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.
Alassra growled again. After the dust, distraction was the worst part of cleaning. She hadn't meant to read her spellbooks, merely look at them, examine the pages for some vagrant mote of magecraft placed there or exploited by an enemy. There could be no other explanation for the ambush she'd triggered in Sulalk. Outside this chamber, only her sisters knew of her interest in the twilight-colored colt, because no one else could be trusted not to tell the Old Mage. She'd spied on the village in utmost secrecy from this chamber and someone, somehow, had spied on her.
On her! On Alassra Shentrantra, the Simbul, the witch-queen who'd mastered every kind of magic but was- perhaps-a bit behind in her housekeeping and careless with all these things she scarcely remembered acquiring.
Not totally careless, she assured herself. Alassra routinely examined everything she touched for magic and malice. The way she attracted enemies, vigilance was an absolute essential, but the Simbul rarely resorted to artifice. When she needed to eavesdrop, she'd transform herself into a spoon and ride the soup tureen up from the kitchen. Not many mages, though, shared her sense of humor; fewer still had the skill and imagination to bind themselves into a nonliving shape.
The mirror had been the most likely suspect, since the ambushers had been Red Wizards and the mirror was the artifact she used to keep an eye on both Thay and the colt. As soon as she'd gotten the little girl bedded down, Alassra had subjected it to a thorough examination. It had come up innocent of any tampering. She'd thrown a quilt-also examined-over it to keep the dust off while she probed the rest of her artifacts. Confronted with the prospect of scrutinizing every page in her considerable library, Alassra decided to give the mirror a second going- over. She dribbled patterns of salt and rainwater across the dome.
'All right.' She cracked her knuckles. 'East, to Thay! Show me the tharchions and zulkirs. Show me Thrul and Szass Tam. Show me that damned Mythrell'aa. Show me Lauzoril last.'
If any one of them had a connection with the mirror-if they knew anyone with a connection-the water would become steam and the salt would burst into brilliant yellow flame. Alassra watched as familiar patterns swirled in the glass. She marked a mutation in the Bezantur pattern: Aznar Thrul and Mythrell'aa were probing each other. When rivals squabbled, enemies paid attention. Otherwise Thay was unchanged until the end. Where she expected to see Lauzoril's rogue-handsome face, there was only a spiral as green as his eyes.
Alassra glanced anxiously at the salt and rainwater patterns. Short of the mirror itself, smiling Lauzoril was her prime suspect. She wasn't at all relieved to discover that a day after the Sulalk ambush, his reflection had gone abstract. But there was neither steam nor flame.
'Show me everyone who wishes me harm.' The mirror went black and began vibrating. 'Sorry-bad question. Set it aside.' The vibrations ceased. Alassra restored the patterns. 'Show me Aglarond. Show me those who would work knowingly for the Red Wizards.'
The mirror revealed a handful of faces. Red Wizardry had been Aglarond's dread enemy for generations. There were few households that didn't memorialize someone slain by Thayan magic, fewer still with members who would openly consort with the enemy, and the Simbul's mirror knew them all. Alassra used Aglarond's traitors as bloodhounds, letting them flush out the Thayan plots and minions that penetrated her realm.
They did very little that wasn't discreetly observed, by her or by her living accomplices, but it was possible that mistakes had been made. A traitor might have made a Thayan connection without her becoming aware of it, but that wouldn't account for Red Wizards waiting in Sulalk.
Waiting.
Alassra considered the implications. She'd known her attackers for what they were by the reek of Thayan wizardry surrounding them, but none of the villagers had her skills. To them, the Red Wizards had been strangers. What might an ordinary Aglarondan say to a curious stranger? The mirror couldn't tell her what the Sulalkers might have said yesterday or the day before, but the question still seemed worth asking:
'Show me Aglarond. Show me those who speak ill of me or wish me the same.'
The Simbul anticipated more faces than before: She was Aglarond's queen, not the bosom friend of each Aglarondan. Being fair meant everyone's fur got rubbed the wrong way once in a while.
'Gods! I'll be here all night!'
Alassra laughed without appreciating her own humor. It was one thing to know she wasn't loved as her sisters were loved and cherished by those who knew them-even Qilue was beloved by those who worshiped the drow goddess, Eilistraee-but the sheer number of faces flickering within the dome depressed her. And these were only the folk displeased with her at the moment. The mirror couldn't show the folk who'd cursed her name over breakfast or would do so at supper.
There were Fangers swearing in their squalid boats, revanchist Cha'Tel'Quessir muttering her name in the Yuirwood. Their numbers dismayed her, not their attitudes. No, the surprise and sadness came from the truly ordinary folk who blamed her for whatever misfortune had befallen them: a fishmonger whose eels had escaped from a broken basket, a wet nurse with a teething infant, a cook whose sauce had clotted, a baker with bad yeast.
Their queen was the mightiest wizard in all Faerun. She could destroy armies with a single spell. Why then-they demanded in words easily read from their lips-were her taxes so high? What did she do with their hard-earned coins? Why was it raining when a farmer wanted dry weather for cutting his hay? Why was it so hot-couldn't the Simbul do something about the weather? Why was she always somewhere else, but never in Glarondar… Emmech… or wherever the mirror captured their reflections.
The mirror clouded; Alassra sighed and covered her eyes. Aglarond was a predominantly human realm, and humans were old when they'd lived as long as she'd been queen. They were ready to turn their affairs over to children, perhaps grandchildren, and, deep in their hearts, they expected their queen to do the same.
When she'd accepted the crown and throne, the Simbul had assembled her court from the best men and women she could find. They served competently, loyally, and the Simbul replaced them with equally capable folk only when they died or retired. It was fair to say that Aglarond was a better ruled realm than it had been during any other reign; but it was also fair to say that it was ruled by gray-beards and crones.
