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I do not know when peace began to end. That is the trouble with such things. Men like to mark the moment after. It gives the mind a place to point and say, there. That was where it began. But I think it had begun before I knew to name it.
It was not the fall of kings that drove Flora from me. That came later, and by then I was already far from Tethyr. This was closer to home. Axes in the old wood and angry words at the edge of a road. Men pretending the forest had no memory.
The Wealdath had never been gentle. I knew that better than most. I had been raised close enough to its shadow to know the trees were not only trees. They were borders, and at times, warnings. Old griefs with roots. Human villages pressed near them because men needed fields, timber, roads, and walls. Elves kept to the deeper places because they remembered what men preferred to forget. Between the two, folk like us tried to live. Sometimes we managed. Sometimes we did not.
At first it was only talk. Hunters finding arrows buried in stumps. Woodcutters returning without their tools and with no wish to go back for them. A survey marker split down the middle and left in the road. A cart found overturned near the trees, its horse gone, its owner refusing to say what he had seen. Men in taverns speaking too loudly of what belonged to the king, or to men, or to any hand strong enough to take it.
I heard such words and thought them foolish. I should have known better. Foolish words are often where blood begins.
Flora heard it too, though not the way I did. I listened for the forest and the life it held, or signs of the lack of it. Silence where there should have been small life moving. Tracks that crossed a path and did not return. Flora listened to people. She heard it in the woman who came for feverfew and would not say why her husband had not returned. In the boy who asked if yarrow could stop bleeding from an arrow wound, then lied badly about whose blood it was. In the old man who wanted something for sleep but would not speak of his dreams.
She was an herbalist before most folk thought of her as anything else. Druid, some would say, and not be wrong. But what they came to her for was simpler. A way to quiet pain long enough for morning. Flora helped who came to her. That was one of the things I loved about her. It was also one of the things that frightened me. A human man sees her treat an elf and wonders where her loyalty lies. An elf sees her bind a human logger’s hand and wonders the same. Fear likes clearly drawn lines. Flora cared nothing for it. Neither did I, though I pretended otherwise.
Then came the child.
I write that plainly because I do not know how else to write it. There was the child. Neither born nor named. Not yet anything I could hold. And still, from the morning Flora told me, the room changed. And the world along with it. Every risk I had once counted as mine alone became something else.
She told me after sunrise. The memory is vivid to me. The hearth had burned low, leaving only the pale light that came through the window. Flora was quieter than usual, and I thought she was ill. I asked if she had taken anything for it, which was a foolish question to ask someone like her. She gave me the look I deserved, then she smiled. I do not remember every word. I remember the pause before them. The way her hands settled together, telling me something had shifted before I understood what it was. When she finally told me, I had no answer.
I have faced beasts with steadier hands. I have stood under arrows and known what to do. But that morning I only looked at her, then at the room around us, as if the table or hearth or herbs above the rafters might explain what sort of man I was meant to become.
She laughed at me, though her eyes were wet. “You look as though someone set you before a dragon.”
“A dragon I might know what to do with,” was all I could think to say.
That made her laugh properly.
I crossed the room. Slowly, I think. I remember my hands hovering before I touched her, uncertain of where they belonged. I had known her as wife, friend, healer, and the woman who had made a place for me in the world. But this was a deeper thing. Something I had no training for. I put my hand against her gently. There was nothing to feel yet. Still, I felt changed.
For a while after, I tried to let joy be joy. The house remained itself. The hearth still smoked when the wind turned wrong. The table still threatened my life with its crooked leg. Flora still scolded me for mud on the floor and knives left where knives ought not be. She still kept flowers too long and said they were trying. She still moved through the room as though tomorrow had a right to come.
Outside, the roads grew worse. A holding near the forest hired blades to guard woodcutters. Young fools went into the trees to prove something and returned with one fewer among them. Someone burned a boundary grove. Someone else answered with blood.
No one called it war. Not then. Men rarely do while there is still time to stop it.
I was called away more often. A road to watch here. A missing hunter to track there. A message carried between folk who did not wish to be seen speaking. Sometimes it was only a day, if Tymora was on my side. Each time I returned, Flora looked first at my face, then my hands, then the rest of me. She was checking whether I had come back whole. I usually had. Mostly. There were the arguments. Not a lot, but enough that I remember their shape more than their words. Flora telling me I could not protect her by carrying every fear alone. My denial that there was fear at all, even as I wore it plain enough for her to see. She was right too often.
The first time I spoke of Waterdeep, I did not say what I meant. Cowardice, perhaps. I spoke of my sister, instead. Of familiar streets and shops. Of ships that still sailed north. Of distance from the Wealdath. Of walls, healers, and safer rooms. Flora listened while cutting herbs, her knife slowing with every word. She understood me before I had the courage to say it. I wanted her to leave. Not because I wanted distance from her. Gods, no. I told myself distance could be shelter. I do not know if I believed it. I needed to.
“I am safest with you,” she told me.
I wanted that to be true. But the roads were turning cruel. The forest was full of warnings. Our child was growing inside her. And I had begun to fear that every danger I could not kill would find its way to our door.
The days after that were strange. We spoke. We ate. We slept near one another. She still placed a cup beside mine. I fixed the latch I had ignored too long. From outside, our life must have looked much the same. Inside, everything had begun to loosen. The herbs above the hearth. Her jars. The shawl over the chair. My spare bowstring by the shelf. The flowers she would not throw away. The two bowls.
I began to hate those bowls. They looked too trusting.
When she agreed at last, she did so in her own way. Not because I had convinced her. Not because she thought me wise. She agreed because she loved the child, and because some part of her knew I would break myself against every danger in Tethyr if she stayed. I remember promising to write. I remember promising to come when I could. I remember her making me promise not to turn myself into a grave simply because she was gone. That one was harder. Perhaps she knew it would be.
We left for the nearest port before dawn some days later. I remember the sky being gray, though memory may have made it so. She carried less than I thought she should. I carried more than she wanted me to. Small stubbornnesses to ease the grief.
The ship was called
The Silver Tern. I remember that name too well. It sat in the harbor with its sails still furled and gulls crying above it as if the day were any other. Men loaded crates. Ropes creaked. Someone cursed over a barrel. The sea moved beneath the hull, bright and uncaring. I hated the ship. Not because it looked unsafe. It seemed seaworthy enough. Neither was it because the captain seemed incompetent. Far from it. I hated it because it would carry away what my arms could not keep.
My sister would be waiting in Waterdeep. That was the plan. Flora would not be alone there. She would be taken care of and would not want for anything. That was what I told myself, and her. Waterdeep was far from the Wealdath. Far from this looming shadow. Far from me.
Flora stood beside me on the dock, her cloak moving in the wind. She looked tired that morning. Tired, and beautiful. I remember thinking I should say something worthy of farewell. I said nothing worthy. Few men do, I think.
She took my hand and placed it where our child rested unseen between us.
“Come back to us,” she said.
Us.
One word can be heavier than iron.
“I will,” I told her. And I believed it. That is the cruelest part.
We held each other once. Not long enough. Nothing is long enough when a man is counting the last moments without admitting they are last.
Then she boarded.
I watched from the dock as the ship pulled away. I watched until distance took the shape of her from me. Until she was no longer Flora, but only a figure among others. Then no figure at all.
The Silver Tern turned toward open water, white gulls wheeling above it, and the sea took back its own voice. I stood there after it was gone. Longer than I should have.
I did not know then that I had watched my wife leave me for the last time.
I only knew the dock felt empty beneath my boots, and the wind off the water had found every place in me her hand had kept warm.
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There are memories that do not stay in the past when a man writes them. They rise as they were. The sound of rope against wood and the crying of gulls, almost mocking to the ears. Even now, with ink on my fingers instead of salt, I can stand there again if I let myself.
I have stopped there before. More than once, I think. The quill dries, its ink spent not on letters but in useless drops upon the page. The candle burns low. Some excuse presents itself, and I let it. There are memories a man can walk around for years if he is careful where he steps. I have rarely taken the next step with this.
But I have no heart to leave this part for another day.
The Silver Tern did not reach Waterdeep.
There. Written plainly. Small words for the shape they left in me.
My sister waited, yet no wife came down the gangplank. No letter arrived ahead of her. No captain sent word after. The ship that had carried Flora from me vanished somewhere between the southern coast and the harbor that was meant to shelter her. Men told me many things after. Storms. Pirates. Wreckage sighted off some nameless stretch of shore. A ship taken under false colors. A ship seen limping north with torn sails. A ship never seen at all. Every tale gave me just enough to follow and never enough to believe.
There was no body to bury. No shawl washed ashore. No ring placed in my hand. No small child I could hold and mourn.
Only absence.
I think that was what undid me most. Death, at least, has a shape. A cruel one, but a shape all the same. This had none. It was a door left open in winter, snuffing out the hearth and any warmth it left. A name spoken by strangers who did not know what it cost to hear it.
So I went looking. Not straight to Baldur’s Gate. Grief does not walk in straight lines. I followed rumors first. Docks. Roads. Taverns where sailors drank enough to remember poorly and speak loosely. Harbors where men knew the names of ships better than the names of their own children. I asked after the Silver Tern. I asked after survivors. I asked after a woman with kind eyes and healer’s hands.
Most answers led nowhere. But nowhere is still a place a desperate man can reach, and I reached it often. I told myself I was searching for Flora. For proof that she once existed and I did not simply dream her. For some scrap left behind by the sea or by men worse than the sea. A name in a ledger. A witness. A piece of wreckage. A child carried ashore by mercy or chance.
Perhaps I was. Or perhaps, if I am honest, I was searching for the man I had been before I watched that ship leave harbor. The husband who had placed his hand over an unborn child and promised he would come back to them.
I never did.
In time, the trail bent north again. Toward Baldur’s Gate. Ships passed through its waters. Sailors carried stories there. Merchants heard things without knowing they were precious. Refugees, liars, cutthroats, priests, widows, fools, and lost things all found their way to that city sooner or later. If there was a rumor to be caught along the Coast, Baldur’s Gate had a way of catching it.
So I came.
Not for coin nor glory. Not because the city called to me. I came because there might have been one more scrap of truth waiting there. One more name. One more sailor who had seen the Silver Tern. That is a poor kind of hope. But it is hope all the same, and I had little else.
I did not know then what Baldur’s Gate would become to me. I did not know the roads I would walk, the names I would learn, the friends I would keep or bury, the enemies I would make, or the years that would pass with Flora’s face still waiting at the edge of every quiet moment.
I only knew I had made a promise.
Come back to us, she had said.
I had answered that I would.
Maybe the gods heard me. Maybe they did not. Maybe promises made on docks are carried off by gulls and wind and waves, and men are fools for thinking words can hold against the sea. Still, I carried mine. I carried it north through rain and mud and sleepless nights. I carried it through every rumor that failed me. I carried it to the gates of a city that did not know my name and had no reason to care.
That is where this chapter ends.
Not because the love ended, nor because the search did. But because the man who left that dock did not remain whole enough to be the same man who reached Baldur’s Gate.
And because some wounds do not close.
They only learn the road.
