“The golden born, the cloven hooves, everything,” Tanalasta confirmed. “Instead of answering me, the woman leaped laughing onto the unicorn’s back and vanished into the forest. Flowers and shrubs rose to blossom in its hoof prints.”
Rowen stood without speaking for a long time, then finally asked, “And when it was gone, you found you had been at the monastery all along?”
“Almost,” Tanalasta said, surprised. “I was at my favorite lake. How did you know?”
“Had you stiff been lost, it would not have been much of a vision.” Rowen’s expression changed from apprehensive to dazed. “And you think I am this unicorn?”
Tanalasta shrugged. “You’re the best candidate so far-and I doubt it was a coincidence that I found your Faith Planting at Orc’s Pool.”
Rowen shook his head. “But my family…”
“Now who is being dishonest?” Tanalasta asked. In the sky behind Rowen, one of the ghazneths peeled off and started south after her mare. “You know as well as I do that the vision wasn’t about politics. It was about love.”
Rowen paled visibly and seemed too stunned to speak.
Tanalasta took his hand and turned to continue their flight. “Now can we go?”
Filfaeril sat alone in the apse of a silent throne room, staring down a long ambulatory bounded by double-stacked arches and tall columns of fluted marble. Though the chamber smelled of mildew and rot, it had been immaculately adorned in broad, vertical bands of brown and gold. The pattern was a simple one favored by Cormyrean royalty more than a thousand years earlier, when the kingdom had barely extended past the Starwater, and Arabel had been little more than a cluster of crossroad inns. The queen could not imagine any family of Arabellan nobles building such an archaic reception hall-nor, having gone to the expense of building it, allowing the place to grow as dank and musty-smelling as this one. It just did not make sense.
Then again, nothing made sense since Vangerdahast’s return. She did not understand why he had brought the phantom with him, or why the lurid creature had abducted her only to abandon her here and wander off. Was the thing that confident of its prison, or had it simply forgotten her-and what was it, anyway?
As important as the answers to these questions were, they were not the ones to which Filfaeril’s mind kept returning. More than anything, she wanted to know what had happened to Azoun and Tanalasta-and to Vangerdahast. And those answers she would not find in this throne room.
The queen forced herself to remain seated for a while longer, using the time to study her environs and look for any hint of her captor’s presence. In the event of an abduction, Vangerdahast’s instructions were quite clear. First, do as little as possible and wait for the war wizards to show up. Second, avoid giving a captor any excuse to harm her. Third, fight or flee only if death looked imminent. Vangerdahast had told her many times that once the war wizards were alerted to a royal’s danger, a rescue company would arrive within minutes. But Filfaeril had been sitting on the throne for hours, and she had seen even less of the rescue company than of her captor. Clearly, something had gone wrong with the royal magician’s plan.
Filfaeril stood and descended the dais. She paused to see if the phantom would show itself. When it did not, she walked down the ambulatory to the bronze grillwork gates at the end. Her captor had not bothered to shut them, so she stepped through… and found herself looking up the ambulatory toward the dais, as though she had merely turned around.
Filfaeril spun on her heel and found the gates hanging ajar between the same two pillars, looking out on the same gloomy foyer and huge oaken doors as before. She pushed the gate open and walked through. Again, she found herself looking up the ambulatory toward the two wooden thrones on the dais. Frowning, the queen pulled the gate closed, then opened it and stepped through-to the same result.
The queen slammed the bronze gate behind her, then started up the ambulatory. She had suspected all along that the phantom had not simply flown off and forgotten about her, but leaving the gate open was a hint of the creature’s true cruelty. As every good torturer knew, the secret to breaking a victim’s will lay in controlling her mind. Leaving the gate ajar had been a deliberate attempt to rob Filfaeril of hope. It had worked better than she cared to admit.
On her way back to the dais, she took the time to step through each of the arches along the ambulatory, but the result was always the same. She found herself standing on the opposite side of the room, facing the same arch through which she had come.
Finally, the queen resigned herself to the fact that her prison was as secure as any dungeon cell and returned to her throne. She sat down as deliberately and calmly as she could. After taking a moment to compose herself, Filfaeril pictured the royal magician’s bushy-bearded face and rubbed her signet ring.
Her mind remained as quiet as the throne room, and a dozen possible reasons for Vangerdahast’s silence leaped into her thoughts. She wished they had not. Had he been able to, the wizard would have answered. That he had not meant one of two things: either he was incapacitated, or the strange prison prevented him from hearing her.
A fanfare of trumpets echoed through the throne room, and the phantom appeared inside the gate. He was as gruesome as before, with his folded wings, tarnished crown, and red-tinged eyes glaring in Filfaeril’s direction. In his hands he held a limp mass of gray rags that might have been a body or a wad of clothing, and from his talons dangled long strings of gore.
“Milady.” He bowed deeply, then started up the ambulatory toward Filfaeril. “If I have let you grow lonely, you must forgive me. The traitors have kept me busy.”
As the phantom neared the dais, Filfaeril saw that the rags he carried were black weathercloaks with bronze throat clasps. The war wizards had found her after all. The queen’s fingertips began to ache, and she realized she was digging her nails into the arms of her throne.
The phantom dumped the clothes in a heap and ascended the dais. “There is no need to call for someone else.” As he drew closer, the stench of blood and battle offal grew overwhelming. “I am never far from you. Ever.”
He stopped beside Filfaeril’s throne, then reached down and lifted her hand. She gave an involuntary shiver and shrank away.
“Come now.” He clasped her signet ring and gently worked it off her finger, leaving her whole hand smeared with warm gore. “Do you really believe I would hurt you?”
Filfaeril could only look at him and wonder if she had gone mad.
The phantom closed the ring in his palm, then his eyes rolled back and his wings spread a quarter of the way open. He gave a low groan. Finding herself at eye level with his naked loins, Filfaeril turned away in disgust-but instantly thought better of it and reached for her hair. In a swift and practiced motion, she slipped her fingers between the tines of her silver comb and thumbed a tiny catch, then pulled a razor sharp fist-rake from its sheath. The queen twisted in her seat, driving the weapon’s needlelike tines into her captor’s abdomen and hissing the command word that activated the weapon’s death magic.
The phantom snarled in pain, then opened his hand and let the signet ring clink to the floor. He did not fall.
Filfaeril yelled her command word again, pushing against the thing with all her might. The throne beneath her gave an ominous creak and collapsed, and she found herself sitting on the floor atop the moldering green remains of a rotten bench. On the stone before her lay a drab band of tin bearing the royal dragon of Cormyr. The queen was too confused to tell what had happened to the throne, but she knew when the magic had been drained from her signet.
The phantom plucked Filfaeril’s comb from his abdomen and stood staring at it in confusion. Behind him, the majestic throne room had grown as dark and murky as a cellar, and the queen could barely make out the blocky shapes of several tall cask racks silhouetted against a distant rectangle of filmy light.