by James Wyatt
“The nobles of the Feywild do not hunt beasts for sport,” Albanon said. “If there is a hunt on our heels, it means we are the quarry.”
“But your father granted us passage,” Kri said. “Did he change his mind?”
“Perhaps he decided that the insult you gave him could not be allowed to stand. I’ve rarely seen him that angry.”
Kri drew himself up. “He needed a slap in the face.”
“Not where others could see, not from a stranger in his court, and certainly not from a human. Even if he had been willing to ignore your insult, he might have felt he had to punish you in order to save face with his courtiers.”
“So what now?”
“Now we run. Splendid, lead the way to the tower!”
“If what?” the drake said.
“If what? I don’t think I understand you.”
Splendid’s voice dripped with disdain. “If you please.”
“You must be joking.”
“Am I a pet? A servant? A slave? I think not.”
“Fine, Splendid. Please!”
The drake sniffed. “That will have to do.”
She pushed up from Albanon’s shoulder, sending him off balance again, and flapped into the air. She circled a moment as Albanon watched, then flew away in more or less the direction they’d been heading, but a little more to the south.
“And now we follow, as fast as these damned thorns will allow.”
Albanon hurried after Splendid, the thorns parting in front of him and closing in behind. He searched the rolling plain ahead for a sign of the tower, cursing himself for forgetting to ask Splendid how far away it was. Then he crested a rise and spotted it, nestled in a thicket at the top of another low hill. Too far away—they’d never make it, if the hunt was as close as it sounded.
“Albanon!”
He turned and saw Kri ten yards behind him. Grasping thorns pinned the priest in place, caught in his clothes and piercing his skin. Albanon growled in frustration. They’d never escape the hunt if Kri kept getting snagged in the brambles.
“Use your power, Albanon,” Kri said. “The thorns respond to your mere presence. If you command them, they’ll respond to that as well.”
Albanon’s eyes widened. Why didn’t I think of that? he thought. I am a wizard and the scion of an eladrin prince. Did Moorin utterly crush my sense of my own abilities?
He stretched one hand toward Kri and the other, gripping his staff, in the direction of the tower. Drawing a deep breath, he focused his will and his magic, then with a grunt he extended both out through his hands. Kri staggered free of the thorns, and a path appeared through the brush and vines, a hundred yards long.
“That’s more like it,” Kri said. His broad smile filled Albanon with pride, and together the two men raced for the tower.
When they reached the end of the first path, Albanon thrust both hands in front of him and made a longer one. Over the sounds of the baying hounds in the distance and Kri’s wheezing breath, he heard the high, clear notes of a horn urging the hunt onward. Too close. At least Kri was moving faster, but it still felt too slow.
When they reached the end of the second path, Albanon had an idea. First he summoned his will to clear a new path in front of them, the longest one so far. He could feel each individual thorn and vine when he stretched out his senses, feel the magic in them and shape his own magic to control them. It was so easy, now that he understood it.
Why did I never learn this before? he wondered.
With fierce joy surging in his heart, he turned around and lifted his arms over his head. He watched as the vines surged back over the path he’d left in his wake, then thickened still more, growing taller and tougher. In a moment they were a wall behind him, studded with terrible thorns.
“That should slow our pursuers,” Kri said.
“Yes. Even if they carry my father’s authority, it’ll take them some time to clear a path through that, or to go around it.”
Each time they reached the end of a path, Albanon set up a new barrier behind them. Soon the tower loomed close, and Albanon finally allowed himself to believe they might reach the tower before the hunt caught up to them.
Splendid swooped down and landed on a thick bush, nimbly twisting herself around the large thorns. “I have to admit, apprentice,” she said, “your control of the thorns is admirable. The great wizard Moorin would approve.”
Albanon turned away before Splendid could see him scowl, then found himself blinking back tears. What would Moorin have thought? he wondered. He still missed the old wizard, despite the resentment that seemed to be growing in his heart. And despite the excitement he felt at the thought of learning from Kri.
Splendid jumped onto his shoulder and they hurried along Albanon’s path. The horns blared with a new urgency, as if the hunters had realized that their quarry was escaping them. But the thorny barriers didn’t seem to be slowing them as much as Albanon had hoped, which only confirmed his fear that the huntmaster carried the full authority of the Prince of Thorns, allowing the hunt to clear a path as easily as Albanon did.
Albanon cleared one more path, and the thorns fell away from the base of Sherinna’s tower. It was a slender spire of white marble draped in ivy, five or six stories high. It had weathered the centuries well—but most structures built in the Feywild by eladrin hands did. The tower’s entrance was a door of stout oak reinforced with mithral bands, and Albanon felt a sudden worry that they’d reach the tower only to find themselves unable to open the door to escape their pursuers.
He turned to raise a thorny barrier behind them, and caught his first glimpse of the hunt. The hounds at the lead had glowing green eyes, and with each yowl and bark they belched a puff of emerald fire. Behind them, a half dozen eladrin nobles rode white and gray horses, the pennants of the Prince of Thorns trailing from their upraised lances.
So there was no denying it—the Prince of Thorns had sent them out to kill his own son.
Albanon raised the barrier just in front of the lead hounds and heard them crash into it with yelps of surprise and pain. Smiling with bitter satisfaction, he nodded to Kri. “Almost there,” he said.
Only then did he see the toll their flight had taken on the old priest. Kri was bent over, hands on his knees as he tried desperately to catch his breath. His ashen face was twisted with pain and streaked with sweat.
“Oh, no,” Albanon breathed, stepping to the old priest’s side. “Come on, Kri.” He put an arm around Kri’s shoulder and tried to help the priest walk to the tower. “We’re so close.”
Kri accepted his help and they hobbled together along the path, the yelps and barks behind them growing more intense as the hounds forced their way through Albanon’s thorny barrier. The hunt was so close that Albanon could hear the eladrin spewing colorful curses as their horses balked at the rising brambles. The tower seemed impossibly far away.
Every few paces, as Kri caught his breath, Albanon threw back one hand and summoned another surge of thorns to slow the hunt. Slowly—painfully slowly—they drew nearer and nearer to the tower, and their pursuers remained at bay. Each step stretched to an agonizing eternity.
Somehow that eternity drew to an end, and they stood before the mithral-bound doors to the Whitethorn Spire. Albanon glanced over his shoulder and saw two riders circling around the end of his thorny barrier, spurring their horses for a charge.
“Open the doors!” he urged Kri.
Exhausted as he was, the old priest tugged with all his remaining strength on the mithral ring that hung from one door. The door didn’t budge.
“Is it locked?” Albanon asked. “Do you have a key?”
“No! There’s not even a keyhole.” Kri raised his staff and chanted a few arcane syllables Albanon recognized as a simple charm of opening, but again the doors showed no hint of movement.
“They’re coming!” Splendid chirped in Albanon’s ear.
Albanon put his back to the door and clenched his own staff. The lead rid
er was about twenty paces away, but riding hard and fast. Albanon called up another surge of thorns to slow them, simultaneously trying to prepare his mind to unleash a spell of fire or lightning on the riders. Panic and his pounding heart shattered his concentration, making both efforts ineffective.
The door suddenly slammed hard into Albanon’s back, knocking him to his knees as Kri yelped and staggered back. Albanon twisted around to see what had opened the doors.
His guts wrenched in fear as he recognized the monster in the doorway—a hulking brute, almost like some kind of beetle, standing upright but hunched forward. Four arms tipped with heavy claws sprouted from its torso. Its red eyes glowed in the shadow inside the tower, set above a mouth full of sharp teeth. A massive carapace of reddish crystal covered its shoulders and back and rose in two sharp spikes above its head. It was one of Vestapalk’s minions, but larger than any he’d seen before. A plague demon, born of the Voidharrow.
Smaller demons swarmed behind the one in the doorway. So Vestapalk’s corruption had already spread as far as the Feywild, to the very tower that Kri believed held the secret to defeating them. Albanon scrambled to his feet, his eyes darting between the demons in the tower and the charging fey hunters.
On one side, the claws of the demons held the promise of torture and death, or worse. On the other, the hounds of the fey charged forward, ready to tear him to shreds, and the spears of his kin were aimed to pierce his heart. But the thought that came to mind was Tempest’s face, smiling in her determination. She would have gone down fighting. He could do no less.
CHAPTER EIGHT
The demons shrieked as Shara’s sword cut into them. The arrival of Quarhaun and his lizardfolk allies had thrown them into confusion, and Shara’s whirling fury broke their resolve completely. Those that could turned and fled back the way Shara and Uldane had come. The rest were trapped between Shara and Quarhaun, and a hint of her old exultation coursed through her as she hacked and stabbed a path to where the drow stood.
He came back, she told herself, singing the words to the rhythm of her blade.
A quieter voice in the back of her mind kept reminding her, the way Jarren can’t.
In a matter of moments the demons were all dead or dispersed, and Shara leaned on her blade beside Quarhaun. Her exhaustion couldn’t keep the grin from her face, and Quarhaun returned the smile, a little sheepishly. Their eyes met for a moment, which did nothing to calm her pounding heart.
One of the lizardfolk nudged Quarhaun’s arm and he looked away, reluctantly, to answer some question in their sibilant language, pointing to the demonic corpses that littered the hall.
“Ow,” Uldane said.
Shara turned to find the halfling, pale and frowning, slumped against the wall behind her. He was picking at the torn scraps of leather armor that had covered his chest, pulling strips of it from a bloody wound.
“Nine Hells, what happened to you?” Shara said, dropping to her knees beside him.
“You missed it!” Uldane said, the beginnings of his smile turning into a wince of pain. “One of the demons had me in its mouth and it was shaking me back and forth, and I stabbed it in the eye!” He drew a ragged breath and forced a smile to his face. “Do you have any idea how hard it was to get it in the eye when it was shaking me like that?”
“I can imagine,” Shara said. She tried to keep the concern from showing on her face as she helped him pull the armor away from his wound. His cut had the same angry red swelling along the edges that her wounds had. “I don’t know how I could have missed it.”
“You were busy protecting Quarhaun.” His voice was matter-of-fact, but there was an edge of disapproval in his eyes.
Shara frowned. “We need to put both of you in heavier armor. I’m not sure I can keep every enemy away from the two of you.”
“I don’t like wearing heavy armor,” Uldane said. “It slows me down.”
“I know, Uldane.” Shara brushed a long braid of dark hair out of his face. “I’ve got a potion in my pack that should take care of this wound. It’s not as bad as it looks.”
“It feels even worse than it looks.”
“I’ll be right back.” She stood and picked her way through the demon corpses back to the room where she and the halfling had holed up. Quarhaun was waiting for her at the door.
“You came back,” she said quietly.
“That was the plan, right? Kill them all?”
“You risked your life to save us.” The words had a hard time escaping past the lump in her throat. “That was foolish. You said it yourself.”
“You did it for me.” Quarhaun touched her chin softly with his gloved hand, and a shiver went through her. “And if you did it, it must be worth doing.”
Her thoughts a jumble, she squeezed past him into the room and grabbed her pack. “And you found friends,” she said.
“A hunting party. They were following our tracks into the ruins, actually. I convinced them to help me kill the demons.”
“How did you do that?”
Quarhaun shrugged. “By convincing them we could, I guess. They fear the demons and hate them for thinning the prey. I showed them an opportunity to give up one hunt in order to get better hunting in the future.”
“Give up one … they were hunting us?”
“Prey is scarce in the fens.”
Shara found the potion she needed and stepped back to the door. “Quarhaun … thank you.”
The drow scowled, speechless.
Shara went back in the hall to find Quarhaun’s lizardfolk friends crouching there, their glassy eyes fixed on her, and she wondered if they were assessing her ability to fight back if they decided to make a meal of her. She looked down the hall and saw one of them crouched beside Uldane, prodding at his wound with a feather-bedecked length of bone.
“Hey! What are you doing?”
The lizardfolk turned its head slowly and its eyes fluttered open to stare at her. It opened its mouth and hissed something low and rumbling.
“Quarhaun!” she called. “What’s it saying?”
“Shara,” Uldane said. “Don’t worry. I think it’s helping.”
Shara stepped closer and saw that the color had returned to Uldane’s face. She dropped to her knees and took his hand. “I’m sorry,” she said to the lizardfolk. “Please go on.”
Quarhaun spoke in the lizardfolk’s hissing tongue and the healer or shaman or whatever it was turned its attention—and its bone totem—back to Uldane. The halfling winced and squeezed her hand, but the wound began to knit itself closed and the angry red color faded from his skin. Uldane’s bright eyes opened again and a smile spread across his face.
“What an interesting feeling!” he announced, trying to sit up. “I felt like I was swimming.”
Shara looked at her friend’s chest. Water soaked his clothes and had washed the blood away from the wound, which was still a bit pink but otherwise completely healed.
“Looks like you were,” Shara said, smiling at the halfling.
“Oh! I’m all wet.” He looked up at the lizardfolk. “How did you do that?”
Quarhaun hissed a few words, and the shaman responded in kind.
“He says the water spirits healed you. He just brought them where they needed to be.”
Uldane sprang to his feet, all the pain of his injury forgotten. “Ooh! Do you think I could learn to do that, Shara?”
Shara just smiled and wished that she could learn to recover so quickly and so completely from her wounded heart.
“We should leave this place,” Quarhaun announced. “The demons might come back in greater numbers.”
“You’re right,” Shara said. “We should hit them before they can regroup.”
“Hit them?”
“Of course.”
“Shara,” Uldane said, “just a few minutes ago you were saying you didn’t want to die here. You want to have your revenge on Vestapalk before you die, right?”
“I have no intention of dying,”
Shara said. “We’re stronger than ever, and the demons are on the run. We need to root them out of here.”
Quarhaun caught her gaze with his blank white eyes. “Why?”
Shara’s face flushed and her words were heated and fast. “You’ve seen them. Whatever has changed Vestapalk, whatever he tried to do to you—that same substance is here. It made these demons. They’re all part of the same … the same disease. For all we know, Vestapalk could be here, somewhere in these ruins, spreading his plague from here.”
Quarhaun held her gaze for a long moment until she looked away, uneasy.
“You are quite a warrior,” he said at last.
“What does that mean?”
“It’s not our way, you see? Among the drow, women hold sacred positions, ordained by the Spider Queen. They’re the matron mothers and priests, generals at times, but not warriors. I’ve never known a woman like you.”
“Does that mean we’re going to explore these ruins some more?” Uldane asked.
“I suppose it does,” Quarhaun said.
“Well, that’s a bright side to it. I wonder how far down the tunnels go? It can’t be too far, or they’d be full of water, wouldn’t they?”
“It depends. Sometimes stone tunnels jut up all the way from the Underdark, solid and dry even when they touch the surface in swampy areas like this.”
“Really?”
“It’s rare, but it does happen.”
“I’d like to see that.”
Shara let Uldane pester Quarhaun with questions as she tried to sort through the feelings the drow’s words had stirred up in her. It’s natural that he’d respect a skilled warrior like me, she told herself. And the fact that I’m a woman makes me … a curiosity. That’s all.
And the way he touched my chin … the memory of it brought echoes of the shivers it had sent through her. Who knows what that means to a drow like him? Maybe it’s a warrior’s sign of respect.
She felt a grin creep into the corners of her mouth. I wonder what else drow warriors do as a sign of respect …