"I don't need your help." "Prove it."
Bro did, using his right arm to steady himself as he knelt on the rocks to drink cold, fresh water. Getting up would be harder. Alassra made a show of looking the other way; he'd have to ask, if he wanted help. Her thoughts wandered: Rizcarn awakening the old Yuirwood gods ... if the Zandilar she'd glimpsed in Bro's thoughts were a god ... the quicksilver transformations of a young man's heart ... no wonder she turned to Elminster; the Old Mage knew his own heart... the body sticking out of the brush on the far side of the stream.
The body...?
Alassra rubbed her eyes. It couldn't have been there just a little while ago when she came down to the stream herself; she couldn't have failed to notice a corpse less than a hundred paces away from her nose. Yet one or the other had to be true. From her current vantage the Simbul could see a leg, naked except for a laced buskin, and a blood-covered arm, enough to guess that the body belonged to a man and the man was Cha'Tel'Quessir. She thought of Halaern, then the absent Rizcarn.
And let her thoughts go. Either way, Bro had seen enough of raw death. She'd get him back to the camp, eating supper and sneak back here alone. It would be easier to do her work without witnesses anyway.
"Chayan!"
Another miscast plan: Bro had spotted the body.
"Chayan, look, over there. I think... I think it's a body."
Alassra held out her hand. "It's a body. I wasn't going to tell you."
"You knew?" More disappointment and betrayal.
"I noticed him while you were drinking." She grabbed his arm and hauled him upright. "Are you sure you wouldn't rather go back to the camp. It's not going to be pretty."
"Maybe I haven't fought everyone, but I have seen death, Chayan."
He wrested free and started across the stream ahead of her. Alassra almost smiled: the Bro who'd attacked her three times in the Yuirwood was back.
The corpse had been torn apart by something larger than a bear and more ferocious. Its other arm was missing, along with its heart and the rest of its innards. Alassra laid her hand on Bro's good shoulder.
"Do you recognize him?" she asked very softly.
Bro didn't flinch away. "Lanig. My father knew him. Went looking for him first. He never stopped talking, but Rizcarn trusted him. He was going to dance with Zandilar. He couldn't remember my name; he started calling me Rizcarn's son. At least it wasn't magic or an arrow that killed him, just a bear. I guess he was lucky."
"Right," Alassra agreed, though she read the scene very differently. "I can't carry him alone and you've only got one arm. We'd better go to the camp and tell them what's happened. First you, then this. Maybe we should try to send them home?"
"They won't go. Not unless the full moon comes and goes without Rizcarn leading them to the Sunglade. They believe, Chayan; my father makes them believe. But maybe they'll post an extra watch tonight, if you tell them. You've got weapons and fought the Tuigans; they'll listen to you."
He was more perceptive than Alassra had credited him for. At his age she wouldn't have thought of doubling the watch, wouldn't have understood the delicate balance between weapons and belief.
"What else do you see here, Ebroin, other than a corpse?"
"Other than that? What could be other than that?"
"He's covered in blood—his chest was ripped open and he was gutted—but there's no blood on the ground, none on the leaves, the trees. The ground's fairly soft. You can see where we walked up from the stream. But there are no other tracks. Dead or alive, Ebroin, how did he get here? And when? I didn't see him when I came to the stream myself. Was I blind while I drank from the stream? Were we both deaf while you rested on the rock?"
Bro lifted his right hand, thought better of it, then scratched his scalp with his left. "Magic? Red Wizards? The Simbul? What's left? What do we have that they'd want? We're just some crazed Cha'Tel'Quessir who want to dance in the moonlight. Killing us won't change anything; Rizcarn's not here." Bro stopped and sighed. "It's because Rizcarn's not here. He took Relkath's protection with him."
Alassra didn't ask about Relkath's protection. There were natural creatures in Faerun that could savage a man this thoroughly, but without blood splatters or other signs of struggle, magic seemed a better explanation: a murder disguised as a mauling and concealed by spellcraft. Any Red Wizard old enough to leave Thay could have cast the spells.
"We'd better get to the camp. You should do the talking, Ebroin, if you're up to it. With or without a sword, you are Rizcarn's son. I just got here today."
Bro couldn't replace Rizcarn in the camp, but the Cha'Tel'Quessir listened as he described what they'd find on the far side of the stream and what it meant.
Yongour called three other names; the four of them headed for the stream. Bro moved to follow. Alassra held him back.
"You've done enough," she assured him. "With two holes in your side, no one expects you to carry Lanig's body uphill."
"Before you were telling me to use my arm more. Lanig was no one to me, but he was there when they pulled the arrow out of me; I owe him. He must've died sometime today. Before or after you got here, I wonder. You who've fought everyone, everywhere. You know about Thayan arrows, maybe you know Thayan spells, too. You've been staring at me since you got here, Chayan. Why? Because I'm still alive?"
"Let's go somewhere quiet and talk about this, Ebroin."
She reached for his right arm; he wrested away.
"I don't think I should go anywhere with you, alone."
Alassra tried again and caught his wrist. "I didn't put an arrow in you, Ebroin, and I didn't pop Lanig's heart out of his chest. I'll prove it to you, if I have to, but I'd rather you took my word."
"I want proof."
"Not here. Somewhere private."
She led Bro out of the camp, wondering, as she walked, if he'd be any more convinced of her innocence once he did know who she was. Perhaps the best course would be to summon Trovar Halaern, whose thoughts she could catch through the circlet and who could say, with absolute honesty, that they'd been together last night and this morning and nowhere near the camp.
"We'll start with the simple things." Alassra began, still holding Bro's wrist. "I didn't put an arrow in you because I don't have any reason to. I came to this camp because I'd heard about Rizcarn, your father, and what he planned to do in the Sunglade. When I got here, Lanig told me Rizcarn was gone and Rizcarn's son was injured. So I made myself useful, making sure you didn't die—I know you, Ebroin, I know you better than you imagine and I rather like—"
Alassra got no further in her explanation. Bro's right arm—the one she'd been telling him he could move with confidence—slipped around her waist. Any other time, she would have bounced him off the ten nearest trees for impertinence, but sometimes even the queen of Aglarond took the easy way, wrapping her arms around him and kissing him gently before saying:
"You're a handsome young man, Ebroin. It's very easy to stare."
My lady?
Halaern answering her summons.
Never mind. I thought there was a problem, but I've got it under control.
As you wish, my lady.
He was attractive and his wounds were healing. If she were careful ... but, no, she'd break his heart as she'd broken others, or he'd break hers by growing old. Alassra risked a little magic; Bro found himself yawning and interested only in a nap. Next time she came to the Yuirwood, Alassra swore, there'd definitely be warts on her face, a lot of them, plus crossed eyes, and crooked teeth, with great, dirty gaps between them 22
The Yuirwood, in Aglarond Morning, the twenty-third day of Eleasias, The Year of the Banner (1368DR)
Bro awoke early, wrapped in a woolen blanket. He remembered little of the previous evening, except that he couldn't stop yawning while Lanig's grave was dug and had fallen asleep shortly after sunset.
His wounds didn't hurt, not the cautery burns nor the puncture passage between his ribs. Bro considered the possibility that the Simbul's knife had healed him overnight. The queen hadn't told him it would protect him against poison; he'd had to learn that for himself. Maybe it had healing powers as well.
Perhaps he should have been more careful with her boots. Perhaps he shouldn't have blamed her for Sulalk. Perhaps he wasn't healed at all. Perhaps the lack of pain was proof that the wound had festered, deadening the flesh around it. Perhaps each beat of his heart was pushing fatal poison closer to his brain. Perhaps he should take off his borrowed shirt, unwind the bandages and see for himself.
Bro decided against all of that.
He looked around quickly. His nearest neighbor, still asleep, was a head of long brown hair, half- braided, half-loose, spilling onto another trade blanket. Not Rizcarn, whose hair was raven black. There wasn't a raven hair to be seen in pale light. Rizcarn hadn't returned.
The watch had retired and the camp was stirring. Cha'Tel'Quessir rekindled their fires for breakfast cooking, shook out their clothes, wandered in and out of the bushes, tending their private needs. Bro counted a handful of new faces among them; they numbered forty now, give or take a few. Chayan hadn't been yesterday's only new arrival, though she was the only one he'd noticed.
Thinking of her, Bro pounded his fist against his forehead. Healed or poisoned, he was clearer- headed this morning, and the memories ... What had he been thinking of when she led him out of the camp? Had he truly put his arm around her? Tried to kiss her on the lips?
"Gods curse me for a fool," he muttered, knotting his shirt within his fist, until he remembered it was hers and smoothed it out again. "They were digging Lanig's grave and I was thinking ..."
Bro didn't want to say what he'd been thinking, not even in a whisper. The very morning that she died, his mother had chided him for being too shy and awkward around the Sulalk human girls. Time enough, he'd told himself, when he got back to the Yuirwood.
But barely enough: Chayan was practically the first unspoken-for woman he'd met, and he'd made a fool of himself. Cha'Tel'Quessir grew up as fast as their human cousins, then settled into an almostelven maturity. Bro recalled how shocked he'd been when Shali once told him she was old enough to be Dent's mother. Chayan, who'd fought everywhere with everyone and whose tree-family, SilverBranch, Bro didn't recognize, was almost certainly older than Shali. Age wasn't supposed to be important between men and women in the Yuirwood, but the longer Bro thought about it, the younger and more foolish he felt.