"If Zandilar wants me dead, nothing will save me."
"Do you truly think a goddess shot that arrow?"
He stared at his feet; Alassra stared at them, too, and at her boots, scuffed, scratched and muddied almost beyond recognition.
"Everyone else was asleep in the camp, except for the guards and Rizcarn. If I don't believe what they tell me, then I've got to ask myself if I think that my father put an arrow in my back."
So, he had considered that possibility and hadn't gotten around to wondering where she might have been last night-with Trovar Halaern, for an extra day of discussion, and more, but she couldn't tell him that. Instead, she asked, "Well, do you?"
"Rizcarn didn't have a bow. He never was much of an archer, and that arrow, it wasn't a Cha'Tel'Quessir arrow. It wasn't an Aglarondan arrow, either. I never saw anything like it before."
Alassra seized an opportunity. "I have. It was a Thayan war arrow thick enough to pierce lightweight chain mail and spiral fletching to make it twirl as it broke your skin, to make the entry wound bigger. That fletching also slows it down so it's less likely to pop out your other side. Keeps the poison where it's meant to be: inside the victim. It was shot from a short, heavy bow by someone perched in a tree. An easy shot, I'd guess, less than fifty paces, and either a poor archer, or a very good one, to miss your heart by a double handspan."
Bro's eyes were wide and his jaw had dropped.
"I told you, Ebroin, I've fought everyone, everywhere. I won't let you die and I won't let you starve, either." She offered him a journey cake that Halaern's sister, Gren, had baked.
He stared at the flat bread with its bright berry jewels and nuts. Alassra was sure he'd take it, but he turned away instead.
"Not now. Not yet. I've-" He glanced east, where the grass beyond the camp was trampled flat. "I've got to stand and walk before I can eat."
She understood. Odds were, the Cha'Tel'Quessir had been giving him purgatives all day. Alassra got to her feet.
"No better time to start," she offered him a hand up.
Bro got dizzy as he rose and lost his balance. Alassra caught him easily. His face was flushed; he wouldn't meet her eyes. Embarrassment… she hoped. They made their way slowly east, out of the camp. The Simbul offered to leave him alone for a few moments and he blushed spectacularly. Embarrassment, she decided, with no small relief, and headed down slope to the camp stream for water.
Bro, looking seedy, had perched himself on a rock when she returned. Honestly concerned that he might have opened one of the wounds, Alassra ordered him out of his shirt. The wounds were healing nicely beneath their cautery scabs; he'd have a handsome set of scars with which to impress his lady friends, once he stopped blushing whenever a woman looked at him. Since the wounds were exposed, Alassra administered another dose of her healing potion, but what Bro needed more was food and friendship. She offered both in the form of Gren's journey cake.
He took the cake and the Simbul's hand as well, not quite certain what to do with it, but determined not to let it go.
"Put those thoughts clear out of your mind, Ebroin."
The warning was for his own good. If all went well, Chayan of SilverBranch would disappear from Bro's life and if it didn't, she'd seen what loving the Simbul had done to Trovar Halaern. She didn't want to see it again.
Bro ate slowly and in physical silence. His thoughts were another matter. Alassra had all she could do not to hear his entire life and all his adolescent doubts. The turmoil wasn't entirely without useful information. The Simbul caught images of Zandilar's Dancer, a swamp she didn't recognize, and a luminous mist Bro called Zandilar, which had absorbed the horse into the ground.
Interesting. Interesting at the very least.
"You're an orphan, too."
Bro interrupted Alassra's thoughts. She realized she'd been toying with her Cha'Tel'Quessir beads, two of which were smooth and black. It was easier not to have parents when you didn't want to have a past. Most folk wouldn't ask questions, but most folk hadn't lost their mother and regained their father in the past week.
"Long ago. A fire." She kept her stories simple and told them with great reluctance. On the other hand, Chayan didn't know Rizcarn had recently returned from the dead. Alassra seized an opportunity. "I heard you called Rizcarn's son. Did I miss something?"
Bro explained himself, the day he saw his father die, the black bead he'd worn for seven years while he lived in a human village, and his odyssey through the Yuirwood. He spoke in awkward, mumbled phrases. "At first I didn't believe my father could have come back. Then I wondered if maybe he hadn't died. Now I think maybe my father was never truly alive, that he was some sort of forest spirit who came into my mother's life."
The Simbul had had similar thoughts, but kept them to herself. "If your father was a forest spirit, what would that make you?"
"The same as Zandilar's Dancer: something that was born, but doesn't have its own life."
The opportunity she'd had been waiting for: "Who's Zandilar's Dancer?"
"A horse," Bro began and filled in another layer that included the destruction of Sulalk and his encounter with the Simbul. "She wanted to steal Dancer for herself," he told the woman he thought was Cha'Tel'Quessir. "Maybe I shouldn't have stopped her. It doesn't matter, does it? Dancer's gone either way, and I heard Rizcarn shout Zandilar's name after he put an arrow in my back."
Alassra resisted the urge to defend her own actions; she defended Rizcarn instead. "Ebroin, your father didn't shoot that arrow."
"How can you be so sure, Chayan?"
"Because the entry wound is here."
Alassra reached toward Bro's back. He flinched and, favoring his right side, teetered backward on the rock. To keep his balance, the young man had to flail both arms in broad movements that, undoubtedly, hurt. Indignant and simmering, he glared at her through a curtain of dishevelled hair. Undeterred, Alassra clamped a hand on his forearm and finished what she'd been saying.
"The exit wound they made to break the arrow out, is here, two ribs lower. If your father had shot the arrow, it would have been going up, not down, when it entered you."
Bro said, "Oh," and stared at Alassra's hand until she removed it.
Their eyes met, his so filled with hurt and lost innocence that Alassra swore the next time she cast a Cha'Tel'Quessir disguise she'd cross her eyes and cover herself with warts.
"I smell food cooking in the camp." She tried to end the awkward silence. "Let's get ourselves some supper before it all disappears."
"You go. I want to get a drink from the stream."
"The way you're moving, Ebroin, you'll tumble in and drown."
She'd hoped that would be enough to straighten Bro's spine. When it wasn't and he did stumble heading down the slope she hurried to his side.
"I don't need your help."
"Prove it."
Bro did, using his right arm to steady himself as he knelt on the rocks to drink cold, fresh water. Getting up would be harder. Alassra made a show of looking the other way; he'd have to ask, if he wanted help. Her thoughts wandered: Rizcarn awakening the old Yuirwood gods… if the Zandilar she'd glimpsed in Bro's thoughts were a god… the quicksilver transformations of a young man's heart… no wonder she turned to Elminster; the Old Mage knew his own heart… the body sticking out of the brush on the far side of the stream.
The body…?
Alassra rubbed her eyes. It couldn't have been there just a little while ago when she came down to the stream herself; she couldn't have failed to notice a corpse less than a hundred paces away from her nose. Yet one or the other had to be true. From her current vantage the Simbul could see a leg, naked except for a laced buskin, and a blood-covered arm, enough to guess that the body belonged to a man and the man was Cha'Tel'Quessir. She thought of Halaern, then the absent Rizcarn.