of traitors, den of thieves,' she murmured, remembering the old Suzailan song deriding the Court.
'Lord Caladanter, I thank you,' she said then, putting a firm hand on his knee and staring deep into his eyes. Under her palm, he seemed as excired as a puppy, his eyes glowing as he stared into hers-but again, there was no hinr of the seducer.
'Your very life is in danger,' she said, telling him what she knew he wanted to hear-and knowing it was all too true. 'If you breathe one word to anyone about speaking to me and anything that even hints at what you've just told me, someone-possibly several someones-will kill you.'
She paused a moment to let that sink in and watched his excitement slide slowly into fear. Not as swift- witted as he'd first seemed, this one. Madwits, yes, but a slow madwits, to boot.
'You must not be seen leaving my rooms,' she said. 'Will you submit to a spell, if I cast a translocation upon you?'
He started to nod eagerly then frowned. 'A-oh. To whisk me in an instant from here to… somewhere else?'
Tsantress nodded. 'To one of the gates where the Royal Gardens lets out onto the Promenade. Whence you can easily stroll home.'
'P-please!' he stammeted.
She rose, gesturing that he should, too-and the moment he did, touched him with a ring she had already awakened. In its silent flash, he vanished without another word.
'No touching farewells, young lord,' she murmured, more to hear her own voice than for any other reason. She didn't want to wallow in how deeply this news had troubled her, didn't want toHold! No one had seen him depart, yes. But had anyone seen him arrive?
Tsantress marched across the room and flung the door wide to do her own sharp look up and down the passage.
She found herself meeting the startled gaze of a doorjack in the usual livery, standing formally outside the door across the passage and a few strides down.
It was a man she'd never seen before, and it was an odd door to stand upon ceremony-because it led onto a landing of an internal staircase, not into a state room or anyone's chambers.
At her scrutiny, the doorjack's expression turned cold. He was almost glaring at her as he slowly turned, opened the door, and stepped through it.
Tsantress saw a slice of landing and stair through its frame, just as she'd expected-but she also saw something more.
The doorjack had turned his head to stare at her as he strode out of sight, and just before he passed from view, his unfamiliar face slid into the featutes of someone else.
Vangerdahast.
Chapter 9
The Lost Palace Yet though I live so long, I pray you lords thrust your blades deep into me, to make sure I breathe no more if ever I begin to become the sort of king who forgets his own name, knows not lifelong friends nor foes, and loses even palaces in the fogs of his failing mind.
The door closed behind Vangerdahast. Tsantress srared at it, her mind racing. Her entire world whirled away in an insranr… what to do? What should she do?
She looked up and down the passage out of sheer habit, seeing no one, then heard the faintest of sounds in the room behind her-or thought she did-and whirled around.
Nothing. Her antechamber was dark and srill, with no grimly smiling Royal Magician or anyone else standing there. Tsantress closed the door again, strode swiftly across the room to snatch up a wedge of cheese for later consumption and took down her dagger in its thigh-sheath from its usual place on the wall. Drawing in a deep breath, she used her teleport ring again.
It was the only way out, given the wards in place over the vast Royal Court and the Royal Palace beyond that would foil any translocation cast by someone not wearing such a ring-and she had to get out.
To find time to think, if nothing else.
Wherefore she found herself standing on a ledge high on the Thunder Peaks, lashed by rain. She stared bleakly out over fog-shrouded eastern Cormyr for a few moments, called on the ring again, and teleported to where she was really bound for. An exrra 'jump' should foil any tracing magic Old Thunderspells used to follow her. She hoped.
The ledge went away in the usual instant of falling endlessly through bright blue mists, and then there was solid stone under her boots again, and familiar dank gloom surrounded her amid smells of earth and old bear dung.
She was home. Or rather, she was back in a side-fissure of a wilderland cave that she'd long ago cast a spell upon to keep a bear or anything else from settling into it and lairing. The cave was nigh the Moonsea Ride near Tilverton, clear out of Cormyr, where she'd spent days and nights practicing her spell-casting when she'd been younger.
'Tluin,' she whispered, taking a step to where she could perch one foot on an upthrusting rock and more easily buckle her dagger about her thigh.
She was gone from Cormyr, gone from the life she had known that had made her feel so happy, so important, so… needed.
Now what?
A lantern was unhooded, and the Knights of Myth Drannor found themselves staring down a littered srone cellar at four men. The foremost of whom was Lord Maniol Crownsilver.
Behind the noble lord were three unfamiliar men in robes, arranged in a stony-faced line. All were glaring at the Knights.
One robed man held the lantern high; the other two had their hands outstretched toward each other, and the air was flickering and pulsing between those reaching fingers-little flowerings of blue radiance rhat grew, winked out, then flashed into existence again, more strongly.
Three wizards. By the style of their sashes and rune-adorned jerkins, Sembian wizards-for-hire.
'Jhess,' Florin muttered. 'What magic's that?'
'A porral, I think,' Jhessail murmured back as they saw the lantern set down carefully on the floor-and the flickerings form a pulsing blue-white upright oval of glowing air as tall as a man.
Belatedly, Florin bowed his head and said respectfully, 'Well met, Lord Crownsilver.'
The noble took a slow step closer to the Knights and swept them with a withering glare. There was no trace about him of the quavering, broken shell of a man they remembered seeing last. Crownsilver seemed alert, purposeful, and even-when one saw the fire in his eyes-frenzied.
'Slayers of my wife and daughter,' he said, 'taste my revenge! For Narantha! For Jalassa, damn you!'
The three Sembian mages snatched wands out of their rune-adorned jerkins and grinned in cruel triumph as they aimed-and unleashed.
The Knights shouted, sprinting desperately this way or that, but ravening wandfire roared down the cellar in a blinding white flood that drove a million tiny lances into bare skin even as it hurled and tumbled the Knights hard into the unyielding stone wall behind them.
Very hard. Faerun started to go watery and whirl away from more than one Knight, with the searing magic still roaring on and on.
Amid a splintering groan of riven support posts, the ceiling above started to collapse-and Florin, Pennae, and Islif, still struggling to move and to see, beheld the little tracer-gem Pennae had stolen bursting forth from its concealment beneath her tattered leathers. It spun and spat strange purple flames and sparks as the roaring white
