by Lisa Smedman
LARAJIN
Larajin took a deep breath, hoping the elf would listen this time.
“Twenty-six years ago, Thamalon Uskevren journeyed north to the Tangled Trees. He met an elf woman—a wild elf of the forest—and…lay with her.
A year later he returned, and found that she had given birth to his child.
“I was raised in his house, in Sembia, but now I have returned. I am looking for…”
She paused, unsure for a moment how to continue.
“For my roots. My … family.”
The elf’s eyes had grown wider as Larajin spoke.
Suddenly, in one swift motion, she lowered her bow.
She pressed both hands against her heart, palms to her chest and bowed.
DIVIDED HEART, UNSWERVING STRENGTH.
“I should have paid more heed to the goddess’s sign. Perhaps then I would have recognized you,” she said as she straightened, “but it’s little wonder that I didn’t. You and your brother are as different as day and night.”
SEMBIA:
GATEWAY TO THE REALMS
Book I
The Halls of Stormweather
Edited by Philip Athans
Book II
Shadow’s Witness
Paul S. Kemp
Book III
The Shattered Mask
Richard Lee Byers
Book IV
Black Wolf
Dave Gross
Book V
Heirs of Prophecy
Lisa Smedman
Book VI
Sands of the Soul
Voronica Whitney-Robinson
Book VII
Lord of Storm weather
Dave Gross
PROLOGUE
The Year of Wild Magic (1372 DR)
Crowned by the horns of a rising crescent moon, the stone stood in the forest, dappled with shadow and enfolded deep in the whispers and creaks of trees moving in the wind. Four times the height of a person and wider than extended arms could reach, it had been hewn from a single slab of gray granite, then polished by ancient crafters until it was as smooth and glossy as the surface of a still lake.
A solitary figure kneeled before the stone, his knees and bare feet denting the loamy ground. Dressed in short leather breeches with fringe at the knees and a leather vest tooled in an oak-leaf pattern, he held a bow, the ends of which had been carved in the shape of acorns. The fingers and thumb that gripped that bow were dark, though the hand itself was no ruddier than was usual for his race.
The figure’s dark auburn hair was pulled back in a single braid, revealing sharply pointed ears, the left one pierced near its tip with a length of gilded bone. The elf’s face was long and narrow with almond-shaped eyes, and framed by bangs that hung in a series of tiny fringelike braids. A small black feather was woven into the tip of each braid and fluttered against his forehead in the wind. At his throat was a glint of gold: a ring that hung on a leather thong.
With his free hand he reached out, touching the stone with slender fingers. As they rested upon its surface, moonlight revealed the delicate tracery of ink on skin that made the digits appear darker than the rest of his hand. A single, broad line had been tattooed along the back of each finger, another along the thumb. Smaller lines feathered out from these root lines, giving his digits the appearance of dark quills.
Feather-fingers moved upon the Standing Stone, tracing the words that had been inscribed upon it more than thirteen centuries before. Twining around the base of the stone like a vine around a tree, the inscription—written in Espruar, the flowing script of the elves—commemorated the ancient pact between Cormanthor and the humans of the Dales.
The kneeling figure whispered it aloud, from memory. “For thus have the humans of the East solemnly sworn: No axe shall fell the Forest, nor road cross it, nor settlement or farm reduce it, nor invasion claim it, so long as there are elves in this Wood. In return, the Elven Court grants the humans from the East full title to the lands surrounding Cormanthor, to tend and sow as they will. Let this stone stand as a permanent monument to this our solemn pact. For so long as the friendship and trust between our two races endures, so long this stone shall…”
Where the final word should have been was only a dark, empty space. The flowing script vanished into a split in the stone. More than four fingers wide at the base, the crevice rapidly narrowed, but a thin crack continued up the front of the monument, marring its smooth surface.
Tracing this crack with a fingertip, the elf slowly stood. The line ended at a point even with his heart.
The elf drew a bone-handled knife from the belt at his waist and tested its tempered steel against a smooth section of stone. Metal grated against granite once, twice, thrice, eventually etching a faint line. Lowering his knife, the elf peered at the scratch he’d made, watching as it began to glow with a faint, silver light. As the wound in the stone healed itself, the elf slowly nodded. The magic of the Standing Stone was still intact.
Movement at the base of the monument caught the elf’s eye. Sheathing his dagger, he kneeled swiftly. He reached into the crack in the stone with a slender finger and felt something round and rough that had an opening in its side. After a moment, he recognized it as a carefully woven ball of twigs and leaves: a hidden nest. The crack must have been there for some time, perhaps a month or more.
Gently probing inside the nest, his fingertips brushed against the soft back of a tiny bird with an upturned tail—a wren—who protested the intrusion with a sharp peck of her beak. Ignoring the warning, the elf quested further. Inside the nest were two tiny eggs, tucked under the wren’s downy chest. A third egg, pushed to one side of the nest, was cold.
Dead?
The elf closed his eyes and turned his head, seeking out the direction of the breeze by its feel against his skin and the flutter of the feathers in his bangs. He whispered a prayer, letting the wind take his words. A moment later, the sound of a distant flute blew back on the wind. He inhaled sharply, taking it into his lungs, then concentrated its energy from lung to heart to veins to fingertips. Slowly, the egg grew warm under his touch. When it was the same temperature as the others, he nudged it back under the wren’s warm chest.
The elf withdrew his hand, then stood. He turned away from the stone to peer through the darkened wood. No more than a few dozen paces from where he stood was a gap in the forest—the wide, bare slash that was Rauthauvyr’s Road. It was a wound in the forest that was growing wider, becoming more putrid, with each passing day.
As the clouds overhead thickened, the elf scowled. The Elven Court of years long past was wrong to have capitulated to the humans of the south, to have allowed the trees to be felled and the road to be built, breaking the sacred pact. It was a wonder that the stone had not split then, with the first stroke of the axe.
He spat. If he had been born five centuries earlier …
But he had not.
For four hundred and fifty years, human feet had stamped along that road, tramping through the Vale of Lost Voices and troubling the sacred sleep of those laid to rest between the roots of the mighty oaks.
A blight was spreading along that road, destroying the forest to either side and worming its way deeper into the wood with each passing day. Like fleas on a dog the blight must have been carried by humans.
It had to be stopped.
Trees creaked against one another as the wind picked up, and clouds scudded across the face of the moon, throwing stone and elf into shadow. Closer to the road, one of the blighted trees groaned as it was bent by the wind, then it cracked and came crashing down in a tangle of broken limbs. After a silence that stretched for a heartbeat or two, thunder grumbled in the sky to the east. The clouds overhead thickened, and the first
drops of rain began to fall.
The elf turned his face up to the heavens, allowing the tears of the Leaflord to mingle with the tears flowing from his own eyes.
“These humans,” he vowed, in a voice as twisted as a gnarled tree root. “They will pay for what they have done.”
He slung his bow over his shoulder and squatted beside the stone, thrusting hands out to either side. A faint tingle began at his splayed fingers, and a shivery chill rushed up his arms. The transformation began. Tattooed fingers flattened and became feathers, arms elongated, changed articulation, and grew into wings. Vest and breeches turned into a covering of sleek black feathers. As the elf’s head grew rounder and his nose and lips hardened into a beak, his body shrank, continuing the shift until he stood on three-toed feet.
Shaking the rain from his feathers, the elf-become-crow gave a single loud caw. A heartbeat later, the cry was echoed by a bright flash of lightning.
The crow launched itself into the air, circled the Standing Stone once, then winged its way to the southeast through darkening skies.
CHAPTER 1
Larajin stared at the face that looked up at her from the pages of the leather-bound book she held in her lap. The woodcut image, printed more than a century before, showed a wild elf with a long, narrow face and high forehead. Tucked behind his pointed ears were braids tied with bits of bone and feather. Feral, almond-shaped eyes glared above cheeks tattooed with thick, black lines.
Bare-chested and clad only in rough leather breeches, the elf stood in a forest, surrounded by the trunks of massive trees, thick ferns hiding all but the top of his fringed moccasins. He gripped a knife with a hilt made from a deer’s hoof in one hand, a short bow in the other. Underneath the illustration was the caption: Wild Elf Warrior of the Tangled Trees.
Larajin ran a finger along the top of her own ear. It was smooth and round—a legacy of her human father, Master Thamalon Uskevren the Elder. From her mother—a “wild elf” of the Tangled Trees—Larajin had inherited her rust-colored hair, slim build, and impulsive nature.
What had her mother been like? Beautiful, certainly, to have lured the master’s affections away from his wife. Well respected by her people, Habrith had said, but Habrith—who was like an aunt to Larajin—had refused to tell her more. She said only that Larajin would find out on her own in due time, when the moment had ripened.
Larajin knew she would one day travel to the Tangled Trees, but something was holding her back. It was fear, perhaps, or the comforts of Stormweather Towers, or the fact that the few Elvish words she’d managed to glean from dusty old tomes would not enable her to make her complicated story understood.
A thud startled Larajin out of her reverie. She peered around the high back of the armchair in which she sat, thinking that someone had entered the library—that she was about to be caught handling the master’s precious tomes. She saw with relief that the door to the library was still closed and realized the noise had just been a book falling over on one of the shelves. From elsewhere in Stormweather Towers came the sound of raised voices, but in the hall outside the library, all was quiet.
On the carpet at her feet, a tressym sighed contentedly, eyes closed. The catlike creature sat like a sphinx, forepaws extended and wings tucked tightly against her back. Even folded flat, the wings were exquisitely beautiful. Unfolded, they rivaled a peacock’s feathers, with spots of brilliant turquoise, vibrant yellow, and ruby red, all edged in tabby-stripe black.
As if sensing Larajin looking at her, the tressym opened luminous golden eyes and inclined her head.
Brrow? she asked quizzically.
Larajin bent down to stroke silky, blue-gray fur. As always, she was amazed at how the tressym trusted her. Anyone else foolish enough to try to pat the creature would have had her hand shredded by those sharp claws.
“You shouldn’t be here,” she chided. “You’re a wild creature—you should have flown back to wherever you came from, after I healed you. Why do you keep sneaking into Stormweather Towers? Don’t you know your being here is dangerous—for both of us?”
The only answer was a rumbling purr. The tressym closed her eyes and in a moment was fast asleep.
Larajin settled back into the armchair and turned the page, wrinkling her nose at the musty smell of age-spotted paper and old leather. The book was a history of the founding of Sembia, an unfortunately rather dry account of what must in fact have been truly heroic events. Larajin would liked to have learned more, for example, about the great clash between humans and elves at Singing Arrows in the year 884 DR. What had prompted the historians to give such a bloody battle so poetic a name? Also given short shrift was the visit to the Elven Court of Sembia’s first Overmaster, Rauthauvyr the Raven, in 913. Instead of describing elven customs, the author dwelled interminably on arcane legal arguments about whether or not Sembia had the right to construct a road.
There was one tantalizing detail, however. A footnote at the bottom of a page containing a list of the members of the council noted that these were not the “true names” of the elves. It added that every elf was given both a true name and a common name by his parents on the day that he was born.
Larajin had been named by her adoptive human mother, the servant Shonri Wellrun. Now she wondered—had the elf woman who died giving birth to her twenty-five years ago lived long enough to give her daughter a true name?
Lost in thought, Larajin heard the tressym hiss, but she paid it no heed, assuming the creature was reacting to something in a dream. A long shadow fell across the pages, and a hand reached down and jerked the book out of her lap, causing Larajin to shriek in alarm.
“This is the final stone, girl,” a deep voice growled.
Blushing furiously, Larajin looked up into the stern face of her nemesis: Erevis Cale, head servant and butler to the house of Uskevren. Tall and implacable as a tower, he glared down at her, a terrible wrath in his deep-shadowed eyes. The sleeves of his gray shirt were smudged with what must have been soot, judging by the strong odor of smoke that clung to him, and there was a small cut on his bald scalp, as if he’d banged his head on something.
“B-but, Sir,” she sputtered, “it’s long past dark, and my chores are done. I know that’s a rare and valuable book, but I took great care with it and didn’t bend any—”
“And what of the tallow you were melting on the stove?”
The quiet words stopped her cold, more than any shouted rebuke might have done. Her eyes widened as she remembered the last task she’d been assigned that evening: softening tallow for the servants who topped up the lamps in the evening. Despite the close summer warmth of the library, her stomach felt like sharp icicles had suddenly sprouted inside it. A question rose in her mind, one she dared not whisper aloud: How much of the kitchen had been burned?
Behind Cale, the tressym launched herself into the air, seeking the safety of the rafters. For the first time since the creature had followed Larajin back to Stormweather Towers, some eighteen months before, the butler ignored the fact that it had once again crept indoors. Instead he merely stared at Larajin, his lips pressed together in a thin line.
“Get up,” he ordered. “This time the master himself will deal with you.”
As she was marched to the door, Larajin heard him add, under his breath, “And this time, by the gods, I’ll finally be rid of you.”
The hallway to the master’s study had never seemed so long. Steered by Cale’s heavy hand on her shoulder, Larajin dragged her feet along the plush carpet, unwilling to face the disappointment she knew she would see in the master’s eyes. Gilt-framed portraits of the Uskevren ancestors glared down at her from either side, and a suit of plate mail holding an axe stood as if waiting for Larajin to place her neck on the chopping block.
From behind the heavy oak door of the master’s study came the murmurs of two voices. As Larajin and Cale approached, the door opened. Through it came one of the kitchen staff—Aileen, a girl with wispy blonde hair who hid a shrewish disposit
ion behind pretty smiles—carrying an empty decanter. She wore the formal Uskevren servant’s uniform: a white dress slashed with blue, and a gold vest and turban bearing the Uskevren crest with its horse-at-anchor design. Tiny silver bells sewn onto her turban tinkled as she stopped short, obviously surprised to find Cale and Larajin in the hallway.
Larajin was suddenly aware that she had mislaid part of her uniform—again. Her own turban was lying forgotten in the library, and her long hair hung uncombed and tousled about her shoulders. Aileen noted this with a quick glance and crinkled her nose.
Aileen had halted with one hand still on the door behind her, which remained open a finger’s width.
“The master has a visitor, Sir,” she told Cale in a mincing voice. “He instructed that…”
Her eye fell on Larajin’s shoulder, and the sooty mark Cale’s hand had left there. Her lips twitched into a smirk.
“The master instructed that whoever caused the fire atop the stove be brought to him straight away.”
Larajin turned to Cale to protest, but her words died on her lips when she saw the hard gleam in his eyes. He either couldn’t see that Aileen was ensuring that the master would deal with Larajin more harshly after being interrupted, or he didn’t care.
As Aileen scurried away down the hallway, Cale marched Larajin to the study. As his hand fell on the door latch, a snatch of conversation came from behind the door.
“… such drastic measures,” the master was saying. “Surely the Merchant Council must realize the reaction this will prompt. It came as no small surprise to me that the Hulorn encouraged this folly.”
Cale paused, obviously reconsidering the wisdom of an interruption. As a frown creased his brow, Larajin allowed herself a tentative shred of hope. Perhaps the butler would be forced to wait until morning to bring her to the master. By then, both their tempers might cool.
From the study came a second male voice, this one with a slight wheeze to it.
“The Hulorn was not the only one to cast a vote in favor. The council will stand behind its decision, come what may. Your opinion is that of the minority—even the Overmaster recognizes the necessity of responding to the attacks with swords, not words. The Dales have declared themselves neutral, and Cormyr has shown no interest in the squabble.”
