Seiveril lowered his gaze and said, "I apologize, my lady."
Amlaruil stood in silence for a long moment. Then her face softened.
"You know as well as I that I rule by the consent of the People. I am not a tyrant who can drive my subjects in any direction I choose. The monarch of Evermeet represents the collective will of all the People and must remain subservient to their goals and desires, not her own. While I may not care for the ambitions and arrogance of Du-rothil or Veldann or any of the other Houses who follow them, I cannot escape this one fact: Perhaps as much as a third of Evermeet's folk believe strongly that spending our strength to defend realms in Faerun is pure folly.''
"They are mistaken," Seiveril said.
"I am inclined to believe so too, though I find that I lack your unshakable certainty on the question. But regardless of how I feel about the matter, I cannot ignore the reservations of so many of my subjects."
"Reservations or not, elves are in dire peril in Faerun. We cannot stand by and do nothing!" Seiveril took a small step toward the queen and caught her hand in both of his. "Send something, I beg you. Whatever force you dispatch will be better than nothing. Surely, Durothil and Veldann cannot prevent you from doing that."
"Yet they can," Amlaruil said with a sigh. She extricated her hand from Seiveril's and turned away, pacing across the moonlit glade. "Soon after the council adjourned for the day, Selsharra Durothil came to speak to me privately. She informed me that if I dispatched any expedition to Faerun, she would recall all Durothils from Evermeet's service-and with them, the Veldanns, as well as all the Houses that owe them fealty. That constitutes something like three in ten of our mages and warriors."
Seiveril's stomach ached with dread.
"Surely," he said, "not all of the Durothils and Veldanns would abandon their oaths and return to their homes?"
"Some would defy Lady Durothil, I am sure. But how many others from different families might be encouraged to express their own private reservations in the same way?" Amlaruil hugged her shoulders against the growing chill in the night air and continued, "I dare not call her bluff, Seiveril. If my actions force the strong sun elf Houses to repudiate their allegiance to the throne, I open the door for horrors such as we cannot imagine. No, I must accept that Evermeet's heart is divided on the question of whether to turn our faces toward Faerun or away from it, and as long as Evermeet's heart is so troubled, my own must be too."
"Durothil needs to be put in her place," Seiveril snarled into the night. "The Seldarine themselves have anointed House Moonflower as the ruling House of Evermeet. If she opposes you, that is one thing, but she is trying her will against that of Corellon Larethian himself, and that I will not stand."
"That may be the case, but it is not for me to punish her, nor for you." Amlaruil looked back to Seiveril and said, "I must return before I am missed. Since you have argued so passionately for intervention, I wanted you to hear my decision first, and I wanted you to know why I made it. Needless to say, I do not want anyone else to know of the threat Lady Durothil issued me. I am entrusting you with this so that you will understand why you must yield the point."
Seiveril closed his eyes and replied, "I will not repeat this to anyone. It stands between the two of us and the Seldarine alone."
"Good." Amlaruil whispered the words of an arcane spell, and her form began to glow silver and shift its shape again. "Your passion does you credit, Seiveril. My hands may be tied, but perhaps yours are not."
An instant later, she took wing again, a white shadow flitting through the darkness beneath the trees.
Seiveril watched her fly off, his mind turning. The gods themselves had ordained the ascendancy of House Moon-flower, yet still there were those who envied Amlaruil's rule and thought to govern in her place. He looked up to the stars overhead again.
"Corellon, show me the path," he whispered. "There must be something I can do."
The forest seemed chill and shadowed, empty in the growing darkness. But then a single moonbeam broke through a gap in the clouds to flood the silent grove with silver light. Seiveril turned his face up to Selune, and an idea arose in his mind. The audacity of it staggered him, but if it worked-if it worked! — he might turn the course of events as surely as a few well-placed stones might alter a river's flow.
Dank green moss clung heavily to the twisted limbs of the dark-boled trees looming overhead. Araevin and his companions had traveled three hundred miles south with a few short steps through the ancient elfgate in the House of Long Silences. The broken stump of an abandoned elven watchtower dating back to old Miyeritar stood over the southerly arch of the elfgate. Its ragged top no longer pierced the dense, close canopy of the forest, but the plaza of cracked flagstones surrounding it created a small clearing beneath the trees.
"I don't like the looks of this," Maresa said. The pale genasi led her horse away from the gate, studying the shadows under the trees. "The whole place positively reeks of trolls."
"They prefer to hunt by night," Araevin said. "With luck, we'll reach clear ground before dark. We would be wise to proceed without delay." He nodded at a thickly overgrown trail leading away from the tower, following the bed of an ancient roadway. "If we follow that path, we'll meet the Trade Way in about ten miles."
"You've come this way before?" asked Ilsevele.
"Once, about fifty years ago, when I was engaged in exploring the portals in Elorfindar's care. I was fortunate enough to avoid the trolls, but there are a couple of difficult stream crossings ahead."
"Nothing brightens a day of winter travel like the prospect of a good soaking," Grayth observed. He sighed and took his mount by the reins, leading it away from the tower. The brush and tree limbs overhanging the path were too thick for riding.
Ilsevele, as the most wood-wise of the party, took the lead, bow in hand. Araevin followed her, leading both his horse and hers so that she could watch the trail ahead without tending a mount. Maresa and Grayth followed, and the young swordsman Brant brought up the rear, leading the packhorse along with his own mount.
The trail was much as Araevin remembered it, climbing steeply up and down as it wandered eastward over a series of fingerlike ridges stretching north from the nearby Troll Hills. The forest was soggy and cold, with swift, narrow rivulets of water rushing down in hundreds of nameless little brooks that crossed their path, and when the trail reached the ravine and valley floors between the ridges, it usually met a loud, swift, and cold stream.
At the boulder-strewn bank of one such stream about an hour's walk from the tower, Araevin found Ilsevele crouched over the trail.
"Tracks?" he asked.
She glanced up as he approached and said, "How often do people come this way?"
"It's not really on the way to anywhere. Adventuring companies searching for the Warlock's Crypt might pass this way. I suppose there are a few who might seek out the watchtower, hoping to find some lost elven treasure or maybe make use of the portal, as we did. What do you see?"
"Troll sign, not more than a few hours old. At least four or five of them, I think. They're following the trail ahead of us." Ilsevele straightened and brushed off her hands. "I've seen tracks both coming and going. We may meet these fellows if they come back this way."
The company pressed on, fording the stream and climbing back up the heavily overgrown ridge on the far side. They marched for another two hours, as the overcast slowly descended and a cold rain began to fall, lightly at first but growing more steady as the afternoon wore on. The going was even more difficult than Araevin remembered. At no point did the trail open up enough for them to mount their horses, and finding ways to get the animals across the treacherous broken streambeds took far more time than he had supposed. By dusk Araevin guessed that they still had three or four more miles before reaching the forest's edge. He began to consider the question of whether they should push on, or make camp.