Yet with an exasperated sigh, Amarune suddenly turned away from it, fists clenched. “I know I can walk right out that door, and down to the gate, and out into all waiting Faerûn-but I daren’t. I know not where to go, or what to do … this house is as warm and comforting as any place I’ve ever been in, yet it’s a prison for us!”
Arclath set aside the old, thick book of recipes he’d been delving in, and hastened to wrap comforting arms around his beloved. “You want to be out there doing,” he murmured soothingly. “That’s my lady. A true however-many-greats granddaughter of Elminster.”
“Lord Delcastle,” Rune muttered into his chest, “are you patronizing me?”
“No! Gods, no! Your need to be out striving is a credit to you; you are a true noble, caring for the land and the folk in it, wanting to help. It’s just that … staying here, where Storm knows where to find us, and you can survive if the Old Mage should fall, is the best service you can render just now.”
Rune arched her back and shoved on his upper arms to put distance between them, so she could lift her chin and glare at her lord. “Oh? And who made you the all-knowing sage, between two beats of my heart? Hey?”
Arclath grinned. “There, you’re even sounding noble.”
“Oh, go ride a unicorn’s horn!” she snarled, breaking free and striding across Storm’s kitchen. She flung out an arm to bat a bundle of dried herbs down off its beam, then stopped herself, hands like claws, only to whirl back to him and say pleadingly, “Oh, forgive me, my love! It’s just-not being part of what’s going on gnaws at me!”
“I know,” Arclath almost whispered. “I feel that same ache.” He took her hand, as if he was going to whirl her into a dance across the smooth-worn flagstones of Storm’s farmhouse kitchen, but instead drew her close and murmured, “But I must confess it’s being overtaken swiftly by a deeper ache. Yawning hunger. Let’s make some soup.”
“Soup? At a time like this? Is that how Cormyr was founded, and defended, and made great? By the making of soup?”
“Doughty nobles ride into war best with full bellies,” Arclath replied brightly, giving her a wide and false smile. When he batted his eyelashes at her like a dockside lowcoin lass, Rune found herself snorting in helpless amusement.
She wagged a reproving finger in his face. “You, my lord, are a dangerous man!”
“But of course,” Arclath replied airily, twirling away from her into a full-flourish court bow. When he rose out of his crouch, he was holding a tureen and a large wooden spoon. “Soup?”
Amarune put her hands on her hips, shook her head, and then smiled wryly. “Soup,” she confirmed.
“Good. Pull some leeks and parsnips while I prime the pump.”
Rune arched an eyebrow. “My, but lords are very good at giving orders.”
“ ’Tis what we do best,” he replied airily. “Which really means most of us are hard-galloping disasters at doing anything else, but at least I’m one of the all too few who knows so, and will admit it. You chose well.”
“I chose-? Lord Delcastle, may I remind you-”
“You may. Several times, and beating your points into me with yon spoon if you feel the need-after you get the leeks and parsnips.”
Rune stopped in midretort, nodded, grinned, and went out the back door into the garden. Only to peer back through the door arch and ask warily, “You do know how to cook, yes?”
Arclath grinned. “Wise woman. Know ye: so long as we stick to the six-no, I lie, seven-dishes I was taught, down the years, behind my mother’s back, I probably won’t kill us both.”
“Probably,” Amarune echoed warily-and flashed him a grin before ducking out into the garden again.
Arclath found the pump didn’t need priming, so he had the tureen full of water and the beginnings of a fire smoldering under it when his lady returned.
“Gods, what a garden,” she murmured, joining him at the counter with its window looking out into the beanstalks. “I could learn to love it here.”
“Storm told me generations of Harpers have stayed here, when they found the need,” Arclath told her, inspecting what she’d brought and reaching for a trimming knife.
“You’re strangely calm, considering the doom that may soon befall all Faerûn,” Rune complained.
Her lord shrugged. “I can’t do much, so I’m seizing this rare time of not running around swinging a sword to think. Yes, we nobles do think. Once or twice in our lives, between flagons and platters of whole roast boar.”
For a moment, Rune’s face told him she was going to say something saucy and stinging by way of reply, but then her face changed and she asked almost humbly, “And what are you thinking about just now, my lord?”
Arclath set down the knife, looked straight into her eyes, and replied, “When I was a child, my mother told me of a prophecy the High Herald Crescentcoat once shared with her. It impressed her so much that she wrote it down and often referred to it. I’m trying to remember it.”
“Because?”
“It might bear on what’s befalling right now. All I can recall of it, here and now, is the last half of it: ‘That when two cities fall together, nobles across Faerûn must and shall renew the realms they serve.’ So I find myself wondering if the prophecied time is nigh.”
“Renew Cormyr?”
“If it’s time. And if that be the case, and Myth Drannor is one of the cities that will fall, what’s the other?”
Rune shrugged to indicate she hadn’t the faintest. “Elminster has shown me that prophecies are put into the minds and mouths of mortals by the gods. They are what they want mortals to believe-wishful thinking, if you will-not firm destinies that can be fully understood beforehand, and counted on. That prophecy may be so many empty words, or-”
The front door of the kitchen swung open, and a man in worn leathers and homespun confronted them, drawn sword in hand.
“Who are you?” he growled. “And what’re you up to?”
“Making soup,” Arclath replied, bending to add some of Storm’s split kindling to the fire, and wincing at how damp it was. “I hope.”
The sword leveled at him didn’t waver. “Neither of you are the Lady Storm-”
“No,” Amarune replied calmly, “but she brought us here, and asked that we stay and await her.”
“Oh? And what did she say might depend on your obedience?”
Rune and Arclath blinked at their gruff interrogator … and then Rune remembered Storm’s words. “The future of the Realms,” she replied triumphantly.
The man stared at her for a moment, then-very slowly-smiled, and his sword went down.
“Well met,” he said. “I’m Braerogan, of Shadowdale. Next farm up. Heard your voices.”
Arclath bowed. “I am Lord Arclath Delcastle, of Cormyr, and this is Lady Amarune Delcastle, my wife. We are … friends of the Lady Storm.”
Braerogan lifted a bristling brow. “Lords and ladies, is it? Well, carry on. Didn’t know nobility knew how to make their own soup, but … live and learn, live and learn. Any friend of the Lady Storm is a friend to all Shadowdale. And we need friends, what with all this fighting and tumult from one end of Faerûn to the other, and portents and priests muttering about Chosen, and I don’t know what all.”
He nodded, sheathed his sword, waved an uncertain salute in their direction, and went out, pulling the door closed behind him.
Rune stared at it in statuelike silence for long enough that Arclath had all the parsnips washed and chopped and into the tureen and was starting on the leeks before she exploded into pacing. Across the kitchen and back, across and back, whirling hard at each turn, and growling under her breath.