Never Through Me Shall You Be Overcome

Emmen shrank down to human form to take the meeting where Pelenn informed her that he would not be pursuing permanent vows.

She seemed surprised. “You could stay longer as an oblate if you wanted to,” she told him. “Everything that happened last year was so disruptive, you didn’t get the time you should have had.”

Adalyl made an arch comment about leaving the cloister to chase adventure, which was patently not what Pelenn was doing, but he didn’t make a thing out of it. They respected each other these days, but that respect consisted at least partially of appreciating that they were never going to see things the same way.

Tioghus received the news calmly but said, “I thought we might get to keep you.” Pelenn shrugged uncomfortably. He couldn’t really hide anything from Tioghus, but he was also keenly aware that he couldn’t tell them the whole truth. They gave him one last Blessing, a little bit of silver magic sparking in the air between them by way of valediction. He bowed his head and remembered the first time they’d done that, how astounded he’d been by something that soon became ordinary.

Torgu wasn’t surprised. They’d heard too much about Pelenn’s family, his old practice, his magic-poor hometown; too many of their conversations about death over the past three years had turned to the subject of patients Pelenn had lost, whom nowadays he could save with a cantrip. When they said goodbye, Pelenn said, “I’ll miss you, you know. Don’t forget to live a little, okay?”

Torgu smiled in the unnerving way that they never did in front of patients. “Don’t forget you’re going to die one day.”

So now here he is, back in Luigrann, and nothing is like it used to be. He gave up his old clinic when he left. The new one is stocked with the usual supplies, but he goes through them at a much slower rate, because now he can use magic instead. It’s gratifying, and yet at the same time almost infuriating, how much easier it all is. There are days when he finds himself suddenly grieving people who died in his care years ago. For a while Pelenn’s morning prayers are oddly tense: thank you O giver of life for your bounteous generosity and by the way why didn’t you get here sooner?

Tamara doesn’t answer in words. As is her way, she lets him sit with the question for a good while, with at most a silver spark at the edge of his vision confirming that she heard.

It’s similar to when she first chose him—that odd, persistent feeling that someone was actually listening to his prayers; the sense of gently inquisitive attentiveness that greeted him every time he showed up for midnight prayer, where the infirmary staff going off shift met the ones coming on, and something always seemed to be present in the atmosphere around them; the offer that crept into his consciousness and stayed there for weeks until he finally trusted it enough to accept. The first time Tamara gave him the ability to cast spells, he barely understood what had happened. Tioghus talked him through sending up a few Thaumaturgy sparks, and Pelenn choked back something between a laugh and a sob.

None of those memories constitute a direct answer to his frustration, but they eventually resolve into a simple realization: he wasn’t ready, until he was. Bahamut’s Rest was so full of clerics that it seemed like the gods could place them anywhere, at any time; but of course it only feels that way after the monastery’s century and a half of dedicated daily practice in communicating with the celestial plane. It’s not the fault of anybody in Luigrann that they haven’t had the time to devote to that kind of thing. That anybody did, in this post-cataclysmic world, is a bit of a wonder. And the gods are limited; the events of the past year have certainly taught him that. None of that is wholly satisfactory when he looks at how much work there is to be done here, and how little magic there is to help with it; but it makes him more assured in his decision to come back.

He connects with the local Tamara devotees. They’re a disorganized group who hold rites out in the woods some weeks but not every week, and when the weather forces them to meet indoors they shuffle around responsibility for hosting. It’s no wonder he never bothered finding these people before, but they’re sweet and earnest and dedicated to no abstract principles except that they’re all awfully lucky to be alive and ought to take care of each other. They invite him, hesitantly, to preach, and seem relieved when he firmly declines.

Pelenn’s brothers and sisters and aunts and uncles and cousins and parents and classmates and colleagues incorporate him back into their lives. He’s not exactly living in the clan household, but he’s there about half the nights of the week, spending the other nights in the rooms behind his practice, and still trying to get this balance of solitude and company right.

Everything and nothing is the same as it was, and it’s hard to remember why he left—except that of course he does remember, the spell in the archives and the crisis of conscience and the incoherent fear that something terrible was brewing and he had no idea who was safe to tell. Sometimes he looks at one of his siblings and remembers that vision he was presented as a test, the gruesome fight where everyone he loved was overcome with supernatural anger, and it takes him a moment to reorient himself. Some days he’s pretty sure that the reason he came back to Luigrann is that he was confident he could handle the problems he found here. But then, this is where the last crisis started. There could be another one. Tamara offers magic but no guarantees.

He’s been back for a couple years, and is in the middle of an intake examination, when a young halfling woman tumbles into his examination room and shouts his name.

His patient, a fire genasi, shrieks in surprise and gives off a small flame, which washes right into Pelenn’s face, as he was leaning in to check that her pupils were dilating.

Pelenn coughs as the heat washes over his scales and dies down. “It’s fine, I’m resistant. I’m so sorry, the door should have been secured.” He’s pretty sure that was a couple points of damage, actually, but it’s not worth fussing about. He turns around to look at the newcomer. “Can I help you?”

The halfling woman has dark skin and curly black hair and is dressed in traveling clothes, with an incongruous gold chain looped several times around her neck. “Pelenn!” she cries again. “I came to see you!”

That much is obvious, but he can’t remember ever having met her. That does happen sometimes, that people remember him better than he remembers them, even now that he’s been back here for a while—but he does his best to be tactful about it, since nobody likes being forgotten by their healer. Maybe he knew this person as a child, although there are very few halflings living around here. A doppelganger, perhaps? He squints at the bright excitement in her eyes, trying not to look obviously confused, and that’s when it clicks.

From some pocket on her traveling clothes, she retrieves a handful of confetti and throws it into the air. “Surprise!”

Pelenn closes up shop while Qony bounces around the office, taking a worrying interest in the instruments and herbs and spell components until he ushers her firmly out the door.

“Why didn’t anybody tell me you were coming?” he asks, locking the door of his office and then looking up and down the street as if he’ll find something there to entertain her.

“Well, Emmen made me write a letter,” she says. “But then I thought it would be more fun if I didn’t send it.”

“Pelennnnn, I didn’t want a plan. If I wrote to you I’d have to come on the day I said I’d come, and then what if I saw a waterfall and hadn’t planned time to go play in it? Or what if I found some treasure? If I showed up late you’d get worried, and you probably wouldn’t even think the treasure was a good reason.”

“That’s true,” he says. It also sounds a little grown-up; the last time he saw her, she wasn’t really capable of considering that the things she did might cause other people to worry.

It’s not the first time he’s seen her since leaving the monastery. He goes back to Bahamut’s Rest for the equinox more often than not. And he’s sent letters, although she doesn’t really answer them. It is the first time she’s come here, though, and the first time since leaving that he’s faced the task of entertaining her by himself. What does a five-year-old dragon want to do in a midsize city of no particular distinction?

He points them down the street in a random direction and they walk for a while, passing through shadows of structures that used to be taller than they are now. Luigrann is a city living in the shadow of its own history; some of the ruined upper stories got restored after the cataclysm, but many didn’t. For the most part, the small remaining population cleared out and rebuilt the ground level, while waiting for some hypothetical, more prosperous future to start building upward again.

“That’s where I went to school,” he tells Qony as they pass a newer building set back from the street with a little fenced yard around it.

Qony is more interested than he expected, swerving away from him to go wrap her hands around the posts of the school’s iron fence and inspect the sign in the yard. “The sign’s in Common. Why didn’t you go to a dragon school?”

Pelenn blinks. “There isn’t a dragon school. I don’t think I’ve ever heard of one, outside the monastery.”

“Huh.” She lets go of the fence with one hand and swings around to look at him. “I guess I haven’t either. That seems strange, though.”

“Even if there were one, I’m not sure it would have been a good fit. Remember, I took about three times as long to grow up as you did. It was—” He squints up at the school. He doesn’t usually think anything of it when he walks past here, but now that they’re talking about it, it’s bringing back some complicated memories. “It was weird enough here. There aren’t really many dragonborn in town, outside my family.”

“Is it?” Pelenn has already started walking again, and she jogs to catch up with him. “Whoa, I’m so much slower like this! It’s weird. Where are we going now?”

In a few blocks their walk takes them to some of the ruins at the western edge of town. It’s a beautiful sight, or a depressing one, depending on whom you ask. Pelenn doesn’t come here very often. People have scavenged any metal worth saving, and the glass is all long broken, so what remains is mostly stone—ornate arched windows opening onto the sky or the ground; isolated cornerstones with inscriptions you can still read. Over the past century and a half, it’s developed into something almost natural, with grasses and young trees growing up among the scattered stones. Pelenn’s seen enough art depicting this site before the cataclysm that it almost feels like he can remember it. He doesn’t know what it looks like to Qony.

She changes into her dragon form and springs into the air to explore. Pelenn watches her for a while, calling out an occasional “Don’t touch that!”

After Qony has worked off some of her excess energy, she comes back and coils herself around the rock where Pelenn is sitting. “This seems like a weird place to live. It’s all fallen down and there aren’t any dragons. Why did you come back here?”

Well, Qony the Uninhibited lives up to her name. Pelenn thinks about how to answer the question. On the one hand, she’s grown up; on the other, she’s still only five, and relates to him more as a caregiver than a peer. This isn’t a time for unburdening his private anxieties.

Qony tilts her head up at him. “The World Serpent? Not a whole lot. I mean, the teachers have probably told me things, but when they start talking about theology I always notice how many colorful birds there are to look at.”

Pelenn smiles. “Right. Well, most pantheons have a creator god. There are a lot of pantheons, and it’s hard to know much about the creation of the world or who was and wasn’t involved, so to some extent we just have to take those stories as stories.”

Qony furrows her brow. “Is your answer to this question going to start with the actual beginning of the universe? That’s backing up kind of far.”

Pelenn laughs despite himself. “Touché. The thing about Asgorath is…no one sees or talks to Asgorath, or knows Asgorath’s alignment, or has personal stories to tell about him. She hears all our prayers but never answers them. There are supposedly clerics of Asgorath, but I’ve never met one. Chromatics say she’s chromatic, metallics say he’s metallic. There’s almost nothing we can definitely say about them, and that’s where our histories start, right? Out of that complete unknowability. The world, or at least dragonkind, exists for no purpose we’re capable of knowing. So that’s our square one.”

Qony doesn’t say anything, just looks out at the horizon and squints as if what he’s telling her reminds her of something. Maybe an ancestral memory. This story is likely in there with the oldest knowledge she inherited.

“So everything we call nature or heritage, even the qualities of the other gods like Tamara’s goodness or Tiamat’s evil, that all came later and it’s mostly a set of choices. Dragonkind has known those distinctions for most of our history, but they weren’t there at the start of it. Taking sides is a choice. Pursuing life or justice or joy, like the monastery aims to do, is a choice. I tend to believe that if it’s not actively chosen, then it means a lot less.” He looks out at the sharp edges of the ruins against the sky. “You understand what lawfulness means, right? Choosing not just an action but a rule you’re going to follow—that’s a big choice. It constrains the rest of your choices from that point on. I can’t do that kind of thing lightly.”

“You do, though.” She sounds confused. “Don’t you? Being a healer means following rules.”

He shakes his head. There are similarities, certainly, between a healer’s oath and monastic vows, but the differences mean everything, and he doesn’t know how much to explain. Somewhat shamelessly, he goes for distraction instead. “Are you hungry?”

The Drazkaeth homestead is larger than it looks. The official address belongs to one house, on a residential street in relatively good repair by the city’s standards. It’s narrow, two stories high, and flush with the houses on either side of it. Those other houses used to be separate, and they still appear so from the street, but the internal walls have had doors knocked in them so that the various branches of the clan can come through to check on each other without going outside. It’s an adaptation that some of the family see as convenient and some as a capitulation to fear: the main reason to avoid going outside, for people who are largely impervious to the weather, is to avoid the neighbors.

Pelenn usually enters through the third house in the row, just because it’s the first door he comes to when he walks here from work, but he decides that company is as good a reason as any to go through the proper front door. His niece Daz is on the floor just inside, and when the door opens she freezes and tells Pelenn, “I didn’t do anything.”

“Hm,” he says. “It looks like you’re pulling all the shoelaces out of everybody’s shoes.”

“This is Qony,” Pelenn says, “and one of those shoes is trying to get away, so you should probably go after whatever you put in it.”

The shoe-creature in question is a small toad, which Daz rescues and offers to Pelenn as if it’s a peace offering. “No, thank you,” he says. “Why don’t you—”

Qony pipes up. “I’ll take it.” She crouches down on the floor where Daz is sitting and asks, “Where did you find it?”

“If we just let it go outside,” Qony tries, “do you think it will be okay?”

Daz looks stumped by that one. Pelenn offers Qony a hand up. “There are other people here who would do a better job answering that question.”

The nearest room to the front hall is a small study, where an adult dragonborn is sitting at a desk and going over an account book. “Oh, you’re here,” she says, when she sees Pelenn; “were we expecting you tonight?”

“Probably not, but I have a guest. Qony, this is my sister Laketh. Laketh, I’ve told you about Qony. She’s, uh, adopted a new form and gone traveling, apparently. And this is the toad that Daz was putting into someone’s shoes.”

“Please remand yourself and this toad into the custody of the nearest parent.”

Daz nods, takes the toad back from Qony, and swiftly takes herself away, obedient in a way she’s never offered to be for Pelenn.

“If you earn Daz’s trust, she might show you where it came from.” Laketh smiles. Many people consider hers an intimidating smile. She’s older than Pelenn and was born to different parents; her scales are a burnished gold color that looks similar, in the dim of the study, to the brass of most of the family, but has an imposing luster in the sunlight. She’s obviously making an effort to be friendly, but it still sounds like a command when she asks, “What brings you to Luigrann?”

“Oh,” Qony says, “um, I just—it was—I had to do a, uh, thing…” She seems to be hoping that somebody will interrupt her, but both Pelenn and Laketh are genuinely interested in her answer, so they wait for her to finish, and she trails off.

Qony appears a little lost, and finally she says, “I thought I did. But it’s hard to explain.”

Laketh breaks the tension by clapping her hands together and saying, “Well, you’re here now. Let’s see what’s happening in the kitchen.”

What’s happening in the kitchen is that Worrell, one of the elders, is frying something and hot oil is flying everywhere, and young Kriv is making a show of clearing his homework out of the way and being aggrieved about it, and high-strung Harann is asking a question while Worrell tries to listen but keeps interrupting himself to attend to the stove.

Laketh waves a hand to get Harann’s attention: “He can’t help you while he’s cooking. What do you need?”

Harann looks aggrieved. “I need seven loaves of wheat bread, immediately, and he forgot all about them because he thought it was tomorrow—”

“That festival is tomorrow, isn’t it? Unless they scheduled another one and nobody told me. Or I’ve forgotten what day it is.”

That last sentence is rather pointed, and Harann goes still as she, along with everybody overhearing the conversation, comes to the only possible conclusion: Laketh, who keeps scrupulous track of both time and money, is right, while her sister has been so anxious about a responsibility that she mentally skipped a day ahead in time. Harann blushes the bright green color of oxidized brass. “I should…oh gods. I already wrote and apologized. I—sorry—excuse me!” And she’s off, out of the kitchen and out the door.

Pelenn gets recruited into scrubbing some of last night’s dishes so they can set the table, and gradually other members of the clan wander in from school or work or play or, in Harann’s case, from triumphantly chasing down the courier who had been about to hand over her message. The adults currently responsible for childcare come in last, looking tired; Daz is with them, as is the baby, who has a name but whom everybody still refers to as “Egg” from force of habit. When they sit down to eat, Qony in halfling form is shorter than all the adults at the table and seems self-conscious about it. “I’m bigger than this really,” she says to Worrell, and then she blushes, seeming to notice how childish that sounds.

“Sure,” he says. “Thirteen is a lucky number. It’s a good thing you’re here.”

Qony looks up and down the table, which has twelve people seated at it, and seems confused. Worrell looks to Pelenn and asks, “Did you want to…”

Pelenn holds out his hands, palms up, and his siblings on either side indulge him by taking hold. Qony is seated across from him, but she says “Oh!” in recognition and follows suit. Tal is busy minding the baby, and Lith opts out, but the rest of the family holds hands and pays more or less attention while Pelenn offers a quick prayer over their food.

Lith shrugs. “I don’t have time for gods that have never had time for me, but you can do what you like.”

The baby knocks its sippy cup off the high chair, and Laketh catches it before it can hit the floor. “It doesn’t make much difference to me one way or the other,” she says as she puts the cup back, “but I’m happy enough to do it if it makes Curious feel better about being related to all of us heathens.”

Pelenn doesn’t normally rise to that bait, but with a visitor there he feels compelled to say, “I’ve never called anybody a heathen, and I’m grateful for all of you.”

Pelenn is struck all over again by how young she is. “Dragonborn don’t really have epithets,” he explains. “It’s more of a nickname. Most people are too intimidated by that one”—he nods to Laketh—“to use anything but her given name, but if she lets you call her Exactitude you know you’re family.”

“It’s not Exactitude, it’s Precision,” Laketh says, a little distractedly. Pelenn grins at her and she huffs. “He did that on purpose,” she tells Qony.

“You all seem to get along fine,” Qony says to Pelenn. “I thought you left here because they didn’t understand you.”

Pelenn feels himself blushing, but he fights the urge to hide his face and instead makes eye contact with his sister as he says, “Laketh, why did I go to the monastery?”

“I know that now, but that’s still what it was. You didn’t think you could carry on the way you had been. You needed—” She coughs delicately. “Time and distance and self-determination.”

Pelenn is surprised to realize that she’s quoting back at him what he told her when he first left, when he had realized that if he stayed where he was, he’d never figure out what to do with the terrible information he had found. It was so hard, then, to prioritize that over being there for the clan. Every time they needed anything, he had always come running. Letting him go had put a financial burden on them—on Laketh in particular, the other chief breadwinner among their siblings, who knew precisely how much they could or could not afford for her brother, successful and gaining recognition in his career, to take even a temporary vow of poverty. Hearing his own words repeated back to him like that might feel like mockery from someone else, but from his sister Precision, it’s an affirmation that she was paying attention. He smiles gratefully at her; she looks away and takes a sip from her glass, seeming a little embarrassed.

Pelenn’s uncle Zikal looks up from his food and says, “I thought you left because you got religion.”

“No,” Laketh says, not waiting for Pelenn to respond; “that didn’t really happen until he was already gone. I’ve got the letters. The way he talks about the gods when he’s just showing up for prayers, and the way he talks about them right after the cleric thing—it’s like he’d casually been going to the theater for years, and suddenly he got invited onstage for an improv exercise and decided he never wanted to do anything but act.”

That’s embarrassingly on the nose, and Pelenn lets himself hide his face behind a hand for a moment. Laketh pats him on the shoulder. “It’s all right to have a crush.”

“Oh for—” It’s the start of a kind of curse Pelenn doesn’t habitually say anymore. He takes a moment to let that roll off him and then says to Qony, “I learned something very…concerning, and I didn’t know what to do, or how to figure out what to do, or even who I could ask. And telling…any of them,” with a wave at the table generally, “seemed like it would just mean terrifying everybody.”

Pelenn spreads out his hands in a gesture of helplessness. “Maybe! I would have thought I could handle it too, if you’d asked me in the abstract. It was a lot more upsetting in reality. I couldn’t even understand what I had found, so…I went away. To somewhere I could hopefully figure it out. And then a lot of things happened at Bahamut’s Rest, and overall it’s a good thing I was there, because for various reasons none of the permanent acolytes could have handled it.”

Zikal looks tempted to answer that question, and Pelenn shoots him a warning look. Pelenn doesn’t much care if the clan is irreverent toward the gods, who can take care of themselves; but Pelenn’s interest in the draconic side of their heritage is a more sensitive subject. Zikal takes the warning, raises his brow a bit, and says, as if to prove how good he can be, “I’m sure they’re all very upright citizens, but sometimes it takes some human initiative to get things done.”

Qony watches that exchange with a sharply attentive look on her face. “Okay,” she says, “so that’s your opinion, but I’m pretty sure it’s not an actual explanation.”

Laketh, who knows more of the truth than anybody else in the family, pokes Pelenn in the side. He sighs and says, carefully, “Belonging permanently to the monastery means…submitting…to some magical effects, and if I had been under those effects, I couldn’t have contributed to the situation—”

“I couldn’t have helped get Adalyl out of jail, uncovered the truth about the murder of his friend, or helped to restore peace between the gnomes and the dragons, because I wouldn’t have been able to perceive the whole truth of what was happening.”

Pelenn hesitates, but Qony has always been able to tell when information was being withheld from her, and she’s always hated it. Also, Laketh will call him out if he fails to answer the question. “If I took permanent vows after all that,” he says, “as far as I can tell, I would have forgotten information that was crucial to the whole adventure. I was talking about choices, earlier. I would have lost the ability to make sense of my own past choices. I probably could have borne it, if I thought it was needed. If Tamara had definitely called me to it. But she left it up to me.”

There’s a pressure behind his eyes, and he tips his head back for a moment and takes a deep breath. Getting visibly emotional about his patron deity is still embarrassing.

Most of the family has been taking part in to their own conversations rather than listening to this one, and Pelenn takes a moment to relax into that familiar babble. Tal is talking to the baby in slow Draconic with a strong local accent; Daz is trying to share some gossip with Kriv, who doesn’t know anybody she’s talking about, probably because Daz made half of them up; Worrell and Prex are talking about work. Zikal coughs pointedly and holds a bowl of salad toward Qony, who stares at it for a moment but eventually figures out she’s supposed to help herself and pass the bowl along. Pelenn wonders if she’s so new to this form that she hasn’t yet learned humanoid table manners, or if she’s being difficult on purpose. It wouldn’t surprise him if she’s noticed Zikal’s attitude.

Pelenn takes the pause as an opportunity to take a few bites of food, and to ask Qony for updates on the people in Baros: who’s still there, who’s gone off on further adventures, who keeps claiming he’s going to leave on another adventure but hasn’t done so yet. “He just never left,” she says with a shrug. “I haven’t even seen him do any weather magic for, like, years.”

It’s at that moment that they hear the front door opening and a voice calling “Hey! Someone with strong arms! Please get here pronto!”

There’s a brief hubbub at the table as everyone either offers to go or claims not-it, and after a moment Prex gets up and goes to the front door. They return a minute later carrying a wooden crate that they can barely see over, looking urgently for a free space somewhere in the room to put it down, and are followed by a human woman with somewhere between four and thirteen tote bags hanging off her arms and shoulders.

“Tal, honey,” she says, “thanks for the referral to the garden witch, but she had no sense of scale. Hi, sweetie,” she adds, as an aside to the baby in the high chair. “I’m swimming in cantaloupes and they’re going to be ripe for about seven more minutes as far as I can tell, and the greens are everywhere. Do you know anyone who’s pregnant, because I could meet a village’s worth of weird cravings for witch greens, and I wouldn’t even put the baby in a tower in exchange. I know this is terrible timing and you’re already eating, and I’m gonna have to unload the sweet stuff on some humans, but at least take the sour cherries for dessert, I can’t afford to have someone keep casting freshness charms on them.”

She unloads her tote bags as she talks, and the table, which had been set for a modest midweek family meal, is now laden with the bounty of an extraordinarily productive late-summer garden. It’s only then that she notices Qony, who’s watching with wide eyes. “Oh hey,” she says. “Sorry, I’m Linda. Aunt Linda, to about half of these guys.”

Pelenn is ready to intervene with a polite introduction, but Qony says, “I’m Qony the Uninhibited. I’m from—”

“Ohhh,” Linda says, “I’ve heard about you. Holy moly, you must have grown up fast. How old are you now? Dragons are wild. You here to see the sights? There aren’t that many of them but we do have the most overproductive backyard garden I’ve ever heard of, so that’s got to count for something. Oh, and there’s some new stuff at the Gallery, I’ve been meaning to get in there—”

“Nah, it’s more of a—I mean, they’re my main supplier.” Qony’s eyes widen and Linda laughs. “Not for drugs. I guess you’d call it an overstock store but it’s where I get a lot of the stuff I end up repurposing and selling.”

Worrell drags an empty chair up to the table and Linda drops into it gratefully as the family members around her scoot over to make room. “Ah, no, this isn’t an adventurers’ town like Baros. And I haven’t got the education for that.”

“You know more than a school could teach you anyway,” Zikal says loyally, and Linda rolls her eyes.

“I literally don’t, but I’ve got a good eye. There’s lots of people—artificers, sure, but also more mundane types—who don’t know how to find what they need, and won’t even recognize it unless someone goes out and gets it for them. Interesting line of work, but sometimes I get sick of the hustle and go hold down a steady job for a while. Eventually my customers miss me and I get back in the game. Anyway, what’s your story?”

Linda is seated next to Pelenn now, which puts her across from Qony. Qony leans both her elbows on the table and appears to think seriously about her answer. “Well. I’m an orphan. I was hatched at Bahamut’s Rest, so I don’t exactly have any parents or siblings but I have a lot of guardians and nestmates. Most of them are good and most of my ancestors were evil, as far as I know. And I grew up seeing the gods visit the material plane twice a year, and—” She looks a little embarrassed but plows through. “And at the last equinox, Hlal asked me what I was still doing there.”

Pelenn frowns and wants to express some concern, but he’s held back by the realization that Qony tried and failed to tell him this earlier, when he asked why she came—or else she didn’t want to tell him, but couldn’t come up with a better story.

“N…no.” Qony seems hesitant. “It was more like she just assumed I wanted to go? And was surprised I hadn’t already?”

“Did you want to?” Linda asks. She pulls a bag full of green beans toward her and starts snapping them into shorter pieces to offer to the baby.

Qony says, “I don’t know. I didn’t really have a plan or anything. But once she asked, I was like, well, where would I go, and then I realized I didn’t even know the answer. I tried to follow Jo on one of her jobs but she said it was too boring, and Emmen said it was too dangerous, and then they couldn’t agree which one it was, and it turned into a whole thing and it didn’t seem all that fun anymore. Nerida’s undercover or something and nobody else I know ever goes anywhere, and anyway everywhere that wasn’t Baros seemed…uh.” She fidgets with her fingers a bit.

“Baros wasn’t exempt from that,” Pelenn murmurs, almost reflexively, though he feels bad about it when Qony shivers a little.

“Yeah,” she says, “but also other dragons. Like, other chromatic dragons.”

“Huh,” Linda says. “I don’t really know any chromatics. You think they would give you trouble?”

“What was he trying to do?” Linda may or may not remember anything Pelenn told her about Ches, but either way she doesn’t seem bothered by it.

“Is that what you want to do?” Linda asks. She seems very casual, holding another green bean toward the baby rather than looking at Qony. It’s only thanks to how long he’s known her that Pelenn can tell she’s paying focused attention.

“I meant the lair in the woods thing,” Linda says, “but since you are sitting here as a halfling then sure, that too. You could go learn a halfling trade, practice it for as long as I’ve been doing what I do, and at the end of that time you’d still have multiple human lifetimes to do something else.”

Qony looks startled. Pelenn says to Linda, hoping that he isn’t picking up the wrong cue, “Weren’t you headed out to Osegan sometime soon?”

Linda flashes him a grin. “Fancy you should mention that. I am in fact headed to Osegan to check out what the merchant fleet dragged in.” She gives Qony a speculative look. “I could probably use some help carrying, if they turn out to have anything good. There are some dragons there, I think. More than there are here. Might be some useful people to meet. And if not, it’s still a pretty interesting place. Good food. Post-cataclysmic architecture. Bunch of universities.”

Qony narrows her eyes a little at the mention of universities, like she suspects that she’s being manipulated. Linda spreads her hands and says, “I’m serious that I could use the help. It wouldn’t be a long trip—maybe three days to get there, spend a week or two there, come back here to see what we can sell, and after that it just depends what we’ve got and how long it lasts. I’d cut you in on the profits. We’d be able to do a lot more with two of us.”

Qony says, “I can carry a lot when I’m in my own form. And travel faster.”

Linda nods thoughtfully. “We can talk about that, for sure. I treat hirelings fairly. You can check my references.”

“It’s true,” Laketh says; she’s been listening quietly for a while now. “I keep her books and I can confirm. Though she has references with less of a personal connection, too. I have a list in my office.”

Qony looks a little overwhelmed at that. Pelenn gives Laketh a slightly pointed look and says, “Qony, you don’t have to start second-guessing whether everybody here is covering for each other. If I didn’t think you’d be looked after on this trip I’d tell you. I think it sounds like a good idea. It’s, um. It’s hard to decide where in the world you belong if you’ve only ever seen one place.”

“I know you can,” Pelenn says placatingly, and Linda says, “I wasn’t going to ask that, but heck, maybe it would come in handy.”

“Shouldn’t be either of those things, I hope. If the road gets boring, there’s theater in Osegan.”

Qony is starting to visibly vibrate with excitement. “When are you leaving? Are you leaving now?”

Linda laughs. “Not for a few days. You can have your visit here, and check my other references if you want to be diligent.”

“Write home and tell them where you’re going,” Pelenn interjects. “And send the letter this time.”

“Honestly,” Pelenn says, “I think they’re always going to worry a little, and all you can do is try not to give them a reason to actively panic.”

“Oh,” Qony says, “because they like, raised me and care about me and things. I know. I think they worry about you, too.”

Pelenn smiles and shakes his head. “It really doesn’t need to be anybody’s job. But it kind of comes with the territory of having people who care about you. Unless you’re Linda, who somehow is always completely fine.”

Linda winks at him. “Unsinkable. You’ll be in good hands, kid. So, you up for an adventure?”

Notes

The title is from Edna St. Vincent Millay's poem “Conscientious Objector,” which happened to make me cry approximately seventeen times around the time I started writing this. That didn't end up being particularly relevant to the story, but it still feels like part of it in some way.