The Simbul's Gift (25 page)

Bro heard the sucking mud, as Rizcarn guided Dancer through the swamp, but the sound was distant, easily excluded from the visions swirling behind his closed eyes. He could hear the ever-present insects, too, but the swarms were clever enough not to feast on a doomed Cha'Tel'Quessir. Once—just once—Bro opened his eyes. The bones in his arms, the bones in Dancer's neck were shining jewels visible through translucent flesh. Looking down, he could see Dancer's heart, a pulsing ruby, and his own, which seemed smaller … darker … dying. He closed his eyes more tightly than before but the bones were etched behind his eyes, and the pleasanter visions wouldn't return.

Dancer stopped beneath him. Rizcarn grasped his arm and shook it.

“We've come to the river.”

Aglarond had streams aplenty but only one river, the River Umber, flowing out of Thay to the Sea of Dlurg on the northern coast. Bro had never seen the Umber. He opened his eyes. The sky was purple, the evening stars were green and the ribbon of water before them was the color of milk.

“Zandilar's Dancer must swim again.” Rizcarn took Bro's wrist and knotted the lead rope around it. “And you'll have to tell him.”

The swamp was a step or two behind them. Bro suggested they could camp on the river bank.

“On the other side, son.”

“I can't see right,” he protested, not adding that he could still see his bones and Dancer's, but that Rizcarn had none. Rizcarn was a voice and a shadow. Another time, that might have disturbed Bro. Confronted with his own skeleton, though, his father's featureless shape was oddly reassuring. “I can't ride—not like lord or knight. What if I fall off? I won't know which way to swim.”

Rizcarn tugged on the rope. “That's what this is for: to
keep you and Zandilar's Dancer together. I'll find you, son, wherever the colt fetches up, but it would be better if you stay astride.”

“If I can—”

“No
ifs
, Ebroin,” Rizcarn said as he whacked the colt's rump hard.

Dancer leapt into the water. The river wasn't wide, if Bro could believe anything his addled eyes perceived, but it proved deep and swift. The colt was swimming from the start, his legs churning steadily, powerfully. He tried to return to the bank where they'd started.

“Tell him where to go!” Rizcarn shouted.

Zandilar's Dancer was an even-tempered, but untrained colt. Bro was a panicked Cha'Tel'Quessir who knew no more about riding a horse than Dancer knew about being ridden. On land, trust and luck kept them together. In the river, they needed more than either knew how to give. Shouting and throwing clots of mud, Rizcarn kept them from returning to the near bank, but convincing Dancer not to turn around wasn't the same as convincing him to swim for the far bank. Without firm guidance, he wanted nothing to do with either bank and, once in the current, headed downstream.

“Tell him, Ebroin!”

Dancer wasn't listening to anything except himself. He'd decided where he was going, and his neck was stronger than Bro's arms. Rizcarn's shouts had faded; the milk-colored water had turned a bloody red under an equally bloody sky. In last-ditch desperation, Bro wriggled forward until his legs clamped around Dancer's shoulders and his free hand grabbed the halter.

“Over there!” he screamed as he pulled with all his strength. “To the land!”

The colt's body followed his head. Bro released the halter when the far bank was directly in front of them. A heartbeat later he realized he should have turned Dancer upstream, but at least the colt
was
swimming crosscurrent, and when the bank didn't shout or throw things at him, Dancer decided land was the place he wanted to be. After that, there was nothing Bro could have done to keep the colt in the river.

The riverbank was higher than the swamp island had
been. Dancer tried twice before his hooves found solid ground, then he shook like a wet dog, from nose to tail. With neither saddle nor reins to help him, Bro lost his never-secure perch and tumbled to the ground, twisting his tied-up arm in the process.

The best horse in the world was a skittish creature, apt to shy at anything, friend or foe. After all he'd been through, Zandilar's Dancer shied mightily when Bro yelped. He took off at a trot, dragging Bro beside him. Soaked and swollen, the serpent knot at Bro's translucent wrist wouldn't yield to his frantic fingers until he remembered the Simbul's knife, secure in its sheath. Its blade—ordinary steel in Bro's otherwise addled vision—cut the rope cleanly, though he nicked himself before he got free.

Dancer took off, an apparition of glowing bones and barely visible flesh galloping across blue-green grass. Bro gave up the chase before it started. He was nauseous again, and the cuts on his forearm stung. When the stinging spread up his arm, Bro suspected magic and, remembering the seelie, kept hold of the hilt as he dropped to the ground.

He blacked out when the stinging reached his heart. When he recovered consciousness, the land around him was night-dark, as it should have been. The nausea had passed. Hard, itching scabs sealed the cut he'd given himself. Without thinking, Bro scratched the itch. The scab fell away; his skin was smooth.

A crescent moon had cut through the clouds. It shed enough light to distinguish shape from shadow. Bro was out of the swamp, out of the Yuirwood, maybe out of Aglarond altogether. He had to find the colt and Rizcarn or else he was going to have to find his way home alone.

After wringing out his hair, clothes, and boots, Bro stood up. He felt refreshed and more confident than he'd been since the witch-queen vanished with Tay-Fay. He could think of his sister now, think of Shali, Dent, and all the horrors of that morning, without fighting tears. Bro still blamed the Simbul for all that had happened, but if he met her again—which he hoped he never would—he'd thank her for the knife.

With a hand on the studded hilt protruding from its sheath, Bro started walking upstream. He had no fear and
wasn't unstrung when Rizcarn, leading Dancer, separated from the darkness.

“You're better now, son.”

Bro shrugged. No reason to tell Rizcarn about his knife. “Grandfather always said terror could cure anything from hiccoughs to fevers. I'm so cured I could walk until dawn, if that's what you want.”

“Not so far or long, son. We're almost there.”

Rizcarn started walking away from the river. Bro followed, leading the colt by the rope.

“This was forest once, long before the Cha'Tel'Quessir were born,” Rizcarn explained, more talkative than he'd been before. “See … over there. That's where Zandilar danced with the hunters.”

Bro sighted along his father's arm and saw the stones, a score of them at least, heaved into the night. He touched the knife; his fingers tingled.”

“Is she there, Father? Am I—? Is
she
going to dance with me, as she promised?” After today, Bro didn't want to dance with anything magical.

“Zandilar keeps her promises.” There was, unexpectedly, a hint of concern and caution in Rizcarn's voice. “But not tonight, I think. Later. Best it were later, son. Relkath protects.”

The stones rose haphazardly from the ground, no two the same height or angle, completely unlike the measured stone circles of the Yuirwood. Bro worried that they were no part of his heritage, until he stood close to one and studied its markings. He couldn't read the runes his elven ancestors carved on trees and stones alike, but he recognized them and was reassured.

“Magnar.” He touched one of the more common carvings. That last summer, when he'd followed his father through the forest, they'd carved Relkath's name into the trees, but they'd carved Magnar's name whenever they'd found a moss-covered boulder. “The stones remember.”

“No time to awaken the stones, son. We're here for Zandilar.”

Bro wasn't terribly surprised when Rizcarn produced a pair of silver pipes. He'd never heard his father play, but it was a rare Cha'Tel'Quessir who couldn't coax a melody from the pipes. He wasn't terribly concerned that the
melody was unfamiliar and grew less disciplined as Rizcarn wove from one stone to the next. Though he'd been a child when he left the Yuirwood, he'd heard about moonlight revels where everyone danced themselves to exhaustion. If Zandilar were going to dance, he imagined she'd prefer wild music. Just so long as she didn't expect
him
to dance with her.

His trust vanished when they reached the center of the ancient stones. A large stone lay flat, its visible surface covered with swirling marks that weren't like any runes Bro had ever seen. When he stared at them, his body began to weave in rhythm with Rizcarn's music. He walked forward, toward the stone until he tripped and, aware that there was magic in the air, wrapped his hand firmly around the hilt of his knife.

Immune to both his father's music and the meandering swirls, Bro noticed the hole at the stone's center. No bigger around than a circle made by the thumb and fingers of both hands, it was unnaturally dark and cold in his night vision. He'd opened his mouth, to call it to Rizcarn's attention, when he noticed a pale, thin mist rising from its depths. Bro's hand tingled, then the hilt itself seemed to freeze in his hand, a warning, he supposed, that Zandilar's magic was stronger. He tried to turn around and found that, though his thoughts remained his own, his feet did not. It was stand still or move toward the stone and the mist.

Bro kept a grip on Dancer's halter while the mist thickened into the goddess herself. The lithe figure had a woman's arms and legs, but it was taller than him and its body was shimmering, featureless light.

“My servant,” Zandilar said in a voice so resonant that Bro couldn't guess whether it came from a god or a goddess.

Rizcarn lowered the pipes from his lips and sank to his knees. “Your servant.”

Then Zandilar looked at Bro. The knife burned in his hand. He could neither speak nor breathe until Zandilar turned away.

“We thought you would never return, but you have, and you have done well. The beast is worthy.”

Bro gasped. The hilt had gone cold again; his heart was
colder. He didn't like the implications of her words,
the beast is worthy;
Dancer wasn't a beast. He recognized the voice that had spoken to him the day the colt was born, though it no longer seemed lighthearted or flirtatious.

“Is it enough, Zandilar? Will you dance in the Sunglade? Will you choose your consort?”

“In the 'Glade, when the moon is full.”

The mist extended its arms, which wrapped, cloudlike and glowing softly with their own light, around Rizcarn's neck. His face vanished. There was a sound like a deeply passionate kiss. Modesty proved stronger than curiosity; Bro stared at his toes.

“I will know.” The voice was that of a man locked in a dream.

Bro ground his teeth together to keep from screaming. Then he felt a hand—a soft, warm woman's hand—caress his neck and jaw, relaxing each muscle it touched, lifting his chin as if it were a feather. She was beautiful. Her skin was as blue as a clear, autumn sky. Her eyes were sunshine. He was young and utterly inexperienced, but all her lovers had been inexperienced at first.

Zandilar's face drew so close that Bro closed his eyes. He felt her lips against his and, scared for reasons that had nothing to do with magic or gods, squeezed his knife's hilt until it cut his palm. Suddenly, he was alone. The mist was formless and Rizcarn was angry.

“Surrender him! The horse is not yours. The horse has always belonged to Zandilar. Has living among dirt-eaters made you forget what you owe to our gods, Ebroin?”

Bro remembered Zandilar riding into the mist the day Dancer was born. That much was true: Dancer had never belonged to him.

“What will you do with him?” he asked, his voice steadier than he'd dared hope.

“Dance in the Sunglade when the moon is full. Dance with another, instead of you, silly young man.”

For a heartbeat, Bro believed he'd lost something more precious than his mother's love. Then, with the knife hilt stinging his palm, he saw danger for him and the colt he'd raised. He saw, as well, that no matter what he did, the colt was doomed: Zandilar would have Dancer, had always had him. Bro found the strength to release the knife and
wrap his arms around a trusting neck, to hide his face in a coarse, black mane.

“Good-bye,” he whispered, not a word he'd trained the colt to understand.

Then, with a last pat, he offered the rope to Zandilar who had no use for it. Her mist-made form dissolved around the colt, obscuring him, consuming him, drawing him back into the small, dark hole.

Bro had expected her to ride away on Dancer's back, as she had in his vision. He hadn't expected the colt to completely disappear. A macabre progression formed in his thoughts: Shali's corpse had been whole, Dent's had been half-gone, Dancer was wholly gone. It meant nothing; nothing had meaning any more. Bro was back where he'd been in the stable: deaf and numb but without Dancer, without even his human sister to keep him moving.

“It's time to leave,” Rizcarn said. Bro hadn't noticed him approaching or felt his hand on his arm. “You angered her. Disappointed her.”

Bro shook his head.

“The moon's waning, Ebroin. There's much to do between now and when it's full again. We'll meet Zandilar in the Sunglade. Maybe you'll get another chance, son. Maybe. I can't say, but you're still with me, and I've got much to do.”

Bro shook his head again. Rizcarn's hand was warm on his arm, but there was no way he could pretend that it was his father's hand, no way to pretend that he wasn't an orphan. Worse than an orphan. He was a man in a world of trouble with no where to go but forward, following the man who had once been his father back across the river.