Brimstone Angels Read Online Free PDF

what he might have done if things were a little different—
    “Is something troubling you?”
    Brin looked up at the man sitting beside him, who had also paid the cart’s owner to carry him to Neverwinter.
    “No,” Brin lied. “Just thinking.”
    The man was a Calishite, perhaps in his forties or fifties, slim and muscular. The threads of gray in the man’s hair might as well have been ornaments and the crinkles in his brown skin, paint for all he wore his age. He smiled, one corner of his mouth crooked by a small scar where something had once cut the skin deeply. Brin wondered how someone came by a scar like that, and his eyes strayed briefly to the chain the man wore wrapped around his waist like a belt.
    The man gave Brin a look that Brin was accustomed to getting from adults, down his broken nose, as if the man knew very well that Brin was lying. He nodded at the flute Brin wore tucked into his own belt. It was the only thing Brin had taken that he didn’t strictly need. It had been his father’s.
    Brin’s hand tapped the holes of the flute.
    “You seemed nervous,” the man said. “Do you play?”
    “Oh,” Brin said. He set his hand back down on the cart bed. “Yes.”
    “But you’re not a musician?”
    “What makes you say that?”
    The man shrugged. “You haven’t played it once since you joined us in Waterdeep. In my experience, someone who depends on their skills to eat doesn’t give them a chance to get rusty.” He smiled again. “You’ll have to forgive me. There’s not much to do on this stretch of the road but observe each other. I’m called Tam.”
    “Brin.” Whatever other attributes Constancia and the rest of their family had tried to impress onto Brin, they had succeeded in making him curious about other people and observant enough of the minor details that hinted at a whole. His eyes dropped to the silver pin onthe man’s shoulder—a pair of eyes surrounded by seven stars. The symbol of Selûne. Another pin sat below it. But it was pinned from the inside of his cloak. Curious.
    Tam followed his gaze. “Suppose the game’s a little duller if I wear my profession on my sleeve, hm?”
    “Suppose so,” Brin said. “Do you like being a priest?”
    Tam studied Brin for a moment, as if he were trying to divine whether Brin was making conversation or if he was really curious. Brin made himself stay quiet—let him guess.
    “It’s a calling,” Tam said finally, “and it suits me. Mostly.”
    Which, as far as callings went, sounded like a decent set of cards to be dealt in Brin’s opinion. Maybe the Moonmaiden was a more generous mistress than most.
    “What doesn’t suit you?”
    Tam leaned forward. “Traveling,” he said in conspiratorial tones.
    Brin smiled because he was supposed to—the pin might be the mark of a Selûnite, but the spiked chain that looked older than Brin had nothing to do with the Moonmaiden and neither did the canny look in Tam’s eye. At least I’m not the only liar in this wagon, he thought. He wondered if the priest realized his little game of observation went both ways.
    “Aren’t you a little young to have fled Neverwinter?” Tam asked.
    “Not me,” Brin said. “My parents.” The parents had been part of the story since the beginning—they were his ticket to Neverwinter.
    “Ah,” Tam said. “Of course. Where did they head?”
    “Darromar,” Brin said, the same city he’d told the wagon driver. Before, it had been Westgate and before that Yhaunn. Later, he thought, he might say Waterdeep—a city big enough that even if he met a Waterdhavian, they wouldn’t bat an eye if they didn’t know the same people or the same areas.
    Lying out in the world was easier than lying at home—for one, nobody here assumed Brin
was
lying when he opened his mouth, and nobody criticized his lies once he told them. The tricky part was keeping his story straight when he had to keep changing things.
    “Oh?” Tam said. “I lived in Athkatla for some