The Simbul's Gift

21

The Yuirwood, in Aglarond Afternoon, the twenty-second day of Eleasias, The Year of the Banner (1368DR)

Alassra examined both pieces of the arrow the Cha'Tel'Quessir had removed from Bro's side. She recognized it without magic. It came from Thay.

She did use magic on the arrow, swiftly, surely, and without fear that it would be detected. Over the centuries, Alassra had absorbed a number of useful spells-some simple, some not. They'd become as much a part of her as her eyes or ears and when she disguised herself those spells were disguised as well. The ruse would never fool Elminster or another masterful wizard, but in the Yuirwood, among Cha'Tel'Quessir who couldn't cast more than three spells between them, her mind asked questions; her fingers perceived answers as natural as breath, as quick as a single beat of her heart.

The arrow had no magical properties. It had been steeped in a nasty poison that would have condemned young Ebroin to a drawn-out, agonizing death if the Cha'Tel'Quessir hadn't tended the wounds with her knife. The feathered, spiral vanes at its base, so difficult to shape precisely and the reason the Cha'Tel'Quessir thought it had been shot from a god's bow, were the work of a Thayan master fletcher, almost certainly working for a zulkir. With a drop of quicksilver and a sprig of betony the Simbul could have deduced which zulkir but that would have undone her disguise.

Mythrell'aa was the only zulkir with reason to put a slow-poison arrow in poor Ebroin's back and leave his father alive, though that assumed she wasn't trying to abduct Ebroin as she'd taken Lailomun. Trovar Halaern was roaming the nearby forest. He'd find the answer and eliminate the guesses. Meanwhile, the Simbul would get a different sort of answer from the Cha'Tel'Quessir.

"Why would gods shoot an arrow at Ebroin?" she asked the man who'd handed her the arrow.

"Not at Rizcarn's son, at Rizcarn himself, to keep him from leading us to the Sunglade. There are many who wish the Yuirwood and the Cha'Tel'Quessir to remain apart."

The Simbul nodded, silently agreeing with Halaern's opinion: Rizcarn's followers were passionate believers in something no outsider could understand. She pitied Bro who sat in shadows while others stood close and talked over his head. From the carnage in Sulalk to Yuirwood fantasies in one week was a long, tortured journey.

"Our Rizcarn has enemies," a woman assured Alassra. "The Simbul would tear the Yuirwood apart to stop him, if she knew his plans."

The Simbul asked, in her sweetest voice, "Why ever would she do that? When I left Aglarond, the Simbul was the Yuirwood's staunch defender against Thay."

"Aglarond and Thay aren't the Yuirwood. The Yuirwood won't need Aglarond or its queen once our gods are awake. The Yuirwood will swallow the world once it's awake again!" the woman spoke in hushed, urgent tones, sharing some treasured secret.

Alassra nodded. These people weren't searching for the mysterious Cha'Tel'Quessir heritage. These people had taken leave of their senses-which, from a queen's perspective was neither harmless or trivial. Without half trying, the Simbul could think of a score of magical ways to blind ordinary folk or corrupt them, and the Red Wizards of Thay knew them all.

Punctured Ebroin notwithstanding, the person Alassra truly wanted to see was Rizcarn. She was tempted to find her forester, tell him to keep an eye on these lost sheep, and pursue the more interesting quarry herself. She even considered taking Bro with her, but to catch up with Rizcarn, she'd have to heal his son and she'd probably wind up revealing herself in the process. Waiting in the camp while healing him more slowly with subtle magic these folk might readily believe came from the Yuirwood gods, became the more rational option.

As for what Ebroin might think or want, Alassra could see him sinking into despair near her knees. Once he'd seen the arrow that pierced him, seen how close he'd come to dying, he'd stopped feeling lucky.

"Rizcarn's son needs rest." Alassra took a step back from the log, hoping the Cha'Tel'Quessir would follow her. She wouldn't resort to spells if simple persuasion would suffice. "He'll need food, too. We all will. I don't see any fires burning."

Men and women straightened their backs as if startled. They looked around, saw what Alassra had seen and hurried to get the cooking fires going. Purposeful activity, which had been lacking when she arrived, spread through the camp, confirming the Simbul's suspicion that without Rizcarn's presence, the magic that kept his followers together was unravelling.

"Thank you, Chayan," The boy struggled to make himself presentable in clothes that were ragged when they left Sulalk and were slashed, bloodstained ruins now. "They don't listen to me, not truly. I don't think they see me at all. I'm Rizcarn's son, something to be brought along with the baggage until we get to the Sunglade."

Alassra looked through his disguise. Bro was young and unsure of himself, but he wasn't a boy. He'd grown since she left him with a strand of her hair knotted around his wrist. Shock and loss of blood accounted for much of the change, but finding his father must not have been easy. And there was the small matter of Zandilar's Dancer. The horse wasn't in the camp; there were no horse images in the surface thoughts she'd skimmed from the Cha'Tel'Quessir while they surrounded her.

If Bro had lost his horse, that would account for the deep melancholy Alassra sensed around him. She couldn't ask; he had to bring the subject up.

"That shirt's seen better days. Got another one?" she asked, because Chayan wouldn't know he'd left Sulalk empty-handed. Bro shook his head and fussed with his shirt some more. "Never mind, I've got a spare in my kit."

Helping him into it gave Alassra another opportunity to close his wounds with a healing salve. Bro complained of her icy hands, an unavoidable consequence of the salve; she complained that he favored his injuries more than necessary.

"If Zandilar wants me dead, nothing will save me."

"Do you truly think a goddess shot that arrow?"

He stared at his feet; Alassra stared at them, too, and at her boots, scuffed, scratched and muddied almost beyond recognition.

"Everyone else was asleep in the camp, except for the guards and Rizcarn. If I don't believe what they tell me, then I've got to ask myself if I think that my father put an arrow in my back."

So, he had considered that possibility and hadn't gotten around to wondering where she might have been last night-with Trovar Halaern, for an extra day of discussion, and more, but she couldn't tell him that. Instead, she asked, "Well, do you?"

"Rizcarn didn't have a bow. He never was much of an archer, and that arrow, it wasn't a Cha'Tel'Quessir arrow. It wasn't an Aglarondan arrow, either. I never saw anything like it before."

Alassra seized an opportunity. "I have. It was a Thayan war arrow thick enough to pierce lightweight chain mail and spiral fletching to make it twirl as it broke your skin, to make the entry wound bigger. That fletching also slows it down so it's less likely to pop out your other side. Keeps the poison where it's meant to be: inside the victim. It was shot from a short, heavy bow by someone perched in a tree. An easy shot, I'd guess, less than fifty paces, and either a poor archer, or a very good one, to miss your heart by a double handspan."

Bro's eyes were wide and his jaw had dropped.

"I told you, Ebroin, I've fought everyone, everywhere. I won't let you die and I won't let you starve, either." She offered him a journey cake that Halaern's sister, Gren, had baked.

He stared at the flat bread with its bright berry jewels and nuts. Alassra was sure he'd take it, but he turned away instead.

"Not now. Not yet. I've-" He glanced east, where the grass beyond the camp was trampled flat. "I've got to stand and walk before I can eat."

She understood. Odds were, the Cha'Tel'Quessir had been giving him purgatives all day. Alassra got to her feet.

"No better time to start," she offered him a hand up.

Bro got dizzy as he rose and lost his balance. Alassra caught him easily. His face was flushed; he wouldn't meet her eyes. Embarrassment… she hoped. They made their way slowly east, out of the camp. The Simbul offered to leave him alone for a few moments and he blushed spectacularly. Embarrassment, she decided, with no small relief, and headed down slope to the camp stream for water.

Bro, looking seedy, had perched himself on a rock when she returned. Honestly concerned that he might have opened one of the wounds, Alassra ordered him out of his shirt. The wounds were healing nicely beneath their cautery scabs; he'd have a handsome set of scars with which to impress his lady friends, once he stopped blushing whenever a woman looked at him. Since the wounds were exposed, Alassra administered another dose of her healing potion, but what Bro needed more was food and friendship. She offered both in the form of Gren's journey cake.

He took the cake and the Simbul's hand as well, not quite certain what to do with it, but determined not to let it go.

"Put those thoughts clear out of your mind, Ebroin."

The warning was for his own good. If all went well, Chayan of SilverBranch would disappear from Bro's life and if it didn't, she'd seen what loving the Simbul had done to Trovar Halaern. She didn't want to see it again.

Bro ate slowly and in physical silence. His thoughts were another matter. Alassra had all she could do not to hear his entire life and all his adolescent doubts. The turmoil wasn't entirely without useful information. The Simbul caught images of Zandilar's Dancer, a swamp she didn't recognize, and a luminous mist Bro called Zandilar, which had absorbed the horse into the ground.

Interesting. Interesting at the very least.

"You're an orphan, too."

Bro interrupted Alassra's thoughts. She realized she'd been toying with her Cha'Tel'Quessir beads, two of which were smooth and black. It was easier not to have parents when you didn't want to have a past. Most folk wouldn't ask questions, but most folk hadn't lost their mother and regained their father in the past week.

"Long ago. A fire." She kept her stories simple and told them with great reluctance. On the other hand, Chayan didn't know Rizcarn had recently returned from the dead. Alassra seized an opportunity. "I heard you called Rizcarn's son. Did I miss something?"

Bro explained himself, the day he saw his father die, the black bead he'd worn for seven years while he lived in a human village, and his odyssey through the Yuirwood. He spoke in awkward, mumbled phrases. "At first I didn't believe my father could have come back. Then I wondered if maybe he hadn't died. Now I think maybe my father was never truly alive, that he was some sort of forest spirit who came into my mother's life."

The Simbul had had similar thoughts, but kept them to herself. "If your father was a forest spirit, what would that make you?"

"The same as Zandilar's Dancer: something that was born, but doesn't have its own life."

The opportunity she'd had been waiting for: "Who's Zandilar's Dancer?"

"A horse," Bro began and filled in another layer that included the destruction of Sulalk and his encounter with the Simbul. "She wanted to steal Dancer for herself," he told the woman he thought was Cha'Tel'Quessir. "Maybe I shouldn't have stopped her. It doesn't matter, does it? Dancer's gone either way, and I heard Rizcarn shout Zandilar's name after he put an arrow in my back."

Alassra resisted the urge to defend her own actions; she defended Rizcarn instead. "Ebroin, your father didn't shoot that arrow."

"How can you be so sure, Chayan?"

"Because the entry wound is here."

Alassra reached toward Bro's back. He flinched and, favoring his right side, teetered backward on the rock. To keep his balance, the young man had to flail both arms in broad movements that, undoubtedly, hurt. Indignant and simmering, he glared at her through a curtain of dishevelled hair. Undeterred, Alassra clamped a hand on his forearm and finished what she'd been saying.

"The exit wound they made to break the arrow out, is here, two ribs lower. If your father had shot the arrow, it would have been going up, not down, when it entered you."

Bro said, "Oh," and stared at Alassra's hand until she removed it.

Their eyes met, his so filled with hurt and lost innocence that Alassra swore the next time she cast a Cha'Tel'Quessir disguise she'd cross her eyes and cover herself with warts.

"I smell food cooking in the camp." She tried to end the awkward silence. "Let's get ourselves some supper before it all disappears."

"You go. I want to get a drink from the stream."

"The way you're moving, Ebroin, you'll tumble in and drown."

She'd hoped that would be enough to straighten Bro's spine. When it wasn't and he did stumble heading down the slope she hurried to his side.

"I don't need your help."

"Prove it."

Bro did, using his right arm to steady himself as he knelt on the rocks to drink cold, fresh water. Getting up would be harder. Alassra made a show of looking the other way; he'd have to ask, if he wanted help. Her thoughts wandered: Rizcarn awakening the old Yuirwood gods… if the Zandilar she'd glimpsed in Bro's thoughts were a god… the quicksilver transformations of a young man's heart… no wonder she turned to Elminster; the Old Mage knew his own heart… the body sticking out of the brush on the far side of the stream.

The body…?

Alassra rubbed her eyes. It couldn't have been there just a little while ago when she came down to the stream herself; she couldn't have failed to notice a corpse less than a hundred paces away from her nose. Yet one or the other had to be true. From her current vantage the Simbul could see a leg, naked except for a laced buskin, and a blood-covered arm, enough to guess that the body belonged to a man and the man was Cha'Tel'Quessir. She thought of Halaern, then the absent Rizcarn.

And let her thoughts go. Either way, Bro had seen enough of raw death. She'd get him back to the camp, eating supper and sneak back here alone. It would be easier to do her work without witnesses anyway.

"Chayan!"

Another miscast plan: Bro had spotted the body.

"Chayan, look, over there. I think… I think it's a body."

Alassra held out her hand. "It's a body. I wasn't going to tell you."

"You knew?" More disappointment and betrayal.

"I noticed him while you were drinking." She grabbed his arm and hauled him upright. "Are you sure you wouldn't rather go back to the camp. It's not going to be pretty."

"Maybe I haven't fought everyone, but I have seen death, Chayan."

He wrested free and started across the stream ahead of her. Alassra almost smiled: the Bro who'd attacked her three times in the Yuirwood was back.

The corpse had been torn apart by something larger than a bear and more ferocious. Its other arm was missing, along with its heart and the rest of its innards. Alassra laid her hand on Bro's good shoulder.

"Do you recognize him?" she asked very softly.

Bro didn't flinch away. "Lanig. My father knew him. Went looking for him first. He never stopped talking, but Rizcarn trusted him. He was going to dance with Zandilar. He couldn't remember my name; he started calling me Rizcarn's son. At least it wasn't magic or an arrow that killed him, just a bear. I guess he was lucky."

"Right," Alassra agreed, though she read the scene very differently. "I can't carry him alone and you've only got one arm. We'd better go to the camp and tell them what's happened. First you, then this. Maybe we should try to send them home?"

"They won't go. Not unless the full moon comes and goes without Rizcarn leading them to the Sunglade. They believe, Chayan; my father makes them believe. But maybe they'll post an extra watch tonight, if you tell them. You've got weapons and fought the Tuigans; they'll listen to you."

He was more perceptive than Alassra had credited him for. At his age she wouldn't have thought of doubling the watch, wouldn't have understood the delicate balance between weapons and belief.

"What else do you see here, Ebroin, other than a corpse?"

"Other than that? What could be other than that?"

"He's covered in blood-his chest was ripped open and he was gutted-but there's no blood on the ground, none on the leaves, the trees. The ground's fairly soft. You can see where we walked up from the stream. But there are no other tracks. Dead or alive, Ebroin, how did he get here? And when? I didn't see him when I came to the stream myself. Was I blind while I drank from the stream? Were we both deaf while you rested on the rock?"

Bro lifted his right hand, thought better of it, then scratched his scalp with his left. "Magic? Red Wizards? The Simbul? What's left? What do we have that they'd want? We're just some crazed Cha'Tel'Quessir who want to dance in the moonlight. Killing us won't change anything; Rizcarn's not here." Bro stopped and sighed. "It's because Rizcarn's not here. He took Relkath's protection with him."

Alassra didn't ask about Relkath's protection. There were natural creatures in Faerun that could savage a man this thoroughly, but without blood splatters or other signs of struggle, magic seemed a better explanation: a murder disguised as a mauling and concealed by spellcraft. Any Red Wizard old enough to leave Thay could have cast the spells.

"We'd better get to the camp. You should do the talking, Ebroin, if you're up to it. With or without a sword, you are Rizcarn's son. I just got here today."

Bro couldn't replace Rizcarn in the camp, but the Cha'Tel'Quessir listened as he described what they'd find on the far side of the stream and what it meant.

Yongour called three other names; the four of them headed for the stream. Bro moved to follow. Alassra held him back.

"You've done enough," she assured him. "With two holes in your side, no one expects you to carry Lanig's body uphill."

"Before you were telling me to use my arm more. Lanig was no one to me, but he was there when they pulled the arrow out of me; I owe him. He must've died sometime today. Before or after you got here, I wonder. You who've fought everyone, everywhere. You know about Thayan arrows, maybe you know Thayan spells, too. You've been staring at me since you got here, Chayan. Why? Because I'm still alive?"

"Let's go somewhere quiet and talk about this, Ebroin."

She reached for his right arm; he wrested away.

"I don't think I should go anywhere with you, alone."

Alassra tried again and caught his wrist. "I didn't put an arrow in you, Ebroin, and I didn't pop Lanig's heart out of his chest. I'll prove it to you, if I have to, but I'd rather you took my word."

"I want proof."

"Not here. Somewhere private."

She led Bro out of the camp, wondering, as she walked, if he'd be any more convinced of her innocence once he did know who she was. Perhaps the best course would be to summon Trovar Halaern, whose thoughts she could catch through the circlet and who could say, with absolute honesty, that they'd been together last night and this morning and nowhere near the camp.

"We'll start with the simple things." Alassra began, still holding Bro's wrist. "I didn't put an arrow in you because I don't have any reason to. I came to this camp because I'd heard about Rizcarn, your father, and what he planned to do in the Sunglade. When I got here, Lanig told me Rizcarn was gone and Rizcarn's son was injured. So I made myself useful, making sure you didn't die-I know you, Ebroin, I know you better than you imagine and I rather like-"

Alassra got no further in her explanation. Bro's right arm-the one she'd been telling him he could move with confidence-slipped around her waist. Any other time, she would have bounced him off the ten nearest trees for impertinence, but sometimes even the queen of Aglarond took the easy way, wrapping her arms around him and kissing him gently before saying:

"You're a handsome young man, Ebroin. It's very easy to stare."

My lady?

Halaern answering her summons.

Never mind. I thought there was a problem, but I've got it under control.

As you wish, my lady.

He was attractive and his wounds were healing. If she were careful… but, no, she'd break his heart as she'd broken others, or he'd break hers by growing old. Alassra risked a little magic; Bro found himself yawning and interested only in a nap. Next time she came to the Yuirwood, Alassra swore, there'd definitely be warts on her face, a lot of them, plus crossed eyes, and crooked teeth, with great, dirty gaps between them