Found Out

Vladislak bolts upright in bed, moved to action by the sound of heart-wrenching sobs. For a moment he wonders if he dreamed them, but no–the sobs are still audible despite the snores of Rhogar and Darrak in their adjoining rooms. The half-elf gets out of bed and throws on a tunic, breeches, and boots, rushing as the sobs carry on, hiccupy and feminine. If he didn’t know better, he’d think it was coming from Naivara’s room down the hall, but Naivara never shows emotions other than anger and grim, mild joy. He decides it can’t be Naivara and then wonders what other ladies might be staying in the adventurers’ wing of the Felnuth Tavern’s lodgings.

To his surprise, though, the sound of sobbing leads him out of his room and directly to Naivara’s door. Worry and curiosity battle for dominance in his mind. He’s concerned about the woman he’s been working with for a few moons, but also can’t help hoping this will be his chance to get close to her and win her over. Naivara is by far the most attractive–and most deadly–woman he’s ever met.

He knocks lightly on her door, and the sobbing stops short.

“Who’s there?” Naivara demands. Her voice is rough.

“A friend,” Vladislak answers evasively. Much as he wants to be the one to comfort Naivara in her time of need, it’s possible that he’s the last person she wants to see.

Vladislak hears muffled cursing and rustling on the other side of the door and winces. He shifts from foot to foot, debating whether he should just go back to his room or see this through. He doesn't want to think about what she might do if this goes badly. Maybe it would have been better for Naivara if Lorilla could have been here, but she lives outside of the city–no chance of that. Rhogar and Darrak sleep like the dead, Vladislak has found since they all started renting a room together. Neither of them would wake up for someone crying even if the sound was right under their pillow. Then again, Naivara wasn’t exactly quiet, since she managed to wake Vladislak up…

Time stretches for what seems to the bard like ages, but the door doesn’t open. His patience runs out and he knocks again.

“A moment,” Naivara calls. She mutters something else, but Vladislak can’t quite make it out. He sighs and paces back and forth in front of Naivara’s door.

At long last, the door swings open, revealing his wood elf comrade-in-arms. Naivara looks like she always does, dressed in her roguish black leathers with weapons on her hips, long dark hair in a neat braid down her back, face impassive with no signs of tears. 

“What do you want?” she demands.

“Um…Are you all right?” Vladislak asks. Genuine concern colors his tones.

Naivara makes a slight grimace and fidgets with one of her knives. “I’m fine. Thank you for asking. Shouldn’t you be asleep?”

“I was. Until I heard….” Vladislak pauses, finding it difficult to continue under the weight of Naivara’s glare. “What happened?”

She sighs heavily. “You’re not just going to go back to bed, are you?” She steps back, creating space for him to come into her room. Not one to look a gift horse in the mouth, Vladislak steps past her before she can change her mind. She closes the door behind her and locks it, her expression unreadable.

“Well, you didn’t kill anyone. It wasn’t someone else sobbing in terror,” he deduces as he surveys her room, which looks as though it’s unoccupied; all of Naivara’s belongings are either on her person or hidden somewhere, and beyond that, everything is spotless, the cleanest tavern room Vladislak has ever seen in a long career of visiting taverns.

“No. I…had a dream. Nothing to worry about.”

“Naivara…” He runs a hand through his reddish-brown hair. “If it was nothing to worry about, you wouldn’t have been–”

“Don’t say it. It’s embarrassing enough that you’re here. We don’t have to talk about it.”

“Whatever it is, you shouldn’t have to deal with it alone. Sure, Lorilla would be better, but she’s out in the woods, past the city gates. And Rhogar and Darrak aren’t exactly…sympathetic.”

Naivara rolls her eyes. “I’ve been taking care of myself for decades. Your concern is…touching, but I can handle this.”

They stand at an impasse, eyes locked, neither one yielding, for several moments before Vladislak sighs and shrugs. “Well, it’s not right to leave you alone to deal with whatever it is that’s shaken you up so badly. I’m sure you can handle it alone, but you shouldn’t have to. So I’ll just…sit in this chair in the corner, and if you decide you want to talk, I’ll be here.” He settles himself in the plain wooden chair next to the window, which has curtains drawn and shutters closed and latched, permitting no view of the city Thradnyss or the night sky.

Naivara huffs and sits on the end of her bed like a panther preparing to pounce on its prey. “I didn’t invite you in. I didn’t ask you to come here.”

“No. But we’re friends, aren’t we? Or something like it? How many jobs have we worked together now?”

“At least a dozen,” she mutters.

“And on each of them, we’ve had each other’s backs, worked well together. I know I can trust you with my life, and I hope you feel you can trust me the same way.”

She looks away from him, choosing instead to trace the embroidered geometric patterns on her bedspread with her long, slender fingers. He leans back in his chair and tries to relax, to show that he’s not going anywhere anytime soon.

Vladislak has almost dozed off by the time the wood elf decides to break her silence.

“If I’m going to tell you anything,” Naivara says with a voice like a knife blade, “I need you to promise–no, swear a blood oath–that nothing I say will leave this room, that you will never speak of this to anyone else under any circumstances.”

Vladislak wants to argue–why so serious?--but the wood elf’s adamantine gaze obliterates his objections. His mouth opens and closes a few times before he finds the right words to say.

“If that’s what it will take for you to trust me and feel safe,” he agrees.

Naivara arches an eyebrow, either surprised or skeptical. After a few moments of tense eye contact, she slides off her bed and crosses the room to Vladislak’s chair with fluid steps, pulling a small, ornate knife out of one of her pockets as she does so. She pauses to examine the knife for a moment, tracing the patterns on the hilt with one fingertip; then her face hardens and she keeps moving like nothing happened.

“You’re sure?” she asks as the half-elf rises so that they’re face to face, perhaps a hand’s breadth of space between them.

Vladislak nods. Naivara nicks first her thumb, then his with the knife.

“Last chance to back out,” she warns.

“I’ll take your secrets to my grave,” Vladislak assures her. He’s certain that if he breaks his oath, she’ll waste no time in making him pay with his life.

They press their thumbs together so that the blood of their cuts intermingles. Electric tingles run from Vladislak’s hand through his whole body. Naivara’s nearness is intoxicating for him, but he steels himself not to let on.

Naivara nods, satisfied, and steps away from him. “Good. I’ll hold you to it.”

“I would expect no less.” Vladislak pauses, hoping Naivara will tell him what’s upset her so badly tonight, but her eyes are on the ceiling and it feels like she’s not even in the room with him anymore. He bites his lip, then decides that some prompting might be worthwhile. “So…a bad dream, then? I didn’t know elves could dream during that meditation trance thing you do.”

“Not a trait your elf-parent gave you, I take it,” she answers, meeting his gaze briefly before deciding that the floor is safer to look at. “Yes, we dream. Or at least I have, on occasion. This was the first one in…a long time. And it wasn’t…pleasant.”

“I could guess that much.” His tone is gentle, but Naivara still shoots him a glare in response. Vladislak bites his lip and looks down. Patience has never been one of his strengths.

“It was about…my former life. Long before I met any of you.”

“The cultists?”

Naivara shakes her head, a ghost of a smile gracing her lips. “That might have been easier to deal with.”

“You’ve…endured worse?” The thought makes his stomach turn. Naivara didn’t offer Vladislak or any of the rest of their group much detail on her time as a prisoner of a cult since they interrogated her at The River Oyster after apprehending some Yuan-Ti agents of biological warfare, but he’d guess it had to be horrible for her to kill them all as she claimed.

“Not…the way that you’re thinking. I know how to deal with terrible people and terrible things. But losing something good…. No matter how far I travel or what else I experience, the pain doesn’t fade.”

“Sometimes…sharing the good memories…can help,” Vladislak suggests, choosing his words with far more care than usual. His usual silver-tongued charms are useless on Naivara.

After another long pause, Naivara speaks again, her tones hushed and colored with a warmth Vladislak’s never heard from her before. “She lived in a clan not far from mine, back in Roaksaethya, but underground. As is typical for drow. After I left home, I tried to join her clan. I thought I could do anything, as long as we were together.”

“She…?” His thoughts are racing. This idea is a lot for him to process.

Naivara nods. “Arindi. She was my best friend, but more than that…. I loved her.” The rogue pauses, staring at the floor between them, and then lifts her head to meet Vladislak’s concerned gaze. “I’m sorry. I lied. I still love her.”

The half-elf fights to keep from showing his surprise. Naivara’s utter lack of interest in entertaining flirtations from any man suddenly makes much more sense to him, and her repeated rejections of his own advances sting less with this revelation.

“But love wasn’t enough to get past the realities of life in the Underdark. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t learn to like the spiders and the mushrooms and all the gross creatures that live down there…. When Arindi and I were together, I could forget for a little while, but it never got better. And I couldn’t ask her to leave her family and her life behind for me. So…I told her that it couldn’t work, and…I left.”

Vladislak reaches as if to hold Naivara’s hand, to offer her some comfort, but then thinks better of it. Naivara doesn’t strike him as a touchy-feely kind of person. “That had to be…awful. I can’t even imagine.”

“It was. I broke both of our hearts.” Naivara’s matter-of-fact tone, as though she’s out of tears to cry or they’re locked behind some icy barrier, makes Vladislak wince. “That’s what I dreamed about. And that’s why you can’t tell anyone. Ever.”

“I wouldn’t dream of it. Although…it might help with the city guards who keep hitting on you, if you told them that you prefer–”

“I’ve tried that, other places. They either tell me they can change my mind or want me to be part of a threesome. Men are disgusting.”

Normally Vladislak would find a remark like that insulting, but in the context he can’t help but chuckle a little. “Fair enough.”

“Thanks for being here tonight. I thought you’d be the worst person for this, but…talking about it did help.”

Vladislak’s first thought is that Naivara must be mocking him, but her tone is earnest, and she’s even smiling a little.

“I’m…glad I could be of help.”

“Instead of your usual insufferable self.” This time there’s a twinkle of mirth in her eyes and Vladislak knows she’s teasing.

“We’re all full of surprises. It’s good to know that you’re not just a hardass killing machine.”

“Remember, you can’t tell anyone. It would ruin my reputation.”

Outside, a rooster crows. Naivara sighs and stretches.

“Join me for an early breakfast?” she invites. “Unless you’d rather get some more sleep–”

“Breakfast sounds great.” They have a good thing going, and he has no intention of ruining it.

***~O~***

Naivara and Vladislak sit in companionable silence at a table in the Felnuth Tavern’s dining area, enjoying a breakfast of fruit-studded rice porridge, when the front door suddenly swings open. A tall, slender, dark-skinned elf with hair like moonlight and the face of an angel comes through the doors and makes her way straight to the tavern-keep behind the bar. Naivara freezes still as a statue, except for her eyes, which follow the dark elf’s every move. Vladislak can’t help wondering if this is his friend’s long-lost lover.

“I’m looking for a wood elf….” the dark elf says to the tavern-keep, and Naivara’s spoon clatters against her pewter bowl as it drops from her fingers. The dark elf glances towards the source of the sound, and then turns to face them, her face a picture of joy and relief.

“Naivara,” she breathes.

“Arindi,” Naivara replies, rising from her seat with her face contorting between anger and happiness. “How did you find me?”