Corineus rushed into the room, his white eyes shining bright with rage. 'How dare you disobey-'
'How dare 7?' Vala tossed the tail barb into the baelnorn's face, then touched the tip of her darksword to his throat. 'Let's get something straight, White Eyes. I need you as much as you need me, but lf you ever send me into a lair again without warning me, it'll be you I'm carving into little pieces. Clear?'
The baelnorn moved closer, enveloping her in his chill aura. 'I do not think you understand who you are talking to.'
Vala stepped even closer, so close that her face and hands began to ache with cold. She laid a bloody palm on his flesh-freezing face.
'Oh, I understand,' she said, 'but what you need to know is I mean to see my son again, and I'll gut anything that makes that less likely.'
A low groan rolled from beneath the roots of the smoke tree, where Aris lay hidden in an undercut carved out of the dry riverbank by some long-ago flood. Galaeron, standing watch outside, dropped to his haunches and peered inside, where Ruha kneeled beside the unconscious giant's head, using a wet rag to drip water onto his cracked lips. His broken arm was stretched out beside him, splinted to the straightest pair of branches Galaeron had been able to find in a mile of dry riverbed. A shield-sized circle of charred flesh on his chest marked where the dragon's lightning bolt had entered his body, and a blackened foot marked where it had left. Of the most concern to Galaeron, however, were the giant's black and sunken eyes, which Ruha said were signs of the head injury he had suffered.
Aris groaned again, and a gray tongue appeared between his lips. Ruha squeezed the cloth hard, dribbling water directly onto the tip of the tongue, then tilted her head at the pair of empty waterskins resting on the shadow blanket beside the giant. 'More water,' she said.
'More?' Each skin held two gallons, and Galaeron had filled them twice already since the dragon attack. 'That's a good sign, isn't it?'
Ruha shrugged. 'How much would a healthy giant drink in a day? I don't know.' She placed the rag in a small hollow she had lined with dragon skin and filled with water. 'It takes water to heal, and I would say the matter remains uncertain.'
The witch did not look at Galaeron as she spoke, and her voice remained cold. He reached into the undercut and pulled the waterskins off the shadow blanket, then left the scant shade of the smoke tree to creep along the edge of the dry riverbed. Ruha's manner had been much the same since she'd used her air magic to float Aris into the shelter of the undercut. She clearly held Galaeron responsible for the giant's injuries, and he was not so sure he disagreed.
The shock of seeing Aris pinned beneath the dragon had jolted his conscience into asserting itself again, driving his shadow self back down into the dark realm beneath his conscious mind, and he had instantly realized how his actions must have seemed to someone else. Even given the spell he had cast to confuse the dragon when it wheeled on Aris, preventing the witch from attacking the dragon's belly must have reeked of cowardice. If Galaeron doubted his own motivations in that first instance, he did not in the second, when he had used a shadow snare to drag the dragon back to ground. At that point, his only concern had been for the shadow blanket, and it had not even occurred to him that Aris would be further injured when the wyrm crashed into the ground.
The dragon's corpse still lay out on the Saiyaddar, surrounded by a ring of glutted predators and blanketed beneath a mountain of flicking feathers. Galaeron longed to move beyond sight of it, and not only because looking at it reminded him of his terrible selfishness. If a Shadovar patrol or another of Malygris's dragons happened across the corpse, he and his companions were certain to be found. Ruha lacked the magic to move Aris a long distance, and Galaeron was determined never again to use his own. He could no longer touch the Weave at all, and he recognized he was far past the point where he could wield shadow magic without yielding control of himself to his shadow. The next time he cast a spell, he feared, even causing a friend's injury would not be enough to bring him back.
Galaeron reached a clump of giant featherwoods growing along the outer curve of a bend in the riverbed and kneeled beside a deep hole nestled down among the tree's roots. Though the bottom was concealed in shadow, there should have been enough light for an elf to see whether it contained any water. Galaeron saw only murk.
He was not even all that surprised. Since touching the Shadow Weave, he had gradually started to become less and less of an elf. He had lost the ability to enter the Reverie and started to sleep just like a human, and even to dream. He was awakened by nightmares almost nightly and occasionally talked in his sleep, and he no longer felt any mystic connection in the presence of other elves. He could no longer see in dim conditions. It was, he had decided, a symptom of his shadow's growing hold over him. Elves were born with a special bond to the Weave and his connection was being weakened by the Shadow Weave's power over him. The only thing that remained was for his senses to grow as dull as those of a human. He thought of himself running around with a three-day sweat, thinking he smelled as fine as a spring rain, and shuddered.
Galaeron dropped a pebble into the hole and heard only a wet thud. The hole had not yet refilled. He gathered himself up and wandered half a mile down the riverbed to the next well-also in the roots of a feather- wood-and found water. Ruha had explained that it was only worth digging under a featherwood, and only when they grew on the exterior curve of a river bend.
Though even this short trip in the hot sun was enough to make Galaeron thirsty, he filled both waterskins first, and by then there was barely a handful of muddy liquid left for him. He quaffed it down gratefully, then shouldered the waterskins and climbed out of the well to find a tall, silver-haired woman in elven chain mail, elven boots, and an elven cloak standing before him, her hand resting on the hilt of a fine elven long sword. The woman, however, was definitely human-and one he recognized from an ancient portrait hanging in the halls of Evereska's Academy of Magic.
'Well met, Lady Silverhand,' Galaeron said, holding out one of the waterskins. 'If you're not my dying hallucination…'
'You should be that lucky, elf,' Storm said, not taking the waterskin. 'After the evil you brought into the Realms, I'll send you to the Nine Hells to look for Elminster before I let you die a peaceful death in Anauroch.'
'The Mage Masters at the Academy always said you were the merriest of the Seven Sisters,' Galaeron retorted, concealing the hurt the words caused him behind a facade of cynicism. He hefted the waterskins onto his shoulders and started for the undercut. 'If you are about to open a hell-mouth beneath my feet, at least wait until I deliver this water. My friend Aris is in danger of dying.'
'I didn't come here to punish you, elf,' Storm said, ignoring Galaeron's attempt to elicit her concern for the stone giant. 'That is not my place-even were you worth the trouble.'
Galaeron glanced up at the blazing sun and licked his cracked lips, then asked, 'Well then, if you didn't come to help and you didn't come to punish, what are you doing here?'
'Delivering a message on behalf of Khelben Arun-sun,' she said. 'He asks that I inform you that your sister Keya is well.'
Galaeron nearly dropped the precious waterskins. 'Keya is safe?' he gasped. 'The siege has been lifted?'
'Not exactly,' Storm replied, 'but the shadowshell has weakened the phaerimm deadwall. Khelben is in the city.'
Galaeron was so astonished he couldn't quite think of what to say. The Chosen of Mystra seldom took an interest in the affairs of individual people-how could they, when they were so few and those who needed them so many? — yet here was Storm Silverhand, delivering a message from Khelben Arunsun about his younger sister Keya. It was so far beyond likely that Galaeron grew convinced he was suffering heat hallucinations.
Resolving to waste no more of his energy on illusions, he clamped his jaw shut and fixed his attention on the undercut where Aris lay resting.
The hallucination walked along at his side. 'That's all?' she asked. 'Not even a 'thank you for your trouble'?'
Galaeron ignored her and continued toward the undercut.
'Well, you would at least be wise to thank Khelben,' the illusion said. 'He's going to a great deal of effort to undo the trouble you and that shadow wizard unleashed.'
'That may be true,' Galaeron said, speaking aloud in the hope that the sound of his own voice would lend
