by Ed Greenwood
Florin glanced up at the sky. “The day,” he told it conversationally, “does draw on. We have to cross an owlbear’s hunting ground to get out of this forest; it’d be a real pity for us both if night found us when we were just passing its lair.”
“ Stop spinning dire tales!” Narantha spat. “You’re lying! Just making things up, to try to scare me into obeying you! Well, I won’t, so there! There must be a bridge across this stream somewhere-or you can chop down a tree and make me one! Yes, sirrah! Hear now my command: fell a tree, right here, and-”
Florin strode up out of the water, gallantly cupped her elbow in his hand, and escorted her-straight into the Dathyl. When she started to struggle, seeing where he was heading, his gentle grip turned to iron, and he towed her into the water until she was stumbling, flailing, and almost immediately shrieking as her foot threatened to come out of her right boot, leaving it behind, deep underwater.
“Stamp down hard,” he commanded quietly, “or you’ll be out of those boots-and crawling for days through the forest. If the beasts let you live that long.”
He kept hold of her-which was a good thing, considering how many hidden holes and rocks she seemed to stumble over, unintentionally almost sitting down twice-and took her on a long and very wet stroll down the stream before climbing out onto some bare rocks, with a grimly dripping Narantha beside him.
Something seemed to shift, along the side of a tree ahead of them, and Florin called something soft in a liquid, shifting-sounds tongue Narantha had never heard before. She thought she heard the merest whisper of an answer before Florin dragged her back into the stream and walked on, around another bend.
This time she did fall, snatching her hand away from him and promptly losing her footing. She came up coughing, spitting, and very wet, and made no protest when he gently claimed her arm again. Her teeth were chattering by the time they stepped out of the Dathyl once more.
“What was that you said?” she asked, miserably, folding her arms across her breast to try to cover herself from him in the drenched ruin of her nightrobe. “And to whom?”
“A polite greeting, and assurance we meant no harm. To the one whose home we almost blundered into.”
Narantha waited, shivering, until it seemed clear the tall forester wasn’t going to say anything more. “I’ve never heard that speech before,” she blurted, finally. “What was it?”
Florin gave her a raised-eyebrow look. “You’ve never heard Dryadic? With all the schooling nobles get?”
“We nobles do not,” Narantha told him icily, “anticipate dealing overmuch with dryads when debating great matters of the realm. Now if you speak to me of Elvish, I can write that, and speak it… a little.”
Florin merely nodded.
“Well, sirrah? Can you?”
Florin nodded again. His attention seemed to be on the trees around them, as if he were searching for something.
After a few breaths, he nodded in satisfaction, as if he’d been shown something by an unseen hand. Collecting her hand again, he set off through the trees in a slightly different direction, his strides slow and deliberate.
“Was that really a dryad?” the noblewoman asked, curiously, as he towed her along. “I–I didn’t really see.”
Florin nodded. “And that unseeing,” he said gently, “is why you’d be dead before nightfall, if you took to wandering around this forest alone. Don’t leave my side, if you want to see your grand houses again.”
Narantha opened her mouth to say something really rude-then shut it again without uttering a sound.
Florin’s sword was in his hand, and she hadn’t even seen him draw it. “Ah… is there danger?”
“Always,” he replied shortly, stalking on through the trees. Narantha tramped after him, her boots squelching.
“Why is your sword all dirty like that?” she asked, after they’d walked for what seemed an eternity. “My father’s blades- all Crownsilver swords, and all those I see at Court, too-shine bright silver; they gleam like mirrors.”
Florin nodded. “My life may depend on a foe not seeing sunlight-or moonlight-reflecting from my steel. So I rub it with a tree gum we use to quell rust, as well as shine. The swords you describe are meant to impress. I’ve never had a need to impress anyone, nor had anyone standing around to be impressed, come to that. Swords don’t impress many Cormyrean farmers… nor rangers.”
His words done, he fell silent again, leaving the noblewoman listening to silence-except for the thuds and crashings of her own clumsy progress-and expecting more. Didn’t this lout know how to spout gallant converse? To pass the day away with clever words?
No. Of course not. He was an unlettered, graceless, backcountry lout who knew a trick or two and so thought himself better than-than his betters. The sooner she was out of his clutches and seeing him flogged for his impudence by a few furious Purple Dragons…
She turned her ankle for about the dozenth time, and slammed the side of her head hard into a sapling as she started to topple. Clawing her way down the tree until she caught her hands in enough branches to stop her fall, she gasped angrily, “Are you expecting me to walk all the way to Suzail?”
Florin gave her a puzzled frown. “Why not? How else do you usually move yourself around?”
“Horses,” Narantha told him, seething, as she dragged herself back upright. “Coaches. River-barges. Palanquins. That’s right: servants carry me.”
They trudged on for a few more paces before she snapped, “Well? Aren’t you even going to offer to carry me?”
Florin waved his sword. “This requires one of my hands. Moreover, this pack is already heavier than your entire body; can’t you manage to carry yourself around?”
Narantha had no answer to that, and trudged along in silence as they crested a little ridge, still deep in the forest, and found a rather slippery way down its far side.
“I’m appalled,” she announced, reaching more or less level ground again-and wondering why so many trees seemed to feel the need to fall over, and keep right on growing sidewise, in a tangle no forester could have nimbly won past. “Appalled, do you hear me?”
Florin did not reply, so she was forced to explain. “I’m appalled at the thought you expect me to walk most of the length of the kingdom!”
Florin turned his head away. She suspected-correctly, though she could not be sure-that he was hiding a grin from her, and snarled, “Don’t you dare ignore me, ignorant, lowborn lout!”
Florin towed her along even faster, setting a swift stride that forced her to trot to keep up with him; when she tried to slow, he kept firm hold of her hand and started to drag her.
“You’re hurting me!” she shouted, truly furious again. “You cruel, coarse ballatron! You titteravating cumberworld! You-you gidig nameless-kin bastard! ” Florin made no reply, and the flower of the Crownsilvers abruptly fell silent, her panting telling him why: she’d run out of breath to curse him.
Keeping his face set hard to keep the widening grin within him entirely off it, he quickened his pace still more.
“Slow down, knave!” the noblewoman snapped. “I can’t-can’t-”
“Catch your breath while you’re yelling at me? I’m not surprised. But we dare not slow down. Not while you’re making all this noise. Every owlbear and wood-wolf for miles has heard-”
Narantha shut her mouth abruptly, pinching her lips into a thin, furious line.
“-all the crashings of your every footfall… and they’ll be stalking us right now, following patiently, waiting until you weary and stop to rest.”
“Oh, gods bugg-buh- violate you!” the Lady Crownsilver snarled, stumbling in her fury and almost falling on her face in a slimy hole of mud and long-rotten leaves.
Florin raised expressively reproving eyebrows, looking so much like her father when he did so that Narantha shrank back. The ranger turned his head away from her, jaw set, and her cheeks flamed with mortification.
They would have flamed with something else if she�
�d been able to see his face, and the crooked grin that now kept springing onto it despite Florin’s best efforts to wrestle it down.
Chapter 5
LAWS, SCHEMES, AND DOOMS
In my days thus far, I’ve observed three things that beset all kings: laws that trip them up or are used against them; the plottings of traitors, scheming to weaken and shame them and bring them into the dark regard of their subjects ere the plots turn to their bloody removal from the scene; and those very same murderous fates that befall them. Yet do they not deserve it? After all, the dooms of kings are always a lot more bother for all than the killings of mere bakers, foresters, and cobblers.
Havandus Haeratchur
Musings of an Ale-Seller published in the Year of the Lion
T he floating scrying orb darkened and sank a little as Horaundoon passed his hand over it, banishing a scene of one more elf mage lying dead with doomed astonishment stark on his face.
Humming a jaunty tune, Horaundoon strolled past a table on which rested a neat row of three human skulls, to another table where several old and massive metal-bound tomes lay waiting. At his approach, the air in front of his nose roiled briefly, presenting an intricate glowing sign in warning.
He slowed not a step, and the sigil promptly vanished again-without the thunderclap of unleashed Art that would have slain any other man.
The archmage reached out with a hand that shimmered with enspelled rings for the darkest, most battered book. Galaundar’s Grimoire should hold what he was seeking, somewhere in the pages just after the section on preparing dismembered limbs to be spell foci…
A sound as of tinkling bells occurred in the room behind him.
He drew back his hand, and turned. “Yes?”
The sounds came again, more liquid this time, ascending in different notes. In time with them, a glow flickered in midair like a passing flame leaping out of nowhere, a little glowing scene dancing above the central skull of the three.
Horaundoon peered at it closely. The hargaunt was showing him his last slaying: the elf mage crumpling down his own garden steps, to sprawl limp and lifeless, forever staring.
Its bubbling, bell-like speech came again.
“Yes,” Horaundoon agreed gravely, “the spell is dangerous-but only if I’m actually caught in the act of using it. It leaves no trace behind, no link to me or to this place.”
Bells cascaded like water, and another scene sprang into brief existence where the first had danced only moments ago. The hargaunt, it seemed, was unimpressed.
One of the earliest slayings, this time, the elder elf who’d raced in vain to reach his ward-spells, and died clawing the air well outside their crackling reach.
The archmage nodded patiently. “No magic is foolproof-with the Art, we steer and shape energies that betimes have intent of their own, in a world full of old, hidden spells that can flare into life without warning. Yet consider how safe, in something as rife with uncertainty as sorcery must needs be, this crafting of mine is. Mages are given to grandiose claims and boasts that far outstrip their true talents, yes, but this is not only my masterwork, but a masterwork by any solemn measure of spellcrafting.”
He strode back through the protective ward, waving a hand to call up a vision of his own, much larger than those the hargaunt emitted.
The air between them was suddenly full of yet another elf mage, this one life-sized and battling something that swirled half-seen around him, dread on his face as he came to know that there was nothing he could do against this attack, and that his doom was come upon him at last.
Horaundoon stepped right through the image even before it began to fade, as he strode to stand over the skull. “My master-spell can detect any mantle and move toward it, drifting across half Faerun if need be. When it impinges upon the mantle, I am made aware of this-and at my command, the spell conquers the mantle and turns it against its user! From the mantle’s focus gem it lashes into the mind of he who wears the mantle, emptying his spells into the gem and feebleminding him as it does so. This, too, I am made aware of, whereupon it sends those spells to me. The weight of that mind-burst can be staggering, yes, but-behold-I’m still standing. I then command my spell, intermingled with the mantle, to immolate itself, gem, mantle, and mantle-wearer-or merely his mind, turning his brain to ash, and ’tis done.”
The hargaunt belled anew.
“Ah, but it has worked every time. I’ve slain elf after elf, though I’m going to have to work very swiftly indeed, now. Word is spreading, and Fair Folk are abandoning use of their mantles from Evereska to the Dragonreach shores. I’ve been stealing the spells of the most powerful mages I can catch alone, avoiding only masters of the High Magic-and with each mind I empty, the spells at my command grow richer.”
The hargaunt made its querying whistle, accompanied by that wisp of pink that meant, as clearly as if it had shouted out the word in Common: “Why?”
Horaundoon shrugged. “The ranks of the Zhentarim grow steadily unfriendlier, the schemes and betrayals and false blamings crowding in hard and fast, one upon the other. If I remain, with the wits and standing all know I have, I continue to be a target. Sooner or later, most probably sooner, some rival or cabal of rivals will inevitably slay me.”
The archmage raised a hand, and the air around him sang, briefly and faintly, reassuring him that his shielding spells-that blocked all scrying, and warned of attempts to intrude, or to shatter or alter them-remained intact.
“So I must grow powerful enough to make myself a way out of the Zhentarim. That’s why I tolerate apprentices. Already my magics have made them my slaves, though they know it not. When the time is right, I’ll force one of them to take my shape and seeming. The others, just as spellbound, will slay this false Horaundoon. Leaving me, in a new guise fashioned by you, to vanish from the notice of the Brotherhood. Free once more.”
The hargaunt trilled, throwing up a scene that flashed briefly blue.
“Already? Haularake, where does the day go?” Horaundoon hurriedly loosened the sash of his robes and shrugged them back off his shoulders, letting them fall to where his arms held them up at his waist. “I know, I know,” he added, before the hargaunt could interrupt him. “Spellcrafting always takes longer than I think it will. Naed, we’ll have to really hurry now.”
He extended his other hand to the skull. It promptly bulged, coiled, and became an ivory-hued, sightless snake, oozing up his arm with purposeful speed, and leaving no sign of the skull it had been.
“Naed, naed, naed, ” the archmage murmured impatiently, the last word muffled by the hargaunt flowing over his lips as it molded itself to his face, giving him quite a different visage. A woman’s face, strikingly beautiful.
Below Horaundoon’s newly pointed chin, the bulk of the hargaunt had molded itself into a pair of decidedly feminine-and decidedly attractive-breasts.
He was breathing hard in his haste by the time he reached the wardrobe mirror, and cast the spell that turned him from a rather gaunt and hairy man with an incongruously smooth and beautiful woman’s face and front, into a shapely and curvaceous woman. Blowing himself a mocking kiss, he whirled into the wardrobe, snatched out a suitable gown, thanked the watching gods (and not for the first time) that the current fashions in footwear were low-heeled and the current jewelry simple, and hurried to pin up his hair.
He was staring into a mirror, three of the pins in his mouth and one in his hand, when a hollow chant arose from whence he’d come. He slammed the hairpins down on the table and hurried back to his study.
“An intruder!” the remaining two skulls chanted in unison, jawbones wagging. They were still rising up from the table as Horaundoon slid to a halt in front of them. “An intruder!”
“Blast him down!” Horaundoon roared, “and trouble me no more with such trifles!”
He was two running strides back toward the mirror when the floor under him shook slightly, there was a long and rolling booming sound, and the skulls ceased their chanting in mid-wor
d.
Duly blasted. Good.
Horaundoon snatched up the pins and grimly set to work again pinning up his hair. With all the war wizards infesting this oh-so-peaceful Forest Kingdom, beautiful and wealthy merchants’ widows could get far closer to king’s lords than archmages widely suspected of being Zhentarim could.
And there was a lord or three in Cormyr he wanted to befriend. They might well come in very useful when the time was right. Soon.
“We… we’re following the stream, aren’t we?” Lady Narantha gasped, clambering up to join Florin beside an overhanging tangle of exposed tree roots and boulders.
The forester gave her a sharp look. “We are. Well spotted. ’Tis the best way not to get lost.”
“Won’t the bears and the… the hunting beasts follow it, too?”
“Yes.”
“But-” Narantha started to scramble up a stairlike tangle of roots, to look over the boulders. Florin’s hand shot out and caught hold of her elbow-and Narantha found herself struggling to climb but not moving one fingersbreadth forward. “What’re you-?” she gasped.
Florin drew her close and murmured sternly, “Never show yourself over the top of a ridge like that. Haven’t you been watching me? Cautious, duck low, show as little head as possible as you take a good look; that’s the way. Now, you just used one of my least favorite words: ‘but.’ What were you going to say after that?”
The noblewoman blinked at him, as they stood nose to nose, then frowned as she remembered. “ But if the beasts follow the stream, they’ll find us-and what then?”
“Ah.” Florin nodded. “Then this.” He held up the sword Narantha had all but forgotten was in his hand.
She looked at it, then up at him. He asked, “You’ve never been trained to use one of these, have you?”
