A Writing of Value

Morning came to Lantern Hall whether Rishi’s body was ready for it or not: boards cool under bruised feet, water drawn and put over the fire, the sweep that made his shoulders answer each stroke while last night’s grit gathered at the edges.

The altar glow held steady in the dim, and Elisa held steady with it—present, contained, making the Hall feel anchored without speaking.

Rishi took his breathwork where he always did, in the small space his body knew. Stretching. Light maintenance—enough to wake joints without pushing them.

Then the Hall again: heat checked, kettle watched, a quick glance to Elisa—anything break overnight?—and a fast audit of the supplies corner. Cloth. Wraps. Clean rags folded tight. Jars sealed.

His hands were sorting when his mind slid sideways.

The boy’s hands in Ragpicker’s Alley—empty, shaking, held too high. The way his breath had caught when Rishi told him to run. The scrape of small feet on wet stone. The flash of rust-red cloak and steel, and then the sudden empty space where the boy had been.

A boy that small could disappear into Baldur’s Gate before anyone finished breathing out.

What stayed was the moment the sword struck his palm and stopped there, and the ache it left under the wrap.

His thumb found the red cord and rested there. He let the exhale lengthen until his shoulders eased. The thought thinned.

Late morning and midday took him out into the city with a bowl and a practiced face that asked without words. Doorways. Corners. Small exchanges made without ceremony. People gave him crusts or a copper and, in return, he listened with his eyes as much as his ears: the grey of fatigue, the hitch in a breath, the way a hand guarded a rib even while the mouth said “nothing.”

A dockworker sat on a step with a cut that wouldn’t stop weeping. Rishi rinsed it clean, wrapped with firm, even tension, and asked two questions that mattered.

As he tied off the final turn, the phrase surfaced uninvited—green witch. Bridge talk—Maeril’s smirk behind it.

He didn’t chase it. He kept his eyes on the dockworker’s face. He felt his feet on the stone. He counted one slow breath out.

“You dizzy?” he asked. “Any fever?”

Afternoon pulled him back to Lantern Hall for what never stopped arriving: intake, triage, water, food, clean cloth, fevers checked by touch. He restocked what he had used and put every tool where a tired hand could find it without thinking.

Dusk cooled the river air. People came into Lantern Hall’s yard to spar under watchful eyes.

Hands were wrapped. Weapons were checked. Tempers were watched before they became fights.

Rishi took matches with whoever needed the work: sailors, mercenaries, and sometimes a Flaming Fist man who needed to hit something and had come here because Lantern Hall would make him stop before hitting became cruelty.

Between rounds, sweat cooling on his skin, his attention flicked—unasked—to Maeril watching the bridge: not one body, but the spaces between bodies. The pause before a line soured. The child angling toward warmth instead of food. The uniformed man people made room for before he asked.

He reset his stance. Hands up. Work continued.

Late night meant alleys: routes, sightlines, exits. Walking Brampton and the Lower City, listening more than looking, learning how violence started before it started. Footing. Angles. The quiet change in a voice that meant someone was about to do something stupid.

For three days he did it all the same way: exact, clean, present.

And for three days, at the oddest moments, the same pieces came back. The boy’s empty place. The Green Witch. Maeril’s smirk. The way she watched the bridge without looking like she was watching at all.

Bruises made sense to him.

This did not.

Late afternoon thinned Lantern Hall by layers. The last bowls had gone out. The soup smell faded to damp wood, soot, and clean cloth. Voices dropped, and chairs settled into their places again.

Elisa left before the work was finished, ledger under one arm, cloak already fastened. Three narrow slips of paper marked places between the pages.

“I need to see Quill,” she said. “We have made a noble very unhappy.”

Rishi understood enough.

The ledger meant seals, titles, polite threats. Wounds made of paper. Not his work, and still Lantern Hall’s blood.

“Do you want my hands?” he asked.

“No.”

Her eyes moved once over the room, then over him: bruises, wrapped hand, the stiffness he had not managed to hide from her since he was fourteen. “Not for this. This is my battlefield. You have yours.”

He inclined his head.

Then she was gone into the wet afternoon, and the Hall settled around the space she left behind.

Rishi returned to the supplies, wiped a jar’s rim clean, set the lid, and pressed the seal down with his thumb.

Movement caught at the threshold.

Maeril’s hawk perched on the doorframe as if it belonged there. Its feathers were ash-pale, the edges ghosting to translucence when the light caught them. It held the wood without sound. Its eyes fixed into the Hall and did not blink.

Rishi’s hands went still.

He moved to the doorway and stopped at a respectful distance. The hawk’s head ticked once, small and exact.

A pale strip of paper was bound to its leg.

He reached slowly, not grabbing.

The bird allowed it.

The note came free without struggle.

Three short lines and a signature. Plain hand. No flourishes.

The boy from Ragpicker’s Alley agreed to meet you.

Badly.

Meet us at your door.

—The Green Witch

For a breath, the words did not stay ink.

They became small hands held too high. Wet stone under running feet. The empty space where the boy had been.

Rishi read the note again.

The boy from Ragpicker’s Alley.

Not gone.

He folded the paper once. Then again. Not hidden. Not crumpled. Made small and kept inside his belt wrap.

The hawk opened its wings. Ash-pale feathers cut once through the doorway light, and then it dropped back into the evening.

The next hour did not pass cleanly. Rishi worked because work was what his hands knew: fever, kettle, cloth, bandages. A wounded man tried once to sit up before one look from Rishi ended the attempt without a word.

Again and again, Rishi’s attention went to the threshold.

He did not stand there waiting.

He worked.

Then one of the evening volunteers came through the side door too fast, one hand braced against the frame, breath sharp from running.

“Rishi.”

He was already turning.

“Outside,” she said. “Near the corner. The witch. A boy with her. Two men stopped them. They’re not letting her pass.”

The Hall narrowed: fever cot, kettle, clean wraps, the volunteer’s frightened face.

“Stay with the fever,” he said.

She nodded.

Rishi came out of Lantern Hall into the wet street before the door had settled behind him.

Maeril stood at the mouth of the lane, where the narrow way opened toward the wider street.

The boy from Ragpicker’s Alley was with her, half a step behind and not quite beside her, weight set as if he had not decided which way to flee.

Two men stood between them and Lantern Hall.

Not Flaming Fist.

Guild men, then.

No badge. No color. Nothing a patrol would have to admit was there. Just the set of their shoulders and the calm of men who expected the street to remember them.

The men turned when Rishi came out.

The nearer one shifted first, hand moving away from his belt. The other turned more slowly, enough to keep Maeril and Rishi in the same glance.

Rishi saw the pale seam before he placed the face.

It crossed the inside of the nearer man’s forearm, half-hidden under dark hair and old grime. Rishi had washed that cut at Lantern Hall, held the flesh closed, wrapped it clean.

A blade wound.

The angle had bothered him then: low to high, awkward, defensive. Maybe tavern work. Maybe someone smaller cutting to get free.

He had not asked.

He had healed him anyway.

The man recognized him a heartbeat later.

His eyes dropped to Rishi’s wrapped hands, then lifted to his face.

His mouth changed.

For a moment, no one moved.

The silence found the boy first.

He shifted his weight. His eyes cut to the two men, then to Lantern Hall’s open door behind Rishi, then away again. His hands stayed empty, but his fingers flexed once at his sides, quick and sharp, as if they missed having somewhere to hide.

The man with the old blade wound saw it.

“Rook,” he said. “Enough games.”

Rishi held the name without moving.

Rook.

The boy’s jaw tightened.

The man tipped his chin toward Maeril, then toward Rishi. “Those two will make you soft.”

Maeril’s face changed.

Not much.

Enough.

The man kept his eyes on Rook. “Soft gets used. Soft gets spent. You want a place, you walk with us.”

Rook looked at Maeril first.

Maeril’s jaw tightened. One hand opened at her side, then closed again.

She did not reach for him. She did not reach for the men.

Then Rook looked at Rishi.

Rishi did not speak.

He took one step forward.

Only one.

The men saw it. Maeril saw it. Rook saw it.

Rishi stopped there, hands empty, shoulders loose, feet set in the wet street.

Empty hands did not make him harmless.

He said nothing.

For half a breath, the two men did not move.

Then the man with the old blade wound smiled.

He stepped forward too.

The other came with him, mouth pulling toward a grin, as if Rishi’s empty hands were a joke they had decided not to laugh at yet.

The nearer man looked past Rishi to Lantern Hall’s open door.

“Careful, monk,” he said. “A place like yours only stays open while people let it.”

Rishi did not answer.

Lantern Hall stood open behind him.

That made them right in the one way that mattered.

He let his shoulders ease. His hands lowered a fraction.

Then he stepped back once.

Maeril moved.

Not forward. Not yet.

Her hand lifted at her side, palm half-turned. Two fingers bent inward. Her mouth parted around the beginning of a spell, and the wet air between her and the men seemed to tighten.

Rook did not look at her.

His eyes stayed on the two men as he lifted one hand in front of Maeril, palm out.

“Don’t.”

Maeril stopped.

The word had not been loud.

It did not need to be.

Rook’s eyes stayed on the men. His jaw worked once.

“It’s…” His throat moved. “It’s what I want.”

Maeril looked at him then.

Not at the men. Not at the open door behind Rishi.

At him.

“Really?” she asked.

Rook’s face shut tighter.

Maeril’s voice stayed quiet. “That’s what it is?”

He said nothing.

That was answer enough.

He let his hand fall from between them and walked toward the two men.

Neither of them reached for him.

Rishi did not move.

Maeril did not cast.

Rook crossed the wet stones on his own feet and stopped beside the man with the old blade wound.

Only then did he look back.

Maeril stood where he had left her.

“So it’s a farewell, then?”

Her voice was quiet enough that the street almost took it.

Rook looked at her.

Then at Rishi.

“Yes,” he said.

The word closed the space.

The men turned.

Rook went with them.

No one touched him.

He kept walking.

They walked back toward the bridge without speaking.

Rishi did not ask what spell she had almost cast.

Maeril did not ask why he had stepped back.

The sight of Rook walking away with the Guild followed them anyway.

The bridge took them in the way it always did: press of bodies, cart wheels, river damp rising through the boards.

Maeril moved through it without looking like she was making a path. Rishi kept beside her, close enough not to lose her in the crowd, far enough not to crowd the silence.

Above the awnings, the hawk’s shadow slid once, then kept pace.

They crossed without stopping.

When Maeril finally spoke, she chose a question that did not touch Rook.

“How long have you been in Baldur’s Gate?”

He took a moment. Cut his life down to what was usable.

“I was born here. I traveled for about a decade to train, and then came back. You?”

“A few years,” she said. “People see the Abyss in my face and decide where I belong. Usually somewhere else. But here, nobody minds. So I settled. Found a rhythm that worked.”

His eyes flicked to her horns, her green-tinted skin, her yellow eyes—then away. He had seen people treated like warnings.

The hawk passed overhead. Her gaze snapped up without thinking, then returned to the path like it had never moved.

“You watch from above?” he asked.

“I keep eyes on the bridge. And on the ones it eats first.”

She spoke like it was work.

For a breath, the words did not stay that clean.

“It also keeps me from being surprised by the wrong things.”

She went quiet for a heartbeat, measuring.

“And then I saw you step in,” she added. “Between Rook and the blade.”

Her head tilted, studying him.

“Looks like it tends to be a habit of yours. Those scars don’t come from one good deed.”

A small huff escaped him—almost a laugh. “Indeed.” His hand went to the back of his head, fingers finding the old knife-cut scar by muscle memory, then dropping.

“Some things don’t stop unless someone steps in,” he said.

Maeril did not press on them.

After a moment, she smiled, looking ahead. “Most people can’t even stand being inconvenienced for someone else.”

“I’ve learned how to live with it,” he said. “You have your pot. I have my hands.”

“I’d rather cry over onions than cough blood,” she said.

He surprised himself with the grin that followed. “Try my stew. You’ll understand why I choose bruises.”

Her laugh came out warm and quick. “No, thank you. I’d rather stay alive.”

They left the densest part of the bridge behind. Boards gave way to packed earth. The city edge loosened: shacks spaced wider, scrub showing between them, wind gaining room. The hawk kept pace overhead, silent and steady.

Ahead, her hut waited: bead and leather strips where a door should have been. Herb bundles hung at the opening like a warning and an invitation at once.

He frowned at the lack of a door.

She said, “Hinges don’t stop anything that matters. Wards do. And flying claws.” Her eyes flicked up toward the beam line, as if the hawk could hear praise. “Some dare. They usually try once. Then regret it.”

She stopped at the threshold without stepping aside. Not blocking him—just refusing to make the choice for him.

“You can turn around. I won’t chase you.”

“You would,” he said, not believing her.

“I would. But I won’t drag you in either.” She gestured toward the hut’s interior and left the space open.

For a moment he tasted the ease of leaving. The clean relief of making it simple by disappearing.

“…All right.”

Rishi stepped through.

No flare. No spectacle.

The space simply held itself: ordered shelves, jars and bundles, a hearth giving steady heat. Two mismatched stools stood near it, close enough to share the fire. The air smelled of dried herbs and clean earth, river damp kept politely outside.

Maeril invited him to sit.

He did.

Above them, the hawk settled quietly on a beam.

Tea came without ceremony. Simple cups. Steam that smelled of mint and honey.

“Where did you learn to cook?” he asked.

Maeril smiled—at the question, at the fact he had asked it. “Everyone needs food. It’s an easy way to earn a place when you don’t have one.”

The words sat for a beat.

Rishi watched the way her gaze went past him, not far—just enough to touch an old memory.

“I let it become one of my joys,” she continued.

She glanced at her small working desk, crowded with the quiet clutter of practiced craft.

“It taught me the value of practice and creativity,” she said. “Useful skills for an arcane weaver.”

The fire sank lower. Their cups cooled as Maeril spoke about learning magic when she was young—the hunger of it—and then turned the question on him, asking about Lantern Hall like it mattered, like it was more than a place where people went to break.

As they talked, something in him loosened. Then the warmth of being received began to feel familiar, and his stomach tightened.

“I should let you sleep,” he said, bluntly.

“You can leave if you want. But don’t pretend it’s because you’re polite.” Her grin wasn’t cruel. It was accurate. “It’s you trying not to get used to being taken care of.”

His throat tightened.

Not shame.

Recognition.

He let it sit there without wrestling it into a story.

“Drink your tea,” she said. “Then decide what you’re actually doing.”

Her mouth twitched, amused at his discomfort without taking advantage of it.

He drank the last of his cold tea. His shoulders dropped a fraction.

“Should we make more?” he asked. “It’s gone cold.”

She smiled at the indirect agreement and set about warming what she had prepared earlier.

They held silence while the water heated. He listened to the small sounds—kettle, fire, the bead strips shifting when the wind touched them—and let his body understand that, for once, no one needed anything from him.

Maeril refilled their cups, sat back, and let the quiet settle.

Rishi took his cup, but his eyes moved past her shoulder.

The desk in the corner had looked like clutter at first: notes, paper, scrolls, ink, waxed thread, a small knife, a ruler worn smooth at the edge. Now, with the room softer and the fire lower, he saw the order inside it. Pages grouped by narrow strips of cloth. Loose folios stacked beneath a flat stone. Margins marked and marked again. Not spellwork.

Something being gathered.

“Are you writing a book?” he asked.

Maeril followed his gaze.

For a moment, the question did not seem to land where he had aimed it. Her eyes went to the papers, then beyond them, somewhere past the hut’s walls.

“I wouldn’t call it that yet,” she said.

Her voice had gone quieter.

“It’s more a pile of notes that learned how to accuse me.”

Rishi looked back at the desk.

She drew one finger along the rim of her cup, not drinking.

“For years, I told myself it was my wizard mind being unbearable. Wanting a key. Wanting Candlekeep. Wanting to know what sits behind those Emerald Doors badly enough that I kept collecting anything that might become useful.”

A faint smile touched her mouth and vanished.

“Patterns on the bridge. Who comes hungry. Who stops coming. Which guards make people move before they speak. Which children learn to steal bread before they learn to ask for it. What weather does to tempers. What hunger does to choices. What fear does when everyone pretends it is law.”

The fire shifted.

Rishi said nothing.

Maeril’s eyes came back to him.

“But that’s not what I was doing.”

Rook’s name did not enter the room.

It did not need to.

“I was trying to put together something that would tell the rest of the Realms what this city does to its young.” Her jaw tightened once. “All of them I tried to keep alive with bread and soup and bitter herbs. All the ones who still ended up walking toward something they could not afford to refuse.”

Rishi thought of Rook’s hand lifted in front of her.

Don’t.

He thought of the boy walking on his own feet.

Yes.

Maeril looked down into her tea.

“Some of them die,” she said. “Some of them don’t. Sometimes I’m not sure which is harder to watch.”

The room held that.

Not gently.

Honestly.

Rishi set his cup down with care.

“Candlekeep requires a writing of value,” he said.

Maeril looked up.

He nodded toward the desk. “That may be one.”

Her expression changed slowly, as if she had expected mockery, refusal, caution—anything but that.

“It isn’t ready.”

“No.”

“It may never be.”

“Then we begin before it is ready.”

A breath left her. Not quite a laugh.

“We?”

The word sat between them, small and enormous.

Rishi looked at the desk again: ink, notes, witness, bridge-weather, hunger, names that might otherwise disappear.

“Yes,” he said.

Maeril stared at him.

Then the corner of her mouth lifted, relief trying very hard to disguise itself as suspicion.

“Did you just volunteer to write?”

“It is not the worst decision I made tonight.”

Her laugh came out warm and startled, and for the first time since Rook had walked away with the Guild, the room felt less like it was holding its breath.

For a beat they held each other’s gaze.

Then both looked away, as if holding it too long would make it fragile.

“Come back tomorrow,” Maeril said. “And bring your neat monk handwriting.”

“Writing’s not neat. My hands do other work.”

He turned one hand, showing bruised knuckles like proof.

“That’s fine,” she said. “Candlekeep can suffer a little.”