Guenhwyvar
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GUENHWYVAR
R. A. Salvatore
Josidiah Starym skipped wistfully down the streets of
Cormanthor, the usually stern and somber elf a bit giddy
this day, both for the beautiful weather and the recent developments
in his most precious and enchanted city. Josidiah
was a bladesinger, a joining of sword and magic, protector of
the elvish ways and the elvish folk. And in Cormanthor, in
this year 253, many elves were in need of protecting. Goblinkin
were abundant, and even worse, the emotional turmoil
within the city, the strife among the noble families—the
Starym included—threatened to tear apart all that Coronal
Eltargrim had put together, all that the elves had built in
Cormanthor, greatest city in all the world.
Those were not troubles for this day, though, not in the
spring sunshine, with a light north breeze blowing. Even
Josidiah’s kin were in good spirits this day; Taleisin, his uncle,
had promised the bladesinger that he would venture to
Eltargrim’s court to see if some of their disputes might perhaps
be worked out.
Josidiah prayed that the elven court would come back together,
for he, perhaps above all others in the city, had the
most to lose. He was a bladesinger, the epitome of what it
meant to be elven, and yet, in this curious age, those definitions
seemed not so clear. This was an age of change, of great
magics, of monumental decisions. This was an age when the
humans, the gnomes, the halflings, even the bearded
dwarves, ventured down the winding ways of Cormanthor,
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past the needle-pointed spires of the free-flowing elvish
structures. For all of Josidiah’s previous one hundred and
fifty years, the precepts of elvenkind seemed fairly defined
and rigid; but now, because of their Coronal, wise and gentle
Eltargrim, there was much dispute about what it meant to
be elvish, and, more importantly, what relationships elves
should foster with the other goodly races.
“Merry morn, Josidiah,” came the call of an elven female,
the young and beautiful maiden niece of Eltargrim himself.
She stood on a balcony overlooking a high garden whose
buds were not yet in bloom, with the avenue beyond that.
Josidiah stopped in midstride, leapt high into the air in a
complete spin, and landed perfectly on bended knee, his long
golden hair whipping across his face and then flying out wide
again so that his eyes, the brightest of blue, flashed. “And
the merriest of morns to you, good Felicity,” the bladesinger
responded. “Would that I held at my sides flowers befitting
your beauty instead of these blades made for war.”
“Blades as beautiful as any flower ever I have seen,” Felicity
replied teasingly, “especially when wielded by Josidiah
Starym at dawn’s break, on the flat rock atop Berenguil’s
Peak.”
The bladesinger felt the hot blood rushing to his face. He
had suspected that someone had been spying on him at his
morning rituals—a dance with his magnificent swords, performed
nude—and now he had his confirmation. “Perhaps
Felicity should join me on the morrow’s dawn,” he replied,
catching his breath and his dignity, “that I might properly
reward her for her spying.”
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The young female laughed heartily and spun back into
her house, and Josidiah shook his head and skipped along.
He entertained thoughts of how he might properly “reward”
the mischievous female, though he feared that, given Felicity’s
beauty and station, any such attempts might lead to
something much more, something Josidiah could not become
involved in—not now, not after Eltargrim’s proclamation and
the drastic changes.
The bladesinger shook away all such notions; it was too
fine a day for any dark musing, and other thoughts of Felicity
were too distracting for the meeting at hand. Josidiah
went out of Cormanthor’s west gate, the guards posted there
offering no more than a respectful bow as he passed, and into
the open air. Truly Josidiah loved this city, but he loved the
land outside of it even more. Out here he was truly free of all
the worries and all the petty squabbles, and out here there
was ever a sense of danger—might a goblin be watching him
even now, its crude spear ready to take him down?—that
kept the formidable elf on his highest guard.
Out here, too, was a friend, a human friend, a rangerturned-
wizard by the name of Anders Beltgarden, whom
Josidiah had known for the better part of four decades. Anders
did not venture into Cormanthor, even given Eltargrim’s
proclamation to open the gates to nonelves. He lived
far from the normal, oft-traveled paths, in a squat tower of
excellent construction, guarded by magical wards and deceptions
of his own making. Even the forest about his home was
full of misdirections, spells of illusion and confusion. So secretive
was Beltgarden Home that few elves of nearby Cormanthor
even knew of it, and even fewer had ever seen it.
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And of those, none save Josidiah could find his way back to it
without Anders’s help.
And Josidiah held no illusions about it—if Anders wanted
to hide the paths to the tower even from him, the cagey old
wizard would have little trouble doing so.
This wonderful day, however, it seemed to Josidiah that
the winding paths to Beltgarden Home were easier to follow
than usual, and when he arrived at the structure, he found
the door unlocked.
“Anders,” he called, peering into the darkened hallway
beyond the portal, which always smelled as if a dozen candles
had just been extinguished within it. “Old fool, are you
about?”
A feral growl put the bladesinger on his guard; his swords
were in his hands in a movement too swift for an observer to
follow.
“Anders?” he called again, quietly, as he picked his way
along the corridor, his feet moving in perfect balance, soft
boots gently touching the stone, quiet as a hunting cat.
The growl came again, and that is exactly when Josidiah
knew what he was up against: a hunting cat. A big one, the
bladesinger recognized, for the deep growl resonated along
the stone of the hallway.
He passed by the first doors, opposite each other in the
hall, and then passed the second on his left.
The third—he knew—the sound came from within the
third. That knowledge gave the bladesinger some hope that
this situation was under control, for that particular door led
to Anders’s alchemy shop, a place well guarded by the old
wizard.
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Josidiah cursed himself for not being better prepared
magically. He had studied few spells that day, thinking it too
fine and not wanting to waste a moment of it with his face
buried in spellbooks.
If only he had some spell that might get him into the room
more quickly, through a magical gate, or even a spell that
would send his probing vision through the stone wall, into
the room before him.
He had his swords, at least, and with them, Josidiah
Starym was far from helpless. He put his back against the
wall near to the door and took a deep steadying breath.
Then, without delay—old Anders might be in serious trouble
—the bladesinger spun about and crashed into the room.
He felt the arcs of electricity surging into him as he
crossed the warded portal, and then he was flying, hurled
through the air, to land crashing at the base of a huge oaken
table. Anders Beltgarden stood calmly at the side of the table,
working with something atop it, hardly bothering to look
down at the stunned bladesinger.
“You might have knocked,” the old mage said dryly.
Josidiah pulled himself up unceremoniously from the
floor, his muscles not quite working correctly just yet. Convinced
that there was no danger near, Josidiah let his gaze
linger on the human, as he often did. The bladesinger hadn’t
seen many humans in his life—humans were a recent addition
on the north side of the Sea of Fallen Stars, and were
not present in great numbers in or about Cormanthor.
This one was the most curious human of all, with his
leathery, wrinkled face and his wild gray beard. One of Anders’s
eyes had been ruined in a fight, and it appeared quite
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dead now, a gray film over the lustrous green it had once
held. Yes, Josidiah could stare at old Anders for hours on
end, seeing the tales of a lifetime in his scars and wrinkles.
Most of the elves, Josidiah’s own kinfolk included, would
have thought the old man an ugly thing; elves did not wrinkle
and weather so, but aged beautifully, appearing at the
end of several centuries as they had when they had seen but
twenty or fifty winters.
Josidiah did not think Anders an ugly sight, not at all.
Even those few crooked teeth remaining in the man’s mouth
complemented this creature he had become, this aged and
wise creature, this sculptured monument to years under the
sun and in the face of storms, to seasons battling goblinkin
and giantkind. Truly it seemed ridiculous to Josidiah that he
was twice this man’s age; he wished he might carry a few
wrinkles as testament to his experiences.
“You had to know it would be warded,” Anders laughed.
“Of course you did! Ha ha, just putting on a show, then.
Giving an old man one good laugh before he dies!”
“You will outlive me, I fear, old man,” said the bladesinger.
“Indeed, that is a distinct possibility if you keep crossing
my doors unannounced.”
“I feared for you,” Josidiah explained, looking around the
huge room—too huge, it seemed, to fit inside the tower, even
if it had consumed an entire level. The bladesinger suspected
some extradimensional magic to be at work here, but he had
never been able to detect it, and the frustrating Anders certainly
wasn’t letting on.
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As large as it was, Anders’s alchemy shop was still a cluttered
place, with boxes piled high and tables and cabinets
strewn about in a hodgepodge.
“I heard a growl,” the elf continued. “A hunting cat.”
Without looking up from some vials he was handling, Anders
nodded his head in the direction of a large, blanketcovered
container. “See that you do not get too close,” the old
mage said with a wicked cackle. “Old Whiskers will grab you
by the arm and tug you in, don’t you doubt!
“And then you’ll need more than your shiny swords,” Anders
cackled on.
Josidiah wasn’t even listening, pacing quietly toward the
blanket, moving silently so as not to disturb the cat within.
He grabbed the edge of the blanket and, moving safely back,
tugged it away. And then the bladesinger’s jaw surely
drooped.
It was a cat, as he had suspected, a great black panther,
twice—no thrice—the size of the largest cat Josidiah had
ever seen or heard of. And the cat was female, and females
were usually much smaller than males. She paced the cage
slowly, methodically, as if searching for some weakness,
some escape, her rippling muscles guiding her along with
unmatched grace.
“How did you come by such a magnificent beast?” the
bladesinger asked. His voice apparently startled the panther,
stopping her in her tracks. She stared at Josidiah with an intensity
that stole any further words right from the bladesinger’s
mouth.
“Oh, I have my ways, elf,” the old mage said. “I’ve been
looking for just the right cat for a long, long time, searching
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all the known world—and bits of it that are not yet known to
any but me!”
“But why?” Josidiah asked, his voice no more than a
whisper. His question was aimed as much at the magnificent
panther as at the old mage, and truly, the bladesinger could
think of no reason to justify putting such a creature into a
cage.
“You remember my tale of the box canyon,” Anders replied,
“of how my mentor and I flew owl-back out of the
clutches of a thousand goblins?”
Josidiah nodded and smiled, remembering well that
amusing story. A moment later, though, when the implications
of Anders’s words hit him fully, the elf turned back to
the mage, a scowl clouding his fair face. “The figurine,”
Josidiah muttered, for the owl had been but a statuette, enchanted
to bring forth a great bird in times of its master’s
need. There were many such objects in the world, many in
Cormanthor, and Josidiah was not unacquainted with the
methods of constructing them (though his own magics were
not strong enough along the lines of enchanting). He looked
back to the great panther, saw a distinct sadness there, then
turned back sharply to Anders.
“The cat must be killed at the moment of preparation,”
the bladesinger protested. “Thus her life energies will be
drawn into the statuette you will have created.”
“Working on that even now,” Anders said lightly. “I have
hired a most excellent dwarven craftsman to fashion a panther
statuette. The finest craftsman . . . er, craftsdwarf, in all
the area. Fear not, the statuette will do the cat justice.”
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“Justice?” the bladesinger echoed skeptically, looking once
more into the intense, intelligent yellow-green eyes of the
huge panther. “You w
ill kill the cat?”
“I offer the cat immortality,” Anders said indignantly.
“You offer death to her will, and slavery to her body,”
snapped Josidiah, more angry than he had ever been with
old Anders. The bladesinger had seen figurines and thought
them marvelous artifacts, despite the sacrifice of the animal
in question. Even Josidiah killed deer and wild pig for his
table, after all. So why should a wizard not create some useful
item from an animal?
But this time it was different, Josidiah sensed in his
heart. This animal, this great and free cat, must not be so
enslaved.
“You will make the panther . . .” Josidiah began.
“Whiskers,” explained Anders.
“The panther . . .” the bladesinger reiterated forcefully,
unable to come to terms with such a foolish name being
tagged on this animal. “You will make the panther a tool, an
animation that will function to the will of her master.”
“What would one expect?” the old mage argued. “What
else would one want?”
Josidiah shrugged and sighed helplessly. “Independence,”
he muttered.
“Then what would be the point of my troubles?”
Josidiah’s expression clearly showed his thinking. An independent
magical companion might not be of much use to
an adventurer in a dangerous predicament, but it would
surely be preferable from the sacrificed animal’s point of
view.
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“You chose wrong, bladesinger,” Anders teased. “You
should have studied as a ranger. Surely your sympathies lie
in that direction!”
“A ranger,” the bladesinger asked, “as Anders Beltgarden
once was?”
The old mage blew a long and helpless sigh.
“Have you so given up the precepts of your former trade in
exchange for the often ill-chosen allure of magical
mysteries?”
“Oh, and a fine ranger you would have been,” Anders replied
dryly.
Josidiah shrugged. “My chosen profession is not so different,”
he reasoned.
Anders silently agreed. Indeed, the man did see much of
his own youthful and idealistic self in the eyes of Josidiah
Starym. That was the curious thing about elves, he noted,
that this one, who was twice Anders’s present age, reminded
him so much of himself when he had but a third his present
years.
“When will you begin?” Josidiah asked.
“Begin?” scoffed Anders. “Why, I have been at work over