The Simbul's Gift

25

The Yuirwood, in Aglarond Before dawn, the twenty-fourth day of Eleasias, The Year of the Banner (1368DR)

Bro sat where he'd fallen when the storm started, knees drawn up to his chin, trying to take advantage of the shelter a shoulder-high cedar provided from the wind and rain. He was soaked to the bone and shaking, as much from memories as from the cold. From the first thunder crack he'd relived the nightmare of Sulalk while the nightmare of the Yuirwood played out above him. His throat was raw. He'd screamed himself hoarse, but he didn't remember making a sound, didn't remember anything except mindless, endless terror. There might have been a man, tall as a tree and formed from fire, hurling flame and lightning at the Cha'Tel'Quessir. There might have been a woman, too, standing with the Cha'Tel'Quessir, shrouded in silver who fought with fire and lightning of her own.

Zandilar.

Zandilar, who'd first come to him when he sat beneath a Sulalk tree, seducing him with promises of the Yuirwood. Zandilar, who'd taken the colt into the ground. Zandilar, who'd surrounded him with soft light when there was a Thayan arrow in his back. Zandilar, who, according to Chayan, had healed him in a deep-water pool.

Once Dent said the worst thing that could happen to a man was that a god took an interest in his life. Bro had dismissed his stepfather's remark as typically shortsighted, typically human, typically Dent. The Cha'Tel'Quessir were different; their gods were different… better. Of course, he'd been younger then, a least a month younger. Beside the cedar tree, Bro admitted to Dent that he hadn't known what he was talking about. Everything had been simple while he'd lived among humans, dreaming of the Yuirwood.

Nothing was simple now, least of all, the Yuirwood gods.

When Bro thought about it, there was a third layer of nightmare in his memory, between Sulalk and the loud, fiery battle he'd just survived. He'd seen the flaming man before, not as tall and not in flames, when he'd cowered behind the Simbul in an out-of-place, out-of-time part of the forest. The Simbul was someone Bro tried not to think about but, like Zandilar, she'd taken irreplaceable things from him and also saved his life with lightning.

Bro wondered-without wanting to-whether there was some connection between Zandilar the Dancer and Aglarond's queen, some reason that they would both want a twilight-colored colt or would do battle with the same enemies.

Such thoughts left Bro more uncomfortable than the waning storm. He raised his head and looked around.

The wind was down to a damp breeze. Rain fell in slow, soft drops from the trees rather than like stones from the sky. Above the trees, the moon-a crescent shy of full-chased away ragged clouds. Bro wrung out his hair. He stood slowly, half-expecting something new and terrible to happened when he straightened his back. His ears hadn't been deafened as they'd been at Sulalk. He could hear the dripping trees… the faint, infrequent moaning of wounded Cha'Tel'Quessir.

"Chayan? Rizcarn? Yongour?" Bro didn't know the names of the other Cha'Tel'Quessir his father collected. He'd refused to learn them because they hadn't learned his. "Anyone?"

He heard a moan and saw someone trapped beneath a fallen tree.

"I'm coming!"

Bro grabbed a tree limb. It came apart in his hands. He held the broken piece in the moonlight. His mind made sense of what his eyes saw: not a tree limb, but a Cha'Tel'Quessir limb: an arm, charred stiff at the elbow and wrist. Bro didn't so much drop it, as let go and retreat. He gagged bile and forced himself to look at one corpse burned beyond all recognition and at a second that he'd thought-wrongly-had been the source of the moan.

It was Sulalk again, Shali and Dent again, Lanig again, and Bro was stretched beyond his ability to accept what he saw as the truth. He dropped to his knees, then curled forward, hands holding his head down and against the ground. His eyes were open; no tears flowed. His mouth was open; he could neither retch nor scream. Aching with pain his body couldn't feel, Bro made himself small and prayed for the nightmare to end.

"Ebroin. Ebroin, listen to me. Come around, Ebroin."

Chayan's voice, her hands between his shoulders, urging him to sit up. She had her sword still, the spear, bow, and arrows were gone.

"No. Go away."

"I can't. I need your help, Ebroin. Come around. Look at me."

"Leave me alone. I want to die."

"No, you don't. Look at me, Ebroin."

Chayan got her hand beneath Bro's arm. She dug her fingers between his healed ribs. He flinched; that was all the leverage she needed to get him sitting upright again. Then her hands surrounded his jaw. Her thumbs pressed against his cheeks.

"They're all dead, Chayan!"

"Not all of them, not you, not me. You can't help this one, but there are others."

She pulled Bro to his feet. When she let go, he looked down-by accident, to avoid looking at her. Everything was as it had been: two corpses, one completely charred, the other bloody and torn. When he started to shake, Chayan slapped him hard. Bro's arm came up to return the blow. She seized his wrist.

"Later, Ebroin."

"How-?" Bro asked, but he knew the answer. Anger had restored him, if restored was the proper word. A chasm loomed between him and what he saw when he looked anywhere in the moonlight. There were the unlucky ones, the ones who hadn't survived. Bro didn't want to join them, but he wasn't grateful, either, to the woman who'd opened the chasm. "Don't you see? Don't you care? Or have you seen worse, fighting everyone, everywhere?" He made the question scornful.

"I have, Ebroin. You don't want to imagine what I've seen. And I still care. When we have done what we must, then I'll sit and weep and fold my arms over my head, just like you."

Still holding his wrist, Chayan led Bro across devastation. Trees were down, burnt or toppled outright, leaving muddy craters. There were more bodies, charred, blasted, and in pieces. The scents of death, charred wood and burnt flesh, hung in the air despite the breeze.

"How many?" Bro asked. "How bad?"

"Thirteen dead. Thirteen that I can find. Thirteen alive, counting you and me. The rest are…" Chayan swept her free arm in front of them. "The rest are missing, including Rizcarn."

Bro stumbled. It was inconceivable that his father-his once-dead father-hadn't survived. Or maybe, not so inconceivable. Maybe Zandilar had taken Rizcarn into the ground along with the colt, leaving him and twelve others alive… as a warning: Don't anger the Yuirwood. Don't go to the Sunglade.

The other survivors, hollow-eyed and silent, sat in the lee of a large toppled tree. They looked up at him. Bro imagined Chayan had collected them all and wondered, when she released his wrist, why she'd collected him last. One said, "Rizcarn's son," as he sat down. He said nothing; even now, he wasn't one of them, wasn't a person in their eyes.

Chayan scrounged wood; Bro didn't ask where. She laid a fire. If the decision had been his, Bro would have said he'd never want to see flames again, but Chayan didn't ask. The gently crackling tinder and firefly sparks widened the chasm between death and survival. One of the men began to weep. One of the women took out a broken loaf of journey bread. Bro's share of the baking, tied up in the remnants of his Sulalk shirt and slung from his belt, had become a sodden lump he wasn't hungry enough to eat.

Chayan appeared at Bro's side. She offered bread from her own pack before saying, "We must search for your father."

Bro looked at the destruction surrounding them. He thought of the missing Cha'Tel'Quessir, and that missing meant worse than dead, worse than cindered. Missing meant burst into pieces too small to find.

"Why look? Why not assume he's dead, instead of looking for a bit here, a bit there? Say the wizards got him and say we're lucky they didn't get us, too. Our gods have cursed us, Chayan."

"All right, Ebroin. I'm not going to argue with you. I'll be back around dawn. You'll be safe enough here."

He looked at the others gathered around the fire, the Cha'Tel'Quessir who didn't know his name. "I'm coming."

They were in the undamaged Yuirwood before Bro spoke again. "This time I did see Zandilar. I looked up during the firestorm. I saw her fighting a monster that looked like a man made from fire. That's two times in one day that she saved my life."

Chayan stared at him sideways. She looked puzzled, maybe jealous.

"I suppose I owe her a prayer, some sort of offering. With Lanig dead and Yongour-maybe she's decided I should dance with her after all."

"I wouldn't think you owe Zandilar any more than you think you owe the Simbul. They both saved your life, but Zandilar took your colt, Ebroin. Seems to me that you'd be about even."

"The Simbul-" he began to explain that Aglarond's queen had started everything downhill when she tried to steal Dancer from him in Sulalk. But he'd said that before. It didn't matter how anything had started, just that it ended in the Sunglade.

Chayan's cousin, Halaern, served Aglarond's queen and Halaern couldn't have been far away when the storm-framed battle erupted between Zandilar and the flame-man. Like Rizcarn, the forester was missing. Once the thought had occurred to him, Bro realized that he cared more whether Trovar Halaern had survived than whether Rizcarn had, but when he suggested that they might look for the forester instead, Chayan shook her head sharply.

"We need Rizcarn," she insisted, beginning to sound like Lanig or Yongour, or the Cha'Tel'Quessir sitting around the little fire.

"We need to go home," he countered, but neither of them had homes waiting for them.

They wandered, keeping track of their position by the stars and finding the occasional faded Relkath rune, left over from other seasons when Rizcarn had wandered the Yuirwood. Chayan admitted the possibility that Rizcarn was truly missing; Bro suggested that Zandilar had taken him with her after she defeated the flame man. That was the wrong thing to say.

"Zandilar didn't defeat the Old Man of the Yuirwood. Mark me on this, Ebroin: The storm defeated the Old Man-the way running out of arrows will defeat an archer. All Zandilar did was attract his attention."

"Still, she might have taken Rizcarn to the same place she took Dancer."

"She was humbled. She didn't take anything away from this battle."

Bro argued, but not for long. They both spotted the brightly glowing tree at the same time. Chayan, Bro noticed, had her hand on her sword as they approached. The first thing Bro noticed was that none of the light came from Rizcarn. It all came from the tree where his father chiselled a Relkath rune. Rizcarn's clothes were torn and ragged. A raw burn ran the length of his right arm. It was painful to behold, but didn't seem to affect him as he hammered an iron chisel with a rock-hammer. By the depth of the cuts, Rizcarn had been chiseling and rechiseling the same rune for quite a while.

"Wake up the trees, Rizcarn." Bang! "Gather the Cha'Tel'Quessir, Rizcarn." Bang! "Lead them to the Sunglade, Rizcarn." Bang! Bang! Bang! "Wake up the trees."

"Poppa?" Bro called, keep a good distance between himself and the tree, and grateful for Chayan's sword, which he assumed she could use. "Poppa?" he called a second time, louder than before.

"Ember? Is that Ember?"

Rizcarn turned around with the rock and chisel still in his hands. There was a gouge across his face that ran diagonally from his forehead to his cheek. One eye was swollen shut; the other had the white-ringed aspect of madness. Yet Ember had been Bro's name before his father died, a name Rizcarn hadn't used since they'd reunited.

Bro exchanged a glance with Chayan, who nodded in response to his unasked question.

"Yes, it's me, Poppa. Ember. Chayan and I have come looking for you."

"You have a ladylove now? You're growing up… grown. I didn't see you grow. How is your mother, Ember? I haven't seen her in so long, either. I've been with the trees, waking up the trees." He gestured with his chisel and rock. "So many trees. Wake up the trees to protect the forest."

"Poppa, Shali's dead. Lanig's dead. Yongour's dead. A whole lot of Cha'Tel'Quessir died tonight. Don't you remember."

Rizcarn's open eye blinked. "Shali dead? When? How? Lanig and Yongour?"

Of all the madness Bro imagined for his father, this one, in which Rizcarn appeared oblivious to his own wounds, to the destruction into which he'd led them had never entered his mind.

"How-?" he began sharply. Chayan took his arm. Bro jerked free and turned his question at her instead. "How can he not remember? How can he pretend he doesn't remember? Look at him. He was there. He was hurt. How can he not remember?"

"You were lying in the mud with your hands over your head. You told me to go away. You told me you wanted to die."

"But I remembered!"

"You weren't responsible for all those who died. There's no guessing what got jarred loose in Rizcarn's mind. You think you saw Zandilar-"

"Zandilar?" Rizcarn interrupted. "You saw Zandilar? Did she come to protect the Cha'Tel'Quessir? Did Relkath wake up to protect the trees?"

"See? He does remember. He was pretending."

But Chayan ignored him; she had her own questions to ask. "Protect the trees and the Cha'Tel'Quessir from what, Rizcarn? What did Zandilar fight back there? What waited in the storm? Why did it want to stop you from leading the Cha'Tel'Quessir to the Sunglade?"

For a moment it seemed that Rizcarn knew the answers to Chayan's questions and would share them. Then his mad eye narrowed with cunning intelligence. "Where are the others?" He looked left and right before choosing the direction that would lead him back to Chayan's little fire. "There's still time. She cares for you, Ebroin. She's forgiven you. Zandilar will dance with you at the Sunglade. The rest doesn't matter."

And though the dancing goddess had saved his life, that was nothing Bro wanted to hear. He didn't like the way Rizcarn's manner had changed so suddenly, either, almost as if something sleeping inside Rizcarn had awakened. Bro tried not to think about the warning Chayan and Halaern had given him: Rizcarn might be possessed by a Red Wizard, but at this moment possession seemed preferable to some of the other thoughts in his head. He wrapped his hand around the hilt of the Simbul's dagger.

Beside him, Chayan cursed and muttered under her breath. "He knows. He knows. At least he knows who it was… what it was. It's Yuirwood, not Thayan. He wouldn't know the Red Wizards." She paused. "Cold tea and crumpets. That body we found. Half wizard, half Cha'Tel'Quessir. What walked away? Half Cha'Tel'Quessir, half wizard? Could that happen? It could happen. Anything can happen in the Yuirwood. What does he remember? Halaern said the Yuirwood doesn't like him. Well, maybe it wouldn't, not if he's half wizard. And where does Zandilar fit in? Elminster! You hairy old goat, this is all your fault!"

"Elminster?" Bro knew the name. Everyone alive knew Elminster's name. "Is Elminster involved in this?"

Chayan scowled. "Elminster? Who said anything about Elminster?"

"You did, just now. You said 'Elminster, you hairy old goat, this is all your fault.'-"

"You heard me say that?" She scowled deeper and stared at his hand, still clutching the knife, before she shook her head. "I must be getting tired. It's something we said fighting the Tuigans. Whenever something went wrong: Elminster, this is your fault."

Bro walked beside her another few steps before saying, "You said it in Trade." He meant the common human language of all Faerun.

"There weren't many Cha'Tel'Quessir up fighting the Tuigans, Ebroin. You pick up a lot of languages when you spend your life fighting other folk's battles. Wait and see, when I'm truly exhausted, I might start cursing in goblin or orc."

Bro didn't expect to hear either of those exotic languages any time soon. He wasn't entirely convinced Chayan was tired. Rizcarn certainly wasn't. He was striding across the moonlit ground as if he'd just awakened from a good night's sleep and Chayan was having no trouble keeping up with him. The sell-sword was as strange as everything else in Bro's strange journey from Sulalk to who-knew-where, but when she held out her hand, he grasped it without hesitation.

There were eight, not eleven, Cha'Tel'Quessir waiting for them when they got back to the fire. Rizcarn said they should start walking again. Bro argued, saying they should wait until dawn and look for more survivors. He turned to Chayan, expecting her support, but she was as stone-faced as the others.

"Do you want to be in this place when the sun comes up?" she asked.

"No, but-"

"There are no more survivors, Ebroin."

"The dead?"

"It took four men half a day to dig Lanig's grave."

"Their beads?"

Chayan patted a pouch at her waist. "I have all I could find."

Rizcarn was leading the other eight away.

"This is war, Ebroin." She held out her hand again.

Bro shook it off. "It's Sulalk. It's the same as Sulalk." He had an unwelcome vision of crows and vultures perched on the cottage roof. "It's not right," he muttered, on the verge, suddenly, of tears. "It's not fair."

"It never is, Ebroin."

She took his hand and led him away.

They walked through dawn and into a bright, cool morning. Fewer people made faster progress along the trail. Bro recognized the forest now, in a general way. Details had changed in seven years, of course, but he knew when they were near MightyTree and said nothing as they walked past the trails that would have taken him south and west to home.

Rizcarn called a midday halt. Two of the Cha'Tel'Quessir fell asleep as soon as they sat. The rest ate what they had before closing their eyes. Rizcarn found a suitable rock to use with his chisel and started carving Relkath's rune into every tree large enough to hold it. Chayan told Bro to take a nap while she kept watch.

"Once I fall asleep, you're going to go off and talk to your cousin."

"You have a suspicious mind, Ebroin."

"But you are, aren't you? You wouldn't have walked away if you hadn't known he was alive. You're going to ask him about the Red Wizards, whether they were close enough to get killed, and tell him what you've seen, so he can tell the Simbul."

"And I suppose you'll follow me, if I don't invite you to come along?"

He didn't bother answering the question, but got up and walked with her. Trovar Halaern waited in the crook of a tree no more than three hundred paces from where they'd been sitting. The forester was tired and ragged.

"Bad storm last night, cousin," he said as he leapt down from the tree. "Worse for you though. I see Rizcarn survived, and Ebroin. You're still headed for the Sunglade?"

"Zandilar has Ebroin's colt. My bones say she's going to dance tonight whether we're there or not. What about our Red Wizard spies? How did they fare last night?"

"Better than they deserved, my-cousin. Wet and frightened and convinced that they're on the right trail. They outnumber you now, almost two to one. Rizcarn seems to be a changed man."

"Several times over," Chayan agreed. "I'm starting to think that corpse the Simbul found-"

Halaern cleared his throat. "The foresters found it, cousin, following her suggestions."

"I knew I didn't find it. But it wasn't wholly Cha'Tel'Quessir or Red Wizard, and I don't think Rizcarn is, either."

"That should make tonight more than interesting."

Chayan nodded. "I think it's time to make it less interesting. Ebroin had a good idea the other day. There're too many Red Wizards in the Yuirwood."

"And the Simbul?"

"If she asks, we'll blame it on Elminster, won't we, Ebroin?"

"Elminster?" Halaern looked from his cousin to Bro.

"It's a joke, I think," Bro explained. He wished he'd had the sense to stay with the other Cha'Tel'Quessir. When Chayan and her cousin bantered, he felt like a child who only understood every other word in adult conversation. "I overheard her cursing Elminster last night after the storm. She said it was a habit she picked up fighting the Tuigans."

"You never mentioned that, cousin."

Chayan flashed a dangerously toothsome grin. "When do we have a chance to talk, cousin? What about our solitaire Red Wizard, the one that followed Rizcarn out of the camp when it was west of here? At first you said you thought it was a woman. Why? And do you still think so?"

"Before Rizcarn left, I found a footprint, small and narrow. It could've come from a child or a halfling, but my best guess was a woman. I haven't seen any more. She's smarter than the others, I think, and she's alone, or nearly so. I never saw her, only felt her presence, and I haven't felt it since Rizcarn left. She's stopped using magic."

Chayan seemed lost in her own thoughts. Bro seized an opportunity to ask a question that had been very important two days ago, "Did Rizcarn actually visit MightyTree? He said he would, but he wasn't gone long enough, even if he ran day and night."

"It would seem that he did, Ebroin. According to Urell, Rizcarn, or something like him, appeared at his door in the middle of the night and gave him his daughter's necklace. Rizcarn said he couldn't stay, but wanted a mourning bead, so Urell gave him one off his own neck. That is MightyTree work." The forester pointed to the bead in question.

"How?"

"Why not ask him yourself?" Chayan asked, more an order than a question. She turned to Halaern. "You'll join me after?"

"Yes," he agreed, but she was already walking away, not as quiet as a forester, but quiet enough that she was quickly gone. "Come on, Ebroin. I'll walk you back to the others."

Bro folded his arms. "I'm not a child, Trovar Halaern, and I saw what Red Wizards can do to a whole village. She's got a sword, that's all. She doesn't even have her spear anymore and she decides-just like that-that she's going to destroy the Red Wizards?"

Halaern nodded. "Let's go, Ebroin."

"Chayan's not what she says she is, is she?"

"She's very good at what she does, and one of the things she does is destroy her enemies, including Red Wizards."

"She's not your cousin."

The forester gave up with a sigh. "No, Ebroin, Chayan's not my cousin; and she's not what she seems, either."

"She's Zandilar in disguise, isn't she?"

Halaern was speechless. Bro was pleased with himself and his guess. He started back to the napping Cha'Tel'Quessir. A twig snapped; the forester must be so flustered that he was making noise as he caught up. Bro turned around. He saw a shadow, then a face, then hands that grabbed him.

He heard a voice from deeper in the shadow: "Good, Lailomun, my pet. You caught him. Now bring him here."

Bro struggled and as he did he heard another voice, the forester's, but it came too late. He fell forward into darkness.