The glyphs ringed the sycamore in an elegant spiral, as sinuous as a snake and as clearly defined as the day they were engraved. Though Tanalasta could not identify the era of the carving, she had studied enough elven literature to recognize the style as an archaic one. The letters flowed gracefully one to another, with long sweeping stems and cross arms that undulated so gently they appeared almost straight. While the language was definitely High Wealdan, the inscription itself seemed archaic and stilted, even by the standards of the Early Age of Orthorion.
This childe of men, lette his bodie nourishe this tree. The tree of this bodie, lette it growe as it nourishe. The spirit of this tree, to them lette it return as it grewe.
Tanalasta stopped reading after the first stanza and stepped back. Aside from its peculiar spellings and the reference to men, the inscription was the standard epitaph for a Tree of the Body, a sort of memorial created by the ancient elves of the Forest Kingdom. When an esteemed elf died, his fellows sometimes inscribed the epitaph in the trunk of a small sapling and buried the body beneath the tree’s roots. The princess did not understand all the details of the commemoration, but she had read a treatise suggesting only elves who had been a special blessing to their communities were honored in this way. In any event, she had visited several of these memorials during her short-lived travels with Vangerdahast and never failed to be impressed by the majesty of the trees bearing such inscriptions.
The sycamore before her was a marked contrast to those ancient monuments. The tree was a warped and gnarled thing with a split trunk and a lopsided crown of crooked branches straying off into the sky at peculiar angles. Its yellow leaves looked like withered little hands dangling down to grasp at anything unlucky enough to pass beneath its boughs, and the bark changed from smooth and white on the branches to a mottled, scaly gray at eye level. The greatest difference of all lay at the base of the trunk, where a recently dug hole wormed down into the musty depths beneath the roots.
Tanalasta returned to the inscription and read the next stanza.
Thus the havoc bearers sleepe, the sleepe of no rests. Thus the sorrow bringers sow, the seeds of their ruins. Thus the deathe makers kille, the sons of their sons.
Tanalasta’s stomach began to feel hollow and uneasy. Curses were rare things in elven literature, even in the relatively angry era of King Orthorion’s early reign. Of course, the Royal Library did not contain works predating Orthorion-apparently, early Cormyreans had lacked either the time or interest to learn High Wealdan-but the princess found it difficult to believe that such curses had been any more common to pre-Orthorion poetry. Aside from a single famous massacre and a few lesser incidents, elves in the Age of Iliphar had been standoffish but peaceful.
Tanalasta followed the inscription around the tree and read the last stanza, which consisted of only a single line of summoning:
Here come ye, Mad Kang Boldovar, and lie among these rootes.
Tanalasta thought instantly of the crowned ghazneth that had disappeared with Vangerdahast, then stumbled back from the tree, hand pressed to her mouth, heart hammering in her chest. Boldovar the Mad was one of her own ancestors, a king of Cormyr more than eleven centuries before. According to the histories, he had slain a long succession of palace courtesans before being dragged off the battlements of Faerlthann’s Keep with one of his victims. The unfortunate woman had died on the spot, less because of the fall than the horrible wounds inflicted by the insane Boldovar.
Less commonly known was that the king had lingered on for several days while Baerauble Etharr, the first Royal Magician of Cormyr, was summoned from abroad. Fortunately for the people of the realm, however, Boldovar “wandered off” alone before the royal wizard could return. When a badly bloated body dressed in the king’s purple was found floating in the Immerflow a tenday later, Baerauble announced his liege’s death and ordered the corpse burnt at once. Until now, there had never been reason to believe the wizard’s hasty order due to anything but the sensibilities of his nose, but Tanalasta could not help thinking Baerauble had used the incident to solve a terrible dilemma he must have been facing. As the Royal Magician sworn to protect the crown of Cormyr at all costs, he could hardly have condoned the overthrow even of a mad king-but neither could he have believed that Boldovar’s reign benefited the realm. Perhaps he substituted another body for Boldovar’s and spirited the mad king off to live out his days someplace where he could do no harm.
Rowen came around the tree behind Tanalasta. “Is something wrong, milady? You look… uneasy.”
“I’m frightened, actually-frightened and puzzled.” Tanalasta did not take her eyes from the tree as she spoke. “Were the glyphs on all the other trees the same as these?”
Rowen answered without studying the characters. “They looked the same.”
“Yes, but were they exactly the same?” Tanalasta pointed at the three characters that stood for Mad Kang Boldovar. “Especially here?”
“I think so, Princess,” Rowen said, sounding slightly embarrassed. “To be honest, I can’t even see the difference between the glyphs you’re pointing at and the ones next to them. I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be.” Tanalasta turned to him. “I should have realized how difficult it would be to learn High Wealdan without the Royal Library at your disposal.”
“Or even with it,” said Rowen. “I fear I’ve never been a student of the old tongues.”
Tanalasta smiled at the ranger’s candor. “High Wealdan isn’t really a tongue. It’s closer to music. Listen.”
The princess went around to the front of the tree and ran her finger along the initial glyph. A melodic rasp instantly filled the air, intoning the epitaph’s first line in a haunting female voice as anguished as it was menacing. Of course, Tanalasta understood the words no better than Rowen, for no human ear could comprehend the full timbre of an elven weald poem.
Rowen’s eyes grew wide. “I’ve never heard anything like it!”
“Nor have I.” Tanalasta shuddered at the pain of the music. ‘That was an elven spirit-voice, if you can believe it.”
She led the ranger around the tree, translating each glyph aloud both for his benefit and to assure herself that she was reading it correctly. By the time she finished, Rowen’s face had grown as pale as alabaster.
“An elf made them?” the ranger asked, clearly referring to the ghazneths. “Why?”
‘We won’t know that until we discover who that elf was,” said Tanalasta. “First, we need to be sure the ghazneths are related to these trees. That’s why I want to know if this glyph looked the same on the other trees.”
Rowen shrugged. “I just can’t say. If I’d known what to look for…”
“How could you have?” asked Tanalasta. “I’m sure I can figure it out from Alusair’s notes.”
“Notes?”
Tanalasta sighed. “I suppose Alusair isn’t really the note-taking kind, is she?”
“She was trying to catch Emperel.”
“I’m sure she was in a hurry.” Tanalasta started around the tree toward the musty hole. “Alusair always is. Did she at least look inside the tombs?”
“That’s where we found this.” Rowen pulled the iron dagger from his belt and handed it to Tanalasta. “In the second tomb.”
Tanalasta stopped beside the hole and examined the weapon, noting its stone-scraped cutting edge and the hammer marks on the face of its blade.
“Cold-forged iron,” she said. “I’m astonished this survived. It was made in Suzail over thirteen hundred years ago.”
“How can you tell?” Rowen frowned at the blade. “I didn’t see any markings.”
“That’s how I know. Suzail built its first steel works in the year seventy-five, the Year of the Clinging Death. Before that, people smelted their own iron in ground ovens and beat the weapon into shape on a communal anvil.” Tanalasta returned the knife to the ranger. “While this is a good piece of handiwork, no merchant bound for Cormyr would burden himself with iron when he knew the market wanted steel.”
“I see.” Rowen shook his head in amazement, then asked, “Is there anything you don’t know?”
“Of course,” Tanalasta said lightly. “To listen to Vangerdahast, he could fill volumes with the things I don’t know.”
Rowen chuckled lightly, then glanced back toward where the royal magician had disappeared. Tanalasta followed his gaze. The ghazneth could be seen circling over the labyrinth of canyons, its head still engulfed in a glowing gold orb. Though Vangerdahast had cast the spell less than thirty minutes earlier, the magical glow was already beginning to fade. Determined to finish her investigations quickly, the princess removed the Purple Dragon commander’s ring from her cloak pocket and slipped it onto her finger.
“Keep watch,” she ordered, stooping down at the rim of the hole.
Rowen caught her by the arm. “Where are you going?”
Though the gesture would have seemed condescending coming from anyone else, from Rowen it seemed merely an expression of concern. Tanalasta patted his hand.
“I need to look inside myself,” she said gently. “We both know I’ll see what others have missed.”
Rowen gritted his teeth, but nodded. “It would be best to make it fast, Princess.”
Tanalasta glanced in the direction of the ghazneth. “I won’t be slow.” The princess activated her ring’s light magic and started into the hole, then glanced back and smiled. “And didn’t I tell you to call me Tanalasta?”
Rowen stooped down to give her a stubborn smile. “As you command, Princess.”
Tanalasta kicked a clump of dirt at him, then turned and started forward. The musty smell grew stronger and more rancid as she crawled, and her skin began to prickle with the wispy breath of evil. When she reached the end of the passage ten paces later, she had goosebumps the size of rose thorns, and her jaws ached from the strain of holding back her gorge. Ahead of her lay a body-shaped hollow, surrounded on all sides by a fine-meshed net of broken black roots. The tree had no taproot, at least that she could see. The tiny chamber was empty, save for a simple floor of flat stones littered with scraps of rotten cloth and an odd assortment of tarnished buckles, buttons, and clasps.
Tanalasta pulled herself into the foul-smelling chamber and nearly cried out when something soft and diaphanous clung to her cheek. She quickly brushed it off and found a transparent web of gossamer filaments stuck to her fingers. It took her a moment to recognize the stuff as raw silk, and she began to notice it everywhere-tangled among the roots above her head, hanging down around her to form the walls of the tomb, and clinging to the debris scattered across the floor.
The princess’s first impulse was to leave, as the filmy stuff reminded her of nothing quite so much as the web of a black widow spider, but she clenched her jaw and forced herself to begin scraping the filament away from the walls. To her surprise, the silk came away in thick gobs, and she actually found herself digging a small tunnel that did not end for nearly ten paces-about the distance it would be to the sycamore’s dripline.
Tanalasta suppressed the urge to shudder, realizing that the tree-or the corpse beneath it-had so corrupted the ground that the normal process of soil replacement had been halted. She returned to the center of the tree and examined a handful of buttons. The gold plating was so tarnished that she could barely make out the shape of a dragon rampant, its wings spread and its tail curled over its back. Any doubts she had about the ghazneth’s identity vanished at once. It was the emblem of King Boldovar. Fearful of being tainted by the palpable evil she sensed in the place, the princess tossed the buttons aside and crawled out of the tomb.
Rowen was waiting at the mouth of the hole, holding the mare’s reins and staring back toward the canyon lands. He did not even let her leave the hole before he asked, “How long before Vangerdahast returns?”
Tanalasta looked up to find an uneasy expression on his face. “We may be on our own until tomorrow. I doubt Vangerdahast had two teleport spells ready, and even he might need time to prepare another.”
Rowen’s uneasy expression changed to one of true distress. “We’d better hurry.”
He reached down, and Tanalasta gave him her hand. Instead of helping her out of the hole, however, he slipped the commander’s ring off her finger.
“Untie the saddle packs.” He turned back to the mare. “We’ll use the ring as a decoy.”
“Don’t you think that trick’s getting old?” Tanalasta asked, climbing from the hole. “It barely worked last time.”
“It’s a new trick to this one.”
Rowen was using both hands to tie the ring into the mare’s mane, so he simply nodded northward. The first ghazneth was still circling over the maze of canyons, the golden halo around its head now faded to the point that she could make out the outline of a haggish head, but that was not the cause of his concern. A second dark speck was coming out of the north, growing larger even as she watched. The princess scrambled to the mare’s flank and began to undo the saddle packs.
“Tie a loose knot,” she said. “I know a decoy is our best escape, but this horse has been good to me. I’d like to give her a chance.”
“Done.” Rowen stepped back, leaving the glowing commander’s ring fastened to the mare’s mane by a loose but complicated knot. “Without a load to carry, I give her a better chance than us of getting home.”
“That only seems fair,” said Tanalasta.
The princess pulled the saddle packs free, then raised her hand high and slapped the mare hard on the flank. The beast bolted south, heading for the deep canyon that separated the two Mule Ear peaks. Tanalasta quickly pulled her bracers off and slipped them into the saddlebags, then unclasped her weathercloak and checked herself for any other magic that might give them away.
Once she felt satisfied she was radiating no magic, she asked, “Which way?”
Rowen nodded southwest past the face of the Mule Ears. “Go ahead. You’ll see the hoof prints in about twenty paces. I’ll cover our trail.”
Though she did not like being separated from the ranger with the ghazneth so near, the princess saw the wisdom of his plan and set off at a steady run. As Rowen had promised, she soon came to a narrow trail of hoof prints left by Alusair’s company. She pulled her cloak from her shoulders and began to sweep the dusty ground as she ran, cursing Alusair’s sloppiness and doing what she could to help the ranger obliterate the tracks.
The hoof prints all but vanished twenty paces later, and Tanalasta realized that her sister had intentionally left an obvious trail to help Rowen determine the direction she had gone, but was now taking precautions. The princess continued to sweep away any tracks she noticed, but now the prints were few and far between. She shifted her own tactics, trying to stay on rocks or hard ground whenever possible and avoiding any bushes that might snap or snag as she dashed past.
The tiny speck grew steadily larger, becoming first a barely distinguishable V, then a tiny cross. Tanalasta found a series of four hoof prints turning slightly southward. She swept them away and adjusted her own course and found herself climbing a small ridge. The princess glanced back. Seeing Rowen less than fifty paces behind her, she decided to risk crossing the crest and dashed up the slope at her best sprint.
By the time Tanalasta neared the top, the approaching ghazneth appeared nearly as large as her thumb. She dropped to her hands and scrambled the rest of the way on all fours, taking care to step only on stones, and to keep the sparse brush between her and the approaching phantom. She crossed the summit itself on her belly, then ducked behind a bush and turned to watch the phantom.
Rowen was still ten paces from the hilltop when the thing grew large enough that she could make out the shape of its wings. She hissed a quiet warning to the ranger, then motioned him down. He fell to his belly and rolled beneath a bush, covering himself with his mottled cloak and growing almost invisible, even to Tanalasta.
They waited, exhausted and huffing, as the ghazneth flew past less than half a mile from the crest of the ridge.
It started to swerve toward the withered sycamore, then veered off over the canyons toward its golden-haloed fellow.
Tanalasta rose from her hiding place and motioned the ranger over the ridge. “Now, Rowen-and hurry!”
Rowen rolled from beneath his bush and swept his cloak across the ground quickly, then scrambled over the ridge beside Tanalasta. “You are quite… a runner,” he gasped. “I didn’t… know if I could catch up.”
“Fear will do that to you.” Tanalasta turned to angle down the ridge in the direction of Alusair’s trail. “You’d have no trouble keeping up if you were as terrified as I am.”
Rowen came up beside her. “If I’m not frightened, it’s only because I have nothing to lose. You… you’ll be queen some day. Why did you pull away from Vangerdahast?”
“The king commanded me to find Alusair,” she said. “There is something he wanted me to tell her.”
“No,” said Rowen. “That is an excuse, not a reason. Even if you and Vangerdahast were not so open about your disputes, the air between you is as taut as a plow lead.”
They reached the bottom of the ridge and dropped into a broad trough, with the craggy face of the Storm Horns soaring up on the south and the ridge rising more gently to the north. Rowen used his cape to sweep away four hoof prints leading directly up the furrow. Tanalasta glanced over her shoulder and found the sky mercifully free of ghazneths-at least for the moment.
“You’re trying to coerce him… into something,” huffed Rowen. “What?”
Tanalasta flashed a scowl in his direction-then stumbled on a rock and nearly fell. “Even if you were… right,” she said, now starting to gasp herself. “It is not for you to question a royal princess.”
“It is now, Princess.” Rowen emphasized her title. “When you did not go with Vangerdahast, you made it my duty to ask.”
“Very well.” The princess was finding it more difficult to maintain the pace, though Rowen only seemed to be growing stronger. “I know you’re familiar with how Aunadar Bleth embarrassed me. If I am to
… rule well, I must win the respect of my subjects back. I won’t do that by teleporting to safety every time there is the slightest danger.”
“No.” Rowen stopped running.
Tanalasta halted two paces later and turned around to face him. “What are you doing, Rowen?”
“You do not earn people’s respect by lying to them,” said the ranger. “That is how you lose it.”
Tanalasta glanced at the sky behind him and saw two dark specks weaving back and forth through the air. “We have no time for this.”
“You do not need to win my respect, Princess,” said Rowen. “You have already done that with your bravery and your intelligence. Now, please show me that you respect me.”
Tanalasta rolled her eyes. “Then can we go?”
Rowen nodded.
“Very well.” Her gaze dropped, and she found it impossible to raise it again. “If you must know, I stayed because of you.”
“Me?”
Tanalasta nodded. “You are certainly aware of the royal magician’s concerns that I may be growing too old to provide an heir for the realm.”
“Those concerns are shared by many,” said Rowen. “But I hardly see-“
“Do you want to hear this or not?” Tanalasta snapped. She waved a hand toward the two ghazneths. “We don’t have much time.”
Rowen swallowed. “Please.”
“My father’s birthday celebration was a thinly disguised effort to prod me into marrying Dauneth Marliir. Everyone knows this.” Tanalasta paused to grind her teeth, then continued, “What they don’t know is that when the invitation arrived at Huthduth, I told the High Harvestmaster I would be returning to Cormyr to wed him.”
“And what did the High Harvestmaster say to change your mind?”
“That he wished me well and knew Dauneth to be a good man.” Tanalasta’s reply was sharp. “My doubts arose later, when I was out alone, taking my leave of the mountains.”
Rowen nodded and said nothing, as though he did not see anything alarming in the crown princess wandering orc-infested mountains alone.
Tanalasta continued, “When I reached the headwaters of the Orcen River, the air filled with the sound of song-birds and the light turned the color of gold. A magnificent gray stallion came out of the forest bearing an old crone with eyes of pearl and armor of silver lace, and when I called to her, the woman guided her mount down to the water across from me. She would not speak, but when the horse drank, an inky darkness passed from its nostrils into the stream. The grass along the shore withered before my eyes. On the hillside above me, the pine trees browned and lost their needles.”
“And this was not a dream?” Rowen asked.
“I was as awake as we are now,” Tanalasta replied. “A single tear ran down the crone’s cheek, and she shook her head at me.”
“And you think-“
“I did not think at all,” Tanalasta said, cutting him off. “I was so frightened that I fled without regard for how far I ran or what direction. Before I knew it, I was lost and the day was nearly gone. After a time, I came to a copse of willow and choke-cherry so thick I could barely pass. I would have turned back, save that I heard a woman giggling and thought she might tell me how to return to the monastery.”
Rowen’s expression grew apprehensive. “And?”
“I fought my way through the thicket to the shores of a small pond, where the young woman I had heard was watering her mount from the pool. The beast was as white and luminous as a diamond, but even then I did not realize what it was until I called out to ask the way to the monastery and the creature raised its head.”
“It was a unicorn.” It was not a question.
“The golden born, the cloven hooves, everything,” Tanalasta confirmed. “Instead of answering me, the woman leaped laughing onto the unicorn’s back and vanished into the forest. Flowers and shrubs rose to blossom in its hoof prints.”
Rowen stood without speaking for a long time, then finally asked, “And when it was gone, you found you had been at the monastery all along?”
“Almost,” Tanalasta said, surprised. “I was at my favorite lake. How did you know?”
“Had you stiff been lost, it would not have been much of a vision.” Rowen’s expression changed from apprehensive to dazed. “And you think I am this unicorn?”
Tanalasta shrugged. “You’re the best candidate so far-and I doubt it was a coincidence that I found your Faith Planting at Orc’s Pool.”
Rowen shook his head. “But my family…”
“Now who is being dishonest?” Tanalasta asked. In the sky behind Rowen, one of the ghazneths peeled off and started south after her mare. “You know as well as I do that the vision wasn’t about politics. It was about love.”
Rowen paled visibly and seemed too stunned to speak.
Tanalasta took his hand and turned to continue their flight. “Now can we go?”
Filfaeril sat alone in the apse of a silent throne room, staring down a long ambulatory bounded by double-stacked arches and tall columns of fluted marble. Though the chamber smelled of mildew and rot, it had been immaculately adorned in broad, vertical bands of brown and gold. The pattern was a simple one favored by Cormyrean royalty more than a thousand years earlier, when the kingdom had barely extended past the Starwater, and Arabel had been little more than a cluster of crossroad inns. The queen could not imagine any family of Arabellan nobles building such an archaic reception hall-nor, having gone to the expense of building it, allowing the place to grow as dank and musty-smelling as this one. It just did not make sense.
Then again, nothing made sense since Vangerdahast’s return. She did not understand why he had brought the phantom with him, or why the lurid creature had abducted her only to abandon her here and wander off. Was the thing that confident of its prison, or had it simply forgotten her-and what was it, anyway?
As important as the answers to these questions were, they were not the ones to which Filfaeril’s mind kept returning. More than anything, she wanted to know what had happened to Azoun and Tanalasta-and to Vangerdahast. And those answers she would not find in this throne room.
The queen forced herself to remain seated for a while longer, using the time to study her environs and look for any hint of her captor’s presence. In the event of an abduction, Vangerdahast’s instructions were quite clear. First, do as little as possible and wait for the war wizards to show up. Second, avoid giving a captor any excuse to harm her. Third, fight or flee only if death looked imminent. Vangerdahast had told her many times that once the war wizards were alerted to a royal’s danger, a rescue company would arrive within minutes. But Filfaeril had been sitting on the throne for hours, and she had seen even less of the rescue company than of her captor. Clearly, something had gone wrong with the royal magician’s plan.
Filfaeril stood and descended the dais. She paused to see if the phantom would show itself. When it did not, she walked down the ambulatory to the bronze grillwork gates at the end. Her captor had not bothered to shut them, so she stepped through… and found herself looking up the ambulatory toward the dais, as though she had merely turned around.
Filfaeril spun on her heel and found the gates hanging ajar between the same two pillars, looking out on the same gloomy foyer and huge oaken doors as before. She pushed the gate open and walked through. Again, she found herself looking up the ambulatory toward the two wooden thrones on the dais. Frowning, the queen pulled the gate closed, then opened it and stepped through-to the same result.
The queen slammed the bronze gate behind her, then started up the ambulatory. She had suspected all along that the phantom had not simply flown off and forgotten about her, but leaving the gate open was a hint of the creature’s true cruelty. As every good torturer knew, the secret to breaking a victim’s will lay in controlling her mind. Leaving the gate ajar had been a deliberate attempt to rob Filfaeril of hope. It had worked better than she cared to admit.
On her way back to the dais, she took the time to step through each of the arches along the ambulatory, but the result was always the same. She found herself standing on the opposite side of the room, facing the same arch through which she had come.
Finally, the queen resigned herself to the fact that her prison was as secure as any dungeon cell and returned to her throne. She sat down as deliberately and calmly as she could. After taking a moment to compose herself, Filfaeril pictured the royal magician’s bushy-bearded face and rubbed her signet ring.
Her mind remained as quiet as the throne room, and a dozen possible reasons for Vangerdahast’s silence leaped into her thoughts. She wished they had not. Had he been able to, the wizard would have answered. That he had not meant one of two things: either he was incapacitated, or the strange prison prevented him from hearing her.
A fanfare of trumpets echoed through the throne room, and the phantom appeared inside the gate. He was as gruesome as before, with his folded wings, tarnished crown, and red-tinged eyes glaring in Filfaeril’s direction. In his hands he held a limp mass of gray rags that might have been a body or a wad of clothing, and from his talons dangled long strings of gore.
“Milady.” He bowed deeply, then started up the ambulatory toward Filfaeril. “If I have let you grow lonely, you must forgive me. The traitors have kept me busy.”
As the phantom neared the dais, Filfaeril saw that the rags he carried were black weathercloaks with bronze throat clasps. The war wizards had found her after all. The queen’s fingertips began to ache, and she realized she was digging her nails into the arms of her throne.
The phantom dumped the clothes in a heap and ascended the dais. “There is no need to call for someone else.” As he drew closer, the stench of blood and battle offal grew overwhelming. “I am never far from you. Ever.”
He stopped beside Filfaeril’s throne, then reached down and lifted her hand. She gave an involuntary shiver and shrank away.
“Come now.” He clasped her signet ring and gently worked it off her finger, leaving her whole hand smeared with warm gore. “Do you really believe I would hurt you?”
Filfaeril could only look at him and wonder if she had gone mad.
The phantom closed the ring in his palm, then his eyes rolled back and his wings spread a quarter of the way open. He gave a low groan. Finding herself at eye level with his naked loins, Filfaeril turned away in disgust-but instantly thought better of it and reached for her hair. In a swift and practiced motion, she slipped her fingers between the tines of her silver comb and thumbed a tiny catch, then pulled a razor sharp fist-rake from its sheath. The queen twisted in her seat, driving the weapon’s needlelike tines into her captor’s abdomen and hissing the command word that activated the weapon’s death magic.
The phantom snarled in pain, then opened his hand and let the signet ring clink to the floor. He did not fall.
Filfaeril yelled her command word again, pushing against the thing with all her might. The throne beneath her gave an ominous creak and collapsed, and she found herself sitting on the floor atop the moldering green remains of a rotten bench. On the stone before her lay a drab band of tin bearing the royal dragon of Cormyr. The queen was too confused to tell what had happened to the throne, but she knew when the magic had been drained from her signet.
The phantom plucked Filfaeril’s comb from his abdomen and stood staring at it in confusion. Behind him, the majestic throne room had grown as dark and murky as a cellar, and the queen could barely make out the blocky shapes of several tall cask racks silhouetted against a distant rectangle of filmy light.
“Look what you’ve done to our thrones!” The phantom gestured at the splintered remains of the moldering bench, then fixed his red-rimmed eyes on Filfaeril. “When did you grow so fat? You’re as big as a sow!”
And Filfaeril suddenly felt as large as a war-horse. Her breathing grew labored and slow, her body became ungainly and sluggish, and her stomach began to rumble and growl. A terrible feeling of despair and lethargy came over her, and she looked down to discover a mountainous lump of flesh in place of her once-svelte body. She cried out in shock, then tried to back away from the phantom and found she could not move her own weight.
“Who are you?” The queen was surprised to hear her demand pour out in a barely-coherent wail. “What are you doing to me?”
The creature kneeled beside her and ran his gore-caked fingers through her long tresses. She would have knocked the hand away, save that when she tried, her arm was too heavy to lift. Behind the phantom, the dank room once again became a majestic throne room.
“Why do you make me do these things?” the phantom demanded. He wrapped his hand into her hair, then jerked her head back. “Do you think this is the way I want to treat my queen?”
“Your queen?” Filfaeril took a deep breath and forced herself to look into the phantom’s mad eyes. “I am nothing to you but a hostage-a hostage that you would be wise to treat well. When the king finds us-“
Something huge and hard slammed into the side of Filfaeril’s face and sent her corpulent body tumbling across the dais. She did not stop rolling until she slammed into the plinth of a marble pillar.
“I am king!” The phantom sprang to her side, then grasped her chin and tilted her head back. “And you are my queen.”
Filfaeril shook her head. “I am wife to Azoun.”
As she spoke, the throne room grew murky again. The ghostly outlines of cask racks appeared along the ambulatory, and she began to see that her only hope of salvation lay in clinging to her true identity.
“I am Filfaeril, queen to King Azoun IV.”
The cask racks grew more substantial.
“You are queen to no king but me!” The phantom slapped her again, and her vision went momentarily black. “You are wife to King Boldovar. To me.”
Filfaeril began to tremble, and the murkiness vanished from the throne room at once. As adolescents, she and her sisters had delighted in keeping each other up nights by telling grisly tales of how King Boldovar had murdered his mistresses.
“B-boldovar the Mad?”
“Boldovar the King-husband to Queen Filfaeril!” The phantom pressed Filfaeril’s comb-dagger to her fleshy breast, then ordered, “Say it.”
“K-king Boldovar, h-husband…” Filfaeril stopped, realizing that to indulge the phantom was to lose herself in his madness-perhaps forever. She shook her head, then raised her chin. “I’d rather die.”
Almost instantly, her body became slender and beautiful again, and she found herself lying on the floor of a dank wine cellar Boldovar scowled and looked around in confusion, then shrugged and returned his attention to Filfaeril.
“As you command, milady.”
The phantom scraped the sharp tines along the queen’s flesh, opening four shallow cuts along the top curve of her breast. She closed her eyes, surprised that death’s black fog had not risen up to carry her off already. Once Vangerdahast’s enchantment was activated, even the weapon’s scratch was supposed to kill instantly and surely. She commended her soul to Lady Sune, then opened her eyelids to find Boldovar’s ghastly eyes still gazing into her own.
“What is this? Did I drink up all your magic?” He tossed the comb aside, then flashed her a needle-fanged smile. “Perhaps you wish to recant?”