Calain looks up at Alexander, his eyes glaring, his face spattered with drow blood from his dagger. He laughs.
"You're happy that 'I'm fine,' eh? You want my 'input,' think it would be 'appreciated?' Don't presume to think that I have any interest in helping you or any of your motley little band here. I am here for this sole reason: a complete stranger is using extortionist tactics to make me raid a temple of a god whose clergy have never wronged me, to retrieve something for an idiotic woman who mocked me and made a similar mockery of one of the finest men I've ever known. I am here to serve a single-minded purpose, and that is to play back-up wet nurse to a bunch of incompetent fools who don't have the slightest scrap of common sense or intuition necessary to question their own circumstances. You speak of plans for the next time we're attacked? Cheerfully? As if it's some sort of chess game? You people make me sick. People died today. It matters not whether their cause was for or against us. Three of us were almost killed, including myself. You have about as much cohesiveness as a group of drunken kobolds in a snowstorm. You say that you are pleased to see me wake, that you value my opinion, and yet where were you when I lay there bleeding to death? Where were any of you? Good question. So go on and say your pretty words and make your pretty plans, and know that they mean nothing to me, and they will mean nothing when it is you that has the sucking hole in your chest, and you feel the air slip from you as the blood fills your lungs...tell me about your plans then, about your little game, and then I'll listen. If you can. Now leave me alone and go play with the other children."
Calain closes his eyes.
"You're happy that 'I'm fine,' eh? You want my 'input,' think it would be 'appreciated?' Don't presume to think that I have any interest in helping you or any of your motley little band here. I am here for this sole reason: a complete stranger is using extortionist tactics to make me raid a temple of a god whose clergy have never wronged me, to retrieve something for an idiotic woman who mocked me and made a similar mockery of one of the finest men I've ever known. I am here to serve a single-minded purpose, and that is to play back-up wet nurse to a bunch of incompetent fools who don't have the slightest scrap of common sense or intuition necessary to question their own circumstances. You speak of plans for the next time we're attacked? Cheerfully? As if it's some sort of chess game? You people make me sick. People died today. It matters not whether their cause was for or against us. Three of us were almost killed, including myself. You have about as much cohesiveness as a group of drunken kobolds in a snowstorm. You say that you are pleased to see me wake, that you value my opinion, and yet where were you when I lay there bleeding to death? Where were any of you? Good question. So go on and say your pretty words and make your pretty plans, and know that they mean nothing to me, and they will mean nothing when it is you that has the sucking hole in your chest, and you feel the air slip from you as the blood fills your lungs...tell me about your plans then, about your little game, and then I'll listen. If you can. Now leave me alone and go play with the other children."
Calain closes his eyes.