The Simbul's Gift

by Lynn Abbey

  “Lailomun. Lailomun, my pet. Pay attention to me.”

  Mythrell’aa had designed the perfect punishment for a wayward lover. The incantation she’d used to cripple his memory might have made her rich, if she’d needed more wealth or written down the spells she devised. Once she’d cast the spell successfully, she’d lost interest in it. Her notes had disappeared years ago, and Lailomun’s torment so amused her that while he lived—an unexpected side effect of the addling spell had given him an odd kind of immortality—she’d needed no other pets.

  The brazier cooled, the ember images crumbled, but that hardly mattered as Mythrell’aa put her pet through his paces, sharpening her tongue on his wounds. Dawn had become morning before she grew bored. She left him twitching on the floor, returning her attention to the brazier.

  Using a bone-and-brass poker, the zulkir stirred hot coals from the bottom to the top, feeding them incense powders. Wisps of pungent smoke arched toward her when Mythrell’aa uttered the names of her minions, but none congealed into a recognizable shape. Her fears confirmed, Mythrell’aa added a drop of green oil to the incense mix.

  “Vazurmu,” Mythrell’aa called the name of an illusionist of no small talent and a woman bound to her in death as well as life. “I summon you.”

  “I hear you, Mighty Zulkir. My eyes and ears, my heart and mind are yours.”

  Vazurmu’s voice came faintly out of the smoke. Mythrell’aa made a sour face as she poured amber oil and more incense into the brazier. The village where her minions were supposed to ambush Alassra Shentrantra was near the Yuirwood and the Yuirwood interfered with Red Wizard magic. Mythrell’aa despised Aglarond’s great forest almost as much as she despised Aglarond’s queen. When the Red Wizards finally conquered that wretched realm, she’d personally cast the conflagration spells to burn all those thrice-damned trees to the ground.

  “Tell me what happened,” the zulkir commanded.

  Smoke thickened into a woman’s shape and spoke more clearly. “An old woman appeared yesterday morning. No one knew her—”

  “Beshaba!” Mythrell’aa muttered the name of her patron goddess, “Did you think the bitch-queen would arrive with bugles and milk-white horses?”

  Vazurmu’s image quaked soot. “No, Mighty Zulkir. We were alert for all strangers, even birds and toadstools. Arnoz approached her cautiously. She saw through him before he had time to cast a spell. Then madness ruled. We followed your orders. The village is dead and burning. No witnesses survive to say what happened.”

  “Except for you and the Great Bitch! What happened?”

  “I stayed out of the fighting, as you instructed. I kept her in front of me. I watched her. She is … she is like no other, Mighty Zulkir. She is a fiend unleashed.”

  “I don’t need you to tell me what she is, I need to know what happened next!”

  “Yes, Mighty Zulkir I was hidden—quiet—no one could have noticed me, yet I was struck down from behind—”

  “By a dirt-eating peasant! Beshaba gives me fools to work with.”

  “Yes, Mighty Zulkir.” Vazurmu knew better than to argue with her zulkir. One word from Mythrell’aa and, the Yuirwood notwithstanding, her flesh would shrivel; another word and her blood would boil. “I am a fool struck down by a peasant and I have ill-served you. But I recovered my senses before the queen left.”

  “And?” Mythrell’aa paced around the brazier.

  “I followed her to the stable where the horse was kept. She’d led the horse outside and had drawn a circle in the grass to take it away from the village. A boy—”

  “A boy? What boy? You said, no witnesses.”

  “Yes, Mighty Zulkir. The boy and a little girl broke into the circle as the silver-eyed queen cast her spell.”

  If she hadn’t already known the resolution, Mythrell’aa would have chuckled in eager anticipation. The laws of spellcraft were the same on both sides of the Yuirwood. No Red Wizard—including herself—could have held the circle if two people had broken it. It made what she’d seen earlier that much more remarkable, more ominous.

  “The backlash was terrible, Mighty Zulkir. A dead space opened where they’d been. Anything that wasn’t already dead, died, I’m certain.”

  “You’re certain,” Mythrell’aa purred at her minion, already contemplating the woman’s demise: Alassra had saved the little girl, at the very least. Vazurmu had failed on many levels; she’d pay the full price of failure. “Of course, you’re certain. Where are you, Vazurmu?”

  “I … in the village, Mighty Zulkir, what’s left of it.”

  “You didn’t try to follow her?”

  “No, Mighty Zulkir. They’re lost between here and there.”

  “Lost, Vazurmu? The Great Bitch lost? She’s been seen everywhere. Where could she wind up and be lost? She wound up at home in Velprintalar—that’s how lost she was!” Silence rose from the smoking brazier. “Vazurmu!”

  More silence, then: “Mighty Zulkir, I entered the dead space. I cast my own spells. They were hurled into the Yuirwood, hurled through time, as well. I didn’t dare follow. No Wizard is safe there.”

  Mythrell’aa raised her arms above her head. The window wards crackled with sickly green light behind her.

  “I care not a whit’s finger for your safety, Vazurmu. Didn’t I tell you to follow the bitch? Didn’t I tell you to be my eyes and ears? What good are eyes and ears in a dead village? If you’d done what I told you to do, even if you’d died in the forest, your shade would be there to tell me what had happened! What happened to the boy? Where’s the horse? Am I to believe that the Great Bitch rescued a girl-child and left a damned horse behind?”

  “Mighty Zul—!”

  Vazurmu’s plea for mercy was cut short as the serpentine wreath tattooed above Mythrell’aa’s hairless brow glowed. Illusion’s alliance with Szass Tam had given Mythrell’aa—among other things—an awesome and very private array of necromantic magic, ripe for casting. From the tattoo, the light leapt to Mythrell’aa’s hands and from her hands it narrowed to a dagger’s point within the incense image. There was a flash bright enough to blind a zulkir.

  The brazier clattered across the floor, striking Lailomun, who roused from his stupor. His eyes had been shielded in the crook of his arm. He could see clearly and, for the first time in memory, he remembered more than the distant past, more than the horrifying moment when he realized the woman waiting for him was not Alassra.

  This time Lailomun remembered the brazier, the room, Mythrell’aa herself, and the words she taunted him with. He was a quick-witted man with a gift for seeing the shortest path. While the zulkir blinked and rubbed her eyes, Lailomun pieced together what he could. Mythrell’aa, his master in magic and first lover, had crippled his memory. She’d left him unable to recall recent events. He lived in isolated slices of time with no ability to plan where he’d go next or remember what had gone before.

  How many slices? The question elbowed into his thoughts; he shoved it out again. How long, how many didn’t matter. In his current condition, he couldn’t hope to thwart, much less defeat a zulkir. In another moment she’d be able to see; his torment would begin again—and knowing that he, himself, was a Red Wizard of Thay, Lailomun knew that it was mercy, not tragedy, if he could not remember what happened to him. Except …

  In his one memory, Mythrell’aa had said Alassra had a child. She’d tried to make him believe the child wasn’t his, because legitimacy was important to Red Wizards. A poker lay beside him. It had fallen with the brazier and remained to sear his skin when he pressed it against his forearm.

  You have a child, Lailomun told himself as he made a second, curving mark and a third that curved the other way. A part of you lives free. He knew he wouldn’t remember but perhaps, if Mythrell’aa didn’t take away the scars, he’d look down at his arm each time he awakened and read the message there, written in a code he’d devised when he was an apprentice with many spells to learn.

  “Lailomun! Stop that. You’re hurting
yourself.” Mythrell’aa wrenched the poker from her pet’s hands.

  Their eyes met at close range. It seemed to Mythrell’aa that there was something more in his expression, something like hope. She seized his cheek, digging her enameled nails into his flesh.

  “What are you thinking, Lailomun? What plan have you hatched? Nothing will come of it, my pet. You can’t remember anything from one hour to the next. I’ve had you here for more than a hundred years and I’ll have you for another hundred before I’ll let you die. There’s nothing you can do, my pet, nothing.”

  The light that had glimmered briefly in his eyes was extinguished.

  8

  The Yuirwood, in Aglarond

  Near dawn, the fifteenth day of Eleasias, The Year of the Banner (1368DR)

  The moon set into the Yuirwood treetops, leaving Bro in deep shadows with only Zandilar’s Dancer for company. The colt nibbled forest grass contentedly from the end of the lead rope. Bro had anchored the rope beneath his heel as he sat with his back against a tree trunk, too weary to sleep, too numbed to think.

  A great owl roosted in the branches above him. Bro greeted the night hunter with proper Cha’Tel’Quessir deference. It examined him with gold-glowing eyes, hooted sharply, and fluffed its feathers until it seemed twice as large as before.

  “Don’t leave,” Bro whispered when it batted its wings.

  He heard the hollow ache in his voice. Ashamed by what he took for weakness in a man’s character—he couldn’t imagine his father or stepfather on the verge of the childish tears that threatened his eyes—Bro hung his head, hiding from the owl’s judgment. He closed his eyes when he heard the soft whump of its wings. Long moments passed, each bitter and burning, before he found the courage to look up again.

  The owl had moved to another branch, closer to the trunk, closer to the ground and him. Relief freed more tears. Bro wiped his eyes until both sleeves were damp and useless, then he stared up at the lightening sky and let his tears flow unhindered.

  Zandilar’s Dancer folded his legs for a nap as the lavenders of dawn yielded to the brighter colors of sunrise. Bro tried to follow the colt’s example but each time he closed his eyes, he found flames and death. Think of pleasant things before you close your eyes, Shali had said in the days after Rizcarn’s death. Fawns and flowers for springtime, summer berries, autumn leaves, and a warm hearth in winter. Bro thought of his mother, not her advice. Sleep was farther away than ever.

  Dawn became a gray-clouded morning, unseasonably cool but damp and clinging. Dent would call it a day when he worked twice as hard to do half as much …

  More numb tears for a man he hadn’t loved. Disgusted, Bro threw his shoulders back, cracking his head on the tree trunk. The collision distracted him; he repeated the act until its sheer stupidity made him stop.

  His stomach growled; he hadn’t eaten since supper a day ago. Shali had made bread soup and simmered it beneath a thick cheese crust. Her son’s mouth watered, then his eyes: There’d be no more bread soup, with or without cheese. No more Midwinter puddings laced with nuts and bits of dried fruit. No more dumplings. No more sausage. No more of any of his favorite meals, nor any of the lumpy vegetable porridges in their various shades of green, tan, and orange that he’d never liked.

  He felt like a fool, because he was. He felt alone, because he was, as he hadn’t been after his father’s death. Rizcarn had roamed the forest alone, leaving his wife and son behind. Bro’s Yuirwood was a tiny cottage on the edge of the MightyTree community, but still very much a part of it, with a steady stream of aunts, uncles, cousins, and lesser kin looking out for Shali and him whenever his father was gone. He wouldn’t have been alone if Shali hadn’t taken him out of the Yuirwood.

  In Sulalk, Bro had dreamed of returning to the Yuirwood, imagining that he’d follow his father’s restless footsteps, when what he truly remembered, truly missed was the company of MightyTree.

  “I want to go home,” Bro said aloud, because sound broke the isolation.

  Home is gone, his thoughts answered.

  “I want what I had.”

  It’s gone, forever.

  Bro sobbed loudly, waking Dancer. The colt stood over him, licking the salt from his cheeks. Bro knotted his fingers behind Dancer’s ears and let the colt help him to his feet. There were twigs and leaves in the colt’s mane. For a few tearless moments Bro busied himself with grooming, until he found a tangle that wouldn’t yield to finger pressure. He wished for the curry-comb he’d made last winter and Dent’s shears, both of which were kept in the barn …

  Bro struggled to put anger in front of grief. He trained his thoughts on the Simbul. “All gods curse on her. This is her fault!”

  But neither the curse nor the anger were strong enough to stanch his tears. He blamed Aglarond’s queen and wanted her, too: The Simbul had said she would return and of everyone, she was the only one who could keep her word.

  She was the only one who knew where he was.

  Bro had left the Yuirwood just once, with his mother after Rizcarn died. He’d followed her; she’d followed a stream from the forest to the grasslands, from the grasslands to Sulalk and Dent. The night Bro rode Dent’s mare into the trees, he’d been looking for the stream. He’d seen nothing recognizable then, saw nothing now. Bro had no idea where in the Yuirwood he and Dancer were. And despite his bold assertions about being Cha’Tel’Quessir, the Cha’Tel’Quessir weren’t one friendly family.

  A lone half-elf could find himself in a world of trouble if he hunted in the wrong part of the forest. Rizcarn had managed, but Rizcarn wasn’t like other Cha’Tel’Quessir. Bro’s father claimed to be Relkath’s messenger and said that the tree god protected him—which made his death, falling out of a tree, all the more pointless.

  That last summer before he died, Rizcarn had taken Bro on two of his shorter journeys. What little Bro knew about living free in the Yuirwood, he’d learned during those few days. Mostly he’d learned to carve runes into Relkath’s trees.

  Remind the trees, Rizcarn said. Help the Yuirwood remember. If the forest forgets, we’re all lost.

  Rizcarn wouldn’t explain what the forest was supposed to remember. He was long on telling someone what to do and short on telling someone why, especially when someone was his son, whom he didn’t know very well. And, when Rizcarn did come home, Bro got sent off to stay with his mother’s sister. All the childhood tears and tantrums Bro remembered were associated with those visits to his aunt’s. Bro had begun to relive childhood events as if they’d just happened, balancing old hurts against the burden he carried away from Sulalk … trying to balance them, and failing.

  Dancer demanded attention, rubbing his head against Bro’s chest, flattening Bro’s back against the tree until the youth had to scratch the places only fingers could reach. It proved impossible to wallow in memories while nose-to-nose with an animal that depended on him. He scratched, petted, and scratched some more, until the only pain he felt was a pleasant ache in the muscles of his arms.

  “You and me, Dancer.” Bro wrapped his arms around the colt’s neck. He filled his lungs with the scents of horse sweat and a light forest rain. “Just us. We’ll see each other through. Together, we’re not alone.”

  Dancer nodded vigorously, not agreement, merely behavior Bro had encouraged over Dent’s insistence that horses shouldn’t be permitted to toss their heavy heads. And a wise insistence at that, when Bro’s chin came out second-best in a collision with the colt’s long nose. He’d bit his lower lip and the pain, though ultimately trivial, had him hopping on one foot—to Dancer’s snorting amusement.

  “It’s not funny,” Bro insisted. “I’m bleeding!” This was true and it produced a fresh scent that horses, especially young and untrained horses, didn’t like.

  The colt retreated, stiff-legged and tossing his head again in a way that made it both difficult and dangerous for Bro to grab the rope dangling from his halter. Disaster was averted, but Dancer wanted the rope’s full length between
himself and his suddenly suspect god.

  “We’ll find water and I’ll wash myself off,” Bro promised, tugging on the rope.

  Dancer wasn’t reassured, wouldn’t cooperate. The search for a stream was a frustrating battle of wills, while a storm formed above them. Bro knelt down and drank his fill beside the colt. Then, because rain was falling and there was no longer a need to rinse his face or shirt, he looked for shelter.

  A cave would have been best, but caves were few in the Yuirwood and any one large enough for a horse was likely to be occupied by something not interested in sharing with strangers. That left gullies, underbrush, and young trees with tall neighbors to draw the lightning away. Bro headed upstream until he found an acceptable spot where he and Dancer could wait in safety, if not comfort.

  The storm left them soaked and shivering, though that changed quickly as the sun burned through the thinning clouds. Zandilar’s Dancer munched on the bushes that had sheltered them. Bro found a handful of half-ripe berries that did little to end his hunger.

  Flooded by rainfall, the nearby stream was out of its banks and choked with debris, including a gopher’s bedraggled carcass. Bro hauled it out of the water, said the words of departure and thanksgiving, and asked himself if he was desperate enough to eat raw meat because, though he had steel, he had no flint and even if he’d had both, the dripping Yuirwood offered no tinder.

  “She knew,” Bro admitted to Dancer, the carcass, and himself. That quirky smile on the Simbul’s lips before she left with Tay-Fay had meant she knew his Cha’Tel’Quessir boasts were hollow. She’d given him a knife and boots but he’d need more if he was going to stay in the Yuirwood—much more if he was going to live free.

  Bro examined the knife the Simbul had given him and the silver strand she’d wrapped and knotted around his wrist. The hair was her key for finding him—or so she’d said. And if—a very large if—he believed her. The knife was the finest blade he’d ever seen. It was sharp enough to cut wood or flesh and a whetstone set into its sheath would keep it that way. One touch and it would rid him of the silver hair, if the hair was her key.