Elminster Must Die

around them. “Come.”

“Your command is my wish, Lady,” the Lord Delcastle told her lightly-almost mockingly-as he offered her his arm. She ignored it, but when she turned, pointed toward the distant royal palace, and started walking, he fell in beside her.

Amid the suddenly tight ring of their watchful Purple Dragon escort.

Amarune was half-expecting to find Talane waiting in her rooms, but there was no sign of her. Or anyone.

Not even under the bed.

Her heaps of soiled clothing lay just as she’d left them, the untidy little mountain range of her laziness. By the state of them, the undisturbed dust, and the way her other minor untidynesses reigned unaltered, it didn’t look as if any intruder had so much as thought of entering Amarune’s rooms.

When she finally dared to believe that and relax, weariness broke over her like a harbor storm, leaving her reeling.

She staggered across the room, suddenly very tired-yet still scared, a rising fear that got worse as her thoughts started racing through all the possibilities of Ruthgul’s murder, the drunken wizard of war who’d known who she was-did they all know? Why hadn’t they done anything to her, then? — and Talane …

Amarune was shaking so hard, she was almost a shuddering by the time she clawed at a certain hiding place until a bedpost yielded and she could haul out a slender and precious flask of firewine. Taking a long pull, she reeled across the room again, flinging back her head to gasp loud and long at its fiery bite.

When she fetched up against a wall, Amarune got the stopper back in, then took the flask with her as she lurched to her bed and flung herself down on it.

“What by all the Hells am I going to do?” she hissed aloud.

The walls maintained their usual eloquent silence, and she sighed, let her shoulders sag in the first part of a shrug of helplessness she didn’t bother to finish, then in sudden irritation pulled off her boots, one after the other, and flung them hard against the wall.

Wrenching off the cloak was harder, and she was panting by the time she whirled it into the air and watched it swirl down to the floor.

The sweat-soaked robe came off with comparative ease, and she hurled it onto the highest peak of her piled-up dirty laundry.

Whereupon the heap rose up with a grunt, and a bearded old man was smiling at her, her smallclothes still decorating his head.

Amarune stared at him then flung herself up off the bed, opening her mouth to scream-and Elminster hurled himself atop her, moving surprisingly fast for such such seemingly old bones, and thrusting two or three of her underclouts into her mouth to stifle her shrieks.

They bounced on the bed together, the old man on top and Amarune clawing at him and making muffled “mmmphs” as his bony old knees and elbows landed on various soft areas of her anatomy.

Growling, she started to swing and kick at him wildly, and the old man sighed, plucked up her-thankfully empty-copper chamberpot from where he’d found it earlier under the edge of the bed, and brained her with it.

The room spun and swam. Gods and little chanting priests, the minstrels told truth: one does see stars … sometimes …

Amarune fell back on her pillows, clutching her head and groaning.

Whereupon the old man got off her, caught up her cloak from the floor, and wrapped it firmly around her, pinioning her arms to her sides, and propped her up on her pillows like a firmly efficient nurse.

“I’m very sorry I had to do that to ye, lass,” he announced, trundling back down to the foot of her bed and perching there, “but we must talk. I need ye. Cormyr needs ye. Hells, the Realms needs ye.”

Amarune groaned again, trying to peer at the gaunt, white-haired intruder as she struggled free of her cloak. He made no move toward her. The moment she could move her arms freely, she clutched the cloak more tightly around her-though it was more than a little too late to guard any thin wisp of modesty she might still have possessed. He was obviously waiting for her to speak, so she did.

“Who … who are you?”

“Elminster,” came the prompt reply. “I used to be a wizard. Yes, that Elminster. Well met, Great-granddaughter.”

Amarune couldn’t help herself. “Great what?”

She stared at him in the sudden silence, open-mouthed. He filled the pause by smiling and nodding, but by then she was frowning again.

“Elminster? But you can’t be! Why-”

“ ‘Can’t’? Did I hear the word ‘can’t’? Amarune, do ye know anything about wizards, at all?”

“But how-? The goddess Mystra …”

“Ye will be unsurprised to learn,” the old man told her in very dry tones, “that ’tis a long story. Right now, I’d rather hear just what ye-and young Lord Delcastle-are up to.”

“Why?”

Elminster regarded his great-granddaughter with something that might have been exasperation, or just might have been new respect.

“This has been a long evening already, aye? Let’s go somewhere that has good wine and decent food and talk a bit. I’ve found dancers like to talk. Anything to keep from doing the other things customers expect them to do, I suppose.”

“So this Amarune is the famous Silent Shadow,” Wizard of War Glathra Barcantle mused, sounding entirely unsurprised. “You obviously didn’t know that until just now, so what made you suspicious of her? Or were you governed by a paramount interest in a mask dancer who might be willing, for coins enough, to do more for you than merely dance?”

Arclath Delcastle stared rather coolly back at his interrogator. “I’ve seldom seen a need to pay anyone to fill my bed, Lady Wizard. Handsome, remember? Noble? Dashing, yes?”

Glathra’s expression remained coldly unimpressed.

He sighed, waved dismissively, and added, “Ne’er mind. I was interested in her for a reason you already know; I wanted to learn why she’d been listening to what Halance, Belnar, and I were discussing about the council. Particularly now that Halance and Belnar are so suddenly and violently dead. Though I grant that it’s both unusual and unfashionable for nobles to be so, in this day and age, Lady Glathra, I do happen to be loyal to the Crown.”

“We know that,” she replied quietly, “and that’s why I’ve brought you here. We have a proposition for you, Lord Delcastle.”

“ ‘We’?” Arclath asked pointedly, staring around the room. The two of them were sitting facing each other across a shining expanse of table, and the palace chamber around them was bare of all guards, war wizards, scribes, or anyone else. Just a few portraits, a tapestry or two, and a lone closed door. “Have you a twin? Or are you using the royal ‘we,’ and there’s been a royal marriage I’m not privy to that I should be congratulating you about, Lady?”

As if his questions had been a signal, one of those tapestries was thrust aside by a firm hand, and Delcastle found himself staring into the wise old eyes and familiar face of King Foril Obarskyr of Cormyr.

The High Dragon of the Forest Kingdom was wearing a simple circlet on his brow and hunter’s garb of jerkin, belt, breeches, and boots of plain leather. Of the finest make and tailored to fit his lean, trim body. A simple belt knife rode his hip, and discreet rows of plain rings-most of them enchanted, no doubt-adorned his fingers. He was smiling.

“Nothing so dramatic, Lord Delcastle,” the king said dryly.” The Lady Glathra was speaking on my behalf and was aware of my presence-as, now, are you.”

By then, Delcastle was out of his chair and down on one knee. Foril looked pained and waved at him to