Aris noticed the way Galaeron was holding his hand and frowned in concern.
“You hurt yourself. Maybe I can—”
“Quiet!” Dove hissed. “The dragons are coming.”
Aris peered up into the forest’s darkening canopy and said, “I don’t see—”
Ruha held a finger to her veil and whispered, “Listen.”
Aris fell silent. Galaeron listened and heard nothing but the distant murmur of panicked caravanners crashing through the dusky woods. It took him a moment to realize that Dove was talking about what they couldn’t hear. There were no chirping crickets, no hooting owls, no more screams from the road.
A faint rustle drifted down through the treetops. Galaeron thought at first that a breeze was coming up, but the rustle continued to grow and soon became the distinct hiss of air rushing over scales. A dragon-shaped darkness appeared to the north and came sweeping through the woods toward them. Galaeron and most of the others scrambled for cover, Alustriel lingering to complete her spell and Aris kneeling beneath the boughs of a great oak. The hissing grew louder, and the darkness came nearer, meandering back and forth, as vast as a lake, swallowing everything in its path.
Alustriel finished her spell in a hushed whisper, then took up the last vial and lay down in the shadows along the stream bank. Galaeron kept his gaze turned upward, but the canopy was too thick for him to see anything except a tiny smear of sky and a handful of the evening’s first stars. The hiss swelled to a whooshing, then the edge of a wing blocked even that small light.
They were plunged into darkness, and Galaeron waited in frozen silence, the throbbing of his broken hand forgotten. He counted one heartbeat, two, a dozen, then two dozen. Finally, the rushing faded to a hiss, and the darkness swept away to the south. He started to breathe again without realizing that he’d ever stopped, and a lone cricket began to chirp somewhere beyond the creek.
Khelben emerged first, going straight to the boulder to pick up a potion. By the time the others had arrived, he already had the cap off and was raising it to his lips.
Before he could drink, Alustriel caught him by the wrist and said, “Hold there.” She took the vial from his hand and passed it to Laeral. “Perhaps you have no care whether you drink a man’s potion or a woman’s, but we do.”
Khelben raised a brow. “There’s a difference?”
Alustriel nodded and said, “A pair of bosoms would look as strange on you as a beard would on me.”
She selected another vial that looked just the same and gave it to him. Once Alustriel had passed out the rest of the potions, Khelben raised his hand as though making a toast, and the Chosen drank the magic down.
The effect was swift, but not instantaneous. By the time they finished their potions, the Chosen had shrunk to the size of elves. They continued to diminish before Galaeron’s eyes, their fingers growing so small they had to grasp the vials in their whole hands. Alustriel produced two green pills from somewhere within her cloak. Though they could not have been much smaller than peas, in her fingers they looked more the size of Cormyr’s purse-hogging gold lions.
“Swallow this when you are ready to be rid of us,” she said. “There is no hurry except that imposed by your hunger … but in the Lady’s name, don’t eat! There are some ways I never wish to pass.”
Galaeron reached down to take the pills and said, “Have no fear of that. I doubt Aris and I will be dining at any banquets.”
Galaeron turned to pass the pill along and found the giant staring south into the forest, his brow drawn into a deep furrow.
“Aris?”
“The dragon—it’s coming back,” the giant whispered. “Ten seconds, perhaps twenty.”
Galaeron passed Aris’s pill up—he had to tug on the hem of the giant’s tunic to get his attention—then looked back to the Chosen. They were still waist-high.
A faint hiss drifted down through the treetops, and a familiar darkness appeared in the woods ahead.
“We’re not going to make it,” Galaeron whispered.
Khelben looked up at Ruha. The witch paled—at least what little could be seen above her veil—but nodded and began to rub her hands together. Galaeron started to protest, but was reminded of the difficult decisions they had already made when his hand started to throb again.
By the time he turned to say his good-byes, Ruha was already racing away from them. She murmured a word of magic, and the sound of her whispering feet began to reverberate through the forest. A soft pulse sounded down through the leaves as the dragon flapped its huge wings, then its black shadow abruptly turned and swept off in pursuit of the fleeing witch.
“Fare you well, my brave friend,” Galaeron whispered.
“You won’t be rid of her that easily, elf,” Storm said. She stood only about as high his knee, and her voice was little more than a tinny hiss. “Ruha spent her childhood dodging blue dragons. She’ll be there waiting when Shade falls.”
“I pray so,” Aris whispered. He looked down, then kneeled and extended a hand. “I think I can do it now, if you’re ready.”
“I don’t think we’ll ever be ready for something like this,” Khelben said, stepping onto the giant’s palm, “but if you can do it now, the sooner the better.”
Aris tipped his chin back, then dangled Khelben over his open mouth.
“And remember not to chew!” Khelben ordered.
Aris dropped him headlong into his gullet, then made a sour face as he struggled to swallow without closing his mouth. For a moment, Galaeron thought his friend would choke and send Khelben flying through forest, then the archmage’s black boots finally vanished into the giant’s gaping mouth.
Aris made a loud gulping sound, then lowered his hand again.
Laeral and Storm exchanged uneasy glances, and Storm waved her sister forward.
“By all means.”
“You’re too kind,” Laeral said with a grimace, then she stepped onto Aris’s palm.
She had grown just enough smaller that the giant was able to gulp her down without gagging, and Storm went down even easier. That left only Alustriel and Dove, who—at ankle height—were still too large for Galaeron to swallow.
While they waited, Dove turned to Alustriel. “You’re sure we won’t suffocate?”
“That’s what the water breathing magic is for.” She looked up at Galaeron and added, “You will remember to drink lots of water.”
Recognizing it as an order and not a question, Galaeron merely nodded.
“And we won’t be digested?” Dove pressed.
“We’re Chosen,” Alustriel said. “A little stomach acid isn’t going to hurt us. And I do have protection—”
The flicker of a far-off lightning bolt flashed through the forest, followed almost instantly by a muffled crackle. Galaeron glanced over and saw the distant glow of a burning tree.
“What now?” he asked. At about twice the size of his thumb, Alustriel and Dove were still too large for him to swallow—at least without chewing first. “It has to be coming this way.”
“There’s only one thing to do.” Alustriel waved a tiny arm, and the five vials shattered into sparkling dust. “If you wait here, the dragon will know you want to be caught.”
The steady throb of wings beating air sounded from the direction of the burning tree and began to grow rapidly louder, and the dragon’s dark shadow sailed through the forest in their direction.
Galaeron snatched both Chosen up in his good hand and shouted, “Run, Aris!”
The giant spun and crashed off to the west. Trying to keep hold of the shrinking Chosen without suffocating or crushing them—in his panic to escape the dragon for a few moments longer, the absurdity of that concern did not strike him—Galaeron turned southward and sprinted along the bank of the stream. He was making it more difficult to capture them both, but he had to try as hard as he could to escape. A dragon that old would know if he tried to make it easy.
The dragon’s shadow arrived to the terrific rushing of
leaves as the trees shuddered beneath the buffeting of its wings. Galaeron stopped—more from terror than conscious will—and dropped behind a fallen log. The beast passed overhead so closely that he could smell the odor of fresh lightning still clinging to its scales and hear the high branches scraping its belly. He thought for a moment that it would take him before he could swallow the Chosen, but it continued on westward, chasing the crashing steps of Aris.
Galaeron opened his mouth to sigh in relief and found himself panting for breath. The dragon plunged into the forest with a horrific sound of crashing and splintering, and Aris bellowed in shock. The cry changed to one of pain and fear, then rose into the air.
And that was all. The giant was gone, just that fast.
Galaeron remained motionless, half-expecting to hear Aris’s body come crashing back into the trees when the dragon realized it still didn’t have him. When the giant’s cries only grew more distant, he finally stood and looked down at Alustriel and Dove. They were about half the size of his thumb now, small enough that even an elf could swallow them.
“Aris was taken,” he reported, “but I think it missed—”
The leaves shuddered with a sudden rushing as something settled in the treetops, then the trees began to groan and creak beneath some great weight. Galaeron was seized by such an aura of cold terror that his shadow rose inside him and set his mind whirling in a black tornado. Slowly, he raised his eyes, and above the treetops he saw what looked like black, bare limbs curving across the few visible wedges of starlit sky.
Galaeron stood there, frozen in terror and confusion, trying to understand what he was seeing. An enormous black cord of bare vertebrae snaked across a smear of open sky a dozen paces to his right, bringing into view a fleshless, horned skull as large as a rothé.
The skull slowly rotated around until Galaeron found himself looking into the burning blue star of a huge, lifeless eye.
Galaeron! Alustriel’s voice came to him inside his head, slicing through the black fog of fear that was clouding his mind. Now!
Even in his dragon-inspired panic—and this was the worst he had ever experienced—Galaeron knew better than to raise Malygris’s curiosity by swallowing the Chosen in front of him. Instead, acting as much by instinct as by plan, he spun on his heel and fled, bringing his hand to his lips as he ran and sucking the pair into his mouth.
A huge claw crashed down above him, bringing with it a torrent of leaves and splintered wood and trapping him in a cage of bony talons.
“Not so fast, elf,” Malygris said. “You are the one I have been searching for.”
Galaeron swallowed and felt the Chosen sliding down his throat. With any luck, he had remembered not to chew.
CHAPTER EIGHT
16 Flamerule, the Year of Wild Magic
Keya Nihmedu stood in the first rank of the Company of the Cold Hand, trembling in the rumble and the flash of the attack, her head tipped back as she watched sheet after sheet of crimson blast magic roll across Evereska’s flickering mythal. The city’s archers answered by darkening the sky with their arrows, and elf battle mages stood spaced along the Meadow Wall, barraging the demolished terraces of the Vine Vale with crackling bolts and arcs of acrid flame.
But, aside from the wall of bugbear mind-slaves behind which the phaerimm were hiding, nobody was dying. The thornbacks themselves were hovering at the edge of spell range, defended from Evereska’s assaults by missile guards and spell shields, and they were even more careful to keep their ragged army of beholders and illithids scattered far up the vale where no arrows and few spells could do them harm. The elves were just as safe behind their mythal. While it stood, no attack—magic or otherwise—could cross the Meadow Wall to harm anyone inside.
For perhaps the thousandth time in the past two days, Lord Duirsar strode by in front of the Company of the Cold Hand, his wrists crossed behind his back and his gaze fixed on the distant rank of phaerimm. The events of the last months had aged him as elves do not age, turning his long hair more gray than silver and stooping his shoulders beneath the weight of his worries.
“I see what they’re doing, Lord Commander,” Duirsar said to a tall moon elf—the acclaimed Kiinyon Colbathin—who was striding along at his side. “It’s going to work.”
“The mythal has held all these months, Lord Duirsar, even when it was cut off from the Weave.” Attired in the battered but once-elegant armor of an Evereskan high noble, Kiinyon looked as care-worn and stressed the high lord himself. “It will hold until Lord Commander Ramealaerub arrives.”
Duirsar spun on Kiinyon, wagging a bony finger in his face.
“If Ramealaerub arrives, Lord Commander—if,” he said. “Even if he does, it may not be in time.”
Kiinyon did not argue the point. At last report, Ramealaerub’s army had still been camped in the Vyshaen Barrows, awaiting guides from Evereska. Unfortunately, sending guides by foot was impossible, and those who tried to teleport made it only as far as the vale’s boundary before falling to ground in a bloody spray, no doubt intercepted by the same phaerimm magic that prevented inbound supplies and reinforcements from entering Evereska via its translocational gates.
Duirsar turned and studied the phaerimm.
“They are wearing us down, Lord Commander, draining our defenses.”
“They are trying, milord. That is not the same as doing.” Kiinyon glanced back at the long line of young runners bringing casks of fresh arrows down from the city and said, “It would take a decade to deplete Evereska’s supply of arrow wood, and with the Weave available again, there is no need at all to worry about our magic.”
“You know what I am worried about, Lord Commander—and it is not arrows or lightning bolts,” Duirsar replied, glancing up at the flickering mythal. “I think the time has come for the lion to leave his den.”
Kiinyon scowled in Keya’s direction, and she realized she was nodding in agreement. She stopped but held his gaze until duty compelled him to turn his attention back to Lord Duirsar.
“Milord, that’s what the enemy wants,” Kiinyon said. “They are trying to draw us out where we will be vulnerable to their attack.”
“Or exploiting our temerity to exhaust the mythal.” Duirsar continued to study the sheets of magic crashing across the surface of the mythal and said, “In all my centuries, I have never seen it waver like this. The mythal needs our help, Kiinyon.”
The lord commander looked up, shielding his eyes against the flashing magic, and said, “We are doing all we can. At least our archers and our battle mages are holding them at a distance. Imagine the damage the thornbacks could do, were they free to stand beside the mythal itself.”
Keya had to bite her tongue to maintain the silence expected of a soldier in the ranks. Kiinyon Colbathin was one of the greatest spellblades Evereska had ever known—almost the equal of her own father, who had fallen saving the life of Khelben Arunsun—but he was an under-confident, and therefore timid, general. It would be wrong to blame Kiinyon for Evereska’s inability to break the siege, though he had certainly not hesitated to blame her brother Galaeron for prompting it, but it was no exaggeration to say that his only clear strategy seemed to be holding out until someone from outside arrived to save them.
Lord Duirsar remained silent for a long time after Kiinyon spoke. Keya thought he might actually be trying to imagine what possible difference it would make if the phaerimm were standing at the mythal.
When he lowered his gaze she saw more anger in his face than uncertainty, and she knew that he was growing as frustrated with his lord commander as she and the rest of Evereska. Duirsar stared at the ground and seemed to be debating something, then raised his gaze and looked straight at her.
“What say you, Keya?” he asked.
Keya knew better than to let her astonishment show, or to hesitate for fear of offending Kiinyon. Khelben Arunsun had been her house guest for much of the siege, and during that time she had spent enough time in the company of both elves to know that Lor
d Duirsar expected an answer when he asked a question and that Kiinyon would only hold her reply against her if he thought she was being less than honest. Cautious though the lord commander might be in his strategy, he was faithful in his duty and loyal to his city, and if that meant being embarrassed in front of the High Lord, then so be it.
Keya took all the time she dared to consider her answer—thinking fast was no easy task with the battle thunder crashing overhead—then she inclined her head in deference.
“If Evereska’s army crosses the Meadow Wall to meet the phaerimm spell to spell, it will not return,” she said. “Milord Colbathin is correct in this much. Our losses were heavy enough when we had an army of Shadovar and two Chosen fighting at our sides. Without them, our casualties would be total.”
Though accustomed enough in matters of state to hide his feelings behind a mask of indifference, Lord Duirsar was too exhausted and nerve-racked to conceal his surprise. He studied Keya as he might a crouching wolf, his eyes narrowed and his brow raised.
But it was Kiinyon himself who demanded, “And in how much am I mistaken, Swordlady?”
Keya dipped her head in the lord commander’s direction and said, “In fighting not to lose, milord. We cannot break the siege by conserving our forces. We must summon our resolve and fight to win.”
Seeing the look of apprehension that came to the lord commander’s eyes, Keya turned back to Duirsar, whose wry smile suggested that he understood exactly what she was saying.
“Continue, Lady Nihmedu.”
Keya felt a secret thrill at being called by her hereditary title. At just over eighty, she was still a decade too young to assume the title formally, and being addressed by it by Evereska’s high lord was a token of his respect.
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