powerful archmage in all Waterdeep, too. She rang the servants’ bell and went to unbolt the door for them. She must get Grandmama’s spellbooks and magic things before some maid spirited them away to make fair coin and they were lost. Ambreene had much work to do.
* * * * *
A month later, Ambreene stood beside the wardrobe and looked at herself in her glass. A gaunt and hollow-eyed maid with white skin and dark, burning eyes gazed back at her. She knew the servants whispered her wits had been touched by the Lady Teshla’s death, but she cared not a whit.
Ambreene was almost ready. Mastery of all the spells in Teshla’s books—her books, now—might take years, but the Eye of the Dragon shone openly on her breast, and at night quivered warmly against her skin, whispering to her in her dreams.
All too often the night visions it sent drifted away in smoky tatters, but when her will was strong enough to hold steady to them, they showed her how to command the pendant to take memories … and to yield its memories up, like the scenes acted out at revels.
As Grandmama had warned, the Eye could drink memories, and when she got the right chance, she’d use it on Khelben to steal his magic. Then she would be a great sorceress, and he’d be left a shambling, slack-jawed idiot. A fitting fate, she’d thought… until that dark day when the pendant showed her why he’d refused to keep Grandmama alive.
Teshla had been a lush, dark beauty in her youth, all flashing eyes, flowing raven hair, and full, cruel lips … and as proud and amoral as any haughty noble. Many men sighed for her, but she saw them as passing fancies to be duped into building her wealth and power. She professed undying love for one wizard—but in her bed, the Eye pressed between them by their bodies and her mouth entrapping his, she’d drained all Endairn’s magic away, becoming a mage of power in one night.
With her newfound arts she’d chained him in a dark cellar, bound in spell-silence, and set forth to lure the most cunning merchant of the city to wed her.
Horthran Hawkwinter had been rich indeed. She’d not refused his shower of coins, but it had been his wits she’d wanted, his judgment of folk and knowledge of their pasts, schemes, alliances, and abilities. And it was his wits she’d taken on another night like the first, in the very bed in which she died; a gift from him, seeing its first use. The confused Horthran had been confined to his chambers from then on, visited by Teshla only when she wanted an heir, then another child in case misfortune befell the first.
Ambreene shivered a little as she watched her infant elders set aside in a nursery while Teshla clawed and carved her subtle way to dominance, making the Hawkwinters a grand and respected house in Waterdeep.
She wept when the Eye showed a bored Teshla bringing together her husband and the mindless wizard and goading them into fighting each other for her entertainment. They’d both died—sharing a look of heartfelt gratitude as they stared into each other’s eyes and slowly throttled each other.
That look had troubled Teshla, even after she’d had the bodies burned and the ashes scattered at sea by a Hawkwinter ship. Eventually her nightmares had frightened her servants so much that they’d called in the Lord Mage of Waterdeep … and the look Khelben had given her as he stripped away all her spellbooks and things of power except the Eye and left her alone in her turret room had haunted Teshla almost as much as the dying looks of Endairn and Horthran.
Over the long years, Teshla had built up her magic again, scroll by scroll, her coins reaching where she could not, to win for her—often with bloodied blades—magic she dared not seek openly. Her son and heir, Eremoes, grew into a man of wisdom and justice under the best tutors the Hawkwinter coffers could buy, and there had come the day when he’d returned to Hawkwinter House with a new and beautiful wife, the sorceress Merilylee Caranthor of Athkatla.
Seeing her mother clearly for the first time, Ambreene sought Khelben’s protection against the Eye. Cloaked in his spell, she tried to seize Teshla’s magic for her own.
Eremoes never knew the sorcerous attack on Hawkwinter House that left no trace of his beloved Merilylee, half his servants dead, and the upper floors of the family mansion a shambles was not the work of a rival house at all—but the result of a sorcerous duel between his mother and his wife. A duel Teshla did not lose.
Ambreene wept as she saw herself shielded in her nursery by Teshla’s spells. Her Grandmama had chosen Ambreene to be her friend and sorcerous heir from the first, and shaped her into the role as coldly and as calculatingly as anything else she’d set out to do.
Ambreene spent a long night of tears on her knees when Śshe was done seeing all the long, long years of memories the Eye had seen, but when she rose at last, dry-eyed, Khelben’s hated face still burned in her mind.
Why hadn’t he stopped Grandmama? He was Lord Mage of Waterdeep, and had a duty. Why had he let Ambreene’s mother be blasted to nothing, and the Hawkwinters groomed to Teshla’s wishes? What, in this uncaring—when he knew her deeds and ambitions, and did nothing—made him any better than Lady Teshla Hawkwinter?
Nothing. She was gone, leaving behind only spells, the Eye, and shame. But he lived still, and had dismissed Ambreene without even a look, and let the house of Hawkwinter become what Teshla had twisted it into. And her father did not even know…
That very morning Eremoes Hawkwinter had broken his mourning silence and sent forth invitations to a grand feast, to the folk of the Palace and every grand house in the city. And they would come; Hawkwinter hospitality was legendary.
Khelben Arunsun’s name was on one of those invitations, and he would come. After Ambreene had told the Lady Laeral that she was thinking of studying magic, and very much wanted to see the Lord Mage of Waterdeep at Hawkwinter House, Laeral would see that he attended.
Ambreene smiled slowly and went to where her spell had little time to prepare herself to greet Khelben properly. She suspected it might not be all that easy to make an archmage kill himself.
* * * * *
The gate-greetings were done, and the many-colored driftglobes she’d conjured (to her father’s smiling approval) were becoming useful as dusk drew down. From a distance, across the dance floor, Ambreene smiled and waved at Laeral as the arriving Lord and Lady Mage of Waterdeep were welcomed by her father—then allowed herself to be swept away into a chalantra by one more would-be suitor.
She’d scarcely recognized herself in the glass when the chamberladies had finished with her, but she could have resembled one of the sacks of unwashed potatoes piled up in the cellars and still been nearly trampled by the attentions of every younger noble son of the city. As the night wore on, Ambreene kept a smile firmly on her face and magic to keep her hair up and her feet just a breath above the tiles. She wasn’t nearly as weary and footsore as she should have been when she slipped away from a sweating Talag Ilvastarr after moonrise and sought somewhere private.
Many couples had stolen away from the laughter, min-strelry, and chatter to enjoy the beauty of the extensive gardens of Hawkwinter House together. A part of Ambreene ached to be giggling and caressing the night away in the arms of a handsome young blade, but she had sworn an oath, the first thing of consequence she had set out to do in her life. Ambreene Hawkwinter would keep her oaths. All her oaths.
Then she was alone in a room that was dark enough. A few gestures and a hissed word and Ambreene’s muscles shifted in the loose gown she’d chosen. It felt peculiar, this sliding and puffing, as she became older and fatter, her cheeks and chin chubby, and her hair russet red. Now no suitor would see her as the highly desirable Hawkwinter heiress and press his attentions, or want to dance with her all night.