I suppose someone will always be watching, wherever I go.
A gentle breeze arose, fresh and fragrant with wildflowers, and Narnra lifted her face to catch it, and looked around at the rustling trees and waving grass.
This was a fair place. It must be nice to live here. Wherever "here" was.
Some time later, Elminster quietly sat down beside Narnra and steered a fresh mug of tea into her hand. "Ye, ahem, threw away the chance to finish yours," he said gently.
Narnra gave him a red-eyed glance and—after a long moment— took the tea.
Saying nothing, she quickly looked away, and sat cradling it and staring at the pool.
After a time, she absently sipped it.
A little later, she risked a glance to her right. Elminster was sitting silently beside her, looking out over the pool rather than at her, his unlit pipe floating in the air near at hand.
Is he just going to sit there? Waiting for me to beg his forgiveness, cry for his acceptance, say I love him? Knowing I can't run from him, don't even know where to run to, and that he can blast me whenever he wants?
I threw my tea in his face, shouted at him—why hasn't he blasted me already?
What's he afraid of?
Narnra shot a glance at her father. He didn't look afraid of anything. He was smelling the breeze, nose lifted, a half-smile on his face.
He doesn't look afraid, he looks smug. Damn him. Oh, yes, too late for that. Such big words, such calm claims. Smug old man.
She drew in a ragged breath, looked away, and sipped from her tankard again.
It was getting cold—but grew warmer, even as she drew back and made a face at it.
Narnra glared at Elminster. "Are you using your magic on this?"
"Of course," he said gently. "Ye prefer it warm, d'ye not?"
She regarded him, hefting the tankard in her hand as if she might throw it at him. Again. "And you always use your magic to do what other people prefer?"
"Nay. Most folk don't even know what they prefer. Most never stop to think." He turned his head to watch some flower petals drift by. "Do they?"
You mean that as some sort of a thrust at me, old man? You think clever words can change everything?
Narnra turned her back on her father again.
Every time she turned around again, however, he was still there. He smiled at her once or twice, but she gave him stony silence. After a while, she started watching him.
He sat and looked around at Shadowdale, not seeming to mind.
Later, her tankard empty, Narnra murmured, "This place is beautiful."
"Aye. I sit here often. Dawn, sunrise, sunset, and dusk offer the best views, of course. If ye want to bathe, soap-flakes and hair-scent are under yon rock."
Narnra gave him a startled look. "You expect me to stay?"
Elminster shook his head. "I expect nothing—but I offered ye welcome at any time ye might care to claim it, and ye might arrive some day desiring to get cool or clean or wash the blood of someone ye disagreed with off ye, so 'tis handy to know where the soap is."
"I suppose you have drying robes waiting under some other rock?"
"No, but if ye go and lie on yonder stone, yell find it both heats and sucks away the damp. The black velvet butterfly hanging on the shrub beside it is one of Jhessail Silvertree's hair-slides. She comes here often to lay her hair out in a fan to get it properly dry."
It was Narnra's turn for head-shaking. "I—I don't understand you. You seem tender and kind, you protest your noble reasons and causes, insist you look at everything from all sorts of viewpoints . . . yet you use people as if they were farm-beasts, love women and leave them as casually as you change your socks, and-and—why?"
"Because I'm a mere mortal, twisted beyond sanity by what I've seen and done, and by holding a goddess in my arms, and by living for far too long," Elminster whispered. "I'm a crazed villain and a proudly enthusiastic meddler as well as thy father . . . but I'd also like to be thy friend. I take folk as I find them and leave judgments to the young; I hope ye can learn to do that, too."
"Old Mage," Narnra told him firmly, "young people have to learn to judge others or they never survive to become older. Yet I'll grant that you . . . are more than I thought you were."
She turned to look directly into his eyes and added, "If I'd never known you'd sired me, we'd already be friends. I'm . . . I'm trying to set aside my anger over growing up fatherless then being left alone to fend for myself after my mother died. I may be just one of uncounted thousands of forgotten, abandoned orphans in Faerun, but I'm me, the only person I've ever had to worry about, and—"
"Precisely. Ye're the only person ye've ever had to worry about. Go get thyself a few friends—real friends—and ye'll have that many more folk to worry over."
"And you worry about thousands, is that it?"
"Worry and do something—lots of things, endlessly—for them. Grieve for all those I failed and those the passing years have taken from me. Whole realms I loved are now gone," Elminster replied and added calmly, "Boo hoo."
Narnra snorted in surprised mirth and set her tankard down. "I could learn to love this place," she said almost wistfully—and then turned her head to look into her father's eyes and added slowly, almost struggling with the words, "To accept you too, I think, with all your lies and meddling. Someday."
"I'd like that," he said gently. " 'Twould mean much to me."
She nodded, and they looked calmly into each other's eyes for what seemed a very long time.
Abruptly Narnra became aware, as she stared through it at her father, of how tangled and sweat-soiled her hair was. Her gaze fell longingly to the pool, and after a few breaths of silence she asked, "Would you mind going away whilst I bathe if I promise to work no mischief?"
Elminster chuckled, took up her tankard, and laid a hand on her shoulder. "I'll be up in the Tower preparing evenfeast when ye're done. Florin has probably worn his sword-edge dull slicing edibles by now. I'm not much of a family, lass, but ye're welcome, whenever."
Narnra gave him a strange look and waved at the pool. "There aren't—snakes or biting turtles or anything like that, are there?"
"Nay," Elminster told her, as he conjured up a fluffy robe, towels, and slippers, and bent with a grunt to lay them out on a handy rock. "I asked the beast that eats them to depart when ye arrived, and it did."
She gave him a longer look, until he turned and added, "Trust me."
"I'm learning to," she said with a lopsided smile. "Don't make me regret it. Please."
"Well, if ye'd like to toss your clothes onto yon rock, I'll snatch them away with a spell and give them a wash whilst ye're soaking—because they certainly need it. Knives and all, mind. I'll be careful not to let things rust. Oh, and the little blades ye keep hidden in thy hair, too they're starting to tarnish."
Narnra gave her father quite another look and said, "If you trick me . . ."
"I'll be overcome with remorse," he said with a grin and strolled off, his pipe floating after him.
Narnra watched him go, shaking her head. Well, at least she had an interesting father. When she heard the Tower door close, she disrobed, carefully putting her gear where he'd indicated—all but one knife with its sheath, which she laid ready at the water's edge.
She lifted the stone Elminster had pointed out, scooped up some flakes of soap, and waded in.
The water was wonderful.
* * * * *
"B'gads, what if they find us here?" Bezrar muttered. "What tale do we tell them then?"