Chapter Text
1492
“You always were sentimental.” Gortash remarks as he eases himself down to sit on a chair. He leans his hands on the head of his cane, setting his chin on his knuckles. The whisky bottle dangles perilously from his fingers. The chair is wooden and straight-backed, very plain but for the vaguely familiar splatter marking up one leg.
“Sentimental?” Dana repeats from where she kneels on the floor. She does have a habit of keeping things from successful battles, but she wouldn’t say it’s from any sort of sentimentality or nostalgia. There are jars full of body parts in the chest before her that would agree. There’s wizard bones in the bottom of her pack that would agree.
“Perhaps not the best word, but the only one I could think of. You always had a certain draconic tendency to hoard prizes and snap the heads off any who dared get too close, is that better?” His head tilts as he asks, a better angle to study the line of her nightgown. It has pooled around her on the floor, so unlike anything he knew her to sleep in. It’s too long - she’d secured a belt around her middle and tucked most of the skirt into it to ease her climb up the tree next door - and the little puff-pastry sleeves are entirely out of character. Did the Ravengard boy buy it for her? Is his money earned through monster-hunting or did daddy dearest grant him some gold before he left? It’s more likely to be the former, and he’s willing to spend his hard-earned coin on Dana. He’s besotted. Only an idiot would have missed the lovesick puppy look about him at the coronation. Only Gortash revelled in the kicked-puppy look about him when Dana had accepted the proffered hand of Bane. Both to ally with and to dance with. It had been a delicious little cruelty. Wyll Ravengard has never done anything wrong to him personally, he’d left Baldur’s Gate before he was old enough to apprentice under his father, but he has no more right over Dana than Gortash does. No matter what he thinks.
“I remember this,” Dana has taken everything out of the chest one by one, carefully cradling each piece of her past before putting it down, and now holds the thick green blanket that had lined the wood of the box. She brings it to her face and inhales, “It doesn’t smell the same.”
“Well, it has been washed since your departure.” Gortash explains. He spilt wine on it once. It had reeked of horses and rot after a trip to Moonrise. The smell of Dana’s unwashed, unbloodied skin had always clung to it. Not anymore. It will again, the bundle of fabric held tight to what skin is bared by the drooping neckline of the nightgown. She picks up her crystal glass and holds it out,
“A drink, Enver?” she asks, staring up at him.
“Don’t you have a pup to get back to?” Gortash counters, even as he concedes and pours them both double measures. Dana scowls at him, and maybe she hasn’t changed as much as he thought. Or maybe he’s almost drunk, “He doesn’t know you’re here, does he?”
“If I’m not back by first light, Wyll knows how to find me.”
“You wound me, little horror,” he leans forward, past the strict line of the cane keeping him steady, and clinks his glass against hers, “Wyllyam might not know your lies, but I do.” Dana is an open book. He knows the pages intimately, has scrawled notes in the margins.
“Jaheira will find me.” Dana corrects, and there’s no uncertainty in her voice. She believes it wholeheartedly.
“ Jaheira? You should have taken care of that old crone along with Ketheric. Do you know the part she played in destroying the Bhaalists a hundred years ago?”
“I do.” Dana replies. It will not do to question her further, she’s shutting that avenue of conversation down. Besides, he can’t quite think of what to say. His gaze is fixed on her eye. It is opaquely white - no sign of inky black pupil or cedar-brown iris - as though blinded, but she can see him perfectly well. A magical affliction, surely, the white reaching beyond the eye itself and into the skin of the socket.
“What did you do to your eye?” Gortash asks as she takes her glass back.
“Tell me about this and I’ll tell you about that.”