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The marble floor was hard beneath Abdirak’s knees, and cold besides. He had not finished dressing when Esvele had summoned him, dismissed her maid, and bade him kneel. Her gown was black and slinking, and she had not yet donned the leather domino laid atop her dressing table. Her mask was firmly in place just the same, distant and imperious as she braced one booted foot against his shoulder.
The spike heel bit into his chest. The leather was worn to suppleness and dull luster, the laces dusty—with disuse, he imagined; he had not seen her wear them before. They were loose, too, the tongue lolling, the shaft falling away beneath its own weight past the knee.
“What would you have of me, dear one?” Abdirak asked.
With her other foot, Esvele nudged forward a wooden box. “Make them shine for me,” she said.
“I would like little better,” was his answer. He bent forward slightly to open the box and examine the contents, and her heel pressed against his chest. She would not move so much as an inch for him, he understood, and the thought made him smile. He ran reverent hands up the length of her leg and began to unlace those high boots.
“Why came you to Waterdeep?” she wanted to know, and Abdirak was surprised to realize he wanted to tell her.
“The Pains of Loviatar are meant to wander,” he said, nimble fingers tugging cord back and back through the eyelets, “but I needed somewhere to winter. I did not think it would be here.”
Esvele pressed him back an inch or three, and he looked up into her green eyes. There was a question there she left unspoken, and as Abdirak wound the laces around his hand and set them aside, he considered how much to say.
“I thought it might be Baldur’s Gate,” he told her, which startled a single sharp laugh from her lips.
“That backwater?” Her tone was incredulous. “What would you have done there?”
The leather of her boot sagged beneath its own weight, now that he’d unlaced it, and he reached up with careful movements to tug straight the tongue. “Taught discipline to ship’s corporals and anyone else with a purpose for pain. But given the state of the city—and of my autumn—I wanted the society of a temple.”
Taking up first the soft, worn cloth, he soaked it with water and squeezed until its surface was damp. This was hardly the time, Abdirak suspected, to perform the full ritual purification that any Taystren might use to bless the waters and oils in her kit, but he closed his eyes and said a brief prayer nevertheless before he dared touch cloth to boot.
“You probably had your own kit, didn’t you,” Esvele realized. This made her laugh again, less haughty and more amused.
Abdirak could only nod, smiling despite himself. “I would not spurn a lady’s generosity just for that,” he said. Between her skin and his was the cloth, and the leather, of course, but his touch was reverent just the same. He had laid his hand upon her before, in giving her the pain she sought, and in ministering to her afterward, but this was a less familiar form of worship.
“They had not built the temple yet,” said Esvele, “when my family was exiled.”
He did not look up into her face in the wake of that admission, focusing instead on winding a silken cloth about her leg above the knee to protect her skin. But he did ask the obvious question. “Your family was exiled?”
She reached down to take hold of his chin, her thumb tracing one of the old scars that notched his lips. “You’d be the only one in the room tonight not to know,” she said, apparently weighing the merits of keeping him in ignorance. “Yes, House Rosznar was banished from the city a century ago and more. It was Lord Neverember who recalled my parents from exile—and profited by it, from what little I know of the man,” Esvele said. She did not sound grateful.
Abdirak did not press her, only opened the little pot of lanolin and lampblack she had given him, and scooped a little onto a fresh, dry cloth. He glanced up, once, to show he was still listening, then bent himself once more to his work.
She sighed, putting a hand to her temples. “It is not even that I don’t understand why we were disavowed,” she said, “nor that I can’t comprehend why one might assume my parents were fonder of the last Open Lord than this one, but what has any of that to do with me?”
There were some small scratches and cracks in the leather. Abdirak could feel them beneath his fingers as he worked the conditioning cream into her boots, and he murmured a prayer of mending as he went, feeling the cracks and rents repair themselves. It was the least he might do, but it made manifest in him the warmth of his goddess’s favor.
He knew then what to say to Esvele. “There is a reason, when you seek me, you must slip down certain alleyways and look for hidden passageways. The House of Pain does not stand alongside the hundred other shrines and temples of this city. When it was built in the Undermountain, my goddess was in as poor of repute as your forebears.”
She seemed to consider this with a tilt of her head, saying nothing more as she watched him work. He put a hand beneath her heel and made to lift it, and felt her muscle tense, holding fast against him. Esvele would not deign to move for him, so Abdirak had to stretch and twist and minister unseen to the leather.
“All of that,” he said, “was before I found my way to her service. We were less discerning, once, about the purposes of our pain. It is not a thing much spoken of, least of all with outsiders. But you have been my patron more than once, and it is my sacred duty to understand your suffering. How else might we offer it up?”
She smiled, a little, despite herself, pushing him back upright with a nudge of her toes. “So you, too, suffer beneath a shadow that stretches back to an age before you?”
“And others besides,” Abdirak admitted, his fingers molding to her calf, burnishing the leather with unhurried circular motions. “The first time you came to the House, I assumed it was a lark.”
“It’s a common enough fancy among my peers,” Esvele admitted.
“You kept coming.” It was not an accusation. He traded the chamois for the brush.
“A calculated risk,” she said then. “I would not be the first in my house to have my name linked with unsavory worship.”
With slow, methodical strokes, he brushed away the excess polish. Abdirak took his time over it, breathing in the scent of wax and leather, which stirred him. “So you do still think of us as unsavory,” he noted, a wry smile twisting his scar-notched lips.
“Well, I don’t,” she protested. “But my great-grandfather was a notorious devotee of Talona, it’s said.”
That made him laugh: “A coup for the Mistress of Pain, then, to turn you from your natal goddess. Especially that one.” But he had not been entirely satisfied by her earlier answer, so he ventured to ask, “Why did you keep coming?”
Esvele regarded him seriously then, setting her feet on the floor. The leather shone, and Abdirak leaned down to kiss the toe of her boot. “I was hoping,” she said, “you could give me what I needed.”
“Well, dear one,” he told her, rising to his kneeling position once more, “I hope so, too.”