The Simbul’s Gift

Now she wouldn't bother to ask, but she needed some explanation, some quick excuse to account for her unscheduled visit. One that had already crossed her mind and might even cross Aznar Thrul's mind. "I wonder, my lord, how Mythrell'aa knew where to place her minions, how she knew that one particular horse in that one particular village would draw the bitch-queen's attention."

Thrul stroked his beardless chin. "Yes," he said slowly. "How, indeed. Better spies, woman?" "Unlikely, my lord. These were the first minions she's sent into Aglarond since you came to Bezantur, and half were castoffs from other schools. She had help, my lord, of one kind or another." "Help inside Aglarond or inside Thay?"

The spy master nodded. "One kind or the other," she repeated. "To find out which, there must be pressure here in Bezantur."

"That can be arranged, woman. Easily arranged. I've waited for this day! I warned her when I took the Priador tharchionate that her time was up. Two zulkirs cannot live in the same city. She swore no interest in politics and broke her oath last winter. She thought Szass Tam had me on the rocks, but he's the one who foundered in the spring. He's not the lich he was! I'll tighten the noose; you watch who runs where, and then we'll call everyone in to account." Thrul straightened in his chair. "Well done, woman. I expect nothing less of you." He returned her carnelian token. "No hard feelings?"

She fastened the token to her gauze gown, pointedly ignoring the stains where she'd bled after the fall. "None at all, my lord." 10

The city of Velprintalar, in Aglarond Afternoon, the fifteenth day of Eleasias, The Year of the Banner (1368DR)

Alassra's chambers were in chaos. Artifacts were strewn everywhere, as if a restless child had played with each for a moment, then discarded it. Spellbooks, some of them older than she and written in languages unknown in the realms, were heaped haphazardly in the middle of her work chamber. Every table top was clear for the first time since she created this bolt-hole. The walls were bare, the shelves emptied of all but her most fragile mementoes, none of them magically useful—gifts from her sisters, a lock of her mother's hair, the thorn branch she'd taken from Lailomun's pillow.

She'd learned the domestic cantrips for cleaning centuries ago, but simple magic never intrigued her. The storm queen had always been better at whipping up the weather than containing the dust that burst from an ancient tome. She sneezed—which didn't help her or the spellbook she held—and got to her feet, a feral growl rumbling in her throat.

"Where did all this come from? Who brought it here?"

The most rhetorical of rhetorical questions: No one else was in the room. No one else had ever been in the room. Even her sisters and Elminster, back when the Old Mage accepted her invitations, went no further than the antechamber where the little Sulalk girl was now sleeping on a gilded daybed that had once belonged to a queen of Chondath. (Alassra hadn't wanted to disturb the palace with her return when she expected—or had expected—to be leaving quickly. When she had everything back under control, when she could spare a thought for the little girl's care, then would be soon enough to throw the royal household into an uproar.)

Alassra had accumulated, abandoned, and forgotten the entire mess herself. She'd never had a permanent home before Velprintalar. She'd cached her few possessions throughout Faerun in warded boxes, none of them larger than a seaman's chest. Her life had been the pursuit of knowledge and adventure, not things, not until she became a queen.

Royalty acquired and accumulated. From her deathbed, Queen Ilione had warned her apprentice and heir: Clean out the past. Don't let it pull you under. Alassra had taken the words metaphorically, ignoring many of Aglarond's dearly held traditions as she established her reign, but Ilione had intended a more literal interpretation.

If dust had market value, the queen of Aglarond was the richest woman in Faerun.

She muttered another cantrip at the opened tome. Parchment sheets broke loose from the brittle binding. Two fluttered out the window, the spells written upon them lost for eternity, if Alassra didn't catch them before they vanished in the ether.

She didn't.

"Cold tea and crumpets! Where does the dust come from?"

Tucking those sheets she had rescued beneath the back cover, Alassra began a page-by-page examination of the spellbook. A spell for the transmutation of sand into glass caught her attention. The other variants she knew produced crystal-clear glass, no matter the color or coarseness of the sand. This one, cruder in concept, yielded glass as mottled as its component sand. A little tinkering and it might yield stained glass panels.