The Simbul’s Gift

Bro wondered—without wanting to—whether there was some connection between Zandilar the Dancer and Aglarond's queen, some reason that they would both want a twilight-colored colt or would do battle with the same enemies.

Such thoughts left Bro more uncomfortable than the waning storm. He raised his head and looked around.

The wind was down to a damp breeze. Rain fell in slow, soft drops from the trees rather than like stones from the sky. Above the trees, the moon—a crescent shy of full—chased away ragged clouds. Bro wrung out his hair. He stood slowly, half-expecting something new and terrible to happened when he straightened his back. His ears hadn't been deafened as they'd been at Sulalk. He could hear the dripping trees ... the faint, infrequent moaning of wounded Cha'Tel'Quessir.

"Chayan? Rizcarn? Yongour?" Bro didn't know the names of the other Cha'Tel'Quessir his father collected. He'd refused to learn them because they hadn't learned his. "Anyone?"

He heard a moan and saw someone trapped beneath a fallen tree.

"I'm coming!"

Bro grabbed a tree limb. It came apart in his hands. He held the broken piece in the moonlight. His mind made sense of what his eyes saw: not a tree limb, but a Cha'Tel'Quessir limb: an arm, charred stiff at the elbow and wrist. Bro didn't so much drop it, as let go and retreat. He gagged bile and forced himself to look at one corpse burned beyond all recognition and at a second that he'd thought— wrongly—had been the source of the moan.

It was Sulalk again, Shali and Dent again, Lanig again, and Bro was stretched beyond his ability to accept what he saw as the truth. He dropped to his knees, then curled forward, hands holding his head down and against the ground. His eyes were open; no tears flowed. His mouth was open; he could neither retch nor scream. Aching with pain his body couldn't feel, Bro made himself small and prayed for the nightmare to end. "Ebroin. Ebroin, listen to me. Come around, Ebroin."

Chayan's voice, her hands between his shoulders, urging him to sit up. She had her sword still, the spear, bow, and arrows were gone.

"No. Go away."

"I can't. I need your help, Ebroin. Come around. Look at me."

"Leave me alone. I want to die."

"No, you don't. Look at me, Ebroin."

Chayan got her hand beneath Bro's arm. She dug her fingers between his healed ribs. He flinched; that was all the leverage she needed to get him sitting upright again. Then her hands surrounded his jaw. Her thumbs pressed against his cheeks.

"They're all dead, Chayan!"

"Not all of them, not you, not me. You can't help this one, but there are others."

She pulled Bro to his feet. When she let go, he looked down—by accident, to avoid looking at her. Everything was as it had been: two corpses, one completely charred, the other bloody and torn. When he started to shake, Chayan slapped him hard. Bro's arm came up to return the blow. She seized his wrist.

"Later, Ebroin."

"How—?" Bro asked, but he knew the answer. Anger had restored him, if restored was the proper word. A chasm loomed between him and what he saw when he looked anywhere in the moonlight. There were the unlucky ones, the ones who hadn't survived. Bro didn't want to join them, but he wasn't grateful, either, to the woman who'd opened the chasm. "Don't you see? Don't you care? Or have you seen worse, fighting everyone, everywhere?" He made the question scornful.

"I have, Ebroin. You don't want to imagine what I've seen. And I still care. When we have done what we must, then I'll sit and weep and fold my arms over my head, just like you."

Still holding his wrist, Chayan led Bro across devastation. Trees were down, burnt or toppled outright, leaving muddy craters. There were more bodies, charred, blasted, and in pieces. The scents of death, charred wood and burnt flesh, hung in the air despite the breeze.

"How many?" Bro asked. "How bad?"

"Thirteen dead. Thirteen that I can find. Thirteen alive, counting you and me. The rest are ..." Chayan swept her free arm in front of them. "The rest are missing, including Rizcarn."

Bro stumbled. It was inconceivable that his father—his once-dead father—hadn't survived. Or maybe, not so inconceivable. Maybe Zandilar had taken Rizcarn into the ground along with the colt, leaving him and twelve others alive ... as a warning: Don't anger the Yuirwood. Don't go to the Sunglade.

The other survivors, hollow-eyed and silent, sat in the lee of a large toppled tree. They looked up at him. Bro imagined Chayan had collected them all and wondered, when she released his wrist, why she'd collected him last. One said, "Rizcarn's son," as he sat down. He said nothing; even now, he wasn't one of them, wasn't a person in their eyes.