“Not this time. We have politics to discuss.”
“You never let me go anywhere,” Ysabel pouted.
“When I make the world safe for innocents like you, then you may walk freely,” Tresco promised her. “But until that time, I must keep you safe.”
“There are safe places other than Kinnard Keep,” Ysabel pointed out.
“It’s not just the temporal realm, child,” Tresco said patiently. “The darker realms conspire against us as well. They assaulted your mother, and I was powerless to stop them.”
“What do you mean?”
“In the days before your mother was killed, she talked about her death,” Tresco told her. “It was as if she knew it was coming.”
“How could she have known?” Ysabel asked.
“I don’t know, child. I wish I could have protected her. I know that I’ve guarded you carefully. It’s because I don’t want anything to happen to you the way it happened to your mother. But I must let you go into the world and marry. It would be wrong to keep you a child forever.
“I have something for you,” Tresco said. “I planned to give it to your mother the night she died. I’ve kept it with me ever since, but I want you to have it.”
Tresco opened his hand and held out an amulet. A delicate golden chain held a circular crest embedded with diamonds.
“Oh, Uncle!” Ysabel cried, looking down at it. On the crest was the lithe, curving body of an ermine, the symbol of Kinnard Keep and Tresco’s ancestral house. “It’s beautiful!”
Tresco looked away from the delighted Ysabel to the statue of Evonne, who had a knowing smile carved on her stone lips.
“It is indeed,” he replied.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
2 Flamerule, the Year of the Ageless One (1479 DR) Chult
The yuan-ti stripped the crewmates of their weapons and possessions and tied them together with a single length of rope, so they were forced to walk in a line like pack animals. Verran was in the front, followed by Kitto, Harp, and Boult. Each of the men was gagged, which meant that Verran and his unpredictable spells were going to be of no help to them.
Across from the gate was a massive patch of the crimson flowers like the ones that Harp had blundered into the day before, and Boult noticed that the yuan-ti gave the poisonous blooms a wide berth as they headed into the underbrush. Surprisingly, Boult didn’t feel panic about the direction things had gone in, although he would miss his pipe and griffon-head tamper. The situation hadn’t played itself out yet. Somewhere in the jungle they had an unknown allythe dwarf who had cast the ward of protection on the trees in the grove.
Despite the rope on his wrists and the gag in his mouth, Boult felt triumphant. He’d learned a few things from that treacherous elf. Even if Cardew was following the orders of a patron, the Hero of the Realm was still in the thick of things somehow. Since the Children’s Massacre, Boult had devoted his life to exacting revenge on the man who had framed him for murdering the royal heirs. If being captured by crusty snake-faces was just another step on-the path to vengeance, so be it.
As he marched behind Harp of the Slumped Shoulders, Boult asked himself for the millionth time why he traveled with a man whose biggest talents in life were self-pity, self-torture, and self-delusion. That Liel was an evil, conniving bitch did not surprise Boult at all. That Harp had spent years of his life pining for the elf was a little more surprising. There was no doubt that she was attractive. But ever since Boult had begun to piece together the story of Liel, he doubted that the elf had ever loved Harp.
Boult would never admit it to anyone, but it wasn’t compassion that drove him to help Harp in the Vankila Slab. Once he had figured out that Cardew hated Harp specifically, Boult reasoned that there must be ways to use the situation to his advantage. But if it wasn’t compassion that made him take Harp under his wing, it soon was guilt. As Harp endured session after session, every part of him systematically killed and brought back, Boult wondered if that were a punishment that Cardew would have imposed on Amharhad Amhar not switched identities with the real Boult and escaped the Practitioner’s attentions.
That was something that Boult liked about Harphis formidable refusal to die. Hopefully that would serve them in the Chult forest, seeing how they were trussed up and helpless.
The yuan-ti led them down a well-traveled path that headed north along the river gorge. As they crested a small rise and came out of the undergrowth, Boult felt droplets of water dampening his face and clothes. At first Boult thought it was raining despite the sun in the sky, but he realized it was mist rising from a waterfall that lay in front of them. The water rushed through a narrow channel dotted with boulders, over a sheer drop-off, and into a dark blue lake. The yuan-ti stopped and seemed to be arguing about something, giving Boult and the others a chance to stare in awe at the vista.
The rushing river drained into a deep, round canyon so perfectly formed that the smooth cliff walls looked like they were shaped by godly design rather than the chaos of the elements. Like the primary directions on a compass, four waterfalls drained into the canyon. Boult and the others stood on the the southern edge at the top of the smallest waterfall, which was at most thirty feet high. The height of the waterfall on the northern side was much more dramatic. Foaming water blasted down the northern waterfall into a wide canal, one of many canals that ringed the flat ground at the bottom of the canyon.
Beyond the northern waterfall, a range of six mountains blocked their view of the horizon. Huddled together in an unnatural circle, the mountains were like spikes jutting out of the tangled mat of jungle growth that covered the uneven landscape. The bare, silvery rock of the peaks made Boult think of sharp teeth taking a bite out of the sky. Dark gray clouds framed the tops of the mountains. Between the clouds, winged creatures glided on air currents, their shapes disappearing and reappearing in the mist.
On the eastern side of the basin, a golden dome shimmered in the sunlight like a coin at the bottom of a reflecting pool. A city had once flourished in the valley, but it lay in ruins and was partially obscured by years of rampant growth. Only the gilded dome was untouched by the creeping vines and unblemished by either the passage of time or the ravages of the climate. The domed palace had not entirely escaped the jungle, however, and the earth had opened up and swallowed the lower floors. Once the ground had settled, the bottom of the dome was level with the jungle floor.
Canals funneled the water from the four waterfalls into the mouth of a narrow gorge on the western side of the basin. The remains of a network of roads radiating out from the palace were visible between crumbling stone buildings. The city had been laid out in a series of circular sections with the walls and archways between the piazzas having since vanished beneath the jungle.
Tired of waiting for something to happen, Boult turned his attention to his captors. The more humanoid yuan-ti, with their fancy golden anklets, seemed to be arguing with the leg^ less slitherers about the steep path that started at the head of the waterfall and traversed the slope down into the basin. It would be a challenging walk for anyone with feet, and Boult couldn’t imagine the wide-bodied, heavily armored warriors making it along the narrow path.
As the argument between the Jumpers and the Slitherers intensified, a spear suddenly appeared above their heads. Although it was aimed in his general direction, Boult stared at it quizzically as it seemed to drift lazily across the gray sky. There was nothing threatening about it, just a pointy stick with a single blue feather and a metal tip. It hit one of the Slitherers, clattering uselessly against its armor and falling to the dirt.
Before anyone reacted to the spear, a much larger volley of darts whistled through the air. The cluster of tiny barbs soared out of the trees and hit the serpentfolkbut not Boult and his crewmateswith surprising accuracy. Even before all of the darts had found their targets, something short and wide barreled out of the underbrush, sprinting toward them at top speed and bellowing in a surprisingly loud and uncomfortably high-pitched manner.
Boult was the first one to register that it was a dwarfa hairy, squat, overly confident dwarf. Despite the spear, the darts, and the dwarf running pell-mell in their direction, the serpentfolk seemed unconcerned, as if none of these things were worth a reaction. One of the Slitherers reached up to brush off the clump of darts that bristled
