The Spine of the World

by Philip Athans

  “But if you’re wanting it—”

  “I’m wanting more than that,” Meralda explained, “and if I make him wait, I can make him beg. If I make him beg, I can get all that I want from him and more.”

  “What more?” Tori asked, obviously confused.

  “To be his wife,” Meralda stated without reservation.

  Tori nearly swooned. She grabbed her straw pillow and whacked her sister over the head with it. “Oh, you’ll never!” she cried. Too loudly.

  The curtain to their bedroom pulled back, and their father, Dohni Ganderlay, a ruddy man with strong muscles from working the peat fields and skin browned from both sun and dirt, poked his head in.

  “You should be long asleep,” Dohni scolded.

  The girls dived down as one, scooting under the coarse, straw-lined ticking and pulling it tight to their chins, giggling all the while.

  “Now, I’ll be having none of that silliness!” Dohni yelled, and he came at them hard, falling over them like a great hunting beast, a wrestling tussle that ended in a hug shared between the two girls and their beloved father.

  “Now, get your rest, you two,” Dohni said quietly a moment later. “Your ma’s a bit under the stone, and your laughter is keeping her awake.” He kissed them both and left. The girls, respectful of their father and concerned about their mother, who had indeed been feeling even worse than usual, settled down to their own private thoughts.

  Meralda’s admission was strange and frightening to Tori. But while she was uncertain about her sister getting married and moving out of the house, she was also very excited at the prospect of growing into a young woman like her sister.

  Lying next to her sister, Meralda’s mind raced with anticipation. She had kissed a boy before, several boys actually, but it had always been out of curiosity or on a dare from her friends. This was the first time she really wanted to kiss someone. And how she did want to kiss Jaka Sculi! To kiss him and to run her fingers through his curly brown hair and gently down his soft, hairless cheek, and to have his hands caressing her thick hair, her face …

  Meralda fell asleep to warm dreams.

  In a much more comfortable bed in a room far less drafty not so many doors away, Lord Feringal nestled into his soft feather pillows. He longed to escape to dreams of holding the girl from the village, where he could throw off his suffocating station, where he could do as he pleased without interference from his sister or old Temigast.

  He wanted to escape too much, perhaps, for Feringal found no rest in his huge, soft bed, and soon he had twisted and turned the feather ticking into knots about his legs. It was fortunate for him that he was hugging one of the pillows, for it was the only thing that broke his fall when he rolled right off the edge and onto the hard floor.

  Feringal finally extricated himself from the bedding tangle, then paced about his room, scratching his head, his nerves more on edge than they’d ever been. What had this enchantress done to him?

  “A cup of warm goat’s milk,” he muttered aloud, thinking that would calm him and afford him some sleep. Feringal slipped from his room and started along the narrow staircase. Halfway down he heard voices from below.

  He paused, recognizing Priscilla’s nasal tone, then a burst of laughter from his sister as well as from old, wheezing Temigast. Something struck Feringal as out of place, some sixth sense told him that he was the butt of that joke. He crept down more quietly, coming under the level of the first floor ceiling and ducking close in the shadows against the stone banister.

  There sat Priscilla upon the divan, knitting, with old Temigast in a straight-backed chair across from her, a decanter of whisky in hand.

  “Oh, but I love her,” Priscilla wailed, stopping her knitting to sweep one hand across her brow dramatically. “I cannot live without her!”

  “Got along well enough for all these years,” Temigast remarked, playing along.

  “But I am tired, good steward,” Priscilla replied, obviously mocking her brother. “What great effort is lovemaking alone!”

  Temigast coughed in his drink, and Priscilla exploded with laughter.

  Feringal could take no more. He swept down the stairs, full of anger. “Enough! Enough I say!” he roared. Startled, the two turned to him and bit their lips, though Priscilla could not hold back one last bubble of laughter.

  Lord Feringal glowered at her, his fists clenched at his sides, as close to rage as either of them had ever seen the gentle-natured man. “How dare you?” he asked through gritted teeth and trembling lips. “To mock me so!”

  “A bit of a jest, my lord,” Temigast explained weakly to defuse the situation, “nothing more.”

  Feringal ignored the steward’s explanation and turned his ire on his sister. “What do you know of love?” he screamed at Priscilla. “You have never had a lustful thought in your miserable life. You couldn’t even imagine what it would be like to lay with a man, could you, dear sister?”

  “You know less than you think,” Priscilla shot back, tossing aside her knitting and starting to rise. Only Temigast’s hand, grabbing hard at her knee, kept her in place. She calmed considerably at that, but the old man’s expression was a clear reminder to watch her words carefully, to keep a certain secret between them.

  “My dear Lord Feringal,” the steward began quietly, “there is nothing wrong with your desires. Quite the contrary. I should consider them a healthy sign, if a bit late in coming. I don’t doubt that your heart aches for this peasant girl, but I assure you there’s nothing wrong with taking her as your mistress. Certainly there is precedent for such an act among the previous lords of Auckney, and of most kingdoms, I would say.”

  Feringal gave a long and profound sigh and shook his head as Temigast rambled on. “I love her,” he insisted again. “Can’t you understand that?”

  “You don’t even know her,” Priscilla dared to interject. “She farms peat, no doubt, with dirty fingers.”

  Feringal took a threatening step toward her, but Temigast, agile and quick for his age, moved between them and gently nudged the young man back into a chair. “I believe you, Feringal. You love her, and you wish to rescue her.”

  That caught Feringal by surprise. “Rescue?” he echoed blankly.

  “Of course,” reasoned Temigast. “You are the lord, the great man of Auckney, and you alone have the power to elevate this peasant girl from her station of misery.”

  Feringal held his perplexed pose for just a moment then said, “Yes, yes,” with an exuberant nod of his head.

  “I have seen it before,” Temigast said, shaking his head. “It is a common disease among young lords, this need to save some peasant or another. It will pass, Lord Feringal, and rest assured that you may enjoy all the company you need of the girl.”

  “You cheapen my feelings,” Feringal accused.

  “I speak the truth,” Temigast was quick to reply.

  “No!” insisted Feringal. “What would you know of my feelings, old man? You could never have loved a woman to suggest such a thing. You can’t know what burns within me.”

  That statement seemed to hit a nerve with the old steward, but for whatever reason Temigast quieted, and his lips got very thin. He moved back to his chair and settled uncomfortably, staring blankly at Feringal.

  The young lord, more full of the fires of life than he had ever been, would not buckle to that imposing stare. “I’ll not take her as a mistress,” he said determinedly. “Never that. She is the woman I shall love forever, the woman I shall take as my wife, the lady of Castle Auck.”

  “Feri!” Priscilla screeched.

  The young lord, determined not to buckle as usual to the desires of his overbearing sister, turned and stormed off, back to the sanctuary of his room. He took care not to run, as he usually did in confrontations with his shrewish sister, but rather, afforded himself a bit of dignity, a stern and regal air. He was a man now, he understood.

  “He has gone mad,” Priscilla said to Temigast when they heard Feringal’s
door close. “He saw this girl but once from afar.”

  If Temigast even heard her, he made no indication. Stubborn Priscilla slipped down from the divan to her knees and moved up before the seated man. “He saw her but once,” she said again, forcing Temigast’s attention.

  “Sometimes that’s all it takes,” the steward quietly replied.

  Priscilla quieted and stared hard at the old man whose bed she had secretly shared since the earliest days of her womanhood. For all their physical intimacy, though, Temigast had never shared his inner self with Priscilla except for one occasion, and only briefly, when he had spoken of his life in Waterdeep before venturing to Auckney. He had stopped the conversation quickly, but only after mentioning a woman’s name. Priscilla had always wondered if that woman had meant more to Temigast than he let on. Now, she recognized that he had fallen under the spell of some memory, coaxed by her brother’s proclamations of undying love.

  The woman turned away from him, jealous anger burning within her, but, as always, she was fast to let it go, to remember her lot and her pleasures in life. Temigast’s own past might have softened his resolve against Feringal running after this peasant girl, but Priscilla wasn’t so ready to accept her brother’s impetuous decision. She had been comfortable with the arrangement in Castle Auck for many years, and the last thing she wanted now was to have some peasant girl, and perhaps her smelly peasant family, moving in with them.

  Temigast retired soon after, refusing Priscilla’s invitation to share her bed. The old man’s thoughts slipped far back across the decades to a woman he had once known, a woman who had so stolen his heart and who, by dying so very young, had left a bitterness and cynicism locked within him to this very day.

  Temigast hadn’t recognized the depth of those feelings until he realized his own doubt and dismissal of Lord Feringal’s obvious feelings. What an old wretch he believed himself at that moment.

  He sat in a chair by the narrow window overlooking Auckney Harbor. The moon had long ago set, leaving the cold waters dark and showing dull white-caps under the starry sky. Temigast, like Priscilla, had never seen his young charge so animated and agitated, so full of fire and full of life. Feringal always had a dull humor about him, a sense of perpetual lethargy, but there had been nothing lethargic in the manner in which the young man had stormed down the stairs to proclaim his love for the peasant girl, nothing lethargic in the way in which Feringal had accosted his bullying older sister.

  That image brought a smile to Temigast’s face. Perhaps Castle Auck needed such fire again. Perhaps it was time to shake the place and all the fiefdom around it. Maybe a bit of spirit from the lord of Auckney would elevate the often overlooked village to the status of its more notable neighbors, Hundelstone and Fireshear. Never before had the lord of Auckney married one of the peasants of the village. There were simply too few people in that pool, most from families who had been in the village for centuries, and the possibility of bringing so many of the serfs into the ruling family, however distantly, was a definite argument against letting Feringal have his way.

  But the sheer energy the young lord had shown seemed as much an argument in favor of the union at that moment, and so he decided he would look into this matter very carefully, would find out who this peasant girl might be and see if something could be arranged.

  e knew you,” Morik dared to say after he had rejoined Wulfgar very late that same night following his venture to the seedy drinking hole. By the time the rogue had caught up to his friend on the docks the big man had drained almost all of the second bottle. “And you knew him.”

  “He thought he knew me,” Wulfgar corrected, slurring each word.

  He was hardly able to sit without wobbling, obviously more drunk than usual for so early an hour. He and Morik had split up outside the Cutlass, with Wulfgar taking the two bottles. Instead of going straight to the docks the barbarian had wandered the streets and soon found himself in the more exclusive section of Luskan, the area of respectable folk and merchants. No city guards had come to chase him off, for in that area of town stood the Prisoner’s Carnival, a public platform where outlaws were openly punished. A thief was up on the stage this night, asked repeatedly by the torturer if he admitted his crime. When he did not, the torturer took out a pair of heavy shears and snipped off his little finger. The thief’s answer to the repeated question brought howls of approval from the scores of people watching the daily spectacle.

  Of course, admitting to the crime was no easy way out for the poor man. He lost his whole hand, one finger at a time, the mob cheering and hooting with glee.

  But not Wulfgar. No, the sight had proven too much for the barbarian, had catapulted him back in time, back to Errtu’s Abyss and the helpless agony. What tortures he had known there! He had been cut and whipped and beaten within an inch of his life, only to be restored by the healing magic of one of Errtu’s foul minions. He’d had his fingers bitten off and put back again.

  The sight of the unfortunate thief brought all that back to him vividly now.

  The anvil. Yes, that was the worst of all, the most agonizing physical torture Errtu had devised for him, reserved for those moments when the great demon was in such a fit of rage that he could not take the time to devise a more subtle, more crushing, mental torture.

  The anvil. Cold it was, like a block of ice, so cold that it seemed like fire to Wulfgar’s thighs when Errtu’s mighty minions pulled him across it, forced him to straddle it, naked and stretched out on his back.

  Errtu would come to him then, slowly, menacingly, would walk right up before him, and in a single, sudden movement, smash a small mallet set with tiny needles down into Wulfgar’s opened eyes, exploding them and washing waves of nausea and agony through the barbarian.

  And, of course, Errtu’s minions would heal him, would make him whole again that their fun might be repeated.

  Even now, long fled from Errtu’s abyssal home, Wulfgar often awoke, curled like a baby, clutching his eyes, feeling the agony. Wulfgar knew of only one escape from the pain. Thus, he had taken his bottles and run away, and only by swallowing the fiery liquid had he blurred that memory.

  “Thought he knew you?” Morik asked doubtfully.

  Wulfgar stared at him blankly.

  “The man in the Cutlass,” Morik explained.

  “He was mistaken,” Wulfgar slurred.

  Morik flashed him a skeptical look.

  “He knew who I once was,” the big man admitted. “Not who I am.”

  “Deudermont,” Morik reasoned.

  Now it was Wulfgar’s turn to look surprised. Morik knew most of the folk of Luskan, of course—the rogue survived through information—but it surprised Wulfgar that he knew of an obscure sailor, which is what Wulfgar thought Deudermont to be, merely visiting the port.

  “Captain Deudermont of the Sea Sprite,” Morik explained. “Much known and much feared by the pirates of the Sword Coast. He knew you, and you knew him.”

  “I sailed with him once … a lifetime ago,” Wulfgar admitted.

  “I have many friends, profiteers of the sea, who would pay handsomely to see that one eliminated,” Morik remarked, bending low over the seated Wulfgar. “Perhaps we could use your familiarity with this man to some advantage.”

  Even as the words left Morik’s mouth, Wulfgar came up fast and hard, his hand going around Morik’s throat. Staggering on unsteady legs, Wulfgar still had the strength in just that one arm to lift the rogue from the ground. A fast few strides, as much a fall as a run, brought them hard against the wall of a warehouse where Wulfgar pinned Morik the Rogue, whose feet dangled several inches above the ground.

  Morik’s hand went into a deep pocket, closing on a nasty knife, one that he knew he could put into the drunken Wulfgar’s heart in an instant. He held his thrust, though, for Wulfgar did not press in any longer, did not try to injure him. Besides, there remained those nagging memories of drow elves holding an interest in Wulfgar. How would Morik explain killing the man to them
? What would happen to the rogue if he didn’t manage to finish the job?

  “If ever you ask that of me again, I will—” Wulfgar left the threat unfinished, dropping Morik. He spun back to the sea, nearly overbalancing and tumbling from the pier in his drunken rush.

  Morik rubbed a hand across his bruised throat, momentarily stunned by the explosive outburst. When he thought about it, though, he merely nodded. He had touched on a painful wound, one opened by the unexpected appearance of Wulfgar’s old companion, Deudermont. It was the classic struggle of past and present, Morik knew, for he had seen it tear men apart time and again as they went about their descent to the bottom of a bottle. The feelings brought on by the sight of the captain, the man with whom he had once sailed, were too raw for Wulfgar. The barbarian couldn’t put his present state in accord with what he had once been. Morik smiled and let it go, recognizing clearly that the emotional fight, past against present, was far from finished for his large friend.

  Perhaps the present would win out, and Wulfgar would listen to Morik’s potentially profitable proposition concerning Deudermont. Or, if not, maybe Morik would act independently and use Wulfgar’s familiarity with the man to his own gain without Wulfgar’s knowledge.

  Morik forgave Wulfgar for attacking him. This time….

  “Would you like to sail with him again, then?” Morik asked, deliberately lightening his tone.

  Wulfgar plopped to a sitting position, then stared incredulously through blurry eyes at the rogue.

  “We must keep our purses full,” Morik reminded him. “You do seem to be growing bored with Arumn and the Cutlass. Perhaps a few months at sea—”

  Wulfgar waved him to silence, then turned around and spat into the sea. A moment later, he bent low over the dock and vomited.

  Morik looked upon him with a mixture of pity, disgust, and anger. Yes, the rogue knew then and there he would get to Deudermont, whether Wulfgar went along with the plan or not. The rogue would use his friend to find a weakness in the infamous captain of Sea Sprite. A pang of guilt hit Morik as he came to that realization. Wulfgar was his friend, after all, but this was the street, and a wise man would not pass up so obvious an opportunity to grab a pot of gold.