Dawnbringer: A Forgotten Realms Novel

by Henderson, Samantha

  This wasn’t what she was supposed to be, or what they were supposed to be.

  “That’s not the same thing,” she managed.

  “No?” he said. “Explain that to Jonhan Smith. Explain it to his donkey.”

  Suddenly she couldn’t look at him. She walked on, faster and faster until she was running, her breathing heavy in her ears as she left Lusk behind her on the path.

  That night while she meditated in her rooms, she remembered Wolfhelm, a village in one of the remote Erlkazar baronies, nestled in the foothills between the Thornwood and the Cloven Mountains. Built on the ruins of some ancient town more prominent in its time, it was a pleasant place, trading the lavender from the sun-warmed fields around it to the bigger baronies.

  But Wolfhelm, as its name suggested, was founded where lycanthropes once claimed their territory and bayed beneath the moon. And one season, while the lavender ripened and children were sent into the fields to harvest it, the werewolves came back.

  Jonhan Smith and his donkey.

  She and Lusk had mustered out the inhabitants of the village, arming them with any weapon that could be found and sharpened with Jonhan Smith’s skill. They knew the community’s only hope lay in driving the lycanthropes back, mercilessly, until they had killed them all.

  Lakini and Lusk, needing little sleep, were on patrol. For the last two nights the weres had howled unrelentingly, from sunset to dawn, at the very gates of Wolfhelm, and the villagers had huddled awake, unable to rest and without anything tangible to attack. The devas knew the lycanthropes were softening up their victims for the kill.

  Lusk held his bow at the ready, an arrow to the string. The village had three gates: north, south, and west, and a tall wall that was unreliably warded by old spells that the local priest of Chauntea did his best to maintain. As they approached the west gate, they spotted a figure, still and pale in the moonlight. Lusk had raised his bow and Lakini had her knife in her hand before they heard the chanting and realized it was the priest, trying to weave the wards back together.

  He turned when he saw them and lowered his hands, looking abashed.

  “It’s dangerous out here,” said Lusk, gesturing past the gate to the hills visible beyond. “If you’re alone, a were could take you and we would never know.”

  “The wards used to be so strong,” said the priest. “But now I haven’t the strength—”

  His words were drowned by another howl and the sharp tearing sound of an animal screaming.

  The cold silver moonlight bathed the village, making everything light and shadow. Here and there lights flickered on behind shuttered windows. The screaming was coming from the north gate, and Lakini tore the sword from its sheath as she ran, sensing Lusk close at her heels.

  Jonhan the blacksmith was there in his nightshirt and bare feet. He clutched the neck of a donkey, trying with all his might to pull it from the grasp of an enormous wolf that had its claws buried deep in the animal’s sides.

  The donkey was the one screaming.

  The wolf was unnatural, its forelegs like muscular human arms; its head huge. It tugged once, twice, and the donkey brayed desperately as it was pulled half out of the gate. Blood, black in the moonlight, ran in glistening rivulets down its heaving sides. Jonhan lost his grip and fell on his knees in the dirt. The lycanthrope opened its maw and lunged at the animal’s back, about to tear the flesh from its spine.

  Lakini moved in fast, taking her sword in an instinctive two-handed grip and swinging it underhand and up. It skimmed the top of the unfortunate donkey’s back, passing under the werewolf’s gaping jaw and through the sinewy neck. The creature’s head arced through the air and landed with a wet thunk between the gateposts—not far, Lakini thought, from the place where its many-times great-granddam’s skull had been staked for all to see. The body remained for a second, poised over the animal’s haunches, claws still flexing in and out of its hide. A gout of blood pulsed from the severed neck, mingling with the donkey’s blood that trickled down its sides. Then the beheaded were slowly slid to the ground. The donkey kicked it as it went down, and it flew like a giant rag doll to lie next to its own head.

  Lakini turned to Jonhan, still on his knees before the donkey. He was staring over her shoulder, and his eyes widened in alarm.

  The feathers of the shaft of Lusk’s arrow almost brushed her face as it sang past her, over Jonhan’s head and into the chest of the were that had loomed out of the darkness behind the blacksmith. The creature arched backward with a cry somewhere between a growl and a human scream. Jonhan rose and stared at the werewolf as it twitched on the ground behind him.

  Blindly, he grasped a halter around the donkey’s neck and pulled it away from the gates and the dismembered werewolf.

  “Rosebud gets out sometimes,” he muttered, half to himself and half to Lakini, examining the wounds on the donkey’s sides. Lakini had seen the animal tethered behind the smithy, snatching at some flower boxes. “I woke up and thought she might have wandered, and then I heard that … howling. And she screamed.”

  “Were you bitten?” Lakini asked the smith, as he patted Rosebud’s trembling neck.

  “No,” he said.

  “Think very carefully,” she said. “Are you sure?”

  “That one only touched Rosebud,” he said, nodding at the body between the gates. “And then your friend killed the other before it could touch me.”

  “Good,” she said, and meant it. She didn’t like the idea of killing the smith, but she and Lusk would have little choice if he’d been infected with lycanthropy.

  “But what about Rosebud?” he said, looking at her in concern. “It clawed her. I don’t know if it bit her. Can donkeys become werewolves? Or … or weredonkeys?”

  Rosebud whickered at him, and he scratched her ears reassuringly.

  “No,” said the priest, his voice shaking as he looked at the dead werewolves. “Only the human-shaped can catch the curse.”

  Lusk was circling the area, bow at the ready, making sure no more werewolves lurked in the darkness. Once he looked at Lakini, then shot an inquiring look at Jonhan, lifting a ready arrow. She shook her head at him.

  Jonhan ascertained that Rosebud’s wounds were more scratches than gouges, and led her home. Lakini stood guard at the gate all night after the moon had set, beneath the cold starlight.

  In the morning they burned the bodies of the werewolves, and the thick, greasy smoke of the burning rose straight in the air like a beacon and a warning. The priest who tended the small chapel of Chauntea, after hastily consulting books and scrolls he hadn’t touched in years, began to reconstruct the north gate wards.

  In her room at Shadrun, Lakini blew out her meditation candle impatiently and leaned against the rough wall, the plaster surface pulling at the thick, slick fabric of her robe. She didn’t like to remember Wolfhelm. What had possessed Lusk to remind her of it, so many years later?

  Should she have shown mercy to Jonhan Smith, later, when the time came?

  Or was her crime in even considering it?

  She tried to sleep, although devas rarely slept. It was a way of forgetting the despairing cry of the barghest, the glazed eyes of the murdered halfling, the mournful bleat of a donkey.

  Lakini had no sleep that night. She wondered if Lusk had even bothered to try.

  And when she closed her eyes, she saw geometric forms glowing purple on the walls, although none were scrawled within her chamber.

  The next morning, Lakini packed her gear in a worn leather pack and sought out Lusk.

  “I’m going away for a time, Cserhelm,” she told him when he opened the door. “Will you come with me?”

  He opened his mouth, and for a second she thought he would assent, take a few minutes to grab the bare necessities, and measure his stride against hers on the road into the wide world. But he paused, and the gray eyes looking down at her had a clouded look.

  He closed his lips and shook his head.

  “No, my dagger-mate,” he
said. “One of us must stay to protect this place. One day you will see the truth of that and return.”

  She knew him too well to argue. She left Shadrun without a word, although as she passed the stables, she almost turned aside to bid farewell to Bithesi. But as she paused, she felt that tickle in her mind of that voice telling she should stay, must stay, must not leave Lusk alone. Any longer here and she wouldn’t be able to ignore it, so she struck out on the road, passing a cluster of grimy, white-clad pilgrims and a saffron-robed, prosperous-looking woman on a donkey. As she turned the corner at the sentry rock, the voice faded and she walked faster and faster, Faerûn spread like a map before her.

  NONTHAL, TURMISH

  1600 DR—THE YEAR OF UNSEEN ENEMIES

  The small study in the headquarters of House Beguine had changed little over the years, its fine carpet and tapestries still intact, although a little faded with time. The man behind the elaborately carved Mulhorand desk, looked up from an age-yellowed, closely written sheet of paper, and frowned.

  “Let me get straight to the point. My niece is in danger, and I need your help to protect her.”

  Sanwar Beguine steepled his fingers together and contemplated the man who had served the House as captain of the guard for the past fifteen years, ever since the mysterious raid on the party that brought Kestrel Beguine to meet her future husband at Shadrun-of-the-Snows. There was more white in Kaarl vor Beguine’s beard now, and gray streaked Sanwar’s hair as well.

  Kaarl stood on the other side of the desk, in the relaxed stance of an old soldier, and frowned. “I don’t understand. Is Mistress Ciari …?”

  After Ciari had wed Vidor Druit, half a year after her younger sister’s alliance with House Jadaren, the family home in Nonthal had been enlarged with the purchase of the shops of a grocer and a wine merchant to make room for an additional wing for Ciari, Vidor, and their growing brood of children. The Beguine-Druit clan was under the protection of the Beguine House guard, and Kaarl should have known about any threat against her.

  “No, no,” said Sanwar, leaning back. “That girl is perfectly capable of taking care of herself. I mean Kestrel.”

  “Kestrel!” The astonishment on the old soldier’s face was plain. “But surely … Jadaren Hold is impregnable, everybody knows that. What possible danger—”

  “The danger doesn’t come from outside the Hold, but from within,” said Sanwar. He held his right hand spread over the yellowed paper, hovering just above it as if it were a source of heat.

  “I had hoped it wouldn’t come to this,” he continued. “It’s no secret I opposed the alliance. But I hoped I was wrong about the Jadarens, and all this time it seemed I was.”

  Taking the edge of the paper carefully between the tip of his forefinger and thumb, he lifted it slightly from the surface of the table.

  “Now I fear for my niece, more than I ever did. I wish I could have obtained proof like this before my poor brother’s passing.”

  In the months after the alliance was negotiated, Nicol Beguine had sickened, although on the voyage to Jadaren Hold for Kestrel’s wedding, his appearance and strength had improved. Some months afterward, however, he fell into a decline, and the physicians suspected one of the mysterious wasting diseases that sometimes struck down seemingly healthy people with no outside indication of what could be ailing them. He grew weaker and weaker, and Sanwar took branches of the business under his management so his brother could rest. Finally, the winter after Ciari’s wedding, Nicol died in his bed, with Vorsha holding his hand.

  Business continued with barely a ripple—Sanwar already controlled so much of House Beguine’s dealings that transitioning power from his brother to himself was an easy task. After a decent interlude, he married Nicol’s widow, a decision that engendered some enjoyable gossip amid the more prominent families of Nonthal but was in the main considered good business sense.

  The Beguine girls kept any opinion they held of their uncle’s marriage to their mother, good or bad, to themselves.

  Sanwar still held the edge of the paper gingerly. “What do you know about the history of House Jadaren?”

  Kaarl’s forehead wrinkled in thought. “I know something of the routes they’ve forged over the years. And the feud, of course. But the history of the merchant families isn’t chronicled the way that of the noble families is, of course—although it’s my opinion they influence the course of history just as much, if not more.”

  Sanwar smiled faintly. “That a man of war is wiser than a chronicler doesn’t surprise me.”

  He frowned down at the paper. It was of a curiously thick texture, and the writing on it was strange to Kaarl—all slanted, angular lines, rather like dwarf runes.

  “The feud,” he continued. “This vendetta we pretend is finished. It’s old news to the merchants we deal with, both those that aligned themselves one way or another and those that managed to stay neutral. But does anyone know why it started?”

  Kaarl shrugged. “Ivor Beguine partnered with a man named Jadaren, long before the Spellplague. I’d heard they had a shipping business, and one cheated the other.”

  Sanwar nodded. “My father told me Gareth Jadaren cheated Ivor Beguine out of a contract to deliver cedar to Waterdeep. My grandfather claimed a Jadaren poisoned a Beguine when they were rivals in love. I never cared why. I had plenty of reason to hate Bron Jadaren and his sniveling nephew on my own, the smug, self-satisfied—”

  He bit his lip and stopped, looking up at Kaarl with glittering eyes.

  “Here.” He lifted the paper fractionally. “A scribe in Old Nonthal took this down from Ivor Beguine’s son, as the son lay on his deathbed. It tells why his father hated Gareth Jadaren and why he warned his generations against his. There’s a dark secret at the heart of House Jadaren, within that riddled rock they call their home. It explains the protective magic of the Hold. It explains why the alliance will prove disastrous to my niece.”

  He let the paper settle back on the table. “They are patient. They’re willing to wait years for their plans to bear fruit, to see a crop from the seeds they’ve planted deep within the bosom of our family. I know of at least one spy that we all trusted with our lives.”

  Sanwar smiled as his quick eye caught Kaarl’s shoulder muscles tense and his right hand flex automatically. “Yes, I know you’ve always suspected that Boro Nimor had something to do with the raid on the party to Shadrun, so many years ago. You can speak honestly to me.”

  Kaarl took a moment to marshal his thoughts. “He was so insistent I keep to the back,” he said. “And he let the others slop around, out of formation, that distance from the sanctuary. It wasn’t like him. It wasn’t like a man of his experience. It’s always bothered me. It’s not my place to say so. But it did.”

  “You’re a Beguine as much as I am,” Sanwar told him. “Wrong side of the blanket or no. You have every right to state your opinion, to me or anyone else, Cousin.”

  The captain of the guard bent his head. “Thank you.”

  Sanwar studied Kaarl dispassionately, aware it wouldn’t be as easy to trick him as he had tricked Nimor.

  “They will attack you as you approach the sanctuary,” he had told him. “Keep the experienced men in the back, with the girls and the wagon. You’ll know them by the green uniforms—Jadaren uniforms.”

  Nimor had frowned at that. “I don’t understand.”

  Sanwar had sighed internally and put an expression of patient concern on his face. “I know the Jadarens intend something sinister in this so-called alliance. How they’ve convinced my brother baffles me. If he didn’t live so transparent a life, I’d suspect blackmail. I do believe they’ve wrought an undue magical influence upon him, and I have tried to nose it out, to no avail.”

  “My lady Kestrel … she has no such concerns?”

  Sanwar had bit back an impulse to tell the captain of the guard to concern himself with martial matters and leave the thinking to him. “She obeys her father’s wishes. And the spell might ext
end to her as well. I would do so, if I had cast such a thing.

  “I need to put doubt in my brother’s mind, just to crack the surface of whatever it is they’re doing to him. Just so I can talk some sense into him, and have a chance of his listening.” Sanwar studied Nimor’s face, seeing obstinacy in his lowered brows. Carefully, he composed the tonalities of his voice, pitching his words in such a way as to make everything he said seem eminently reasonable.

  “Do you think the Jadarens would be any kinder to my niece than they were to your sister?”

  Noting the involuntary widening of the eyes and the clenched muscle at the side of the jaw that betrayed a sudden flare of rage, he adjusted his voice accordingly, making it more insinuating. “Forgive me, my friend. I don’t wish to prod such a painful wound. But you can’t deny that they entangled that poor woman into debt, encouraging bad decision after bad decision, until everything had been stripped from her and she was destroyed.”

  In fact, Boro Nimor’s sister had been an extraordinarily unlucky and poor businesswoman, in debt to many before ill health and despair had cut her life short. At the end, the agents of House Jadaren she had cheated had been dunning her, as were half a dozen other merchants.

  But Nimor loved his sister and couldn’t bear to believe her lack of business acumen was her own failing. He needed a scapegoat to blame, and Sanwar had long since convinced him that Angharah Nimor was the innocent victim of Jadaren manipulation.

  Sanwar chose his words carefully, cajoling the captain into believing that his plan was the only sensible solution.

  “If Nicol thinks there’s a chance Jadaren guards would attack Kestrel, he’ll delay the wedding. The more time I have, the better chance I have of convincing him to call the whole thing off.”

  Nimor shifted his weight, considering. “I would not like any of my guard to be hurt in this charade. Many of them are young and untried.”