“Remind me why,” grumbles Jem's brother, tipping too much powder into the matchlock, “we’re shooting bottles in this alley?”
“You’d shoot bottles in the street?” Jem leans to light the matchcord with the tip of her smoke. The singed end ignites like her grin; illuminated, her elfin face springs from the dark like a gunsmith's grease-smudged ghost. There should be cautionary tales. “You might hit someone, Silky.”
He fumbles the wadding into the handgun's muzzle, then drops the scouring-stick. When he stoops for it, he drops it again. It's almost pleasant, after another day busking in the Wide, to do something he's bloody stupid at. "Don't call me that."
"Frid."
"Or that."
The matchlock, he admits to himself, is a pretty little piece: Jem's handiwork, of course, clever as any fancy firestick out of Lantan. She's etched seabirds and blowsy brigantines, like the ones they'd watched as children, up and down the barrel; he recalls leaning too far over some patriar's rooftop terrace, Jem's curls tickling his cheek, while Way grinned and pointed out the sloops. See, she's square-rigged on the foremast, with a gaff sail—
Jem claps him on the shoulder. "Present!"
He straightens dutifully into something like good form, then blows a few times on the matchcord. The smoldering end flares. An archer could have gotten off a whole quiver of arrows by now—
"Give fire!"
He pulls the trigger: echoing crack, tail of smoke, and so forth. One of the bottles lined against the brownstone even wobbles.
His sister whoops, though he hasn't hit anything. Someday he'll discover a way to miss the wall. "What do you think?"
"Of the gun?" He should ask her, sometime, what she thinks of a fugal interlude. "Lovely, as usual. Doesn't kick much."
"Good girl, isn't she?" She takes the thing from him and primes it. "Not that it matters. She'll be living on Portyr's mantel. Nim's dubbed her the Conversation Piece."
He scrambles for a moment to place the name—Nimble, he thinks, her eldest. His other siblings' interminable children, wags and wastrels and Waterdhavians, he knows mostly by reputation: the tinkerers, the twins, the Blackstaff alumnus who lights people's breeches on fire. Sorcerer. Possibly tenured now, combusting apprentices—
Jem prods him. “I’m sorry,” he says, and almost means it. “I was woolgathering.”
“Feeling sorry for yourself, you mean.” Jem looks sidelong at him, seeing too much. “Natty wants a deft hand round the shop. Told him you’d rather starve to death, but—”
He’d be less stunned if she put the gun to his head. His laugh comes out breathless and ill, a sort of convalescent cough. “I should leave off music to bang out shoddy hobnails with Natty Cobble?”
“Mind his moneybox, more like. You couldn’t hit a nail on the head if it leered at our mim.” An ember drops from Jem’s smile. “You know, Nat’s a live-alone, now—”
“Oh, Jem.” His own sister. He swallows an indignant cri de coeur: I used to lace your shoes for you. I used to comb your hair. “Give that back so I can shoot myself.”
* * *
He had felt sorry for himself, in those lean years before a Linnacker heard him play. He feels sorrier now.
“Oh, what’s this?” crows Astarion sotto voce, as if over a scandalous bit of gossip. He delves into the Moonrise warden’s lockbox—stuffed with such dangerous Ironhand contraband as a greasy kerchief, a hammer, some rolling-papers—and, with finger and thumb, lifts out an antique hunk of iron. A matchlock. In the doorway, neglecting to keep an eye on the corridor, his watchman’s heart seizes at the etchings on the barrel.
“It’s not a lady’s slip,” he hisses after a moment of near-catalepsy, and makes an absurd grab at the thing. Jem must have let Nim keep it. Unless she’s in the pile by the midden-pit, he’d looked at his sister’s daughter through iron bars and—Milil take his worthless hands, if they keep shaking—failed to mark the resemblance. “Hold it properly.”
“Please, Silk,” says Astarion, lifting the gun out of his reach. “As if you know how to hold a—” He peers into the minstrel’s mind. A slow, astounded smile draws those insufferable creases at the corners of his mouth. “No.”
He hasn’t felt so sick since Grymforge. He leaps to snatch the gun and rummages through the warden’s desk. “Look for the scouring-stick.”
“The what?”
“The ramrod—”
“I’d rather not look for your ramrod, thank you,” says Astarion—and, contrary as ever, dives back into the box. The minstrel is marginally less inclined to shoot him. “Is this it?”
It is. He snatches that, too.
You’re angry. The voice from the minstrel’s dreams, musical as the god’s, ripples through his mind with slight surprise. Be careful.
It’s his hands, not his head, that memorize the motions of a chord. There’s powder on the warden’s writing-table, in a paper twist; he tips too much of it into the matchlock, trusting his hands to tremble through the steps. Wadding in the muzzle. Scouring-stick. When he drops it, he curses through his teeth.
Someone’s coming, says the voice in sonorous warning. A beat. It’s the warden.
“Oh, no,” says Astarion, gleeful as a child with a new toy. He lights the matchcord with an eager snap of his fingers. “Somebody, help—”
The door bangs open. The minstrel jumps and pulls the trigger. The ball whistles wide of the surprised warden, missing her by an armlength, and explodes a scrying eye.
“Darling,” says Astarion afterwards, flicking the blood from his knives, “that was almost dashing.” He tastes the flat of one blade with the tip of his tongue, then wrinkles his nose. “Of course, it being you—”
“Count yourselves lucky,” snaps Gale, peering in, “that I silenced that!”
When the moment comes, it’s very simple. The Harpers and the Fist upstairs and Jaheira here, who fought so hard for them. June and Shadowheart, whose lives together can now begin. Wyll and Duke Ravengard, and a gaping void of power in Baldur’s Gate.
A principle she has had to explain to many a paladin, but never a wizard: if you don’t understand a threat, how do you really know if it’s gone?
There isn’t time to reason it out, why Mystra would prefer blood on her hands, knowledge lost. Following the will of the gods is mostly intuition, and Aliafer has always trusted hers.
“You can’t do this,” she says.
“I choose you,” he says, and her stomach lurches: that isn’t the choice she meant to pose. But it’s what she said, isn’t it. Maybe not what she meant, but what she said. And he chooses her, the way she couldn’t quite ever say she chose him.
But there’s a different god to deal with just now. June strikes the killing blow, but the crumpled form of Ketheric Thorm falls at Aliafer’s feet. He cries out for his god and receives no answer.
+
The gods don’t just answer. That’s what people who profess no particular faith don’t understand. They don’t just answer, and the Lady of Mysteries least of all.
When she sees Gale pacing in the corner of Moonrise, apart from the exhausted celebrations, she readies herself for a torrent of guilt. But he’s too much like her: on to the next thing, his mind consumed already by the sight of that crown—the promise, as he clutches her shoulder, caresses the back of her neck with his thumb as he speaks, that they haven’t ruined everything.
And in the shine in his eyes, Aliafer understands. There was always another way. Mystra must have known of this, must have feared the death gods and the Elder Brain. Must have known there was indeed only one person who could defeat it: Gale, with his lifetime of study of Netherese magic, with his prodigious talent and skill.
Intuition. Is it as Gale says, her anger and envy, keeping him from this second Netherese artefact? Forcing him to choose death over the temptation of power?
Or does she fear what will become of him if he tempts fate a second time? Was his death to be salvation from destruction?
There are things that can destroy a mortal soul, rend it in too many pieces for a god to collect and bring to their afterlife. Becoming a mindflayer, of course, is one such thing.
Do you understand, she wants to say, testing her thumb against the points of the star of Mystra in her pocket, the chain of her holy symbol snapped during the fight, that you cannot choose me without choosing her, too?
Does he understand that for her, Mystra is not a lover, not a mentor, not even a muse? She is the ever-present sensation of the Weave; she is the promise of mysteries to uncover; she is the feeling of knowledge settling itself into understanding after hard work and study. All the things that wizards know and seek to master, she feels, she worships. That is what they share, not the mere name of a goddess, not paired holy symbols that they carry.
Does he understand?
“There is another way, a better way, for both of us,” he says, and she has to believe that he does.
“I think that sounds like an excellent idea,” she says.
Thinking again about how Mizora adds absolutely nothing to Wyll’s storyline in the Wyll Ravengard draft and how it was just a sunk cost because she’s on the marketing.
And also how the fact that she’s on the marketing so much, has a unique face and is voiced by a singular voice, implies that maybe she was going to be a secret companion. Which would have been a disaster imo.
They really should have made Wyll’s patron Raphael in the final draft for narrative tightness.
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