The Simbul's Gift (22 page)

“You're sure the little girl won't get into mischief while we're gone?”

“Absolutely.”

The sisters hiked opposite banks of the stream, their mage-trained senses sharp for signs of a struggle—broken branches, dislodged stones, skid marks in the damp moss. They were alert for immaterial clues as well, the faint traces that spellcasting, though the latent magic of the Yuirwood consumed such traces quickly.

Two sets of footprints and—more tellingly—a set of hoofprints marked the place where Bro and his now-confirmed companion dropped the twig into the stream. There were no indications that Bro was other than a willing participant in deception. The horse and the two Cha'Tel'Quessir—both sisters assumed Bro was with another Yuirwood half-elf—had continued upstream, not troubling to conceal their trail.

“Follow them?” Alustriel asked.

Alassra shook her head. “Only if we need to. Open your mind. I'm noticing something very strange.”

As a wizard, Alassra was more skilled than any of her sisters. On a good day and with the wind at her back, she could sense things even the Old Mage missed. At that moment she sensed another corpse, not far from the stream and reeking of magic.

“Yes,” Alustriel agreed after a moment. “A death gone wrong.”

“My thoughts exactly.”

Alassra led the way, readying spells as she walked. Behind her, she sensed Alustriel doing the same. If malice was loose in the Yuirwood this night, it was in for a thorough trouncing. They followed the trail of footprints and hoofprints some hundred paces before it and the sense of unrightness diverged. The Simbul drew no conclusions, but turned away from the marked trail.

Not far into the laurel and briar, they found what they were looking for: a corpse, man-shaped in the moonlight. Alustriel made a misty light and set it hovering over their heads. Alassra covered her mouth—a reflexive human reaction when confronted with deformity and mutilation. The
High Lady of Silverymoon invoked Mystra's name; she cast several lesser spells against evil and one, which Alassra didn't recognize, that would have freed the man's spirit, had it remained trapped in the mangled body. It was the sort of compassion Alassra expected from and respected in her elder sister and that almost never occurred to her.

On the other hand, Alustriel was reluctant to get down on her knees for a closer look, which bothered Alassra not at all. Using the little wand she'd used to probe the Red Wizard corpses in Sulalk, she began her examination. The wand vibrated in her hand, discharging its particular magic and raising a pattern of incomplete tattoos.

“What the—?”

“That shouldn't have happened,” Alustriel said, as much a question as an answer.

“I imagine he said the same thing, or tried to.” Alassra resorted to acid humor as she sat back on her heels.

The corpse, already naked, cratered and broken, took on a new awfulness beneath the wand's glowing magic. Gingerly, Alassra touched it again with the wand, lifting a hank of brittle hair away from its face, revealing two mouths, three eyes, and half a nose.

“A soured shapeshifting?” Alustriel suggested. “Illusion, perhaps, or necromancy, or something begun by a god?”

“Or a failed possession. Tried to swallow something and it swallowed him back.” Alassra used the wand to expose the corpse's blasted abdomen. “Quite a stomachache.”

“How can you make jokes?”

“How can I not?” Alassra stood up. “Someone who might have been a Red Wizard crossed paths with someone who might have been Cha'Tel'Quessir. One of them died, but which one?”

“Both of them, I should think.”

“Then who was walking beside young Ebroin?”

“You think he's with … 
this?
It … it doesn't look recent.”

“Agreed. I'd say weeks, maybe months, if I'd come across it anywhere but here. Here is too close. I don't believe in coincidence.”

Holding her gown carefully away from the corpse, Alustriel at last knelt down to examine it. “If it's not coincidence, there has to be cause. You didn't plan to come here:
Your travel spell yawed. No one could have predicted that, or where you'd come out.” Her hand wove above the corpse as she spoke. The luminous tattoos faded. She laid her bare hand on a malformed cheek. Within moments, her expression changed from puzzled to deeply concerned. “I like this not at all, Alassra.”

“A coincidence?”

Alustriel ignored the jibe. “It
is
old—part of it, at any rate. You said you were displaced in time: Days? Months? Years?”

“Try centuries. Try millennia … several. The stars didn't match.”

“Oh dear.”

Alassra took her sister's hand, helping her to her feet and saying, “I don't like the sound of that ‘oh, dear'.”

“Could anyone have followed you?”

“
I
couldn't have followed me.
You
couldn't—but someone did, don't you think?”

Alustriel nodded, then immediately shook her head. “It makes no sense.”

“Welcome to the Yuirwood, sister. Stay here long enough and you'll get used to it.” Alassra restored the glowing tattoos. Coincidence or not, there was none where the corpse's heart should have been. “It might not mean anything,” she muttered. “That part might be pure Cha'Tel'Quessir. All the other tattoos stop and start. The fact that I can't determine which zulkir marked him might not mean anything at all.”

With nothing more to be done or learned, the Simbul cast fire on the corpse. The sisters stood in respectful silence while hot, blue flames reduced it to a thin layer of ash that would disappear in the next rain.

“This is your forest, Alassra. What do we do now? Head back to the stream and follow that trail in its other direction?”

Alassra resisted the temptation. She was never without an arsenal of magic sufficient to get her—and a sister—out of any trouble she might find by accident, but the spells she had in mind weren't the ones she'd choose if she were actively looking for trouble.

“Bro could be in trouble,” Alustriel said into the lengthening silence.

He could be dead, possessed, or worse. If it were as simple as rescuing one man from a Red Wizard, Alassra would have set after him in a heartbeat. But one man's safety wasn't sufficient reason to go raging through the Yuirwood, not tonight. Ebroin was in the thick of something much larger than himself.

“This wants thorough thinking, sister. It's time to go home and do it,” the Simbul said, expecting an argument. “The gods of the Cha'Tel'Quessir will have to look out for him for a little while longer.”

“And one of those gods is Zandilar.”

Alassra nodded. “A goddess could solve all our problems with cause and coincidence. She must be involved, but after two years, I know precious little beyond what I knew that night when I first heard her name.”

“Have you consulted with the elves?”

“With the Cha'Tel'Quessir. They know the name, but if they know more than that, they—the ones I know the best and trust the most—aren't saying anything. They know precious little of the old Yuirwood.”

“I meant the Tel'Quessir, the sages of Evermeet.”

The Simbul rolled her eyes. “The Cha'Tel'Quessir don't know Zandilar; why would the elves of Evermeet? They'd lost contact with the Yuir elves long before the Cha'Tel'Quessir began.”

“The Yuir had lost contact with the Elven Court,” Alustriel began, using a wise, patient tone guaranteed to set Alassra's teeth on edge.

“Sister, if you know that the damn elven sages know something, then say so.”

Alustriel took a deep breath, drawing herself up to her full height, currently a finger's breadth above her sister. “The Yuir had become decadent. They were divided by petty wars and wracked by disease … by
disease
, 'Las. You know Tel'Quessir almost never become physically unwell unless their spirits are unwell first. They don't talk about it, but I'm certain they know more than they've said and far more than the Cha'Tel'Quessir.”

“I don't suppose you could coincidentally arrange a meeting with them?”

“I think they'd come to Everlund, if I were there with both you and them, in case there were
disagreements.”

Alassra shrugged off her sister's not-so-subtle criticism. “They behave; I behave. They become insufferable; I become insufferable.”

“They're very old and very wise. You must make allowances.”

“I'm getting to be quite old myself, Alustriel, and I don't suffer fools easily, no matter how old and wise they are.” She held out her hands to whisk them both back to Velprintalar.

The room was welcome after the haunted shadows of the forest, though neither woman made a move toward the comfortable chairs. Alassra's eyes drifted toward her tidy bookshelves. After what she'd seen tonight, there were spells she didn't want to be without. There were folk she wanted to speak with, too: Cha'Tel'Quessir whose willingness to trust her with Yuirwood secrets was going to be tested. She made appointments in her mind.

“Will Everlund at sunset, three days from now, be acceptable, or do you want me to ask them to come sooner?”

With a bit of luck, in three days time Alassra could have the whole problem resolved and the meeting wouldn't take place. “Sunset, three days from now, will be ideal.”

Alustriel's eyes narrowed. “Be careful, 'Las,” she advised, as if she'd guessed her sister's plans. “Something happened to the Yuir and it would be bad for all Faerûn if it started happening again. When you talk to your Cha'Tel'Quessir friends, ask them why there are two circles in the Sunglade.”

Alassra demanded, “What about the two—” but Alustriel had gone.

She could have followed her sister to Silverymoon. Perhaps that was what Alustriel hoped. If so, the High Lady was due for disappointment. An afternoon and evening of Alustriel's perfect company was enough. Sooner or later they'd have gotten into an argument, probably about the proper way for a queen to rule her country. No, Alassra would have argued, sworn, and shouted; her sister would have been pained and disappointed and eventually mentioned a need for diplomacy …

In truth, Alassra didn't need to have her sister nearby in order to hear her describe how things were done in Silverymoon. The High Lady never criticized or compared directly, but Alassra was sure Alustriel considered Aglarond to be a chaotic, ill-run realm, completely lacking in
diplomacy
.

“Try being diplomatic with the Red Wizards,” Alassra told her absent sister.

She'd found the spellbook she wanted, had it open to the right page, but couldn't muster the concentration to commit a spell to memory.

“Or the Fangers, or, gods willing, the Cha'Tel'Quessir themselves. Things need to be
done
in Aglarond, not discussed into the ground.”

Thunder shook the tower. The Inner Sea storm had arrived. Alassra could see the rain, backlit by brilliant sheets of lightning, whipping past, but not through, her bolt-hole windows. A score of times each summer, the palace had endured such storms and, mostly, ignored them because, for all their fury, summer storms changed little by their passage.

She was sometimes called the storm queen. She kept Aglarond safe—which was more than any summer storm could claim. But after fifty years, she was still fighting the same enemies with the same strategies.

Perhaps it wasn't that she needed an heir. Alustriel, after all, had twelve and the folk of Silverymoon would have revolted if she'd tried to put one or all of them in her place. Perhaps she just needed a change in strategies. Instead of raging through the Yuirwood like a summer storm, perhaps she should meet with the elves and hear them out. Instead of bashing heads, perhaps she should disguise herself as Cha'Tel'Quessir and discover their beliefs from the inside out.

Fresh from bathing, Lauzoril sauntered across the grassy yard between the estate house and the stables. He entered the stall of a black gelding, whose injured hoof was of some concern to him. His actions, however, once he'd closed the door behind him, had nothing to do with the horse.

With practiced movements, the zulkir fashioned bits of horse bedding into a palm-sized doll. When the twisting and tying was finished, he tossed the straw into the air, imbuing it with a spell that was both enchantment and illusion.

A sphere of red light surrounded the straw; a soft hum, as of a bee within a flower, filled the air. Lauzoril stood beside the gelding's head, whispering ordinary words to keep it calm. Light fell from the sphere like rain, shifted and become opaque. At first it had the crude shape of the straw man; within moments it had become the zulkir's double, casting a shadow, mirroring his gestures until he spoke a word in the old Mulhorandi dialect.