The Simbul's Gift

13

The city of Velprintalar, in Aglarond Nearing midnight, the fifteenth day of Eleasias, The Year of the Banner (1368DR)

Order had been restored to the Simbul's privy chambers at a cost measured in pride rather than possessions, although the thorn branch was gone, crushed to dust along with its crystal case.

That had hurt.

Alassra stood with her back against the doorjamb between her workroom and its antechamber while Alustriel's skilled fingers directed the last of the dust out the open window.

"You are astonishing," Alassra said in a determinedly neutral tone.

"It must run in the family." The elder sister shrugged. "Well, at least you'll be able to find what you're looking for now-for a few months."

"Nonsense. It will take me at least a year before I know where anything is." She entered the antechamber. "Tea?"

Alustriel followed Alassra. A plain clay pot simmered on the brazier. Fruit and a plate of cold, sliced meat sat on a table beside it. The sisters ate in silence, until Alustriel broke it.

"So, tell me, what was a little girl doing here, and why, by Mystra's mercy, did you leave her alone?"

Alassra set down her cup. "Because it seemed like a good idea at the time? I told you: There was a problem in a village. There were loose ends and I had to get them tied up quickly. I intended to be back before now. Cold tea and crumpets, Alustriel! The child was exhausted. I thought I was right, letting it sleep-"

"Her, 'Las. Letting her sleep."

"Don't goad me," the storm queen warned. "The child has seen terrible things. You're the one who says children heal while they're sleeping. She was already asleep. I sang her a lullaby cantrip. I thought it would keep her asleep until I got back."

Alustriel sighed. "Babies. I'm sure I said babies. Babies sleep most of the time, but even they wake up every few hours. That little girl is seven years old; she's not a baby. A lullaby cantrip won't work on a seven year old, not for long anyway. And you left her here, in these rooms! There must be a thousand ways for a child to hurt herself here."

"How was I to know she hadn't been properly raised? If she had, she wouldn't have touched anything."

"Tell that to the Witches of Rashemen!"

Alassra opened her mouth and closed it again.

"We can be grateful," Alustriel continued, "that all Tay-Fay did was open a window. That started the between whirling. I'm surprised you didn't hear."

"I was busy. I made a mistake; I can see that, but the child was here because every adult in her village had died at Red Wizard hands. I was trying to get her, a brother, and a horse set to rights."

"A horse? You haven't said anything about a horse. El's infamous birthday gift?"

Alassra simmered, then cooled. "Yes, that horse, in that village. The wizards found out… Oh, never mind: It's too complicated." Alassra poured more tea. Her sisters didn't know about Lailomun; the family needed a few kept secrets.

"Boesild said there were fresh problems with Thay."

"He told you about Nethra?" Alassra asked.

Alustriel nodded. "Something is different in Aglarond, 'Las. You didn't sense a breach in your own bolt-hole?"

"I said I was busy. If Boesild told you about Nethra, you can understand those corpses took all my concentration."

"Of course. But I noticed a difference as soon as I got here."

Alassra swallowed pride with her tea. "Thayan?" she asked, all but conceding that she'd grown so accustomed to Red Wizard incursions that she no longer trusted her ability to detect a new one.

"I'm not sure. What I felt was wild, like the wind before a summer storm."

They both looked out the window where distant lightning silently streaked the sky above the Inner Sea. At this time of year it was sometimes hard for any wizard to sense the difference between man-made magic and the natural interaction between sunlight and salt water. Then Alustriel said:

"If it bears the mark of anything, it bears the mark of the wilderness. I've felt something similar in the High Forest south of Silverymoon."

"The Yuirwood," Alassra sighed. "Something's rising in the Yuirwood." She'd known that-or she should have-when she first heard the colt's name, certainly when she'd found herself deep in both the forest and the past. Suddenly, talking about children seemed preferable again. "What did you do with the child?"

"Why, you don't even know her name, do you? It's Taefaeli."

"She was asleep! I saw no need to wake her up with foolish questions."

Alustriel had the decency to be shocked and the grace to keep her opinions to herself. "I found a very nice woman in the palace below. She's human, but her mother was half-elf and she's got a brother in the forest. She knows what Tay-Fay needs. She'll help her understand that her brother won't be coming back."

"I know that, but how, by the coruscating frosts of Talimesh, do you know that?"

"Children listen and children talk. Tay-Fay told me about Sulalk before I summoned you. She told me what happened to her parents, in the stable when you saved her brother's life and when she told him that you were stealing his colt, the spell-ride to the Yuirwood, and the look in Bro's eyes when the two of you were bargaining."

"All this time, you've known all that and you've been asking me questions as if you didn't." Alassra smiled. Her teeth showed; she didn't care. "Which one of us do you believe, sister?"

"You, of course," Alustriel said quickly. "But, what drew your attention to this Zandilar's Dancer in the first place? A vision? Who is Zandilar?"

"The Old Mage thinks she's one of the goddesses the old Yuir elves worshiped in addition to the Seldarine pantheon-or, maybe, before them. He's been helping me with the research. I've been trying to get him here, as I'm sure you know. Once I had the colt in my stable, I thought… Well, the infamous birthday gift, as you said."

"You know, 'Las, you truly should think this through. A child, if Tay-Fay's any indication…"

Alassra set her cup down. The bowl cracked; the handle broke. "I have thought this through. I'm not planning to have twelve-" She stopped in mid-tirade. She'd just felt a sharp pain on her scalp, as if she'd plucked out an exceptionally well-rooted hair. She glanced out the window where the coming storm hid the moon and stars. "Cold tea and scones! Sundown. I told him I'd be there at sundown." She glared at her sister.

Alustriel scrutinized the specks floating in her tea. "I thought about it when the sun set. He doesn't want to come to Velprintalar… I assumed you knew. I assumed you were letting him keep his horse."

"Well, you assumed correctly-for now, anyway. He had nothing from Sulalk, not even shoes. I left him a knife and my boots. I was going to take him better kit."

Alustriel was on her feet. "We'll take it now. He'll understand."

Alassra started to object that Ebroin wouldn't understand anything, then abandoned the notion. Alustriel charmed elves; poor Ebroin wouldn't stand a chance. He'd probably agree to follow her to Silverymoon.

"He's in trouble. I gave him a token-a strand of hair. It just broke."

"What are we waiting for?"

The sisters clasped hands. The cozy chamber vanished and was replaced by Yuirwood shadows. They were alone on the bank of a stream-fed pool. Bro wasn't there. There were no signs of a fight or ambush cut into the moss. No indication that any Cha'Tel'Quessir had visited the pool recently.

"You're sure this is the right place?"

Alassra had been transporting herself around Abeir-toril for nearly six hundred years. She wasn't perfect, but her mistakes were few and far between-until now. In two days, two spells had dumped her in out-of-the-way parts of the Yuirwood; the same part of the Yuirwood, unless she missed her guess. The forest had always been chancy for wizards, but only a blind fool would fail to detect the beginnings of a new and ominous pattern.

She opened her mind, searching for a piece of herself. If her senses could be trusted, a strand of her hair was nearby.

"It's the place that drew me. Whether it's the right place-look for yourself."

Alassra hadn't meant for her sister to take her words literally, but Alustriel stripped off her gown and sandals. She dived head first into the dark-water pool, causing Alassra's heart to skip beats until a silvery wreath broke the water's surface.

"He didn't drown."

"There were other-safer-ways to learn that."

"And waste more time, if he was under water."

Alustriel paddled to the side of the pool. Alassra knelt on the bank, offering her hand. The sense that her hair was nearby had grown stronger. Squinting, she caught a glint of silver in an eddy on the pool's far side. Alustriel swam and brought back a forked twig to which Alassra's hair had been carefully attached. She took her sister's hand and climbed onto the bank where she shed a graceful waterfall and was completely-perfectly-dry.

One of the twig's tines was empty, the other wasn't.

"He had help," Alassra decided.

"You gave him a knife. I assume the steel was good enough to cut hair."

"Umm… But what I felt was this end coming loose. This was notched and the strand attached before it was cut and I'd tied it around the arm he favored. He'd need help to perform that trick with his off-weapon hand."

"An extra pair of hands, perhaps, but help?"

"We weren't bargaining," Alassra admitted, harkening back to Alustriel's recounting of her conversation with the little girl. "He blamed me for what happened. He didn't want my help. If he found it…"

"He'd have left your hair, your boots and your knife where you could easily find them. This," Alustriel twirled the twig between her fingers, "floated here. Someone made certain that Bro would be far away when you found it."

"Alustriel, you have a devious and suspicious mind. I like that in a sister."

"I try to keep in practice. Shall we wander our way upstream?"

"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 Faerun 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.