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“Shar’s blessings upon you,” she said to Oak as he approached, with a look like she was challenging him to say something about it, but he just nodded in acknowledgment and gave her his usual easy smile.
“May I join you?”
“Of course,” she said, the wariness softening a little as she grabbed a second cushion from inside her tent and gestured for him to sit. He settled down next to her, close enough that their shoulders were almost touching.
“I wanted to talk to you. About what you said earlier.”
“I’m sure you do,” she said sharply, “but try to understand that it’s not just something I can talk about freely.”
“I’m not interested in giving you a lecture on the relative merits of different gods,” Oak said, holding up his hands. “It’s just…something that matters to you, and I want to understand.”
“Very well. Perhaps there’s even potential in you,” she said, sharp and mocking. She used to speak to him like that all the time, and he hadn’t realized that she hardly did anymore until he heard it again now. “I am indeed a disciple of Shar, Mistress of the Night and Lady of Loss. I assume you’ve heard of her?”
“Not much,” Oak said with an apologetic shrug.
“My Lady Shar is the Nightsinger, the patron of darkness and loss.”
Oak watched her quietly, waiting for her to continue, and after casting him a suspicious look she did.
“Most fear the dark, like children, because in darkness they see their fears reflected. But Shar teaches us to step beyond fear. Beyond loss. In darkness we do not hide; we act. Pain. Hope. The promise of better days. All of these are heavy cloaks that bend our backs and burden our hearts. We shed those cloaks. Before Shar we stand gloriously naked, beyond the vanities of mortals.” Her voice took on a certain ringing cadence with the confidence of repeating words memorized and recited a thousand times before.
“It sounds…oddly comforting, when you put it that way,” he said.
“There’s comfort, yes, but often there has to be pain beforehand. We destroy false idols. We tear down the lies the world is drunk on, the petty gods they worship, the futile lives they cling to. There’s often suffering—death, even. Many people break before they accept Shar’s truths.” She fixed him with that cold, challenging look again, braced for his horror, his rejection.
He wasn’t horrified. He was thinking about the stories he’d heard about the cult of Shar—he had some vague recollection that there had once been a large enclave somewhere east of Baldur’s Gate—and the misery and disruption they’d caused, but all of those stories had happened long before he or Shadowheart were born. For all her talk of bringing cleansing destruction to leave a new and better order in its wake, he didn’t think she’d ever seen it happen, certainly not on the scale she described now. But she must have seen it play out on the intimate, personal scale a hundred times before with new recruits at her cloister. She must have played her part in teaching that lesson to others over and over again. He felt an aching sympathy for her, and also a hot, eager fascination with the thought—a kinship with her that he hadn’t the slightest clue how to express. So he asked a different question, something on solidly neutral ground.
“What did your cloister want with the artefact?”
“I don’t know. I was sent as part of a group. We were supposed to take the artefact from the githyanki and bring it to Baldur’s Gate, no matter the cost. As it turned out the cost was very steep: I was the only one of the group to survive. I took it and fled—and then I was captured by mind flayers, of all things, and I wound up in that pod where you found me. That’s all I know. That’s all I need to know.”
Oak gave a sympathetic wince. Now he understood why she’d been so hostile towards Lae’zel from the moment they’d met, at least.
“Admirable conviction, though I think I’d prefer to know what I was getting myself into.”
“That’s not a luxury open to many people, us included. I have my faith to turn to instead. Don’t you have yours, too?” She added mockingly.
He knew that beneath the armour of her condescension there was uncertainty, fear, and the lonely desire to know his answer. So, painstakingly, he dragged one of his own private fears into the light of observation and tried to put it into words. “I made an oath to Silvanus, and I have faith that he’ll honour it so long as I do. But, if I’m honest… I don’t know what honouring it even looks like half the time. I don’t know how much he expects from me. I feel like I’m stumbling around blind and I’ll only know what he wants from me when I fail to deliver it. But he hasn’t cut me off yet, so I suppose that’s a passing grade.” He shrugged, giving her a rueful smile. “Perhaps it would be different if I actually remembered pledging myself to his service, but…”
Her expression softened, and with that crack in her composure he saw just how tired and worn out she looked.
“Faith persists in the absence of memory,” she said, and he thought she meant for it to be comforting—for her, perhaps, as much as for him. She rubbed absently at her hand as she spoke, as if it ached.
“That wound on your hand…”
“Yes, it’s my burden from Lady Shar,” Shadowheart said, looking at the dark mark on her palm.
Oak reached out, taking her hand in his. She drew in a sharp breath in surprise, but she didn’t pull away. The mark was a lurid purple-red, like a bad bruise or a deep puncture that had just healed over.
“It never quite heals, and sometimes it causes me terrible pain. But I can feel her influence, somehow.”
He envied her the clean, quick pain over his prolonged headaches. An icy jolt of discomfort ran through him as he realized the comparison he’d just unthinkingly made. Almost as if you owe yourself to another god, that insidious little part of him thought, but he refused to follow that thread; he didn’t want to know it.
“Is there any way I can help?” He asked Shadowheart.
She looked more startled than when he’d taken her hand.
“I don’t think so. Just…be patient with me, the next time you see me wince or cry out. It’ll pass quickly enough. It always does.”
He stroked his thumb up and down her palm as she spoke, and she leaned her shoulder against his.
“Pain is sacred to the followers of Lady Shar,” she continued quietly. “Pain will give way to loss, and then to the peace of her eternal darkness. You can tolerate a great deal of suffering, so long as it has meaning.”
She cried out suddenly, clenching her hand into a fist and curling in on herself. Oak held her hand tightly between both of his, and after a few moments the rigid tension her body eased and she breathed a shaky sound of relief. She uncurled her fist and held onto Oak’s hand again, and he put his other arm around her shoulders.
“What causes it to hurt?”
“It’s difficult to say,” she said, still sounding a little shaky, but she was clearly used to recovering quickly; he supposed that she had to be. “Sometimes I wonder if it’s supposed to be guiding me, punishing me, testing me… But perhaps it’s none of those. Perhaps it’s completely random.” She sounded very small, and tired. “I’d like to hope there’s more to it than that; some meaning that Lady Shar will reveal to me when the time is right. And until then, all I can do is endure.”
He gave her hand a squeeze.
“Tell me something else about you,” he said suddenly. “Something besides Shar. Something from your life before all of this,” he added, gesturing around at their little camp.
“What, something besides my life’s calling and the greatest problem I’ve ever faced?” She said sarcastically, raising her eyebrows.
“Exactly,” Oak said with a crooked smile.
“Well,” she said, smiling despite herself, “I like night orchids and I can’t swim. Is that the sort of thing you meant?”
“Just the sort,” he said. “Night orchids, hm? You’ll have to point them out to me if we ever pass some.”
“It’s a deal.”
A long moment passed in companionable silence, their fingers laced together, before Shadowheart spoke again.
“Thank you for reminding me of that. With my memories suppressed, I can’t betray Shar’s secrets, but I can’t remember much of myself either.”
Oak stilled. “You’ve had your memories suppressed? That sounds… extreme,” he said carefully, trying to keep his voice steady. He didn’t even know what he was feeling, only that the strong swell of emotion was threatening to overwhelm him.
“Of course it is,” she replied. “It’s an act of faith, not to be undertaken lightly. Shar will reward me when I succeed.”
He was furious, he realized—helplessly, violently furious. He wanted to burn her cloister to the ground, to bar the doors and let her superiors beg and scream for mercy that wouldn’t come. He wanted to kill Shar, too, like the ancient king in Gale’s story, to unravel and unmake her. And he was afraid. He was afraid that if she ever got her memories back he would lose her: his Shadowheart, her hand warm in his as she told him about suffering and sacrifice and night orchids. She was a new thing, just like he was; a splinter of the self that, left ungoverned, had grown tenaciously into a new whole. He wondered if her old, disembodied self would be just as eager to eat her alive as his was.
“Is something the matter?” She asked, giving his hand a squeeze.
“Just thinking too much,” he answered, shaking his head. He took a deep breath and let it out in a sigh, trying to cast all of those thoughts from his mind. “Well, some pair we make. Maybe between the two of us we’ll remember enough to find our way around Baldur’s Gate when we get back there.”
Shadowheart gave a pained laugh. “And you’ll have to show me your favourite flower, too. You can pick a new one if you don’t remember.”
“Perhaps it’ll be night orchids too, once I see them.”