other hand of the blade he’d let fall, and asked hesitantly, “Father?”
For a moment it seemed as if the King of Cormyr had not heard. He turned his head slowly, almost idly, his eyes staring up unseeing at the low, streaming ceiling of gray clouds, and twisted his lips in a bitter-or was it rueful?-smile.
The princess was about to speak again when Azoun said slowly, “So they did get you, bravest of daughters. Twice the warrior most of my knights are. My little Alusair. My Steel Princess. I’d begun to permit myself the tiny, sneaking hope that you’d somehow escaped the dragon, and yet lived.”
“Father,” Alusair said, leaning close to kiss him, “I am alive… and so are you. You’ve slain the dragon.”
“Such long sadness,” the king murmured. “So deep, so fierce. Her love as strong as any Obarskyr, but for a different Cormyr…”
“Father? Are you hurt?” Alusair asked sharply, shaking him gently. It was a foolish question if she’d ever uttered one. Owden Foley was already deep in muttered incantations, laying his hairy-backed hands on Azoun’s throat, brow, and palms with careful care.
The princess sat back to give him space to reach. Under his careful hands, the king murmured something unintelligible. A fleeting lacework of purple fire flashed into being across Azoun’s body, then was gone. The king convulsed, gasping, and his eyes fell shut. Alusair’s own eyes narrowed.
“What was that, Harvestmaster?” she snapped.
Owden Foley’s face was grim as he met her angry gaze. “The best healing I’m capable of-or so it began as,” he said. “What it became, I’ve no idea. We’ve got to get his majesty out of this dragon’s blood. I don’t know why, but it’s twisting all magic awry-and worse.”
“Worse how?”
Owden lowered his voice to a whisper and leaned close to the princess to murmur his next words, putting a hand to his mouth to shield his speech from the man lying beneath them. “It’s eating away his flesh, Your Highness-right down to the bones, if we let it work long enough. We have to move him.”
“His tent,” Alusair snapped, inclining her head in the direction of the other hill. “There’ll be water there to wash this ichor away.” She lifted her hands, now tingling-no, burning slightly-under their coating of black slime. She regarded them thoughtfully for a moment before she turned her head the other way and called, “Sardyn!”
“My lady?”
“Are you finished felling goblins, or do some of the lads feel the need to add to their sword-totals yet?”
“The hill is clear and we’ve all had our fill and more,” came the heartfelt reply.
Alusair’s lips twisted in a wry smile and she turned to regard the shield ring. Sardyn had turned to address her, but the others, true to their training, were still facing the battlefield, leaning on their blades and resting now. Gods, what brave swords!
“I need the king and the royal magician carried-as gently and as safely as possible, in a ring of blades-to the royal tent. Tarry not.”
Sardyn inclined his head, then bellowed, “Break ranks! Walking ring! Elstan, Murrigo, Julavvan and Perendrin- to me!”
All around her, men started to move. Alusair stood, motioning Owden and Rowen to keep their distance from her, and went a little distance away, to where she could wipe the dragon’s blood from her boots, knees, and hands. Her fingers went to the clasp of the weathercloak she wore, bunched and sweat-drenched, around her shoulders beneath the high-fluted shoulders of her armor.
“He’s alive, Tana,” she murmured in relief, as she fixed her sister’s face in her mind and concentrated on it.
The contact did not come. Frowning, Alusair closed her eyes and shut out the battlefield, its calling crows and tramping men fading away, to see Tanalasta as vividly as she could.
That time she’d thrown back her head and laughed so heartily that she’d spilled her tallglass of flamekiss or when she’d slapped Alusair, and had her wrist grabbed and held, and they’d stared into each other’s eyes as slow fear over Alusair’s strength mounted in Tanalasta’s eyes. Or…
Nothing. Emptiness, darkness-not even the confused, dim dream images of someone sleeping. The clasp tingled as she drew on it. Abruptly Alusair turned her thoughts away, calling up the face of one of the few men who’d attracted her for more than a few nights-the turret-merchant Glarasteer Rhauligan. Twice her age, and iron calm, with hair going gray and wrists as strong as steel. She wondered if the court spies had ever informed Vangerdahast or her father of those acrobatic liaisons among the shadows of the armory, or what they’d thought.
The contact was almost instant. Rhauligan was in an alleyway somewhere-Suzail, by the look of it-holding a man none too gently against a wall.
The next time you think armsmen off to war means their wives are yours for the taking… Rhauligan was snarling, the words echoing in Alusair’s distant mind.
Even as he felt her presence, she breathed the words, “We’ll speak later, I promise,” and broke the contact.
So the clasp’s enchantment was working, all too well.
She bent all of her will to capturing and holding as vivid a collection of remembered Tanalasta’s as she could, but met only with darkness, an empty sensation, and ominous silence.
Alusair threw back her head, her mouth suddenly dry, gulped in a deep breath, and rose to her feet. Owden and Rowen were waiting on either side of her, well away but obviously standing guard, and the procession carrying Cormyr’s king and court wizard was just disappearing from view down the hill.
The Steel Princess ignored their anxious glances and stared at the royal tent on the distant hilltop. From her lips, after a moment, came a long, shuddering sigh. She shivered as a sudden chill washed along her shoulders and arms.
There could be only one reason why Tanalasta did not answer.
45
The fire of surging, thudding pain-a roiling that only comes from being struck hard and deep by magic seeking to slay-lashed the royal magician back to wakefulness. There was an iron tang of blood in his mouth, and his fingers were tingling as if they held huge, rushing spell energies overdue to burst forth. The world was lurching.
Vangerdahast was being carried across uneven ground, the sky storm-riven smoke above him. He was still on the battlefield, with the dark peak of Azoun’s tent looming above him. The bloodstreaked faces of the knights who bore him were turned toward it, and he thought he knew why.
Long ago, Baerauble had said it was the curse of the magely protectors of Cormyr to be right, all too often. The weak, bubbling voice that came to the royal magician’s ears now told him he’d been right again.
Vangerdahast found that he could turn his head, as they laid him down, and see the king.
Azoun lay on a broad, creaking bed of shields set over rolled blankets to raise them from the trampled ground. The cloaks and sleeping furs atop those shields had been dragged into wildness by the king’s clawing hands, and the king of all fair Cormyr was still moving in the restlessness of ravaging pain, threads of smoke rising from his groaning mouth as knights bent as near to him as they dared.
More smoke was rising from the hacked and torn rents in Azoun’s armor, the places where the once bright plates had been torn away in the dragon’s fury, and the cloaks beneath the king were drenched with dark blood.
More blood was coming from the king’s mouth as he turned his head, fixing eyes that were bright with pain on Vangerdahast’s face. For a moment Azoun’s gaze roved, as if he did not see what lay around him but beheld something else, then the king’s eyes grew sharp again. His lips twisted in what might have been cynical amusement, or might have been just the pain.
“It seems I still live,” he said.
“Great lord?” Lionstone led a general rush of Cormyr’s war captains to their king.
Unhelmed now, they were so many anxious hulks in scarred and scorched armor, sweat-soaked hair plastered to their faces or matted with blood, gauntlets gone to reveal bloodied fingers that reached for their king
