Richard Byers - The Reaver

“You know better,” Anton said. “So set it aside and concentrate on finishing Lathander’s business.”

Clearly pondering, Shadowmoon bowed her head and toyed with one of the carved wooden buttons running down the front of her gown. Finally, she said, “While we can’t overturn the assembly’s sentence, I don’t see that we’re obligated to carry it out here and now. I recommend that when the time is right, we escort Anton Marivaldi to Alaghôn and turn him over to the assembly. He can plead for mercy, and I’ll speak on his behalf.” She looked to Ashenford and Shinthala. “Does that meet with your approval?”

“Yes,” the half-elf replied.

“I agree, too,” Shinthala said.

Shadowmoon turned back to Anton. “You heard the plan,” she said. “Will you cooperate? Will you swear to remain with us for now and surrender yourself to the assembly when we command it?”

“I swear it on my honor,” Anton said.

Shadowmoon inclined her head. “Then we’ll treat you like a guest and not a prisoner. And with that decided, we need to take up the greater matter before us: how to feed the multitude who are starving.”

The lean-to leaked. Annoyed by the trickling and dripping, Umara tried to rearrange the weave of branches over her head and only succeeded in making matters worse. “The Black Hand take it,” she growled.

Lying beside her, Anton chuckled. “You’d think rangers could build a better shelter.”

“I don’t suppose they could have, really. Not one that this rain couldn’t find its way through. When I get back to Thay, I’m never going out in foul weather again.”

“We could still watch the ceremony from inside the sanctuary. The rain hasn’t worked its way through that roof.”

She shook her head. “I don’t want to try to make out what’s happening from the other side of the pool. I want to be up close.”

It surprised her to learn that the Chosen’s ritual wouldn’t take place inside the temple. But as Ashenford explained, the entire plateau was sacred to the Oakfather, whereas only the easternmost patch of land could be considered holy to the Morninglord. Thus, it made sense to perform the rite where the petitioners would find it easiest to draw power from both gods.

There were plenty of them to do the drawing, too. After Shadowmoon canceled the massacre of the scar pilgrims, she’d dismissed most of the rangers and other warriors from her little army. But the Elder Circle had summoned additional druids to gather in their place, along with a miscellany of nature spirits and forest creatures. Sprites the size of mice flitted on dragonfly wings, and treants towered over everyone else, remarkably easy to mistake for actual trees with their gnarled, asymmetrical bodies, crowns of leafy branches, and bark-like skin, shifting ponderously when they moved at all.

The company had assembled to perform a work of magic greater than Umara had ever witnessed or likely ever would again. It would be priestly magic, not arcane, and beholden to the forces of Light and Nature rather than those of those of the Pit, and thus, in no way her sort of power. But she meant to drink in the spectacle and learn all she could nonetheless.

The ceremony should commence soon. At the moment, everyone was waiting for Stedd to announce that, behind the wall of gray thunderheads to the east, the sun was rising.

Umara turned back to Anton. “You wanted to watch this, too, didn’t you? That’s why you haven’t already run away.”

The pirate drew back. “Wizard, you insult me. I gave my oath.”

He was only able to maintain his air of affronted dignity for a moment. Then a snort forced its way out, and she laughed with him.

“You’re right, of course,” he said. “Naturally, I want to see how this all works out. But once it’s over …” He gestured in the general direction of Hierophant’s Trail.

“I suspect Shadowmoon actually intended for you to flee.”

“Then she won’t be disappointed.”

“You don’t suppose the Assembly of Stars might actually pardon you?”

He grinned. “In their place, I wouldn’t.”

She took a breath. “Well, then, we’ll smuggle you back aboard the Octopus and safely out of Turmish.”

Anton hesitated. “If someone catches you helping me, we’re liable to end up facing the headsman together. Even if we don’t, you’ll still have forfeited any good will you may have generated on Thay’s behalf. And from what you told me, that’s the one prize you can offer your superiors to make up for not bringing home a Chosen.”

Umara made a spitting noise. “Please. You already saw me trick Shadowmoon herself with an illusion. I can fool any Turmishan if I put my mind to it. Druids and such have their talents, but Thayan magic is the most sophisticated in the world.”

Anton laughed. “Certainly, Thayan arrogance is the most egregious.”

“You do realize I’m offering to help you.”

“I know, and-” His head turned to the druidic spellcasters and their allies. “We can talk about this later. I think the ritual is starting.”

He was right.

Standing at the brink of the drop-off, closer to the hidden sunrise than anyone else, Stedd extended his hands to the eastern horizon, and they bloomed with gold and crimson light. He turned and thrust them at the ground. Lines, circles, triangles, and more complex figures spread outward from the spot he was indicating, writing themselves on the ground in light.

Standing to the west of her collaborators, Shadowmoon began a kind of slow, twisting, pirouetting dance in place. She made the contortions look as effortless as they were lithe. To the north, Shinthala looked upward and muttered; the clouds overhead rumbled and flickered as lightning stirred inside them. In the south, Ashenford stroked arpeggios from his harp.

Traceries of light flowed from the druids’ positions across the ground to interweave with the figures Lathander’s power was drawing. But the new designs were green instead of yellow or ruddy, and more freeform, their shapes hinting at the uniqueness of every leaf on every branch or every bend in the course of every stream rather than the perfect roundness of the sun or the flawless arc of its daily progress across the heavens.

Trained to construct every pentacle with geometric precision, Umara winced at a sloppiness that, had a Red Wizard committed it-perhaps because he was drunk-would have proved either futile or suicidal. But the Elder Circle’s figures smoldered with a power that, so far at least, they seemed fully able to contain.

A droning began. It sounded so much like a deep tone from the Thayan pump organ called the zulthoon that Umara might have mistaken it for one had she not known no such instrument was anywhere nearby. Eventually, she realized the treants were groaning out the hum as accompaniment to Ashenford’s harp.

One or two at a time, the other celebrants joined in, sometimes singing, sometimes chanting, sometimes contributing by other means. A barefoot, dirty, and nearly naked druid-a hermit, Umara suspected-beat out rhythms on a pair of femurs. Sprites hovered in a cloud to merge the whine of their wings into a piercing chord. A spindly horned man with enormous eyes and ears simply exploded into a run of eight ascending brassy notes, leaving not a speck of flesh nor a drop of blood behind.

By rights, it should have all combined into cacophony, but somehow, beauty emerged instead. What Umara chiefly noticed, though, was vibration resonating through her bones as mystical energy accumulated.

The glowing designs grew larger than the space taken up by those who created them. A straight line of rose-colored luminescence shot into Umara and Anton’s lean- to and out the back. Figures and sigils even wrote themselves on the surface of the pool, maintaining their forms thereafter despite the constant flow to the tops of the three waterfalls.