"Relkath protects," Alassra repeated the phrase she'd heard often enough around the camp. "Zandilar didn't want your son to die."

One by one, the Cha'Tel'Quessir touched Bro's scars. Several of them collected ash from the cindered willow. Bro helped Alassra climb out of the pool. He waited until she'd wrung out her shirt and retied her sandals before asking:

"What truly happened back there? What did you see?"

"Me? I closed my eyes, Ebroin. You tell me, what did you see?"

"But you said-"

"I lied. You were healed. Does it matter who did it or how? Let it be Relkath, that's what Rizcarn and the others want to believe."

They trudged another hundred paces in silence.

"I thought it was you, Chayan. I thought I felt magic pass from you to me."

"Nonsense, Ebroin," she said, though that was precisely what had happened. "A sell-sword like me, making trees explode? What do I look like, the Simbul herself?"

"No. Of course not. It's just… Chayan, I'm not myself. I don't know me anymore. But I-I could more than like you, Chayan-if I thought you cared."

"Oh, Ebroin, I care. I care very much, but I'll move on, too. I don't stay in one place very long."

"I guess that's what Rizcarn told my mother."

Alassra slipped her hand around Bro's. "There's a time for thinking about tomorrow, Ebroin, but it's not when there's a hanging storm over your head."

They walked through a sultry afternoon where the only breeze was the hot breath wafting from their lungs. From time to time, Alassra glimpsed Halaern or another forester pacing them in the near distance. Like them, she kept her senses honed for Red Wizard activity. Spread out and nearly mindless, the Cha'Tel'Quessir were vulnerable to attack, but none came. The Thayans were taking their cues from Rizcarn, following him to the Sunglade along with two-score Cha'Tel'Quessir.

Sunset was a smear of hot-forged steel on the western horizon. Night was black and marked by whiplash winds that came without warning. Halaern could have said whether the storm had followed them as they walked or whether it was as large as the Yuirwood, but Halaern wasn't available for conversation. Alassra knew only that it had been hanging for a full night and day: longer than any summer storm in her memory.

Rizcarn kept them walking. Alassra cut her finger on her sister's knife and kept pace with the Cha'Tel'Quessir. She wondered how the Red Wizards were faring, but not through any misplaced compassion. Though there were spells that would give a human man or woman elven vision for a night, there was a good chance that they'd do something rash if they thought their quarry was getting ahead of them. Even if it were Mythrell'aa herself pacing them, the illusionist was surely traveling with a wizard who could cast the invocation spell for lightning into the hanging storm to bring it down on them all.

Alassra's worst fears seemed confirmed when the winds intensified and pummeled the Cha'Tel'Quessir from every direction. Thunder began, not as ear-splitting cracks but in long, low-pitched rumbles. The sky stayed dark; lightning hadn't yet broken free.

Three steps farther, and Alassra stopped. Lightning was her favorite death spell. When she cast it, the white-hot bolts were met and balanced by a counterthrust from deep within the soil. That force was building under her feet. Looking into the trees, she glimpsed ghostly blue fingers rising from the topmost branches.

The trees of the Yuirwood and all the life beneath them were about to get caught in a battle between the sky and the ground. Alassra threw aside her bow, her arrows, her steel-headed spear and unbuckled her sword belt: She touched one of the studs on her shirt. Her finger healed and the forest went dark.

"Get down!" she shouted in a voice that carried over the wind. "Lie flat."

She might as well have told them to pray to Relkath. When the first bolt struck, a pine tree burst into flames. The second bolt struck an oak. A branch bore the bolt to the trunk, the trunk carried it to the ground where it spread out like a spider's web. Alassra felt it pass beneath her feet, then the thunder fell down on them.

There was panic among them as the Cha'Tel'Quessir ignored her advice, and perhaps just as well. The burning pine collected three more bolts in blinding succession, then it sprouted arms and hurled fire to the ground. Alassra had no time to wonder if she faced a monster summoned by the Red Wizards or something created by the Yuirwood. She shed her Cha'Tel'Quessir disguise and hurled a lightning bolt at its heart, drawing all its fury to a single target: herself.

The Simbul met lightning with lightning, fire with fire, all the while trying to maintain a protective shield around those Cha'Tel'Quessir who might still be alive beneath the battle. As with so many wizardry duels, there was no question of wounding her foe. She strove for annihilation, though if her own defenses wavered, by Mystra's mercy she would escape a similar fate-unless she consciously chose to die.

That thought was never in her mind during the few score moments that the battle raged. It couldn't be, not until sheets of black rain put a stop to the fighting by transforming the creature of fire into a collapsing mass of smoke and ash.

Exhausted and undisguised, Alassra caught her breath in the aftermath. In nearly six hundred years of wizardry, she'd never felt so impotent. The rain had quenched the monster, not her, not all her magic. She'd never touched it. If it were the native force of the Yuirwood, then no wonder the elven sages worried. If it were something new from Thay, then all the gods of Faerun were at risk.

25

The Yuirwood, in Aglarond Before dawn, the twenty-fourth day of Eleasias, The Year of the Banner (1368DR)

Bro sat where he'd fallen when the storm started, knees drawn up to his chin, trying to take advantage of the shelter a shoulder-high cedar provided from the wind and rain. He was soaked to the bone and shaking, as much from memories as from the cold. From the first thunder crack he'd relived the nightmare of Sulalk while the nightmare of the Yuirwood played out above him. His throat was raw. He'd screamed himself hoarse, but he didn't remember making a sound, didn't remember anything except mindless, endless terror. There might have been a man, tall as a tree and formed from fire, hurling flame and lightning at the Cha'Tel'Quessir. There might have been a woman, too, standing with the Cha'Tel'Quessir, shrouded in silver who fought with fire and lightning of her own.

Zandilar.

Zandilar, who'd first come to him when he sat beneath a Sulalk tree, seducing him with promises of the Yuirwood. Zandilar, who'd taken the colt into the ground. Zandilar, who'd surrounded him with soft light when there was a Thayan arrow in his back. Zandilar, who, according to Chayan, had healed him in a deep-water pool.

Once Dent said the worst thing that could happen to a man was that a god took an interest in his life. Bro had dismissed his stepfather's remark as typically shortsighted, typically human, typically Dent. The Cha'Tel'Quessir were different; their gods were different… better. Of course, he'd been younger then, a least a month younger. Beside the cedar tree, Bro admitted to Dent that he hadn't known what he was talking about. Everything had been simple while he'd lived among humans, dreaming of the Yuirwood.

Nothing was simple now, least of all, the Yuirwood gods.

When Bro thought about it, there was a third layer of nightmare in his memory, between Sulalk and the loud, fiery battle he'd just survived. He'd seen the flaming man before, not as tall and not in flames, when he'd cowered behind the Simbul in an out-of-place, out-of-time part of the forest. The Simbul was someone Bro tried not to think about but, like Zandilar, she'd taken irreplaceable things from him and also saved his life with lightning.