The rest of the day was uneventful. Crocus threads in hand, Tessa and I made our way back toward the Guild Hall, Tessa regaling me with tales of her home and her many, many cousins and me listening intently. Neither of us addressed anything beyond that.
We parted ways at the foyer of the Guild Hall, but I had far too much to think about to hang about there. I decided to go to where I always went for quiet.
Alben already had a cup of tea waiting for me.
As I sat down he waited for me to speak first, but his eyes held his question.
I took a deep breath. "I'm in love with Tessa."
Saying the words out loud made them more real than I was expecting, and I felt a huge weight lift from me. I looked at the old librarian, waiting for his reaction.
The old man sipped from his cup, eyes twinkling. "I know. I've been saying this for weeks now."
A couple days passed with more of the same: training, our first official dungeon as a B-rank team, nobody addressing anything important.
I came back to the dormitory after filing a report to find a note under the door, in Hask's handwriting.
Three words. "Final Yak. Tonight."
He was always brutally succinct, even in writing.
I stood in the dormitory doorway for a moment, holding it, understanding that this was not a suggestion.
The tavern was empty when I arrived. Vlod was behind the bar with his head down and a half-finished ale in front of him, clearly having had a long day. Trini was long gone. The fire had burned low. It smelled like the end of a busy and successful service.
Hask was at our table.
Two mugs of Stoneguard ale. One on each side.
He didn't look up when I came in. Just nodded at the chair across from him.
I sat down.
He picked up his mug.
I picked up mine.
Neither of us said anything for a moment. Which was fine. With Hask, silence was rarely empty — it usually meant he was giving you room to find your own way into something.
I found mine. "I've been talking to the Silk Runners."
The foreman stared at me, not angrily, just observing in the way he always did. In that dragging moment of silence, I prepared myself mentally for his response; would he yell at me? Would I be kicked off the team?
He did none of that. Only nodded. "I know."
I breathed a quiet sigh of relief. Deep down, I had known that he knew. I also knew that he knew that I knew. But I had to ask anyway. "How?"
He shrugged. "Necklace I gave you. Tells me where you are at all times. Ain't no other reason you'd go to the Tangle, best I can see."
I played with the copper circle hung around my neck. I wasn't surprised.
He continued. "What I don't know is what you've found out from them."
I didn't wait; I spilled everything. The alleyway in the Tangle, the sigil on the flour crate, Dandy Dan's show, the coin, Stevie Nicks – all of it. And I spared no detail in the info I had obtained, up to and including the deal they offered me.
I also showed him my console.
It felt good to lay it all bare. At this point I trusted Hask with my life, and hiding all this from him had been no small burden.
Hask did not show any sign of surprise. He simply got up, grabbed our now empty mugs and went behind the bar to refill them. "I'm real glad Vlod started shipping this stuff in. A cut above the rest of the swill he serves here."
When he sat back down, he fixed me with that stern gaze again. "That's good work. Proud of you."
Relief flooded through my body and I drained half of the fresh tankard with one gulp. "You're not mad?"
He shook his head. "Can't see a reason to be. I'd probably hide most of that too. Especially with what I'm going to tell you now, which is gonna make it worse."
My hand gripped the mug handle tighter. "Okay…"
He sat back. "You mentioned this Eversley LeGrange fellow. I've seen his name crop up a few times too."
He paused. "And he seems to be connected to you."
My stomach dropped. "What do you mean?"
"Found his name…dug deeper. Powerful man. You already know that. Got his fingers in half the pies in the Empire. And some outside of it too. A lot of people on his payroll, too."
I could tell he was building to something, so I sat in silence. "Found a name that concerned me. A name I saw once before, on your letter of recommendation to the Guild."
I inhaled sharply and asked the question I already had an answer to. "Who?"
He closed his eyes. "Sister Maren, at the House of Healing in Stonewall."
I immediately felt like I was going to throw up. Sister Maren had been the first person I had spoken to upon waking up in the House of Healing with no idea who I was. I had found it curious that she knew my name when I didn't, but had just moved past the thought due to the confusion of it all.
She had fed me, cared for my wounds. Was kind to me.
I felt anger rising slowly inside of me. "What does that mean, then?"
Hask pondered the question, seemingly picking his words carefully. "Didn't know for sure 'til you showed me your console just now."
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I rested my head in my hands and waited. "I don't think you have just any old amnesia. I think your memory got wiped. And someone forged a skill array to hide your identity."
I knew he was going to say that. I still wished he hadn't. "So…I'm not Lorne Callister."
"You are now. I don't think you were."
I set the mug down.
I didn't throw it. I didn't stand up. I just set it down very carefully on the table, which took more effort than it should have.
Someone had done this to me. That was the thing I kept coming back to. Not the amnesia — I had made a kind of peace with the amnesia, or at least a working arrangement with it. Not even the falsified console, which I had suspected for months. Those things had happened to me and I had been living around them like furniture in a room I hadn't chosen.
But Sister Maren had known my name.
She had known my name when I didn't. She had fed me and cared for my wounds and sent me to the guild with a letter of recommendation and I had been grateful. I had been grateful to the woman who put me here.
And someone had paid her to do it.
Why? To dispose of me? To keep me out of the way of something? To take whatever I had been and file it somewhere for some unknown reason, and then point the empty shell of me at a guild that cleaned dungeons for a living and close the door behind them?
I thought about the months. The training grounds and the mess hall and Tessa's gifts and Kael's explanations and Alara's grudging not-quite-warmth and Hask's one-word instructions and the Final Yak and the Swiftfoot Festival and the flour bin in the Tangle and the console lighting up the dormitory ceiling at two in the morning with a skill that shouldn't exist.
All of it real. None of it accidental.
I wasn't sure which of those things made me angrier. "Who was I?"
I asked it quietly, because it was the only way I could ask it without it becoming something else.
Hask treated the question with the same weight I felt asking it. "I don't know."
My jaw set angrily. Hask held up a hand. "But we'll figure it out."
His words were simple. Straightforward. And they hit me where I lived. Everything I had just told Hask, he had just accepted it. Everything strange that had happened so far, from my amnesia to the dart catch and everything in between and around it, he had accepted wordlessly.
Not only that, but he had been trying to figure it out already, on top of investigating the dungeons. He cared enough to find out. Sticking his neck out, running counter surveillance against prying eyes. Training me. Protecting me. Literally risking his life for me in the Ebon Maw. All without having any idea who I was.
Why?
I sighed. I felt tired, suddenly. Deeply, deeply tired. I figured that's how Hask had been feeling this whole time. "Callister. You aren't alone in this. You never have been."
I drained the mug in front of me and stared at the dregs at the bottom, fighting the tears I could feel welling up. One still made it through. "Foreman…what do I do?"
He sat back. "You're gonna go back to the Silk Runners and take that job. And then I'm gonna help you."
He got up and refilled our mugs again. Kael's words that first night I spent in the dormitory came back to me once again.
"Hask is the greatest man I've ever known."
It was impossible to disagree.
He sat back down, looking at something I couldn't see. "Since you aren't alone in this, I want you to know that you're not the only one with a past."
I waited.
"I was born Dekrieg Steelfist. I was born in the Askar Mountains, five hundred and forty-three years ago. I became an adventurer when I was young. Founded a party called Thunder Hawk at the founding of the Delvenmoor Empire."
He glanced at me. "But you've spent enough time at the library to know that."
I nodded. I didn't trust myself to do much more than that.
He turned his mug in his hands. "We were good. Best there was, for a time. Six of us. The kind of party that gets written into histories and songs and the sort of thing young adventurers tell each other around campfires to feel better about their odds."
A pause. "There was a cleric. Ilysa. She was — "
He stopped. Started again differently. "She was important to me."
He didn't elaborate on that and I didn't ask him to. "We took a contract. Dungeon that should have been manageable. Should have been. We made a call that went bad, and she didn't come home. Neither did the rest of them. Just me and one other."
"Varkas."
He looked at me. "You heard that much."
"I heard enough."
He nodded slowly, accepting that without asking what exactly I'd overheard through his office door that night. Another thing he was letting me carry my own way. "Her mother was a woman of considerable faith. Considerable power, through that faith. When we came back without Ilysa, she — "
He stopped again. This stop was different from the others. Longer. The ring turning once, twice. "She asked her gods to make sure we couldn't run from it. Couldn't die and leave it behind. Couldn't do anything except live with it until it was made right."
The fire crackled. Vlod shifted behind the bar and mumbled something in his sleep. "And they listened," I said.
"They listened."
He said it the way you say something you've had five hundred years to make peace with and haven't entirely managed. "So you've been alive since then. Both of you."
"Both of us."
He took a long drink. "Varkas went one direction with it. I went another. Can't say either of us got it right."
I thought about the man in the silver plate armor who had filed a challenge against our provisional license because he couldn't get to Hask directly. Five hundred years of guilt dressed up as institutional politics. "Why a janitor?" I asked.
He was quiet for a moment. "This is just one life. I've had to disappear and then live a couple others. Dwarves live a long time, but not five centuries. About two hundred years back I retired from adventuring and became a farmer with a new name. Then I picked up my axe again when the world forgot me. I kept moving."
He set the mug down. "Didn't seem to help much. Ilysa was still gone. The world was still — "
He gestured vaguely at everything. " — the way it is. So I tried something smaller. Something that needed doing and nobody was going to write songs about."
He looked at me directly. "And then you showed up in my mess hall, couldn't eat the curry, and had a skill array that made no sense. And I thought — there's something here worth figuring out."
Despite everything — the anger and the tiredness and the confusion — I felt something that wasn't quite a smile but was close to one. "That's why you took me on."
"That's part of it."
"What's the other part?"
He picked up his mug. "You remind me of someone I used to know. Before everything went wrong. Don't read too much into that."
I didn't ask who. I thought I already knew.
We sat for a while after that without speaking. The fire burned lower. The Stoneguard ale was better than anything else Vlod stocked, which Hask had said and which I now understood was not a small statement.
Eventually Hask stood. He collected the mugs and set them behind the bar.
He looked at Vlod for a moment — the massive minotaur still deeply unconscious, one enormous hand wrapped around a mug that looked like a thimble in his grip — and something in Hask's expression went briefly soft in a way I wasn't supposed to see.
He turned back to me. "Get some rest. Tomorrow, we start doing this properly."
"Together?"
"Yep."
He put on his coat. Straightened it. The same way he straightened everything — without ceremony, without hesitation, because a thing worth doing was worth doing correctly.
He was almost at the door when I spoke. "Hask."
He stopped but didn't turn around. "Thank you. For — all of it. Everything you did without knowing who I was."
A long moment. "You deserve someone in your corner," he said. "Didn't seem like anyone else was going to do it."
He walked out and the door swung shut behind him.
I sat in the empty Final Yak for a while longer, the fire burning down to embers, Vlod snoring softly behind the bar. The copper pendant sat against my chest. The silver ring was on my finger. The halfling bracelet was on my wrist.
Lorne Callister. Whoever that was.
I stood up, put on my coat, and walked out into the night. The city was quiet around me, the lanterns burning low, Moorhaven going about the business of being a city at an hour when most of its inhabitants had the good sense to be asleep.
I didn't know who I had been.
But I knew who was in my corner.
For now, that was enough.