Neverember Day 1: Home
#a/n. I had the first few hundred words of this written already and lurking on my harddrive. I've now turned it into a full scene. It was actually meant to be three scenes, but time just isn't playing along and I'm about to fall asleep. 😴 It features the protagonist of my main NWN2 fanfic universe plus Georg Redfell No proofreading has happened yet. Will try to do that tomorrow!
She smoothed down her tunic, checked the soles of her boots were clean, and ran a hand through her hair in case the charm she used on it had gone flat in the humidity. Then, putting on what she hoped was her best, most winning smile, she knocked.
Georg’s door was open already, but announcing her presence seemed like the classy thing to do. A Mossfeld would lumber straight in and kick splinters off the doorframe at the same time. One of the hearty, good-natured, and boring Lannon clan would yell whatever was on their mind from the threshold in a voice moulded for summoning cattle home over mudflats. If her stepfather needed the ear of the village mayor, he’d appear like a winter ghost from the shadows of the inglenook, deliver a few sentences held tweezered at arm’s length by his cold monotone, then vanish before the possibility of conversation could arise.
I’m going to be better than that, she thought. No, I am better than that.
The mayor of West Harbour was at his desk, a parchment in front of him. Although he was a big man, and the quill he was using seemed too small for his farmer’s – and swordsman’s – hand, he held it nevertheless with an easy, correct, grip, the index finger and thumb resting lightly a half inch above the nib. Just in the way that Tarmas had taught her and that she now endeavoured to teach the village children in turn.
“Lila. By the mercy of Chauntea, is the village burning down? It’s not midday yet, and you’re out of bed.”
Once, or twice, or perhaps a few dozen times during her adolescence, she’d been late for shared tasks or appointments after sleeping soundly through first light and later. It was one of several details of her history that Georg would never let her forget. But it could be worse: he never mentioned Cormick. Nor did he mention lizardmen, druids or her last abysmal escape attempt.
In submission to the joke, she gave a deep bow and spread her arms so that the long sleeves of her tunic touched the plain floorboards.
Georg squinted past her. “Dragons?” He craned further. “Rakshasas?”
“Ah ha,” she said flatly and raised an eyebrow. As often with Georg, she felt trapped in a place between annoyance and laughter. “Dragons say they can’t make it today. The rakshasa are going to Stormwreck Isle instead for the climate.”
“We’ve got the best climate of anywhere between the sea and The Green Dragon.”
“There are no other villages between the sea and The Green Dragon.”
“There’s the Tumble and – “
“–and the caves and the ruins and the mystery band of swamp druids that only you ever see.” She’d reached for the wrong example there: Georg span up oddities and fancies all the time to populate his stories.
But the druids were real, or as real as anything ever was in marsh fever country. Bevil had said that Simon had told him that his girl Runcie had overheard Orlen talking to Daeghun about trading with some druids who were camping in the lea of Faross Tower. Of course, she’d grabbed him and Amie and gone to investigate, slogging a mile out across the home salt flats in a mizzle rain, only to reach the little meadow under the crumbling lighthouse and find nothing there. Not a thread of strange cloth, not a silver pin, not a nut.
“That’s right. We’re better here than all that lot. When I was a lad in Daggerdale–”
“A tenday ago it was Amn,” she pointed out.
“When I was a lad in Daggerdale, after I lived in Amn and before I moved to Halruaa for the business with the harpies which I told you about before,” said Georg, reshuffling his details without smiling or pausing to blink, “I would never have believed myself so lucky as to live in a place without real winters or summers.”
“Last winter the lake froze, and we all put sledge runners on the boats.”
“In Daggerdale the snow drifts come up past your eyebrows. Every winter you sit in your cabin, living on rations, waiting to see if the first thing to dig through to you will be your friends or a horn-toothed snowgre with a toasting fork.”
Snowgre was a new one. A muscle in her face must have twitched somewhere, because Georg opened his eyes wide in a display of earnest credulity that might have convinced a child, if the child was very young and very naïve.
Had there ever been a point when she believed Georg’s stories? She would like to think that she’d come into the world wise to them, but she also had a stubborn memory of once upon a time excavating a three-foot hole along with Bevil because some respected authority figure had told them that a djinn’s flask locked in a golden casket could be found down there. Retta Starling had marched in to pull them out just as the lustrous, slithering clay walls began to collapse in on their creators.
And for days afterwards, going back to that spot and imagining the glittering casket in the earth, still safe in its dark blanket, just a little further away than she could reach.
“Anway, Georg–” she pressed her nerves down, and tried to sound casual yet also confident and good in a fight. Not like the woman who’d missed the militia’s only real battle because when it happened she’d been in a rocky hollow to the south of West Harbour, persuading a line of ants to turn in a circle to the beat of her tabor, and hadn’t heard the yelling to the north. “I wanted to ask about that escort you’re putting together to meet Galen at the Green Dragon this summer. I’d like to volunteer.”
“Thought you might,” said Georg. “Yes, the escort…” He massaged the edge of his aged desk with his thumb.
“Setting out a month before the fair, I heard, and going up to Leilon first, then down to the Dragon.” When she was growing up, there’d been constant traffic between Leilon and the village. Well, regular traffic. One caravan per month, at least. Then, when she was of age and desperate to see more of the world than the swamp, it had all died away. Patches of reeds were already colonising he straight road north, and pools lay thick across it for most of the year.
Georg looked at her. She’d carefully composed a list of reasons why she should be included in the escort, and they all abandoned her. She suspected they hadn’t been brilliant reasons in any case. If you want to make sure a merchant can travel safely to your harvest fair, then sending him the toughs with combat experience rather than the local schoolteacher might strike you as a better option.
Gods, the bastard was going to send the Mossfelds, wasn’t he? Galen might be better off chancing the orcs and lizards on his own. At least the standards of conversation would be higher.
There was something she didn’t like in his expression. He had started to avoid her gaze. “I’ll be fine,” she said. “And Galen won’t be counting on just me, though I swear I won’t let anything happen to him. I’ll keep him safe.” She paused. “I’ll even get up militia drill early.”
Georg shook his head. “It’s not that.” He threw his quill down on the desk and leaned back in his chair. Flexed his fingers, then folded his arms over his chest. “I’m withdrawing the offer of an escort. Orlen and Daeghun and a few of the others say it’s getting more dangerous out in the depths of the Mere. More of the usual, and there’s worse things crawling out of the bric-a-brac the ancients left us with, bless their souls. The capable people we have should stay here.”
He gave her the kind of serious look that meant that he was including her among the capable people. She supposed she should have feel somehow buoyed up by that. In times past, she surely would have.
His skin was dark, though not as dark as hers. The corners of his eyes crinkled readily into laughter lines, and one side of his mouth rose a little higher than the other when he smiled. He wasn’t her blood father, but he and Retta and Tarmas between them had almost made up for her lack of parents.
They had none of them taken her away from Daeghun though. That was the heart of the problem. Georg was much cleverer than he pretended, and he’d been happy to clown for her when she was a child, nudge her into taking on responsibilities as she grew older, and trade jokes with her as an adult. But the thing she’d really needed – to grow up with a foster carer who didn’t hate the sight of her – that he hadn’t been willing to do. Just like he wouldn’t get involved with Kipp and his family now.
“Let me know if you change your mind,” she said, careful not to let any anger show. Alienating the village mayor would be – what was that phrase in Tarmas’s latest circular? – casting seconds before centuries.
“It’s West Harbour, lass. If I change my mind, you’ll know before I do.”
She plastered on her best smile and went out.
Well, that was another escape plan struck off. Time for the next one.
