Not by night and moonlit, this time, but the same vast carpet of green treetops, spread out before her and stretching into the misty distance.
A bird flew past, startling her. This was no still picture; she was seeing Downdragon as it was right now.
Nice, but she needed something nearer the siege. If the mythal was weakening as badly as she’d feared it was, she might be able to use trees and ridges she’d glimpsed while they were fighting in the forest. Wait, that dead, leafless duskwood, silhouetted against the bit of sky that had gone orange from the Shadovar spell … yes …
Yes! There it was, in the crystal! With drifting smoke from some campfires beyond it, the scene in the crystal moving and alive … which should mean she could look at something-those two dark, entwined trees-at the far left of what she was seeing, make them the center of her view, then look left again, and so face Myth Drannor.
Or what was left of it.
She’d half expected to see a milky shroud blocking any clear view of the city, but there was nothing like that. Just scorched towers and splintered and smoldering trees and a few still-beautiful, leaping bridges arcing between them, cascading gardens of flowing water and lush, spreading plants-and corpses. Everywhere the dead, heaped and strewn and being trodden underfoot by hurrying still-alive elves in blood-besmirched armor, and inexorably tramping mercenaries. Some bridges were broken, abrupt jagged ends thrusting out into empty air, and others trailed what had seemed at first glance to be creeping vines, but that Rune now saw were dangling bodies.
The besieging Shadovar forces were tightening their grip, the exhausted elf defenders ceding more and more of their city-which was being hurled down by the spells of arcanists, tower by tower and bridge by bridge crashing to the forest floor.
And just there, Rune saw, was the lashing tail of an angry dragon that was crawling around, seemingly unable to fly and obviously seething with rage!
“We have to be there,” she told Arclath. “Every last sword and spell is needed. If I could somehow snatch up all the Purple Dragons on duty in Cormyr right now and set them down in the heart of that siege, I’d do it.” She turned to give her beloved a hard look. “But I can’t, so you’ll have to be all of them.”
“Lady,” her lord replied, eyes bright with unshed tears, “command me.”
“We go back to Myth Drannor. Now.”
Arclath nodded, and then spoke like an imperious noble. “Use the jakes first,” he ordered briskly. “Both of us. Then finish this soup. We don’t know when we’ll next-”
“Now I know how the endlessly annoying nobles of Cormyr continue to lord it over the Forest Kingdom,” Amarune snapped, smiling despite herself. “They always finish their soup.”
Arclath bowed low, indicating the garderobe door with a courtly flourish. Then he held it open for her.
She lifted her chin, for all the world as if she’d been born noble, and in one of the haughtiest houses at that, and went in, reading the teleport scroll to herself.
He closed the door behind her, regarded its dark and polished wood, and murmured, “All gods bear witness, I love you, Rune. Was ever a man so fortunate as I?”
“Yes,” a ghostly voice answered him, from somewhere behind him in the room.
Arclath spun around, sword half out, staring everywhere, shocked into silence.
The voice-gentle and low, coming out of nowhere, a woman’s tones-added, “Yet lovers are so easily lost. Treasure every moment you have left together.”
“Who-who are you?” he asked, sword out as he peered around, trying to see where the voice was coming from.
“Once, I was Syluné. Eldest of the Seven. They called me the Witch of Shadowdale. Now I am but an echo in the Weave. Your Amarune is doing the right thing, young lord of Cormyr. May victory be yours.” The voice faded steadily as it spoke, and by that last victory wish, Arclath could hear it no more.
The garderobe door swung open. Amarune peered out, frowning. “Who were you talking to?”
“A-a ghost,” Arclath replied, as he rushed to embrace her.
Their kiss was fierce and deep, but brief-as Rune broke free and whirled away from him, to point at the door and command, “Hurry!”
It was dimly blue wherever they looked, and everywhere they beheld blue leaves and green glowing softly against the dark brown of old dead leaves and the brown-black of forest soil. On all sides the great dark pillars of duskwoods and blueleaf trees soared up to an almost unbroken blue-green canopy. In every direction, over gentle hills cloaked in endless trees, the vista looked much the same.
“Where by Shar’s howling holy darkness are we?” Mattick snapped. “These tluining trees!”
He slashed at the nearest leaves in his temper, sending them spiraling down to the moss-girt fallen trunks underfoot.
“Still in the forest,” Vattick offered, mock-helpfully.
They’d been fleeing wildly through the seemingly endless deep woods around Myth Drannor for some time now, just the two of them. Both were scorched, breathless, and bedraggled.
They’d escaped death by the proverbial hair-slicing thickness of a sharp sword blade’s edge, by both desperately working the same last-moment spell to forcibly swap places with Shadovar arcanists elsewhere in the siege.
So two bewildered unfortunates had almost certainly died in the spells hurled by the coronal and her four high mages, while Mattick and Vattick, wounded and more frightened than they’d been in battle for a long time, had found themselves out in the forest surrounded by startled mercenaries.
Whom they’d departed from the company of immediately, for they were interested now only in getting away. To Shar’s never-seen rump with their father’s grand plans, and with butchering their ways through this old and overgrown elf city they’d never seen before and didn’t care one whit if they ever saw again! It was time to get gone, far and fast, and-and seek their own lives, for as long as they could.
Oh, the Most High would find them soon enough, and that meeting would be less than pleasant, but in the meantime they were still alive, and-
“I,” Mattick vowed, crashing through some dead branches and seeking a little open ground to stride through, “am going to get me some folk I can lord it over, for once. I’m done with all of this conquer worlds upon worlds for the greater glory of Shar!”
“And the greater satisfaction of Telamont Tanthul,” Vattick agreed, before he came to a frowning stop.
“Brother,” he added, “I thought we were leaving Myth Drannor behind, but look.”
He pointed with his sword through the trees ahead.
Mattick peered and swore.
“Elves! More bloody elves! Everywhere we go, it’s rutting, fluting-voiced, tree-swinging elves!”
The twin princes strengthened their wards and strode to meet these new foes, who likewise stalked through the trees to meet them.
As they got closer, both princes could see bodies, both human and elf, strewn here and there, and some shattered walls and towers that were now mostly heaps of rubble.
“We must have got turned around, somehow,” Vattick mused. “That, or Myth Drannor spreads through the forest farther than I’d thought, with far-flung clusters of buildings and wild forest between them.”
“I,” declared Mattick, “am beyond caring about elf architecture or settlement patterns. I just want to hew me some longears! Yeeeeeearrrgh!”
And with that sudden bellow, he launched himself into a wildly swinging charge. Vattick planted his sword in the soft forest mold beside him and worked magic instead-and as the elf warriors closed in, limp bodies and blocks of rubble rose into the air behind them, to whirl forward in silent haste and dash the elves to the ground.