“Will you be staying in Nibenay?” Rieve asked them.
“All I’ve ever wanted is to settle someplace,” Myrana said. “I’m so tired of wandering.”
“And everything I have is here,” Corlan said. “The academy, my family … I think we’ll stay.”
“Good,” Rieve said. “We can visit, once in a while.”
“Anyone else leaving?” Ruhm asked.
“I am,” Amoni offered. “I thought perhaps Tyr. Maybe I’ll join the Veiled Alliance there. Keep enjoying freedom—now I’ve had a taste, I find I like it. Maybe I can help free others.”
“I could go with you, Amoni,” Sellis said. “If Myrana has no more need of me.”
“I’ve been in touch with the family, Sellis,” she said. “You’ll be paid, and well, for your service. I like to think I won’t need a bodyguard any longer. I’m not sure you ever did.”
“It’s Nibenay,” Aric said. “One never knows.”
“She’ll have me, demonslayer,” Mazzax reminded them. “What more could she need?”
“That’s right, Mazzax,” Myrana said. “I’ll have you.” She seemed to take the dwarf’s single-minded interest in good spirits. He could choose some other interest later on, Aric knew, and then again, he could trail her around until his last day—you just couldn’t tell, with dwarves.
“I’m staying,” Ruhm said. “Nibenay’s awful, but it’s home.”
“Staying, and keeping the shop,” Aric said. “Mazzax, he might need a hand now and again.”
“If the lady wills it, demonslayer.”
“I’m sure I can spare you sometimes, Mazzax.”
“Very well, then.”
“But if Ruhm gets the shop,” Amoni asked, “then what of you, Aric?”
“I don’t know that the city has suffered from my absence,” Aric said. “And with Ruhm and Mazzax working together, there’ll still be a smith of uncommon skills. So …”
He didn’t finish the sentence, because he didn’t know what the end of it was. His journey had been hard, dangerous, but he’d caught a taste for travel—like Amoni’s, for freedom, he supposed. He had nothing in particular to hold him in Nibenay, and plenty of reasons to leave, like the memories spawned by so many street corners and buildings and neighborhoods. He could always return; he had the closest thing to a family now that he had ever known. The knowledge that they would always take him back gave him the courage to leave them behind.
The barmaid put a mug before him and he drank deep, thankful for the excuse not to speak. He had no idea where he would go. Athas was a big world, full of perils but also splashes of great beauty, and there might be a place in it for a half-elf with an affinity for steel.
He would have to find where that place was.
Searching for it?
Now, that would be an adventure.
JEFF MARIOTTE is the award-winning author of more than forty novels, including the Age of Conan: Marauders trilogy, horror trilogy Missing White Girl, River Runs Red, and Cold Black Hearts, (all as Jeffrey J. Mariotte), The Slab, the Witch Season teen horror quartet, and others, as well as dozens of comic books, notably Desperadoes and Zombie Cop. He’s a co-owner of specialty bookstore Mysterious Galaxy in San Diego, and lives in southeastern Arizona on the Flying M Ranch. For more about him, please visit www.jeffmariotte.com.