Chapter Three
The air smelt different. Brighter? Fresher? A cool breeze brushed Ashenivir’s skin, a shiver catching him by surprise.
“Surface in five!” Master Do’tyl announced. “The shrine’s making ready for us—there’ll be hot food and plenty of wine tonight!”
A cheer erupted down the entire length of the caravan, the loudest it had been since they’d left Mythen Thaelas. Ashenivir’s spine prickled with anticipation, his stomach awash with nerves. The surface! In no time at all he’d be up on the skin of the world, with nothing above him but endless sky.
“Here,” Rizeth said, depositing a bundle of heavy fabric into his arms. “It is autumn on the surface; it will be colder than you are used to.”
It was a cloak, of similar kind to the one he’d replaced his own piwafwi with the day before. Ashenivir didn’t have a piwafwi to swap out, or any cloak at all—he hadn’t even remembered to bring the one Keszriin had gifted him at graduation, a fact he’d kicked himself for not long after they’d left. The wool he now wrapped around his shoulders was twice as warm as that one, though, and much more practical. He fingered the soft grey fur at his neck. Autumn. The surface changed, didn’t it, as the year rolled by; cold and heat in a regular cycle, wind and rain, mist and snow, thunder and lightning and—
“I take it you are excited.” Rizeth’s voice held the subtle cadence of amusement that warmed Ashenivir without need for a fine fur-collared cloak.
“It can’t all be true, can it? All the things I’ve read?”
“Certainly not all the things you have read,” Rizeth said. “But you will see for yourself soon enough.”
Was it lighter up ahead, or just his imagination? Master Do’tyl had said tonight, and night in the World Above was dark, wasn’t it? That breeze again, cold, nipping at his face. A rustling sound, a kind of whistling and faint rattling. Ashenivir craned his neck, trying to see past the wagons. It was growing lighter, the gloom banished by the familiar flicker of lanterns.
Also familiar were the new voices he could hear, with their Mythen Thaelan lilt. Greetings and laughter and, faintly, someone singing. He recognised the song; Eilistraee’s welcome, sung for strangers and friends alike, for what were strangers but friends yet to be made?
And then they were out. The caravan spilled from the cave mouth into an open space surrounded by tall, dark stalks with not mushroom caps but leaves; branches and leaves, arching overhead in a tangle through which a faint filigree of silvery light turned the ground at his feet to shadowed lace. Trees! Real trees, fed on sunlight and fresh air, and beneath his feet, that was dirt and grass and beneath that—many, many miles beneath that—he’d left his home behind. He couldn’t see the endless sky he’d read so much about, so perhaps that was only a myth, but the idea of being above everything he’d ever known made his head spin. He clutched at Rizeth’s arm.
“Focus on your feet,” Rizeth said. “You will grow used to it in time.”
Boisterous laughter and half-shouted conversation filled the clearing, made louder for the way the noise spread into the wide, uncontained dark. Ashenivir let Rizeth guide him through it, certain there was absolutely no way he could ever grow used to all of this.
“Gather for dinner at the shrine!” Master Do’tyl bellowed over the racket. “And pay your respects to High Priestess Eilist’tra first!”
Eilist’tra? Ashenivir stopped focusing on his feet, a tight ball of anxiety forming in the back of his throat. Before him, in the centre of the clearing, stood the shrine: a flat, circular altar of white stone, the platform surrounded by eight black, sword-like pillars, their points buried in the earth. Drow in white tunics and silver circlets moved about it, tending nearby cook-fires and greeting the new arrivals, all of them strangers to him save one.
His grip on Rizeth’s arm tightened as she approached. Phyrra looked the same as when he’d last seen her, some eight decades prior—soft-featured and lightly freckled, just like Keszriin, though she wore her hair in a high tail, and stood a good few inches taller than her younger sister. The silver crescent-moon-and-sword of Eilistraee hung around her neck on a delicate chain, and she must have been used to the surface cold, for she was barefoot, clad in only a plain white dress.
“My warmest welcomes,” she greeted them. “I hope the journey here was not too arduous.”
Ashenivir’s tongue seemed to shrivel in his mouth. “I…Lady Phyrra, it’s good to see...you’re looking well.”
She frowned. “Have we met before? My apologies, I don’t recall your name.”
She didn’t recognise him. How could she not—but then, the changedance had been a few years after she’d left the Shrine of the Dark Maiden, hadn’t it? Ashenivir swallowed down an acidic mixture of terror and relief.
“I’m at the Arcanum with your…with Lady Keszriin,” he said.
“Oh, I see!” She laughed. “Mother did write and say she’d given up on the Maiden to study magic. She does well, I hope?”
“Very.”
Ashenivir wanted to be anywhere else. Even with the differences wrought by the changedance, how could she not recognise him? She’d realise any moment, she’d say something, right in front of Rizeth, and he wasn’t ready, he couldn’t…he needed to…
“The surface can be difficult the first time,” Phyrra said gently. “Sit and rest, eat—there’s plenty to go around. And welcome again to you both.”
She swept away to continue her greetings, and Ashenivir sagged against Rizeth, not caring who saw or how Rizeth felt about it. Blessedly, neither complaint nor reprimand came his way as Rizeth helped him over to one of the nearby benches.
“Put your head between your knees,” he said. “Breathe on a four-count. I will fetch you something to eat.”
“Thank you,” Ashenivir mumbled. He bent double, gripping his shins and screwing his eyes shut. He’d known there would be a shrine, but why Phyrra? He’d just have to keep away from her, make sure she never got the chance to put two and two together. Goddess, he didn’t want to deal with this.
“—sure they’ll let you join if you want, Ms Jadefoot, everyone’s allowed to dance,” Xullzalle’s voice burbled past. “I know I’m going to.”
“And you’ll be dragging Master Ironbelcher with you into another uncomfortable situation, no doubt.”
A laugh, but Ashenivir didn’t hear Xullzalle’s reply. Dancing. Right. It was a shrine, and that was what you did at a shrine. He groaned and pressed his forehead to his knees.
This was not how he’d pictured his first night on the surface.
There was something more than surface shock wrong with Ashenivir. He watched the dancers in the shrine with eyes that kept darting away, his body held very still and tight. Firelight flickered across his face, fear and longing warring in the shifting shadows.
“You know they will allow you to join if you wish,” Rizeth said. Ashenivir started, as though he’d forgotten Rizeth was there.
“I don’t want to.”
“You do not lie to me, Ra’soltha.” The words were out before he could stop them. It hardly mattered—there was no-one nearby to hear, and the noise from the shrine easily covered their conversation. Ashenivir’s hands twisted tight in his lap, nails carving pale crescents into his knuckles. Rizeth curled his own fingers into a fist against the desire to reach out and prise them apart.
“You will not look foolish. There are undoubtedly worse dancers than you up there,” he said. Xullzalle certainly flung themselves about with more enthusiasm than skill, Bhalrom stomping along in tow.
“It’s not that, it’s…” Ashenivir shook his head. “I can’t. I can’t, Master, please don’t ask me.”
“Can’t, or won’t?”
“Can’t.”
Rizeth thought then of another time, another place. Of Ashenivir falling apart in a scene he shouldn’t have asked for—that Rizeth should have known better than to agree to. Ashenivir with something he couldn’t say, something tangled up with the way his Matron treated him like a disappointment; something to do with his sister, perhaps? She was a priestess, or at least an acolyte, Rizeth recalled. And—according to Ashenivir—their mother did not allow her to stay at the shrine in the city.
“Very well,” he said, because if Ashenivir couldn’t talk about it, then they wouldn’t talk about it. At least not tonight. He stood. “Come along, apprentice.”
Ashenivir rose to follow him, and Rizeth very nearly took his hand. He gripped his staff tighter. That wasn’t the kind of comfort he could offer, even if they had been alone. A distraction, though—that he could provide.
The noise and light soon fell away behind them as they walked, replaced by forested darkness. Leaf-fall crunched beneath their feet, loud in the buzzing night-silence of the forest.
“Where are we going, Master?” Ashenivir sounded more curious than anxious, much to Rizeth’s relief.
“Do you trust me?”
“Of course.”
“Then keep your eyes down until I tell you otherwise,” Rizeth said, and the shrine was no more than a dull hum in the distance now, so he allowed the full measure of command into his voice. Ashenivir dropped his gaze to the forest floor and fell back a few paces, so that he was slightly behind Rizeth instead of alongside. They continued on in that manner for a short while, until Rizeth found what he’d been searching for; a place where the canopy thinned out, leaving the great black blanket of the sky visible above.
A moment of dizziness staggered him—it had been so long since he’d stood below that unbelievable expanse. Such power it held, for something so intangible.
He leaned his staff against a nearby tree and drew Ashenivir to the centre of the small clearing. Quiet hung between them, until he touched Ashenivir’s arm and murmured, “Look up, Ra’soltha.”
Ashenivir raised his head, and his eyes went wide in that beautiful way they did that made Rizeth go stupidly weak at the knees, his mouth dropping open on a gasp.
“Great Goddess!”
It was a clear night in Faerûn that evening. Swathes of silver stars decorated the vast velvet darkness, an impossible handful of diamonds scattered by some careless divine hand. Shifts of deep blue radiated around the waning moon, the glow catching the edges of the thin clouds to halo them with Selûne’s light. On and on it stretched, the endless sky; that precious sight that drow were not supposed to want, that Rizeth had been taught half his life to fear.
Here, now, Ashenivir gazed at it with adoration.
“It’s…I don’t…it doesn’t end,” he breathed out. “The stars, they’re just…” A laugh escaped him, awe and overwhelm. “I feel like I’m going to fall into it! Where does it even go? Is there anything past the moon? There must be, it can’t just be up there with nothing above it.”
He turned in a slow circle, never taking his eyes from the sky. As he did so, his cloak shifted just enough that the moonlight caught his collar, a sliver of starlight around his neck. At the sight of it, Rizeth felt all Ashenivir’s joy as though it were his own, flowing through him in a rush that made him dizzier than the sky ever had.
A cloud shifted, crossing the moon and throwing a shadow over the clearing. Ashenivir at last tore his gaze away, blinking moonstruck eyes back to clarity. It seemed to Rizeth that the stars still lingered there—and who could blame them for wanting to stay in such a precious place?
“Thank you, Master,” Ashenivir said softly. A slight smile curved his lips, an invitation Rizeth couldn’t take up, no matter the ache it conjured in his chest. He clasped his hands behind his back.
“You are welcome, apprentice.”
The bench had the cycles of the moon carved into it, interspersed with the leaping figure of a dancing drow, her long hair winding about her. Ashenivir hadn’t noticed it last night. Too consumed with stupid fear, too busy staring at a dance he couldn’t join no matter how much he wanted to. And once again, Rizeth hadn’t pushed him.
He surely must have been curious. Must have wondered why Ashenivir had reacted so strangely to Keszriin’s sister, to the dancing. Yet just like before, he’d said I can’t and Rizeth had let the matter drop.
Had he already guessed? Ashenivir traced over the carved figure of Eilistraee, worn smooth over years of similar touch. Had Rizeth guessed and was now merely waiting for him to come out and say it? He ticked his nail back and forth over a crescent moon, and looked to where the priestesses were sweeping out the shrine. Even in the pale morning light, he had to squint.
Perhaps it wouldn’t be so bad if Rizeth knew. He wouldn’t be angry, but would he be annoyed that Ashenivir had kept it from him all this time? He didn’t think Rizeth was the kind of person who minded about that sort of thing, but that was it, wasn’t it? You never knew if a person minded until you told them, and then suddenly they did, like his Matron had, when he’d thought his own mother of all people—
“Feeling better this morning?” Rizeth asked, interrupting his spiralling thoughts.
“I can’t get used to how bright it is,” he said, glad for the distraction and gladder still to see Rizeth. He tugged his cloak tighter around his shoulders. “Or how cold.”
“It gets a lot brighter than this outside of the forest. And it will grow colder—though we ought to be in civilised territory well before winter arrives.” Rizeth handed him a folded flatbread stuffed with pale grains and dark, soft fruit. “You have not eaten today.”
He hadn’t, but how had Rizeth known? As if reading his mind, Rizeth nodded towards the altar, where Phyrra stood talking to Master Do’tyl by one of the pillars.
“The High Priestess said you’ve been out here since sunrise. She was concerned about you.”
“She was?” Ashenivir’s throat constricted. He tore a corner from the flatbread, crumbling it between his fingers. “Did she say anything else?”
“She did not, why? Have you some grievance with her?”
“No.”
“Ashenivir.”
That tone usually preceded a firm grasp on some part of him, usually his hair, and it was one that demanded attention—or answers. Rizeth had his hands behind his back, gaze firm and expectant, and Ashenivir wished they were alone so his Master could touch him. It would make all this so much easier to bear.
“You cannot talk about whatever has been bothering you since we arrived, this I understand,” Rizeth said. “But the caravan is not moving on for the better part of a tenday, and if there is some issue between yourself and High Priestess Eilist’tra—or any of the others at the shrine, for that matter—you had best tell me now so I can make arrangements for us to be on our way.”
“On our way?” Ashenivir stared at him.
“If there is some harm being done to you in staying here, we will not stay here,” Rizeth said, as if it were so obvious he couldn’t understand why Ashenivir didn’t know that. Stupidly, he suddenly felt like crying. He crammed too much flatbread into his mouth and chewed hard until his eyes stopped stinging and his throat relaxed enough to let him swallow.
“We can stay,” he mumbled, scrubbing crumbs from his mouth. “I just wasn’t expecting to see Keszriin’s sister. I used to know her when…when we were younger. It’s been a long time.”
He watched Phyrra now, as she moved among the other priestesses in the shrine. The sunlight seemed not to bother them at all—they fit perfectly here, among the swaying trees with their red-orange leaves that spun constantly to the ground in the chill breeze. One of the younger girls twirled between the pillars with her broom, chasing a pile of them off of the altar.
Ashenivir’s arms felt leaden and clumsy just watching her. He’d left his grace behind when he’d left the Shrine of the Dark Maiden, and told himself it didn’t matter—he had what he needed from that one last dance and he could live the rest of his life without ever needing another. He had magic now, after all. A great fat spellbook, a head full of theorems, and enough arcane might to do whatever he wished.
So long as whatever he wished was whatever his mother wanted.
The flatbread churned in the hollow cave of his stomach. He looked up at Rizeth. “Master, I need—”
“Not here,” Rizeth said, quiet and clipped. “When we get to Neverwinter—”
“Please.”
Rizeth glanced to where the wagons and all their occupants sat and talked and laughed and ate, and Ashenivir wanted them gone, all gone. Why did it matter if anyone saw them simply touching? He started to reach out, but his hand stuttered to a stop before it reached Rizeth’s arm, fingers curling uselessly into his palm.
“Not here,” Rizeth said again, but his expression softened. “Finish your breakfast. Then I believe we should acclimatise you a little more to the sunlight.”
How was it possible for light to be so much brighter when it glinted off of water? Ashenivir’s eyes hurt too much if he looked directly at the stream, so he closed them instead. Rizeth tapped his shoulder.
“Open, or you will never grow used to it. Focus on the shaded parts until you can tolerate more.”
“Yes, Master.”
He did as he was told. Oh, it was so much easier to breathe now he was knelt at his Master’s feet again. Rizeth had found them a nearly private place, hidden amongst the trees and the dappled shadows; a fallen log by a small stream, not so far from the shrine as to risk becoming lost, but far enough for them to be safely alone.
Rizeth’s hand settled on the back of his neck, over the mark he’d drawn his braid aside to expose. His heart was steady, beating in time to the magic that owned him, and the calmest it had been since they’d gotten to the surface. Twittering song—birdsong, just as he’d read of—and the burbling of the stream twined beneath rustling leaves and the scrape of branches. Ashenivir sighed and narrowed his eyes to slits as he turned his face to the sky. It was too bright, but it was warm. Even in the cold autumn air the sun bloomed heat on his face, making his skin tingle pleasantly.
“Do not look directly at it,” Rizeth warned. “You will damage your eyes.”
“It feels nice,” Ashenivir said. He lowered his gaze anyway, returning to the shadows of the forest. “It’s beautiful up here. I can see why Eilistraee wants us to come back.”
“It has its charms.”
Rizeth’s hand slipped from his neck. Slowly, so very slowly, he wound Ashenivir’s braid around his fist. The forest sounds seemed to slow and fade away as Rizeth tugged his head back, his grasp not hard enough to hurt—not yet—but firm with the promise of it. The sunlight carved his face in bolder relief than usual, made his eyes glitter.
“Master,” Ashenivir said, “I’m hungry.”
“Then open your mouth.”
Rizeth slid two fingers between his lips with almost painful slowness, pressing in and in until he gagged, then stilling, firm on his tongue. He wasn’t permitted to look away, held tight in place by the hair, eyes locked on Rizeth’s as he shifted in place, tucking his arms behind his back into their proper position.
“Good boy.”
Rizeth’s fingers withdrew slightly, dragging against his lips before pushing deep into his mouth again. Ashenivir licked at them with a low moan, as hungry as he’d claimed to be—all his body thrummed, warmer than the sun could ever have made him.
“You are not coming today,” Rizeth said, offhand. “Not out here.”
In complaint, Ashenivir bit down harder than was remotely acceptable. Rizeth at once hauled his head back, grasping his jaw tightly. “Just because I cannot punish you properly here does not mean you can act free of consequences, Ra’soltha.”
“I’m sorry, Master,” Ashenivir squeezed out, barely able to move his mouth. His favourite cold smile crossed Rizeth’s face, and a swarm of moths took up residence in his ribcage, a whirlwind of wings that sweetened all the pain.
“I do not think you are,” Rizeth said. He released Ashenivir’s jaw and took hold of his collar, leaning forwards until they were barely an inch apart. Ashenivir strained to close the gap, but couldn’t, not with Rizeth’s tight hold on his hair.
“Master,” he begged. “Master, please.”
“Please what? You know how to get what you want.”
“Please kiss me, Master.”
In the darkness of his Master’s pupils, he saw himself reflected; a captive silhouette of need, bound by an unyielding, unspoken control. The thread of power between them hummed stronger with every second Rizeth span the moment out, longer and longer until Ashenivir became nothing but the hand in his hair and the eyes he was lost in. Rizeth bent nearer, until his lips were only a breath away.
“No.”
He released Ashenivir’s hair and let him fall back to his knees. His heart thundered in his chest, and he wanted to fling himself at Rizeth, knock him off the stupid log, and just take what he wanted.
He didn’t. He didn’t, because he was Ra’soltha, and a Ra’soltha did not take, he was given, and then only if his Master wished it.
Ashenivir closed his eyes and took a long, slow breath. When he opened them again, Rizeth was watching him intently.
“Thank you, Master,” he said quietly.
“You are welcome, Ra’soltha.” Rizeth patted his knee. “Back here, eyes on the brightest part you can stand. Another hour will do you good.”
Ashenivir returned to his comfortable position by Rizeth’s feet, hands loose on his thighs, and settled his gaze on a spot near the river where the glare was less intense. All his worry about the shrine, about Phyrra, about the past…it was all gone. Doubtless it would come creeping back when they returned, but he didn’t think it would be as strong as it had been. Not now that his Master had taken such good care of him.
The remaining days at the shrine passed slowly. Rizeth kept a close eye on Ashenivir, not wholly convinced by his assertion that he had simply been surprised to see Keszriin’s sister. No arguments erupted, however, though Ashenivir avoided speaking to her—or to any priestess—as much as possible.
And he never danced. The rest of the shrine’s occupants did, the nightly ceremonies drawing many of the caravan’s passengers to join the priestesses and lay worshippers in their wild celebrations. Rizeth also kept to himself, for he had never considered himself a follower of any but Mystra. Safer, if he had to claim a deity, to claim one that had nothing to do with the Dark Seldarine. Safer to keep whatever prayers he might make from any sliver of a chance of reaching the webs of one he would prefer never to think of again.
Ashenivir, though…he was Mythen Thaelan, raised under both goddesses, and the longing was never far from his face when the dancing started. But he kept himself apart, apparently unable to breach the gap between wanting and having.
Rizeth didn’t press the subject. Ashenivir would come to him if and when he was ready, and Rizeth had no desire to distress him by forcing the issue. He kept him happy instead, in small and stolen moments of submission made all the more precious for their limitations.
The caravan’s rest stop was taking, Rizeth felt, entirely too long.
“You’re not stopping at Neverwinter, are you?” Scheska Jadefoot, the svirfneblin trader, asked him one evening. She hopped up beside him where he sat alone on one of the benches near the altar, a bundle of knitted something or other spread across her lap. Ashenivir had retired early—Rizeth had resisted the urge to go with him.
“Not for more than a few days, no,” he said.
“I only bring it up because I’m heading down to Waterdeep from there,” she said, “and if you’re going that way, I thought I’d offer the company of whatever caravan I manage to put together to you and your young man.”
“My assistant, you mean.”
Scheska shrugged, knitting needles clicking away. “If that’s what they’re calling it these days. The offer stands. Roads being what they are, I’d be more than happy to have two Arcanum mages along for the ride.”
Rizeth committed without committing—if their travel arrangements happened to align, there was no harm in journeying together. Just so long as she didn’t make any more your young man comments; the last thing he needed was Ashenivir feeling uncomfortable around him because of a misunderstanding.
Then, finally, it was time to move on. The wagons were hitched up to horses—the lizards would be left in the care of the shrine for whichever caravan returned this way next—and Master Do’tyl led them out down the well-worn forest trail west towards Neverwinter. Ashenivir was coping far better with the light now, and Rizeth’s own eyes had re-acclimatised as much as they were going to. Neither of them would ever truly be comfortable with it in the way their surface brethren were—the price for clear vision in the dark was to never see true in the day. Most of the time it was worth it.
He and Ashenivir found space to ride on one of the rear wagons this time. Neverwinter Wood was far less perilous than the Underdark, and there was no great need for two wizards on full alert in the middle of the day. Ashenivir sat cross-legged, staring at the forest as it rolled past, as if trying to commit every tree to memory. The play of dappled light lent his features an almost fey beauty, like something out of a dream, and with his attention wholly caught by the forest, Rizeth could safely gorge on the sight of it.
“Master,” Ashenivir said, after they’d been travelling a short while, “I’ve been meaning to ask—where are we going after Neverwinter, if we’re not staying?”
“Waterdeep,” Rizeth said. He ought to stop staring. He’d be caught out if he kept it up.
“Waterdeep.” Ashenivir’s accent rolled around the syllables. “I should have read up more on the Sword Coast before we left. I don’t know much about it.”
“That is why you are here, apprentice—to learn.”
“Mm.” Ashenivir leaned back on his hands, face tilted to the sun. “When we reach Neverwinter, will I be allowed the contents of your bag of holding?”
There was no-one else at the back of the caravan. Rizeth sent a mage hand to tug his collar.
“Some of it,” he said. “Know, however, that I am not expending time and components putting protective enchantments on such temporary quarters.”
Ashenivir finally looked at him, a gleam in his eye that made Rizeth want to kiss him, hard—then put him over his knee and spank him, harder.
“Then you’ll have to make sure I stay quiet, Master.”
Rizeth huffed a laugh and turned his own face to the light.
“I am certain I know how to manage that, apprentice.”