Godsent

They expected Beregost first.

A roof. A gate. Beer, if Maeril had anything to say about it. A room where the ground did not try to climb through the soles of their boots.

The road had been tilting toward town for the better part of an hour. Wagon ruts deepened. Bootprints crossed over one another until no single traveler could be read. The air had begun to smell like country near a market: woodsmoke, damp wool, tilled earth, horses, and the faint sour promise of tannery work carried on the wind.

Maeril shifted her pack higher on one shoulder.

“Another half hour,” she said. “I can almost taste the beer.”

Ṛṣi glanced at the road ahead.

“Close,” he said. “More traffic.”

Above them, the hawk rode a slow circle on the weak afternoon air.

Maeril looked through her.

The world sharpened.

The road became a pale scar through fields worn green and brown. The darker edge of Cloakwood sat westward, all tangled boughs and patient trouble. Ahead, Beregost gathered itself in rooftops and chimneys, with Lathander’s sign catching pale light from a temple tower.

But before the town, at the fork where the Lion’s Way peeled away toward the unseen cliffs of Candlekeep, something else had spread across the land.

Tents.

Not a caravan camp. Too many fires. Too little order. Wagon tilts gutted and made into roofs. Sailcloth patched with sacks. Smoke hanging low because the fires were too close together. Small shapes moving between them.

Too many small shapes.

Maeril came back into herself with a cold tightening under the ribs.

“There is a camp ahead,” she said.

Ṛṣi’s stride changed.

Not faster in a way that looked like alarm. Longer. Decided.

“Soldiers?” he asked.

“No. Families. Refugees, I think.” She swallowed. The hawk circled again, and she let the image settle where her own eyes could use it. “Too many children. Too many low fires. Bad ground.”

He said nothing.

That was answer enough.

They left the last rise and followed the road down.

The smell reached them before the camp did.

Not farm-smoke. Not town-filth alone. The sour heaviness of too many people crowded where water had nowhere clean to go: sweat, old cloth, wet ashes, stale food, mud stirred with waste, and sickness beginning to learn the place by name.

A baby wailed somewhere in the canvas maze.

Someone coughed, deep and tearing.

Maeril’s fingers tightened on her staff.

The Coast Way bent around a shallow depression before rising toward Beregost. The town’s rooftops showed beyond the camp, close enough for the people here to see the walls that had not swallowed them. The Lion’s Way cut away southeast toward Candlekeep and the sea.

Between all of it, the camp sagged in a bowl of churned ground.

“Between town and nowhere,” Maeril murmured.

Ṛṣi heard her.

The camp had grown the way suffering grew when no one claimed responsibility for its shape. First wagons on higher ground. Later tents pushed lower. Bedrolls laid where rain had made the earth soft. Ropes strung from wheel to post, from post to thornbush, holding up cloth that had given up pretending to be dry. A ditch cut too shallow along one edge had become a foul, narrow vein.

“Of course,” Maeril said under her breath. “Put the poorest where everything runs downhill.”

Ṛṣi’s jaw tightened.

Not anger yet.

The moment before it.

As they reached the camp’s edge, he slowed.

Children noticed them first.

Two small faces streaked with dirt stared at Maeril’s horns and green skin. One pointed until the other slapped the hand down with the grave wisdom of a child who had learned pointing could be dangerous.

Maeril smiled at them.

Not broadly. Not falsely.

Just enough.

A woman stirring thin stew watched from beside a low fire. A man with a bandaged hand stopped mending a harness. Someone inside a nearby tent whispered.

“Let’s not walk through the middle like conquering heroes,” Maeril said quietly. “You’ll have people asking you to fix every cough you pass.”

“That is not a problem.”

“I know,” she said. “That is what worries me.”

Before he could answer, a voice cut through the camp.

“Lift, not drag. Lift. Gently, for the Broken God’s sake—no, under the frame, you’ll twist him—there.”

Low. Rough. Carrying without shouting.

Maeril turned.

Ṛṣi had already gone still.

Between two sagging rows of canvas, four exhausted people struggled to carry a makeshift stretcher through mud. Their arms shook. Their footing failed twice in three steps. At the head of the stretcher, boots sunk to the ankles, stood an orc in battered plate and a travel-stained cloak.

He had one broad hand under the stretcher’s frame, steadying what the others could not. A greatsword’s hilt rose over one shoulder.

Beside it, strapped with equal care, was a shovel.

Not decorative. Not symbolic in any polished way. Its blade had been worn bright from use.

On his chest, over steel dulled by weather and work, a brass disk bore a sun half-eclipsed by a horizontal bar. A red cord was tied once around his wrist. Sweat and mud streaked his face. His tusks had been filed blunt. His eyes held the patient focus of someone who had been tired long enough to stop resenting it.

Ṛṣi said his name softly.

“Kargun.”

The orc’s shoulders twitched.

He turned.

For one breath, the camp fell away.

Ṛṣi saw stone under candlelight. A mausoleum. Elisa’s dawnfire burning in a place that had forgotten morning. An orc kneeling in ash, tears cutting clean tracks through soot. A sword laid down on Lantern Hall’s floor like something too heavy to keep carrying. A voice asking, not for forgiveness, but for a different way to live.

Then the mud returned.

The stretcher.

The coughing.

Kargun.

The orc looked at him across the lane.

His expression barely changed.

Only the eyes.

“Ṛṣiśūra,” he said.

He released the stretcher, and the four bearers nearly lost it.

Kargun’s head snapped back toward them.

“Set him by the cart. Higher ground. Then water from the north barrel, not the ditch. If I catch you filling from the ditch again, I will make you drink your own sense first.”

The bearers mumbled and obeyed.

Kargun slogged toward them.

Up close, he smelled of sweat, iron, mud, smoke, and work. The shovel handle over his shoulder had been repaired twice. The leather wrap on it was dark with use.

He stopped a pace away.

“You’re early,” he said.

Ṛṣi’s mouth almost moved.

“For what?”

“Trouble. You people usually arrive after a problem has learned to be dramatic.”

Kargun’s gaze flicked to Maeril. Staff. Circlet. Boots muddy to the ankle. Hawk circling above. Then back to Ṛṣi.

“Passing through?” he asked.

“We meant to be.”

“And the Broken God dropped you here anyway.”

It was not quite a question.

Ṛṣi inclined his head. “It seems so.”

Maeril cleared her throat.

“I’m Maeril,” she said.

Kargun looked at her properly, then gave one short nod.

“Kargun.”

“Yes,” she said. “I gathered. The shovel helped.”

His eyes moved once toward the handle over his shoulder.

“It often does.”

“I saw you once at Lantern Hall,” she said. “You were carrying grain and half a man.”

“Grain was heavier.”

There. A ghost of humor. Dry as bone and just as useful.

Ṛṣi looked past him to the camp.

“What happened?”

Kargun’s face settled.

He answered with facts, because anything softer would have wasted time.

“Floods inland. Bandits on the smaller roads. One village lost its mill. Another its fields. Fever in a third. People moved toward the Coast Way because roads feel like answers when homes stop being one.”

His chin lifted toward Beregost.

“Some got inside the town. Children. Worst cases. Those with coin or kin. The rest stopped here.”

“Why here?” Maeril asked.

“Because no one stopped the first wagons, and afterward everyone pretended the camp had chosen itself.”

She exhaled through her nose.

That, she understood.

Kargun continued. “First wagons took the high spots. Later ones went lower. Rain came three nights ago. The ground turned. Sickness followed the water.”

Ṛṣi’s gaze moved from tent to tent. Too pale. Too hot. Too still. A child lying with mouth open and breath shallow. A man hunched over his own knees, shaking under two blankets. A woman rinsing something in water that should not have touched skin.

“What kills them?” he asked.

Kargun’s jaw shifted.

“Bad water. Fever after. Hunger underneath. Fear through all of it.”

Maeril looked toward the ditch. “Town wells?”

“One shared by permission. Too far for the weak, not enough for the many. The Song of the Morning is stretched thin. They send what they can.”

He did not spit the words.

That made them worse.

“They ration miracles,” he said. “I do not blame them. If they spend all their light out here, someone inside the walls goes dark. Still.”

His eyes moved once toward Lathander’s distant tower.

“Light does not seem to like being asked to choose.”

Ṛṣi said nothing.

Maeril stepped past Kargun far enough to see the camp’s slope. Her eyes moved differently now: not face to face, but line to line. Ground. Water. Smoke. Tent ropes. Children’s paths. Where flies gathered. Where people had decided safety was worth damp.

“This is a bowl,” she said.

Kargun nodded. “That was my thought. Less elegantly.”

“It catches what should be leaving.” She sniffed once and frowned. “Not only runoff. There is a twist in the air.”

“Magic?”

“Badly asked magic, maybe.” She looked back at him. “Someone tried to cleanse this?”

“A young acolyte, I think. Or a hedge-priest passing through. Before I arrived.”

“Of course.” Her tail flicked beneath her cloak. “Someone told the filth to stay politely contained and forgot to tell it where to go afterward.”

Kargun watched her with immediate attention.

“You can see the shape of it.”

“I can smell the stupidity from here.”

“Useful.”

“Unfortunately.”

Ṛṣi looked at the nearest coughing tent.

“When did you arrive?”

“Six days ago.” Kargun’s hand brushed the shovel strap. “I was on pilgrimage. Meant to offer labor at the temple for a tenday. Saw this. Asked to stay.”

“And they let you.”

“They were relieved to let me.” No bitterness. Only recognition. “Less strain on conscience when someone else stands where the overflow gathers.”

A boy ran too close to the ditch. Kargun’s head turned.

“Darvo.”

The boy froze.

Kargun did not raise his voice. “What did I say?”

The child looked at the ditch, then at his own feet.

“Not past the rope.”

“And?”

“North barrel.”

“And?”

The boy sighed with the theatrical exhaustion of the very young. “Mud is not soup.”

“Good. Go tell your sister.”

The boy fled.

Maeril watched him go.

Then she looked at Kargun.

“You have been holding this together with a shovel and threats.”

“And poor theology.”

Then, for the first time, his tiredness showed through the edges.

“I can lift,” he said. “Dig. Keep men from drawing blades when fear makes them foolish. I can stand between two people until their anger remembers hunger is the real enemy. But I cannot see all the flows. Water. Sickness. Magic. Authority.”

His hand touched the red cord at his wrist.

“I have two hands.”

The camp moved around them: smoke, coughs, mud, fretful eyes.

Kargun’s voice lowered.

“Last night I stood on that rise and told the Weight I had reached the limit of what one back could carry. I asked for help that knew how to mend in ways I do not.”

He looked at Ṛṣi.

Then at Maeril.

“I do not presume to say the gods sent you. I do not trust them to be that tidy.”

Maeril’s mouth twitched.

“But the timing,” Kargun said.

He let the rest remain unsaid.

Ṛṣi held his gaze.

A great many answers could have been made from doctrine.

He chose the useful one.

“You asked for more hands,” he said. “You have four.”

Kargun’s gaze moved over the camp: the muddy lanes, the sagging cloth, the thin faces watching with the fragile suspicion of people who had learned hope could be expensive.

For the first time since they had found him, something like relief broke through Kargun’s tired face.

Not enough to soften him.

Enough to show how badly he had needed them.

“Good,” he said. “Then let’s make use of the mercy before it gets ideas about being symbolic.”

He looked at Maeril.

“Tell me where the water wants to go.”

He looked at Ṛṣi.

“Tell me who cannot wait until morning.”

Then he settled the shovel more firmly across his back.

“I’ll keep the camp moving. Tell me where you need me.”