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
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.”