"You're sure this is the right place?"

Alassra had been transporting herself around Abeir-toril for nearly six hundred years. She wasn't perfect, but her mistakes were few and far between-until now. In two days, two spells had dumped her in out-of-the-way parts of the Yuirwood; the same part of the Yuirwood, unless she missed her guess. The forest had always been chancy for wizards, but only a blind fool would fail to detect the beginnings of a new and ominous pattern.

She opened her mind, searching for a piece of herself. If her senses could be trusted, a strand of her hair was nearby.

"It's the place that drew me. Whether it's the right place-look for yourself."

Alassra hadn't meant for her sister to take her words literally, but Alustriel stripped off her gown and sandals. She dived head first into the dark-water pool, causing Alassra's heart to skip beats until a silvery wreath broke the water's surface.

"He didn't drown."

"There were other-safer-ways to learn that."

"And waste more time, if he was under water."

Alustriel paddled to the side of the pool. Alassra knelt on the bank, offering her hand. The sense that her hair was nearby had grown stronger. Squinting, she caught a glint of silver in an eddy on the pool's far side. Alustriel swam and brought back a forked twig to which Alassra's hair had been carefully attached. She took her sister's hand and climbed onto the bank where she shed a graceful waterfall and was completely-perfectly-dry.

One of the twig's tines was empty, the other wasn't.

"He had help," Alassra decided.

"You gave him a knife. I assume the steel was good enough to cut hair."

"Umm… But what I felt was this end coming loose. This was notched and the strand attached before it was cut and I'd tied it around the arm he favored. He'd need help to perform that trick with his off-weapon hand."

"An extra pair of hands, perhaps, but help?"

"We weren't bargaining," Alassra admitted, harkening back to Alustriel's recounting of her conversation with the little girl. "He blamed me for what happened. He didn't want my help. If he found it…"

"He'd have left your hair, your boots and your knife where you could easily find them. This," Alustriel twirled the twig between her fingers, "floated here. Someone made certain that Bro would be far away when you found it."

"Alustriel, you have a devious and suspicious mind. I like that in a sister."

"I try to keep in practice. Shall we wander our way upstream?"

"You're sure the little girl won't get into mischief while we're gone?"

"Absolutely."

The sisters hiked opposite banks of the stream, their mage-trained senses sharp for signs of a struggle-broken branches, dislodged stones, skid marks in the damp moss. They were alert for immaterial clues as well, the faint traces that spellcasting, though the latent magic of the Yuirwood consumed such traces quickly.

Two sets of footprints and-more tellingly-a set of hoofprints marked the place where Bro and his now-confirmed companion dropped the twig into the stream. There were no indications that Bro was other than a willing participant in deception. The horse and the two Cha'Tel'Quessir-both sisters assumed Bro was with another Yuirwood half-elf-had continued upstream, not troubling to conceal their trail.

"Follow them?" Alustriel asked.

Alassra shook her head. "Only if we need to. Open your mind. I'm noticing something very strange."

As a wizard, Alassra was more skilled than any of her sisters. On a good day and with the wind at her back, she could sense things even the Old Mage missed. At that moment she sensed another corpse, not far from the stream and reeking of magic.

"Yes," Alustriel agreed after a moment. "A death gone wrong."

"My thoughts exactly."

Alassra led the way, readying spells as she walked. Behind her, she sensed Alustriel doing the same. If malice was loose in the Yuirwood this night, it was in for a thorough trouncing. They followed the trail of footprints and hoofprints some hundred paces before it and the sense of unrightness diverged. The Simbul drew no conclusions, but turned away from the marked trail.

Not far into the laurel and briar, they found what they were looking for: a corpse, man-shaped in the moonlight. Alustriel made a misty light and set it hovering over their heads. Alassra covered her mouth-a reflexive human reaction when confronted with deformity and mutilation. The High Lady of Silverymoon invoked Mystra's name; she cast several lesser spells against evil and one, which Alassra didn't recognize, that would have freed the man's spirit, had it remained trapped in the mangled body. It was the sort of compassion Alassra expected from and respected in her elder sister and that almost never occurred to her.

On the other hand, Alustriel was reluctant to get down on her knees for a closer look, which bothered Alassra not at all. Using the little wand she'd used to probe the Red Wizard corpses in Sulalk, she began her examination. The wand vibrated in her hand, discharging its particular magic and raising a pattern of incomplete tattoos.

"What the-?"

"That shouldn't have happened," Alustriel said, as much a question as an answer.

"I imagine he said the same thing, or tried to." Alassra resorted to acid humor as she sat back on her heels.

The corpse, already naked, cratered and broken, took on a new awfulness beneath the wand's glowing magic. Gingerly, Alassra touched it again with the wand, lifting a hank of brittle hair away from its face, revealing two mouths, three eyes, and half a nose.

"A soured shapeshifting?" Alustriel suggested. "Illusion, perhaps, or necromancy, or something begun by a god?"

"Or a failed possession. Tried to swallow something and it swallowed him back." Alassra used the wand to expose the corpse's blasted abdomen. "Quite a stomachache."

"How can you make jokes?"

"How can I not?" Alassra stood up. "Someone who might have been a Red Wizard crossed paths with someone who might have been Cha'Tel'Quessir. One of them died, but which one?"

"Both of them, I should think."

"Then who was walking beside young Ebroin?"

"You think he's with… this? It… it doesn't look recent."

"Agreed. I'd say weeks, maybe months, if I'd come across it anywhere but here. Here is too close. I don't believe in coincidence."

Holding her gown carefully away from the corpse, Alustriel at last knelt down to examine it. "If it's not coincidence, there has to be cause. You didn't plan to come here: Your travel spell yawed. No one could have predicted that, or where you'd come out." Her hand wove above the corpse as she spoke. The luminous tattoos faded. She laid her bare hand on a malformed cheek. Within moments, her expression changed from puzzled to deeply concerned. "I like this not at all, Alassra."

"A coincidence?"

Alustriel ignored the jibe. "It is old-part of it, at any rate. You said you were displaced in time: Days? Months? Years?"

"Try centuries. Try millennia… several. The stars didn't match."

"Oh dear."

Alassra took her sister's hand, helping her to her feet and saying, "I don't like the sound of that 'oh, dear'."

"Could anyone have followed you?"

"I couldn't have followed me. You couldn't-but someone did, don't you think?"

Alustriel nodded, then immediately shook her head. "It makes no sense."

"Welcome to the Yuirwood, sister. Stay here long enough and you'll get used to it." Alassra restored the glowing tattoos. Coincidence or not, there was none where the corpse's heart should have been. "It might not mean anything," she muttered. "That part might be pure Cha'Tel'Quessir. All the other tattoos stop and start. The fact that I can't determine which zulkir marked him might not mean anything at all."

With nothing more to be done or learned, the Simbul cast fire on the corpse. The sisters stood in respectful silence while hot, blue flames reduced it to a thin layer of ash that would disappear in the next rain.