The Simbul's Gift

24

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

With Rizcarn's return, word had spread among the Cha'Tel'Quessir that they'd be walking tomorrow, the next day, and the day after that. Daytime rest would be infrequent. Nighttime camp would be late and cold. If folk wanted journey bread, they had the rest of day and a night to grind their flour and bake it. A lucky few, the men and women who'd known Rizcarn from before, gathered in the center of the camp to mourn Shali of MightyTree, the mother of Rizcarn's son. Everyone else, including Chayan of SilverBranch, found a flatish stone and a roundish one, then got down on their knees and began to grind.

Grinding took the most strength, and the least talent. Mixing flour, leavening, and water, while not unlike combining the reagents for a spell, required a better understanding of cookery than Alassra had bothered to acquire over the centuries, and kneading dough was a mystery she'd never unravelled. So she ground grain throughout the afternoon: wheat and oats from the packs of Cha'Tel'Quessir who traded with farmers beyond the Yuirwood, wild rice and millet other families grew in forest clearings, and ripe nuts that could be knocked loose from nearby trees.

The Simbul ground whatever they set in front of her until her back muscles screamed. In private, she healed herself, then she ground more, wondering how the men and women who didn't have a pouchful of magic kept themselves fed. Her hands were another matter. Scraping them bloody as she ground the grain between her two stones was inevitable, and healing them was impossible if she wanted to maintain her disguise.

By sundown, when the grinding ceased, there was a little bit of Aglarond's queen in every loaf. She ate her supper-passing on the fresh bread-alone at the edge of the camp, nursing sore fingers, and in a foul mood. Her frayed temper owed more to the weather than her raw knuckles. The wind had shifted to the east-from Thay- hot, heavy, and thick, plastering Alassra's sweaty skin with bitter dust. It did take a weather-witch to know a storm was coming.

The moon and stars hid behind a stifling cloud blanket. A few Cha'Tel'Quessir kept their fires burning. The rest let the embers die once the bread was baked. Like Alassra, they sat, alone and still, watching the mourners at the center of the camp.

The Simbul pricked her finger with her drow sister's knife, adding elven sight to her mage senses. She didn't like what the night revealed. A silver-green aura flickered around Bro's father. She expected to see that aura around the ancient trees and mossy menhirs that were the source of the Yuirwood's protection. She'd never seen it cast by a man-if Rizcarn was a man. Short of seizing him by the shoulders and subjecting him to a wizard's interrogation, the Simbul couldn't decide what manner of creature Bro's father had become.

He was alive. She'd ascertained that with spells from a distance and by subjecting Bro to an examination of his healed wounds that, not coincidentally, allowed her to get close to Rizcarn. If the man had ever been dead, he'd been brought back a long time ago and brought back by a master. Still, Rizcarn wasn't like any other living man she'd met. Their eyes had met and, fearing he had the power to see through her Cha'Tel'Quessir disguise, the Simbul had looked away first.

Alassra couldn't describe what she'd seen and felt without resorting to the word Stiwelen had used in Everlund: wild. The longer she watched from her safe distance at the camp perimeter, the more she appreciated the Moon elf's judgment. There was a wildness in the Yuirwood, a wildness in Rizcarn himself, a quality that couldn't be measured by the civilized words for right or wrong, good or evil.

As the defender of a small pocket of civilization, Alassra considered putting a stop to Rizcarn and his Cha'Tel'Quessir, but as the Simbul she nurtured a similar wildness close to her heart; she waited and watched.

Rizcarn's arms wove the air as he sang a courtship song he must have once sung to Shali. The other Cha'Tel'Quessir in the circle around him couldn't see the silver-green aura, but they felt the magic-especially Bro, oblivious to the sweat streaming down his face, swaying in rhythm with his father's arms as he sang the chorus.

Of course, there was another explanation for the youth's exuberance. Alassra had lost count of the jugs and skins of honey wine the Cha'Tel'Quessir had passed around their circle. Several of the mourners would sleep where they sat. Not Rizcarn; the aura allowed him to drink to no effect.

And not Bro. Alassra herself had seen to that when she examined his wounds. The youth was living fast tonight, thanks to her spellcraft: a self-indulgent, but useful, variation on the warrior's haste spell left Bro's bones moving at an unexceptional speed while his gut digested honey wine at a prodigious rate. He was steady on his feet when he started walking toward the bushes.

Alassra followed him at a discrete distance. Spells notwithstanding, Bro wasn't as sober as he thought he was, and she needed to remind him-with a pinch of salt and a strand of his hair-that he was thirsty and needed water before returning to the mourners' circle. She trailed him to the stream where they'd found Lanig's body and watched, smiling, as he not only drank his fill, but stripped to the waist and sluiced off the sweat.

Bro headed back to the camp, shirt sleeves tied around his waist, with Alassra keeping a quiet distance behind him. She heard a twig break, loudly and not by accident. Bro finished the journey alone.

"Storm's coming," Halaern said from the shadows.

"The question is, when will it get here. The wind's died, but the storm's still in the air. I wonder what's holding it there? Red Wizard magic? The wind's from their quarter."

"The wind," Halaern agreed. Where weather was concerned, he was the expert. "But not the storm. The storm's here, my lady. The Yuirwood doesn't like all this magic."

"All this magic? If the storm's not from the Red Wizards, what magic is there? The Cha'Tel'Quessir baking bread? Rizcarn?"

Halaern shrugged. "Rizcarn and the Sunglade are part of the Yuirwood, but the Yuirwood has many trees. They are not all the same."

When it suited them, the Cha'Tel'Quessir could be as oblique as any Tel'Quessir. The Simbul could mimic their features, but never their thoughts. Her forester had known Rizcarn; the images she'd gleaned from his memories were more accurate than those she'd gleaned from Bro. How well had they known each other? What would Rizcarn say if Trovar Halaern, elder of Yuirwood, walked into his camp, or did he already know he had the Simbul's forester as an outrider? If Halaern wanted to get a message into or out of the camp, Alassra didn't doubt he could do it and right in front of her eyes.

Alassra's thoughts were always her own, but the silence belonged to both her and Halaern.

"My queen, I serve you as I serve the forest. I would not wish to lose your trust, but there are things I cannot explain."

He stood farther away than usual, with more reserve, less affection, calling her his queen rather than his friend. She could guess why.

"Have I lost yours, dear friend? Do you watch me do what you would rather I did not?"

His eyes hardened; she'd touched a nerve. "Ebroin is young. His eyes are open, but he's never seen."

"Until today?"

"I beg you, my lady, have a care for him. You are his first. For him, there will be consequences."

Halaern knew the consequences because he'd lived them. Alassra suffered a guilty twinge for a situation she did not consider her fault, or at least not entirely her fault. "I do not encourage him, Halaern; I did not encourage you. I offered friendship, and it was freely taken. I offered laughter, and that was taken, too. If Ebroin knew who Chayan SilverBranch was, he'd run in the other direction."

"You mistake the value of your friendship and laughter, my lady, and you are never less than beautiful."

"Would you have me masquerade as a sour-tempered crone?"

"No," Halaern shook his head. "I have seen you disguised many times. Whether you are a blackbird or a dead tree, it makes no difference to my heart. I share you with all Faerun and, as the gods will, I will grow old and die before you. I ask only that you have a care for Ebroin."

There were no words to deny the truth. "Ebroin knows a woman named Chayan of SilverBranch. They will have a few days together, a week, perhaps. Then Chayan will vanish. I hope he remembers Chayan fondly, but if she breaks his heart, she will have done it only once and, if she does, may I presume there will be someone older and wiser nearby to commiserate with him?"

"He won't be alone. But I did not come to argue or talk about Ebroin."

"I was hoping you'd come to tell me where Rizcarn's been these last two days. Did he have time to get to MightyTree and back as he claims?"

The forester shook his head. "Not walking. If he used magic, though, anything is possible. The Rizcarn I knew was no druid, but the Rizcarn I knew isn't sitting in that camp up there. My forester is still on her way to MightyTree. When she returns we'll know more. Just as well, though, that Rizcarn has returned and the Cha'Tel'Quessir will walk tomorrow. The Red Wizards are restless in their cold camps. They're tired of hiding and seeing what we intend them to see; they've started exploring. They can scarcely follow a trail that's blazed with fire crystals, yet eventually they'll blunder into each other and I do not think that is anything we want to see in the Yuirwood."

Alassra nodded. "You think right. What of the solitaire following Rizcarn?"

"The solitaire didn't follow Rizcarn, my lady," Halaern's expression became one of pain and distress. "They were never seen on any of the known paths. When Rizcarn arrived earlier, I backtracked his trail myself. His footprints were clear on the stream banks, but a little further, they were gone. Rizcarn could do that, but not the solitaire. The solitaire was city-bred, like the rest of the Red Wizards. Even with magic they can't conceal themselves, and there was no sense of Thayan magic."

The Simbul's ageless heart skipped a beat, not because the solitary wizard had disappeared: after the corpse she and her sister had found, she was not surprised that Rizcarn had returned alone. Halaern's reticence-telling her about the solitaire only after she asked the necessary question-troubled her. "I would have liked to know that first, Halaern. Red Wizards gone missing in the Yuirwood interests me more than the weather."

"I know," he said, his own concern evident in his soft, flat tone. "It took me much longer to backtrack Rizcarn's trail, as well. Rizcarn knows the Yuirwood, my lady, and makes full use of his knowledge. He made certain no one-no Cha'Tel'Quessir-would know which way he'd come. That was what I meant to tell you when I saw you following Ebroin to the stream just now. What I said, it is all true, but it wasn't what I meant to say. When I saw you together, I became foolish. The weather. A hanging storm brings out the worst in a man. It's brought out the worst in me. It won't happen again."

"You judge yourself too harshly, Halaern, and make promises you may not keep. You told me the storm was the Yuirwood's way of defending itself. You implied, very carefully, dear friend, that someone is keeping that storm up in the clouds. Are you also implying that someone could sense a moment of weakness and use it to distract you?"

Halaern gave the matter a moment's thought. "Not Rizcarn, my lady. He can hide in the forest, that's all, and he has charmed those who follow him, but Rizcarn always claimed to serve Relkath of the Infinite Branches."

"The Old Man of the Yuirwood."

"I have never heard Relkath called that, my lady, but Relkath-I do not think it is wise to awaken the old ones. I never have. As a god, Relkath is like the weather, the only thing a man knows for certain is that it will change. I would sooner invite one of your gods into the Yuirwood."

That could not have been an easy confession. Alassra reached out to him. "Give me your hand, dear friend."

"My lady?"

"I don't want you getting foolish or forgetful again." When he hesitated, Alassra planted her fists on her hips. "I will not compel you, Trovar Halaern," she said, which meant just the opposite. To protect her forester and the Yuirwood, the Simbul would do whatever she judged necessary. She'd live with her conscience. It had proved quite flexible, quite adaptable over the centuries. But Alassra's conscience would lie quiet. Halaern held out his hand. She noticed he had removed the ring she'd given him.

"My lady, I gave it to Gren," he explained. "She has more need of it and I was uncomfortable with so much magic."

"Like the Yuirwood. Better the discomfort of magic you know and trust, dear friend, than the influence of some other kind."

The Simbul cast three spells in quick succession. The first one fizzled, reminding her that the Yuirwood resisted magic; the second, identical to the miscast spell, protected Halaern against the more common magical insults; and the third hid the second.

Sometime after midnight she'd need to go off by herself and study the deerskin pages of her spellbook to restore to memory the spells that she'd cast during the day. In the meantime, the air was lifeless. Each breath numbed the lungs and filled the mind with morbid thoughts. Alassra released Halaern's hand. He retreated an arm's length and more. She wondered if, after half a century, she'd finally lost him.

"Lie low, dear friend," she advised. "There's melancholy and worse afoot tonight. Have a care for yourself."

"And you, my lady."

He turned and was quickly swallowed by the Yuirwood where even drow eyes couldn't follow him. Alassra drank from the stream and sluiced her skin. She was sweat-slick again before she returned to the camp. The stifling air had defeated the Cha'Tel'Quessir mourners, even Rizcarn. His aura throbbed dully as he plodded out of the camp. The Simbul let him go. Halaern would find him, if he was meant to be found, and she'd know if Halaern needed her: the spells she'd cast would see to that.

Ebroin waited beside the blankets they wouldn't need tonight, except as protection from the gnats and blackflies. Insects had emerged from hiding once the wind died. The camp echoed with grunts and slapping.

"Storm's coming," the youth hailed her as Halaern had.

A shiver raced down her spine, followed by beads of sweat. The full moon couldn't come soon enough for Aglarond's queen. "Did the mourning ease your heart at all?"

He shrugged and winced, favoring his right side. "I said good-bye to my mother… and my father. It was strange, with him sitting beside me. I drank more honey wine than I've ever drunk; all it did was make my heart beat fast. Everything seemed slow around me. I heard the silences between words louder than the words themselves."

Alassra slapped a blackfly and felt it die beneath her hand. Halaern wasn't the only distracted and forgetful person in the Yuirwood. She was accustomed to heightened senses; she'd forgotten the side effects her spell would have on Ebroin. "Did the silences help you mourn?"

"They don't bother me anymore. My side does. Do you want to look at it?"

She did. Between the honey wine and the haste spell, Bro's body was in turmoil. The Simbul had already had one spell go awry. She judged it wiser to leave Bro unhealed until morning. He expected more and turned surly when she kissed him chastely on his cheek.

Alassra set aside her better judgment and sent him to a dreamless sleep with a spell. Then she left the camp and stared at her spellbook until dawn. Even the simple things came hard.

The wind came up with the sun. The sky brightened to a gray glare; the storm still hung high, unable or unwilling to descend. Only Rizcarn seemed unaffected by the stifling weather. He gave the order to break camp and harried everyone until all the Cha'Tel'Quessir were moving.

Chayan stayed close to Bro, who wanted nothing to do with her. She kept the Simbul's eye on the forest. The Red Wizards were out there, one could only imagine the effect this weather was having on their notoriously brittle temperaments. One could only imagine the power of the storm when it did break loose. Green leaves fell like autumn as the Cha'Tel'Quessir trudged east following one of the trade trails. Living branches snapped and were swept to ground. One man was struck by a tree limb. He fell and broke his arm.

If that were the worst injury they carried out of this day, they'd be very lucky.

Rizcarn would have marched them all day without rest, but noon found everyone flagged and slouched on the ground. Bro was pale. He leaned against a tree, holding his side with his eyes tightly closed.

Ignored as she approached, Alassra touched Bro's arm to get his attention. "I'll take a look at that again."

Sullen and graceless, Bro pulled off his shirt. Alassra didn't need magic to see that something was wrong. The cautery burns were raw again and weeping blood; the holes were swollen and nearly black. The one in the front showed a fresh gouge where he'd cut it with her poison-proof knife.

"You did your best," he said, fitting his arm into the sleeve again. "It doesn't hurt… much."

"Did I say I was finished?"

"I did, Chayan." He glowered at the hand Alassra laid on his arm. "Let go of me."

The Simbul was going to heal him, with or without his permission, fully and unsubtly, but without an audience. She'd charm his will, if she needed to, to get him away from the other Cha'Tel'Quessir. "They need cleansing, Ebroin. At least let me wash them. There's a pool upstream."

"No. Not again."

"Ebroin-" Alassra readied a mild compulsion.

He relented before she had to use it and sat miserably on a rock while she poured clear water over his burns.

"It would be easier if we were in the water."

The spell Alassra wanted to use, a spell of her own devising that converted the raw magical power of wizardry into healing, would be easier to conceal if they were both up to their necks in water.

"No."

"Well, I'm getting in the water. It'll be cooler and maybe drier, too."

"As you-"

Alassra kicked off her sandals and leapt into the pool. She hit the water like a rock and drenched Bro where he sat.

— "Wish." He swiped his hair one-handed and started to walk away. "I'm going."

"Ebroin, behave yourself. Those holes of yours need cool water. Lots of it. Get over here."

"Or what? You'll cast a spell on me?"

"I might, Ebroin. You never know. I might have to do all manner of things, but all I want to do is get the fire out of those wounds of yours."

The Simbul had seen more enthusiastic criminals on their way to the Velprintalar gallows, but he came, took off his boots-her boots-and his belt-with her knife on it. He stood on the rock and stayed there. She hooked an arm behind his knees.

"Oh, Ebroin," she complained as she pulled him into the water. "You're enough to make a grown woman cry."

While Bro struggled, Alassra loosed the spell that Elminster-with his usual flair for overblown language- nicknamed the synostodweomer. The water churned around them and glowed with rainbow colors. On the bank, a willow tree became an incandescent torch that flashed and died in an eye blink. Whatever one called the spell, it wasn't subtle, but it was effective, and exhausting.

Bro was stunned. Alassra held him upright in the water and caught her own breath.

"What happened?" he murmured in her ear.

He wasn't the only one asking that question. The Cha'Tel'Quessir, with Rizcarn leading them, were coming.

"Relkath protects," Alassra told them. "He sacrificed a tree to heal your son's wounds."

She pushed Bro toward the bank where Rizcarn grabbed an arm and hauled him out of the water. Front and back, puckered scars marked where the arrow had pierced Bro's hide. The cautery burns were smooth skin a few shades darker than the rest of him. Rizcarn himself was awed and speechless.

"Relkath protects," Alassra repeated the phrase she'd heard often enough around the camp. "Zandilar didn't want your son to die."

One by one, the Cha'Tel'Quessir touched Bro's scars. Several of them collected ash from the cindered willow. Bro helped Alassra climb out of the pool. He waited until she'd wrung out her shirt and retied her sandals before asking:

"What truly happened back there? What did you see?"

"Me? I closed my eyes, Ebroin. You tell me, what did you see?"

"But you said-"

"I lied. You were healed. Does it matter who did it or how? Let it be Relkath, that's what Rizcarn and the others want to believe."

They trudged another hundred paces in silence.

"I thought it was you, Chayan. I thought I felt magic pass from you to me."

"Nonsense, Ebroin," she said, though that was precisely what had happened. "A sell-sword like me, making trees explode? What do I look like, the Simbul herself?"

"No. Of course not. It's just… Chayan, I'm not myself. I don't know me anymore. But I–I could more than like you, Chayan-if I thought you cared."

"Oh, Ebroin, I care. I care very much, but I'll move on, too. I don't stay in one place very long."

"I guess that's what Rizcarn told my mother."

Alassra slipped her hand around Bro's. "There's a time for thinking about tomorrow, Ebroin, but it's not when there's a hanging storm over your head."

They walked through a sultry afternoon where the only breeze was the hot breath wafting from their lungs. From time to time, Alassra glimpsed Halaern or another forester pacing them in the near distance. Like them, she kept her senses honed for Red Wizard activity. Spread out and nearly mindless, the Cha'Tel'Quessir were vulnerable to attack, but none came. The Thayans were taking their cues from Rizcarn, following him to the Sunglade along with two-score Cha'Tel'Quessir.

Sunset was a smear of hot-forged steel on the western horizon. Night was black and marked by whiplash winds that came without warning. Halaern could have said whether the storm had followed them as they walked or whether it was as large as the Yuirwood, but Halaern wasn't available for conversation. Alassra knew only that it had been hanging for a full night and day: longer than any summer storm in her memory.

Rizcarn kept them walking. Alassra cut her finger on her sister's knife and kept pace with the Cha'Tel'Quessir. She wondered how the Red Wizards were faring, but not through any misplaced compassion. Though there were spells that would give a human man or woman elven vision for a night, there was a good chance that they'd do something rash if they thought their quarry was getting ahead of them. Even if it were Mythrell'aa herself pacing them, the illusionist was surely traveling with a wizard who could cast the invocation spell for lightning into the hanging storm to bring it down on them all.

Alassra's worst fears seemed confirmed when the winds intensified and pummeled the Cha'Tel'Quessir from every direction. Thunder began, not as ear-splitting cracks but in long, low-pitched rumbles. The sky stayed dark; lightning hadn't yet broken free.

Three steps farther, and Alassra stopped. Lightning was her favorite death spell. When she cast it, the white-hot bolts were met and balanced by a counterthrust from deep within the soil. That force was building under her feet. Looking into the trees, she glimpsed ghostly blue fingers rising from the topmost branches.

The trees of the Yuirwood and all the life beneath them were about to get caught in a battle between the sky and the ground. Alassra threw aside her bow, her arrows, her steel-headed spear and unbuckled her sword belt: She touched one of the studs on her shirt. Her finger healed and the forest went dark.

"Get down!" she shouted in a voice that carried over the wind. "Lie flat."

She might as well have told them to pray to Relkath. When the first bolt struck, a pine tree burst into flames. The second bolt struck an oak. A branch bore the bolt to the trunk, the trunk carried it to the ground where it spread out like a spider's web. Alassra felt it pass beneath her feet, then the thunder fell down on them.

There was panic among them as the Cha'Tel'Quessir ignored her advice, and perhaps just as well. The burning pine collected three more bolts in blinding succession, then it sprouted arms and hurled fire to the ground. Alassra had no time to wonder if she faced a monster summoned by the Red Wizards or something created by the Yuirwood. She shed her Cha'Tel'Quessir disguise and hurled a lightning bolt at its heart, drawing all its fury to a single target: herself.

The Simbul met lightning with lightning, fire with fire, all the while trying to maintain a protective shield around those Cha'Tel'Quessir who might still be alive beneath the battle. As with so many wizardry duels, there was no question of wounding her foe. She strove for annihilation, though if her own defenses wavered, by Mystra's mercy she would escape a similar fate-unless she consciously chose to die.

That thought was never in her mind during the few score moments that the battle raged. It couldn't be, not until sheets of black rain put a stop to the fighting by transforming the creature of fire into a collapsing mass of smoke and ash.

Exhausted and undisguised, Alassra caught her breath in the aftermath. In nearly six hundred years of wizardry, she'd never felt so impotent. The rain had quenched the monster, not her, not all her magic. She'd never touched it. If it were the native force of the Yuirwood, then no wonder the elven sages worried. If it were something new from Thay, then all the gods of Faerun were at risk.