Spring had come, and with it, sheets of rain as a prelude to the warmth. They jabbed and thrust like cold stingers directed at the will of the wind: sharp, sideways, attacking from the side. The mud sucked at his heels, trying to drag him down into the squelching peat. Myrken Wood had always been a place of mud. Even in the most horrendous summers, when the earth seemed run through with black veins and the soil crumbled at the smallest touch, there were always those rancid patches of wetness ready to stain the tail of his cloak.
He'd worn the White since he was a boy. He'd seen his share of burns and burst boils, had lanced enough of them himself. He'd set bones in twisted legs, put warm hands on a thousand chilled cheeks. Like a gentleman-dancer at a barn ball, he had always counted among his most vital talents the ability to avoid the banners of blood and fluids that accompanied his patients.
But the mud always found his hems, rusting the brightness of the uniform -- Uniform? No, too military, too sterile -- just above his boots.
Always mud. Always in Myrken Wood.
The Broken Dagger was a stifling and stinking place. Men and women there drank to excess, stuffing their gullets full of stringy food thinned and spoiled by the recent famine. Men and women in the tavern were forever less jovial, less thrilled to breathe than he ever imagined. And there, men and women pissed the remainder of their lives off the front porch, breeding the stories that had frightened him to sleep as a boy. Creatures that shuffled and walked without a beating heart. Elves as black as burnt oil. Tall tales with bad endings.
Upstairs in the poorly-lit hall, finding her room was easy enough. The dwarf was a fat bauble sitting in a chair beside her door with heels flat on the floor, prepared to spring. He'd never in his life put eyes upon a dwarf. Upon approach he hailed with an uplifted hand, a bow-legged phantom striding with a gait that hoped it might some day belong to a man.
"Henderson," he said to the stout soldier. "Henderson gave me instructions on where to find this place, the room of one..." Timid hands extracted a sliver of parchment from his trouser-pocket. He unfolded it, squinted at it. "One Lady Egg-ris. Ee-gris? Reading isn't my strong suit. One Lady Egris.
"I'm Jule, one of the attendants at the Rememdium Edificium. May I have a word with her?"