He wondered sometimes what had drawn them together. She was young and naïve and possessed of a strong sense of commitment. He was worldly, experienced well beyond anything he had revealed to her, and believed that in order to survive the damage visited on you by the world’s pitfalls and heartaches you had to distance yourself from its needs. It was fine to share yourself when and where you could, but you had to accept that there were limits to the sacrifices you could make.

Aphenglow did not believe such limits existed.

They loved each other in different ways. She loved him for his tough-mindedness and self-confidence and an unexpected tenderness of heart that manifested just often enough to sweep aside her doubts about his brash and impetuous behavior. He loved her for her calming presence and for an inner strength of character that never seemed to waver. The combination was enough, he supposed, to sustain the relationship. But he was not naïve about such things, and he could already sense the ways in which the ties that bound them might fray and eventually break. He would be sad when it happened, but he would survive. She would be devastated.

He was thinking of her on his first night in Varfleet as he roamed from tavern to pleasure house to gambling den, looking for familiar faces and interesting conversation, seeking sources of information that would lead him to one of the magic wielders he sought. Perhaps if he hadn’t, things might have turned out differently, although even afterward Bombax could not bring himself to believe so.

Shed of his Druid clothes and trappings, dressed instead in the trader’s garb by which he was commonly known in Varfleet, he sat in a tavern with three hardened men who made their living hunting and trapping when easier choices didn’t present themselves. Not hunting and trapping animals, of course, but people. Slaves for the mines and the factories, for the fields and the quarries—men, women, and children alike, all in demand for work done in secret, distant places where there was little chance of rescue and no chance at all for escape. He knew two of them casually and while passing by their table had heard one of those he knew mention a man who could shape-shift. It caused him to pause long enough to say hello and offer to buy all three a glass of ale.