through ferns like a ghost. Queen of the Forest, but he loved these walks. The deep green shadows, the magnificent trees, gnarled and vast and patient, sentinels that had seen dozens of passing kings of Cormyr, and stags beyond number…
He was of the forest, he felt at peace here. This was where he belonged.
And yet as spring quickened toward summer in this Year of the Spur, there was a restlessness rising in Florin Falconhand.
Not the weariness of hot metal and forge-crash and ringing, numbing hammerwork that had driven him here from Hawkstone’s service, despite his passable skills, but… something else. Something that was riding him as eagerly as his fellow youngbloods of Espar were riding their lasses this spring, despite the peace of the forest. He gave the trees around him a smile. He didn’t want anything more than this.
But somehow, he needed something more than this.
Soft-footed and sure, Florin strode on, along a ridge that would bring him back to the king’s road again.
Unthinkingly, as he threaded his way around rocks upon rocks, he set enjoyment of the forest aside to wonder rather irritably what it was, this mysterious ‘something’ he yearned for… and abruptly became aware that a new sound had joined the whirring wings and chirping calls of the berrybirds all around.
A distant, faint, confused sound that didn’t belong here, in the deep stillness of the forest.
A few long strides took him close enough to know that it was a human voice-a high, furious woman’s voice, with the shrill, thin fluting accents of highnose Suzail. Someone rich, then, or even noble, but cursing like… like…
Well, like no one Florin had ever heard before. He was used to the snarled “tluin, sabruin, and hrast” of the exasperated, and everyone said “naeth” in surprise or dismay, but this…
This was something new.
Florin headed toward the voice as swiftly as he could soft-stride, leaves dancing in his wake. It was rising into a screech, like the cooks did at Tlarnuth’s in Espar, savaging each other after emptying too many tankards, unfamiliar words coming out in a fluid rush, and
… yes, there, again: being answered by a deeper voice that spoke but little.
Florin ducked under a long-fallen tree cloaked in moss, slithered down a muddy bank beyond, and was close enough to hear properly at last.
“Lady, I-” It was a man’s voice, low, gravel-rough, and to Florin’s ear somehow familiar.
“ ‘Lady’ nothing, sirrah! ‘Oh, pretty lady,’ you mouth, but your words are empty, empty — and your head emptier still! Deeds, not words, knave! Deeds! Treat me as a lady and I am one-but insist I am one yet treat me as any common trull, some prettily dressed slave of yours, and you make me that!”
“Lady,” the man said heavily, “I have my orders. They’re quite clear and em-”
“ Hah! What care I for your orders, sirrah? You say I am a lady, and so I am-and that means I give orders, and you obey! O, watching gods above, why must I be saddled with such a hog-faced, slop-guzzling idiot dog of a miscreant?”
Florin winced, embarrassed by this venom almost into retreating back into the trees, yet fascinated.
The angry lady whooped for breath and went on. “Brutish in words and deeds and at your trencher, before all the gods! You call this food? Fare fit for dogs, aye, and for any passing hog, but not for a lady of the realm!”
The next word was a screech of pure rage, as if words had failed she who insisted so strongly on being a lady, and left her clawing the air in search of what next to say.
She found something.
“Villainous traitor! Seek to poison a Crownsilver? Sirrah, royal blood runs in my veins-I am Cormyr! When you seek to harm me, you harm all Cormyr! The next Purple Dragon I see, I’ll inform of your treachery, and have you put to the sword! Keep me captive, drag me into this horrible wilderness, feed me chopped and stirred offal — why, I’ll see you dead for it! Yet-yet-you’ll suffer first!”
There followed a violent wet sound akin to a wet fish being slapped on a riverside rock, a short, choked-off male growl of anger, and the furious feminine voice rose again, a little farther off.
“Whoreson! Rogue! You’ll die begging for my forgiveness-and I’ll not give it, and stand smiling as they lop off your head!”
“Lady-”
Florin had heard that tone of exasperated protest before, and knew who the man was, now: Delbossan! Horsemaster to Hezom, Lord of Espar, a man he’d known all his life. But who was this spitfire of the loud and murderous rage? Hezom had no daughter, to curse a man in the for “Oh, yes, Master Delbossan, you’ll die for this! I will have it so!”
With a final shriek of outraged dismissal, the harridan-by the Dragon, the Lady Harridan! — fell silent.
A smirking Florin ducked around the last few trees, crouching low to avoid thorncanes, and peered out onto a pleasant view of one of the old woodcutters’ glades beside the king’s road, long ago gone to grass and much used for camping.
Its well-trodden grass was dominated by a grand pavilion tent of flame-orange hue that had been pitched at the far end of the glade. Several horses had been hobbled at the near end, and a dainty coach sat in its trail between, with two of Hezom’s guardsmen wincing and grinning in its lee, not yet daring to peer around the conveyance at what sat glumly beyond.
Not far in front of the pavilion a tiny fire flickered on scorched stones, and sitting on a log before it was Irlgar Delbossan, wearing the remains of a-yes, a large bowl’s worth of stew that had been dumped all over his head.
Florin slipped out of the trees so swiftly and quietly that he was halfway across the glade before the two guards saw him. They came around the coach in a hasty scramble, swords singing out-but Delbossan looked up, gave Florin a hard stare that turned into a sour smile of recognition, and waved the men back whence they’d come.
Flies were already buzzing around the horsemaster. There was-Florin sniffed appreciatively-rabbit stew, still steaming and thick with toasted bread-ends and a thick herbed gravy, all over Delbossan’s shoulders and lap, and piled high on his head.
Some of it fell from brow to lap with a slow, inexorable plop as Florin came to a halt, trying very hard not to chuckle.
“New way of banishing baldpate, Del?” He couldn’t quite keep a smile off his face.
Delbossan scowled. “I suppose your four friends are trailing along behind ye, to come and laugh at me, too.”
“Nay, friend, Tymora smiles upon you: I’m alone.”
“Good. I wearied of Jhessail’s merry tinkling waterfall long ago.”
“Her-? Oh. When she laughs. Aye.”
Planting one boot on the battered strongchest the horsemaster had been using as a dining table, Florin leaned forward, chin in hand, and smiled down at his friend. “So give. Tell me why rabbit stew- good rabbit stew by the smell-ends up piled high on the head of Irlgar Delbossan, horsemaster bold!”
Delbossan sighed and leaned out to reclaim one of the discarded bowls. The loud lady who’d presumably flounced off into the pavilion had obviously slammed her own bowl of stew down over his head, flung it aside, and plucked up his own to season him a second time. Holding the bowl glumly under his chin, he raked a goodly amount of stew down off his head into it.
Florin fought the urge to laugh quite successfully this time.
With gravy running in rivulets down his face, Delbossan looked up and muttered, “I’m at my wit’s end, lad. Yon flaming chit of a noble lass-ye heard her, I know ye did-Horns of the Hunt, half the King’s stlarning Forest heard her! — has driven me half mad already. I can see why her parents have had it to here with her!”
“Nobles, aye? Who is she? And what’re you doing with her out here, in the trees? Aren’t her sort all ‘prithee dance me around my great hall’ types, all gowns and gaudy airs in heart-of-all-Faerun Suzail?”
Delbossan grinned despite himself and licked stew from the back of one hairy hand. Then, as if remembering his manners, he held out the bowl with a dainty flourish. “Stew, lad?”
Florin almost choked, trying not to roar with laughter, but managed to wave the offer away.
Delbossan grinned and got up, stamping his feet to shake great clumps of stew from himself, and headed for the trees. To wash himself clean in the stream that looped and wandered back there, of course. Florin followed,
