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Amalthea remembered the city of Elturel. She remembered the burning wind stinging her eyes as she stood on the west balcony of the House, watching a great floating island out in the distance that hadn’t been there yesterday.
There’d been a commotion in the Gate that morning. She’d ducked into the shadow of an alley as a group of agitated Fists ran by. Words had shot up: Hellriders, Devils, Elturel, and there Elturel had been, sweltering under a dark sun, bound down with leagues-long chains and slowly being dragged into the Styx. She had asked Raphael what would happen to it. He’d guided her from the balcony with a gentle hand on her back.
“Peace, my dear,” he chided softly, and led her to the music room. He brushed the heavy velvet curtains closed and strengthened the muffling spell on the House’s walls with conductor’s hands. The far-off screaming faded, and when he cupped her chin, so did her worry. “Zariel is the playwright of this little plot. It won’t be long before the curtains fall to flaccid applause.”
And he’d been right.
A matter of days and Elturel was gone from Avernus. Raphael had celebrated Zariel’s failure with a lavish supper and a parade of joyous songs. He’d taught her a dance with much twirling and clapping, and Elturel’s story had ended.
But a tiefling man from Elturel was gripping her arm now. His hand was rough as stone and his wrinkles gouged deep into his sharp red face. His name was Zevlor. His eyes burned bright with fear. “Healer, I said!” He urged her up to the gate. “Tend to him, please!”
She nodded dazedly and ran, hiking her skirts to avoid the corpses of the goblins and worgs that were just beginning to stink in the noonday sun.
A sandy yellow tail draped over the edge of the walkway above the gate, the spade tip swinging in the spring breeze. Zevlor had screamed “Kanon” when the arrows flew, and there Kanon was at the top of the ladder, a goblin arrow in his heart, eyes wide and glazed. A woman was draped over him. Each sob made her tremble and her horns brushed his bloodied chest. Amalthea played, and when the woman lifted her head at the unsteady music her sandy yellow face was flushed deep orange, awash with tears.
The song was not beautifully played, but her fingers found the right strings. Kanon did not move. The woman stared at her with those huge, heartbreaking eyes, and trembling, Amalthea repeated the chorus. A man laid his hand on the woman’s shoulder. “Arka…”
But Arka batted his hand aside and didn’t take her eyes off of her. She scarcely blinked. Amalthea kept repeating the chorus until Arka’s tears overwhelmed her and drove her back to Kanon’s corpse.
Amalthea’s apology went unheard.
She descended the ladder as if in a dream, keeping her eyes on Kanon until she sank below his slack-jawed face. He had been from Elturel. He had survived Avernus all those days only to be struck with an arrow to the heart. Had he envisioned dying this way? Had he wished to go painlessly when his hair was white? Her heart told her it was a sister whose cries rang out across the grove. Did all siblings mourn each other like this? Would one have mourned her?
She stumbled to the gate and waited for it to be lifted. It opened just enough for her to duck through before it fell behind her again like an executioner’s axe.
She tended to the other wounded, fingertips flickering along strings in a haze. The heroic figure who had leapt down from the rocks was speaking with Zevlor now, and when she brushed by to heal the gash in his sword arm, he regarded her with a warm smile and a nobleman’s bow. She returned it and left them to their conversation. Mr. Dekarios and Shadowheart had joined now, speaking of the prospects of helping the wayward tieflings of Elturel. She left them to it. She just wanted to go home.
As she passed the site of the slain goblin party, though her heart begged her not to, she glanced at a goblin woman whose neck trickled blood into the grass.
During the battle, Amalthea had put the woman to sleep with a frantic song the moment before she loosed another arrow up into the walkway. As she swayed backwards, the elven man had slipped in to slit her throat. Amalthea shut her eyes before she saw it, but gods, the sound, the wet rip and slide of it. What had the woman’s name been? Had she learned how to braid her hair from her mother? Amalthea, distracted, stepped into the warm puddle of her blood and felt it squelch into her slipper. The handful of berries in her stomach roiled.
She hid in the shade of the oak trees away from the others, stepping out of her bloodied slipper and dragging her foot in the grass to clean it. Tears threatened to bubble over.
“You’re surprisingly adept with that piece of driftwood.” She leapt and faced the elven man who was waving up and down her lyre with a sliced palm. He smiled. “Sorry. Well-loved antique .” She played by way of response and they both watched his hand knit itself back together. He didn’t leave like she uselessly prayed he would; instead, he flexed and stretched his hand, checking his nails. “You know, I was thinking. If you are a bard, I certainly haven’t heard of you.”
She filed her thoughts into order. Her tears hadn’t fallen just yet. She could still play pretend. ‘I don’t suspect you would have, sir.’
“You sing for your own satisfaction, then?”
‘For my mentor,’ she said.
He hummed and looked at her like he knew something. It made her itchy. “The same mentor that gifted you that necklace?”
‘Yes, sir.’
“And the same mentor that gave you your beautiful gown? And your pretty little slippers?”
She didn’t know where he was going with this, but she knew she didn’t like it. She ducked her chin as if to guard her neck.
“And would your mentor just so happen to be… I don’t know, a tragically lonely older man? Desperate for the company of a charming young woman?”
Her hot ears pinned flat. The tears bubbled over.
“What!? There’s no reason to be shy, you lucky duck, you!”
She scrambled to cram her offense into something smaller than it was. She turned and faced the tree, tears streaming down her face and into the black ribbon of her necklace. She was glad she had no voice to break. ‘It is nothing like that at all. He is a good man.’
“I never said he wasn’t.”
‘He is my mentor, I am his student.’
“That never stopped mentors before.”
She puffed out a shaking breath. Small. Small. ‘Sir, if you intend on torturing me…’
“Torturing you? Perish the thought! I just want to get to know my traveling companion.”
‘I don’t wager we’ll be traveling companions for very much longer, sir.’
He rubbed his head as if to nurse a headache. “Yes, yes, your mentor, your mentor. And as much as I appreciate the weak-kneed deference, it’s Astarion, darling. Astarion.”
She echoed it. 'Astarion.' It was a beautiful name. She was at least glad to know there were still beautiful things to be found in this world.
Astarion chuckled. “Well, aren’t you a flatterer? And observant, too.” Amalthea’s face burned.
‘Mere politeness, sir. My apologies.’ She shuttered the connection lest she slip again.
“Mhm. Now come along, dear, it’s only a little blood.” When she turned back to face him there was a tenseness that cut his jaw, a fever in his eyes, a thinly-veiled intensity that made her check his knife hand. But his knife remained in its sheath and he gestured out back to the others with a self-satisfied smile.
She picked up her slipper with a nervous grimace and nodded politely to his boots, rejoining the group alongside him. It had been decided they were helping the tieflings and that they must reason with a woman named Kagha, to Astarion’s disdain.
They needed a healer, not to play messenger for strangers, he said, but Amalthea could only hear the sound of Arka’s crying, whittled down now to hopeless, gasping sobs. There were people out there fit to do the saving. Her only role was to sing the tale afterwards.
She prayed that Raphael would find her soon.