When at last he reached a safe vantage, high in the tree, Artus looked down to find Azoun struggling along behind him. The prince's cloak snagged branches with each move he made, and his chain mail shirt hung heavily on his shoulders. Azoun settled on a thick limb below the boy. Only then did he begin to undo the elaborate clasp holding his cloak closed.
"That was a brave thing you did," the prince noted. He puffed out a breath of relief as he slid the cloak from his shoulders. "Put this around you. It'll get cold up here fast, once the fright lets go of you."
Artus took the cloak with a softly murmured thanks. "What about my fa-uh, the Shadowhawk?" he asked.
The prince paused. "The Shadowhawk, eh? At least I was waylaid by the best." Forcing a grim smile, he added, "Don't worry. The groundlings are professional assassins. They won't harm your father-the Shadowhawk, I mean. He's got my gloves, I suppose. That's why they went after him-they could pick up even that much of my scent on him as he moved. But, like I said, they won't hurt him. Their contract is for my death. To kill someone else would be against guild rules. Do you understand?"
The boy nodded, and the cloud of concern passed from his brown eyes. If the creatures were sentient enough to follow the rules of the Assassins Guild, perhaps his father could fast-talk his way free. "Will they let him go when they figure out he's not the one they want?"
"Not right away. At least not until they've got me. Right now, the groundlings-"
A scraping noise drew Azoun's attention back to the road. There, the assassin's corpse was slowly sliding into the burrow. The sword point jutting from its chest cut through the ground like a plow blade as the groundlings dragged their dead fellow deeper into the earth. Soon, the corpse and the sword were gone.
Azoun sighed. "Right now, the groundlings are building a warren, an underground camp. They must realize they have us trapped, since nothing is moving on the ground. They'll do all they can to bleed us out of weapons, food, and hope, then wait for us to come down." Scowling, he noted, "Especially food. They'll eat almost anything. I managed to escape them outside of Waymoot by dumping my rations onto the road-that and being lucky enough to have a very fast mount with enchanted horseshoes."
"I have some bread!" Artus offered brightly, gesturing to his pack. "I mean, if you can think of a way to use it against the groundlings …"
"Well, at least we won't starve," the prince said, trying not to be patronizing, but failing badly. "But since we don't have a horse or any way of escaping, tossing it to the assassins won't do us much good right now."
Clouds slid over the moon once more, blanketing the hillside in a more profound darkness. A cold breeze made the branches creak and sway. The boy was glad for the prince's cloak then, for his shabby clothes gave little protection from the wind. "I'm Artus," he began softly.
The words jolted Azoun out of some intense reverie. "Eh? Well, Artus, you can call me Balin."
The boy paused, then pulled the gem from his pocket. Its blue light cast strange shadows over Azoun's face. He stared at the young man for a moment, openly sizing him up. "But that's not your name," Artus said at last.
"Of course it is," Azoun began, but he saw the frown on Artus's lips, the look of distrust stealing over his eyes. He looked down at his hands, to the indentation on his finger left by his missing wedding band. His purse was gone, too. "Was it the princess's name on the wedding ring or the signet ring in my purse that gave me away?"
"Kinda both," Artus replied. He dug the gold band out of his pocket and returned it to the prince. "And the tabard, too. Not many sell-swords would wear the king's symbol like that."
Azoun looked down at the torn and grimy Purple Dragon. "My tutor always said this was rather silly, to wear the family crest on a disguise. Still, it fooled men a lot older than you."
"People don't look for the obvious. Do you want me to call you Your Holiness?"
"No," Azoun said, trying not to smile at the boy's blunt-ness. "We're fighting together now, and brothers-in-arms need not bow to courtly manners. Besides, you call clerics Your Holiness, not princes."
"Sorry. I never met a prince before."
"So how do you know so much about me?"
The boy fidgeted uncomfortably with the cloak's fur collar. "Well, I've read about King Rhigaerd and about you on the royal proclamations posted around Suzail. And I saw you on your wedding day, when your carriage went down the Promenade. Well, I was too far away to see you, but I saw your carriage. And then there's the stories they tell in the Thieves Guild about you-how you dress up in disguises and play like you're a knight They say-"
"All right," Azoun said, holding up a hand to stop the torrent. It was his turn to study his unwilling companion, to size up this worldly child-robber. Most children grew up quickly in Cormyr, especially poor children from the city. But this boy was more than world-wise. He was obviously clever. Moreover, he could read, a skill confined mostly to the nobility, the priesthood, and a few wealthy merchant families. "Your father taught you to read, did he?"
Artus laughed with surprising bitterness. "He doesn't like me to read. A priest of Oghma taught me on the sly, until Father found out, that is. It didn't matter, though. By the time he told me to stop I already knew how." He gripped the gem tightly, cutting off most of the light. Still, Azoun could see the angry look in the boy's eyes as he said, "I don't want to be a scamp like him."
The prince held his hand up to the boy. "If you don't want to be a highwayman, how about giving me your mask? I could use it right about now."
For a moment Artus thought the prince was going to try to fit the dirty strip over his face, but he began to tie it over his forehead. Then the boy noticed the gash on Azoun's head was leaking blood into his brown hair, staining it dark and masking the strands of gray already taking hold there. "So what's your ambition then-a priest, perhaps? Maybe a bard? You seem to remember stories pretty well."
A smile crept across Artus's features. "I like stories a lot. I-" He cast his eyes down at the glowing gem and paused. "I know some about you. The men at the guildhall told me about the King's Men. They say you won't be a good king, you know, that you'll be wandering off to rescue people and fight dragons."
"Indeed," Azoun said flatly. "Maybe they're right. We'll find out soon enough, though, won't we?"
Artus let the cryptic comment drop, for the cold tone in the man's voice frightened him just a little. His father sounded the same way whenever he talked about a failed jaunt or a rival in the Thieves Guild who had questioned his skill. "What will we do now?" he asked after a time.
"Wait, I suppose," the prince said mournfully. "They won't attack us once the sun comes up. It hurts their eyes too much. Besides, by dawn there'll be travelers on the road again. We can muster enough people to stand against the little monsters, if they haven't given up by then and gone back to Darkhold."
An uncomfortable silence fell over Artus and Azoun after that. Both were certain there should be some way to fight, but neither came up with a plan worth suggesting. Azoun took to whittling away bark with the boy's knife, while Artus slumped unhappily against the trunk.
Occasionally one of the groundlings would appear at the mouth of the nearest burrow. It would sniff the air, squint uselessly into the night, then call into the darkness, "Escape is not for you, Azoun." Their voices were frightful, high-pitched and screeching like hobnail boots sliding on a slate floor.
After a time, though, even this harassment stopped. Artus dared to hope that the assassins were giving up, that his father would soon crawl out of the ground a free man. But the sudden, violent collapse of a tree perilously close to their sanctuary crushed those hopes.
"They're not going to wait for us to come down," Azoun observed bitterly.
Horror-struck, they watched another tree drop into a sinkhole, then pitch forward. The night filled with groans and cracks as the oak smashed into a leafless maple and both crashed to the ground. All around the fallen trees, groundling burrow tracks cut through the earth. Every few feet, one of the assassins would breach and test the air.
Finding no trace of the prince amongst the wreckage, the groundlings set about toppling more trees. The din was terrible as the oaks and pines tumbled, tearing branches from other trees in the path of their fall, pounding the life out of anything caught beneath their impact. Birds and squirrels and other creatures took flight as their homes swayed and collapsed. Any creature larger than a rat that fled on the hillside found itself swallowed up by a groundling burrow. As the prince had noted, it seemed the voracious assassins would eat almost anything.
Finally a tree toppled close enough to swipe at Artus and Azoun with its barren limbs. The gnarled branches clutched at them like skeletal fingers, scratching a painful line across the prince's cheek and snagging the heavy cloak Artus wore. The boy felt himself falling backward. The gem in his hand threw its magical globe around him at that moment, shielding him from a branch that careened past him. Yet the globe didn't anchor Artus to his perch; neither, he knew, would it cushion his impact with the ground if he fell. Reluctantly the boy let the gem slip from his hands and tried one desperate grab for the trunk.
His cold-numbed fingers closed on air. Shouting for help, Artus plummeted.
He didn't fall far, though. Azoun, his legs wrapped tightly around a branch, grabbed for the boy as he went past. Fortunately, the prince stopped Artus's fall. Unfortunately, he did it by snagging the cloak, which fluttered behind the boy like a sparrow's broken wing.
Artus jerked to a stop. Choking, he tried to get a foothold or handhold on the tree. Any sizeable branches were well out of his reach, so all he managed to do was set himself swinging back and forth. The clasp cut into his throat, and the tree's smaller branches battered his face. When at last Artus got a firm grip on the cloak, he gasped in a ragged breath and looked down at the site of his almost-doom.
The tree had barely landed before the assassins were swarming around it. They nosed at the glowing blue gem, which lay nearby, but it held little interest for them. The groundlings were, after all, dwarves at heart. Though mutated, they shared that stout people's disdain of unfamiliar magic.
The Zhentarim agents wasted little time on the search. As soon as they were convinced the prince had not fallen with that particular oak, they set to work undermining the next. It wasn't long before shudders began to ripple up the tree holding Artus and the prince.
His face red, his arms quivering at the strain of holding his neck out of the fur-collared noose, the boy looked up at Azoun. "Let me go," he croaked.
Ignoring the plea, the prince began to reel in the cloak like a net. Artus writhed, trying to break free. "I can . . . save us," the boy cried.
Azoun grimaced. "Don't be foolish," he snapped. "You can't-"
Another shudder wracked the oak as the groundlings cut away a major root. The prince braced himself, waiting for the trembling to pass. At the same time, Artus twisted sharply, jerking the cloak from Azoun's fingers.
The boy fell, spinning violently in the air. The momentum was enough to send him toward a heavy branch. He grabbed it just long enough to slow his fall, then dropped again, rebounding off limbs closer and closer to the ground. He hit the hillside on his feet and was running before the assassins could react.
As Artus dashed away from the tree, one of the groundlings broke off from the excavation and followed. It tried to keep up with the runner, but he leaped onto the trunks of fallen oaks and scurried into the thick branches of toppled firs. With footfalls muffled by the fresh blanket of needles, he was almost imperceptible to the hunter's keen senses of hearing and touch. Artus might have eluded the creature completely, had it not been for the cloak he wore. Even tearing through the frozen earth, the groundling could smell the prince's scent.
And that was just what Artus was counting on.
A deep groan warned the boy that the tree sheltering Azoun was ready to fall. He turned back just as it started to lean. But instead of avoiding the tree, the boy ran straight toward it.