With a trembling left hand, Catti-brie pulled back the sleeve of her robe. She looked upon the spellscar, the head of Mielikki’s unicorn, as the mist dissipated, and she blinked repeatedly, wondering if it was a trick of the light, perhaps, or of her own light-headedness with her loss of blood. For while the scar remained, it seemed even more distinct than before, more like a tattoo now than a birthmark, a unicorn’s golden horn and with the creature’s head similarly outlined in gold.
Another wave of pain brought a grimace and a reminder, and Catti-brie began again her chant, asking the goddess for more. The mist came forth from the unicorn, her divine powers intact and, she thought, even more powerful than before.
She cast a third minor healing spell, and then, her thoughts clearing, brought forth a spell to heal more serious wounds, focusing her energy on her leg. She felt better immediately within the warm cocoon of the blue-bathing light, like the softest of ocean waters sweeping away the weeds. She sat up straighter, and even flexed her knee as the leg straightened out before her.
She would survive her fall. And she would likely walk again the very next day, once her divine powers had renewed, and she could enact further healing upon her battered form.
Catti-brie took a deep breath and held it, then peeled back the sleeve of her left arm.
The seven-pointed star remained, and like the unicorn head, it seemed more distinct now, like the work of an ink artist, except that its sketching was not golden, but blood red, like a web of angry veins pulsing out the marker of Mystra.
Whatline-height: Isummon did it mean?
Catti-brie tried to recall an arcane spell from her repertoire, but alas, like the levitation earlier, those memorized dweomers were lost to her, a jumble of nonsensical words.
On a hunch, she considered one, her favored fireball. She closed her eyes and thought back to the very first time she had cast that spell, in another body a century before, and she tried to fight her way through the incantation jumble.
Now the words sorted, and she heard her own chant, part ancient, part new, and a fiery pea appeared in her hand. She threw it out and willed it out from her, into the air and away from the trees, and there it exploded appropriately, a burgeoning fireball, and the blue tendrils of magical energies glowed around her left arm, around the symbol of the seven-pointed star.
Catti-brie stared at it and shook her head.
What could it mean?
As she continued to stare upon the spot, the flames dissipating to nothingness, something else caught her eye, and brought her more questions. She saw the first twinkles of starlight as twilight descended upon the land.
But where was her conjured storm?
She looked all around. The sky was perfectly clear. Her spell had failed, utterly.
What could it mean?
“What does it mean?” Lady Avelyere asked Lord Parise Ulfbinder the very next day. She and her minions were managing to enact some magical spells, but only barely and only selectively.
“Instability,” Parise replied, and he seemed, and sounded, quite shaken, Lady Avelyere noted. “I spoke with Lord Draygo Quick this morning. It is, perhaps, as we feared.”
“Explain.”
The Netherese lord shook his head. “Something is upon the world-both worlds! — but there is nothing I can yet explain. The Twelve Princes have sought out the wisdom of the priests.”
“The old ways? The old gods?”
“Where is your former student?” Parise asked. “You have located her?”
“Ruqiah?” Lady Avelyere held up her hands helplessly.
“You said that you did not believe her to have perished in the fire.”
“No, certainly it was not her withered body that we found among the rubble.”
“Then where is she?”
“Nowhere near to us, I am sure,” Lady Avelyere replied. “I have magically surveyed all of Netheril-”
“West,” Parise interrupted. “Search in the west. The Sword Coast. Luskan. Icewind Dale.”
Lady Avelyere looked at him curiously. “What do you know?”
“Of course I did my own research and inquiries after you came to me with that most interesting tale,” he answered. “A lone mountain, you described.”
“It could be anywhere.”
“It could be Icewind Dale.”
Lady Avelyere shrugged, for the name meant nothing to her.
“A stretch of barren tundra through the Spine of the World Mountains north of the DesaiIsummon of the city of Luskan,” Parise explained. “Few live there, fewer still travel there, but it was once the home of Drizzt Do’Urden, Bruenor Battlehammer, and his adopted daughter, Catti-brie.”
“As was Mithral Hall …”
“And the towns of Icewind Dale are built in the shadow of a singular mountain, rising from the tundra.”
Lady Avelyere licked her lips and digested the news. It could be.
“Direct your search between Shade Enclave and Icewind Dale,” Parise commanded. “You will likely find this missing girl.”
“And then?”
“Watch her. Do not return her to Shade Enclave. Let us learn what we may, but safely from afar.”
“We remain five years from her appointed meeting,” Lady Avelyere reminded him.
“A speck of time in the cosmic calendar. But more than enough time for clever Lady Avelyere and her Coven to find this wayward child, yes?” The woman nodded.
“The libraries of Shade Enclave are being opened to all practitioners,” Parise added as Lady Avelyere turned to go. “We must once again adapt our magic, it would seem.”
“The old ways?”
The lord shrugged. “Who can know?”
“Ruqiah, perhaps,” Lady Avelyere quipped, and she shook her head and smiled resignedly, helplessly, and Parise responded in kind.
Catti-brie felt much better the next day, even before she bathed herself once more in the healing magic of Mielikki. Her arcane spells remained a jumble and she discovered that she could barely understand the delicate inflections of the incantations outlined in her spellbook. She felt as if everything magical had shifted several degrees, with different pieces going in different directions. She couldn’t make any sense of it.
“So be it,” she said, and she walked out from under the pine tree boughs that had served as her bedroom. She looked at the rising sun, then all around, to the distant Crags and north, where sat the high peaks of the towering Spine of the World, though she could not see them from this vantage.
She considered her approximate location and the year and season. She had plenty of time to get to Icewind Dale-years even-so perhaps a change of course would be in order here.
“Waterdeep?” she whispered. The lords of that greatest of cities would certainly be investigating the strange happenings-but how might she, a dirty girl from another part of the world, garner any information from those haughty ones? For she was not Princess Catti-brie of Mithral Hall any longer, but merely little Ruqiah of the Desai, and no one of note.
She thought of Candlekeep, the famed library along the coast south of Waterdeep. If any in all the Realms were going to figure out what was going on here, it would be the sages of that most learned of places. But again, how might she gain entrance to such a place?
She lifted her arms and shook them, her sleeves falling back. Her spellscars? Would they get her in?
But they didn’t even look like scars any longer. Any skilled tattooist along the Sword Coast could create the markings inside Catti-brie’s forearms.
The wom a long while to realize ees …onan blew out a deep breath and called upon the spellscars then, thinking to shapeshift and be on her way, whichever way she might decide. Catti-brie closed her eyes and focused on the markings, willing herself to again become a great eagle.
Nothing happened.
She opened her eyes and looked down at her arms. No mist began to form, no hint of magic to be found.