, two, and then twisted it in the way she had been taught long ago by a man Selene had never met.

The revenant came apart.

Not the way the wight had come apart. The wight had been broken into pieces. The revenant unmade — its body collapsed in on itself in a long slow column of dust and old red cloth and small clattering bones that fell to the flagstones in the spiral pattern from which it had risen, and the cold blue lights in its eye-sockets went out one and then the other, and the chamber went quiet.

The last wight — the human in old plate, Halric's wight — was still moving, on the flagstones, with its breastplate caved in. Halric finished it with one downward strike of the war-hammer to the head, in the way one finishes a thing that has already lost.

Silence.

Selene's left arm was beginning to come back, slowly, with an ache that was not pain.

Iselle stood at the centre of the chamber with her staff still raised and her spellbook still open. Her face was very white. A thin line of blood had come from her left nostril and was tracking down to her upper lip. Her hand on the staff was shaking.

The flagstones were moving again.

"Branwen," Vessa said.

"I see it. I see it."

The spiral had begun to collapse. The binding pattern was failing — Selene understood now, with the part of herself that had been listening to Branwen earlier, that the revenant had been the keystone of the binding rather than a thing the binding contained, and ending it had unmade the work, and the chamber was beginning to come down.

"Out," Vessa said. "Out, all of you, out now, leave the bedrolls, leave the saddlebags, go."

They went.

They went out of the chamber and through the southern doorway and across the broken stones of the courtyard at a sprint, with the storm coming down hard now in cold sleet and the horses screaming under the corbelled arch where Halric and Corin had tethered them. Halric reached the horses first and got two of them loose. Corin got two more. Selene, with one good arm, got her own grey gelding loose by feel. Iselle was being half-carried by Vessa across the courtyard; the spell Iselle had cast last had taken something out of her, and she was on the edge of consciousness, and Vessa was running with her under one arm in a way Vessa had not run in front of Selene in five years.

Behind them the tower of Mournstar came down.

It did not come down in a single moment. It came down in three. The first was a shudder that ran up the tower from the foundations. The second was the collapse of the topmost storey, which crashed into the second. The third was the slow folding of the whole tower in on itself, into the chamber they had just run from, with a roar that flattened the moor for a quarter-mile.

A great cloud of grey dust came out of the wreckage. The horses screamed.

The company rode. They rode south and west, away from the falling tower, into the storm, in the dark, in the sleet, with Iselle slumped over the front of Vessa's saddle and Selene riding one-handed and Kael — Selene saw, glancing back — riding last with the bow in his off hand and Letterkeeper now drawn, finally, in his right, the wire-wrapped older sword that had warmed in his hand and called the dead.

The blade was glowing faintly.

The revenant was gone. The blade was still glowing.

Kael, on the ride, did not look at it.

VII. The Hilltop

They camped at first light on a hilltop perhaps four miles west of Mournstar — a low rise of granite and turf that looked back across the moor toward the wreckage of the sky-city, and forward toward the long open country to the north. Kael had picked the hill because of what he had said, quietly, to Vessa in the last hour of the ride: we are not done with this. The wights that came up out of the floor were three. There were more wights in the lower chambers. They will come up. They will come up, and they will follow.

"Will they follow us?" Vessa had asked.

"No. They will follow whatever passes through the perimeter next. The binding is broken. They are loose now, but they are bound to the place in a different way — they cannot leave it without a focus. Whoever crosses the perimeter next gives them a focus. They will track that person until the focus is broken or until they are destroyed."

"How many wights."

"I do not know. Perhaps six. Perhaps a dozen. Branwen?"

Branwen, riding behind, had said: "A tarchon would have had a household of servants in life. Minimum six. Likely ten or twelve. The tower fell on most of them. Some will have been buried. Some will dig out. Of the ones that dig out — perhaps half. Six. Eight."

"Six to eight wights, then. Loose in Mournstar. Looking for a focus."

"Yes."

"How long until they dig out."

"Hours. Perhaps a day."

"All right."

Vessa had ridden in silence for a few minutes.

"The column," she said, eventually.

"Yes," said Kael.

"How far behind us."

"By Halric's reading of the tracks at sundown yesterday — half a day. Possibly a little less. They will be at the perimeter of Mournstar by mid-afternoon today."

"They will follow our tracks in."

"They will."

"Talantha is not stupid."

"Talantha is not stupid. But Talantha is hunting six people including an apprentice she has been ordered to take alive, and we have ridden into a Netherese ruin in a storm, and any senior officer who fails to follow into a ruin in those circumstances loses the apprentice and answers for it. She will follow us in. She will not have a choice."

Vessa did not answer that immediately.

"Kael," she said, after a long while.

"Yes."

"This was not our choosing."

"No."

"We did not lead them here. We came here because the storm forced us. They are following us because they are hunting us. The wights will rise because the binding broke. The binding broke because the revenant came up because — because of the sword, Kael, because of Letterkeeper. We did not choose this either. But we are the cause of it."

"Yes."

"How does Corin sit with this."

"Ask him."

She had asked him, when they had made camp on the hilltop in the grey light of dawn, with the storm finally beginning to ease and the smoke of Mournstar's fallen tower still visible over the moor four miles to the east. Corin had been seeing to the horses. He was, Selene noticed, working with the same slow careful hands he had used the night they buried Vandren. He was a man who did certain things slowly when his interior was loud.

Vessa had walked over to him. They had spoken quietly for several minutes. Selene had not been able to hear the words. She had been able to see Corin's face. At one point Corin had stopped what he was doing and stood very still for perhaps thirty seconds with his armoured hand on his horse's neck. At another he had looked up at the eastern horizon, where the smoke of Mournstar was, and his mouth had set in a way Selene had not seen it set before.

When Vessa came back, Selene asked her, quietly: "Is he all right."

"He is not all right," Vessa said. "He will not be all right today. He has agreed that we will sit on this hill and watch. He has agreed that we cannot ride down. He has agreed that to ride down would be to die alongside them and to fail Sira. He has agreed all of that. He is not all right."

"Will he ride on after."

"Yes. He will ride on. He told me — he told me that he wants Halric to sit with him while we watch. He does not want to sit with me. He does not want to sit with you. He wants Halric, because Halric is the only one of us who has buried more men than he has, and Halric will not say anything stupid. I think this is wise of him."

Iselle was lying under a folded cloak fifteen paces away. She had come back to consciousness an hour after the ride, briefly, and had taken water and asked what had happened, and had gone under again. Vessa had said, watching her: she will sleep until evening. She has been three quarters drained. She did very well, Selene. Did you see what she did.

I saw, Selene had said.

She is sixth-circle, Selene.

I know.

I will speak with her about it when she wakes. Not now.

The column rode into the perimeter of Mournstar at twenty minutes past noon.

VIII. The Battle

Selene watched it through the small folding spyglass Branwen had handed her without comment. She had not used a spyglass before. Branwen had shown her how to set the focus with a quarter-turn of the outer ring, and she had set it, and after the first few minutes she had not put it down.

The column came in from the south, at a hard trot. Twelve riders, two War Wizards riding together in the centre — Talantha at the front of the pair, Branwen had said, looking through his own glass; the second mage is younger, possibly her own apprentice, possibly a journeyman they sent her with. The riders were in standard half-plate and surcoat, pennoned, two outriders ahead, two behind. Talantha was riding a heavy bay. Her hair, even at this distance through the glass, was visible — a dark red pulled back into a soldier's braid, with a thin grey at the temple.

They came to the southern perimeter of Mournstar. The outriders dismounted and inspected the ground. They found the company's tracks and, Selene saw, the deeper drag-mark where Vessa had half-carried Iselle through the courtyard. They reported back to Talantha. Talantha conferred with the second mage. The second mage shook his head once and gestured outward — do not go in, Selene read, even at this distance, from the gesture's shape. Talantha said something to him that was clearly we are going in. The mage did not argue further.

The column entered Mournstar.

For the first quarter-hour nothing happened. The riders moved slowly through the wreckage, in formation, the outriders extended. Selene saw the second mage cast something — a Detect Magic, Branwen said, watching beside her — and saw a faint shimmer pass through the column's formation as the spell completed.

Then the outrider on the left fell off his horse.

Selene, watching, did not see what had taken him. He simply went sideways out of the saddle, and his horse bolted, and the rest of the column wheeled toward where he had fallen, and Talantha had her staff up in less than two heartbeats and a sphere of pale blue light had appeared around the column at perhaps thirty feet of radius — a ward, Branwen said tightly, a fourth-circle ward, that is competent.

The wights came out of the broken stone.

There were eight, by Selene's count through the glass. Eight, not six. Two of them had been the deep-cellar wights Branwen had warned of, and they were faster than the others — they came across the open ground at a sprint that horses could not match.

The blue ward held against the first two.

It did not hold against the third.

The wight that broke through took an outrider off his horse the way a hawk takes a rabbit. He did not have time to draw. The wight had him on the stones inside a heartbeat, and Selene, looking through the glass, saw exactly what a wight did to a living man and made a small sound she had not meant to make and lowered the glass for a moment.

"Keep watching, Selene," Vessa said quietly, beside her. "I am sorry. You need to see this. You need to know what we do not ride down into."

Selene raised the glass.

The column was, by then, in the kind of trouble that competent soldiers can sometimes fight their way out of and sometimes cannot. Talantha had begun casting properly. She was — Tymora, Selene thought; that is power — calling fire out of the air in long whip-shaped lines that struck three wights at once and left them burning on the stones. Her second mage, the younger one, had a second ward up around the four nearest soldiers, holding the perimeter. Two soldiers had drawn silvered blades — they had been carrying them, Selene saw, the column had been briefed for the possibility of undead — and were working the closest wight in a pair.

But it was not enough. The wights kept coming. Eight, then ten — two more had dug out, late, from the deeper rubble. And then from the wreckage of the tower itself a sound rose that was not the sound of wights, and Branwen, beside Selene, said one word:

"No."

A second revenant.

It came up out of the broken tower in a column of grey dust and stood — Selene saw, even at this distance — taller than the first had been. It raised both arms.

What came out of its arms was a wave of cold — visible cold, the air going white in front of it as it travelled — that swept across the column at the third bell.

Three soldiers and the younger War Wizard went down where they stood. The cold passed over them and they did not get up. Selene, watching, understood that they were dead, and that they had been dead before they hit the ground, and that the cold had simply walked them out of their bodies.

Talantha did not go down. Talantha had — Selene saw, through the glass — turned in the last possible heartbeat and brought her staff up in front of her, and a hot golden disc had bloomed between her and the cold, and the cold had broken on the disc in a way it had not broken on any other warding of the day.

That, Branwen said quietly, was Wall of Fire. Fifth-circle. That woman is the real thing, Vessa.

"I see it," Vessa said.

"She is fifth-circle competent under pressure. Under pressure, Vessa. Most fifth-circle wizards are not fifth-circle under pressure. Most fifth-circle wizards under pressure are fourth-circle. She is — she is not a person we want to fight."

"I know."

"Iselle is going to have to fight her."

"I know that too."

Talantha was the only War Wizard left. She had perhaps four soldiers still on their feet. The second revenant was advancing across the courtyard. The wights — five of the original eight, plus the two that had come up late — were closing from the flanks.

Talantha did three things in the next forty seconds, in sequence, and Selene watched all three through the glass and would remember them.

She cast Fireball into the densest cluster of wights, three of them, and reduced them to embers on the flagstones. She turned, before the Fireball had finished detonating, and cast a second-circle Misty Step that put her twenty feet to the right where the second revenant had not been expecting her. And she shouted — Selene could not hear the shout, but she could see it — at the four remaining soldiers, and the four soldiers turned and broke for the southern perimeter at a run.

Three of them did not make it. Two wights came in on the diagonal and took the rearmost two soldiers within ten paces of the perimeter; the third soldier got to the perimeter and was hit at the boundary by something Selene could not see and went down clutching at his face.

The fourth soldier — and Talantha behind him — crossed the perimeter at a sprint.

They did not stop. They did not turn. They ran for the horses — three of which had bolted to the south at the fight's beginning and were standing now, blowing, in a small group two hundred yards from the ruin's edge — and Talantha caught a horse on the second try and was up. The soldier got onto a second horse. They rode south at a hard gallop.

The wights followed.

"They will not catch them in open ground," Branwen said quietly, watching. "Wights are fast for short distances. They are not fast for long distances. The horses will outrun them within an hour."

"Will they."

"They will."

"Then she gets back to the column relief. Or to Suzail."

"Yes. She gets back."

They watched. The two riders disappeared south over the moor's first fold, and the wights followed for perhaps half a mile and then began to peel off, and within an hour none of them were following any longer. They turned, eventually, all of them, and walked slowly back toward Mournstar. The second revenant — Selene saw, with the glass — did not pursue. It stood at the perimeter of its ruin and watched the riders go, and then turned, and walked back into the wreckage, and was gone.

The bodies on the courtyard remained. Eleven of them. The horses that had not bolted were still tethered, screaming, where the column had left them, and the wights — some of the wights — turned to them on the way back into the ruin, and Selene lowered the glass at that point and did not raise it again.

IX. Corin

Corin had watched all of it. He had sat on a flat stone at the eastern edge of the hilltop with his bastard sword laid across his knees and his hands folded over the hilt and his face still. Halric had sat beside him for the entire battle without speaking, except once at the moment of the Wall of Fire, when Halric had said, quietly, "Tymora, that was a working," and Corin had said, even more quietly, "Yes," and then both had been silent again.

When the riders had gone south and the wights had turned back into the ruin and the courtyard had gone still, Corin stood up.

He stood with his back to the rest of the company for perhaps a minute. Then he turned. His face was the colour of the moor in winter. He walked to where Vessa was standing and he stopped four feet from her and he said, in a voice that did not waver but was, Selene heard, doing the work of not wavering rather than the work of not feeling:

"Vessa."

"Yes, Corin."

"Eleven men. Ten Purple Dragons and one journeyman mage. Eleven men who would not have died today if we had not ridden into that ruin yesterday."

"Yes."

"I want you to understand that I understand it. I understand we did not lead them in. I understand we did not have a choice about the storm. I understand we did not raise the revenant — that was the sword Kael carries, and he did not know it would do what it did, and even if he had known it I do not think we could have ridden out into the storm and lost the horses and possibly Iselle. I understand all of this, Vessa. I am not — I am not saying we are at fault. I am saying that eleven men are dead, who would have arrested me if they had caught me alive, and I would have hung in Suzail in chains, and I would have deserved it, and they did not do anything wrong today except follow our tracks into a ruin under orders from people they trusted. Do you understand me, Vessa."

"I understand you, Corin."

"I am going to say a prayer for them. Now. From this hill. I am going to say the Ilmaterian words for them, all eleven of them, and I am going to use the fingers of my right hand to count them as I say them, because I do not want to forget the count. I would like — I would like the company to stand for the prayer, please. I would like all of you to stand. I will not ask you to kneel. I will not ask you to speak. But I would like you to stand, for the eleven men who died down there today because of where we rode."

"We will stand, Corin."

They stood.

Corin said the Ilmaterian words. He said them eleven times, once for each man, with one of his fingers folding down each time. When he reached the last finger of his second hand he stopped. He stood for perhaps thirty seconds in silence. Then he opened his hands and lowered them to his sides, and he turned, and he walked back to his stone, and he sat down, and he laid the bastard sword across his knees again, and he did not speak for the rest of the day.

Halric sat down beside him, and stayed.

X. Riding On

They rode at sundown.

Iselle was awake, weak, but able to ride if Vessa rode beside her with a hand on her elbow at the climbs. The ka-bird and Joren's letter were still inside Selene's jacket against her ribs, and she had become, in the past two days, used to the shape of them. Branwen rode at the rear with Loomwhisper across his saddle and a face like winter. Halric and Corin rode together, at the column's centre, and did not speak. Kael rode at the front, with Letterkeeper now sheathed but, Selene noticed when she rode up beside him for a few minutes, warm to the touch through the leather of the scabbard — the blade had not gone fully cold since the chamber.

Vessa rode beside Iselle.

After they had ridden perhaps a league north and west of the hilltop, and the smoke of Mournstar had finally dropped below the line of the moor behind them, Vessa said quietly to Iselle, on the horses: "What you cast last night. The bolt, and the cantrip you broke off, and the thing you did at the end before you went under. That last one. What grade was it."

Iselle was quiet for a long time.

"Sixth," she said.

"Sixth."

"Yes, Lady."

"You have been carrying sixth, Iselle, in your spellbook, untested in front of a teacher, since when."

"Since perhaps the autumn of last year."

"And your teacher does not know."

"No, Lady."

"All right."

They rode in silence for another minute.

"Iselle."

"Yes."

"Do not — do not tell the company about the sixth. Not yet. Branwen and I have worked it out. The others will work it out in time. But do not announce it. There is a thing about power that I want you to understand, which is that other people's relationship to your power is something you do not control, and the slower they come to it the better they manage it. Do you understand?"

"Yes."

"Good."

They rode on.

Iselle, beside Vessa in the dusk, pulled her cloak tighter against the wind off the moor and looked north toward the country they were riding into — toward Yartar, toward Sira Voss, toward the second tenday of Mirtul and the column behind them and Talantha riding south now to report to Laspeera with her arm broken and her apprentice dead.

Iselle said, quietly, almost to herself: "She will come for me."

"Yes."

"She knows what I am now. She saw the bolt before we left."

"Yes."

"She will tell Laspeera."

"Probably not," Vessa said. "Probably she will not tell Laspeera. Probably she will keep that detail for herself, because she will want to know what you actually are before her seniors do. That is what I would do. That is what Talantha will do. She is going to come for you, Iselle, and she is going to come for you in particular, and she is not going to share what she knows about you with anyone until she has you in her hands. That is the bad news. The good news is that this gives us time. She is now your enemy in a private war, and private wars move slower than public ones. We have until Yartar."

"Yartar."

"Yartar."

Iselle nodded. She rode on.

Behind them, somewhere on the southern road, a War Wizard with a broken arm and a single surviving soldier rode hard for Cormyr with the smell of cold magic in her cloak and the memory of a third-circle force-bolt cast by an apprentice she had been told was nothing more than a dutiful girl from Marsember.

Talantha Blackrune did not weep on the ride. She had been a War Wizard for twenty-two years and she did not weep in saddle. But her hand, on the reins, was tighter than it needed to be, and she was already, by the second hour of the ride, drafting in her head the report she would make to Laspeera in four days' time.

The report would say nothing about the bolt of force from the chamber.

She had decided on that within the first hour.

Iselle Vandrensdaughter, the report would say, was killed in the ruin.

That was a story Talantha could verify or disprove later, on her own time, in her own way, with her own column.

She rode south.

Iselle rode north.

Between them the High Moor lay in the grey-blue dusk, and the smoke of Mournstar settled, and the wind moved, and the company that had been five and was now six rode on toward the second tenday of Mirtul.

---

To be continued in The Approach to Yartar.

Weight is Silver is a story charting rise of the House of Duskmere and of Lady Vessa Duskmere becoming one of the most powerful and influential people in the Sword Coast.

The Weight of Silver - Full Chapter Listing:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Forgotten_Realms/comments/1tcwht4/lady_vessa_duskmere_the_weight_of_silver_a_tale/
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The Ruin at Mournstar

The Weight of Silver — Chapter Four

Days six through nine out of Helmsblade. The High Moor.

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Netherese Revenant in the Ruin at Mournstar

I. The Morning After

Iselle of the Sedgewater woke at the sixth bell of the morning to the sound of someone trying very quietly not to wake her, and lay with her eyes closed for some seconds working out which person it was, in which company, in what country, and on which side of which dawn.

The answers came in that order, and the last of them was the worst.

Her father was dead.

She lay on her side under the borrowed cloak with her face turned to the bracken and let the knowledge be true for a count of perhaps thirty. The bracken smelt of bog-cotton and the small herbs of the moor, and the air above the bracken smelt of woodsmoke gone cold, and somewhere nearby a horse blew through its lips in the way horses do when they are not yet quite awake. She heard, a little further off, the small steady scrape of a whetstone on a blade — Branwen, she thought, though she was not yet sure how she knew it was him by sound alone — and the murmur of two people talking in low voices, one of them Vessa.

The person who had been trying not to wake her was Halric. He was crouched by the cold fire pit with his bastard sword laid across his knees and a small clay pot of something warm — porridge, she could smell it now, oats and honey — at his elbow, and he had heard her shift under the cloak and had gone still in the way a large man can go still when he is trying to make himself smaller.

"Oh," he said quietly, when he saw her eyes open. "I am sorry, Iselle. I was trying not to."

"It is all right."

"I have made you breakfast. It is — it is just oats and honey. I did not know what else. I did not know what you would —"

"It is good of you, Halric. Thank you. I am hungry."

She was. She had not expected to be. She sat up slowly, with the cloak still around her shoulders, and Halric brought the clay pot over and set it on the moss in front of her with a wooden spoon and a small cloth and the air, briefly, of a man who had performed a ritual he did not know he had been about to perform. He stayed crouched in front of her for a moment. His beard was damp from the dew. His eyes were brown and very kind.

"I lost my mother when I was twelve," he said, quietly, in the gentle Damaran cadence he used only when he was speaking carefully. "I will not — I will not say I know. But I know some of it. The first morning is the hardest of all of them. The second morning is also hard. The third morning you will hate everyone at this fire for being alive. The fourth morning you will hate yourself for the third morning. By the seventh you will be eating oats and honey and not noticing that you are eating them, and you will look up and see that the world has not ended after all and feel guilty about that for a long time. That is — that is the shape of it. I am sorry, Iselle. Eat your breakfast."

She ate her breakfast.

He sat with her while she ate, and did not speak further, and when she had finished he took the empty pot away with the same small ceremony with which he had brought it, and Iselle understood, in the way a person understands such things, that Halric Stone had just made himself her uncle by an act of will, and that this was a thing she had needed and had not known she needed and did not yet know how to be grateful for.

She put the cloak aside. She stood.

The company was breaking camp. Corin was checking girths on the picket. Kael was already mounted, fifty yards out, the bay walking a slow arc around the camp's perimeter as he watched the country south. Selene was tying her bedroll behind her saddle, working with the small economy of movement that Iselle had been noticing since yesterday morning, with her short black hair still mussed from sleep and her face — Iselle saw, looking properly for the first time — younger than Iselle had registered on the road. Selene was perhaps her own age. She had assumed the assassin was older. She filed the correction.

Vessa was standing with Branwen at the edge of the willows by the Sedgewater, twenty paces from the camp, in a low conversation that Iselle could not hear. Branwen was holding a small folded square of paper — a report, Iselle understood after a moment, the report, the forged one — and Vessa was nodding as he spoke. Branwen looked up, saw Iselle was awake, and beckoned her over with two fingers.

She went.

II. The Forged Report

"Iselle," Vessa said, when she had crossed the bracken to them. "I am sorry to do this to you so soon after waking, but the country is moving against us and we cannot wait. We need to send a report south. Today. Before noon. If the report goes out today and is intercepted by tomorrow evening, we have until perhaps the twentieth of Mirtul before Suzail begins to suspect it is forged. That gives us five clear days. I need — we need — the report to be written by you, in your hand, sealed with your stamp, and to say what your teacher will expect it to say. Can you do that?"

"Yes."

"You understand what we are asking."

"I understand."

"Then I will not insult you by saying it twice. Branwen has the paper. He has drafted the wording you should use; you may change it as your hand requires it to read truly. The seal is in your father's saddlebag with the rest of your kit. We retrieved it last night. We did not break it."

"Thank you."

"Branwen will sit with you while you write. Not because we do not trust you. Because the wording matters and the wording is his trade. He is the one who knows what your teacher will be reading for. He will check it. Then we will send it."

"How will we send it."

"Halric will drive a horse south at midmorning. The horse will be your father's bay, with your father's saddle, with the report in the saddlebag inside a cylinder marked with your seal. The horse will walk south for perhaps half a day before someone finds it. By then the column will be at the Sedgewater. They will recover the bag. They will read the report. They will believe what they wish to believe for as long as they can."

Iselle nodded. Her hand had begun, slightly, to shake. She put it behind her back.

"There is one other thing," Vessa said.

"Yes."

"After you write the report we will need to talk, you and I, about what happens if they catch us. I would prefer to have that conversation on the road rather than now. But I want you to know it is coming, so that you may begin to think about it, because I will not have you hearing what I have to say to you for the first time when there is no time left to think. Do you understand?"

"Yes."

"Good." Vessa looked at her for a moment. "Iselle. How are you."

"I am — I am not, yet, anything in particular, Lady. I will be something in particular by tonight. I do not know what."

Vessa nodded slowly.

"That is the most honest answer anyone has given me in three days," she said. "Branwen — let her write."

She walked away. Branwen sat down on a flat stone by the willows and gestured Iselle to the moss beside him. He had a small writing-board, a quill, an inkhorn, and three sheets of the standard-issue Cormyrean despatch paper that Iselle had been trained to write reports on since her first year. He had clearly taken them from her own satchel.

She sat. She took the quill. Her hand, she found, had stopped shaking when she touched the quill.

"What does the wording need to say," she asked.

"It needs to say nothing of substance. Field check completed. Direction confirmed. Numbers confirmed at five. No engagement. Returning to Suzail by the eighteenth at the latest. Signed Iselle Vandrensdaughter, apprentice, fourth year, with the date of the fourteenth of Mirtul, which is yesterday's date, because if you write it in tomorrow's hand someone in the cipher office will notice and we will lose a day."

"And my father's signature."

"We are not signing your father's name, Iselle. The report goes in your hand alone and your seal alone. The reason — and I want you to hear me on this — the reason is that I will not put your father's hand to a forgery in the days after his death. He would not want it. I would not want it for him. The report goes with your name only. Your teacher will assume your father chose to let you carry this one yourself. That is a believable assumption. It costs us nothing in deception and it costs your father nothing in honour."

Iselle looked at him for a long moment. She had not expected him to say that.

"Thank you," she said.

"Write."

She wrote. The wording was easier than she had expected; she had written perhaps two hundred reports in this exact form over four years, and her hand did the work without her having to attend to it closely, which left a part of her free to attend to other things. She attended to Branwen, who had picked up his whetstone and gone back to Loomwhisper while she wrote, and who did not watch her. She attended to her own breath. She attended, with the part of herself that had cast Greater Invisibility in a cellar at eighteen, to the small slow current of the Weave on the moor this morning, which she had not been paying attention to in three days because there had been no air for it, and which now she found was — she paused, mid-word, struck by it — thicker than it had been at home. The High Moor was old country. The Weave ran heavier here than it ran in Marsember. She had not known that. No one had told her.

She filed the observation. She finished the report. She sealed it with her stamp. She handed it to Branwen.

He read it once, slowly, mouthing each line.

"It is good," he said. "It is exactly what she will read for and exactly what she will find. Well done."

He stood. He carried the sealed cylinder across the camp to where Halric had already saddled Vandren's bay. He spoke briefly to Halric. Halric tied the cylinder into the saddlebag. He swung up onto the bay, walked it a hundred yards south of the camp, gave the reins a gentle slap, and started the horse southwards at an easy walking pace.

The bay walked south, alone, with Iselle's father's saddle on its back and Iselle's father's blanket folded under the saddle and the report cylinder in the bag.

Halric stood watching it go for a long time. So did Iselle, who had walked over to him without quite meaning to.

"He was a good horse," Halric said, quietly, after the bay was perhaps a quarter-mile gone.

"He was."

"He will find his way."

"Yes."

"I am sorry, Iselle."

"I know. Halric."

"Yes."

"Thank you for the porridge."

"Any morning, child."

III. The Conversation on the Road

They rode north and west all day, and by late afternoon the Greypeaks had risen properly on their left hand — a long broken wall of grey teeth against the sky, with cloud building over the further ridges and the wind off them carrying the first hard cold of weather coming down out of the Spine of the World. Kael had been quiet all day. He had ridden ahead, then back, then ahead again, in the small uneasy circles of a man whose read of the country was telling him something he did not like.

At the eighth bell of the afternoon he reined in beside Vessa and said, briefly: "Tomorrow."

"Storm?"

"Late tomorrow afternoon. Hard. Off the northern peaks. Hail at first, then sleet, then a wet snow by midnight. We will not be able to ride through it. We will need cover."

"Cover where?"

Kael was quiet for a long moment.

"There is one place," he said. "I was hoping not to have to use it. The wreckage of an old sky-city, perhaps fourteen leagues north and slightly east of our line. The locals — the few there are — call it Mournstar. It is a half-collapsed Netherese arcology, mostly stone, with chambers underneath that are roofed and dry and warm in the way these places are warm. It will hold the storm off us for a night. Maybe two."

"Why were you hoping not to use it."

"Because it is bad ground."

"Bad how."

Kael did not answer at once. He was looking up at the cloud over the Greypeaks, which had begun to take the colour cloud takes when it is preparing to come down off a mountain and across a plain.

"I have been past it once," he said. "Eight years ago, with the Black Lions, on a hunting season. We did not go in. Halja Iron-Tooth would not let any of us inside the perimeter. She said the place was holding something that should have been let go a long time ago. She would not say more than that. The Lions do not enter Netherese ruins, Vessa. They do not enter them and they do not let their young people enter them. Halja had reasons. I trusted her reasons then and I trust them now."

"But."

"But the column is closing, and the storm is real, and there is no other cover for thirty miles in any direction we can ride. We sleep in the open in this storm and we lose horses and possibly people. We sleep in Mournstar and we — we deal with whatever Halja was warning the young people about. I can think of no third option."

"How long behind us is the column."

"Two days. Possibly less. Talantha has pushed them harder than I expected. They will be at the Sedgewater by tomorrow noon. They will read the report Iselle wrote. They will believe it for perhaps four hours. By tomorrow evening they will have ridden over the Sedgewater fords and found our tracks heading north. By the day after tomorrow they will be a day behind us. By the day after that they will be a half-day behind us. They are riding without a baggage train. We are not."

"Mournstar, then."

"Mournstar."

He nodded. He turned the bay. He rode back ahead.

Vessa walked her own horse for a few minutes in silence, and then she dropped back along the column to where Iselle was riding behind Halric on the spare gelding. Selene was riding behind Iselle. Branwen was at the rear. Corin had taken the point with Kael for the hour.

"Iselle," Vessa said quietly, falling in beside her. "We need to have the conversation now. Are you ready to have it."

"Yes."

"I want to tell you what happens if they catch us. I want you to understand it before it is something you have to react to rather than something you have already considered. Will you listen to me?"

"Yes."

Vessa looked ahead between her horse's ears for a moment. The wind off the Greypeaks moved her hair across her cheek.

"Yesterday morning," she said, "the company was a thing the Crown wanted to find. They wanted Sira Voss alive. They wanted the rest of us alive too, if it could be managed, so that we could be questioned about who had paid us and who had helped us and what we had been told. We were people the Crown wanted to talk to. Last night that changed."

"Because of my father."

"Because of your father. When the column reaches the Sedgewater tomorrow they will find three Purple Dragon graves. They will assume — they will have to assume — that the company killed Vandren. The arrow in his chest is Cormyrean stock. It looks like our work. They cannot know about Joren, and even if they could know about Joren they would assume Joren broke under our questioning and was killed for it. Do you understand?"

"Yes."

"They will also realise, within four or five days, that the report you wrote this morning is forged. The cipher office in Suzail will request confirmation through normal channels. The confirmation will not come, because you are not in Suzail to give it. The moment Suzail asks for confirmation and does not receive it, Laspeera will draft a Sending to Talantha — to the column commander, who is the senior War Wizard you may have heard of, your teacher's teacher's protégée; she has been brought back into the field for this brief — and the Sending will say the apprentice is with them, the report is forged, kill them all, recover the apprentice if you can. That is the order Talantha will receive. By the twentieth of Mirtul, possibly the nineteenth."

Iselle was silent. The horses' hooves made a soft regular sound on the moor track.

"There is no surrender to ride toward," Vessa said. "Not for any of us. Not for me, not for Kael, not for Branwen, not for Selene, not for Corin, not for Halric. Not for you, Iselle. From the moment that Sending arrives, every Cormyrean in the field is hunting six people, of whom one is a War Wizard apprentice they will be trying to take alive, and the rest are to be killed without challenge. If we are caught, you may possibly be returned to the College. The rest of us will be killed in the field. There will be no trial. There will be no audience with the regency council. There will be no opportunity to explain. You need to know this. You need to know it tonight, riding, where you have a horse under you and the country is open and you can think it through, because I will not have you hearing it for the first time when there is a War Wizard's spell coming at the people I am responsible for and I need you to do something about it."

Iselle said, after a long silence: "And what — what would I be returned to, in the College. Truly."

"Truly?"

"Truly."

"You would be returned alive, Iselle. You would be returned alive into Laspeera's hands. Laspeera would conduct the questioning herself. She would want to know what you saw. What you heard. What you knew about the papers. What you knew about us. She would use Charm, Detect Thoughts, and possibly — depending on her patience — Modify Memory. By the time she had finished with you, you would not be the woman who began this morning at the Sedgewater. You would be a woman who had been adjusted. You would walk back into your apprenticeship. You would pass your fifth year. You would be, on the surface, a credit to the College. You would not remember much of this tenday. You would not remember your father. You would not remember; the woman wearing your body would. That is what would happen, Iselle. I am not embellishing. I am telling you the standard procedure for a returned apprentice in your situation. Laspeera has done it before. She did it to a boy I knew, in 1487 DR, who came out of her hands not much of a person any more."

Iselle's hand had closed around her reins. The knuckles were white.

"My father knew this," she said, quietly. "When he asked you to take me. He knew what would happen if you said no."

"Yes."

"That is — that is why he was so —"

"Yes."

Iselle was quiet for a long time. The wind off the Greypeaks had begun to carry a fine cold mist that was not yet rain.

"I would like," she said, finally, "to be very useful to this company. Lady. I would like to — to be the reason we do not get caught. Will you let me try."

"Yes."

"I have not — I have not had a chance yet to show you what I can do. My father told you the truth about the fourth circle, but he was — he was being careful, because he was dying and he did not want to overstate. I am better than the fourth circle, Lady. I know I am. I have not had the chance to test it. The College does not let apprentices test their ceiling. I think — I think when I have the chance I will surprise you. I want the chance."

"You will have it."

"Soon, I think."

"Yes," Vessa said, quietly. "I think soon also. Kael has just told me we are riding for a Netherese ruin tomorrow because the storm and the column have put us in a position where we have no other cover. He is — he is uneasy about the place. He has not been uneasy about a place all this ride. If you are going to be useful, Iselle, I would prepare yourself between now and tomorrow. Whatever is in your book that you have not yet had the courage to cast, I would think about it tonight. I would ready it tomorrow. I would not hold it back when the moment comes. Do you understand me?"

"Yes."

"Good."

Vessa walked her horse forward. Iselle rode behind her in silence for the rest of the afternoon, and when they made camp at dusk under a low shelf of granite that broke the wind, she ate without tasting her food, and she spread her spellbook open on her knees by the fire, and she read.

Selene, who had been watching her all evening from the other side of the fire with the particular flat watchfulness of an apprentice considering a rival, saw what she was reading.

She did not understand the diagrams. She understood the grade of the diagrams, because she had once, on a job in Iriaebor, been hired to steal a fourth-year apprentice's spellbook and had spent the best part of a tenday with it before delivering it to the buyer, and she had a thief's eye for the shape of arcane notation even when she could not read it.

What Iselle was reading was not fourth-circle work. It was not fifth-circle work either.

It was sixth.

Selene filed the observation. She did not tell Vessa. Vessa, she thought, had probably already worked it out for herself.

IV. Mournstar

They reached the perimeter of the ruin in the last hour of daylight on the seventh day, with the storm cloud closing fast behind them off the Greypeaks and the first hailstones — small, hard, like grit against the cheek — beginning to sting the horses' ears.

Kael had brought them in on the southern approach because the southern approach was the only one with intact stonework all the way down to ground level. The rest of Mournstar — what was left of it — was a scatter of broken plinths and shattered curtain wall across perhaps half a square mile of moor, with the central keep half-buried in a great drift of moor turf and time, and a single intact tower, three storeys tall and topped with a broken finial of black stone, rising at the centre of the wreckage like a finger raised in warning.

The tower's lower chamber was where Kael was taking them. He had walked the perimeter in the last quarter-mile, dismounted, with his bow strung and an arrow loose in his hand, and he had not spoken.

"Halja said let it go," he said quietly to Vessa, when they were within fifty paces of the tower's base. "She did not say this place is haunted. She did not say something walks here. She said let it go. I have thought about that phrase for fifteen years and I do not know what she meant by it."

"Whatever it means, we are about to find out."

"Yes."

They dismounted at the tower. The hail had thickened. The horses were beginning to be miserable; Halric and Corin took them under a broken corbelled arch fifty paces from the tower where the stonework still held and there was rough shelter from the wind, and tethered them, and brought the saddlebags into the tower's ground chamber, and lit a small storm-lamp that Branwen had carried for the entire ride and not yet used.

The chamber was perhaps twenty paces across and circular. The floor was flagstones, set in a spiral pattern from the centre outward. The walls were dressed stone, dark, fitted with a precision that would have shamed a Damaran mason. Three doorways led off the chamber: one to a stair going up the tower, one to a stair going down beneath it, and one to what looked like a corridor running outward into the wreckage of the keep. The two stair doorways were intact. The corridor doorway had collapsed in its first three paces and was impassable.

"Up or down," Vessa said.

"Neither, if we can avoid it," said Kael. "We sleep in this chamber. We do not explore. We light the lamp. We set a watch. We ride out at dawn whether the storm has lifted or not."

"All right."

They settled in. They unrolled bedrolls along the inner curve of the wall. Iselle sat down with her spellbook closed on her lap and her staff across her knees and her eyes closed in the small focused way of an apprentice running through her readied spells. Selene had taken a position at the south side of the chamber by the doorway in, where the lamp's light did not quite reach her, with both her blades drawn across her body. Halric and Corin were stowing the saddle gear. Branwen had walked, slowly, to the centre of the spiral on the floor, and was looking down at it.

He stood there for perhaps thirty seconds.

He said, very quietly: "Vessa."

"Yes."

"This is a binding-sigil. The spiral. Look at it."

Vessa walked over. Selene, watching, saw both their faces, and she did not like what she saw on Branwen's.

"What does it bind," Vessa asked.

"I do not know. Something that was here when this tower was built. Something the arcanists wanted kept here when the city fell. The spiral is a sustaining pattern; it is keyed to the tower's foundations and probably to the stones beneath. It has been holding for three thousand years. It is — it is intact, Vessa. The work is intact."

"Then we are safe."

"We are safe so long as we do not give it a reason to fail."

"What would give it a reason to fail."

"I do not know. Loud noise. Strong magic. Recognition."

He looked across the chamber. He looked at Kael, who had unstrapped his cloak and laid it across a saddlebag and who was now, in the small unconscious habit Iselle had not yet seen him do, settling the wire-wrapped sword on his left hip into a more comfortable position.

Branwen said: "Kael. Do not draw that sword in this room."

Kael looked up.

"What."

"The older one. Letterkeeper. Do not draw it. Do not move it on your hip. Do not — do not unsheath it for any reason in this chamber. Do you hear me."

"Why."

"Because that sword carries Cormyrean magic of a vintage that is — Kael, that sword is older than Cormyr. That sword is Netherese-grade work in a Cormyrean hilt. I have suspected it for two days. I am certain of it now, standing in this chamber. Whatever is bound under this floor will recognise that blade if you bring it forth, and the binding will fail, and we will all of us die in this room. Do you hear me?"

Kael was very still.

"I hear you," he said.

"Good."

Branwen turned back to the spiral. He was — Selene saw — beginning to sweat lightly along the hairline, in a way she had not seen him sweat in five years of working with him.

The hail had become sleet outside the tower. The wind had risen.

It was the eleventh bell of the night when Letterkeeper warmed in Kael's hand.

V. The Revenant

He had been sleeping. He had not been asleep, exactly — none of them had slept properly — but he had been lying on his bedroll with his eyes closed and his breathing slowed in the half-sleep of a man who knew he could not afford to go fully under. His left hand had been resting, in the unconscious way of a swordsman's hand, on the pommel of the older sword, where it sat at his hip even when he was lying down.

The pommel grew warm.

Not the warmth of his own hand on metal. Warmer than that. Warm in the way a forge is warm when it has been banked for the night and a coal has shifted; warm with the slow reactive warmth of a thing that had begun to wake up.

Kael opened his eyes. He did not move.

The chamber was lit only by the storm-lamp, set on a flagstone in the centre of the spiral. Selene was on watch by the doorway. The others were sleeping. Branwen's face, even in sleep, was tight with whatever he had been thinking before he had let himself drift.

Kael said, very quietly, into the dark: "Branwen."

Branwen was awake at the second syllable. He did not sit up. He turned his head.

"Kael."

"The sword is warm."

A silence. Then Branwen said, in the same quiet voice: "How warm."

"Warmer than it should be. I have not drawn it. I have not moved it. It is warming on its own."

"Is it speaking."

"What."

"Is it speaking, Kael. To you. Inside. Words you do not want to be hearing."

Kael was quiet for a long moment. He had not wanted to admit it.

"Yes," he said.

"What is it saying."

"It is saying — it is not — it is not Common, Branwen. It is in a language I do not know. It is saying — one phrase, over and over. The same phrase. I do not know what it means."

"Speak it."

"I do not want to."

"Kael. Speak it. Quietly. Once. So that I can hear it."

Kael spoke it.

The phrase took perhaps three seconds to say. It was in a language Selene had never heard, though she had heard many languages. It was not Espruar. It was not Thorass. It was not Draconic; she had heard Draconic once, in Athkatla, from a sorcerer of mixed blood who had been showing off to a tavern. It was older than any of those. It had hard fricative sounds in it, and a long open vowel at the centre, and it ended on a rising note that made the small hairs on the back of Selene's neck stand up.

Branwen closed his eyes.

"Oh," he said. Very softly. "Oh, Kael. That is — that is Loross. That is the high tongue of Netheril. That is the phrase a Netherese arcanist would speak to a tarchon — to a bound revenant servant — to wake it for service. Your sword is calling it, Kael. The sword is saying I am the focus, come to me."

"What do I do."

"You do not move. You do not speak. You — Kael, do you have any control over the sword."

"I do not know. I have never tried to have control over it. It has always been — it has been mine, but not — not in that way. I do not know if I can stop it."

"Try."

Kael tried. Selene watched him try. She could see, from where she stood, the small movement at his temple as he focused, the slight clench in the jaw, the long exhale. The pommel — visible at his hip in the lamp-light — did not stop glowing. It had begun, as Selene watched, to give off a faint warm light through the leather of the scabbard. Not bright. Warm.

It was answered.

A sound came up from beneath the flagstones. It was not loud. It was the sound of stone being moved very slowly by something that had not moved stone in a long time, and that was relearning how the work was done. It was the sound of attention.

"Up," Vessa said, from her bedroll, awake now, soft and absolute. "Everyone up. Now."

They came up in the practised way of people who had been ready to come up. Halric had his hammer in his hand. Corin had the bastard sword. Iselle, who Selene saw had been awake for some time without the others realising, was already on her feet with the staff in her right hand and the spellbook in the left, and her staff was — Selene noticed, with a cold small recognition — already faintly glowing at its tip with a soft green light Iselle had not yet been asked to make.

The flagstones at the centre of the chamber moved.

They moved in a way flagstones did not move. They lifted, at the centre of the spiral, in a single smooth column of dressed stone, and the column rose perhaps four feet and stopped, and out of the gap at its base came up a thing that was not quite a man and not quite a corpse and not anything Selene had seen in five years of working with Vessa.

The thing was tall. Taller than Halric. It wore the rotted remains of a robe of some material that had once been red and was now the colour of dried blood. Its skin was the colour of old parchment and was stretched over the bones beneath in the way of a thing that had not had moisture in three thousand years. Its hands were long and thin and the fingernails had grown, in death, into curved black points. Its eyes were two pinpoints of cold blue light in sockets that were otherwise empty.

It looked at Kael.

It said something in Loross. The sword at Kael's hip answered, faintly, with a pulse of warmth Selene saw rather than heard.

Then it raised its left hand, and the floor at the western edge of the chamber broke open, and three more figures rose up out of the broken stone, and these were not arcanists. These were wights — the old kind, the ones Vessa had taught Selene about by lamplight in inns when Selene had been fourteen — bound servants of a long-dead master, raised over centuries from earlier explorers who had been foolish enough to come into Mournstar looking for the things Netherese ruins were said to contain.

There were three of them. One had been a half-orc in life. One had been a human in plate armour of a kind Selene had seen in a museum in Waterdeep. One had been an elf, and the elf had been beautiful once, and was still beautiful in the wrong way, and Selene looked at it and looked away.

"Iselle," Vessa said. "Now."

- - space run out on this post - continued in next post: https://www.reddit.com/r/Forgotten_Realms/comments/1tcuv2i/the_ruin_at_mournstar_the_weight_of_silver/

Weight is Silver is a story charting rise of the House of Duskmere and of Lady Vessa Duskmere becoming one of the most powerful and influential people in the Sword Coast.

The Weight of Silver - FULL CHAPTER LISTING::
https://www.reddit.com/r/Forgotten_Realms/comments/1tcwht4/lady_vessa_duskmere_the_weight_of_silver_a_tale/

-----

The Conversation by the Sedgewater

The Weight of Silver — Chapter Three

Fourth night out of Helmsblade. Camp by the Sedgewater.

Lady Iselle Vandren - Trainee War Wizard

---

I. The Fire

The fire Kael had finally allowed was small and clean, built in a pit Halric had cut into the moss with the flat of his short-spade, banked on three sides with stones from the streambed and screened on the fourth by the trunk of a fallen birch. It would not show from a half-mile out and would not show at all from the open ground to the south, which was the direction the country could see them from. Kael had sited it before he had agreed to it being lit at all. Kael's sitings, Selene had come to understand in four days on the road, were not negotiable.

The captain Vandren of Marsember had been moved up against the trunk of a living birch a few feet from the fire, his back propped on a folded saddle-blanket, his bound right arm laid across his lap with the bandaging Kael had done at noon now soaked through in a small dark spreading patch that was not yet alarming but would be by morning. His daughter — Iselle, Branwen had said her name was; he had taken the name off her satchel before she had fully woken — was sitting beside him on the moss with her hands still bound at the wrists in front of her, leaned against her father's good shoulder, awake, and silent.

She had been silent since she had woken at the seventh bell of the afternoon. She had drunk water when Branwen offered it. She had eaten a small piece of dried mutton when her father had told her to. She had not spoken. Her brown hair, which she wore loose over the shoulders of her travelling robe, had come unbraided in the falling and lay tangled against the bark of the birch behind her, and her eyes — Selene noted, with the part of herself that was always noting — were not the colour they should have been for a girl who had been hit hard enough on the temple to come down off a horse. They should have been distant. They were not. They were tracking.

The third Purple Dragon — the boy, the one whose name Selene had not yet heard spoken — was sitting six feet from the fire on the opposite side from Vandren, his ankles crossed under him, his hands resting open on his knees in the way Corin had told him to keep them. Corin had not bound him. Corin had said, at sundown, Son, if you give me your word that you will not move from this place tonight, I will not put a rope on you. I would prefer not to. Will you give me your word? And the boy had looked up at Corin and said, Yes, sir, in a voice that had cracked on the second word, and Corin had nodded once and walked away.

The boy's name, Selene had learned by listening, was Joren. He was nineteen — her age, she had thought when she heard it, and had filed the thought without inspecting it — and he had been out of training six tendays. This was his first deployment outside of garrison. His father had been a Purple Dragon under King Foril and had died at the battle of the Goblin Marches in 1479, when Joren was six, and Joren had wanted to be a Purple Dragon since the age at which most boys wanted to be other things. He had ridden out of Suzail with the patrol the morning of the eleventh of Mirtul with his father's badge stitched to the inside of his surcoat and a rolled letter from his mother tucked inside his cuirass, and the high colour in his face for the first three days of the ride had been, the captain Vandren had said quietly to Branwen earlier in the afternoon, the colour of a boy who finally feels his life has begun.

Selene was sitting where Vessa had told her to sit, which was on a low flat rock at the fire's eastern edge, two arm-lengths from Branwen. Her long single-edged sword lay on the moss beside her thigh, drawn, the blade dark. Her gloves were on. The four throwing-blades in her thigh sheath had been moved, an hour ago, to her belt, where her right hand could find them without looking — a quiet adjustment Vessa had asked her to make at sundown without explaining why.

Branwen had said watch my hands. Selene was watching his hands.

His left hand, holding Loomwhisper's whetstone, had been moving in the same slow rhythm for the last twenty minutes. His right hand was open on his knee.

Vessa was on the far side of the fire, on her own low rock, with both blades on her thighs and her cloak pulled close. Kael was not at the fire; Kael was up on the rise above the camp with the bow, watching the country, where he had been since dusk and where he would be until midnight when Halric would relieve him. Halric was at the picket with the horses, twenty paces away, where he could hear the fire and could not be seen from it. Corin sat on the fallen birch with his bastard sword laid across his knees and his hands resting on the hilt, and he had been sitting in that exact attitude, Selene had noticed, for the last hour and a half.

The fire popped. A shower of sparks went up and died.

Vessa said, quietly: "Vandren."

The captain turned his head.

"You said this morning you were sent to confirm direction and numbers. I want to know the rest. I want to know what Caladnei told you about the people you were tracking. I want to know what she told you about the woman in Yartar. I want to know what you know about the woman in Yartar that Caladnei did not tell you, because you are a valeskar of fifteen years and you do not ride out without making your own enquiries. I want to know all of it, Vandren, and I want to know it tonight, because by tomorrow noon your relief column will be at this stream and we will have to decide what to do with you and your daughter and your boy, and the more honest you are with me tonight the easier that decision becomes for everyone at this fire. Do we understand each other?"

Vandren breathed out, slowly. The bandage on his shoulder darkened a fraction with the breath.

"We understand each other," he said.

"Tell me."

"Caladnei was brought back into Suzail on the third of Mirtul. She came out of retirement at the request of the regency council; the request was carried by Vangerdahast's old apprentice Laspeera Inthré, who is the only person Caladnei would have come back for, and who is the regency council's senior mage advisor in fact if not in title. Caladnei accepted the brief on the seventh. The brief was framed to her as a recovery operation — a noblewoman of suspect loyalty, married into a Waterdhavian merchant house, suspected of carrying papers belonging to the late Royal Magician. She was told the woman is to be returned alive to Suzail for questioning."

"Was she told what is in the papers?"

"No. She asked. She was refused."

"By whom."

"By Laspeera."

Vessa's mouth tightened a fraction. Selene, watching, understood: Laspeera was not a name Vessa had expected. Laspeera was Vangerdahast's own apprentice — the woman who had been at his side for the last decade of his tenure, who had inherited his private papers when he died, who would know what was in the register and would not tell Caladnei. Whatever Laspeera was running, she was running it without Caladnei's full knowledge, which meant the regency council's left hand and right hand were not in the same room.

"Go on," Vessa said.

"Caladnei told me — me, in private, at the briefing — that she did not believe Laspeera. She told me that whatever is in those papers, the regency council does not want them recovered. They want them destroyed. She told me that the order to take Sira Voss alive was a courtesy to me, because I was the field officer and I would not run a hunt that ended in a child's mother being killed in front of her. She told me she had argued the order up to alive at all costs and the council had granted it, but that she did not trust Laspeera to honour it once Sira was in a Suzailan cell and out of the field officers' sight."

"Caladnei told you all of this."

"Caladnei told me all of this. She has known me eighteen years, Lady. I served under her in the western marches when she was Mage Royal and I was a young valeskar in my first command. She trusted me with it because she knew I would not act on it and would not betray it. I have not."

"You are betraying it now."

Vandren closed his eyes briefly.

"I am dying, Lady. Or I am about to be. Whatever you decide tomorrow, I will not be riding back to Suzail on this arm; the wound is dirtier than your archer thinks it is, and I will be in fever by the day after, and dead in three. I have made my peace with that. I am telling you this because Caladnei is not your enemy. She is the only person in Suzail who might be brought, with the right hand and the right offer, to not be your enemy. If you can keep the woman in Yartar alive and out of Suzailan hands long enough for Caladnei to read the papers herself, before Laspeera does — there is a road through this that does not end with all of you dead. That is what I am telling you. That is the gift I am giving you tonight, in exchange for what I am about to ask."

Vessa said, softly: "And what are you about to ask, Vandren."

He opened his eyes.

"Take my daughter with you," he said.

Iselle, leaning against his good shoulder, did not move. She had been listening; her tracking eyes had moved from her father's face to Vessa's and back through the entire exchange. Now they did not move at all.

"She is twenty years old," Vandren said. "She is a War Wizard apprentice in her fourth year. She is — she is more than she seems, Lady, and I will tell you the rest of that in a moment, but first I need you to hear what she is going home to, if you send her back. She has fallen out of favour with her teacher. She has fallen out of favour because she is better than she should be, and the other apprentices have noticed, and the teacher has noticed, and the teacher's response — which is the response of a small woman in a small position — has been to put my daughter on field duties she should not be on, to break her, to remind her of her place. This patrol was a test, Lady. The test was whether Iselle would report me if I said anything seditious in the field. The teacher arranged it because the teacher is hoping I will say something seditious, and Iselle will not report me, and then the teacher will have grounds to break us both. That is what my daughter is going home to. A teacher who is waiting for her to fail. A college that has marked her. A city that no longer has her father in it to stand between her and the people who want her gone."

He looked at Vessa. His eyes were clear. He was, Selene saw, an utterly steady man — the kind of man Vessa might have been, in a different life, in a different uniform.

"I have no other family," he said. "Her mother died when she was nine. I have a sister in Marsember who is married to a man I would not leave a dog with. There is no one, Lady. No one. If you send her back tonight, she will be a War Wizard's broken apprentice within the year, and a corpse in a cell within two. If you take her with you — if you take her with you — she will live, and she will be useful to you, and she will be free, in the only way any of us are ever free, which is by walking away from the people who have decided what we are."

Vessa was silent for a long moment.

"Vandren," she said. "I cannot take a War Wizard apprentice on a hunt the Crown has put on us. The first thing I would have to do is satisfy myself that she is not what I would have planted in this exact situation, which is a young woman with a sympathetic story and a father willing to die for her. I am sorry. That is the honest answer. I am not refusing — I am telling you the conversation we would have to have, and the conversation would take days I do not have, and the days I do not have are days the column behind you closes on us. Do you see?"

"I see."

"Then you see why —"

"I have one thing more to tell you, Lady, and then you will have to decide. May I tell you?"

"Tell me."

Vandren drew a breath. It cost him something. He was, Selene realised, beginning to fail — the fever Kael had not wanted to mention had begun, and the captain knew it, and was burning what he had left of clarity to spend it here.

"My daughter," he said, "is more powerful than her teacher knows. The teacher knows she is gifted. The teacher does not know what she actually is. Iselle has cast, in private, with me, in the cellar of our house in Marsember, spells from the third circle and one — once — from the fourth. She is twenty years old. The fourth circle is a grade no apprentice in her year has touched. She did it without a focus. She did it because the magic comes to her the way water comes to a stream, and she has been hiding it for two years because the day her teacher finds out, the teacher will have her quietly removed from the College for being a threat, which is the polite Suzailan word for a thing they cannot control. She is a major asset, Lady. To you. To anyone. She is a major asset being wasted by a small woman who cannot bear to be outshone. Take her. Take her with you. She will earn her place."

Vessa looked at Iselle.

Iselle looked back at her. The girl had not moved. The tracking in her eyes had not stopped.

"Iselle," Vessa said. "Is what your father is saying true?"

Iselle spoke for the first time since waking. Her voice was lower than Selene had expected, slightly rough from disuse, with the soft Cormyrean coastal cadence of Marsember on the r's.

"Yes," she said. "All of it. The fourth circle was Greater Invisibility. I cast it on my father while he was wounded, in the cellar, two winters ago, when a man came to our door with a sealed warrant and my father had to go through the back garden over the wall. He was forty-six and I was eighteen and he should not have been climbing walls. The spell held for nearly a minute. I was in bed for three days afterward but I did it. I have not told anyone. I have not told my teacher. I have not told my father's commander. I have only told my father, and now you."

Vessa nodded slowly.

"Why are you telling me, Iselle."

"Because my father is right that I have nowhere to go, and because —"

She stopped.

She looked at Branwen.

"— because the man with the parrying sword silenced my focus this morning without speaking a word, and I have been thinking about that all afternoon, and I do not know what discipline that is, but it is not anything the College has ever taught me, and I would like to know, before I die, what other things there are in the world that the College has not taught me. That is the small honest answer. I am twenty years old. I am tired. I do not want to go home."

Branwen, whose left hand had not stopped its slow rhythm on the whetstone the entire conversation, looked up from Loomwhisper for the first time and met Iselle's eyes across the fire.

He did not speak. He nodded, once, very slightly.

It was enough. Selene saw it land in Iselle's face — the recognition, the small shift, the first crack in the silence she had held for six hours. Iselle had not been certain, until that nod, that she had read the situation correctly. Now she was certain.

Vessa drew a long breath.

She looked at Corin. Corin had not moved on the fallen birch. His hands were still on the hilt of the bastard sword. He looked back at her, and after a long moment he nodded — slow, deliberate, a single dip of the head.

"All right," Vessa said. "Vandren —"

She got no further.

II. The Boy

What happened next happened in less than four seconds, and Selene — replaying it later in her head, on the long ride north over the next eleven days, until she could replay it as a continuous unbroken thing rather than a stuttering set of frozen images — would understand that she had felt it coming and had not understood that she was feeling it.

The boy Joren had been sitting six feet from the fire on the opposite side from Vandren. He had been sitting still. He had not moved his hands from his knees in nearly two hours. His face, in the firelight, had been the face of a boy listening to a thing he did not want to be listening to and could not stop himself from hearing.

He had heard his captain confirm that the regency council wanted the woman in Yartar killed.

He had heard his captain confirm that Caladnei the Mage Royal had told him so in private, eighteen days ago, in violation of her oath.

He had heard his captain confirm that the boy's own commanding officer of fifteen years had been sitting on this knowledge — seditious knowledge, knowledge for which an honest Purple Dragon was sworn to report his own captain — for eighteen days and had not reported it.

He had heard his captain ask the company that had killed two of his comrades that morning to take his daughter and ride.

The thing Joren had been holding for the past two hours was not anger. It was the slow gathering of a young man whose entire understanding of the world had cracked open in the space of a single afternoon, and who had been sitting on a moss bank watching the cracks widen, and who had — at some point Selene had not noticed and Vessa had not noticed and Corin had not noticed — decided.

The arrow Kael had pulled from Vandren's shoulder at noon had been laid by Kael on a flat stone three feet from Joren's right hand, and then forgotten by Kael when the dressing was finished, because Kael had been thinking about other things. The arrow was still there. It was a yard-long shaft of straight ash with a steel bodkin head dark with Vandren's dried blood.

Joren came up off the moss in a single motion that was faster than he had any right to be. He took the arrow off the stone in his right hand at the run. He covered the six feet between himself and his captain in two strides.

He was screaming.

Selene would, later, not be able to remember the words. She thought he had been screaming traitor. She thought he had been screaming my father. She thought, possibly, that he had been screaming nothing at all and that she had supplied the words in her head afterwards. The screaming was not the point. The point was that Joren had crossed three of the six feet to Vandren before Selene's hand had moved at all, and had crossed the next two before she had registered her hand moving.

The throwing blade left her belt with the underhand draw Vessa had taught her and the small sharp turn of the wrist that gave the blade its rotation, and it crossed the ten feet to Joren in the time it takes to draw a single breath, and it took him in the side of the throat just below the angle of the jaw, exactly where she had been trained to put it, and Joren went sideways at the run with his right hand still gripping the arrow.

He did not drop the arrow. He had carried it through the air with him as he fell.

The arrow went into Vandren's chest.

It went in below the collarbone, on the wrong side from the wound Kael had made — the unwounded side — at an upward angle, and it went in to a depth of about four inches, which was far enough to find what it found.

Vandren made a small sound. Not a scream. A sound of surprise, almost a question. His good hand came up and closed around the shaft of the arrow as though to inspect it. He did not pull it out. He looked at it for perhaps two heartbeats, and then he looked at Iselle, who had gone perfectly still against his shoulder, and Selene saw in that moment that the captain knew, with the calm clarity of a fifteen-year valeskar, exactly what had happened to him and how long he had.

He had — Selene would understand later, when Kael had explained it on the road — perhaps two minutes. The arrow had gone into the upper lobe of the right lung and grazed something major, and the blood was filling the lung from inside, and a man in that condition could speak for a little while if he was disciplined and did not try to move, and could not be saved by any healer the company carried.

Vandren was disciplined.

He did not move.

III. The Two Minutes

Joren was lying six feet away on the moss with Selene's throwing blade in his neck and his eyes open and his right hand still curled around the place where the arrow had been. He was making a wet sound that was not quite breathing. He would be dead inside a minute.

Selene had come off her rock at the moment of the throw and was standing now beside the fire with her second blade already in her hand, and she was looking at the boy she had killed, and she was finding that the part of herself that did the work — the part Vessa had built in her over five years — was holding, and that the part underneath the work was already beginning to come apart, and that she would have to deal with it later because right now the captain was speaking.

"Iselle," Vandren said.

His voice was lower than it had been. There was a thread of blood at the corner of his mouth. Iselle had not moved.

"Iselle, my heart. Listen to me. Listen carefully. We do not have long."

"Father —"

"Listen. Listen. This is your chance. Do you hear me? This is your chance. The road home is closed to you now. They will know — Caladnei will know, the College will know — that the patrol failed and that I was killed by my own boy, and the question they will ask is whether you betrayed us all, and the answer they decide on will not be the true one. Do you understand? You cannot go home. The road home is closed. This is your chance, my heart. Take it. Take it. Take it."

"Father, please —"

"Iselle." His voice was thinner. He was, Selene saw, managing the breath, allocating it. "Iselle. Look at me. Look at me. Yes. Good. I love you. I have loved you every day of your life. Your mother loved you. We made you in joy. You were a wanted child, Iselle, you were a wanted child, and the world has not been kind to you and that is not your doing and not mine, but it is the world we have. You will go with these people. You will live. You will become what you should have been allowed to become. Do you hear me?"

"Yes."

"Promise me."

"Father —"

"Promise me, Iselle."

"I promise."

"Good girl. Good girl. Cut the cord on my left wrist. Inside pocket of the cuirass. There is a key. It is the key to the cellar in Marsember. The lower cellar. The books are there — my books, your mother's books, the ones the College does not know about. If you can ever go back. If you cannot, leave them; they have waited a long time and they will wait longer. Do you have the key?"

Iselle's bound hands fumbled at the cord; Branwen had crossed the fire without anyone noticing him cross it, and his belt-knife was already in her hand. She cut the cord. She found the key. She held it.

"I have it."

"Good. Good. Lady — Lady Duskmere. Are you there?"

"I am here, Vandren."

He was looking past Iselle now, towards Vessa, although his eyes had begun to lose their focus. Vessa was on one knee beside him; she had moved at the same moment Branwen had, and Selene had not seen her move either.

"Lady. I am giving you my daughter. I am asking you — I am begging you — to take her, and to keep her, and to teach her what your people know. Do not — do not let her be only a wizard. Make her more than that. The College made her only a wizard and they tried to break her for it. Do not — do not be the College, Lady. I know you. I know what you are. I have known what you are since the second time you spoke to me this afternoon. You are — you are the only person at this fire I would give her to. Do you understand me? The only one. Take her."

"I will take her, Vandren."

"Swear it."

"I swear it. On — on what would you have me swear it?"

"On nothing. On nothing, Lady. I do not need a god in this. I need your face to be telling me this, and your face is telling me. That is enough. That is enough."

He closed his eyes. He opened them. His good hand had come up and was on Iselle's hair; the fingers were moving, slowly, in the small unconscious motion of a father stroking a daughter's hair, the motion he had made ten thousand times before, the motion Iselle had felt every night of her childhood and many nights of her adulthood. Iselle had begun to cry without sound. The tears were running down her face into her father's bandaged shoulder.

"My heart," Vandren said. "My heart. My good girl."

"Don't —"

"I am going. I am going now. It is all right. It is all right. I would like to have lived longer but it is all right. I am going. You will live. You will be — you will be —"

He did not finish the sentence.

His hand stopped moving in her hair.

The fire popped, quietly, and a single ember went up, and the night above the Sedgewater was clear and very full of stars.

IV. Iselle

Iselle did not move for a long time.

The company did not move either. Kael had come down from the rise at the sound of the screaming — Selene had not seen him come down, but he was there now, at the edge of the firelight, with the bow in his off hand and an arrow still nocked, looking at the scene with the still face of a man who was understanding several things at once and would not say any of them until he had finished. Halric had come up from the picket. Corin had risen from the fallen birch. Branwen had crouched beside the boy Joren and ended the wet sound at the boy's throat with a small efficient movement of Loomwhisper that Selene saw and would, that night, be grateful for, because she had not yet been able to make herself walk over to the boy she had killed.

Vessa stayed on one knee beside Vandren. She had taken her hand, at some point Selene had not noticed, and laid it gently on Iselle's wrist.

After a while, Iselle said, very quietly, to no one in particular: "He was a good father."

"Yes," Vessa said.

"He was a good father and I was a difficult daughter and I never told him —"

"He knew."

"How do you know that."

"Because of how he looked at you when you said you would not go home. He knew, Iselle. Fathers know. He knew."

Iselle's hand closed around the key. Tightly. The knuckles went white.

"What do I do now."

"You sit here for as long as you need to sit here," Vessa said. "We will not move from this place tonight. We have time. The country is not awake yet. You sit here. You hold your father. When you are ready — and only when you are ready, Iselle — you will let me and Corin take him down to the Sedgewater. We will wash him. We will lay him in the willows on the eastern bank. We will mark the place with a stone Kael will cut, with his name, and the year, and your mother's name beside his. We will say a prayer over him. Corin will say it; it will be Ilmaterian, because Corin is what he is, and your father —" Vessa's voice did something, a small brief thing, "— your father would not have minded."

"He was not Ilmaterian."

"No. He was Tymoran. I could see it in his face when he spoke about your mother. We will say the Tymoran words too. Corin will not begrudge them. We will give him both gods, Iselle, because he was a good man, and we have the time tonight, and we will do it properly."

Iselle nodded. Her hand was still in her father's hair. She was not yet able to take it away.

"Lady."

"Yes, Iselle."

"The boy. The one with the arrow. He was nineteen. He had a letter from his mother in his cuirass."

"I know."

"I would like — I would like the letter. I would like to send it to her, eventually, when I can. I would like — I would like her to know that her son was a Purple Dragon, and that he died doing what he believed was right, and that — and that he was killed cleanly, and that he did not suffer."

She looked at Selene for the first time. Selene, who had not yet sat back down, who was still standing beside the fire with the second throwing blade in her hand, met her eyes across the body of Iselle's father.

"Did he suffer," Iselle said. Quietly. Not an accusation. A question.

"No," Selene said. Her voice came out steadier than she had expected. "I put it where I was taught to put it. He did not suffer. Branwen finished him before — before he could. He did not suffer, Iselle. I am sorry. I would have stopped him without killing him if I had been faster. I was not faster."

"You were faster than the rest of us," Iselle said. "I saw you throw. None of the others had moved. You were faster than the rest of us, and you were not fast enough, and that is not your fault. I would like you — I would like you to take the letter from his cuirass, please, and keep it for me, and we will send it together, when we can."

Selene nodded. She could not, for a moment, speak. She nodded again.

"Thank you," Iselle said.

She turned her face back into her father's shoulder, and she held him, and the company stood and sat around the fire in the quiet of the moor, and no one said anything for a long time, until eventually Corin came across the moss and put one armoured hand very lightly on Iselle's other shoulder, and she put her own hand up to cover his without looking at him, and they sat like that together for what was perhaps an hour.

V. The Sedgewater

They washed Vandren in the stream by lantern-light, an hour past midnight.

Corin and Halric carried him down the bank between them, gently, in the slow processional way of men who had buried more comrades than they could remember and who knew the value of doing the small things slowly. Vessa walked behind. Iselle walked beside her, with Vessa's hand under her elbow, and Selene walked behind Iselle, two paces back, because Vessa had gestured with her head that this was where Selene should be.

They laid him in a hollow beneath the willows on the eastern bank. They washed his hands and his face, and Corin closed his eyes with two fingers in the way of a Damaran soldier closing the eyes of a brother. Vessa cut a small lock of his hair with her belt-knife and gave it to Iselle in a square of black cloth. Iselle put it inside her travelling robe, against the skin over her heart, and did not say thank you, because thank you was not a word that fit the thing.

Kael came down with a flat slab of dark moor-stone he had cut with a piece of harder rock in the hour they had been by the fire. He had carved into it, in the small neat letters of a man who had been taught to write by his father's wizard:

> **VANDREN OF MARSEMBER**

> *Valeskar of Cormyr*

> *Husband of Aleane, beloved of Iselle*

> *Died fourteenth Mirtul, 1492 DR*

> *In honour. In honour. In honour.*

He set the stone at the head of the hollow and pressed it into the moss until the moss had taken it.

Corin spoke the Ilmaterian words. They were simple — suffer, endure, be at rest, the road is short and the road is long and the road is over — and Vessa spoke the Tymoran words after, and the Tymoran words were also simple, and Selene, who had not been raised to any god in particular, found that the words were easier to listen to than she had expected.

When it was done they walked back up the bank, slowly, in the same order. Iselle stopped halfway up. She turned. She looked back at the hollow, and at the willows, and at the small dark slab Kael had cut.

She said, quietly, in a voice meant only for the people standing around her: "I am Iselle. I was Iselle Vandrensdaughter of Marsember. I am — I am Iselle of the Sedgewater now. I think. I think that is the name I will take. I would like to be the woman who began here and not the woman who ended here. Is that — is that all right, Lady?"

Vessa looked at her for a long moment.

"Iselle of the Sedgewater," she said. "Yes. That is your name. We will use it. It is a good name."

Iselle nodded. She turned. She walked the rest of the way up the bank.

VI. After

Selene took the letter from Joren's cuirass herself, an hour before dawn, when the others were sleeping and only Kael was on watch.

She did not read it. She folded it once, into a square the size of her palm, and slid it into the inner pocket of her own jacket, against her ribs, where the small wooden ka-bird already sat. The two small things lay against each other there. She felt them both with the back of her hand through the leather, and she thought — without quite meaning to — that she would now be carrying two dead people against her ribs on the road north, and that this seemed about right for the kind of work the company did, and that the carrying was probably part of the work and she would have to learn to do it properly.

Halric had buried Joren on the western bank, away from Vandren. Corin had said the Ilmaterian words for the boy as well, on his own, quietly, without asking the others to attend, because Corin was the only one of them who had thought the boy was owed words and he had not wanted to make the others stand for them if they did not feel the same. Selene had attended without being asked. Corin had not commented. He had said the words, and finished them, and put his armoured hand briefly on Selene's shoulder on the way back up, and walked on.

Vessa came and sat down beside her at the fire when the sky over the moor had gone from black to bruised violet.

"How are you," she said.

Selene thought about it.

"I do not know yet," she said. "I will tell you in three days."

"All right."

"Vessa."

"Yes."

"She said I was faster than the rest of you."

"You were."

"I have never thrown at a person from a sitting start before. I did not know I could throw from a sitting start."

"You can. I knew you could. I did not tell you, because I did not want you to know it about yourself until you had to."

"That is — Vessa, that is a thing a person should be told about themselves."

"Maybe. Maybe not. We can argue about it on the road."

Selene laughed — a small, surprised, broken laugh that she had not expected to be able to laugh — and Vessa, beside her, let the corner of her mouth do the small thing that meant good, and they sat together at the fire while the eastern sky turned, and behind them in the makeshift bedroll under the birches Iselle of the Sedgewater slept the heavy stunned sleep of a young woman who had crossed a line at midnight and would wake on the other side of it, and had no idea yet what the other side was.

She was, in the morning, going to be the sixth member of the company.

She did not yet know that.

Selene, who had begun the night as the only young woman on the road, looked across at her sleeping shape under the birch — the brown hair tangled on the bedroll, the bound hands now unbound, the small steady breathing — and tried, honestly, to find the resentment she had felt all afternoon at the idea of another apprentice.

It was not there.

It would come back, she thought, in the morning, or in two mornings, when the immediate thing had stopped being immediate. She knew herself well enough to know that. She knew that resenting Iselle was a thing she would have to do, for a while, before she could stop doing it, because that was the shape of her, and Vessa had not yet trained that part of her out and possibly never would.

But for tonight, watching Iselle sleep with the fire going down and the moor beginning to lighten and the willows on the Sedgewater silver in the dawn, Selene Duskwind felt — to her surprise, and only for a moment — the same thing she had felt at fourteen in a back alley in Athkatla, when a tall woman in dark armour had walked into a watch captain's office and bought her out of a cell for reasons Selene had not understood.

Which was that the world had, briefly, room in it for one more person.

She put her hand against her ribs, where the ka-bird and the boy's letter sat together, and she felt them both.

She turned her face to the dawn.

---

To be continued in The Ride to Yartar.

Weight is Silver is a story charting rise of the House of Duskmere and of Lady Vessa Duskmere f becoming one of the most powerful and influential people in the Sword Coast.

Chapter one is here: https://www.reddit.com/r/Forgotten_Realms/comments/1tbuusd/lady_vessa_duskmere_the_weight_of_silver_chapter/

____

The Patrol on the Sedgewater

The Weight of Silver — Chapter Two

Fourth day out of Helmsblade. The High Moor.

------

Kael Auvrenal

I. The Shape of the Country

They had been four days on the moor, and the country had begun to do what the High Moor does to people who cross it without urgency — which is to say, it had begun to lie.

The first day out from Helmsblade had been clean: a hard ride through the foothills, a cold camp by a stream, the horses watered and the company quiet in the way of people who had not yet stopped thinking about the choice they had made. The second day they had crossed the old Trade Way at a ford north of the ruined caravanserai at Berenford, and Vessa had bought salt and dried mutton from a Calishite peddler who did not ask their names and who Branwen had — Selene noticed — paid in Tethyrian silver rather than Cormyrean gold, which was the kind of small careful thing Branwen did without comment. The third day the country had opened out into the moor proper, and the road had become a track, and the track had become a suggestion.

Now, on the fourth, they were riding north-by-northeast across an undulating sea of granite outcrop and bracken and bog-cotton, with the broken teeth of a Netherese sky-city wreckage rising on the horizon to their left like a row of black molars set into the green. Kael had been navigating since dawn by the sun and the wind and a small folded chart of his own making that he carried in his saddlebag and would not show anyone. He was riding fifty yards ahead of the rest of them, where he had been riding for most of the morning, with the longbow unstrung but laid across his pommel and the wire-wrapped sword on his left hip rather than his right.

Selene noticed the sword on the wrong hip. She had been noticing things about Kael for four days, because Kael was the easiest of the four men to read and reading him was a way of keeping her hands busy.

She had been riding at the back of the column on the grey gelding, behind Halric and ahead of no one, which was the position Vessa had assigned her on the first morning and which she had not been invited to leave. Branwen had not spoken to her once in four days except to say good morning on the second morning and pass the water-skin on the third evening. Corin had spoken to her in the brief professional way he spoke to everyone, with no warmth and no coldness. Halric had given her a strip of dried apricot from his own saddlebag on the second night and made a small joke about her gelding being smarter than her, and that was the friendliest thing anyone had done for her on the road.

Kael had not addressed her at all. But he had — and she noticed this — adjusted his pace twice in the past two days so that she was never riding in his blind spot for more than a few minutes at a time, and she did not think that was an accident.

It was just past the noon bell, by the angle of the sun, when Kael reined up.

He did not call out. He did not raise a hand. He simply stopped, perfectly still on the back of his bay, and the company stopped behind him in the unconscious way of a unit that knew his stillness meant something.

He sat the horse for a count of perhaps fifteen, looking due east.

Then he turned the bay slowly, walked it back to them at a trot, and said — quietly, to Vessa — "Riders. Six leagues. Maybe five. Coming our way at a hard canter on the flat. Four. Possibly five. The fifth one, if there is one, is shorter than the others — could be a smaller man, could be a woman, could be a Halfling messenger, I cannot tell at this distance."

"How long?" said Vessa.

"Forty minutes if they hold the pace. They will not hold the pace; the ground breaks two leagues ahead of where they are. Make it an hour."

"How did you see them?"

"I did not see them. I saw a kestrel come up off the moor in the wrong direction at the wrong time, and then a second kestrel a quarter-mile further on. Birds get up off this country in front of riders. They have been doing it for the last ten minutes in a line."

Vessa nodded once. She did not waste questions on Kael when his confidence sat the way it was sitting now.

"Cover," she said.

Kael pointed without looking. "The Sedgewater. Half a mile northwest. Cut bank, willows, water deep enough to walk the horses through without sign. We can be in it in twelve minutes if we move."

"Move."

II. The Sedgewater

The Sedgewater was not on any map Selene had ever seen, and she had seen a number of maps. It was a stream perhaps twelve feet wide and four deep where the company crossed it, running south-west to north-east through a fold in the moor that the eye did not register from any distance — a piece of country that, in Kael's phrase later, kept its own secrets. The willows were old and silver-leaved and grew in a thick double rank along both banks, and the water was the colour of weak tea where it ran shallow and the colour of nothing at all where it ran deep.

They walked the horses upstream for two hundred yards in the water itself, which left no trail on either bank, and then up onto the eastern side and into a stand of birch on a low rise that looked down over a stretch of open ground perhaps three hundred yards across, with the moor track running along the far edge of it.

Kael unsaddled his bay in the time it took Selene to dismount. He hobbled the horse, slid the longbow from its case, strung it with a movement of practised economy, set three arrows point-down in the moss within reach of his right hand, and was lying flat in the bracken at the lip of the rise before Vessa had finished giving the rest of them their positions.

The positions, when they came, were these:

Vessa took the centre of the rise, behind the largest birch, where she could see the open ground and could move in any of four directions. Adishakti and her sister-blade were both on her thighs; she had not drawn either. Her eyes had gone to the flat watchful state Selene had seen in her perhaps six times in five years, and Selene knew, looking at her, that Vessa had already thought through the next forty minutes in something close to its entirety.

Corin took the left flank, on foot, in his full Damaran plate, with his bastard sword drawn and a small steel buckler on his off hand. He stood behind the trunk of a fallen birch and did not move. Selene watched him for a full minute and could not see him breathe.

Halric took the right flank, fifty yards along the rise, with his bastard sword across his back and his war-hammer in his right hand. He had unbuckled the chinstrap of his helm and pushed it back so it sat on the crown of his head — a soldier's habit, for hearing — and he was scanning the open ground in slow regular sweeps that Selene recognised, because Vessa had taught her the same sweep, as the one the Cormyrean infantry trained.

Branwen disappeared. Selene did not see where he went. One moment he was tying his own horse to a low birch, and the next the horse was tied and Branwen was not there, and Selene scanned the trees twice and could not place him. Trist, she thought, would know, and then she thought Trist is not here and then she thought or is he and decided to file the question.

Selene herself was placed by Vessa with a single gesture — you, behind that outcrop, low, do not move until I tell you, do not draw until I tell you — and Selene went to the outcrop and lay flat behind it with the long single-edged sword drawn quietly across her body and the back-blade still sheathed and her breathing slowed to the count Vessa had taught her, which was four in, hold for four, six out, hold for two, repeat.

She could see the open ground. She could see Vessa's left shoulder behind the birch. She could not see Kael, although she knew where he was. She could not see Branwen at all. She could not see Halric, because he was below her sightline. She could see the place where the moor track came around a low fold of ground three hundred yards out, which was the place the riders would appear.

She lay in the bracken and she counted her breath, and the breath after that, and the breath after that.

The first rider came around the fold at twenty-three minutes by her count.

III. The Patrol

There were five of them, as Kael had said there might be.

Four were men — three in the half-plate and surcoat of the Purple Dragons of Cormyr, the surcoats deep purple over silver, with the King's Dragon device at the breast; the fourth in plain travelling leather with a longsword on his hip and a Cormyrean officer's badge at the throat, which marked him as a senior scout, possibly a valeskar — a pathfinder rank Selene had heard of in the war stories of older Harpers and had never expected to see in person.

The fifth was a young woman in dark blue robes belted over riding leathers, with a hawthorn rod at her hip and a small leather satchel across her shoulder. She rode less well than the others; she had a city seat, not a soldier's, and the others had clearly slowed their pace twice in the last few minutes to keep her with them. War Wizard. Apprentice grade, by the satchel — full War Wizards carried their focus inside their robes, not in a satchel a teacher might inspect.

Selene noted all of this in perhaps four seconds, the way Vessa had taught her, and then she went very still, because the patrol had reined up.

They had reined up at almost exactly the spot Kael had told them they would — where the ground broke, where the track turned around the low fold, where the visibility in front of the riders went from open to broken-by-willows. The senior scout in the leather had raised one hand, and the three Purple Dragons had stopped, and the apprentice had stopped behind them with the slightly-too-late stop of a person who is not used to riding in formation.

The senior scout walked his horse forward twenty paces. He looked at the ground. He looked at the willows along the Sedgewater, which from his angle would have shown him nothing — Kael had chosen the rise specifically because the willows screened the upstream stretch where the horses had been walked through the water — and he sat his horse for a long moment, still as Kael had been still, reading the country.

He was, Selene realised, good. He was not an apprentice. He was a man who had been riding scout in the King's service for fifteen years, and the apprentice with him was probably his daughter or his student or both, and he was the reason the patrol was here at all and the others were the reason it would be a fight.

He turned his horse. He spoke quietly to the others. The three Purple Dragons checked their reins. The apprentice lifted her hand to the satchel.

Vessa moved her left hand a quarter-inch.

It was the signal Selene had been told, on the rise twenty minutes ago: they are turning back. Take the talker. Spare the rest if we can.

Two things happened at once.

The first was Kael's arrow.

It came off his bow with a sound Selene heard but the patrol did not — a soft hard thup against the morning air — and it took the senior scout in the meat of the right shoulder, low, between the lames of his leather where the gusset gapped on a man riding turned in the saddle. It was not a killing shot. Kael did not take killing shots when a wounding shot would do. The scout grunted and went sideways off his horse, and his horse shied, and the three Purple Dragons reacted in the trained way of Purple Dragons, which is to say two of them drove their heels into their mounts and charged the willows on instinct because that was the direction the arrow had come from, and the third of them got off his horse and ran to the downed man.

The second thing was Branwen.

He came up out of the long grass on the apprentice's right side at a distance of perhaps fifteen feet — Selene saw it now, saw where he had gone, saw that he had circled wide while they were watching the riders — and he was already moving when she saw him, the parrying sword Loomwhisper in his off hand and his right hand outstretched, and Selene heard him say one word in a language she did not know, and the apprentice's hawthorn rod, which she had begun to draw, went black.

Not darkened. Went black. The silver runes on it went dead, and the small light that had been gathering at its tip simply stopped, like a lamp wick pinched between fingers, and the apprentice gasped and pulled her hand back from her own rod as though it had bitten her.

Branwen was on her in another two heartbeats. He took the rod from her hand without taking the hand off, struck her once in the temple with the flat of Loomwhisper's hilt — a precise blow, calculated to drop without killing — and caught her as she came off the saddle.

The two Purple Dragons charging the willows were the fight.

IV. The Fight

They came at the gallop, longswords out, in a wedge — left rider slightly ahead, right rider slightly behind, the trained Cormyrean pair-charge — and they came straight at the spot in the willows where they thought the archer was, which was a spot Kael was no longer in.

Kael had moved the moment the first arrow left the string. He had rolled left along the lip of the rise, come up in a low crouch behind a different birch, and was already nocking the second arrow when the riders crossed the open ground.

The leftmost rider came through the willow rank at a gallop and into the soft ground of the Sedgewater bank, and his horse foundered.

Selene heard the horse scream. She heard the rider come off it. She heard Halric's voice for the first time in the engagement — a single short bark of "HOY" that was the Damaran infantry's I see you, I am coming, brace — and then she heard the impact of a war-hammer against half-plate at full sprint, which is a sound she had not heard before and which she would remember, because it was not the bell-clang of armour she had imagined; it was a deeper, wetter sound, the sound of metal driven into metal driven into bone.

The Purple Dragon went down. Halric finished him with the second blow, on the ground, which was the cleanest way to do it.

The second rider had broken off when the first horse foundered. He wheeled his mount hard right, away from the Sedgewater, back towards the open ground — and Vessa stepped out from behind the birch.

She did not run at him. She walked. Three paces, four. Both blades on her thighs, neither drawn. She stood in the open and watched the rider come around in his arc, and the rider — who was perhaps twenty-five and had been a Purple Dragon for two years and had never fought outside of a column — saw a single woman in dark armour standing alone in the open on a moor, and made the choice that Vessa had counted on him making, which was to ride her down.

He came at her at a hard canter, longsword low and to the right for the cross-stroke.

Vessa did not move until he was eight feet out.

What she did then was almost too fast for Selene to follow, and Selene was looking for it.

She stepped left, off the line of the charge, on her left foot. Her right hand drew Adishakti from the right thigh in a low cut that came up under the horse's shoulder and into the rider's left thigh where it gripped the saddle, and at the same moment her left hand drew the sister-blade from the left thigh and threw it — threw it, underhand, low — into the gap below the rider's pauldron on the side facing her.

The horse went past at the gallop. The rider did not. He came off the back of the saddle in the way men come off when one leg has been opened to the bone and the other arm has been pinned to the chest, which is to say he came off all wrong, and he hit the ground six feet behind his horse and did not get up.

Vessa walked to him, took the sister-blade out of his shoulder and Adishakti off the bracken where she had caught it on the rebound — Selene saw the blade move; saw the small wrong moment of it being in one place and then in Vessa's hand without crossing the air between — and looked down at the man for a count of perhaps three.

He was alive. He was choking on something. Vessa knelt, set the point of Adishakti under his chin, said something in a language Selene did not know, and ended him in the way one ends a wounded horse.

She stood up. She wiped both blades on the dead man's surcoat. She looked across the open ground to where Halric was finishing with his rider and to where Branwen was carrying the apprentice's unconscious body in a soldier's slung carry, and to where the third Purple Dragon — the one who had run to the fallen scout — was standing with his sword half-drawn and his face the colour of unbleached linen.

Corin was walking towards him from the left. Slowly. Sword down. Plate creaking.

The third Purple Dragon was perhaps twenty-two years old. His sword hand was shaking.

"Son," Corin said. His voice carried across the open ground, low and very level, in the tone Selene had heard him use exactly twice — both times to people he was about to give a chance to live. "Drop the sword. Step away from your captain. We will not kill you. We need one of you alive and we need the captain alive and we will not get either of those things if you make me come the rest of the way."

The boy's sword wavered.

"Son. Drop it. Now."

The boy dropped the sword.

Corin closed the last twenty yards at the same pace, took the boy's sword from the bracken, took the boy's belt-knife out of its sheath, and pushed him gently — gently — to his knees beside the fallen captain. He did not bind him. He set one armoured hand on the boy's shoulder, in a way Selene only later understood was both a restraint and a kindness, and he said, "Now you sit, and you do not move, and you do not speak, until the Lady tells you otherwise. Yes?"

"Yes," the boy said.

The captain on the ground was alive. Kael's arrow had gone clean through the meat without finding the artery, which is what Kael's arrows tended to do when Kael did not want a man dead.

Vessa walked across the open ground to stand over him. The captain looked up at her, and his face was grey with the shock of the wound and the fall, but his eyes were clear, and Selene — watching all of this from the outcrop, where she had still not been told to move — saw a thing pass between Vessa and the captain that was the recognition of two professionals who knew each other's trade.

"Valeskar," Vessa said, and it was not a question.

"Yes," said the captain.

"Whose."

"Crown's."

"Whose handler, valeskar. I do not have time for stupid answers."

The captain breathed twice. The arrow shaft moved with his breath. He looked at Vessa. He looked past her, at the apprentice slumped over Branwen's shoulder. He looked back at Vessa.

"My daughter," he said.

"I know," said Vessa. "She is alive. She will remain alive if you and I have a conversation."

The captain closed his eyes.

"Caladnei," he said.

Vessa went still.

"Caladnei."

"The retired one. Yes. She came back into Suzail a tenday ago. She took the brief from the regency council on the seventh of Mirtul. I am her forward scout. We were sent to confirm direction and numbers. We were not — we were not sent to engage. I was riding back to report when your archer took me."

"How many behind you?"

"Twelve riders. Two War Wizards. Three days behind us. They will be at the Sedgewater by tomorrow noon."

Vessa nodded, slowly.

"All right," she said. "We will keep you alive, valeskar. Both of you. I am sorry about your men. We did not want this either."

The captain did not answer. There was nothing to answer.

V. After

They did not move from the Sedgewater that day.

Branwen carried the apprentice to a flat patch under the birches and set her down carefully, and tied her hands at the wrists with a length of soft cord rather than the harder rope Halric offered, and put a folded cloak under her head. Selene watched him do it. Branwen was not gentle by nature. He was being gentle deliberately, because the apprentice was a young woman of perhaps twenty whose first taste of field magic had been her own focus going dead in her hand at the word of a man she had not seen, and Branwen — Selene understood, watching — knew exactly what that felt like, because someone had done it to him once.

Corin and Halric dug a single grave, large, on the eastern bank of the Sedgewater above the high-water line. They put both Purple Dragons into it together, and the captain's horse, which had broken a leg in the foundering and which Halric had ended with the war-hammer in the way one ends a horse that cannot be saved. Corin said a short Damaran prayer over the grave that Selene had not heard him say before, which was to Ilmater, and not to Tempus as she would have expected, and she filed that.

Kael came down off the rise after a long while. He had stayed up there for perhaps an hour after the fight, with his bow, watching the country to the south and east, in case the patrol had been the forward element of a larger column and the column was closer than the captain had said. Eventually he came down. He spoke to Vessa quietly for two minutes. Vessa nodded. Kael unstrung the bow, slid it back into its case, and went to where the captain lay, and knelt beside him, and looked at the wound he had made.

"I am sorry," Kael said, in a voice Selene could only just hear. "It was a hard angle. I tried to clear the bone."

"You did clear the bone," said the captain. "Cleanly. I have seen worse work by my own archers in barracks."

"Will you let me set it before we ride?"

"Yes."

Kael set it. The captain did not make a sound. The boy — the third Purple Dragon — watched, sitting where Corin had left him, with his hands on his knees and his eyes very wide, and Selene noticed that Halric had at some point in the last hour given the boy a strip of dried apricot from his own saddlebag. The boy had not eaten it. He was holding it in his fist like a charm.

Vessa came across the open ground to where Selene was still lying behind the outcrop. Selene had not been told to move. She had spent the last ninety minutes lying flat in the bracken, watching, the long sword still drawn across her body, her breath at the count Vessa had taught her.

Vessa sat down on the rock beside her. She did not speak for a while. Then she said:

"You did not move."

"You did not tell me to."

"No. I did not. Did you want to?"

Selene thought about it.

"Yes," she said, honestly. "When the second rider went past, I had a clean throw at his back. The sister-blade you used — I would have used my own, at the same point, in the same place. I had the angle."

"I know you did. I saw it."

"Then why —"

"Because if you had thrown, the captain would have seen the throw, and he would have seen you, and we would now be having a different conversation about a different prisoner. I needed to take that man myself, in the open, with my face showing, because the captain needs to remember my face and not yours when we let him go. You are not on the ledger yet. You will not be on the ledger after today. That is the work I had for you today. Lying still on a rock and not throwing the knife. Do you understand?"

"Yes."

"You did it."

"I did."

Vessa looked at her for a long moment. Selene held the look. Vessa was — Selene saw, with a slight surprise — pleased. Not visibly. Vessa's face was Vessa's face. But the small thing at the corner of her mouth that meant good was there, and Selene felt it land in her chest in a way that surprised her also, because she had not known, before today, that she had been waiting for it.

"Get up," Vessa said. "Come and meet the prisoners. The man is called Vandren of Marsember. The girl is his daughter. Her name is Tessa. Branwen will work them tonight; you will sit beside Branwen and listen, because there are things I want you to hear that I do not want to summarise for you afterwards. Do you understand?"

"Yes."

"Good."

Vessa stood. Selene stood. They walked back across the open ground together, in step, with the long shadows of the birches stretching east across the moor, and the wind off the High Moor cool in the bracken, and the willows along the Sedgewater silver in the lowering light.

Behind them, the grave Corin and Halric had dug was already the colour of the rest of the moor, and would be invisible by tomorrow's rain.

Ahead of them, by the small fire Kael had finally allowed because the country could not see them in this fold, the captain Vandren was sitting up against a birch with his arm bound and his daughter's head in his lap, and the boy who had dropped his sword was eating his strip of dried apricot in small careful bites, and Branwen was sharpening Loomwhisper on a small whetstone with the slow regular motion of a man who needed the rhythm of the work to think.

Vessa stopped halfway across the ground. She put her hand on Selene's shoulder — briefly, the first time she had touched her in four days, the first time she had touched her in more than four months — and said: "Caladnei is the Mage Royal who retired in 1487 and who we were told was dead. She is not dead. She is back in Suzail, and she has been given the brief on Sira, and that means we have less time than we thought and more enemy than we thought. Tonight is going to be a hard conversation. Sit close to Branwen. Watch his hands. He will tell you with his hands when to leave the fire."

"Yes."

"And Selene."

"Yes."

"Well done. Today."

She lifted her hand from Selene's shoulder and walked on toward the fire. Selene stood for a moment in the bracken with her own hand pressed unconsciously against her ribs, where the small wooden ka-bird sat warm against her skin, and she breathed once — four in, hold, six out — and she followed.

---

To be continued in The Conversation by the Sedgewater.

This is my first post here - I have been writing this story for myself and its getting so interesting, layered and detailed that I thought it would be good to share it with a D&D community.

It started off as a vignette about the people in the photo and has morphed into epic saga charting rise of the House of Duskmere and of Lady Vessa herself becoming one of the most powerful and influential people on the Sword Coast.

Feel free to leave comments - I have 14 more chapters written and happy to post them if people want to read the whole story.

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The Weight of Silver

A tale of the Sword Coast, in the Year of Three Streams Blooded (1492 DR)

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Lady Vessa Duskmere, Halric Stone, Branwen Asher, Corin Vale, Kael Auvrenal

I. The Walk Down from Helmsblade

The five of them came down the cracked stone of the outer bailey at dusk, with the sun bleeding red over the Sunset Mountains and the banners of House Helmsblade snapping like impatient hounds above them. The keep at their backs was old Cormyrean stonework gone bastard — a border holding granted in the chaos that followed the Sundering, when the Dragon Throne had been too distracted by Netherese ghosts and Shadovar wraiths to mind its western marches. Now, with Suzail's eye turned outward again and the High Forest stirring with things that should not be stirring, places like Helmsblade had become useful once more.

Useful, and watched.

They had been summoned for a private council. They were leaving with something heavier than any of them had brought up the hill.

Lady Vessa Duskmere walked at the centre of them, as was her habit and her right, though she would have refused either word if pressed. She was tall — taller than three of the four men around her — and the wind off the foothills lifted her black hair where it had escaped the silver clasp at her crown. Her armour was Calishite work, or made to look it: blackened plate over the chest and ribs, etched in a script that was not quite Thorass and not quite anything a scholar of Candlekeep would name for you, the metal dark as wet slate and inlaid with copper filigree that caught the dying light. Below the cuirass, the long split skirt of dyed leather and lacquered scale fell to her boots, with thigh straps that held two narrow blades reversed against the leg — a fighting style she had brought back from her years in the East, where she had served, and bled, and learned things she did not speak about.

She was thirty-four. She had been a Harper once. She was not, any longer, anything so simple.

"Say it again," she said quietly, without turning her head. "Slowly."

Behind her left shoulder, Corin Vale obliged. He was the eldest of the company, forty if he was a day, with a face that had been handsome once and had now gone craggy in the way that suited some men better than youth had. His beard was shot through with iron, his hair tied back with a leather thong, and his armour was the heaviest of the five — full plate of Damaran make, the breastplate scored across the left pauldron from a gnoll's axe at the Battle of Berdusk Ford six summers past. The scar had not been buffed out. Corin Vale considered such things to be honest.

"The seal was Lord Helmsblade's," he said. "I watched him press it. The wax was Cormyrean red, not the Helmsblade blue. That means it was witnessed by a Crown agent, Vessa. There was a Purple Dragon in the room we did not see."

"And the contents."

"Are exactly what Branwen says they are."

At Vessa's right, walking a half-pace ahead because he could never quite force himself to walk in line, was Branwen Asher. Younger than Corin by ten years, leaner, sharper-faced, with the high cheekbones and pale hair of a man whose blood ran half-Illuskan. He wore a lighter harness — black scale over a gambeson, a single shoulder of articulated plate on his sword arm, the rest left mobile. Two blades crossed at his back: a longsword for the right hand, a parrying sword for the left. He was a duellist by training, a spy by trade, and a Harper still — the only one of them who had not yet given up the silver pin, though he carried it in a hidden seam now rather than at his collar.

"Three thousand crowns," Branwen said. "Three thousand Cormyrean crowns and a writ of safe passage, in exchange for one woman in Yartar. By the second tenday of Mirtul. Or the offer voids and the bounty quadruples and is opened to the open market."

"Mirtul," said the man behind Vessa's right shoulder. "Three tendays."

This was Halric Stone, and he was the largest of them, though not the loudest. A Damaran by birth, a sellsword by necessity, a bear of a man with a beard that had gone to rust at the edges and a voice that rumbled up out of his chest like a millwheel. His armour was older than any of theirs — fluted plate that had belonged to his father, and his father's father, with the Stone family device hammered out long ago and replaced now with nothing at all, a patch of bare scarred steel over the heart. He carried a bastard sword across his back and a war-hammer at his hip, and he had killed more men than he could count and fewer than rumour gave him credit for, which is the truth of any man who has fought for coin long enough.

"Mirtul," Halric said again, as though tasting it. "And the woman is?"

Vessa stopped walking. They stopped with her, in the unconscious way of a unit that has fought together long enough that no one needs to give the order. The keep was a dark crown above them now, the last sentries on the wall reduced to shapes against the bruised sky. The stones underfoot were broken in a pattern that looked almost deliberate from above, like the cracked face of a dropped mirror.

She drew the parchment from inside her cuirass and read it again, although she had read it three times already in the lord's solar and could have recited it from memory.

"The woman in Yartar," she said, "is named in the writ as Sira of Auvrenal. Age twenty-six. Dark-haired. Last seen in the company of a Waterdhavian merchant called Olem Voss. The Crown wants her returned alive. Helmsblade will pay the three thousand on delivery."

She let the parchment hang at her side.

"That is the public name and the public price."

"And the private?" Branwen asked, though his voice had gone flat in a way that suggested he already knew.

"Her true name," said Vessa, "is Sira Auvrenal."

Halric did not understand. Corin did, and his jaw worked.

The fifth man understood too, and that was the one who had said nothing yet, and whose silence had begun to weigh on the others like a held breath.

II. The Fifth

He stood a little apart, as he always did. Kael Auvrenal — though only one person in Faerûn living still called him that, and he had not seen her in eleven years — leaned on the low wall of cut stone at the edge of the path and looked out at the failing light over the foothills, and said nothing at all.

He was thirty-one. His hair was the colour of old wheat, longer than was fashionable in the cities, tied back with a thin braid at the temple in the manner of the Uthgardt tribesmen he had run with for two winters in his early twenties — a debt repaid, a story for another night. His armour was the lightest of the five, by his own preference: a cuirass of dwarf-make under a long charcoal tabard, vambraces of beaten steel, a sword-belt that carried both a hand-and-a-half blade and, on the left hip, a shorter, older weapon with a wire-wrapped hilt and a pommel that had been worn smooth by some other hand long before his.

He had a way of going still that the others had learned to read. Halric, who had drunk with him in nine cities, said it was the stillness of a man calculating how many people in the room he could kill before they killed him. Branwen, who had worked beside him in the dark for years and trusted him further than was wise, said it was the stillness of a man trying not to remember something.

Tonight it was both.

"Auvrenal," Halric said slowly, sounding the name out as though that would help. "I know that name."

"You should," said Corin. "You drank his sister's wedding-wine in Baldur's Gate four years ago. You don't forget weddings, Hal, you've told me so a dozen times."

"Gods." Halric's face changed. He looked at Kael, and Kael did not look back. "Gods, that's Sira? Your sister Sira?"

"My half-sister," Kael said. His voice was very level. He had a voice that could be very level when he chose. "Same father. Different mothers. She was twelve when our father died. I have not seen her since the year of her wedding, which was, as Corin says, four years ago."

"And the wedding," Branwen said carefully, "was to —"

"Olem Voss." Kael turned at last. The light caught his eyes, which were grey, and very tired. "Yes. The Waterdhavian merchant. Who is named in the writ as her companion, which is Cormyrean for abductor, but who is in fact her husband of four years, and the father of her two children, and a man I have personally drunk with on three occasions and consider a decent if slightly venal soul."

A silence.

It was Vessa who spoke, finally, and she spoke to Kael alone, although the others heard.

"Why does the Dragon Throne want your sister, Kael?"

He did not answer at once. He was looking down at the stones under his boots, at the cracked pattern of them, and one of his hands had closed unconsciously around the older sword's pommel — the one with the worn grip, the one that had been someone else's first.

"Our father," he said, "served in the household of Vangerdahast for the last six years of the old wizard's tenure. He was not a mage. He was something more useful, which was a man who could be trusted to carry letters and not read them. When the Steel Regent dismissed Vangey in '69, our father came home. He brought certain papers with him."

"Which papers?" Vessa asked.

"I don't know. I never did know. He did not tell me, because I was nineteen and stupid, and he did not tell Sira, because she was twelve. He told no one. He died of a flux in the spring of 1481 and the papers vanished. We assumed he had burned them. The household assumed he had burned them. Apparently —" his mouth twisted, "— the household was wrong."

"Apparently," said Branwen, very softly, "the Crown thinks Sira has them."

"The Crown does not," said Corin. "The Crown thinks Sira knows where they are. There is a distinction. If the Crown thought Sira had them, the writ would name them and demand them. The writ names Sira and demands Sira."

"And the writ," Vessa said, "was witnessed by a Purple Dragon agent in Lord Helmsblade's solar this afternoon."

"Yes."

"Which means," she went on, her voice flat as a struck bell, "that the request did not come from Helmsblade. Helmsblade is the purse. The hand belongs to Suzail."

III. What Each of Them Heard

There is a thing that happens when five people receive the same news and each one of them hears something different, and the air between them becomes for a moment very crowded with the unsaid.

Corin heard Suzail, and remembered.

He had not been a soldier of Cormyr, but he had fought for them, briefly, as a free company captain during the Goblin War of '79 — the small ugly war the chronicles barely mention, fought in the marshes south of Wheloon while the kingdom's attention was elsewhere. He had watched a Purple Dragon officer order the execution of forty bound prisoners because feeding them on the march was inconvenient. He had said nothing, because he had been twenty-six and hungry and the contract paid in Cormyrean gold. He had carried the silence of it for fourteen years. Now Cormyr wanted him to deliver a young woman with two children to that same kind of officer in that same kind of room, and he heard the request the way a man hears a debt being called in by a creditor he had hoped was dead.

Halric heard three thousand crowns, and felt sick.

Three thousand crowns was the precise sum his sister's husband owed to a Calishite slaver-banker in Memnon, against which his sister and her two daughters stood as collateral under a contract Halric had been working for two years to dissolve. He had ridden into Helmsblade tonight with twelve hundred to his name. He had ridden in calculating, as he had been calculating for eight months, how much longer he could keep the banker patient. Three thousand crowns would not just buy his sister's freedom; it would buy her a house in Berdusk and her daughters' apprenticeships and a future. And all he had to do was help take a Waterdhavian merchant's wife from her bed in Yartar and put her in a wagon bound for Suzail. That was all. He had done worse for less.

He looked at Kael, and felt sicker.

Branwen heard Vangerdahast's papers, and went cold all the way to the bone.

Branwen was the only one of the five who knew what those papers almost certainly were, because Branwen had been a Harper long enough and well-placed enough to have heard the rumour, twice, in two different cities, from two different sources who did not know each other and were both now dead. The rumour was that Vangerdahast, in the last months before his dismissal, had compiled a private register of the bloodlines of the Cormyrean nobility — including the irregularities. The bastards. The substitutions. The quiet infidelities of two centuries of Obarskyr queens and their cousins. The register had vanished when Vangey did. If it existed and if Suzail wanted it back, then Suzail did not want it for safekeeping. Suzail wanted it because someone in the current succession was vulnerable to it, and the current king was a child of eleven, and the regency council was already at one another's throats, and a piece of paper with the wrong name on it could pull the whole kingdom into civil war within a season.

Branwen heard all of that, in the half-second after Kael said Vangerdahast, and he understood that the Harpers needed to know. Tonight. Before any of them slept.

He also understood that telling Vessa would put her in an impossible place, because Vessa was no longer a Harper, and the silver pin in Branwen's collar seam was not a thing he had ever shown her.

Vessa heard the Crown wants her returned alive, and heard the lie under it.

She had served the Zhentarim for eighteen months in her early twenties — a fact known to no one in this company except, possibly, Kael, who knew because he had been the one to pull her out — and she knew the shape of a contract that ended in a quiet death. Returned alive meant delivered alive to a place where she will die. It did not matter what was in the papers. It mattered that Sira knew, and knowing made her a thing that could not be allowed to wander Faerûn telling her story to merchants and priests and drunken Waterdhavian husbands. The Crown was not retrieving an asset. The Crown was closing a door.

And Vessa, who had been pulled out of a Zhentish counting-house at the age of twenty-three by a young swordsman with grey eyes and a worn-pommelled blade and no good reason to bother saving her, looked at that swordsman now and understood, as she had understood from the moment she first read the writ, that there was only one answer she could give.

Kael heard his sister's name, and heard nothing else for a long time.

He had not protected her when their father died. He had been nineteen, and angry, and useless, and he had taken his father's older sword and gone north to the Uthgardt because he could not bear the house. Sira had been raised by their father's sister in Baldur's Gate. He had written, sometimes. He had sent money when he had it. He had stood at her wedding, drunk too much, and left before the dancing because the bride looked too much like their mother, who had died in childbirth, and he could not breathe in that hall.

He had told himself, for eleven years, that she was safe because she was small, because she was domestic, because she was a merchant's wife in a quiet city and not a swordsman's sister in a contested march. He had told himself that the worst gift their father had left them had been the name, and that she had escaped it by taking another man's.

He had been wrong about that, too. He was beginning to suspect he had been wrong about most things.

IV. The Council on the Stones

They did not go down into the village. They sat on the broken stones at the edge of the path, in the long blue moment between sunset and full dark, and they spoke as quietly as five armoured people can speak.

"We have until the second tenday of Mirtul," Corin said. "Three tendays. Yartar is twelve days' hard ride from here, less if the weather holds in the High Moor. If we go now —"

"We are not delivering her," Vessa said.

"I did not say we were delivering her, Vessa, I was speaking to time."

"Then speak to it more clearly. We are not delivering her. We are taking her out. Her, the husband, the children, the household if there is one. We are taking them somewhere the Crown's hand does not reach, and we are doing it before the second tenday of Mirtul, because at the second tenday the bounty quadruples and goes open and every blade between Neverwinter and the Dragonmere will be hunting her."

"Where is out?" asked Halric.

"That is the harder question."

"Waterdeep," said Branwen. "The Lords will not extradite to Cormyr on a sealed writ. Voss has standing there."

"Voss has enemies there," Corin countered. "He left two trade partners ruined when he went to Yartar. Waterdeep is a hornet's nest for him personally."

"Silverymoon, then. The High Lady —"

"Silverymoon is six tendays north and we have three."

"The Underdark," said Halric, with a perfectly straight face, and Vessa snorted in spite of herself, and the moment broke a little, and they were able to think again.

It was Kael who spoke next, and he had not spoken since Vessa had said the hand belongs to Suzail.

"There is a fourth answer," he said.

They looked at him.

"We take her out," he said. "And we take the papers with her. Wherever they are. She will know, or Voss will know, or there will be a trail in the house in Yartar that will tell us. We find them. And we read them."

"Kael," said Corin.

"We read them, Corin. Whatever is in those papers, we read them, and then we decide. If they are what Branwen's face just told me they are —" his eyes flicked to Branwen, who did not flinch, although the cost of not flinching was visible — "then they are a weapon, and a weapon in the right hands is a shield, and Sira does not survive this unless somebody holds a shield over her."

"That is treason, Kael."

"It is treason," Kael agreed, "if Cormyr is the kingdom we serve. I am not a Cormyrean. Vessa is not a Cormyrean. Halric is not a Cormyrean. Branwen is whatever Branwen is this tenday. You, Corin, are the only one of us who has ever taken Cormyrean coin in earnest, and you have been telling me for two years that you regretted it."

"There is regret," said Corin softly, "and there is open rebellion against the Forest Kingdom. They are not the same country."

"No," said Kael. "They are not. But they are on the same road, and the road is shorter than you think."

Vessa said: "I am with him."

She said it before Kael had finished speaking, almost on top of him, and there was something in her voice that none of them — not even Kael — had ever quite heard before. Not loyalty, because loyalty was a word she had used up years ago. Something older and uglier and more honest. A debt being paid forward.

Branwen was the next.

He did it with his hands rather than his voice. He reached into the seam of his collar, and worked the silver pin out, and held it between his fingers in the blue light, and then he closed his fist over it and put it into his belt-pouch and said: "I am with him too. The pin is on a holiday. We will see if it comes back."

Halric looked at the three of them, and then at Corin, and then at his own hands. He thought about his sister. He thought about three thousand crowns. He thought about the look on Sira's face four years ago when she had pressed a cup of wedding-wine into his hand and called him uncle because Kael had been too drunk to introduce him properly.

"Aye," he said, "I am with him."

Corin Vale was the last. He took the longest. He sat with his old plate creaking around him and he looked up at the keep above them, at Helmsblade's banner snapping against the bruised sky, at the Crown of Cormyr that had paid him in gold he had spent and could not give back.

"You understand," he said to Kael, and only to Kael, "that if we do this thing, we do not go back. None of us. Not to Cormyr, not to the lords of the Heartlands, not to any clean contract any of us have ever known. We become outlaws, Kael. Hunted outlaws. With a child of eleven on the Dragon Throne and a regency that needs an enemy, we become exactly the enemy they need."

"Yes," said Kael.

"And you are asking it for one woman."

"I am asking it for my sister," said Kael, "and her children, and the truth of what our father carried home and died of, and the shape of the kingdom that comes after this one. Yes. I am asking it. I will not ask twice."

Corin closed his eyes. When he opened them he was not the man he had been a moment before, and they all saw it, and none of them spoke of it.

"Then I am with you," he said. "Gods help us all. I am with you."

V. The Walk Down

They rose. They did not embrace; they were not that kind of company. They checked their straps and their blades in the unconscious way of people who have decided, without saying it, that the next time they drew steel it would be in earnest.

Vessa folded the parchment and tucked it back into her cuirass, and she did not return it to Lord Helmsblade, and she did not intend to.

Branwen ran his thumb once over the seam of his collar where the pin had been, and felt the absence of it the way a man feels the absence of a tooth — with the tongue, idly, and often.

Halric drew a long breath that smelt of mountain pine and distant rain, and thought, I will find another way for my sister. There is always another way. There has to be.

Corin set his hand on the scarred place on his pauldron where the gnoll's axe had bitten him at Berdusk Ford, and made himself a small, private promise about the kind of man he would be from this night forward.

Kael Auvrenal touched the worn pommel of the older sword at his left hip — the sword that had been his father's, that had carried letters from Vangerdahast, that had hung above a hearth in a house he had not seen in eleven years — and thought of a twelve-year-old girl with dark hair pressing her face against the doorframe and watching him leave.

The wind off the Sunset Mountains lifted and cooled. Somewhere below them, in the village of Helmsblade, the first lamps were being lit.

They walked down together towards the horses, and the road, and Yartar, and the second tenday of Mirtul, and whatever the Year of Three Streams Blooded had left to do with them.

Behind them, on the broken stones of the path, a torn corner of red Cormyrean wax lay where it had fallen from Vessa's hand. The breeze rolled it once, and then again, and then carried it over the wall and down into the dark.

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To be continued in The Second Tenday of Mirtul.

This is my first post here - I have been writing this story for myself and its getting so interesting, layered and detailed that I thought it would be good to share it with a D&D community.

It started off as a vignette about the people in the photo and has morphed into epic saga charting rise of the House of Duskmere and of Lady Vessa herself becoming one of the most powerful and influential people in the Sword Coast.

Feel free to leave comments - I have 14 more chapters written and happy to post them if people want to read the whole story.

The Weight of Silver - Full Chapter Listing:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Forgotten_Realms/comments/1tcwht4/lady_vessa_duskmere_the_weight_of_silver_a_tale/

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The Weight of Silver

A tale of the Sword Coast, in the Year of Three Streams Blooded (1492 DR)

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Lady Vessa Duskmere, Halric Stone, Branwen Asher, Corin Vale, Kael Auvrenal

I. The Walk Down from Helmsblade

The five of them came down the cracked stone of the outer bailey at dusk, with the sun bleeding red over the Sunset Mountains and the banners of House Helmsblade snapping like impatient hounds above them. The keep at their backs was old Cormyrean stonework gone bastard — a border holding granted in the chaos that followed the Sundering, when the Dragon Throne had been too distracted by Netherese ghosts and Shadovar wraiths to mind its western marches. Now, with Suzail's eye turned outward again and the High Forest stirring with things that should not be stirring, places like Helmsblade had become useful once more.

Useful, and watched.

They had been summoned for a private council. They were leaving with something heavier than any of them had brought up the hill.

Lady Vessa Duskmere walked at the centre of them, as was her habit and her right, though she would have refused either word if pressed. She was tall — taller than three of the four men around her — and the wind off the foothills lifted her black hair where it had escaped the silver clasp at her crown. Her armour was Calishite work, or made to look it: blackened plate over the chest and ribs, etched in a script that was not quite Thorass and not quite anything a scholar of Candlekeep would name for you, the metal dark as wet slate and inlaid with copper filigree that caught the dying light. Below the cuirass, the long split skirt of dyed leather and lacquered scale fell to her boots, with thigh straps that held two narrow blades reversed against the leg — a fighting style she had brought back from her years in the East, where she had served, and bled, and learned things she did not speak about.

She was thirty-four. She had been a Harper once. She was not, any longer, anything so simple.

"Say it again," she said quietly, without turning her head. "Slowly."

Behind her left shoulder, Corin Vale obliged. He was the eldest of the company, forty if he was a day, with a face that had been handsome once and had now gone craggy in the way that suited some men better than youth had. His beard was shot through with iron, his hair tied back with a leather thong, and his armour was the heaviest of the five — full plate of Damaran make, the breastplate scored across the left pauldron from a gnoll's axe at the Battle of Berdusk Ford six summers past. The scar had not been buffed out. Corin Vale considered such things to be honest.

"The seal was Lord Helmsblade's," he said. "I watched him press it. The wax was Cormyrean red, not the Helmsblade blue. That means it was witnessed by a Crown agent, Vessa. There was a Purple Dragon in the room we did not see."

"And the contents."

"Are exactly what Branwen says they are."

At Vessa's right, walking a half-pace ahead because he could never quite force himself to walk in line, was Branwen Asher. Younger than Corin by ten years, leaner, sharper-faced, with the high cheekbones and pale hair of a man whose blood ran half-Illuskan. He wore a lighter harness — black scale over a gambeson, a single shoulder of articulated plate on his sword arm, the rest left mobile. Two blades crossed at his back: a longsword for the right hand, a parrying sword for the left. He was a duellist by training, a spy by trade, and a Harper still — the only one of them who had not yet given up the silver pin, though he carried it in a hidden seam now rather than at his collar.

"Three thousand crowns," Branwen said. "Three thousand Cormyrean crowns and a writ of safe passage, in exchange for one woman in Yartar. By the second tenday of Mirtul. Or the offer voids and the bounty quadruples and is opened to the open market."

"Mirtul," said the man behind Vessa's right shoulder. "Three tendays."

This was Halric Stone, and he was the largest of them, though not the loudest. A Damaran by birth, a sellsword by necessity, a bear of a man with a beard that had gone to rust at the edges and a voice that rumbled up out of his chest like a millwheel. His armour was older than any of theirs — fluted plate that had belonged to his father, and his father's father, with the Stone family device hammered out long ago and replaced now with nothing at all, a patch of bare scarred steel over the heart. He carried a bastard sword across his back and a war-hammer at his hip, and he had killed more men than he could count and fewer than rumour gave him credit for, which is the truth of any man who has fought for coin long enough.

"Mirtul," Halric said again, as though tasting it. "And the woman is?"

Vessa stopped walking. They stopped with her, in the unconscious way of a unit that has fought together long enough that no one needs to give the order. The keep was a dark crown above them now, the last sentries on the wall reduced to shapes against the bruised sky. The stones underfoot were broken in a pattern that looked almost deliberate from above, like the cracked face of a dropped mirror.

She drew the parchment from inside her cuirass and read it again, although she had read it three times already in the lord's solar and could have recited it from memory.

"The woman in Yartar," she said, "is named in the writ as Sira of Auvrenal. Age twenty-six. Dark-haired. Last seen in the company of a Waterdhavian merchant called Olem Voss. The Crown wants her returned alive. Helmsblade will pay the three thousand on delivery."

She let the parchment hang at her side.

"That is the public name and the public price."

"And the private?" Branwen asked, though his voice had gone flat in a way that suggested he already knew.

"Her true name," said Vessa, "is Sira Auvrenal."

Halric did not understand. Corin did, and his jaw worked.

The fifth man understood too, and that was the one who had said nothing yet, and whose silence had begun to weigh on the others like a held breath.

II. The Fifth

He stood a little apart, as he always did. Kael Auvrenal — though only one person in Faerûn living still called him that, and he had not seen her in eleven years — leaned on the low wall of cut stone at the edge of the path and looked out at the failing light over the foothills, and said nothing at all.

He was thirty-one. His hair was the colour of old wheat, longer than was fashionable in the cities, tied back with a thin braid at the temple in the manner of the Uthgardt tribesmen he had run with for two winters in his early twenties — a debt repaid, a story for another night. His armour was the lightest of the five, by his own preference: a cuirass of dwarf-make under a long charcoal tabard, vambraces of beaten steel, a sword-belt that carried both a hand-and-a-half blade and, on the left hip, a shorter, older weapon with a wire-wrapped hilt and a pommel that had been worn smooth by some other hand long before his.

He had a way of going still that the others had learned to read. Halric, who had drunk with him in nine cities, said it was the stillness of a man calculating how many people in the room he could kill before they killed him. Branwen, who had worked beside him in the dark for years and trusted him further than was wise, said it was the stillness of a man trying not to remember something.

Tonight it was both.

"Auvrenal," Halric said slowly, sounding the name out as though that would help. "I know that name."

"You should," said Corin. "You drank his sister's wedding-wine in Baldur's Gate four years ago. You don't forget weddings, Hal, you've told me so a dozen times."

"Gods." Halric's face changed. He looked at Kael, and Kael did not look back. "Gods, that's Sira? Your sister Sira?"

"My half-sister," Kael said. His voice was very level. He had a voice that could be very level when he chose. "Same father. Different mothers. She was twelve when our father died. I have not seen her since the year of her wedding, which was, as Corin says, four years ago."

"And the wedding," Branwen said carefully, "was to —"

"Olem Voss." Kael turned at last. The light caught his eyes, which were grey, and very tired. "Yes. The Waterdhavian merchant. Who is named in the writ as her companion, which is Cormyrean for abductor, but who is in fact her husband of four years, and the father of her two children, and a man I have personally drunk with on three occasions and consider a decent if slightly venal soul."

A silence.

It was Vessa who spoke, finally, and she spoke to Kael alone, although the others heard.

"Why does the Dragon Throne want your sister, Kael?"

He did not answer at once. He was looking down at the stones under his boots, at the cracked pattern of them, and one of his hands had closed unconsciously around the older sword's pommel — the one with the worn grip, the one that had been someone else's first.

"Our father," he said, "served in the household of Vangerdahast for the last six years of the old wizard's tenure. He was not a mage. He was something more useful, which was a man who could be trusted to carry letters and not read them. When the Steel Regent dismissed Vangey in '69, our father came home. He brought certain papers with him."

"Which papers?" Vessa asked.

"I don't know. I never did know. He did not tell me, because I was nineteen and stupid, and he did not tell Sira, because she was twelve. He told no one. He died of a flux in the spring of 1481 and the papers vanished. We assumed he had burned them. The household assumed he had burned them. Apparently —" his mouth twisted, "— the household was wrong."

"Apparently," said Branwen, very softly, "the Crown thinks Sira has them."

"The Crown does not," said Corin. "The Crown thinks Sira knows where they are. There is a distinction. If the Crown thought Sira had them, the writ would name them and demand them. The writ names Sira and demands Sira."

"And the writ," Vessa said, "was witnessed by a Purple Dragon agent in Lord Helmsblade's solar this afternoon."

"Yes."

"Which means," she went on, her voice flat as a struck bell, "that the request did not come from Helmsblade. Helmsblade is the purse. The hand belongs to Suzail."

III. What Each of Them Heard

There is a thing that happens when five people receive the same news and each one of them hears something different, and the air between them becomes for a moment very crowded with the unsaid.

Corin heard Suzail, and remembered.

He had not been a soldier of Cormyr, but he had fought for them, briefly, as a free company captain during the Goblin War of '79 — the small ugly war the chronicles barely mention, fought in the marshes south of Wheloon while the kingdom's attention was elsewhere. He had watched a Purple Dragon officer order the execution of forty bound prisoners because feeding them on the march was inconvenient. He had said nothing, because he had been twenty-six and hungry and the contract paid in Cormyrean gold. He had carried the silence of it for fourteen years. Now Cormyr wanted him to deliver a young woman with two children to that same kind of officer in that same kind of room, and he heard the request the way a man hears a debt being called in by a creditor he had hoped was dead.

Halric heard three thousand crowns, and felt sick.

Three thousand crowns was the precise sum his sister's husband owed to a Calishite slaver-banker in Memnon, against which his sister and her two daughters stood as collateral under a contract Halric had been working for two years to dissolve. He had ridden into Helmsblade tonight with twelve hundred to his name. He had ridden in calculating, as he had been calculating for eight months, how much longer he could keep the banker patient. Three thousand crowns would not just buy his sister's freedom; it would buy her a house in Berdusk and her daughters' apprenticeships and a future. And all he had to do was help take a Waterdhavian merchant's wife from her bed in Yartar and put her in a wagon bound for Suzail. That was all. He had done worse for less.

He looked at Kael, and felt sicker.

Branwen heard Vangerdahast's papers, and went cold all the way to the bone.

Branwen was the only one of the five who knew what those papers almost certainly were, because Branwen had been a Harper long enough and well-placed enough to have heard the rumour, twice, in two different cities, from two different sources who did not know each other and were both now dead. The rumour was that Vangerdahast, in the last months before his dismissal, had compiled a private register of the bloodlines of the Cormyrean nobility — including the irregularities. The bastards. The substitutions. The quiet infidelities of two centuries of Obarskyr queens and their cousins. The register had vanished when Vangey did. If it existed and if Suzail wanted it back, then Suzail did not want it for safekeeping. Suzail wanted it because someone in the current succession was vulnerable to it, and the current king was a child of eleven, and the regency council was already at one another's throats, and a piece of paper with the wrong name on it could pull the whole kingdom into civil war within a season.

Branwen heard all of that, in the half-second after Kael said Vangerdahast, and he understood that the Harpers needed to know. Tonight. Before any of them slept.

He also understood that telling Vessa would put her in an impossible place, because Vessa was no longer a Harper, and the silver pin in Branwen's collar seam was not a thing he had ever shown her.

Vessa heard the Crown wants her returned alive, and heard the lie under it.

She had served the Zhentarim for eighteen months in her early twenties — a fact known to no one in this company except, possibly, Kael, who knew because he had been the one to pull her out — and she knew the shape of a contract that ended in a quiet death. Returned alive meant delivered alive to a place where she will die. It did not matter what was in the papers. It mattered that Sira knew, and knowing made her a thing that could not be allowed to wander Faerûn telling her story to merchants and priests and drunken Waterdhavian husbands. The Crown was not retrieving an asset. The Crown was closing a door.

And Vessa, who had been pulled out of a Zhentish counting-house at the age of twenty-three by a young swordsman with grey eyes and a worn-pommelled blade and no good reason to bother saving her, looked at that swordsman now and understood, as she had understood from the moment she first read the writ, that there was only one answer she could give.

Kael heard his sister's name, and heard nothing else for a long time.

He had not protected her when their father died. He had been nineteen, and angry, and useless, and he had taken his father's older sword and gone north to the Uthgardt because he could not bear the house. Sira had been raised by their father's sister in Baldur's Gate. He had written, sometimes. He had sent money when he had it. He had stood at her wedding, drunk too much, and left before the dancing because the bride looked too much like their mother, who had died in childbirth, and he could not breathe in that hall.

He had told himself, for eleven years, that she was safe because she was small, because she was domestic, because she was a merchant's wife in a quiet city and not a swordsman's sister in a contested march. He had told himself that the worst gift their father had left them had been the name, and that she had escaped it by taking another man's.

He had been wrong about that, too. He was beginning to suspect he had been wrong about most things.

IV. The Council on the Stones

They did not go down into the village. They sat on the broken stones at the edge of the path, in the long blue moment between sunset and full dark, and they spoke as quietly as five armoured people can speak.

"We have until the second tenday of Mirtul," Corin said. "Three tendays. Yartar is twelve days' hard ride from here, less if the weather holds in the High Moor. If we go now —"

"We are not delivering her," Vessa said.

"I did not say we were delivering her, Vessa, I was speaking to time."

"Then speak to it more clearly. We are not delivering her. We are taking her out. Her, the husband, the children, the household if there is one. We are taking them somewhere the Crown's hand does not reach, and we are doing it before the second tenday of Mirtul, because at the second tenday the bounty quadruples and goes open and every blade between Neverwinter and the Dragonmere will be hunting her."

"Where is out?" asked Halric.

"That is the harder question."

"Waterdeep," said Branwen. "The Lords will not extradite to Cormyr on a sealed writ. Voss has standing there."

"Voss has enemies there," Corin countered. "He left two trade partners ruined when he went to Yartar. Waterdeep is a hornet's nest for him personally."

"Silverymoon, then. The High Lady —"

"Silverymoon is six tendays north and we have three."

"The Underdark," said Halric, with a perfectly straight face, and Vessa snorted in spite of herself, and the moment broke a little, and they were able to think again.

It was Kael who spoke next, and he had not spoken since Vessa had said the hand belongs to Suzail.

"There is a fourth answer," he said.

They looked at him.

"We take her out," he said. "And we take the papers with her. Wherever they are. She will know, or Voss will know, or there will be a trail in the house in Yartar that will tell us. We find them. And we read them."

"Kael," said Corin.

"We read them, Corin. Whatever is in those papers, we read them, and then we decide. If they are what Branwen's face just told me they are —" his eyes flicked to Branwen, who did not flinch, although the cost of not flinching was visible — "then they are a weapon, and a weapon in the right hands is a shield, and Sira does not survive this unless somebody holds a shield over her."

"That is treason, Kael."

"It is treason," Kael agreed, "if Cormyr is the kingdom we serve. I am not a Cormyrean. Vessa is not a Cormyrean. Halric is not a Cormyrean. Branwen is whatever Branwen is this tenday. You, Corin, are the only one of us who has ever taken Cormyrean coin in earnest, and you have been telling me for two years that you regretted it."

"There is regret," said Corin softly, "and there is open rebellion against the Forest Kingdom. They are not the same country."

"No," said Kael. "They are not. But they are on the same road, and the road is shorter than you think."

Vessa said: "I am with him."

She said it before Kael had finished speaking, almost on top of him, and there was something in her voice that none of them — not even Kael — had ever quite heard before. Not loyalty, because loyalty was a word she had used up years ago. Something older and uglier and more honest. A debt being paid forward.

Branwen was the next.

He did it with his hands rather than his voice. He reached into the seam of his collar, and worked the silver pin out, and held it between his fingers in the blue light, and then he closed his fist over it and put it into his belt-pouch and said: "I am with him too. The pin is on a holiday. We will see if it comes back."

Halric looked at the three of them, and then at Corin, and then at his own hands. He thought about his sister. He thought about three thousand crowns. He thought about the look on Sira's face four years ago when she had pressed a cup of wedding-wine into his hand and called him uncle because Kael had been too drunk to introduce him properly.

"Aye," he said, "I am with him."

Corin Vale was the last. He took the longest. He sat with his old plate creaking around him and he looked up at the keep above them, at Helmsblade's banner snapping against the bruised sky, at the Crown of Cormyr that had paid him in gold he had spent and could not give back.

"You understand," he said to Kael, and only to Kael, "that if we do this thing, we do not go back. None of us. Not to Cormyr, not to the lords of the Heartlands, not to any clean contract any of us have ever known. We become outlaws, Kael. Hunted outlaws. With a child of eleven on the Dragon Throne and a regency that needs an enemy, we become exactly the enemy they need."

"Yes," said Kael.

"And you are asking it for one woman."

"I am asking it for my sister," said Kael, "and her children, and the truth of what our father carried home and died of, and the shape of the kingdom that comes after this one. Yes. I am asking it. I will not ask twice."

Corin closed his eyes. When he opened them he was not the man he had been a moment before, and they all saw it, and none of them spoke of it.

"Then I am with you," he said. "Gods help us all. I am with you."

V. The Walk Down

They rose. They did not embrace; they were not that kind of company. They checked their straps and their blades in the unconscious way of people who have decided, without saying it, that the next time they drew steel it would be in earnest.

Vessa folded the parchment and tucked it back into her cuirass, and she did not return it to Lord Helmsblade, and she did not intend to.

Branwen ran his thumb once over the seam of his collar where the pin had been, and felt the absence of it the way a man feels the absence of a tooth — with the tongue, idly, and often.

Halric drew a long breath that smelt of mountain pine and distant rain, and thought, I will find another way for my sister. There is always another way. There has to be.

Corin set his hand on the scarred place on his pauldron where the gnoll's axe had bitten him at Berdusk Ford, and made himself a small, private promise about the kind of man he would be from this night forward.

Kael Auvrenal touched the worn pommel of the older sword at his left hip — the sword that had been his father's, that had carried letters from Vangerdahast, that had hung above a hearth in a house he had not seen in eleven years — and thought of a twelve-year-old girl with dark hair pressing her face against the doorframe and watching him leave.

The wind off the Sunset Mountains lifted and cooled. Somewhere below them, in the village of Helmsblade, the first lamps were being lit.

They walked down together towards the horses, and the road, and Yartar, and the second tenday of Mirtul, and whatever the Year of Three Streams Blooded had left to do with them.

Behind them, on the broken stones of the path, a torn corner of red Cormyrean wax lay where it had fallen from Vessa's hand. The breeze rolled it once, and then again, and then carried it over the wall and down into the dark.

---

To be continued in The Second Tenday of Mirtul.