Thankfully, the wind didn't blow Aleksei's scent toward us, although we probably would have moved on a little faster, if it had. As it was, we sat down and began to try to figure out where we would go.
"Before, I am on my way to mountain city," Aleksei shrugged. "I am hearing that it is good town, with laws that are helping everyone equally, so I am thinking that I will be guardsman there."
"Whoever told you that was a good bard," Silveredge frowned. "Every statute, every bylaw, has its price- if you have enough money, you can really get away with murder."
"Or if you just move fast enough," I reminded her with an arched eyebrow. She shook her head at me.
"That was an accident. I knew a woman who was a nobleman's friend, and he nearly killed her in the street with no fear of reprimand, because the she dared to hint that she may soon be getting married." She looked at her clothes, which had been tied together in knots in the places where Syjenge had cut them. "These were hers. I switched with her in an alleyway, with the help of some nosy wives, so that she could get away. I don't know if her friend ever caught up with her, but I hope he didn't."
"This is not a good friend," Aleksei ventured, his face a mask of scaled confusion.
Bahlzair poked at Aleksei, and after looking at each other for a few moments, dark disgust settled on the Dragonborn. "That is not a friend at all, Bahlzair. I am not speaking good Common, but I know that is not 'friend.' "
"It's what she calls it, can we just skip over that?" I sighed, crossing my arms. "We all know what she means, and some of us know better than others."
Everyone looked at Bahlzair, who rolled his eyes and shrugged.
"I vote that you get a writing tablet or something, so you can quit casting spells on the ground or on the walls," I grunted. "Or just staring at people- that's creepy. And how many languages do you really know?"
With a halfhearted shrug, Bahlzair put up three fingers. Slowly, he used his other hand to take one finger down, then pointed to himself. He put another finger down and made a circle in the air, then his put down the last finger and jabbed his thumb back toward the mountain cave that we'd left.
"Flouncy Elf language or regular Elf language?" I asked, not quite sure of the last indicator.
Bahlzair allowed his lips to bend into a smug smirk, and lifted his nose into the air with a sniff.
"Okay, flouncy Elf, got it. A wonder why you learned that one and not the other. And how on earth do you even speak your own language without being able to-"
Bahlzair put up his hand to tell me to hold that thought, then began an intricate pattern of hand movements that stunned me with their speed. Silveredge smiled and made a few slow hand motions of her own, and Bahlzair reached over to fix her positioning on some of them.
"So number one, dark Elves have their own hand signing language, and number two, you were sitting around down there in the Underdark long enough to learn some of it. That jerk really owed quite the debt, didn't he?"
Silveredge turned to look at me, but her eyes in some far-away memory for the briefest of moments.
"The Underdark was... not unlike home, and the people there were more similar to my own than all the stories would have led me to believe. The Drow know what it is to have to carve survival out of every crevice possible- to have to piece your existence together from a world that would love nothing more than to crush you."
The silence that reigned in the camp after that statement could have choked an Orc to death.
Aleksei got up and pulled his two swords out of the ground.
"Unless you have food with you, we will have to hunt, and find something to burn. You two can watch this place for threats, since you have more magic and poison between you than is in a Turathi bazaar."
"You're right about that," I smirked. "On its best days, the market didn't have a lot of teleportation tomes to spare. Do you... breathe fire?"
"When I am drinking good liquor, sometimes it feels like it," Aleksei laughed. "But my people are not having fire breath, no. There is too much ice in our bodies; we are too far north. I have frost breath, instead. So, we will have to get flint rocks, too."
"No, I think I can handle that," I smiled. "And I guess I know how we're going to put the fire out too, I suppose."
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