The lass gave him a rather superior smile-gods, she could not be more than thirteen or so! — drew herself up, and announced, “I am Alusair Nacacia Obarskyr, Princess of Cormyr.”
From behind them both came curses of amazement, and then a more startled oath as the Purple Dragon at the top of the gate lost his footing in his astonishment and fell back among, or onto, his fellows.
“Princess-Highness-I am honored,” Florin stammered, “but I must go.”
He knelt to her, on the roof, and Alusair put her hand on his, so light and swift a caress that it seemed almost as if a breeze had touched him, and said quickly, “Of course. Pray begone, and may the gods guard you.”
He gave her a smile, nodded, and thankfully raced away along the broad top of the ornate mansion wall.
Behind him, he heard a Purple Dragon gasp, “It is her, hrast all the gods! Princess, how came you to be here? ”
Florin caught hold of the top of some sort of carved stone ornament adorning the wall and turned to swing himself around and down-but paused for a moment to watch what befell the princess.
“I am unaccustomed to giving any account of myself to passing Purple Dragons,” she snapped, her voice rising in anger as she saw the soldiers hastening to encircle her.
Various Purple Dragons converged on her on the gatehouse roof, holding up their lanterns. Florin was in time to see the Princess Alusair smile triumphantly and vanish, winking out of their clutches.
The Purple Dragons swore in hearty and collective earnest.
Ghoruld Applethorn, Master of Alarphons of the Wizards of War, chuckled in glee at what was unfolding in his scrying crystal. This particular wet night in Arabel offered superb entertainment.
The crystal winked as lightning split the sky somewhere between Arabel and Suzail, and the unicorn ring on his finger winked back at it. The surging energies made the hargaunt restless; it slithered across the floor, a mottled rippling curtain with a tail and ever-shifting tentacle-arms, and started to climb Applethorn’s leg.
The battle in the stables was over, Purple Dragons converging on the place and rushing around with shouts and brandished swords. Idiots.
“Better and better,” Applethorn purred. “These Knights are going to prove so useful. How many war wizards and overambitious nobles can I manage to get them to kill before they’re out of the realm?”
He ran a toying finger over the warm, yielding skin of the hargaunt, now slithering up his thigh, and murmured, “Out of the realm for now, that is. Until I need them to deal death again.”
Stepping through the blue mists that took Laspeera at a single stride from Arabel to the Palace seemed a mere moment ago; a moment that had been spent hastening to a robing room to exchange her wet, clinging garments for dry robes, and then hurrying on, by secret ways, to the queen’s apartments, where the hurrying would end. The regular duty of guarding the queen overnight thankfully involved very little haste and tumult.
Yet no sooner had the Wizard of War Laspeera settled into this night’s attendance on Queen Filfaeril than a seldom-heard chime sounded.
Laspeera looked up, frowning sharply. The triggering of that warning-spell meant that someone had just traversed a nearby portal. Specifically “the Back Way,” a wardrobe that stood in one of the few rooms of this wing of the Palace that wasn’t heavily warded against translocation magics, and had probably been created in the days of the Royal Magician Amedahast. Kept for emergencies, it was known only to Azoun and his queen, a handful of Highknights, and a few senior war wizards. Or so she’d thought.
“Something’s wrong,” Filfaeril murmured. Laspeera pulled a wand from her belt, and a secret panel slid open with the faintest of whisperings to admit Margaster, who stepped into the room with a heavy black rod in his hand that crackled with blue glows and arcings of awakened power. Filfaeril took up a dagger and a magic orb from a sidetable. “If my Az-”
Tapestries billowed aside as Dove of the Harpers shouldered through them and strode into the room, carrying an unconscious Princess Alusair in her arms.
The queen went white, but Dove gave her a smile and said firmly, “She’s alive and unharmed. Her slumber’s due to a spell of mine.”
The slack mouth and lolling head of the princess made her look a lot worse than asleep, and Filfaeril looked less than reassured as the tall, burly woman in worn leathers stalked across the room to arrange her royal burden gently upon a cushion-strewn lounge. “Where-?” Filfaeril began.
“A hilltop near Jester’s Green,” Dove said over her shoulder, “where I happened to be meeting privately with a fellow Harper. Your daughter appeared rather abruptly between us-thanks to magic, obviously-soaked through as you see her, and seemed profanely disinclined to follow my suggestion to accompany me back here.”
Laspeera started to smile. “So you…”
“So I cast a little spell on her, which sent her off to visit her dreams for a bit, while she was still threatening both of us with her little dagger. Fee, your little one is growing teeth, and starting to use them.”
The Dragon Queen almost smiled. “Did she say where she’d been, and what she had been doing?”
“No,” Dove said calmly, “so I then used a little more magic on our sleeper here to learn what she’d been up to. I could scarce resist. How often these days do minstrels have a chance to cast spells on sleeping princesses?”
Laspeera’s smile vanished. “You dared use magic on an Obarskyr? Do we not have an agreement, between Harpers and Crown?”
“We do,” Dove said firmly, drawing herself up to give Laspeera a steady look. “Yet we Chosen agreed with Baerauble and Amedahast and Thanderahast and Jorunhast and now Vangerdahast, as to exactly what we can and can’t do regarding the Dragon Throne. An understanding quite separate from what the Harpers have agreed to. Moreover, Lasp, I’m unlikely to accept any rebuke on using magic on anyone from a war wizard. You do the same, and more, daily. Yet worry not. Before Mystra I swear that all my magic did was compel Alusair to sleep, and then peer at her most recent memories-and only her newest memories.”
She turned to the queen and added, “Learning something of her… activities, I relieved her of this ring”-Dove turned back to Laspeera, and handed her a ring that certainly hadn’t been in her fingers a moment earlier-“that this night took her to Arabel before she dropped in on us, and then I brought her home to you.”
She spun around again to face Filfaeril, and murmured, “Fee, you must promise me you won’t cage your younger daughter-or let your war wizards do so. They’ll only make matters worse if they try. Instead they’re going to have to shadow her — unseen by her-as she spreads her wings into womanhood. Ready to rush in and rescue her if needful, of course, but taking care not to rush in too soon, and in doing so rob her of making her own mistakes and darings.”
The Dragon Queen lifted her chin. “You certainly have my promise on that, Dove. Yet you speak as if you suspect otherwise. What dark things did you learn from my Alusair’s mind?”
“That she feels caged right now. She bitterly hates being shut into the Palace and hounded by ever-watchful servants and courtiers and war wizards. She hungers for adventure-so strongly that just going into a tavern alone, to eat stew and some buns, delights her as adventure.”
Laspeera sighed. “I know you’re right, Dove. I’ve been watching her. Yet eating in a tavern isn’t all she did, is it?”
“No,” Dove said, putting a comforting arm around the Dragon Queen before she added, “She went for a walk along an alley or two, and met some drunks and a Zhentarim.”
Filfaeril started to shake, silently, and Dove spun her gently around into a full embrace, folding her arms around the queen. For all her iron will and sharp tongue, Fee had never gotten over the murder of her infant son Foril, and what this particular Chosen of Mystra was going to have to say to her next certainly wasn’t going to help her do so.