Dahl didn’t laugh, but a small smile tugged at his mouth. “Who taught your sister the glaive?”
Farideh shrugged. “Everyone. Our father, to start. A … friend of his honed her. Some of the people in the village where we grew up knew a thing or two. They showed her what they knew, and she picked up the rest by watching.”
He looked down at Havilar in the yard. “I’m surprised she listened that well. She doesn’t strike me as an easy pupil.”
Farideh shrugged. “Not at everything. Not at much else, really. It’s how her thoughts flow. She can watch you fight with a chain or a broadsword or just a pair of daggers, and come back knowing something more about her glaive.” She sipped the cordial, watching Havilar leap past Pernika’s jab as though she had wings. “I’ll bet if you gave her ritual lessons, all she’d get from it would be how best to block magic with a glaive.”
“You don’t fight with rituals,” Dahl said.
Farideh looked up at him. He was still staring out the window, the smile gone, his expression closed. “I know that,” she said. “You’ve mentioned it several times.”
“And you can’t block magic with a glaive,” he added.
“Well, good thing I was joking,” she said, flushing. “You needn’t take everything so seriously.”
“It’s serious magic,” he said, and Farideh got the distinct impression it wasn’t her that he was talking to so much, but that she was answering for it nonetheless. “Rituals still take years of study and a knack for the Art. It’s not just some … feather in your cap.”
“No one’s saying otherwise,” she said hotly.
Dahl fidgeted with his glass, still staring down at the practice yard. “Will you tell me what you’re after?” he said a moment later. “Because I don’t believe you’d be so eager to learn for learning’s sake.”
“Because I’m just some tiefling out of the mountains?” she said bitterly, and he had the decency to look embarrassed. She’d overheard him talking to one of the local Harpers.
“Because you want something,” he said. “And we both know it. I owe you ten rituals. But tell me what you want so we don’t have to argue over ten more.”
Farideh took another roll and picked at the raisins. It would look exactly like the ritual Havilar’s scroll had performed, the one that had called Lorcan forth in the first place. But unlike spells to mend broken glasses and translate strange languages, there was no disguising the purpose of such rituals.
What ill luck had fallen on her that Dahl Peredur was the surest source of such a spell? Even with the ritual book in hand, even with his promise to teach her, and his pride in his talents, the chances he would teach her the ritual that made the passage between the worlds and the circle of protection were small. Smaller, she suspected, if he found out why she wanted them …
But if she didn’t ask, she would surely end up learning the ten simplest rituals he knew.
“Tam made a circle once,” she said finally. “A ring of runes meant to protect-”
“A magic circle,” he interrupted. “I know.”
“So you’ll teach me that next?”
“Perhaps.” He pinched off a piece of the bread’s crumb and rolled it between two fingers. “What do you need protection from?”
“Shady codloose winkers,” she said bitterly.
Dahl scowled and mashed the bread-ball flat. “You seemed awfully concerned before about devils.”
She regarded him evenly. “Are you saying you wouldn’t appreciate protection from devils?”
“I’m saying most people don’t need it,” he replied. “And Master Zawad could have taught you that. What else?”
Farideh shook her head. She’d have to tell him eventually. “I need a portal,” she admitted. “A way to get someone from another plane.”
Dahl started laughing. “Are you quite serious? Do you think I can-or would-teach you that?”
She felt her cheeks burn. “I’d hoped.”
“Portal magic is well beyond you,” he said. “It’s well beyond me. Short of finding a master wizard to help you build a scroll, you’re not getting that ritual.”
“You said all sorts of things are possible-”
“Well, breaching the Hells is right out,” he said. “If there’s a way to work around the difficulty of it, I’m not doing it for you.”
“Did I say the Hells?”
“You didn’t have to,” he said. “Tell your devil to find its own way out.”
Farideh stood. “Then I will see you tomorrow,” she said tightly, “and you can show me how to cast the protective circle instead.” She stormed from the room before he could start after her again. If he thought he was going to put her off by being rude and unpleasant, he had no idea how very stubborn she could be.
Portal magic is well beyond you, she thought rubbing her hands over her face. She stopped and leaned against the wall near the end of the hallway. Gods, ah, gods-there had to be a way. Maybe he was lying. Maybe he was just refusing to try.
She rubbed her bare arm, the brand that marked it. It had been bad enough in the days and tendays after fleeing Neverwinter to know that Lorcan was in danger, to know she had to do something, and soon. But nearly a month had passed and the constant alarm had grown into its own entity, like a second head settled into her own, whose constant thoughts were of finding the means to breach the Hells. Before Lorcan died and whatever protection he provided was gone.
Farideh sighed. Even your daydreams have gone mad, she thought.
The hallway ended at a larger room that overlooked the river valley down below. Mira and Tam stood over a great stone table, beside the open windows. Half a dozen maps were spread over the table, small marks and notes littering the reproduced landscape. Granite quarries here, Farideh read as she drew nearer. Water flows up from aquifer here.
The page lay flat on the table, all on its own. Tam was watching the subdued swirl of its ink.
“Well met,” Tam said looking up. “Feeling better?”
Mira kept her head down and her eyes on the distance marked by a pair of brass calipers. Farideh hesitated, but the guard didn’t look up or greet her. She still wasn’t sure how Mira fit into all of this, only that Tam knew her somehow and that Mira knew about the page and its origins.
“Well met,” Farideh said. “And yes, very well. Have you had any word from Mehen?”
“Not yet. But keep in mind,” he said when she frowned, “Cormyr has quite a reputation for protocol. You can hardly carry a weapon through the wilds without a proper writ.”
“It’s been nine days,” she said.
“I once spent a month waiting for the charter to travel armed through the forest.” Tam shrugged. “I’m sure we’ll hear something soon. Take it as a sign of how well he trusts you.”
Farideh bit her tongue. It didn’t sound like Mehen. Before Neverwinter, certainly, he would have sent a dozen messages by now, and demanded a dozen back. Assuming he’d even left them behind. Even if Neverwinter had made him reconsider his daughters’ capabilities, she couldn’t see him changing that much. She wanted to tell Tam so, to enumerate all the ways he’d miscounted Mehen.
But then Tam was inclined to be as overcautious as Mehen. And he wasn’t worried.
“Are you having any luck finding your way?” she asked instead.
“It’s not luck,” Mira said without looking up. “It’s deduction. This”-she planted a finger on a point in the middle of a mountain range-“is the Caverns of Xammux, without a doubt our most likely location. There’s the name, foremost, easily a corruption of Tarchamus or Attarchammiux. ‘Through rock and flood I’ve come to this’-so we’re looking for some place buried, then, some place with plenty of water. I’ve managed, too, to coerce the page into displaying a schema of a huge dome-let’s assume that’s our ruin, and so we need a mountain to cover it. Otherwise, every adventurer in the Silver Marches would have tramped through it already.
“The caverns are at the source of a stream that flows into the River Rauvin. According to the locals, the stream’s fed by some sort of river in the Underdark-it floods every so often, and when it does, it sends a great deal of debris into the Rauvin. Including, according to my sources, finished stone with the same circular patterns as Rhand’s fragment.”