“You are not of our people,” the mage replied coldly. “You do not see things as we do.”
“This is not even your fight,” another high mage put in.
“We’ve been defending this forest, this great city, for longer than you have been alive, human,” said a third. “Do not presume to tell us how to conduct ourselves in battle.”
“As it happens,” Storm replied mildly, “I was defending this city-and the forest all around us, here-when it was an overgrown ruin, and none of you were to be seen anywhere near here. I know this to be firm truth, for I knew everyone who ran with Alok Silverspear, and knew them well.” She raised her voice so all the elves around could hear, and added, “Your lives are worth more to all Tel’Quess than this little ridge, or that stand of shadowtops yonder. So keep moving, striking from the trees and running on, to strike again. The trees can’t move, so do the moving for them. If you stand your ground against so many, you’ll die.”
“School humans, human,” the first high mage sneered, and turned away. Storm shrugged and bent her attention to a wounded bladesinger.
“They’re coming again,” Arclath warned, peering through the trees.
“Help me get her to her feet,” Storm told Rune, who rushed to aid the bladesinger.
“There, amid the artraela,” the first high mage ordered. “We’ll meet them there.”
Arclath hadn’t heard the Elvish for “duskwoods” before, but it was obvious what the elf was pointing at. The other high mages were already heading for it, picking their way over moss-girt tangles of long-fallen trunks with a fluid grace he envied.
Only a handful of the other elves were moving with them. The rest looked at Storm, as she and Rune got the shuddering bladesinger up between them, and either moved to form a ring around them, or melted back into the trees.
“D’khessarath!” the nearest high mage swore. “Heed!” he cried, and pointed at the stand of duskwoods.
Silent elf faces looked back at him, but no one obeyed.
He whirled to give Storm a glare. “This treachery is your doing!”
She arched an eyebrow. “Treachery is a strong word, from one leaving wounded to the nonexistent mercies of the foe.”
“Insubordinate defiance of discipline wins no wars,” he snarled, and whirled away from them to hasten for the duskwoods.
Storm sighed. “Too many Tel’Quess are sounding more and more human, these days.”
Beside her ear, the wounded bladesinger tried to chuckle, but it turned into a gasp.
The elves around them peered at the advancing besiegers, then looked to Storm uncertainly.
“Go,” she said firmly. “Into the trees, to move swiftly and strike shrewdly at the foe and then withdraw again before you can be surrounded and overwhelmed. Go!”
One warrior looked at the wounded bladesinger and then at Storm, anguish in his face. “I-there is no honor-”
“Win more honor by staying alive and fighting on,” Storm said softly, “warriors of Myth Drannor. Do not let your fallen have died in vain. I say again: go.”
They went, some shaping salutes to her-and they were barely gone amid the trees in one direction when rising shouts and the crashing of trampled ferns and brush from another heralded the arrival of the foremost mercenaries.
“Leave me,” the bladesinger panted. “Save yourselves!”
“No,” Storm replied firmly, lifting the elf with her hair and settling her gently against the scorched and blackened trunk of a forest giant that had been blasted away. “Here, against what’s left of this shadowtop. Rune, to my left-Arclath, my right. We’ll do as yon fools want, and make a stand.” She glanced at the onrushing besiegers. “There are only about threescore of them.”
“Meaning?” Arclath asked with a grin.
“They don’t stand a chance,” Storm told him grimly, her hair lifting from her shoulders to writhe, each tress lashing like the tail of an angry lion, as she took a step forward and let her hair rise into a great restless halo of full readiness.
“Here we go,” Rune said to no one in particular, as the yelling mercenaries crashed through the last few strides of brush and fell upon them.
The two false monks were hurling their spells already, magics that told him they were powerful wizards indeed-arcanists of Thultanthar, most likely-as they stared at Elminster across the spellcasting cavern with looks that mingled hatred and sneering triumph.
There was time for him to elude death, but only just. An escape that concerned only himself and the Weave immediately around him, and though it meant agony when done so swiftly, it could be done in mere moments.
If you were a master of the Weave.
And if his mastery failed now, or he was an instant too slow, he would be as dead as if those spells struck him …
Elminster gave himself to the Weave, pouring himself into it in all directions at once, throwing back his head and trying to scream in utter silence. The pain …
And by the time a fell emerald glare flared to visit death upon him, and a forest of slicing force blades hissed into being to rain down and make that demise doubly sure, Elminster was a mere seeing sentience in the moving air.
There were many who muttered that the Sage of Shadowdale was a great bag of wind, and El reflected wryly that they’d only been wrong about the “great bag” part.
“You must tell me how to manage that,” Amarune muttered, as the sounds of the siege suddenly came back to them-and various broken mercenary bodies slid bloodily down trees all around them, to crash limply to the forest floor.
“If I have to try it much more often,” Storm whispered raggedly, her face gray, “you may just have to learn it on your own.”
She sagged, and Arclath leaped to catch her before she fell. She leaned gratefully on his arm.
“I’m not the Weave master Elminster is, or some of my sisters were,” she said grimly. “I was always more interested in people. Speaking of which …”
Flinging out her hair to clutch at tree trunks like a drunken man keeping his feet by grabbing onto anything and anyone handy, she set off through the blood-drenched forest toward the stand of duskwoods. Most of the mercenaries had come at Storm, but more than a few had gone crashing up the nearby slope into the duskwoods.
“Well?” Arclath asked, glancing at Rune and then at the bladesinger who nodded her approval of their departure. He started to pick his way over downed trees and fallen elves after Storm. “How fared our oh-so-friendly high mages?”
“This,” the bard replied heavily, as he and Rune caught up with her, “is bad.”
The small stand of duskwoods looked like the nest of some gigantic forest carnivore, a great, untidy ring-shaped heap of bodies-besieging mercenaries, most of them, but at the heart of it, elves.
Including every last one of the high mages, who’d been overrun and cut down. Storm looked from one to another of their slack, staring faces amid all the blood, and shook her head.
“Small wonder there are so few high mages, and fewer as the years pass.”
Now naught but roaring wind, Elminster blew himself across the cavern, racing at the two furious and almost certainly counterfeit monks who’d just sought his death. Seeking not to slay them-though momentarily blinding them and driving them down to cowering helplessness was both tempting and useful if he wanted to get well away-but just to escape.