...The ranger's fingers traced the bolt of black-and-jade fabric in the Emerald Market of Cormyr, held between her and the afternoon light. She was leaving the Court, leaving the oaths, and would need clothes that didn't announce themselves. Black alone would mark her as someone fleeing, but black with the green spoke a different language entirely. In the wild, those colors meant she walked between things, belonged to no single faction. The dyer watched her from behind his counter, recognizing the kind of deliberation that came from hard choices. He knew her reputation, the ranger who'd saved a noble's child from goblin raiders, only to refuse payment and disappear into the wood.

In the Silverwood, weeks later, a group of poachers heard the whisper of boots on soft ground and turned to find her standing at the perimeter of a sacred glade, dressed in black that seemed to drink in the forest's shadows and jade that matched the ancient trees themselves. Their weapons felt suddenly foolish, ornamental. One of them whispered about a ghost, about a woman-spirit who guarded the wild. She never drew a blade that night; the colors did all the work. After that, the poachers told a story in taverns from Waterdeep to Suzail. The woman in black and jade who needed no sword to own the forest. Word traveled. Game returned. The Verdant Brotherhood gained a customer who paid in trinkets and left protective wards instead of coin...