A man she didn’t know at all.
Shaking her head-what, by all the gods, was going on? Had Ruthgul been someone else all those years, or was that someone who’d been impersonating him and had paid the price? — she ducked into a side alley and trotted hastily along it to reach the door to her abode on a side of the building the Lord Delcastle couldn’t see.
Arclath regarded the stone-faced Dragons, who were forming a wall of burly uniformed flesh to prevent him following the dancer or getting a better look at the dead man-whose change he’d half-glimpsed, and confirmed from some of their reactions-with a broadening smile. Giving them a theatrical sigh, he observed, “Women! I’ll never understand them!”
“Whereas they,” Dralkin told him warningly, “understand you all too well, Lord. As, now, do we.”
“Bravely challenged, good Swordcaptain,” Arclath replied airily, turning with a wave of farewell to stroll off back the way he’d come, “yet you don’t, you know. No one understands me! Save perhaps one person, a little.”
“That would be me,” a sharp voice said suddenly at his elbow.
It was a voice he knew, and it belonged to a wizard of war by the name of Glathra.
“I’ve listened in to a lot of what you’ve said and done this night,” she added briskly, “so spare me all the fanciful tales and instead yield me a few plain answers.”
“Not without something decent to drink,” he said, giving her a courtly bow. “So beautiful an interrogator deserves no less.”
“I believe we have water in the palace that doesn’t have too many squirming things floating in it,” she replied dryly, as war wizards and Purple Dragons appeared from all sides to close in around them. “Come.”
“Your command is my wish, Lady,” the Lord Delcastle told her lightly-almost mockingly-as he offered her his arm. She ignored it, but when she turned, pointed toward the distant royal palace, and started walking, he fell in beside her.
Amid the suddenly tight ring of their watchful Purple Dragon escort.
Amarune was half-expecting to find Talane waiting in her rooms, but there was no sign of her. Or anyone.
Not even under the bed.
Her heaps of soiled clothing lay just as she’d left them, the untidy little mountain range of her laziness. By the state of them, the undisturbed dust, and the way her other minor untidynesses reigned unaltered, it didn’t look as if any intruder had so much as thought of entering Amarune’s rooms.
When she finally dared to believe that and relax, weariness broke over her like a harbor storm, leaving her reeling.
She staggered across the room, suddenly very tired-yet still scared, a rising fear that got worse as her thoughts started racing through all the possibilities of Ruthgul’s murder, the drunken wizard of war who’d known who she was-did they all know? Why hadn’t they done anything to her, then? — and Talane …
Amarune was shaking so hard, she was almost a shuddering by the time she clawed at a certain hiding place until a bedpost yielded and she could haul out a slender and precious flask of firewine. Taking a long pull, she reeled across the room again, flinging back her head to gasp loud and long at its fiery bite.
When she fetched up against a wall, Amarune got the stopper back in, then took the flask with her as she lurched to her bed and flung herself down on it.
“What by all the Hells am I going to do?” she hissed aloud.
The walls maintained their usual eloquent silence, and she sighed, let her shoulders sag in the first part of a shrug of helplessness she didn’t bother to finish, then in sudden irritation pulled off her boots, one after the other, and flung them hard against the wall.
Wrenching off the cloak was harder, and she was panting by the time she whirled it into the air and watched it swirl down to the floor.
The sweat-soaked robe came off with comparative ease, and she hurled it onto the highest peak of her piled-up dirty laundry.
Whereupon the heap rose up with a grunt, and a bearded old man was smiling at her, her smallclothes still decorating his head.
Amarune stared at him then flung herself up off the bed, opening her mouth to scream-and Elminster hurled himself atop her, moving surprisingly fast for such such seemingly old bones, and thrusting two or three of her underclouts into her mouth to stifle her shrieks.
They bounced on the bed together, the old man on top and Amarune clawing at him and making muffled “mmmphs” as his bony old knees and elbows landed on various soft areas of her anatomy.
Growling, she started to swing and kick at him wildly, and the old man sighed, plucked up her-thankfully empty-copper chamberpot from where he’d found it earlier under the edge of the bed, and brained her with it.
The room spun and swam. Gods and little chanting priests, the minstrels told truth: one does see stars … sometimes …
Amarune fell back on her pillows, clutching her head and groaning.
Whereupon the old man got off her, caught up her cloak from the floor, and wrapped it firmly around her, pinioning her arms to her sides, and propped her up on her pillows like a firmly efficient nurse.
“I’m very sorry I had to do that to ye, lass,” he announced, trundling back down to the foot of her bed and perching there, “but we must talk. I need ye. Cormyr needs ye. Hells, the Realms needs ye.”
Amarune groaned again, trying to peer at the gaunt, white-haired intruder as she struggled free of her cloak. He made no move toward her. The moment she could move her arms freely, she clutched the cloak more tightly around her-though it was more than a little too late to guard any thin wisp of modesty she might still have possessed. He was obviously waiting for her to speak, so she did.
“Who … who are you?”
“Elminster,” came the prompt reply. “I used to be a wizard. Yes, that Elminster. Well met, Great-granddaughter.”
Amarune couldn’t help herself. “Great what?”
She stared at him in the sudden silence, open-mouthed. He filled the pause by smiling and nodding, but by then she was frowning again.
“Elminster? But you can’t be! Why-”
“ ‘Can’t’? Did I hear the word ‘can’t’? Amarune, do ye know anything about wizards, at all?”
“But how-? The goddess Mystra …”
“Ye will be unsurprised to learn,” the old man told her in very dry tones, “that ’tis a long story. Right now, I’d rather hear just what ye-and young Lord Delcastle-are up to.”
“Why?”
Elminster regarded his great-granddaughter with something that might have been exasperation, or just might have been new respect.
“This has been a long evening already, aye? Let’s go somewhere that has good wine and decent food and talk a bit. I’ve found dancers like to talk. Anything to keep from doing the other things customers expect them to do, I suppose.”
“So this Amarune is the famous Silent Shadow,” Wizard of War Glathra Barcantle mused, sounding entirely unsurprised. “You obviously didn’t know that until just now, so what made you suspicious of her? Or were you governed by a paramount interest in a mask dancer who might be willing, for coins enough, to do more for you than merely dance?”
Arclath Delcastle stared rather coolly back at his interrogator. “I’ve seldom seen a need to pay anyone to fill my bed, Lady Wizard. Handsome, remember? Noble? Dashing, yes?”
Glathra’s expression remained coldly unimpressed.
He sighed, waved dismissively, and added, “Ne’er mind. I was interested in her for a reason you already know; I wanted to learn why she’d been listening to what Halance, Belnar, and I were discussing about the council. Particularly now that Halance and Belnar are so suddenly and violently dead. Though I grant that it’s both unusual and unfashionable for nobles to be so, in this day and age, Lady Glathra, I do happen to be loyal to the Crown.”