Elminster's Daughter

by Ed Greenwood

  “Well, if you’re collecting women to come watch you swat Vangerdahast,” the High Lady of Arabel spoke up, “I insist on coming along too. I don’t want to miss seeing Old Haughty get his—and someone besides magic-crazed wizards should be present, to witness fairly and to report back to the Crown.”

  Alusair nodded. “Well said, Mreen. Old Mage?”

  Elminster smiled. “If Myrmeen Lhal desires to come along, then so she shall, in all the safety I can provide.”

  Abruptly, his seat was empty. He, Caladnei, and Myrmeen were simply gone from the room.

  Crown Princess Alusair Nacacia Obarskyr gaped at their empty seats then sprang to her feet, snatching up her scabbarded sword, and snarled, “Elminster? Caladnei?”

  There was no answer but faint birdsong from outside. The Steel Regent threw back her head and let her fury pour out in a wordless roar. No chance to privately confer with Cala or Mreen, no chance for them to prepare gear or make arrangements! The scheming old bastard!

  She smashed the nearest door open and strode out into the forest, striding hard. Her scabbard whirled back in her wake, almost slapping handsome young Lord Malask Huntinghorn across the face. He blinked, came out of his doorguard’s stance, and started after the Crown Princess.

  Ducking around wildly waving branches and swaying saplings, he reached a dense thicket in time to see Alusair hiss out a stream of curses he was glad he couldn’t quite catch and reduce a defenseless sapling to kindling with a few furious slashes of her sword.

  Throwing back her head to shake the hair out of her eyes, she strode purposefully to the next sapling. Malask Huntinghorn swallowed, drew in a deep breath, and performed the bravest act of his young life, thus far … perhaps his last brave act ever.

  “Princess,” he said firmly, striding forward to catch at her swordarm, “that tree deserves to live, just as you or I do. The living green heart of the realm, as Lord Alaphondar often reminds us, is its trees. I don’t think you should—”

  Princess Alusair spun around far more swiftly than she’d ever done when making love to him—faster than any battle-knight of the realm he’d ever seen—and pounced on the scion of House Huntinghorn, flinging her blade away to punch, kick, and claw.

  Malask found himself on his back, winded and with a fierce pain in his shoulder where he’d fetched up against a tree-root—and even sharper pains erupting in his gut and ribs as the Regent of Cormyr slammed her fists home, snarling and shouting in fury.

  He was suddenly very glad indeed that he’d donned full forest-leathers, codpiece in particular, to take his turn at guard—as knees and knife-edged hands thrust home, slaps made his ears ring and his face burn, and the woman he was sworn to defend thrust her nose almost into his eye and shouted, “Defend yourself, you great rothé, damn you! Fight, Malask!”

  “M-my Queen, I—”

  “I’m not your damn queen or anyone’s queen, Lord Lummox! I’m a warrior who feels great need of a sparring partner, right now! Hit me, you great lump of cowering man-flesh!”

  Malask swallowed, closed his eyes against a punch that almost closed one of them for him, and reluctantly thrust one arm up and out. She swatted it aside, bruisingly, and belted him across the nose.

  “Aaargh!” he roared, eyes streaming as the pain stung him into trying to twist and roll out from under her. “Gods, you’ve probably broken it, Luse! I’ll look like some sort of country straw-butt lout for the rest of my life!” He shielded his dripping nose with one hand, wincing and blinded by tears.

  “Well, why not? You are a country straw-butt lout!”

  With a roar, Malask Huntinghorn forgot all about duty, princesses, treason, royal persons, and how soft and ardent this particular royal person had felt on occasion—and lashed out with a roundhouse swing that had all of his pain and anger behind it.

  There was a grunt, a sudden loss of weight atop his hip, and silence.

  He blinked, swallowed, and knuckled his eyes feverishly to clear them. “Luse? Luse?”

  “That’s more like it,” she snarled into his ear, as both of her fists struck home, low in his ribs, driving the wind right out of him. Groaning and flailing out, he punched, clawed, and punched again—and somehow found himself staggering to his feet, under a welter of blows, tearing a fluffy nightrobe clean off the Crown Princess of the realm as he spun her off-balance so as to plant a solid blow to her breast that sent her over backward to the ground, doubled up and spitting curses.

  Glowering, he strode toward her, fists balled. She launched herself up and into his gut, headfirst, hurling him backward.

  He greeted the ground with a crash, a snapping of ferns and dry dead branches, and a Crown Princess of the realm on his pelvis, punching at him. Malask got in an uppercut that snapped Alusair’s jaw up and back, and she collapsed onto him with a groan, rocking back and forth.

  “Oh, my jaw aches,” she muttered, as she crawled up the body of her battered guard, both of them wincing at their bruises, and kissed him.

  “Gods above, Luse,” he whispered, “is this one more way of hurting me? My nose …”

  “I’ll help you forget your nose,” she said huskily, finding and tugging at his laces. Malask Huntinghorn groaned and shook his head. Oh, Alusair. Ah, fortunate Cormyr … and lucky me, too.

  Ten

  SCHEMES AS BLOOD-RED AS RUBIES

  Beware all schemes, O king, for such beasts have a way of shedding blood on the floors of this kingdom like poured-out sacks of rubies.

  The character Malarvalo the Minstrel

  in Scene the Fourth

  of the play Daggers In All Her Gowns

  by Nesper Droun of Ordulin

  first performed in the Year of the Morningstar

  Rhauligan was barely out of the turret when Narnra cast a glance back over her shoulder and saw him.

  She gave him a glare, ran on a few paces, stopped, peered off to the left where the balconies and turrets of Haelithtorntowers jutted closest to the wall—then took a few racing steps and launched herself between the leaf-cloaked boughs of the great trees of the mansion gardens, in a daring leap that …

  … took her safely to a clinging landing on the head of a brooding gargoyle, chin in hand, holding up one corner of a balcony.

  Rhauligan hoped it was rock-solid carved stone and not of one those stonelike monsters that would suddenly move to bite and claw—probably when she was safely gone, but he was trying to land in the same spot.

  Keeping his eyes on her to make sure she set no traps behind, Rhauligan trotted along the wall, looking for the right place to make his running jump.

  He sighed, once.

  Caladnei and Narnra, I’m keeping a tally here. And if the gods grant me more luck than any man in the kingdom has enjoyed for the last century or so, I just might live to collect it.

  Rhauligan took his last two running steps with the wind in his face and launched himself into the air. The balcony was enough lower than the top of the wall that he’d been able to clearly see through the windows of the room it opened into. No one was moving therein. He’d paced off the run calmly enough, and now he’d just have to hope he’d been …

  … right. He landed hard, numbing his elbows on the lichen-splotched old gargoyle and losing a lot of breath—but his first surge of angry strength took him safely up and over the intricately carved stone rail onto a balcony that seemed far too spattered with bird dung to belong to a house that held caring servants. The Harper took but an instant to safely plant his feet ere he looked up.

  The long legs and trim behind of Narnra Shalace were just vanishing through an open window, high above.

  As Rhauligan leaned out to peer, she slipped inside the window, favored him with the briefest of glares, and closed it behind her. Through its dung-streaked, amber-tinted glass, the Harper saw her turn its catch, latching it firmly.

  So. He could either climb the outside wall—and though he was the stronger of the two of them, he was also much the heavier—to break that window an
d force his way in or stand here on a nice level balcony and do the same to a window or door.

  Out of habit Rhauligan ducked low and turned back to peer over the balcony rail. Its gargoyles were still gargoyles, and there was no sign of guards or anyone else in the mist-beaded shade-gloom of the lush garden below.

  He spun again to the door, still in his crouch. Nothing moved in the room beyond the door—which was dark and seemed to hold a lot of large, draped things … furniture shrouded in dust-sheets. Rhauligan’s eyes narrowed. Lady Ambrur was certainly still in Marsember—or had been, yester-morning—so this couldn’t be the usual nobles’ practice of shutting up one house and journeying to another … not that current local Harper wisdom knew of Lady Joysil Ambrur having any other abode. Of course, she could be invited to some Sembian hunting lodge or Cormyrean upcountry castle at any time, but …

  Perhaps she merely found the house too large for her daily purposes and used this part for storing the furniture she liked the least. Yes, that’d probably be it.

  The door had the simplest of latches but also featured an ornate inner bar and two floorspike bolts, so Rhauligan undid a catch on his boot-heel and slid the heel off, exposing it as the hilt of a razor-sharp scriber.

  A moment later, he was neatly removing the first shaped pane of glass, cut along its putty-lines, and reaching in to undo a floorspike. He had to work swiftly or Narnra would have time to descend the three levels or so from the window she’d entered to this floor and get below and past him … leaving him the entire gods-kissed, servant-crowded mansion to search for her in. Yes, the score was still rising …

  Out of habit he kept casting glances back over his shoulder to make sure no one was on the wall or flying past—Why not? Some of these nobles sponsored or gave house room to apprentice mages, gaining the protection of thiefly fear of such guardians—to see him and raise the alarm … or just practice their skills at putting handy crossbow quarrels through intruding Harpers.

  No such hazards presented themselves before Rhauligan got the doors open. Once the floorspikes were drawn up, the doors could be made to part enough to thrust his prybar between them, lifting the latch and thrusting the inside bar up and out of its sockets.

  He had the door open swiftly enough to dart one hand out to deflect the falling bar from a crash down onto the floor—nice polished emeraldstone tiles, alternating in diamond-shapes with white marble—into a thudding impact with the nearest draped wardrobe or whatever it was and a fairly quiet tumble down the cloth to the floor.

  The Harper restored the bar to its rightful place, sheathed his prybar, and advanced cautiously into the dark, quiet room. A mouse scurried from under one shrouded thing to under another, but otherwise … nothing moved but the dust. He was leaving a faint trail through it, he knew, and soon found the piled-up extra end of a too-large dust-sheet to wipe his boots on.

  The room was large, and opened onto the next chamber of the mansion through a great tapestry-filled arch rather than doors. Rhauligan listened at the wall of cloth, hearing nothing, went to one end of it—rather than disturb it trying to find its center parting—and slipped his head around it.

  He found himself looking at a large, dust-dancing stairwell, with a railed landing joining it to his room and others out of sight beyond the wall that cradled the stairs.

  “Nothing,” a voice called suddenly. “Something disturbed the doves, right enough—a gorcraw, mayhap—but none of ’em had any messages. I checked every blessed one.”

  Rhauligan hastily drew back a breath or two before a bored servant-woman whose bosom resembled a large sack of potatoes trudged down the nearest stair and went along the landing.

  “Well, that’s all right, then,” another, sharper voice said from somewhere under Rhauligan’s boots, presumably the next landing down. “So long as we miss nothing and catch no Lady-fury …”

  “Huh,” the large woman agreed, as she started down the next flight of steps and passed out of Rhauligan’s view. “Can’t be thieves, unless they can fl—” She stopped, stock-still and said in a different voice, “Hold, now! That was it—the window was shut! Shut and latched! One of them birds ‘prolly came flying to get in and smacked right into the glass! Send Norn down to check for one lying in the gardens, and get the lantern—oh, and fire-pokers for the both of us! I’m not going back up there alone!”

  “Aye,” Sharp Voice agreed, her voice fading as she descended unseen stairs, “but what sort of thief shuts a window behind hisself?”

  “An idiot thief, that’s what sort!” Lumpy Bosom replied sourly, almost driving Rhauligan to chuckle.

  You have that right, goodwoman, you do indeed … and I’m assigned to be her keeper, more’s the pity.…

  No, that was unfair. The Waterdhavian’s only mistakes had been to blunder after a wizard to get here—and to run from half the gathered War Wizards and Harpers in the realm.

  Well, she’d ended up with only one following her, hadn’t she? So perhaps her lone hunter was the idiot.…

  Rhauligan put away that wry thought and turned back to the task at hand. So the window had been left open to let doves in and out of their cote. Well, that explained the handy open window and the bird-dung … and if Lumpy there had gone up the stairs to answer whatever alarm Narnra had triggered in any sort of haste, the thief from Waterdeep had to still be somewhere above him.

  Of course, he now had to keep watch over the stairs so she couldn’t slip down past him and at the same time manage not to be seen by two wary she-servants when they came back up here—and walked right past his staring face—with pokers in their hands.

  Perhaps the rooms on the far side of the stair …

  Rhauligan was out along the landing and around the stairhead like a hurrying ghost, and into … more dark, shrouded rooms given over to dust. Smaller than the one he’d been in, one giving into another through archways, again. Must be hard to heat in winter, with no doors to close, and that was probably why this tower of the mansion had been the one chosen to languish as storage. Cold storage, ha ha.

  Well, he’d best turn and find the best vantage p—hold! What was … another stair!

  Rhauligan was across the room like a storm wind, already fearing he was too late. This stair was narrower and steeper—a servants’ route, no doubt—and deserted. He peered at it then went chin-down to the dusty floor and squinted up at the steps. Aye, there! And there! She’d been down it, right enough, and not long ago.

  * * * * *

  Mask aid me, how big was this house? A grand pile indeed, from outside, yes—but to leave so much of it to the dark and dust! Was its owner a half-witted hermit, clinging to a few rooms and shuffling about mumbling about past glories? Or shut up in a sick-bed, with dwindling coins keeping fewer and fewer servants?

  Or were there newer, grander wings and towers and entire rambling mansions beyond this, that she hadn’t seen yet?

  Somehow Narnra suspected the latter.

  “Just go on being the Silken Shadow,” she breathed to herself, hoping the Harper hound on her trail had given up or been caught … and knowing, somehow, that she was just dream-wishing.

  Yet she felt—good. When her prowls were going well, she seemed almost to float along in the silence and the gloom, silence wrapped around her like a cloak.

  She felt like that now.

  Narnra gave the darkness a fierce grin and went on, wondering what lay ahead. Perhaps the stables, with a hay loft to hide in. And coaches. All nobles had coaches, and coaches betimes went out through city gates.…

  * * * * *

  Rhauligan followed the stair down as quietly as he could, which was quiet indeed. This was old, solid stonework and thick boards pegged into place, none of your slapdash modern gaudywork.

  As he went down, the noises of work—servants, of course—began to be audible: people chattering, laughing, hurrying back and forth laden with things, someone chopping food on a wooden board or table, someone else making banging and scraping sounds.

>   “Where’re them brooms, then?” The rough male voice was accompanied by a striding entry too sudden for Rhauligan to draw back. He froze on the stairs as sudden light spilled across a landing below, as a man with a long-ago broken nose and wheezing lungs snatched up a long-handled pushbroom from where it leaned against a wall, spun around without sparing a glance up the dark and dusty stairs where the Harper stood, and banged his door closed behind him again.

  Rhauligan hurried, in case the habit was to return the broom the moment its job was done. He was past that door and on down the next flight ere the door opened again, but by then the growing hubbub and light around him, through various ill-fitting hatches in the stairwell walls—it seemed he was passing a large, multi-level kitchen where a small legion of servants were keeping quite busy—was considerable.

  One hatch afforded him a gap large enough to peer through, and he put his eye to it. Shiny copper vats or tanks greeted his view, with men in aprons squatting at the taps filling great tankards as large as their torsos. Below them, several steps down on another level in the same vast room, stood a great table covered with flour and dough, with women swarming busily around it. Steam from cauldrons was rising from a lower level yet, down out of sight to his left. Rhauligan cast a glance right across the chamber and froze again.

  There, just visible through a forest of hanging pans and pots and ladles, was another, open stair—and peering through that kitchenmongery was Narnra Shalace, just for a moment ere she melted back and away and went on down those dark steps.

  She must have passed through the rooms of the floor above and found that matching servants’ stair. So she was below him, now, and he’d have to move like a man trying to catch the morrow.

  Rhauligan raced down steps with more haste than quiet. Given all the racket in the kitchen, he’d probably have to shout or bang one of those pans with a sword-hilt to be noticed, anyway, and—