A’Meer smiled then, leaned across the table and touched Kosar’s cheek. “Gods, I’ve missed you Kosar,” she said. “And it took you a while to ask that. Getting old, yeah? Losing it a bit up here?” She tapped his head and sat back in the chair.

“Drink-addled,” he said. “And shocked. Imagine, my sweet A’Meer who likes it bent over a chair is a warrior, and probably the most dangerous person I know.” There was no humor in what he said; he did not feel frivolous. If anything he was drained, and tired, and perhaps a little annoyed that she had made this evening all her own.

“The reason it fought me is why I have to ask for your help, Kosar. It fought me because I’m a Shantasi warrior, and it’s our chosen cause to bring magic back into Noreela. And you have to help me because that boy you saved, the only other survivor from Trengborne, may be what I’ve been waiting for all my life.”

THEY LEFT THE tavern arm in arm. Kosar had a hangover, his inebriation driven to ground by A’Meer’s revelations. She felt light by his side, her arm thin, and he thought he could probably pick her up and fling her about his head with very little effort. Yet she was a warrior, and she had defeated a Red Monk in battle. Images mixed in his head; the Monk from Trengborne peppered with arrows, and the Monk in the Ventgoria marshes slashed and pierced by Shantasi weapons.

The streets were busy with drunks, prostitutes and drug dealers, yet Kosar felt removed. Here people continued their small existences, busy doing the same thing day in day out, busy doing nothing. He did not resent them that, nor did he look down upon them; they had to get by the best they could, and most of them were decent folk reduced by general decline. But although he was a thief, he was a traveler also. He thought he had seen many things.

Compared to A’Meer, he had barely left the place of his birth.

She had been born in New Shanti, a place where few non-Shantasi visited. She had been south of Kang Kang to The Blurring. She had traveled along The Spine to its very tip, a place that many believed did not even exist. And he suspected that she had been to other, even more obscure places she had yet to tell him about.

Kosar shook his head. “A’Meer, you amazed me so much when we were together, and you amaze me more now that we meet again.”