Cadderly blinked away the moisture that suddenly came into his gray eyes. "What are their names?" he asked quietly.
The beggar looked at him curiously for a moment, then his lips curled up in his first sincere smile. "Jhanine, my wife," he answered. "Toby, my son, and Millinea, my young daughter. None have shown signs of my infection as yet," he explained, guessing Cadderly's unspoken question. "I see them rarely - to deliver the pittance I have gained from the guilty arrogants of Carradoon."
The beggar chuckled, seeing Cadderly's blush. "My pardon," he said, dipping into a low bow. "I, too, am sometimes blind, seeing the well and fortunate in a similar light."
Cadderly nodded his acceptance of that inevitable - and excusable - fault. "What is your name?"
"Nameless," the beggar answered without hesitation. "Yes, that is a good name for one such as me. Nameless-akin to all the other Namelesses huddled in the squalor between the towers of the wealthy."
"You hold such self-pity?" Cadderly asked.
"Self-truth," Nameless answered immediately.
Cadderly conceded the point. "I could cure you," the young priest said again.
Nameless shrugged his shoulders. "Others have tried," he explained, "priests from your own order, and those of Oghma as well. I went to the Edificant Library - of course I went to the library - when the signs first appeared."
The mention of the Edificant Library brought an unconscious frown to Cadderly's face. "I am not like the others," he asserted more forcefully than he had intended.
The beggar smiled. "No, you're not," he agreed.
"Then you will accept my aid?"
Nameless did not relinquish his smile. "I will ... consider it," he replied quietly. Cadderly caught an unmistakable glimmer of hope in his dark brown eyes, and saw a shadow appear atop the man's shoulder, a shadow of the beggar himself, gaily tossing a small form - Millinea, he somehow knew - into the air and catching her. The shadow fell apart quickly, dissipating in the wind.
Cadderly nodded somewhat grimly, suspecting the dangers of false hopes for one in this man's position. Suspecting the risks, but not truly understanding them, Cadderly now knew, for he was not, for all his sympathy, standing in the beggar man's holey shoes.
The young priest tore the pouch from his belt. "Then accept this," he said forcefully, tossing it to the large man.
Nameless caught it and eyed Cadderly curiously, but made no move to return the coin-filled purse. Here was an offering holding no false hopes, Cadderly understood, an offering of face value and nothing more.
"I am one of those arrogants," Cadderly explained, "guilty, as you have accused."
"And this will alleviate that guilt?" the beggar man asked, his eyes narrowing.
Cadderly couldn't hold back his chuckle. "Hardly," he replied, and he knew that if Nameless believed the purse would alleviate his guilt, then Nameless would have thrown it back at him. "Hardly a proper penance. I give it to you because you, and Jhanine, Toby, and Millinea, are more deserving of it than I, not for any lessening of the guilt. That guilt I must carry until I have learned better." Cadderly cocked his head to the side as a thought came to him.
"Call the gold a tutor's fee if that helps you to lessen your own guilt for waylaying one as innocent as me!" he said.
The beggar man laughed and bowed low. "Indeed, young priest, you are not like those of your order who greeted me at the library's great door, those who were more concerned with their own failings to cure me than with the consequences of my ailment."
That is why they failed, Cadderly knew, but he did not interrupt.
"It is a fine day!" Nameless went on. "And I pray you enjoy it." He held up the purse and shook it. His whole body shaking in a joyful dance, he smiled at the loud jingle of coins. "Perhaps I will as well. Tb the Nine Hells with Carradoon's stinking alleys this day!"
Nameless stopped his dance abruptly and stood stock-still, eyeing Cadderly gravely. Slowly, he extended his right hand, seemingly conscious, for the first time, of his dirty, fingerless glove.
Cadderly understood the action as a test, a test he was glad he could pass so easily. Without a thought for superstitious consequences, the young priest accepted the handshake.
"I pass by here often," Cadderly said quietly. "Consider my offer of healing."
The beggar man, too touched to reply verbally, nodded sincerely. He turned about and walked briskly away, his limp more pronounced, as though he no longer cared to hide