Shara led the way past Aerin’s Crossing, through another desolate stretch of silent woods, to the foot of the bluffs. The road wound back and forth up the bluff from there to more farms and orchards, and then to the Nentir Inn. Looking up the cliffside, she dreaded what she would find at the top. The darkening late afternoon sky had afforded her little view of the town across the river, but from what she’d seen, Lowtown seemed deserted as well. Quarhaun’s description of returning home to find his city completely destroyed kept resurfacing in her thoughts, and she started trying to imagine what it would mean if Fallcrest had been obliterated. What would it mean for trade in the Nentir Vale? For the precarious balance between civilization and the monstrous races and savage tribes of the region? And what town in the region would fall next?
“How are you holding up, Quarhaun?” she asked the drow.
He sighed. “I’m tired. That bed you were talking about earlier is sounding better and better.”
“Well, at the top of this bluff we’ll either find beds or else discover that there’s no safe place to rest left in Fallcrest. Can you make it up this road?”
Quarhaun looked up at the road. “It doesn’t look all that steep,” he said. “I think …” He frowned, staring up.
“What is it?” Shara tried to follow his gaze.
“I thought I saw something moving up there.”
“Where?”
Quarhaun pointed, and Shara leaned in close to gain the same vantage on his pointing finger that he had.
“You see where the road bends the second time?” His breath was warm in her ear, and she had some trouble keeping her eyes and her mind focused. “There’s a bush there, see it?”
Shara nodded, speechless.
“I thought I saw movement around the bush, the branches shaking. It might have just been a rat or lizard, I don’t know.”
“But we haven’t seen any other living thing in more than half a mile of walking,” Shara said, pulling away from Quarhaun and shaking off the distracting effect of his nearness, but keeping her eyes trained on the spot he’d identified.
“I don’t see anything,” Uldane said.
Shara shook her head. “Neither do I. But that doesn’t mean there’s nothing there. Stay on guard as we ascend. This would not be a good place to get attacked.”
“Then it logically follows that this is where we will be attacked,” Quarhaun said.
“Logically follows?” Shara said. “If you’re suspicious to the point of madness, perhaps.”
“I don’t know about the point of madness, but that kind of suspicion is what lets drow live to see adulthood.”
“How can you live like that? Expecting attack around every corner?”
“All I mean is that if there’s something here and it’s going to attack us, it makes sense that it would choose this road to launch its attack. It’s a defensible position and puts us at a strong disadvantage, particularly if the attacker is better at navigating the cliff than we are.”
“What’s your advice, then?” Shara asked, exasperated.
“Is there another way up?”
“We could ford the stream and pass through Lowtown. Two other roads lead up the bluffs, but they’re just like these.”
“In the absence of a better option, then, we climb the road here. But instead of hoping we don’t get attacked, we prepare for an ambush. That way, with luck, we stay alive.”
Shara nodded. “All right. I’m going first. I need both of you behind me with your eyes wide open-especially you, Uldane. You’ll notice any attackers long before I do. When they strike, they’ll probably come from front and back, to make sure we can’t flee down the road. So Quarhaun, you have to be ready to cover our rear. Uldane, stick to throwing your dagger, unless you can get around behind them on the narrow road.”
“Fine,” Quarhaun said. “But I think you’re forgetting something.”
“What’s that?”
“You’ve planned for an attack from two directions. What if they come from three directions, or four? Or what if they come only from the top and bottom, scaling the cliffside?”
Shara blinked, trying to imagine what sort of ambush Quarhaun was used to.
Evidently Quarhaun could discern her thoughts. “My people have been known to ride giant spiders that cling to walls as easily as walking on the floor,” he said. “With a large enough attacking force, we would come from all four sides in a situation like this.”
“Then what defense do you recommend?”
“If there’s that many of them, we’re in trouble.”
“You’re really not helpful, you know that?” Shara started up the road. “Let’s go. We’re overthinking this. If we get attacked, we kill them all.”
“Because that plan worked so well in the swamp,” Uldane grumbled.
“We’re still alive, aren’t we?” Shara said.
“Sure, I’ll take blind luck over careful strategy any time.” The halfling couldn’t hide his smile.
“Good, because I think that’s all we have.”
Shara found herself remembering her conversation with Uldane in the swamp ruins, discussing the day Jarren and her father died. She tried to remember the hours before the dragon attacked, the trek through the forest, the jovial banter that made up the fabric of their bond as a group, an adventuring party. They’d shared a rapport that was so hard to come by, but so easy to relax into. She still had it with Uldane, most of the time, but with Quarhaun-somebody always seemed to say something wrong, and somebody else felt hurt or took offense.
She and Jarren had shared more than a comfortable rapport, of course. Even in the moments before the dragon’s attack, he’d given her one of his smoldering looks, and she’d brushed against him with a suggestive smile. By all the gods, how I miss him, she thought, wracked with the familiar ache of his absence.
Quarhaun’s eyes seemed to be developing a certain smolder, too, and that left her … confused. Even more perplexing was the reaction his touch seemed to stir up in her, from the raw physical yearning to the damned schoolgirl blushing, which she wished she could just turn off.
She rounded the first switchback in the road, and realized she’d been ignoring her own orders, walking up the bluffs with her mind on anything but the threat of ambush. She glanced back at Uldane and Quarhaun to make sure they were paying better attention, and the drow met her gaze with a sly grin. Ignoring him, she tried to clear her mind of her other thoughts and stay alert.
Despite her best efforts, she found her mind drifting back to Quarhaun, thinking about that grin, his breath in her ear, his hand on her chin. She tried to also remind herself about his snide comments to Uldane, his outrageous attitude about the lizardfolk being expendable, and his apparent acceptance of bloodthirsty drow politics, but her mind kept coming back to the way his eyes lingered on her.
When the demons leaped out near the second switchback, she was almost relieved.
A good fight will get my blood flowing, she thought, and not so much to my brain.
Then her thoughts fled entirely, replaced by paralyzing fear as the nearest demon, a creature of shadow and burning blood, tore into her mind.
Roghar and Tempest rode toward Fallcrest on the King’s Road from the west. The late afternoon sun cast long shadows in front of them, and the forest that lined the wood was draped in a cloak of silence and darkness.
“It’s awfully quiet,” Roghar said. He didn’t expect an answer-Tempest had spoken little on their long journey from Nera. At times he’d almost wished he’d been traveling alone. At least then, he could sing at the top of his lungs without feeling like he was disturbing someone.
“It’s not right,” Tempest said.
Roghar looked around in surprise at her reply. She was peering into the woods around them, a frown creasing her brow.
“There’s an unnatural presence here,” she said. She met his gaze, and the anguish in her eyes drove his smile away. “It’s him.”
“You can feel his presence?” Roghar said.
“Not exactly. But I can feel the wrongness, all around. Can’t you?”
Roghar closed his eyes and drew a deep breath through his nostrils. The smell of autumn decay and fresh earth filled his nose, but there was something more-acrid smoke, not the warm scent of hearth-fires but the sharp odor of destruction. He closed his eyes and reached for whatever sense could detect “wrongness,” and felt a warm tingling at the back of his skull. Then nausea seized his stomach and cold fear gnawed at his chest.
“Oh, that wrongness,” he said, blinking.
“We should ride,” Tempest said.
From the look on her face, Roghar wasn’t sure whether she meant ride ahead to discover the source of the wrongness or turn around and ride away as fast as their horses could carry them. He cocked his head at her.
“I don’t know if I can do this,” she said, slumping in her saddle.
After their encounter with the cult of the Chained God in Nera, Tempest had stayed in bed for three days, sleeping-or at least pretending to sleep whenever Roghar came to check on her. Finally, he had forced her to look at him and argued the case that they should return to the Nentir Vale. If the demonic influence had spread as far as Nera, then it appeared they could not flee far enough to escape it forever. It was far better, he argued, to return to the Vale and confront it at its source. In Fallcrest, he argued, they had other friends who could help them, and the mention of Albanon seemed to finally start to sway her.
It had taken all of Roghar’s powers of persuasion, but he’d finally convinced Tempest that no other course of action would ever bring her peace and close out that chapter of her life. And so they had ridden for weeks from the old capital out to the frontier of the fallen empire, where the nightmare had begun.
“It’s the only way,” he reminded her, as gently as he could given the harsh reality of her situation.
“Remember your promise,” she said, meeting his eyes.
Roghar nodded slowly. The only way he’d been able to convince her to come to Fallcrest was by swearing a solemn oath that if she ended up possessed or infected in some way by the vile red liquid, he would kill her without hesitation. He wasn’t sure he could actually carry out this promise, but he had sworn it and so he supposed he must.
But he earnestly hoped he wouldn’t have to.
Apparently satisfied, Tempest coaxed her horse back into motion. Roghar spurred his black stallion ahead of her, turning over in his mind the significance of the nausea and fear he had tasted.
The road wound around the base of Aranda Hill to come into Fallcrest from the north. Roghar recognized the point on the road, just ahead, where they would come out of the curve and be able to see straight down the road to the Nentir Inn. He called it the homecoming spot, the point where he always announced that he’d arrived. The thought of the inn made his body ache with longing for a soft, warm bed and a real dinner.
He kept his eyes fixed on the road ahead, and a grin of excitement spread across his face as he neared the homecoming spot, but he closed his eyes in the moment he reached it. “We’re home,” he said with a sigh, then opened his eyes.
The Nentir Inn was in flames, pouring smoke into the sky.
Tempest rode up beside him and stared with him at the wreckage of the inn. They exchanged a glance, then together spurred their mounts and galloped down the road. Even before they reached it, Roghar could see that they were too late to do anything. The building was an empty husk already, withered beams and posts standing above blackened fieldstone. A moment later, he realized that no one was fighting the fire-no one was even watching the inn burn down.
“Tempest, wait,” he called, reining in his horse.
“What?” She slowed, but didn’t stop her chestnut mare. “We have to help!”
He shook his head. “There’s no help for it now. I think it’s a trap.”
She looked at the inn and back at Roghar, then came to a stop. He caught up with her and pointed at the burning inn.
“There’s no one there,” he said. “Where’s Erandil?” The half-elf Erandil Zemoar had built the Nentir Inn only a few years ago. “You think he’d let his new inn burn down without even watching it? Where’s the watch? Where are the spectators drawn to the disaster like moths to flame?”
“You’re right,” Tempest said. “That is strange. But a trap?”
“I think someone lit the fire in hopes of drawing people here to fight it.”
“So what do we do?”
Roghar thought for a moment, then dismounted. “Leave the horses,” he said. “Once we clear the forest, we make a wide circle around the inn and see if we can catch whoever is lying in wait.”
Tempest slid out of her saddle and nodded. “Let’s do it.”
Roghar took her reins and led both horses off the road, where he draped the reins around a low tree branch. It would keep the horses in place for a little while, but if he and Tempest didn’t come back, they’d free themselves eventually and find their own way to safety. He patted his stallion’s flank and left the horses.
They hugged the forest rather than walking along the road, alert for any sound among the trees, but not even a squirrel or bird rustled in the leaves as they drew closer to the burning inn. Tempest signaled a stop just before the road left the shelter of the woods, then she drew the afternoon shadows around herself in a concealing cloak and stepped to the edge of the trees.
The inn had its own fire apple orchard, and two small farms shared the clearing on this part of the river’s west bank. The road ran straight to the inn and then forked, with the left branch crossing the Five-Arch Bridge into Hightown and the right passing the farms before winding down the bluff toward Aerin’s Crossing.
Tempest scanned the clearing and then waved Roghar forward. He moved as quietly as he could, but he was under no illusions about his capacity for stealth-his bulk, the weight of his armor, and the tendency of the metal plates to clank against each other despite their padding combined to make him easy to spot and especially easy to hear. He chose a path through the fields, aiming to pass close by the two farmhouses on the west side of the road.
“You don’t want to keep to the shelter of the trees?” Tempest asked.
“If they’re hiding in the farmhouses while they watch the road and the inn, maybe we can catch them off guard. At the edge of the woods, we’ll be too far away to see them.”
Roghar felt the tension in every muscle of his body. This was not his preferred way to face danger-he would rather have charged at top speed toward an obvious foe, sword in hand and divine power at the ready. Sneaking around didn’t sit well with him, and waiting for enemies to reveal themselves made him anxious. Tempest seemed much more at ease, moving swiftly and all but silently through the fields, barely even making the corn sway as she passed. For all her earlier trepidation, she was facing imminent danger without a moment’s hesitation.
They reached the first of the farmhouses without incident. Roghar peered in the back windows and found the home dark and apparently deserted. It seemed intact, though, so he doubted that attackers were lurking inside. After a cursory glance, he nodded to Tempest and they moved on.
As they drew near the second farmhouse, Roghar heard the sounds of fighting-the clash of steel, explosions of magic, and a great deal of shouting. It was distant, coming from somewhere off to the south, roughly where the road wound down the bluffs. He looked at Tempest, and she smiled at him.
“Sounds like your kind of fight,” she said.
He returned the smile. “Let me make sure there’s nothing in this farmhouse, then we’ll see who’s in trouble on the bluffs.”
“It’s the first sound of other living creatures we’ve heard in the last half hour,” Tempest said.
Roghar nodded and broke into a run. Even before he reached the second farmhouse, he could see that it was the same as the first-dark, abandoned, empty. He signaled to Tempest and changed course, running full out toward the sounds of fighting. His body started feeling better at once, the exertion of the run soothing the tension from his muscles.
As soon as he reached the bluff and looked down, he saw the fight raging-and recognized two of the fighters. “Shara!” he shouted. “Uldane!” His friends were locked in a struggle with dark figures of shadow laced with the same glowing red liquid that was becoming all too familiar. A white-haired, dark-skinned man in black leather fought alongside them, but it was obvious that he was using his last reserves of strength-and Shara and Uldane weren’t doing too well, either.
Rather than wind his way carefully down the road, Roghar slid down the bluff with a yell, bouncing and rattling as he went but thrilling at the battle ahead.
My kind of fight, indeed, he thought, smiling.