Mistshore (34 page)

He looked up when they appeared, and smiled in genuine pleasure. “Well met, Icelin,” he said. “I received your message. I’m happy to see you are well.”

He didn’t seem to notice or care that there was a puddle of drying blood—leucrotta and Bellaril’s—behind and to his left. The copper scent combined with the leucrotta’s naturally pungent stink must have been overwhelming. But like the dying horse that day on the Way of the Dragon, Cerest took the horror completely in his stride. His pleasant expression never faltered.

Somehow, though, the sight of him amid the blood was less intimidating instead of more. Here at last he wasn’t trying to hide what he was, the deficiency of mind that had set him on

her like a crazed hunting hound. She could see him in this true state and feel pity, though it was a fleeting emotion.

“Greetings, Cerest,” she said. “I hope you haven’t been waiting long.”

“I’m accustomed to being patient. I was more than willing to wait for you,” Cerest said. “In the end, I knew you’d come back to me.”

Icelin felt Ruen tense behind her. She reached back to touch him, but of course he moved just out of her grasp. She dropped her hand.

“Are we alone?” she asked, deliberately affecting a teasing tone.

“There’s at least one in the crow’s nest,” Ruen said. “Ten feet up.” He pointed, and Icelin heard the scuff of boots on wood, a figure hastening to conceal himself in the shadows. Ruen smiled. “I don’t think he enjoys heights.”

Cerest was not so amused. Hatred came alive in his eyes when he looked at Ruen, an emotion so intense Icelin wondered at its root. “I would be more than willing to dismiss my men, Icelin, if you would send your friend away,” he said. His voice was unsteady. He swallowed.

“But that’s hardly fair,” Icelin said. “I have so few friends left, thanks to you.” She reached into her pack and pulled out the stack of letters. “Do you know what these are?”

Cerest stood and walked toward her outstretched hand. Icelin allowed him to approach but kept her body squarely between Ruen and Cerest, noting the irony of her protection of the elf.

Not for long, she thought, as the viper took the letters from her hand. I won’t need you for long.

Cerest shuffled through the letters, and Icelin could tell he recognized the handwriting immediately. “These are Elgreth s,” he said, handing them back to her. “I never would have credited him with the strength to write them. He was in poor shape when I left him in Luskan.”

She thought she’d been prepared for anything, but at his words, Icelin felt a cold kiss on the back of her neck, as if one of the wraiths had drifted down to whisper hateful truths in her ear.

Anger bloomed in place of the cold, and the contrast made her tremble. She felt the letters flutter from her hands. They landed on the harbor’s surface and became tiny, worn boats carried away by the rippling current.

She had felt many things upon learning of her grandfather’s identity and subsequent fate: grief, confusion, loss, but always a place removed from her heart. It wasn’t that she was callous. It was simply that nothing could surmount the pain and anger that lived there after Brant’s death—until now.

“Why?” she said. “If you found Elgreth in Luskan, why didn’t you bring him home to Waterdeep? You said he was your best friend. How could you leave him in that godscursed place?”

“He was too far gone to walk,” Cerest said, “and I didn’t have enough men. I never would have made it out of the city with him. We would have been set upon—fresh carrion for the vultures.”

“Of course,” Icelin said bitterly. “You wouldn’t have risked yourself to make your old friend comfortable in his last days.”

“Whatever you think of me, Icelin, I was Elgreth’s friend,” Cerest said. “I would have given anything to have brought him home. He should never have gone to Luskan.”

“He went to protect me,” Icelin said. “He must have been terrified you would find me. What was it, Cerest? What did you do to betray my family’s trust in you so completely?”

“I never intended to betray them,” Cerest said, “just as I didn’t intend for Elgreth to run from me. You are too young to understand. My family was composed of artisans. They had centuries to hone their skills. My father could craft weapons that sang with arcane music. He only made a handful of blades in his lifetime, but they were named. If not alive, they were near

enough to sentient that men in Myth Drannor craved the bond between sword and man more than they craved a mate. And it was all because my father could sense magic and make it bend to whatever shape he desired. It didn’t matter that the Spellplague was ravishing magic all over Faerűn. My father might have been a god. He was master of the unbound weave.”

“But his son did not inherit his ability,” Icelin said.

“No,” Cerest said. “I tried, but the gift never came. There were reasons, my father said. A question of birth.”

The naked longing in his eyes was of a kind Icelin had never seen except on a grieving person. Cerest had long ago realized what he could never be, but he refused to come to terms with his inadequacy.

“It was easier after I left,” Cerest said. “I comforted myself by thinking that this kind of gift was an aberration. I would never see it again, even in my long lifetime.” His voice was ragged, emotion breaking through at last. “I met Elgreth, and your parents, and everything was perfect. We would have continued together, year after year, explorers all”—his face contorted—”if Elgreth hadn’t wanted to explore the Rikraw Tower.”

These were the words Icelin had waited to hear. Cerest had given the tower a name, and names were power. She felt the bonds around her memories snap.

As Cerest spoke, Icelin felt a kind of stupor descend upon her

mind. The fog thickened and deepened. This was not like the other times she’d gone into her mind, seeking a stray piece of lost information. This was not in her control. She was being led down the twisting corridors by a hand that belonged to a person that was her and yet not her. This person was a child and yet possessed of more wisdom than her waking self.

Icelin was only half-aware, in this state, of Cerest moving closer to her and Ruen farther away. This repositioning made no sense to Icelin, but she had no time to consider the implications. The hand pulling het was moving faster, sweeping her along with its urgency.

The corridors turned to aged stone; dust and cobwebs clung to the corners. Was she going backward in time? An appropriate metaphor, Icelin thought. Brant always said her mind worked with the same ptacticality of a history text. Past was old, present was new.

She came to the end of the passage and found a swathe of green cutting brilliantly across the stone. Stepping out of the passage, Icelin found herself in a vast held.

At first she was afraid. The space was too open. The smells of the city were gone. She could only detect grass and the distant smell of smoke in the air.

This was what outside the city smelled like. This was what space smelled like. Gone were the constant press of animals and South Ward wagon traffic and the refuse of so many folk living side by side. She felt—remembered—the grass tickling her ankles, the movement of insects in the living carpet.

She breathed deeply and caught the hint of smoke again. Mingled with the ash and fire was the scent of onions cooking, and fresh game nearby.

A dusty ribbon of road, stamped many times over with hoof prints, snaked out in front of her. It led up a steep hillside and out of sight. She followed it, and when she crested the rise saw the campfire, the stew pot cooling in the grass, and the circle of figures waiting for their meal.

The feeling of familiarity cascaded over Icelin with such intensity that it left her dizzy and unmoored in her own memories. It was like encountering beloved friends with whom she’d corresponded for years but never seen face to face.

Elgreth cradled a spit stuck with flaming venison. He looked young, his dark brown hair showing only a few threads of silver in the sunlight. He had a thick moustache and wide arms like ale barrels. His cloak fell around him in a pool of darker green against the grass. He pulled the venison off the spit, snatching his hand back from the steaming meat. He sucked on his fingers and pulled faces at the child seated across the fire from him.

Icelin recognized her young self only distantly. Her black hair was trimmed short. She looked like a boy, except she was delicately framed and wore a dress of thick cotton and indeterminate shape.

How strange to see herself this way. She was no longer walking through vague half-memories, as she had been in her dreams. Her mind was spinning the completed story, as vividly as Kaelin had staged his play.

A woman stepped into view and dropped a blanket over her younger self s head. The child squealed and crawled out from under the quilt, her eyes staring adoringly up at her mother.

Her mother and father. Icelin saw them more clearly than she saw her younger self. Her father sat behind her mother, pulling his wife back into his lap, trapping her between thin arms. He

was not nearly as burly as Elgreth. His back was slightly hunched under the weight of the pack he wore. His spectacles had been bent and repaired so many times they gave his face a misshapen appearance. When he looked at her mother, his face was so full of love. And in that breath he became the most beautiful man Icelin had ever seen.

Her mother looked exactly like Icelin. She had the same dark hair, trimmed short, but there was no mistaking her curves for a boy. She had the full mouth and healthy weight Icelin lacked, but their eyes were the same, their cheekbones as finely chiseled.

How did I keep you away from my memory for so long? Icelin thought. Where have you been hiding? She sat down on the grass, determined to stay forever in the field, content to bask in the presence of the family she’d never met.

When she looked back at the scene, she noticed the tower for the first time. An ugly gray spike that was slightly off center from the rest of the landscape, the tower cast a shadow that reached nearly to the campsite.

She noticed other things. Her father kept shooting glances in the tower’s direction, a look of barely contained excitement stretching his face.

Thirty paces from the fire, Icelin saw another figure, small with distance, agile when he moved. The figure had his back to her, but Icelin could see he was male. Two points of flesh stuck out from his golden hair. When the figure turned, Icelin was shocked to see the smooth, handsome features, the lively eyes unmarked by grief and trauma.

Cerest was an angelic blight on the idyllic scene, Icelin thought. She could see how anyone, man or woman, human or elf, would be taken with him. His face, in its symmetry, was more beautiful than any she’d ever seen. He motioned to her family, his face bright with exhilaration.

The camp broke up. Elgreth left the venison smoking in the grass. Her mother scooped her younger self up in her arms and

tossed her over one shoulder. Her delighted squeals trailed away down the hill toward the tower.

Don’t do it. Don’t go. Stay, and be with me always. Icelin got to her feet and followed her family. She tried to tun, but the tower seemed always at a safe distance from her footsteps, and no shout would reach the ears of the living memories before her.

She closed her eyes, and when she opened them, she was inside the tower, just as she had been in every nightmare that had haunted her from childhood.

This time, she was no spectator. She resided in the body of her younger self. She could feel the cool ground beneath her bare feet, and the shadows swirling around her had form and substance. They were her family. Her father was taking scrapings from the brittle stone walls and placing them in vials on his belt. Her mother was chanting in an undertone, her hands on the spine of what had once been a massive tome. The spine was all that remained. Her mother’s eyes were closed. Yellow light encircled her fingers.

Her mother—a wizard! Icelin couldn’t believe it. Her mother had carried the gift of the Art, and Icelin had inherited it. Gods, how much her mother could have taught her, guided her, if she had lived to see to her daughter’s tutelage.

“Be cautious,” said a voice.

The sudden interruption jarred Icelin from her thoughts. She looked to see who had spoken and saw Elgreth standing next to her mother.

“It’s all right,” her mother said. She touched Elgreth s arm. “I sense no pockets here. Cerest was right. The plague has abandoned this place. Have you found anything?” she asked, addressing her husband.

“Where’s Cerest gone to?” Elgreth asked.

“I think he’s putting out the campfire,” her mother said. She touched Elgreth’s cheek affectionately. “I expect we forgot to douse it in our excitement.”

Icelin only half-listened to the test of the convetsation; her attention was caught by the ruined book. She got on her knees and turned her head to see the letters on the spine. They were outlined in blue fire, the edges of the script blurring and fluttering like wings on a dying butterfly.

As she watched, the flames punctured the leather binding, leaving blackened curls in their wake. The smell of charred leather rose in her nostrils. She looked up, and saw that her mother was watching the book too. Her eyes widened, and the color drained from her lovely face.

Icelin, hampered by her younger body, could not get to her mother. She tripped over a pile of wood and fell. Her face caught the sunlight coming from a gaping hole in the towet ceiling. The light beating down was too intense. The ground had been cold only a breath ago, yet everywhere around her she felt heat. It was like she’d stepped into the middle of the campfire.

“Icelin.”

She heard her mother’s voice. It had nevet sounded like that before. With a child’s cettainty and an adult’s memoty, Icelin knew this was the end.

The spellplague pocket, awakened by her mother’s simple magic, swirled to life from the tafters of the ruined towet ceiling. A cerulean cloud that looked like a tiny, confined thunderstorm, it crawled along the walls, finding cracks in the stone and exploding them, spraying shards of rock on the helpless people below.