Spider and Stone

by Jaleigh Johnson

  The girl wore dusty road clothes, breeches stained to the knees by dried mud, a cloak with an unseemly tear in the hem, and boots that were too big for her. Stark white streaks ran through her tangled black hair, and her face had more wrinkles at the eyes and mouth than Arowent thought a young girl should have.

  “Four candles, lantern oil, two shovels, and a thick blanket, please.” The girl read her order off a scrap of parchment with writing scribbled over every available surface. “Patient gods, Sull,” she muttered, “all you have to do is slow down when you write. Then mayhap normal people could read it.” She glanced up. “Sorry, do you have any spices or … table linens?”

  Arowent blinked. “Linens?”

  “And spices. I need mint, cinnamon, and ginger, please.” She squinted at the list. “At least I think it says ginger—might be grimoire, but that wouldn’t make any sense, would it?”

  “Eh?” Arowent was having a hard time keeping up with the girl’s chatter. He heard the front door open and nodded absently to a man leaving the shop. “You’ll have no trouble following that map,” he called after the customer. “Take care, now.”

  “Oh, Sull, are you serious?” The girl scowled at her list and read on. “The linens need to be white, but a subtle color on the border is all right too.”

  Arowent crossed his arms impatiently. “Are you playing a game with me, little one?” he demanded. “I’m a serious man, and you’ve got no business wasting my—”

  “I’m sorry,” the girl said, holding up a hand. “I’ll just take the supplies. Forget the linens. Thank you for all your help.”

  “Hmph.” Arowent started calculating the girl’s bill when Gelphie, his wife, burst in the back door. Face red, she clutched at her cheeks and uttered a choked little shriek.

  “Thief! He took your horse!” she cried.

  “Who did?” Arowent ran to the window where he could see out into the stable yard. His heart sank when he saw that the little brown mare he’d bought only a month ago was gone. “Where did he come from?”

  “He was in here, you blind ass!” Gelphie shouted, her face getting even redder. “Didn’t you see him?”

  His last customer. Arowent slammed his fist against the countertop in frustration. He’d been too busy trying to figure out the dark-haired girl to pay much attention to the thief other than to sell him a map of the area. At this new calamity, he forgot about the girl, so he was surprised when she spoke up in the wake of his wife’s tirade.

  “I saw him,” the girl said. She closed her eyes briefly, deepening the wrinkles at their corners. When she opened them, she looked straight at Arowent. “He had a smooth oval face and a jutting chin with two dark freckles near his lip. Hollow cheeks added a gray tinge to his skin—he looked sick to me, or else drunk and trying not to look it. His eyebrows were thin and brown, as was his hair. The clothes on his back were no better than the ones I wear, so he’s been traveling for quite a while. My guess is someone’s hunting him—he had that look in his eye—maybe the law in another village, or someone he owes coin. If he’s sick, though, he won’t get far. Your constable can catch him, if she hurries.”

  Arowent and his wife stared wonderingly at the girl, who blushed deeply when she saw their expressions. After a moment, Arowent shook himself out of his stupor and said, “You heard her, Gelphie; go for the constable! Go!”

  The woman nodded; cast a quick, furtive glance at the girl; then hurried out the front door. When she was gone, the girl twisted a lock of her hair around her fingers and fidgeted nervously. “Um … my bill?” she reminded him, glancing at the door.

  “Aye. We’re out of mint, though.” Arowent collected her goods, named his price, and waited while she fished the coins out of her neck pouch.

  “My thanks,” she said as she took the sack of supplies.

  “My thanks as well,” he replied, “but how did you know all that about the thief? I never really noticed the man when he came in, and you talked to me most of the time he was here, so you can’t have gotten a good look at him either. You’re not with him, are you?” he asked, suspicion creeping into his voice.

  “No, I’d never seen him before today,” the girl said quickly. She looked longingly at the door, as if she were a breath away from bolting.

  Somehow, in spite of her obvious discomfort, Arowent knew she was telling the truth. He knew people well enough to tell when they tried to deceive him. This girl might have secrets and mysteries hiding in her heart, but she wasn’t a liar.

  “Well, my thanks for your aid,” he said again.

  She was halfway out the door before Arowent realized she hadn’t bought one of his maps. “Are you sure you can find your way?” he called out to her. “It’s easy to get lost around here if you don’t have a decent map.” He thought that would be a sufficient hint.

  “Thank you, but I don’t get lost,” the girl said. “I never forget where I’ve been and where I’m going.” She smiled at him, and that smile jolted Arowent. Gods, she looked so young at that moment. Surely she wasn’t traveling alone. Her flippant answer troubled him, but again, he sensed no deception in her.

  After she’d gone, Arowent found himself wondering if he should begin stocking table linens in his store. What the girl could possibly want them for he had no idea, but a man has to keep on top of demand if he wants to stay in business. Arowent wasn’t a complex soul, but he was, if nothing else, a good businessman.

  Icelin walked along the dusty road with her sack of supplies and berated herself for being an idiot. Occasionally she glanced back toward the inn and store, which were only a small stone speck on the deepening blue horizon, and was relieved each time to realize that no one had followed her.

  She knew as soon as she’d opened her mouth to describe the thief that it was a mistake.

  You’re not in South Ward anymore, safe in Waterdeep, surrounded by people who know you, she told herself.

  Granted those people who’d known Icelin in her old neighborhood had often regarded her with that same suspicion and sometimes fear, but at least they’d known her, and her craziness was of a familiar sort.

  Turning off the road, Icelin took a short track into a wood, retracing her steps back to her campsite. She hadn’t lied to the innkeeper. If she concentrated, she could recall the look of every town, farm field, river valley, and clump of helmthorn she and her companions had passed on their journey. One of her greatest gifts—equally a curse—was that her memory was perfect. She never forgot a face, a name, a lover, or an enemy. She never forgot anything. She didn’t need Sull’s shopping list written out for her—one look and she’d have memorized everything on it—but she didn’t like to draw attention to herself or her gift. Of course, she’d managed to go and do it anyway.

  Icelin sighed, but she couldn’t stop the small grin that spread across her face when she recalled the innkeeper’s bewildered expression. Her perfect memory, used in the right profession, might have made Icelin a very wealthy woman. From a young age, she’d shown an aptitude for the study of magic. Her teacher, Nelzun, had said her memorization of the Art was extraordinary.

  He never anticipated what would happen to the magic when Icelin tried to wield it.

  When the first of her spells went wild, he attributed it to the inexperience of a novice. Soon, however, it became clear that though Icelin’s memory was perfect, that very gift tampered with her magic and prevented her from controlling her Art.

  In Waterdeep, folk had called her gift an aberration. A more accurate word for it, a word used outside the City of Splendors, was spellscar.

  Voices up ahead in a clearing made Icelin quicken her step. The scent of wood smoke and savory hints of chopped garlic filled the air. Beyond the trees, her companions, Ruen and Sull, crouched before a campfire, arguing.

  “I’m sayin’ you can’t just throw more wood on the fire whenever you feel like it!” Sull bellowed. His cheeks flushed bright red, matching his frizzy hair and sideburns. In his hand, he clutched a skillet with t
hree fillets of white fish swimming in butter and spices. A giant of a man, he towered over the smaller, scarecrow-like figure that faced him over the blaze.

  “I’ve always understood the purpose of a fire is to keep its maker warm, frighten away forest vermin, and to cook meals,” said the thin man calmly. “It’s much less effective if you let the blaze die out, wouldn’t you say?”

  Icelin grinned and felt some of the tension ease out of her, though Ruen Morleth was hardly the sort of man to inspire such a reaction on first glance. Tall, and so thin as to appear brittle, he was dressed in black and wore a dirty leather hat on his head that looked perpetually like it was about to fall apart. Beneath the hat’s brim, his eyes were red-brown, the muddy color seeping oddly into his pupils. This was the only outward sign of his affliction, a spellscar of his own, which carried its own unfathomable burden.

  The two men had been Icelin’s companions on the road since she’d left Waterdeep several months ago. What would the innkeeper have thought if she’d brought the pair with her to buy supplies? Which would have been the more remarked on: Sull, a former Waterdhavian butcher, who wore his apron to bed so he’d have his meat cleaver and mallet within easy reach? Or Ruen, the former monk, current thief and con artist, with the most unsocial, taciturn, and blunt disposition of anyone Icelin had ever met?

  “Don’t mind me, gentlemen,” she called out as she entered the circle of firelight. “I’m not some roving brigand come to rob you and steal your virtues, I’m just the wench returned with the supplies—the heavy supplies, I might add.”

  Sull turned, and his furious expression melted into a welcoming grin. “Did you get the seasonin’s, lass?” he asked eagerly.

  “They were out of mint.” Icelin dropped the sack at his feet and waved the shopping list under his nose. “And table linens! Are you completely mad? The innkeeper almost had a fit.”

  “What?” Sull put the skillet down next to the fire and flaked off a bite of fish with his knife. “I thought we could have a fancy dinner is all. Travelin’ folk can’t have a few home comforts while they’re out in the world?”

  “Such as a warm fire?” Ruen muttered.

  Sull shot him a deadly look. “I turn my back for one breath, and you get the flames so hot, they dried the fish to a crisp. You won’t be able to taste none of the flavors now. Look what he did.” He swung the skillet under Icelin’s nose.

  Steam hit her in the face, and Icelin breathed in the scent of melted butter, lemon, and ground pepper. Her stomach rumbled, reminding her she hadn’t eaten anything since that cold morningfeast they’d had at dawn. “Yes, it’s an atrocity, a horror. Put some on a plate immediately,” she said, swallowing a sigh of longing. She glanced at Ruen and smiled, though she felt the expression was a bit forced. “What, no greeting from you, Morleth—and after I got that extra blanket you asked for?”

  “I heard you coming,” Ruen remarked, taking the fish Sull angrily slapped on his plate. He handed it to Icelin. “Likely so did the rest of the forest. You should learn to walk more quietly.”

  “Ah, there now, I knew you’d missed me.” Icelin took the plate and tried to ignore the way her stomach clenched when Ruen made sure not to let his hands touch hers in the exchange. At least he occasionally took his gloves off in her presence. He’d only recently begun doing that.

  Not that she blamed him for the instinctive retreat. Ruen had spent his entire life keeping himself apart from other people because of his spellscar. The same force that gave Icelin a perfect memory and made her magic go wild had warped Ruen’s form in an entirely different way. Skin-to-skin contact allowed Ruen to know how long the person he touched had to live. It wasn’t an exact knowledge. The few times he’d discussed it, Ruen described the sensation as a general feeling of cold and foreboding that increased the nearer the person was to death. He hated it, not just the feeling of impending death, but also the idea of having knowledge that only the gods should possess. Thus, he preferred isolation and was careful never to touch anyone close to him.

  Around Icelin, his caution bordered on the ridiculous, at least in her opinion.

  “Did you finish scouting the ruins?” Icelin asked in an effort to distract herself from the path her thoughts had taken.

  Ruen nodded. “There are at least three intact passages that go deep into the ground. Dwarvish runes cover the walls, and there is evidence of a temple to Haela Brightaxe. Her flaming sword is among the symbols. I didn’t go any deeper, but so far, the information we bought is good. The Arcane Script Sphere may be hidden somewhere in the ruins.”

  “Assuming it wasn’t stolen or reclaimed by the dwarves,” Icelin said. “I didn’t detect any strong magic emanating from the temple.”

  “If it’s a stabilizing conduit for the Art, then perhaps it doesn’t give off powerful magic,” Ruen said. “In that case, it’s a good sign.”

  “Yes, but it doesn’t necessarily mean the sphere will stabilize magic within a human being,” Icelin pointed out, not for the first time. Ruen’s expression darkened, and Icelin suppressed a sigh.

  What was supposed to have been a grand adventure had turned into a two-month-old argument between them. When Icelin had left Waterdeep in Ruen and Sull’s company, she’d thought she was going to see the world, to live an adventurer’s life the way her parents had before her. Instead, almost as soon as they’d left the city, Ruen had become absorbed in this search for knowledge of spellscars. He hoped to find a cure for Icelin’s affliction. Again, Icelin couldn’t fault him for his intentions, and she knew that time was not on their side. But in the past two months, the search had taken on such urgency in Ruen’s mind that he rose from his sleep every morning and drifted off in the evening with nothing but the same thought. He’d pressed them hard and fast, traveling down the Sword Coast at a breakneck pace, following rumors and information purchased with coin they couldn’t always spare.

  Then, a tenday ago, they’d found a lead: rumors of an artifact kept by the dwarves called the Arcane Script Sphere, a conduit for arcane magic that had existed since before the time of the Spellplague. The trail led them to Tethyr, to the ruined dwarven temple. Supposedly, this was the artifact’s last known location.

  “Hurry and finish,” Ruen said curtly, interrupting Icelin’s thoughts. He rose and dumped the rest of his fish into the fire. He hadn’t been eating enough either, a fact that drove Sull—a dedicated cook—crazy. “We need to get to sleep, so we can start early tomorrow.”

  “Where are you going, then?” Sull asked when Ruen strode away from the fire.

  “I want to check the entrance to the ruins again. I won’t be long.”

  “Stubborn, bull-headed, annoying man,” Icelin muttered, just loud enough for Ruen to hear as he walked away. He ignored her, so she turned to Sull. “He’s going to drive himself into the grave if he’s not careful. Can’t you talk to him, Sull?”

  The butcher flushed but not from anger this time. Icelin recognized that cornered expression. Sull never liked to get in the middle of their arguments. He always said it was a dangerous place to be. “He means well, lass,” Sull said, “even if he does go about it all wrong sometimes.”

  “He burned your fish,” Icelin reminded him, though he really had done no such thing. Why couldn’t Sull take her side when she needed him?

  “He’s in a hurry,” Sull said, his gaze following Ruen’s path through the trees. “When you’re young, you don’t notice the way time’s passin’, but when you get older …” He cleared his throat and glanced at her with an uneasy expression. “When you get older, you look ahead of you less and less. You look behind instead, and when you weigh the two together, you realize how much time’s been wasted.”

  Icelin put her plate on the grass and sighed. “I know that better than anyone, Sull.”

  “And you the youngest among us,” Sull said with a humorless chuckle. “The gods have a wearisome sense of humor sometimes.”

  “Maybe not,” Icelin said. “I try not to think of it
too much, but when I do consider all that I’ve been given, there is a bit of balance.”

  “How do you figure that?” Sull asked.

  Icelin shrugged. “My spellscar has shortened my life, but it also lets me forget nothing. All my memories of the life I’ve led—growing up in my great uncle’s house; the day I met you in your butcher shop; the night I met Ruen on the harbor, and the first thing I saw was that ridiculous hat of his.…” Her voice wavered. She cleared her throat. “Our adventures together in Mistshore, dangerous as they were, were some of the most exciting times of my life, and I have them all, every detail vivid in my mind. I won’t lose them.”

  “Good memories are all any of us can ask for, in the end,” Sull agreed. “Good memories and no regrets.”

  “No regrets,” Icelin echoed. She rose and helped Sull gather up the plates and cooking tools.

  “Get some sleep,” Sull told her. “I’ll wash these up first thing in the morning.”

  Suddenly weary, Icelin didn’t argue. She spread out her bedroll near the fire and burrowed into the blankets.

  In Tethyr, the days stayed warm and humid, even in the winter months, but the nights still felt cold to Icelin. She watched the flickering firelight, listening to Sull move about the camp and settle in for his watch. Letting her mind wander, she closed her eyes and pictured Waterdeep, the wagon trails of Caravan City, the perpetual dust in the air and the shouts of the drovers and whicker of dozens of horses. The city’s heart beat with her, even here, in the distant south. Faerûn’s heart beat all around her. She felt it in the swaying oaks and in the cool earth, where fabled cities of light and dark spread deeper roots beneath her.

  They were little more than tales to her, legends spoken of by firelight, but Icelin liked to imagine the people moving about above and below. Movement and life reminded her in turn that she was alive, that she took part in it all.

  A vast, lively, and aching world. Icelin drifted off to sleep thinking how all the tales spoke truth.