The Simbul’s Gift

Now, no one knows anything about Zandilar. The Candlekeep mentors say she's missing or that she's become a part of the forest. But they don't know. No one knows what's happened to her, why she vanished, or whether she could come back.

I think she could come back, if the Cha'Tel'Quessir who live in the Yuirwood now wanted her and the other old gods, but maybe they shouldn't try too hard. Maybe Zandilar's been gone too long. Maybe she wouldn't be a goddess of passion and romance when she came back. 1

The village of Sulalk, in Aglarond Eight days after Greengrass, The Year of the Staff (1366DR)

It was a warm spring morning. Trees were cloaked in flowers. The grass had greened with the promise of rich forage for the mothers of the lambs, calves, and colts born each night in farmyard birthing sheds.

Bro wanted to stretch out on the ground and nap until noon. No matter how beautiful the days, it was the nature of babies to be born at night, and it was the duty of farmers and farmer's stepsons to sit in the birthing shed. Bro had been vigilant for six nights' running, through a steady stream of births, all but one of which had been successful.

A good spring, so far, with good trade even for the stillborn lamb whose tender hide would make a fine pair of gloves for some lady in the royal city, Velprintalar. Dyed and embellished with jewels and silks, the lamb's hide might find its way onto the queen's hands, though thoughts of Aglarond's mighty Simbul fled Bro's mind as fast as they occurred. In Sulalk, on the Yuirwood's verge, Aglarond's seacoast capital was a world, not a week, away.

Adentir, Bro's human stepfather, paid the queen's tithes and abided by her laws, which were, fortunately, rooted in common sense and easily obeyed. Dent raised a glass in the queen's name at festival times and never mentioned her otherwise. For Bro, who'd lived his first twelve years among his own kind, the Cha'Tel'Quessir half-elves of the Yuirwood, the Simbul was the living emblem of an uneasy truce between them and the world outside—the world in which Bro had lived since his father's death.

A hand touched Bro's shoulder. With it came the scents of pine bark and moss that were Shali, his mother, and the Yuirwood. But the forest was memory and the bowl she offered was filled with whey- soaked grain.

"Hungry, Ember?"

She called him by his boyhood name. Everyone else called him Bro, a crude shortening of Ebroin because, deep in their guts, humans remained averse to Cha'Tel'Quessir names and, in his own soul, Bro knew he hadn't yet made Ebroin his own true name.

More tired than hungry, Bro set aside the collection of half-braided thongs that would, when he was clearheaded, become a halter for a newborn foal. He accepted the bowl.

"Maybe tonight." Shali ran a hand through his hair, leaving his ears exposed to the sunlight.

"Maybe." Bro tossed his head, returning his hair to its customary ears-and-face-hiding disorder.

He watched his mother flinch and felt shame. Half-elves weren't a race like their elf or human forebearers. First-generation half-elves took after their elven and human parents equally, but among the Cha'Tel'Quessir, family resemblance was a chancy thing. It wasn't Shali's fault that her skin was human-fair and her ears were small and rounded while he was forest-shadowed to the tips of his very elven ears. No more than it had been her fault that Rizcarn had broken his neck falling out of a tree he'd climbed a thousand times. Shali had loved Rizcarn in a way Bro couldn't begin to imagine; she'd left the Yuirwood because she couldn't bear her memories and couldn't die, either—because she had a son she'd had to finish raising.

In the five years since Rizcarn's death, Shali had become a stranger dressed in layers of woven cloth, a kerchief bound over hair and ears alike. She'd never go back to the trees; they both knew that, just as they both knew he would. The knowledge ached between them.

"Adentir says the foal will be yours, if it's a colt." Shali gave a brittle laugh. The Cha'Tel'Quessir weren't horse-folk. A colt wouldn't keep Bro out of the Yuirwood.

"I'll hold him to his word," Bro replied.

She smiled a thin-lipped half-smile, the only smile Bro saw anymore.

"He's not bad," Bro said awkwardly, speaking words that were, and were not, the truth.

Adentir was human. Everyone in Sulalk was human, except for Bro and Shali. Even Tay-Fay, his half-sister, was human. That was the way of things for the Cha'Tel'Quessir: If a half-elf mated with an elf or human, their children belonged to the full-blooded world. The Cha'Tel'Quessir way of life could vanish in a generation. Bro didn't blame his stepfather. Human ways were ideal for humans, elf ways were ideal for elves, but Cha'Tel'Quessir had to resist both, if they valued themselves.

"He's been good to me, Ember. He understands. Rizcarn—"