The woman was a few inches short of six feet, and her form was filled with womanly curves the leather armor she wore couldn't hide. Her red-gold hair was bound up behind her in an intricate knot, and the lantern light turned her beautiful features ruddy, though dirt and grime stained them. She carried a long bow slung over one shoulder, a long sword at her hip, knives in her knee-high, cracked leather boots, and a traveler's pack secured high on her back.
"Trust me," Tethys said, "this is a lot quicker work and will pay more handsomely than guarding some fat merchant's caravan from Alagh?n bound for Baldur's Gate, Calimport, or even Waterdeep."
Haarn turned the names over in his mind as he listened.
Baldur's Gate, Calimport, and Waterdeep were all famous cities of the Sword Coast known to him through stories he'd heard as a boy growing up under his father's tutelage. Ettrian Brightoak had been more socially driven than Haarn had turned out to be. Though he had no desire to go see those cities, thinking of them still fired his imagination.
He had yet to see even Alagh?n, the so-called Jewel of Turmish, and it lay within three days' travel of Morningstar Hollows where he spent much of his time. The idea of being in a place that housed so many people was at once exciting and terrifying.
Still, his father's descriptions of the Throne of Turmish, as the city was also known, held fascination, especially when Ettrian Brightoak waxed eloquently-an art Haarn had never acquired-about the history of the city that included stories of Anaglathos, the blue dragon that had ruled the city for a time, or of the Time of Troubles when Malar himself-also called the Stalker and the Beastlord-entered the Gulthmere Forest to destroy the Emerald Enclave.