Azure bonds - Kate Novak [142]
She remembered an old inn near the south gate: The Rising Raven. Perhaps she could hock her eagle barrette as an artifact in order to pay for a room and a bath. Used in battle against a god, she thought, holding the slightly melted piece of silver up to the sun.
Her cheer faded some since she had no one with whom she could share her joke. Even if Moander had lied and her friends were still alive, they were still up north, hundreds of miles away-she would not see them for a long time, if ever again. Already she missed them and felt lonely.
She was rounding the merchant yards of the Guldar family, when a familiar but very hoarse voice bellowed her name. She turned and peered down the road behind her. Three mud-spattered, bedraggled figures were waving their arms to attract her attention.
"Akabar!" she shouted. The weariness dropped from her and she ran to them, hugging first the mage, then the lizard, and finally even the halfling. Olive bridled some, drawing back, more concerned with brushing hardened mud from the front of her outfit.
"You're alive!" Alias blurted, beaming at them Olive looked as though she'd been swimming in a swamp, Akabar was dressed in a ragged kilt, and Dragonbait leaned heavily on his sword.
"You noticed," Olive grumbled. "We just chased you from one side of the Realms to the other. Now we can't even get in the gates. Damned forces of law and order."
"It's all right," Alias assured her. "I know a place outside the city walls. They…" She almost said, "They know me there," but she realized that they, like Jhaele of Shadowdale, would remember nothing about her. "They have good food," she finished.
"I don't care about eating," Olive retorted. "I just want to get clean. I feel like I've been swimming in a sewer."
Alias looked up at Akabar, wanting to apologize again for all the horror he'd gone through because of her.
As if reading her thoughts, the mage said, "We can talk when we get where we're going."
The swordswoman nodded. "Here, Dragonbait, give your sword a break and lean on me for a while," she insisted, slipping herself beneath one of the lizard's scaly arms and taking his sword in her other hand.
Akabar expected the proud saurial to refuse her help, but he accepted Alias's close proximity and fussing like a cheerful child. Is it only the identical markings that bond them together? Akabar wondered. Or something more?
Alias did not recognize the innkeeper from her previously "remembered" stays at The Rising Raven. The inn was packed with traders and adventurers. Even if it hadn't been so crowded, the innkeeper needed only one look at the ragtag crew before he began shaking his head vigorously, denying the existence of any vacancies.
Olive was the one who came to the rescue. Following the man across the tavern room, she whispered something to him that Alias and Akabar could not catch. Then she slipped him a coin. The innkeeper's hospitality brightened. He led them from the inn, past the stable, to a warehouse with a small apartment within. The quarters were cramped but clean, and the innkeeper promised to send them hot water as soon as possible. Then he left them.
Dragonbait began to lay a fire in the stove, and Olive sat down in a corner, resting her head on her knees, exhausted. Alias examined Akabar's shoulder and grimaced.
"You've dislocated it, all right. How'd you do it?"
"Ran into an old friend," Akabar joked and tried to shrug. He winced at the pain.
"I wonder what Olive said to the innkeep when she bribed him," Alias said softly.
"I wonder," Akabar replied in an equally soft voice, "where she got the platinum coin she bribed him with."
Olive moved over to the whisperers. "You want to wear that to bed tonight?" she asked Alias, nodding to the shackle about her arm. "Or do you want me to pick the lock?"
While Olive was working on the iron bracelet, two footboys arrived at their doorstep, one bearing a large