He ran. He ran as fast as he could, through the mud in the yard, past the snarling hound lunging on the end of its chain, waking the two remaining hens roosting in the barn’s doorway. Even the old barren sow, due for the butcher before the end of the fall, grunted and shifted in her dreams as he barreled past her pen.
He lunged for the ladder on the far wall and scrambled up it. One rotten rung cracked. He slipped, banged his knees painfully against another rung, but kept climbing. When he got to the top of the ladder, he flung himself face first into the musty old straw. There, safely hidden from the world, Gustin Bone gave way to the fury, sorrow, and regret that shook his ten-year-old body and howled like a lost soul.
A long time later, Gustin uncurled, wiping the tickling straw out of his hair and face. Then he walked across the ominously creaking floor to the open barn window and gazed across the moonlit farm, the most desolate and lonely place in all the world. His uncle was gone, nowhere to be seen.
“I’m going to die here,” Gustin pronounced. And, liking the sound of his own voice echoing into the rafters, he shouted a little louder, “I’m going to grow old, die here, and nobody is ever going to know my name! It will be a tragedy.”
Then he stopped. He wasn’t quite sure that something could be a tragedy if nobody else knew about it. But he loved the sound of the word. He had learned it from the widow. She visited on a regular basis to clean out the farmhouse and scold his uncle about the state of Gustin’s clothes and general hygiene.
“If you never come clean, boy, it will be a tragedy. Your mother, if she lived, would weep to see the state that you’re in,” the widow would say, flinging Gustin’s shirts and breeches into boiling water while he sat shivering on a stool wrapped in a threadbare towel.
As little as he liked her cleaning methods, he was rather fond of the widow, who invariably ended her session of scrubbing by producing some type of biscuit or baked bread from her basket. But it wasn’t her attentions to the mud behind his ears that made him screw his face into a frown and shout that night to the uncaring world, “I refuse to die here!”
No, it was the actions of his uncle-that woefully stupid, uncaring, altogether wrong man-that caused Gustin to scramble through the straw to unearth his mother’s battered old trunk and thrust open the lid to pull out her even more battered knapsack. Finally, Gustin decided, he would fill that knapsack full and follow the road out into the wide marvelous world, all the way to Waterdeep, that City of Splendors. He had to go now, he told himself, before it was too late.
Only that morning he had smiled and chattered as he walked with his taciturn uncle to the village. Gustin filled the silence surrounding them with his own running observations on the birds in the hedgerows, the likelihood that the hens would survive the winter, and the oft-expressed wish that his uncle might adopt a kitten to keep the mice out of the barn.
“Farhinner’s got a litter,” Gustin informed him. Farhinner was the tanner and kept cats to keep the rats out of the leather. “Two tabbies and a ginger-stripe.”
“Dog wouldn’t like it,” grunted his uncle.
Gustin shrugged, a ripple of the shoulders that he’d copied from Farhinner. He liked the man. Since the tanner had no sons, it seemed likely that he might be looking for an apprentice in a year or two. A stinky trade, none smelled worse except the butcher’s shop, but it meant a room in the village and no farmwork. At the age of ten, Gustin already spent his days plotting ways to escape from the farm.
“There’s strangers,” said his uncle, stopping so abruptly that Gustin was two lengths down the road and several paragraphs into an argument in favor of kittens before he realized his uncle was not moving.
Then he blinked and saw what his uncle was staring at. There were strangers. Marvelous strangers emerging from the woods and skidding down the embankment toward the road. The first man was dressed in fantastic colors, with ribbons and feathers hanging from his broad-brimmed hat, and a long swirling cape that went all the way down to the heels of his highly polished boots. The dwarf following close behind this dandy bore a highly polished helmet on his head and sported a bright red beard cascading down his barrel-round front. The third stranger, also human and obviously male, wore leather armor, well cared for but marked with interesting nicks and scars. A long scabbard, very noticeable for its plainness, hung empty from his belt.
“Well met, my friends,” cried the man with the broad-brimmed hat. “We are looking for a smith and an inn. For my friend has a sword in need of mending and we all have need of a place to stay.”
Gustin’s uncle shook his head and turned on his heel, as if he meant to walk all the way back to the farm rather than talk to the strangers. Gustin, however, was propelled forward by his own curiosity.
“You’ll want to follow us into the village,” he announced, ignoring his uncle wavering in the background. “We can show you the smith and the tavern. We don’t have an inn. But you can probably sleep on the benches at the tavern.” It was what laborers from the lord’s fields did on the harvest days, if they’d drunk too heavily to find their way home safely in the dark.
“Any place with a roof would be welcome,” answered the talkative stranger. “We’ll take a stable or even a cow’s shed tonight. I am Nerhaltan, my large friend here is called Wervyn, and the dwarf goes by the nickname Tapper.”
The other two didn’t say anything, but the dwarf Tapper glanced once, quickly, at the shadowed woods behind them. Gustin knew the track that they had been following; it led to old ruins, a little hill fort long since crumbled into a collection of tilting walls and a stair that climbed crookedly up to nothing. Village tales called the spot haunted but every child defied their parents and made their way through the woods to race beneath the high arch that once marked the fort’s gate.
Gustin had run that race in and out of the ruins earlier that summer. No harm had come from it, although there had been a coldness about the place that he didn’t like.
Behind him, his uncle sighed once and then gestured at the strangers. “It’s not far to the village,” he said. “We go slowly, the boy and I. Step ahead of us if you need to.”
“We’re happy for the company,” said Nerhaltan, pacing alongside Gustin. “Your lad seems very bright for his age.”
“My nephew,” grunted his uncle.
“I’m Gustin,” said Gustin. And then he proceeded to beguile the rest of the too-short journey with dozens of questions for the strangers: how far had they come, what type of sword had the fighter broken, did the dwarf carry a battleaxe, had they ever seen a dragon, did they know how far it was to Waterdeep?
The dwarf turned his bright eyes on Gustin when he mentioned Waterdeep.
“That’s a long way from here,” Tapper said. “What do you know about the City of Splendors, boy?”
Gustin paused, catching back his next question before it popped out of his mouth. His uncle had paced a little ahead of them, walking with the tall fighter, and the two were discussing the state of the weather and the possibility of a storm before moonrise.
“I have a book,” Gustin whispered, reaching into his tunic and pulling out his most precious possession so a corner showed. “A guidebook to Waterdeep.”
“Looks a bit chewed,” said the dandy on the other side of him. “Like the rats have been at it.”
“I found it in the barn,” Gustin admitted, “in a pile of rubbish my uncle meant to burn.” Papers and other items belonging to his mother, he didn’t add. His uncle once tossed everything into the bonfire pit after he caught Gustin snapping open the locks on her old trunk and rummaging through it. But then the widow had stopped his uncle from dousing the lot with oil and started a shouting match about respect for his dead sister. Eventually papers went safely from the bonfire pit to the barn, because his uncle insisted that he wouldn’t have “any of it in my house any longer. It will give the boy dreams! And you know what will happen then.”
Gustin still didn’t know what would happen, although he hoped it would take him far away from the farm like his long-lost mother. As for the dreams, they began the first night that he lay curled in his creaking bed and read the enchanting words “Waterdeep, a city of high adventures and dark dealings” by the light of a sputtering candle.
“Have you been to Waterdeep, saers?” he asked the dandy and the dwarf. Both shook their heads.
“Waterdeep is no destination for a poor man,” said Nerhaltan. “I won’t go there until I have gold in my pockets.”
“Yet some say it is the place for a dwarf or a man to find the gold to fill his pockets,” added his short companion.
“It takes gold to make gold,” the dandy said. “That is why we are here, after all.”
