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took a step closer. “Hey! I said, can I…” the shopkeeper began, then stopped. She looked again and shook her head as if to clear it of confusion. “It’s you,” she finally said.
    “It’s me,” Geran said. “Hello, Mirya.”
    “Geran Hulmaster.” Mirya Erstenwold crossed her arms, fixing him with her sharp, bright gaze. “What are you doing here?”
    “I … I heard about Jarad. I had to come.” He rested his hands on the well-worn wood of the counter and lowered his eyes. “Mirya, I’m sorry. I loved him like my own brother.”
    Mirya said nothing for a long moment. Then she sighed and smoothed her apron. “I know you did, Geran.”
    “Is there anything I can do?”
    “No,” she said. “We buried him last Fifthday, alongside my mother and father. It’s done. You’ve no cause to worry on our account.”
    Geran winced. Once upon a time, Mirya wouldn’t have used such a tone on him. Sometime in his seventeenth summer, he’d finally noticed that the sister of his best friend, a girl who had followed the two of them all over Hulburg and the wildlands nearby, was clever, strong, slender, and graceful as an elf princess … and that something in her eyes danced like sunlight on water when he was around her. She’d been his first love, and he’d been hers. But that carefree girl with the easy smile and the soft laugh was just a memory, just as much as the restless boy he’d once been.
    “He didn’t leave anyone behind, did he?” he asked. “I mean, I don’t remember hearing that he’d ever married.”
    “Jarad was promised to Niamene Tresterfin. They meant to marry at Midsummer.”
    “Burkel Tresterfin’s daughter?”
    “Aye.”
    Geran remembered Niamene—a pretty little slip of a girl, perhaps five or six years younger than Jarad. The Tresterfin farm was a good piece of land in the Winterspear Vale,
    three or four miles north of town. She’d been a young teenager when Geran set out from Hulburg. But it seemed that she’d grown up while he’d been away. Strange how ten years changed such things, he mused. “How is she?” he managed.
    “Heartbroken, what do you think? She and her whole family too. Burkel and his wife liked Jarad a lot, and he liked them as well. It would’ve been a good match.”
    “I didn’t know.”
    “No, you wouldn’t have heard.” Mirya glanced down the counter; the woodcutters were finishing their business with her clerk, who was busy writing out their order in a ledger. Satisfying herself that it was nothing she needed to worry about, she took a deep breath and looked back to him. “Where do you keep yourself now, anyway?”
    “Tantras. A few years back I joined an adventuring band called the Company of the Dragon Shield. Tymora smiled on us, and we won a small fortune before we went our separate ways. My comrade Hamil and I bought owners’ shares of a small trading company, the Red Sail Coster. We buy and sell cargoes in the Vast.”
    “I thought I’d heard that you were living in Myth Drannor.”
    His hand tickled, remembering the feel of brushing dry leaves of orange and gold from Alliere’s midnight hair as she laughed and ducked away from him. Strange that his fingers recalled something his heart had no wish to, he mused. He looked down again to banish the memory from his mind. “I did for a time, but I’ve been in Tantras for more than a year now,” he said. He paused and changed the subject. “Listen, Mirya, I know you said that there isn’t much I can do, but….”
    She crossed her arms and fixed her gaze on him. “You don’t need to worry about me, Geran Hulmaster. You’ve not been home in years, and you’re sure to be on your way again soon. Spend an hour by Jarad’s grave if you feel you should, visit with your family, take a ride in the Highfells if you still fancy the scenery. Then go back to whatever place you call
    home now. You’ve nothing more to do here.”
    Geran retreated a step. Mirya had good cause to be angry with