The Simbul's Gift (39 page)

“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 Faerûn 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.