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On her third night after leaving home, Dee extinguishes all the candles and begins to pray.
She doesn’t know which, if any, glyph she should trace in these circumstances, so she skips that part, and she doubts that the hosteller’s flexible definition of cleanliness extends to ritual sacrifice indoors. The room is cold and drafty, and she left her ceremonial robes behind, so she wraps herself in the blanket and foregoes the usual dancing because it’s late and the people sleeping downstairs wouldn’t appreciate the noise.
It shouldn’t matter, she reasons. If – and oh, even in her own mind, that ‘if’ feels dangerous, profane – N’Rygoth is truly as powerful as everyone says, then he should hear what she has to say no matter how she dresses it up. Everything else is just stuff.
After a few minutes, Dee realises that in the absence of that stuff she has been reduced to sitting under a blanket in the dark. “Okay,” she says to the air. “I guess that’s how it is.”
~
Working on the principle that all roads eventually lead to somewhere less swamp-like and squid-worshipping, Dee travels in whichever direction people are willing to take her. After a few false starts, her wobbly grasp on geography starts to firm up a bit. She acquires a map and plans a route which doesn’t involve travelling in fucking circles.
It’s so big, and the merchant tells her it’s only a fraction of the kingdom, which is one of several which make up the continent, which is just part of the whole world; and there are maps for them too. Hundreds, some big enough to take in the entire continent and others small enough to show every alleyway. She wants to go everywhere, which starts with getting as far away from home as possible.
She calls the merchant over, who tries very hard not to make eye-contact and flinches every time she moves and the beads of her necklace click together, and explains what she’s looking for. There should be a map – there has to be; N’Rygoth knows she’s never wanted anything so badly, and it wouldn’t be fair for it not to exist now – which shows all the known world, every bit of land and water and how it joins up with all the others, and with enough of the fiddly details, too, that she can see cities and mountains and roads.
“What?” he says. “Like an atlas?”
“An atlas,” Dee echoes, tasting the word on her tongue. She likes it, she decides. She likes a lot of these new words. “What is that?”
He begins to roll his eyes and then glances at her throat and freezes, his face contorted halfway towards fear. “Well, that is to say-“ he stammers. “It’s a book? With maps and pictures and information?”
“About places?”
Back home, they had a scroll which told them that the world beyond the swamp was filled with those who opposed N’Rygoth and sought to destroy his followers. At some point during her childhood, Dee had gained the impression that there were probably also dragons, and entire armies preparing to wipe them out who were only held back by His Divine Grace, and something called Licentious Ways which she had assumed was a type of dangerous crossroad. Showing any more interest in the outside world had been frowned upon.
She’d never guessed people wrote about things like that. She’d never guessed it would be allowed.
She wants twelve.
The merchant, after only a little bit of dramatic trembling and visibly wondering whether it would go against his moral code to send her to a competitor, eventually gives her directions to the nearest book store, where she buys an atlas and a book which describes the history of the region and another which describes the adventures of a young girl’s adventures with a farmhand and a third which is entirely blank inside.
Dee commandeers a space at the end of the bar in the local inn and borrows something to write with. If she can write down everything she learns—If she has something to take back home, something which will prove that it was worth the journey, that it was worth letting her go—If there’s something to make it all worthwhile, something to make everyone agree that Yes, Dee, this was your path and you were right to follow it and we’re all proud and definitely not angry that you did—
Well. It would be nice, that’s all.
After a while, a large drop of ink pools on the underside of the nib and eventually splashes onto the blank paper where it spreads, first into an amorphous blob, and then into a blob with several long spidery lines protruding from the centre. Like tentacles.
Dee is fluent in two languages, can recognise several of the most common ceremonial glyphs in Higher Jharani and once spent an entire summer sketching Will-o’-Wisps with her mother. She can recite all the Major and Minor Chants of Supplication from memory. Making a record of her experiences should be the easiest thing in the world; she should be able to give herself over to the task, she should be able to empty everything inside her head onto the page, for the glory of N’Rygoth.
She decides to get another beer instead.
~
Further north, the thick muggy heat lightens. Roads get busier, wider, better-maintained. And the cities get bigger and, as they grow, feel less coherent. It’s all very well for the authors of The Tathron World Atlas’ country profiles to write that “Skud is an autonomous farming community located in the foothills of Thirathien” but when they forget to mention that, oh yes, half the villages just happen to be full of werewolves, hope you aren’t passing through on the night of a full moon, then Dee is forced to wonder whether they weren’t missing the point a bit.
You can’t tell people about the world by writing down the capital cities and approximate populations and principal industries. She isn’t sure, yet, that writing is much good for telling people about the world at all; but it seems to her that if you’re going to try then there are much more important things to worry about.
Case in point: Luskan. A port city, optimistically described as “a bustling centre of commerce” with no mention of the city council’s lax approach to public sanitation or the salty-clear smell of the sea. There are temples for gods she’s never even heard of, and a small shrine where travellers are invited to pray to any other divine power they like. Dee watches a woman leave several gold coins as an offering to persuade her gods to watch over her, and, after the woman leaves, she sees a small hand creep up from underneath the altar and scoop them up.
She doesn’t mean to get involved. But something in her flinches at the thought of doing nothing, and Dee reaches forward and grabs the skinny wrist before she can lose her nerve.
“Oi!” It’s not a kid, as she had first assumed, but a Smidgen with a greying moustache and a cassock, and he draws himself up to his full height – almost up to her waist – and glares up the length of his nose at her.
Dee lets go of him, and tries very hard not to feel as though she’s five years old.
“And what exactly d’you think you’re playing at, young lady?”
“Apprehending a thief..?”
“Speak up!”
“I...thought you were stealing. Sir. Um.”
He sniffs. “Of course I was stealing! I want to know what you thought you were doing, interfering! Don’t you know this is a holy site?”
Dee blinks. Around them, the congregation are starting to turn their way, some of them frowning and speaking in hushed whispers. She doesn’t need to hear them to know what they’re saying about the strange girl with the weird jewellery, fancy that, how backward that she doesn’t even know all our priests steal in these modern cities; and she can feel herself cringing. It had seemed so easy to be brave before they all started to stare at her.
“I—yes?”
The priest looks at her for a long moment and then begins to laugh. The sound is dry and sharp and very, very loud. “A holy place,” he continues, “for thieves and tricksters. Why else would we invite heretics to worship here?”
She writes a note on the relevant passage in her atlas that evening: Locals’ beliefs are very, deeply weird.
After some consideration, she adds the word relatively.
The last bookstore she visited had a section titled Comparative Religion. She didn’t look at its contents and she doesn’t have any plans to; but she can feel the words settle against her ribcage, soft and heavy, ready for when she needs to pull them out.
~
On the winter solstice, the dwarves of Waterdeep parade through the streets with lanterns and weapons to drive ill-fortune away for another year; in Suldanessellar, people bury their dead with a candle to light their way through the darkness; and some children in Amn splash through the local river as soon as the ice melts to protect themselves from possession.
There’s no reason why it should work; but when she reaches Northkeep as the city is celebrating its annual fertility festival, she hides her jewellery in her backpack and buys a small bouquet from one of the flower sellers.
It’s only respectful, she tells herself. And for all that everyone warned her about the outside world, Dee’s starting to suspect that most people are perfectly nice.
Well, no: she actually suspects that most people are jerks, but not in the kind of way she needs to worry about. Low-level dickheadishness and a propensity to overcharge girls who look like clueless foreigners – hardly the great conspiracy of wickedness and treachery she was supposed to find.
It’s almost more frightening that way.
~
The thing is, Dee can call upon N’Rygoth to heal the injured through prayer and with His blessing, Kiah can read arcane secrets written in chicken blood, and her aunt Cecile knows how to draw upon His power to take on the shape of a crocodile, so there’s no denying that their rituals work.
It’s just that she’s never asked herself why, before; and that brings along a whole host of other questions like why would His powers manifest differently for different people, if all magic is ultimately through His Divine Grace? and if the people here are so godless what with all the hundreds of other gods around here then how come their healing spells work just fine?
Kiah would know the answers, she thinks. At least, Kiah would believe that he knew, because the holy texts all said so, and that would be certainty enough for him. She used to think it was enough for her, too—but Kiah isn’t here, is he?
And she is.
~
She doesn’t look like any other dwarf Dee has ever seen before. Possibly this is not the sort of thing you’re meant to comment on, or at least not when you’re looking at a woman with a bloody nose and deep purple scratch marks across her knuckles, but Dee has never claimed to be socially gifted.
It’s not the bruises or the scrapes, or how pretty she is, or even the simple plate armour without a clan crest, although that’s not to suggest those are very common characteristics amongst dwarves. Not that Dee would know either way, really – it’s just that she doesn’t have a beard.
Well: she isn’t what Dee would call clean-shaven, exactly. There are a few stray patches and a line of stubble along her jaw, but nothing that actually adds up to a real beard.
“Sweetheart,” the dwarf says, and she gives this low chuckle that Dee can feel, a physical thing, right in her gut. “You have no idea how right you are.”
Her movements are slow, a little uneven, and she smells like clove cigarettes and cheap wine. Dee watches as she wobbles down the road.
“You need any help getting home?”
The dwarf smiles widely. “Home,” she repeats, and starts to laugh. “Yeah. That’d be nice.” And then, horrifyingly, she starts to cry.
Dee can’t just leave her like that, so she puts an arm around her and tries patting her shoulder although the dwarf doesn’t seem to notice through her armour. “There there,” Dee tries. “Um. Sorry, I didn’t mean to. Sorry.” She worries her lower lip between her teeth. “Are you hurt? More hurt?”
When she doesn’t answer, Dee takes one of her hands, careful not to press too hard on her grazes, and begins to pray. Healing is a bodily thing: she feels it in her stomach, winding slowly through her body until it reaches her fingertips and flows into the woman, into her battered hands and through her arms and torso and throat. Then she waits, silently, while the woman sniffs and examines her knuckles carefully.
“Huh,” she says.
Dee doesn’t blush – she has no reason to blush, because ‘huh’ isn’t even a compliment by any stretch of the imagination – but the night suddenly seems to get warmer. Especially the air immediately around her cheeks, by some freak coincidence.
“You do magic.” It’s not a question, but Dee nods anyway. “I fucking hate magic.”
“You’re very welcome,” Dee tells her, and the woman just lets out a short laugh again and begins to walk away.
“Well?” she calls over her shoulder, not bothering to stop. “Are you walking me back or not?”
Her home is a room inside a building which was almost certainly not designed with humans in mind. Dee bangs her head on the doorframe getting inside and then has to walk stooped over through the halls to make sure the woman gets home safely; but there are worse places to spend the night, so when she asks if Dee needs a place to crash for the rest of the night, she says yes.
Well, she says, “I’d love to but we’re total strangers. I don’t even know your name,” to which the dwarf answers, “Violet, and as long as you don’t turn out to be a serial killer, I am officially too drunk to care” before throwing a blanket in her direction, but she figures that amounts to much the same thing.
She’s made a little bed in what she thinks is meant to be Violet’s kitchen area, although there’s a suspicious lack of food and dishware, save for a single wine glass, when Violet raises her head from the pillow and calls over, “Actually, are you a serial killer?”
“No.” Dee sits up so she can see her bed. “Why? Do you want me to leave?”
Violet shakes her head. “Nah, you’re fine where you are. I was just thinking that if you were going to murder me, I should probably go right ahead and say my last words now. In case I don’t get the chance later.”
“I’m…not planning on murdering you in your sleep?”
“Yeah,” says Violet, and sighs deeply. “I just had a really good one, that’s all.”
“Well, you could always say them now anyway?” Dee offers. “After all, I could be lying. Or someone else might kill you in your sleep.”
“That’s true.” Violet sounds cheerier at the thought. “Okay, here we go: ‘Go ahead, make my day.’”
Dee nods and drops back down to her bed. “Very nice,” she tells her, and falls asleep as soon as her head touches the pillow.
~
She doesn’t mean to stick around – not in town and certainly not in Violet’s place – but it just so happens that Violet’s neighbour Betty has heard about some farmer’s dire rat infestation and wants Vi to go along with her to sort it out and make some quick gold, and Vi just wrinkles her nose and says, “Ugh, wading through manure just to kill something which doesn’t even reach my knee? I don’t think so.”
“They’re big enough to reach my knees,” Betty points out.
“Yeah, and you’re the one who wants to go look for them. Hey, Dee, you up for a field trip?”
“To dig through rat droppings?”
“And other animals,” Betty chirps.
Except then Violet remembers that Betty mentioned a reward and the fact she’s apparently behind on her rent, and Dee thinks Well, that’s settled then for all of five seconds while Vi grumbles before she realises that they’re talking about the three of them, together, wading through animal dung and killing stuff, and something soft and warm flutters inside her chest.
~
The outside world – or at least those parts of it Dee has seen so far– seems to think that magic spells are largely a matter of vocabulary. One set of words to heal the sick, another to rain down fireballs on your enemies; and if all that matters is what you say to make the universe lend a hand—Well, what’s the point? Where’s the difference between begging to a god, or a demon, or the fabric of reality? Either way, power is a thing which comes from elsewhere.
Two beers and a noxious green cocktail into Ladies Night, and Dee tries to explain it all.
“You see,” she says, tapping an authoritative finger on the table. “You see, everyone things—thinks—it’s all about thingy. Speaking. Words.”
Violet nods. “Sure. Words’re good.”
“No!”
“No?”
Dee shakes her head emphatically. Beer, she has found, makes it much easier to be emphatic. “No, words are—Not good. No. Wait. No. Words’re good, but people are really, really dumb.”
That gets a grunt out of Violet, which Dee chooses to take as agreement, and Betty just blinks sleepily.
“People think, it’s like, you say a spell and everything falls into place like it’s… shoes. You gotta have thingy. Juice. Magic. And you can feel it, you can feel it here.” With great concentration, Dee thumps twice on where she suspects her breastbone might be. “You can feel it, always. Spells just help you bring it out.”
Neither Violet nor Betty says anything for a very long time. Eventually, Betty says “Huh.”
On closer examination, it turns out that Violet has passed out. They settle up most of their tab—they’re a few gold pieces short and, as it happens, Betty’s talents at requisitioning coin purses have not been dulled by the booze—and haul her out over Dee’s shoulders, Betty shoving Dee’s knees to keep her walking in a straight line.
She’s staring up at a fountain she’s pretty sure she’s never seen before, wondering whether Betty was lying about her Smidgen sense of direction, when Betty taps on her thighs for attention.
“Hey, Dee-Dee, how come ya didn’t just …take the magic?”
“What?”
“Well, if it was me, I’d just steal it,” Betty says, looking upwards at nothing in particular. Overhead, the stars seem as clear and bright as they are back home – they’re harder to spot, sometimes, in places with a lot of alchemists, something to do with all the smoke, and Dee misses being able to watch them at night. “Nothing wrong with just taking what ya want.”
There’s a part of her which wants to call Betty a genius and promise to do exactly that, but there’s another, much larger, part which wants to point out that Actually, Betty, plenty of things are wrong with stealing, starting with the huge problem of getting angry guards trying to put you in jail and going all the way through to actually being in a jail cell with all the other criminals like you, and a third part of her which wants to say, Oh, look, Violet’s waking up.
What she actually says is, “Help me hold her hair back,” as Violet announces her return to consciousness messily.
“Betty’s right,” Violet manages to croak out. “Gotta take. Like I took my sword. Like a rat.” From the tone of her voice, Dee figures Violet means that as a compliment; there’s no time to ask for clarification, though, because Vi’s already turning green and bowing over the side of the fountain to retch. “Oh, gods, I’m gonna die.”
“You’re not going to die.”
“Promise me, promise that if I die—”
“—Nope.”
“—You’ll tell everyone my last words were badass.” Violet stared at the water mournfully. “I used to keep a notebook.”
~
There’s a single clear moment when she and Betty are watching Vi work out—that is, Dee is watching her because Violet’s shirt is sticking to the small of her back and the muscles of her arms ripple interestingly when she swings her sword above her head, while Betty looks sideways at Dee and smirks—when she realises that she’ll never make it as a travel writer, not least because her still-blank journal might be crusted shut with goblin blood and Violet’s fair skin burns whenever they go anywhere which gets more than thirty minutes of sunshine a day.
She’ll never be a writer. She can barely fake it as a speaker-and-listener. But bodies make sense, in a way that other people don’t, and her fingertips crackle with unspent power.
~
It’s not so much that they choose to hang out with Hannah, exactly. She just sort of happens to them: one morning, when Dee is still sleeping on Violet’s floor, she wakes up, hung-over, to find a pair of legs standing over her. They’re far too long to be either Violet’s or Betty’s, which means the woman is either a very under-dressed burglar or someone’s one-night stand.
Either way, she decides it’s safest to keep pretending to be asleep.
“Your cupboards,” the woman tells her, “are a fucking disgrace.”
That seems a little too bold for a burglar, so Dee rolls over and looks at her properly. “What?”
“Seriously, all you have is half a loaf of bread and an onion.”
“We’ve been busy,” Dee tells her, and doesn’t mention Well, I was raised by people who thought a glass of blood a day would keep the healer away, so maybe we have slightly different standards of acceptable cuisine.
“Busy dying of scurvy, probably,” the woman says, and then straightens up. There’s a loud crack as her head collides with the ceiling. “Bilford Bogin, what kind of stupid architect-? Right, first on the agenda, we’re finding a new place. In a building which couldn’t have double as a godsdamned dollhouse.”
“We are?”
They are.
“Nice tats, by the way,” the woman says approvingly, and Dee touches her forehead absently.
“Oh. Thanks. It’s a… religious thing.”
The woman gestures towards her shoulder blade, where dark black script winds across her back and down, across her bicep. “Cool,” she says. “I just thought I’d look hot with one.”
~
This is something she used to do for Kiah. Violet manages by herself most days, but there are times when her knuckles are stiff and bruised and she doesn’t trust herself to make a clean job of it, days when it’s up to Dee to pick up the razor and slides it over her chin, across her throat.
Apparently, letting her potential serial killer friend hold a blade to her neck is less horrifying than the prospect of some stubble.
“It’s a dwarf thing,” is all Violet says, without meeting Dee’s eyes, and Dee’s starting to think that it’s more a Violet thing than anything else.
She just shrugs. “You don’t have to explain. It looks good.”
“Yeah.” Violet watches her hands in the mirror for a bit before continuing: “You don’t know many dwarves, do you?”
“I’ve met plenty.”
“But did you know them? Properly?”
“Some. There were two men, back in the village where I grew up.”
“Well. Men,” Violet says, as though they hardly count. “What clan, anyway? I didn’t think any of the big houses went that far south.”
The truth is, they didn’t, really: clans and houses and guilds and all the other little allegiances people can form didn’t extend into the swampland. Down there, everyone belongs to one another just as much as the next person, and there’s no question of any ties to the rest of the world.
What she says is “I never asked” and Violet just nods as though that proves her point.
“The big clans, everything’s all about tradition, you know? Everything. And sometimes it’s just—“
“Rough,” Dee says. “Vi, believe me, you don’t need to tell me about family expectations.” When she doesn’t look convinced, Dee bites the inside of her cheeks and then adds, in as conversational a tone as possible, “You know, I’m pretty sure I grew up in a cult?”
Violet thinks about that one for a while. “Huh. If it’s any consolation, you still seem more well-adjusted than Hannah, you know?”
“Please. Like that’s difficult.”
~
The full mark of N’Rygoth has to be earned, not chosen: an honour reserved only for those priests who devote their whole lives to understanding His words, a sign that their minds and bodies are entirely given over to witnessing his truth.
That, Dee guesses, probably wasn’t meant to be a loophole.
~
Hannah greets her with a “Fuck me, this place stinks of skin infections” and Dee does her very best to look as though she disagrees.
“Thank you so much for joining me,” Dee says through clenched teeth. “Won’t you please sit down?”
“I was just trying to explain to your friend that we could do all sorts of shapes—anchors, mermaids, dolphins…”
“Forgive me for asking,” Hannah says in the tone of voice which means she clearly has not remembered the Dee-is-about-to-get-her-face-punctured-by-this-man aspect of the evening, “but are all your tattoos basically fish? Because she grew up in a swamp and I’m pretty sure she’s never even seen a dolphin.”
“I’ve seen books!”
Lyle thinks things over. "Well," he says eventually. "I suppose I could try doing a heart with the word 'Mom' inside it?"
"Fuck me-"
"No," Dee says firmly before Hannah can make any suggestions. "Four dots, in white, exactly where I showed you. That is what I, a paying customer, am asking for and that is what you will give me, and Hannah, by N'Rygoth's sweaty asscrack, you will not be offering to do it yourself or asking Lyle to make any additions. OK?"
Lyle nods. Hannah - rolls her eyes, actually, but shuts up. Dee's learning to treasure these little victories.
(Hannah's an asshole, but Vi would never understand why Dee would want to hold onto her past and Betty wouldn't understand that it was a Significant Event, so Hannah is basically all Dee has left. And the thing is, Hannah's not even her last choice or only there by default; she's exactly who Dee wants to be with her.)
“It’s just that I can’t help but notice that the fine tradition of getting totally shitfaced and then getting something inked onto our bodies that we’ll regret for the rest of our lives – no offence, Lyle–“
“—None taken,” he murmurs.
“—Is the exact opposite way round in your itinerary.”
“I didn’t make an itinerary.”
Hannah rolls her eyes as if to say that Dee is getting caught on the little details which don’t really matter. “There is a great wealth of terrible life decisions which you are missing out on right now, you know.”
“I think I’ll live,” Dee says flatly.
“But at what cost?”
But Hannah holds her hand without prompting when Lyle brings out his instruments, and spends the entire time recounting the story of her second tattoo as Hannah’s first was the result of an evening of enchanted shots and events, apparently, are a total blur after the incident with the Elixir of Sneaking; and Dee closes her eyes and bites her lip and thinks, Yes, yes, this I understand.
Dee doesn’t have any more answers than when she first left home: in some ways, she thinks she has even fewer. That’s not the point.
She wants to travel again, some day; preferably without getting kicked out of Palisade first. She wants to show Betty the temple which scams tourists from their coins as an act of worship; she wants to see Hannah’s reaction to the giant flower penises they make in Northkeep; she wants to show Violet her mother’s house and the temple with the rust-brown grooves in the floor for fluids to drain away and the tall cypress trees she used to climb when she was younger so she can tell Vi I understand what happened with you, I understand how weird families can get, I understand you, I promise I always will. But she doesn’t need to: she knows where she belongs.
She draws her thumb across the back of Hannah’s hand, a closed loop, full circle, and it’s a promise and a question all in one.
“Sure, because starting a tickle-fight while a total stranger pushes needles into your eyes is exactly the sort of tactical thinking we encourage in the Rat Queens,” Hannah says, so Dee tells her to shut up; and the bones she wears around her neck are smooth and warm.
~
N’Rygoth got one thing right: sooner or later, it all comes down to blood.