Page 37 of Astarion

Bajia shrugged. Years had passed, but her curls were as dark as ever, and there were no lines at the corners of her tawny eyes. “Bad enough.”

Astarion raised a pale eyebrow and waited. He had never outgrown his desire to impress Bajia—was still, in fact, rather hopelessly in love with her, in a hero-worshipping way—but he had also learned to predict her. She could rarely stand an expectant silence.

His escort heaved a sigh. “The Lady of Silverymoon has decreed that Lady Erikinia be allowed to die in her own home, for services rendered long ago. The manor and the few lands entailed to it are mortgaged to the hilt. The moment that she finally dies, her creditors will descend like jackals.” A smile twitched the corner of her mouth. “Though she’s outlived a few of them, the old termagant. No one expected her to last this long.”

“How much does she owe?”

“More than you could earn in a dozen lifetimes.” Bajia gave him a wry look. “You could slay the oldest dragon in Faerûn, sell every scrap of it from tongue to tail, and drag its hoard to market, and you might cover the interest. For a little while. And that’s just the money. There are creditors who deal in more…complex…matters.”

Astarion, who had indeed been harboring the notion of doing something wild and dashing, hurriedly changed the subject. “So my tutors…” He still felt a fondness for his speech instructor, who had drilled him until the most discerning courtier would swear that he had been raised as a noble from his first breath.

“Paid in other coin. The dwarf woman’s son was a warlock who bargained badly. Your great-grandmother helped disentangle him from his patron. Your history instructor was glad enough for bed and board. Few historians are wealthy.”

Astarion let the silence grow for a time. “Does Great-Grandmother know?”

Bajia sighed. “Sometimes? She’s not senile. She’s sharp as a tack when she wants to be. But I think she chooses not to know. She would prefer the world to be as it was two hundred years ago, so she simply lives in that world, and the rest of us work around it.”

“The rest of us?”

“Me. Wendin. Now you.”

—

Astarion’s distant cousin Lazlo was a plump man who had inherited his pointed ears from his Ancunín mother, and very little else. His office was lined with bookshelves and a whole herd of cows must have been skinned for all the leather-bound volumes that filled them. He looked at Astarion over his glasses and said, “So, what can you do?”

Astarion bridled at his tone but kept it off his face. If he offended this man, there was a chance he’d be sent back to the manor. He’d seen enough of the city on the ride in to make him vow to be courteous to a cockatrice, if that’s what it took. “Sir?”

Lazlo took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. “Are you a wizard, a warlock, a druid? Any magical talent at all?”

“Not to my knowledge, sir.”

“A fighter? Good at archery? Prone to berserker fits?”

“I’m good with a rapier—” Bajia cleared her throat, and Astarion amended it to “I’m competent with a rapier, sir. May I ask why?”

“You’ll need some way to make a living when the old lady dies,” Lazlo said bluntly. “There are places in the world where being pretty and well-spoken will keep you fed, but not here in the North.” A sudden thought occurred to him, and he grimaced. “Hells take it, you’re not a bard, are you?”

“No!”

“Thank the gods for small favors.” Lazlo polished his glasses. “So, what can you do?”

“I…err…” Astarion found himself briefly flummoxed. He’d learned a great many things in Lady Erikinia’s care, but he wasn’t sure how to turn any of them into a living. Nine Hells, I am not cut out to be a deportment teacher. He was very good at arguing and at finding loopholes in any rule applied to him, but he was fairly certain that you couldn’t eat loopholes.

Bajia cleared her throat. “He can read and write a fair hand.”

“Can he, now?” Lazlo looked suddenly interested. “My scribe went off to have a litter of kits. Sit over there at her desk and copy this.” He plunked a piece of parchment in front of Astarion. “Now, come with me, Mistress Bajia, and tell me how the old lady fares…”

They went away, closing the door. Astarion found paper and an inkwell in the desk. Also a quantity of cat hair, which led him to suspect that Lazlo’s usual scribe was a tabaxi. He set to work copying the parchment in his best hand. It seemed to be a proposed amendment to a law regulating…city flowerpots?

Astarion shrugged mentally and bent to his writing.

When he had finished, he rose and went to the office window. The window overlooked a street that was not terribly impressive by Silverymoon standards, but to Astarion, it was a feast. Ivy climbed the walls and twined around windows like a lover. Over the roof of the far building, he could see towers and treetops, thin spires and branching duskwoods. Even the cobblestoned street was beautiful, the stones set in undulating curves, the walks studded with tiled mosaics for no reason except to be beautiful.

He was here. He was in the city. And it was still full of people: people wearing a thousand colors, in fabrics he had never dreamed of; people with jewelry that dripped from their hair and necks and fingertips; people with painted lips and eyelids and hands. Smells from nearby food carts promised meats he’d never tasted and spices he’d never imagined. On the walk to his cousin’s home, they had passed a mural painted on the side of a building—outside! Where weather could get to it and wear it away, and no one worried about it! The wealth on display was so extraordinary that Astarion didn’t even register what it was a painting of, merely that it was vast and colorful and luxurious.

And there was something else, too, something he hadn’t noticed as much at seven but which he noticed very much at seventeen. In that sea of people, there were youths with kohl-darkened eyelashes and women clad in sheer silken veils, slender people who moved with the boneless grace of serpents and curved women with breasts and hips like earth goddesses.

Astarion wanted all of it. He wanted to drown in it—eat everything, drink everything, fuck everything. The city was a banquet, and for years, he hadn’t known that he was starving.