Uncle Lorneth’s face grew solemn, and he laid a warning finger across her lips. “Little one,” he murmured, “you already know several deep secrets. That I’m alive, for one thing.”
“Wha-do Mother and Father not know? ”
“No, and they must not, yet, for fear they’ll tell ‘just a few close friends,’ and so warn certain folk who should not yet be warned. As for secrets, your mother and father have never known what you already know: that I’m among the most secret and highly placed agents of the Purple Dragon himself.”
Narantha smiled. “In a handful of days I’ve learned my own worth, found something useful to do-and drunk deep of adventure! ” She raised her goblet in salute.
“Actually,” Lorneth Crownsilver said brightly, “I think you’ll find that’s zzar…”
Then he turned his back in a flash, in case her snort of laughter heralded the goblet being flung at him.
It did not. When he turned around again, the glass was empty and Narantha was poised over it, chin on hands, regarding him with bright and eager eyes. “So, my highly secret uncle, what’s my next task?”
“There are always guards at the citadel gates, and around the palace,” Pennae snapped. “Just match my pace, keep walking, and don’t look guilty. Ignore the Dragons; to you, they’re… furniture.”
“Really?” Semoor murmured. “Remind me not to sit down on anything in your home.”
“If I had a home, Holy Wolftooth, you’d be the sort of man I’d turn away from my door,” Pennae hissed. “Now stop playing the fool! There are Dragons and war wizards all around us!”
“Strangely enough, I’d noticed as much,” he muttered as the Swords passed between the palace and the gaudy windows of Dulbiir’s Finery and Finer Promises, still bright at this late hour. The rain was no more than a light, clinging mist now, but the Swords were growing more worried about the clinging tendencies of the lawkeepers of Cormyr, patiently closing in around them.
“Pennae,” Florin murmured, “I hope you know where you’re-”
“I’m looking for an inn I know only by name,” she muttered over her shoulder. “It should be right along here… and if we’ve coins enough, or give good weapons in lieu, they’ll both give us rooms and help hide us.”
They walked in slow, steady procession the length of a long block ere Pennae relaxed with a sigh, and turned in at the door of the nearest corner building of the next block.
“The Falcon’s Rest,” Islif and Agannor murmured in rough unison, looking up to read the sign.
Pennae tapped at a small sliding panel in the door. When it slid aside, revealing only darkness, she announced, “We must go to ground, for the Dragons hunt.”
The door clicked open and a dry, elderly male voice said, “Then hurry in, turn to the right, and walk far enough to let all your fellows in behind you. Be welcome in the Rest.”
The Swords hastened inside, the door was closed, bolted, and barred, and lamps were unhooded to reveal a common room with a huge oaken stair rising up to unseen levels above. As they blinked at the staff of the Rest, who nodded welcome to them over loaded and ready handbows, the owner of a rather sly smile stepped back from a lofty landing on the stair, nodded, and stole away into deeper darkness.
The Swords of Eveningstar were in Arabel, and in the Rest. Which meant a certain someone, whose orders had been explicit and forceful, must be informed without delay.
Green adventurers are so easily baited and blamed. This was going to be fun.
Chapter 19
Married thrice, and a lover of many men more, I have seen into the minds of many men with my spells. ’Tis astonishing, even after all this time, what darksome cesspits most men’s minds are.
Murathauna Darmeir
Narantha knew by now what she carried. The small coffer in her chatelaine held something Uncle Lorneth had told her to describe to the disloyal young lordlings as “my gift to you: a thing of pleasure magic deemed suitable only for those of noble blood by its makers, a priestess of Sharess and her lover, a priest of Siamorphe.”
Like all of her earlier offerings, it was a gem enspelled to display softly shifting scenes of beautiful unclad women in its depths, that she could handle safely but that would magically sink into the skin of the men she met with, and melt away.
Uncle Lorneth claimed not to know the precise details of what it did to those lordlings, but Narantha suspected it laid a magic upon them that allowed the war wizards to eavesdrop on their thoughts for signs of treason-and perhaps even trace their whereabouts.
She was well content to broaden the reach of the Crown against those who plotted against it, though she found most of the young, perfumed, arrogant lordlings she encountered even more stomach-turning than she’d thought them before coming to know Florin Falconhand.
Now there was a man…
Narantha purred at the memories that rose at the very thought of him, and almost bit her lip as she smiled. Then she remembered she was alighting from her carriage at the very gates of Erdusking House, and hastily schooled her face and mind to cool attention to the task at hand.
So far as the finer folk of the Forest Kingdom knew, the Lady Narantha Crownsilver was seeking suitable mates among the eligible male nobility of Cormyr. Her quest had commenced with this tour of brief courtesy visits, that favored no particular young lord, but allowed her to meet them all-alone and face to face-without the many distractions of revels and court balls.
Her gown was demure yet spectacular in its elegantly shaped and luxurious way, the spires of its high collar rising on either side of her elegantly piled and styled hair. Her earrings dangled a-sparkle with gems of the most exquisite gaudiness, and her eyes glowed as large and mysteriously dark as her maids could make them.
One of the Erdusking gateguards swallowed visibly as he handed her down; the other, kneeling before Narantha with his greeting-cloak flourished just so for her to tread upon, was devouring her hungrily with his eyes.
She gave him the briefest of winks, and made sure to advance her left foot first so her slit gown swirled to show him a daringly high glimpse of her upper thigh, but kept her face expressionless.
Having a servant in charge of a gate smitten with you might well come in useful in time to come.
Narantha carefully kept her face blank as she passed through the gate and felt the strange fluttering in her mind that meant a wizard’s probe was biting deep, battering against whatever it was that Uncle Lorneth had put in there to defend her.
She was annoyed at the invasion-but, uncomfortably, something inside her head was even more angry than she was.
“I’m beginning to truly like the lass,” Horaundoon said, in answer to the hargaunt’s inquisitive chime. “ ’Tis almost a pity she’ll be dead soon.”
The hargaunt gave forth a melodious rising burst of chimes.
“No,” the Zhentarim told it, “they’re not really gems at all. They look and feel like gems when my spells are complete, yes. That’s to stop anyone from destroying a mindworm before it goes into them.”
Horaundoon strode across the chamber to the articulated claws set atop a spell-scorched pedestal, and the faintly glowing not-gem in their grasp. He plucked it forth and turned it in his hand, watching tiny sparkling motes of unbound magic play along its facets.
“A beautiful stone, or so it appears, with a sequence of spell-images in its depths, of languid unclad maids that fade in and out of view in an endless cycle. They make the males Narantha’s subverting for us pick up the stone, to gaze in at the beauties more closely.”