Philip Athans - Whisper of Waves

Her boots settled onto the cobblestones so gently she had to stand still for a few heartbeats just to be sure any weight had returned to her body at all. Then she looked up, offered a friendly wave to the guards still watching her in mute fascination, then sped off into the darkest alley she could find.

Phyrea sank into the deep shadows and only made it a few steps before she almost ran into someone.

Not entirely surprised, she stopped quickly and back-stepped, careful not to leave the cloaking shadows of the alley.

“Good evening, Wenefir,” she said.

The man who’d hired her to steal the egg nodded a greeting.

He was an odd man about whom Phyrea had heard even odder rumors. His skin was soft, and his whole body had a feeling of rounded edges. He wore a heavy weathercloak pulled tight around his pudgy throat. When he spoke his voice was quiet and just a bit too high-pitched for a man’s but just a bit too low for a woman’s.

“Phyrea,” he said. “May I have it?”

“No,” Phyrea replied.

Wenefir raised an eyebrow in an attempt to appear curious, but she could read the growing impatience on his face.

“I didn’t get it,” she lied. “I got the safe open, but the guards … it broke.”

Wenefir drew in a deep breath that seemed to go on and on for hours. Phyrea wondered at how anyone could hold that much air.

“Sorry,” she said.

He let the breath out in an even longer sigh. Phyrea liked the sound of it. She wished she could sigh like that, so deliciously world-weary.

“You’ll never be able to sell it,” said Wenefir. “How many buyers for such a piece do you think there are in this city? In any city? Who has that much gold?”

“It’s-” Phyrea started. “It was worth that much?”

“Oh, Phyrea,” he said. “You have no idea.”

“Enough for your senate seat?” she asked.

The question caused him pain, and Phyrea thought she almost felt something that might be guilt.

“Alas,” Wenefir replied, “that ship has long since sailed, but be that as it may, I hope that if you have the item you will give it to me now so I can pay you your due and we can still be friends.”

“I hope,” Phyrea countered, “that you’ll believe that the egg was accidentally broken, that I did all I could, you’ll keep your coin, and we can still be friends.”

They stood in the rain in the dark alley and stared at each other for so long Phyrea almost cracked.

“Very well, then,” Wenefir said finally. “I’ll have my ring back at any rate.”

He glanced at the ring on her finger-the enchanted ring that had let her fall a hundred feet and live to tell of it-and there was no way she could deny she was wearing it.

“Of course,” she said, pulling the ring off her finger and reaching out. “Though I wish you’d let me keep it. Thadat, yes?”

She’d seen the mark that identified it as the work of a local Innarlan wizard who was making quite a name for himself selling magic rings. Wenefir held out his hand and she dropped the ring in his palm. He smiled at her, bowed, then turned and stalked off into the night.

Phyrea stood, watching him go. She waited for the sound of his footsteps to recede before she tried one of those long, heavy sighs. She was less than satisfied with the results.

On her way home through the alleys and side streets of the Second Quarter, she picked gemstones off the egg and littered them in her path. When she grew bored with that, she crushed the priceless artifact in her hand and tossed the pieces in the midden.

The egg was beautiful, priceless, and prized by some very powerful people in Innarlith, including the ransar, whom she’d stolen it from, and the mysterious and unsettling Wenefir.

The feeling Phyrea got from destroying it made her happier than she’d been in months.

14 Hammer, the Year of the Wyvern (1363 DR)

SECOND QUARTER, INNARLITH

The dress itched and was uncomfortable when she sat, and only a little more comfortable when she stood. The embroidery embarrassed her. Flowers with butterflies flitting around them? She couldn’t imagine anything more banal, less her.

“Really, Phyrea,” her father said.

The words bore him down. It was as if each of them weighed a hundred pounds and he had to strain to lift them out of his lungs and drop them on the air between them.

“I’m here, Father,” she said.

He looked around as if seeing his own home for the first time and said, “You’re too young for us to see each other so infrequently.”

“You have your work,” she said as quickly as she could, before there could be any time to think that anything was her fault and not his.

“Yes, I do,” Inthelph said just as quickly.

Phyrea cringed. Could he really think she’d played into his hands and not the other way around?

“I have my work,” he went on despite Phyrea’s best world-weary sigh, “and my work depends on my having a certain position, a certain reputation in this city. I am a senator, for Waukeen’s sake, and the master builder besides. I can’t have my daughter-”

The full stop was so affected she almost laughed at him.

“You’re making all the wrong friends, young lady,” he said, his jaw tight, his mouth almost completely closed.

“I’ve told you not to call me ‘young lady,’” she all but growled at him.

“I’ll call you anything I please.”

She closed her mouth, then her eyes, and sat in silence. That was hard. That was really hard.

“I’m glad you like the dress,” he said, apparently trying to make peace.

In the past year or so Phyrea had gone back and forth with her father, and not just arguing, but in her own mind. Sometimes she hoped that the two of them would someday learn to understand, even accept each other. Sometimes she craved his attention so badly it embarrassed her, made her feel like a little baby. Other times she wanted to kill him and had to almost physically restrain herself from slitting his throat in his sleep. She tried talking to him, screaming at him, avoiding him, hiding from him, running from him, telling him jokes, and sleeping with his friends. She’d bedded her first senator at the age of fifteen hoping her father would find out about it, but it turned out she wasn’t the first fifteen-year-old senator’s daughter to try that, and the bastards had learned to be maddeningly discreet. When Phyrea realized her mother, herself a senator’s daughter, had only been sixteen when she’d had her, it made her feel even more stupid, and she stopped sleeping with senators.

“I hate this dress,” she said. “I’m wearing it because you wanted me to wear it. I’m here because you wanted me to be here.”

“Well, then….” he said, suddenly unable to look her in the eye.

“Why am I here?” she asked, sensing weakness.

“I want you to start making better friends.”

“I have friends,” she said.

“I want them to be better people,” said Inthelph, still not looking at her.

They both sipped tea from the service that used to be her mother’s.

“Do you ever think about my mother?” she asked.

“No,” he replied, but his face, and the way he looked at the teacup, said he was lying.

“Did you kill her?” she asked, not believing he did.

He tensed, deeply wounded by the accusation.

“What in the Nine Hells do you want from me?” she asked.

“A young man is meeting us for tea.”

She didn’t bother sighing or scoffing. She just sat there.

“You’ve met him,” he said. “He is a fine young man. The sort of man you should be seen with. The sort of man you should marry.”

“The Cormyrean?”