Mirt had just time to sit down at the table beside Orpaz and swing his feet up onto a nearby vacant chair before the noise the girl was making brought Mother Teshla back into the room.
“Stop that,” Teshla snapped, poking the maiden’s supple— and bare—stomach with one bony finger.
The maiden shuddered, but did not cease her screams. Mirt winced. Her shrieks were reaching notes that needed to have a fast brace of arrows fired through them… or some intrepid adventurer to leap off a turret, catch hold of their rising cacophony, and wrestle it to the ground until the Watch came along to cart them down to the harbor and drown ‘em deep.
Teshla evidently thought so too, for she deftly snatched up a tablecloth, tossed it over the maiden’s head, and followed it with a hard-swung chair. The girl toppled in sudden silence.
“Mirt, if you’ve been attacking my guests—” Teshla began threateningly, as she lowered the girl’s shrouded form to the floor.
“Nay, nay, Teshie. I’ve only just sat down! Orgaz here has kindly caught one o’ me blades that fell from its sheath as I approached,” Mirt assured her.
“I’m sure,” Teshla replied, in a tone of voice that a noble lady of Waterdeep might use to tell a servant that a giant tick seemed to have somehow found its way into her salad.
She glanced at Orgaz. He still looked decidedly like a corpse that had been floating in Waterdeep Harbor for several hot days, but at least it was now a corpse that had decided to try smiling. Slowly.
“When you’re done, would you kindly clean the blood off my table?” she asked him.
Orgaz, who’d managed to say nothing thus far, continued to do so, but nodded hastily, looking at Teshla, then across the table at Mirt.
Chin resting in one hairy hand, Mirt gave him a kindly smile. He was dreaming of Orgaz sliding helplessly down a steep and slippery castle turret roof, crying out for Mirt to throw him something—and Mirt obliging with the only portable thing in the room: a full chamberpot.
Orgaz gulped at Mirt’s wolfish grin, looked back at Teshla, and chirped, “Take me with you. Downstairs.”
Downstairs was where Teshla sold disguises and equipment to needy adventurers. She gave the Boar a look of disbelief, then got up, yanked Mirt’s dagger out of the pirate’s hand, and plucked at his sleeve. Yowling in pain, Orgaz was dragged from the room in the space of a swiftly-drawn breath.
Wiping his bloody dagger clean on the tablecloth that covered the fallen dancing maiden, Mirt sighed and turned to the cowled figure. “None too soon, that. Sit down, lad. Elminster’ll be here right soon, now.”
“I’m here already,” the chair Orgaz had been sitting in said rather testily as it started to shift its shape. “Long enough ago, in fact, to keep three young nobles from spreading their brains all over yonder courtyard. If ye carved any wider a path through the good citizens of Waterdeep, Old Wolf, ye’d soon have nobody left to be Lord over!”
“No doubt, no doubt,” Mirt grunted, “but I’m running late, just now. Could you save the lecture and see to the lad, here?” He grabbed the sleeve of the cowled figure and rumbled, “Unhood, Bergos.”
Obediently the figure pulled back its cowl and blinked at the mightiest mage in Faerun. Elminster looked back at him and sighed. Being born wealthy and noble doesn’t make a young man handsome, polite, or gallant, but the young man seldom realizes this.
The eyes of young Bergos were bulging and staring, and his cheeks were as red as the embers of a roaring hearthfire.
Mirt took one look at him and reached for the nearest decanter. He was in love, all right. This would be, let’s see, the third time this summer that Bergos Brossfeather had fallen into eternal, undying love with a young noble lady of Waterdeep. Er, if it was a young noble this time. Or a lady.
“He’s smitten,” Mirt growled. “Some foe cast a spell on him that makes him lovesick. He falls helm over heels for someone new every time there’s a new moon. I need him cured. Politics.” The Lord of Waterdeep held up his decanter thoughtfully. Ever a glutton for punishment, he stared at himself in its reflective depths.
The Brossfeathers owed Mirt rather more gold pieces than what Waterdhavian nobles called a “thousand thousand” (usually with white faces, gulps, and pursed lips). If Bergos, who’d signed the deeds of debt, didn’t come to his senses, Mirt would have to tear Brossfeather House apart stone by stone to see his money back. And that would make him enemies in almost every noble family in Waterdeep. ‘Twas already his busy season; Mirt didn’t feel like welcoming that many foes just now.
“Who is it right now, Bergos?” Elminster asked quietly, moving his fingers ever so slightly.
The young nobleman grew still, his staring eyes seeing someone not in the room.
The Old Mage nodded as if he could see that someone, too. Then his face seemed to melt and run, dissolving slowly into the features of a young, sapphire-eyed lady with a sparkling grin.
“The things I do for Waterdeep,” Elminster growled as Bergos flung himself across the table to embrace his newly revealed love. From under a rain of kisses, the mage growled, “Ye owe me one, Mirt.”
In a conjured voice that only the old merchant could hear, the great mage added, “I’m probably going to have to keep us both hidden and act like a little spitfire for a month or more to cure him. The spell’s a good one; just smashing it would leave his mind in ruins. D’ye know what better things I could be doing, with an entire month?”
“Wait!” the Old Wolf rumbled, as wizard and ardent young noble began to fade away together. “Who cast the love-spell on Bergos?”
“She did,” Elminster replied, pointing, before he was entirely gone.
Mirt spun around, following the Old Mage’s pointing finger.
Teshla was standing in a doorway, hands on hips. She was smiling brightly—an expression often assumed by women engaged in slipping something past the wits of their loved ones.
“Hello, Old Wolf,” she said huskily.
Mirt got up hastily, decanter in hand. “Why, Teshie? Why’d you do it?”
“It finally got you here, didn’t it?” she replied, a familiar flame kindling in her eyes. As she glided forward, humming a tune he remembered, Mirt wondered if Elminster had left behind another teleport to save him if he dived into the courtyard…
“No,” Teshla told him a little smugly, “He did not. He even laid this spell on me, to let me read your mind. You can’t escape me any longer, Old Wolf. Sit down.”
“Oh,” Mirt replied a little faintly. “Oh, well…”
And he sat down.
THE GRINNING GHOST OF TAVERTON HALL
The ghost is one of the family, you see. The Doom of the Paertrovers. We couldn’t banish him if we wanted to.”
The young lord was in full fettle, his voice as polished as that of any master bard. Immult Greiryn, the seneschal of Taverton Hall, ran an irritated hand through his steel-gray hair and turned away, melting into the deep underbrush with practiced ease and silence. Not for him the fripperies of the high and mighty, nor was it his station to be seen listening or intruding when they were at play. Bad enough that he had to step around their bodyguards behind every second tree and bush.
It was late in the warm summer of the Year of the Banner, and a busy summer it’d been, to be sure. All sun-dappled season long three ambitious noble lords of rising power had dragged their beautiful daughters the length and breadth of the realm, seeking suitable—that would mean rich, Greiryn reflected with a sour smile—husbands for their precious Flowers of Northbank. Farrowbrace, Huntingdown, and Battlebar. Oh, the three ladies were a delight to look upon, even for an old soldier, and well-educated to boot, but their whole journeying was so… calculated. Did these noble lords have iced wine in their veins, instead of blood?
Immult spat thoughtfully onto a fern and traded cold and level gazes with yet another bodyguard whose gloved fingers were fondling the hilt of his dagger. Arrogant lapdogs, lording it over him in a garden that was his to defend!