The Simbul's Gift

  For a heartbeat, Bro believed he’d lost something more precious than his mother’s love. Then, with the knife hilt stinging his palm, he saw danger for him and the colt he’d raised. He saw, as well, that no matter what he did, the colt was doomed: Zandilar would have Dancer, had always had him. Bro found the strength to release the knife and wrap his arms around a trusting neck, to hide his face in a coarse, black mane.

  “Good-bye,” he whispered, not a word he’d trained the colt to understand.

  Then, with a last pat, he offered the rope to Zandilar who had no use for it. Her mist-made form dissolved around the colt, obscuring him, consuming him, drawing him back into the small dark hole.

  THE NOBLES

  King Pinch

  David Cook

  War in Tethyr

  Victor Milán

  Escape from Undermountain

  Mark Anthony

  The Mage in the Iron Mask

  Brian Thomsen

  The Council of Blades

  Paul Kidd

  The Simbul’s Gift

  Lynn Abbey

  THE SIMBUL’S GIFT

  The Nobles: Book 6

  ©1997 TSR, Inc.

  All characters in this book are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  This book is protected under the copyright laws of the United States of America. Any reproduction or unauthorized use of the material or artwork contained herein is prohibited without the express written permission of Wizards of the Coast LLC.

  Published by Wizards of the Coast LLC. Hasbro SA, represented by Hasbro Europe, Stockley Park, UB11 1AZ. UK.

  FORGOTTEN REALMS, Wizards of the Coast, D&D, their respective logos, Dark Sun, and TSR, Inc. are trademarks of Wizards of the Coast LLC in the U.S.A. and other countries. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

  All Wizards of the Coast characters and their distinctive likenesses are property of Wizards of the Coast LLC.

  Cover art by: Todd Lockwood

  eISBN: 978-0-7869-6416-1

  640A2928000001 EN

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  v3.1

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books in the Series

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  About the Author

  From the Concise History of the Chosen Seven written by Cirian, Master Chronicler at Candlekeep, in the Year of the Blue Flame.

  Filed—misfiled—by Mehgrin, apprentice at Candlekeep, on a dreary day when she had a headache.

  The queen of Aglarond, called the Simbul and the witch-queen and many, many other, less complimentary names, is, in fact, Alassra Shentrantra, sixth of The Seven Chosen Sisters. The circumstances of her birth in Neverwinter in the Year of the Yearning are recorded elsewhere. Suffice to say, she was not yet two years of age when her mother, Elué Shundar, died and her father, Dornal, vanished from her life. The mage Elminster entrusted her to the Witches of Rashemen for her upbringing, telling the witches that Alassra was an orphan and without siblings.

  Neither statement was true, but the witches, trusting Elminster, believed him, and Alassra grew up believing the witches.

  Alassra left Rashemen at the age of sixteen, leaving neither roots nor regrets. For decades she roamed Faerûn in search of magic. She stopped wherever there was something to learn, and stayed only until she had mastered it. Deep in a bat-ridden cave, while she was searching for the living pearls of Mysotic, Alassra Shentrantra discovered that though she was human and vulnerable to death, she did not age as other humans did—could not age as they did.

  With the pearls in her purse, Alassra returned to Rashemen, hoping to learn more about her origins. But the witches who had raised her were dead, their successors ignorant, and the Vremyonni seers trembled when she approached them in the Running Rocks. Never one to bear frustration lightly, even in her youth, Alassra took her curiosity to the Outer Planes, visiting places that no human before her had seen, much less survived. She gathered spells like apples. She became a master of magic, but she learned nothing about herself.

  Over the next four and a half centuries, the unaging Alassra Shentrantra lived three-score lives, most as a human woman, but sometimes as a man and sometimes within another race’s skin. On occasion, she lived in obscurity, but many of her disguised lives are remembered in song and legend. By her own accounts, given to the monks here at Candlekeep during her rare visits, she enjoyed her notoriety and was pleased by the number and quality of her enemies. Beneath her disguise, she’d lost much of her humanity, replacing it with the dross of learning and magic.

  We foresaw a loneliness that would consume her and guessed that her lonely spirit would welcome oblivion when it arrived.

  Then, when we and she least expected it, the Sixth-of-the-Seven fell in love. Not for the first time, of course. Alassra took and discarded lovers in all of her disguises, but it was different when Lailomun Zerad strode into her life.

  Lailomun was a mage, a candle mage compared to Alassra’s firestorm. But it was danger, not magic that held them together and led Alassra Shentrantra to reveal herself for the first time, and completely, to another. Now Zerad was an initiate of a magic school that forbade association, intimate or otherwise, with free-lance wizards such as Alassra Shentrantra. More specifically, Zerad’s mentor was a woman who tolerated no rivals, intimate or otherwise. She owned her students outright and would sooner have destroyed a man than surrender him to another.

  The scent of danger surrounded them both during the two years they trysted in secret. Then, Lailomun’s deceit was uncovered.

  The next time Alassra arrived at their bolt-hole, she found a rose-thorn branch waiting on her lover’s pillow. She grieved—of that there is no doubt—but her grief was less than her need for vengeance. Alassra was not yet Chosen; she is the Sixth of the Seven, but she is the first with spellcraft. Beyond doubt, she could have crushed Lailomun’s mentor. With a little care and planning, her spells could have destroyed his homeland. And, at that time, her conscience would have raised no objections to the loss of innocent lives.

  The time had come for Alassra Shentrantra to learn that her conscience had never belonged to her. The Seven had been marked before birth by the goddess Mystra. Their immortality and their consciences belonged to her.

  Mystra confronted Alassra in the planes where she gathered the reagents for her most cataclysmic spells. The conf
rontation lasted a month and in the end, the goddess prevailed. Alassra left the planes as one of the Chosen. She was as wroth as she’d been when she found the rose-thorn branch, but many times wiser.

  Not long after that fateful encounter in the planes, Alassra Shentrantra arrived in Aglarond, southwest of Rashemen, due west of Thay where dwell the Red Wizards, longtime enemies of Alassra’s one-time guardians and—not at all coincidentally—home to Lailomun’s mentor. Without revealing her name—any of her names—the Sixth-of-the-Seven offered herself as an apprentice to Ilione, sister of Halacar, King of Aglarond at that time, though Ilione knew no magic that Alassra hadn’t known for at least a century.

  As the years passed, Alassra buried her love for Lailomun and raised it up again in the simple folk of Aglarond. The vengeance Mystra had forbidden became the just defense of her new homeland. Time and time again, Alassra directed her fury into the land of Thay and against the corrupt Red Wizards who rule there. At Ilione’s suggestion, King Halacar dubbed the nameless apprentice, the Simbul, a meaningless title, so far as I have been able to determine, but one well-respected in Aglarond where it became synonymous with a tall, silver-haired woman, with lightning eyes and a temper to match.

  Emboldened by his sister’s fierce apprentice, King Halacar launched Aglarond’s small army against the Red Wizards, but, for all her magic, the Simbul was not yet a warrior and certainly not a competent army commander. The Aglarondans barely avoided a rout. The people lost faith in their king; the king lost faith in his sister and the Simbul. For a year the very air of Aglarond was rank with anarchy and treason, until the king died, poisoned, it was said, and probably by Thayan hands—though no one looked hard for the culprits.

  Ilione succeeded her brother on Aglarond’s Verdigris Throne. She restored order and righteousness throughout her kingdom, as is recorded in many other chronicles. She built Aglarond’s first navy and rebuilt its army, but kept it home. Throughout Ilione’s sixty-year reign, her apprentice, the Simbul, oversaw Aglarond’s borders and—sometimes with the army’s aid but more often alone—kept them secure from Thayan incursion.

  Before she died, Queen Ilione named the Simbul as her heir. By then, of course, the Aglarondans knew the Simbul was no ordinary human woman, no ordinary wizard. No noble family nor merchant faction was foolish enough to object to the Simbul’s coronation in the Year of the Watching Cold.

  For seven years now, Alassra Shentrantra has ruled as the Simbul. She is at best respected, more generally feared, and only rarely loved by those around her. She keeps the Red Wizards out of Aglarond, and for that she commands her realm’s undivided loyalty.

  Notes for an examination,

  Written by Mehgrin, apprentice at Candlekeep,

  placed, by accident, in Cirian’s Concise History and filed with it

  (The day was very dreary, and the headache very bad)

  Zandilar: a goddess, maybe, called into being in the Yuirwood a long time ago by humans who lived in crude lakeside huts and hunted with stone-tipped spears. The only depictions of her from that time show her either naked and dancing or running with animals—usually horses—while hunters throw spears. (Does this mean that there were two Zandilars?)

  When the Tel’Quessir came to Faerûn, a tribe of the Sy-Tel’Quessir took the Yuirwood for their own. They were stronger and smarter than the humans; they had their own gods, who were stronger and smarter than gods like Zandilar. The humans disappeared from the Yuirwood after the Sy-Tel’Quessir arrived, but their Seldarine gods absorbed Zandilar and the other old human gods instead of driving them out.

  According to the Sy-Tel’Quessir, there was only one Zandilar and she was always dancing. They knew her as the goddess of physical passion and romance, and when they depicted her, they depicted her with a cat, not a horse, because cats are like that. Probably she was a popular goddess, but not an important one, and the other Tel’Quessir never adopted her or any of the other gods the Sy-Tel’Quessir worshiped in the Yuirwood.

  Once the Sy-Tel’Quessir were in the Yuirwood, nothing changed, for a very long time. Then the Yuirwood Sy-Tel’Quessir got careless and got tangled in wars with goblin-kind and the drow. They drew their gods into the wars with them, and even though they won the wars and kept the Yuirwood, they lost, too, because they and their gods had done bad things in order to win.

  So the Sy-Tel’Quessir of the Yuirwood began to forget things. They began to die. When humans came back to the Yuirwood, there weren’t many Yuir elves left, and they’d forgotten most everything that had ever been important to them, including their gods. Other elves remembered the Seldarine, but only the Yuir elves had ever known about Zandilar, Relkath, Magnar and the other old human gods.

  Now, no one knows anything about Zandilar. The Candlekeep mentors say she’s missing or that she’s become a part of the forest. But they don’t know. No one knows what’s happened to her, why she vanished, or whether she could come back.

  I think she could come back, if the Cha’Tel’Quessir who live in the Yuirwood now wanted her and the other old gods, but maybe they shouldn’t try too hard. Maybe Zandilar’s been gone too long. Maybe she wouldn’t be a goddess of passion and romance when she came back.

  1

  The village of Sulalk, in Aglarond

  Eight days after Greengrass, The Year of the Staff (1366DR)

  It was a warm spring morning. Trees were cloaked in flowers. The grass had greened with the promise of rich forage for the mothers of the lambs, calves, and colts born each night in farmyard birthing sheds.

  Bro wanted to stretch out on the ground and nap until noon. No matter how beautiful the days, it was the nature of babies to be born at night, and it was the duty of farmers and farmer’s stepsons to sit in the birthing shed. Bro had been vigilant for six nights’ running, through a steady stream of births, all but one of which had been successful.

  A good spring, so far, with good trade even for the stillborn lamb whose tender hide would make a fine pair of gloves for some lady in the royal city, Velprintalar. Dyed and embellished with jewels and silks, the lamb’s hide might find its way onto the queen’s hands, though thoughts of Aglarond’s mighty Simbul fled Bro’s mind as fast as they occurred. In Sulalk, on the Yuirwood’s verge, Aglarond’s seacoast capital was a world, not a week, away.

  Adentir, Bro’s human stepfather, paid the queen’s tithes and abided by her laws, which were, fortunately, rooted in common sense and easily obeyed. Dent raised a glass in the queen’s name at festival times and never mentioned her otherwise. For Bro, who’d lived his first twelve years among his own kind, the Cha’Tel’Quessir half-elves of the Yuirwood, the Simbul was the living emblem of an uneasy truce between them and the world outside—the world in which Bro had lived since his father’s death.

  A hand touched Bro’s shoulder. With it came the scents of pine bark and moss that were Shali, his mother, and the Yuirwood. But the forest was memory and the bowl she offered was filled with whey-soaked grain.

  “Hungry, Ember?”

  She called him by his boyhood name. Everyone else called him Bro, a crude shortening of Ebroin because, deep in their guts, humans remained averse to Cha’Tel’Quessir names and, in his own soul, Bro knew he hadn’t yet made Ebroin his own true name.

  More tired than hungry, Bro set aside the collection of half-braided thongs that would, when he was clearheaded, become a halter for a newborn foal. He accepted the bowl

  “Maybe tonight.” Shali ran a hand through his hair, leaving his ears exposed to the sunlight.

  “Maybe.” Bro tossed his head, returning his hair to its customary ears-and-face-hiding disorder.

  He watched his mother flinch and felt shame. Half-elves weren’t a race like their elf or human forebearers. First-generation half-elves took after their elven and human parents equally, but among the Cha’Tel’Quessir, family resemblance was a chancy thing. It wasn’t Shali’s fault that her skin was human-fair and her ears were small and rounded while he was forest-shadowed to the
tips of his very elven ears. No more than it had been her fault that Rizcarn had broken his neck falling out of a tree he’d climbed a thousand times. Shali had loved Rizcarn in a way Bro couldn’t begin to imagine; she’d left the Yuirwood because she couldn’t bear her memories and couldn’t die, either—because she had a son she’d had to finish raising.

  In the five years since Rizcarn’s death, Shali had become a stranger dressed in layers of woven cloth, a kerchief bound over hair and ears alike. She’d never go back to the trees; they both knew that, just as they both knew he would. The knowledge ached between them.

  “Adentir says the foal will be yours, if it’s a colt.” Shali gave a brittle laugh. The Cha’Tel’Quessir weren’t horse-folk. A colt wouldn’t keep Bro out of the Yuirwood.

  “I’ll hold him to his word,” Bro replied

  She smiled a thin-lipped half-smile, the only smile Bro saw anymore.

  “He’s not bad,” Bro said awkwardly, speaking words that were, and were not, the truth.

  Adentir was human. Everyone in Sulalk was human, except for Bro and Shali. Even Tay-Fay, his half-sister, was human. That was the way of things for the Cha’Tel’Quessir: If a half-elf mated with an elf or human, their children belonged to the full-blooded world. The Cha’Tel’Quessir way of life could vanish in a generation.

  Bro didn’t blame his stepfather. Human ways were ideal for humans, elf ways were ideal for elves, but Cha’Tel’Quessir had to resist both, if they valued themselves.

  “He’s been good to me, Ember. He understands. Rizcarn—”

  Bro gagged down another spoonful of the cold porridge. He hated it when his mother talked about his father, expecting him to take Rizcarn’s part. He’d loved his father, missed him and mourned him, but when push came to shove, he couldn’t—didn’t want to—replace Rizcarn.

  “Dent says it’ll take two years at least to train a colt,” he muttered. “Says well do it together. Says he’ll show me how it’s done. He’s got good hands—” he paused, leaving the words, for a human, unsaid.